The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

by Gina Ochsner

  He tries to remind her that he is part fish, not all human. But her eyes are flashing hard and bright with fury.

  'I know what happened. In Samashk. Raping little girls. Playing field games with the heads of Chechen elders!' And it hurts his four-chambered fish-heart to hear her accuse him—him, her son—of such things. Fish or man, never in his life could or would he do such things. But it's so hard to protest when you are treading in such crowded blood. So hard not to simply let yourself sink under the weight of congealing judgement.

  And now the courtyard-dwelling children have jumped in, yes, jumped in up to their waists, their spindly malnourished legs churning his viscous blood to clot.

  'Don't listen to her. I did not do those things,' Yuri appeals to the children. They will understand. He is a child, too, more or less. Childlike, anyway. 'The twelve-year-old girls I did not rape. Their grandmothers I did not shoot between their eyes.' Now Yuri pleads with Mother. 'I only opened the tank hatch once during daylight. And then only to ask an old man for directions. And then only to watch as he lobbed a grenade at me.'

  'But you saw Atrocious Things happen. You watched the others doing those Things. You said nothing.' Now Mother's mouth is a keyboard, her tongue the element striking the keys. Even worse, she's stepped out of her Red Star work dress. The dress, voluminous and capacious as language itself, has sopped up most of Yuri's bad blood. Now, together, mother and son, they stand gazing at one another, naked and ashamed. Never has Yuri been quite so terrified.

  'For God's sake, some of us need our sleep!' Zoya's voice rent the nightmare wide open. Her fingernails clawed at the flight helmet. 'If you can't talk quietly in your sleep, as a matter of courtesy you should at least talk about something interesting.' Zoya wrapped herself in the blanket and rolled away from him. And if not that,' now her voice, muffled by the blanket, sounded as if it came from a vast and impenetrable distance, 'then do something useful like go fishing.'

  Fishing! Such a suggestion.

  Yuri hopped out of bed. Down down down the stairs to the courtyard he went, to the place where he'd stowed his bike which appeared to have mysteriously shed yet another essential part, this time a sprocket. Yuri scaled the heap, searching. Up to his armpits in darkness, he could just make out the figure of one of the children. Quite possibly they didn't sleep. Certainly they weren't idle. It was the girl, Big Anna. She'd gathered some of the smaller scraps from the heap: a cracked jump seat from an MTZ-5—those old tractors from Minsk that rumbled over every lonely field in Soviet films—a shoal of plastic water bottles, and a bike sprocket. It caught and cast the meagre moonlight, shining with such lustre and silvery iridescence that Yuri knew with absolute certainty that it was not his sprocket and could not possibly have been discarded on the heap as rubbish. It was just that fine.

  Big Anna dangled the sprocket over her head.

  'Wh-where did you get that?' Yuri asked, incredulous.

  Big Anna laughed, a liquid sound. 'Ten roubles answers all questions.'

  Yuri dug into his hip pocket. He speared the rouble note on the jagged lid of a can of sprats, then watched as the sprocket whistled through the air and landed at his feet.

  In record speed Yuri reassembled his bike and pedalled for the river. The more time he spent around people, the more he admired fish.

  Ah, fish!

  He knew them as well as, if not better than, he knew himself. Men and fish, after all, are more alike than most people know. The body of a fish is three-quarters water. The body of a man is three-quarters water. Man and fish have backbones and skulls housing the brain and the paired sense organs: eyes, ears and olfactory organs. The inner ears of fish, like those of man, detect gravity and motion as well as sound. In both creatures the four-chambered heart lay in a separate cavity at the front of the body. This was why Yuri was almost certain that fish have all the same problems people do.

  Having four chambers to harbour their worries, they understood the need to hide. They had learned to fear the shadow of men. They had seasonal longings that fuelled desperate acts. Consider the instinct to migrate to the sea—so common among trout populations of the Don and Volga where a body of salt water lay nearby. The memory of the sea remained in their mouths and in the gills, which, having learned to breathe in both waters, eventually drove the fish back to the water they worked so hard to leave. Yes, they killed themselves trying to reach the waters of their youth, just as other species of trout killed themselves in their attempts to reach their upriver spawning grounds. Did the trout swimming upstream pass along news to the downriver-travelling trout? Did they grow any wiser for all their troubles? Did they tell the secrets of the men lurking above with sticks and nets, firecrackers and the occasional bottle of bleach in their hands?

  Apparently not, Yuri decided as he hid his bike behind a stand of frozen birch. It was each trout for himself. Yuri blew on his hands. The ice was thinning at the edges of the river and in a few weeks it would break and buck with a boom and roar. It was the sound of the Devil coming up for air, driving all the hungry fish before him. And Yuri planned to be right there, rod and net in hand, ready to bring in the hungry pike, one right after another.

  Yuri squinted. He could just make out two figures stationed downriver behind a wheelchair. And though Yuri could not see him, he knew that in this chair sat Volodya, taking note of who fished and where.

  Yuri uncapped his bottle of vodka. The bottle was the mistress and Yuri understood, had always understood even before his father left, why the old men and the young men on park benches and doorway stoops kissed the neck of the bottle before finishing the last drop. Nothing compared to the love of the bottle—not even the love of a woman. 'Who needs them?' Mircha asked Yuri who, at the time, might have been twelve, or maybe thirteen. 'A man can never make a woman happy and as there are so many of them and so few of us, who's to say we won't wind up with a bad one? But vodka never nags, never complains. Never reminds one of one's moral failings.' Here Mircha gazed over the neck of the bottle to consider Yuri. 'There simply is no such thing as bad vodka. The two words cannot coexist side by side.'

  Yuri nodded then, as he did now, and swallowed a mouthful. A man may privately think the vodka is bad (God forbid), after a quick toss back of a hundred grams of poorer-quality stuff. The burn, the wince, the dyspepsia—a body can't argue with that. But never does a man mention it. For vodka must always be praised, regardless of the quality. Vodka is good. Very good. Truly exceptional vodka is excellent. That said, in Yuri's opinion the Rasputin he now held at arm's length was just so-so.

  'Bitch!' Yuri spluttered. The gazes of a few vets fishing upriver lifted momentarily, fixing the source of the interruption, then dropped back over their holes. 'Bitch,' Yuri repeated, this time with more tenderness. This affectionate cursing was just one of the many protocols of vodka consumption, which are so firm and reliable that certain birds set their wings by them. And Yuri was as loyal and true to these protocols as a healthy lung was to air. The idea being that in the cosmogony of needed and necessary things, vodka was life. Breath. Hobby. National sport. Every Russian man's first love. The Swedes and Latvians liked to think they knew a thing or two about the stuff, and mention vodka around Polish tourists and they'd immediately arrange their faces into long and superior expressions and their bodies into proprietary postures. But give a bottle to a Russian—that is, give some vodka to a well-trained professional whose body is a finely tuned instrument of consumption—and watch what the stuff is good for.

  Yuri took another healthy drink and set to hacking a hole in the ice. The thing was, he imagined now that he was explaining his drinking to all the people in his life who disapproved—that is, Mother, Zoya, Tanya. The thing was, nothing made him feel as good as vodka did. Sure, he was grateful for Zoya's attentions, grateful that there were times she wanted him. But love-making was just a tingle at the base of his spine compared with the way vodka hit the bottom of his stomach and bloomed warm and bright through his chest. And vodka was a practi
cal fisherman's aid, helping him to keep his hands steady and sure.

  The ice now opened, Yuri dropped the line, a brass wire attached to a coat hanger. He peered into the black water. Another thing about drinking vodka, about fishing: both activities afforded clarity of thought, a depth of contemplation, a grandiose ability to see subtle connections. Both activities led to the understanding of certain universal truths. For instance, his previous unassailable logic notwithstanding, for all the similarity between man and fish, there were, admittedly, a few differences. Where a man has arms and legs, a fish has fins. Where man wears a singlet of skin, fish wear a shining chain mail of scales. Yuri peered in the hole he'd made, watched the dark water begin greasing to ice. He poured a little vodka into the hole and the ice curled to the edges.

  Fish, Yuri knew, had no need for the curative effect of vodka. Where a man has regret, fish have only dreams. Their problems are few. They do not suffer cold sweats or night terrors. They don't worry about employment. They have jobs, sure. Even Yuri knew that. But as they went about it all so quietly, it was as if whatever they did was no work at all. And they don't argue with the clumsy failings of their fellow cohabitants. They don't remind each other of how stupid, how morally bankrupt, how useless they have become to one another.

  Likely they were not overly harassed by the females of their species, nor were they bullied about by fish with greater clout. Probably they did not hear ticking inside their heads. In fact, the fish Yuri knew moved about their world with such grace and dignity, flapping their gills in a way that suggested theirs was a world so beautiful, so completely free of complication that they simply could not fathom an end to it. Which explained their umbrage, the baleful looks they cast when hooked.

  The line went taught. Yuri yanked the line and hauled up his catch, visor-level for inspection: a pike, and ornery, judging by its vicious snapping and thrashes in the air.

  'You! Spaceman!' Volodya's bellows knocked from bank to bank, tree to tree.

  Yuri dropped the fish on top of his plastic bag and pounded on the flight helmet with an open palm and scoped the fog.

  Volodya's entourage emerged from the darkness, materializing grain by grain until Yuri could discern with definite clarity the two vets, each of whom had a hand on one of the chair grips, and each of whom now appeared taller somehow, broader of shoulder. Volodya sat straight as a plank in his chair, his service cap low over his forehead. Volodya had lost his legs just below the hips and with his service trousers tucked tight under his stumps it appeared that the front wheels of the chair were his feet. And now the vets had set the brakes so that those wheels rested on top of Yuri's feet.

  'What are you doing here?' Volodya asked.

  Yuri looked at the pike on the bag. 'I'm fishing.'

  Yuri glanced at the vet standing to the left of the chair and took in his service coat with the many badges, confirming what he already suspected: here was a man honoured several times over for doing serious harm in Georgia. Yuri squinted at the vet on the right. This one had received even more badges for his service in Bosnia. In the hierarchy of the feeding chain, Yuri, who had received no medals, no honours, no badges for kicking anybody's ass anywhere, would be lucky to make off with the fins and tail of his pike.

  'You know the rule,' the vet on the left said quietly.

  'Whose river do you think this is?' the vet on the right asked.

  'His?' Yuri pointed to Volodya.

  'So whose fish is that you're holding?' the vet on the left asked.

  'His?' Yuri lifted his visor, pointed to Volodya.

  'The kid is not as stupid as he looks,' the vet on the left said to the vet on the right as they took off their coats and draped them over the grips of Volodya's chair.

  'Gentlemen, please!' Yuri pulled off the flight helmet and attempted the cavalier pose of one who has considered the possibility of getting beaten within a centimetre of his life and found it not a bit troubling.

  'This pike is so small, of such insignificance, but absolutely I was going to bring it to you anyway.' Yuri looked at the pike resting stone still on the plastic bag. 'I just haven't had time to bash it properly on the head.'

  Mention an itch. No sooner were the words out than the vets rolled up their sleeves.

  'Cheer up, boy-o.' Volodya flashed Yuri a munificent smile as the Bosnian vet retrieved the pike. 'This is the price of living. And you're lucky.' Volodya glanced at Yuri's legs, marvellously whole and intact.

  Then pain: a pounding punctuated with sharp interjections. A dash, dash. Boxer's blows to the face. Oh Mother. A comma, a semi-colon, a reprieve and then ellipses. All the pieces of punctuation brilliantly effected by the closed fist, the knee to the groin. Yes, he was getting the message. He was, merciful God in heaven, learning the lesson loud and clear. Oh Mother. Full-stop.

  When he came to, a quick inventory. Afternoon glare achingly white. His flight helmet, check. His rod, check. Pain scale was six and holding. He hadn't made out too badly, all things considered. And Volodya was right: Yuri was lucky. This time they'd only given him a warning beating. Yuri pulled on his helmet (Oh, Mother!), retrieved his bike and pedalled slowly towards the museum. Beyond the city the sky had cracked open for the afternoon, allowing a thin verge of throbbing light to spread into a low welt of frost and pollution. Yuri turned his head and trained his gaze on the front tyre. The ticking in his head—still there—and afternoons like these, even the sky hurt him.

  He wheeled his bike through the back door of the museum. This door no one ever bothered to lock because, with the exception of the toilet paper that Caretaker Daniilov stocked on Tuesdays, there was nothing to steal. Which said something about the art hanging on the walls. The art! Oh, God, it hurt. Yuri moaned and steadied himself on a faux statue of Venus. Someone had taken a healthy bite out of Venus' left buttock—not hard to do, as the statue been fashioned from foam.

  In the beginning it bothered him, this art. If he had any pride, any shame, any artistic integrity he would denounce this museum as a cheap fraud, ridiculous in its pretensions. But the sad fact was that even if he were to shout it from the rooftops, no one, not a soul, would care. Even sadder, after a few weeks of working in the museum, Yuri stopped caring, too. After all, a job was a job. And he needed a job. Catching the occasional pike or carp, deficit items each, wasn't enough and even though Russia was a new country, it still went better with men who made some attempt to work than with those who outwardly loafed.

  Yuri let the visor fall and felt his way towards the hat/coat-check counter. This corridor he'd never liked. Even in the interior gloom of low wattage lighting, the art was still offensive. The pseudo-Kuntskamera exhibit turned his stomach. Never mind that he had actually helped fashion the foetuses out of yellow foam. In the main, Yuri was a big fan of babies everywhere, but these were not babies. These were circus freaks, and not even real circus freaks at that. And yet, the babies paled in comparison to the painting boldly displayed next to the bathrooms. A reproduction of an eighteenth-century painting divided into twelve squares, each square depicting deaths of beloved apostles. Yuri flipped up the visor and squinted at the apostles meeting their reward, in this case horrible deaths by dismemberment, boiling, crucifixions, stonings. And the expression on their faces was so serene, of such solemn patience, as if the loss of their life was of no great importance, that Yuri couldn't help looking at them. Couldn't help looking at them and counting twelve more reasons why he could never be a Christian.

  And then came sound, noise of a museum in the afternoon. Shoes and umbrellas, galoshes, clicks and thuds, thumps, the noise of children moving in groups, and then the distinct sound of Tanya behind the check counter: clomp clomp clomp. Even when wearing her most fashionable pair of shoes her tread was of the heaviest sort. And there she was, her full face round and close and peering through the darkened visor at him.

  'Oh, Yuri,' Tanya flipped up the flight visor, 'what have you done to yourself?'

  'I went fishing and I got into some
trouble.' Yuri sat cautiously in Tanya's fold-down metal chair.

  Tanya bit her lip. 'We're going to have to clean you up. Take off that silly helmet.'

  'I can't.'

  Tanya sighed.

  Together, he pushing, she pulling, they worked the yoke of the helmet over Yuri's head, painful centimetre by painful centimetre. In the relative warmth of the museum basement Yuri felt the blood moving behind his skin, felt his face swelling and the cuts opening.

  Tanya licked her finger and smoothed Yuri's eyebrow. The pain, definitely a seven now. Why does a woman's touch hurt as often as not? And then their words. Mother, for instance, some months ago speaking on the subject of Tanya, who was so close now he could kiss her if his lips weren't split and bleeding: 'Please do not disgrace yourself by falling in love with a Gentile. She's nice, but she's not one of us. If you marry her your grandmother Ilke will torment us in our dreams.'

  No, Tanya really didn't have a chance with him. It wasn't right to let her believe that she ever would, either. And yet ... and yet no denying the small pleasure he felt at this very moment. Tanya chewing her gum close to his ear, cooing over him, grooming him, giving him soft womanly advice he in no way planned to heed.

  'You might fish elsewhere, you know.' Tanya licked at a paper tissue and dabbed at a gash on the side of his face.

  Yuri winced. He could feel the tissue cling to the cut. 'But it's my spot. I earned it.' It was further evidence of his self-loathing, a plague that he could only ascribe to having grown up without a father and to that hazy generational curse of growing up a Jew in Russia.