The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

by Gina Ochsner

  Tanya stepped back to examine her work. 'You can't take schoolchildren on tours looking like this. And we can't let Head Administrator Chumak see you, either. Let's get that helmet back on.' Tanya shoved the helmet over Yuri's head.

  And just in time, too. Thump—slide. Thump.

  Yuri crawled under the counter.

  'Oh, Tanya! News! Big news!' Wedged as he was beneath the long hat/coat-check counter, Yuri could not see Head Administrator Chumak. But he could see the effect Head Administrator Chumak's words had on Tanya. Her hands shook and her knees literally knocked, setting the dimples on her rump in an uproar. No, for all her efforts, that cigarette and chewing gum diet wasn't helping her much. But she was kind, and though kindness didn't get girls like her very far, it ought to, Yuri decided. She deserved much better than what the bowels of the museum afforded.

  'The Americans are coming! It's officially confirmed. They are buying their airline tickets even as we speak!'

  'They're coming,' Tanya repeated, with what sounded to Yuri like disbelief and horror.

  'In three weeks.'

  'Three weeks. That's wonderful news, sir.'

  'Wonderful? Wonderful?' Head Administrator Chumak's voice rolled through the corridor. 'This is better than wonderful. Do you know what this means?'

  'No, sir.'

  'If we get this grant I will buy a fence. I will buy my wife a car. And driving gloves. At last she will be happy and stop pecking at me. But of course, of course, there's so much to do in the meantime. This is such a delicate operation and there's so much.' Head Administrator Chumak peered over the counter. 'What is that unsightly protrusion? That cannot be a hat.'

  'No, sir. It's Yuri. He is not feeling well.'

  Yuri unfolded his body and straightened for Head Administrator Chumak's inspection.

  Head Administrator Chumak's smile faded and his liver spots darkened. 'Well, young man, if you weren't feeling well, you shouldn't have come here. We have been charged with the honourable task of preserving and presenting fine art. It won't do to look like a bleeding tomato wearing a mushroom for a hat.'

  'Preserving and protecting art is, of course, of vast importance and I have the utmost respect for art in all its configurations and manifestations—high, low and everywhere in between.' Yuri glanced at Venus' half-chewed ass.

  Head Administrator Chumak turned to Tanya. 'What's he saying?'

  'He says he's leaving this very moment.'

  Outside the museum, the light had fallen to hips and knees. A three o'clock dusk, and the basement windowpanes reflected a lavender wash and the streetlights dispatched sullen arcs of hazy orange.

  Yuri tied his rod to the frame of his bike and wheeled it through the narrow path shovelled through the snow. Winter was a dangerous time because the cold forced people closer together than nature intended. Not that Yuri didn't love his fellow man, but last week alone he'd been mugged twice on the same day. This very morning he'd nearly lost his sprocket and he'd most certainly lost his entire pike and five-eighths of his remaining pride. What next? Yuri wondered as he walked his bike around a corner, and then immediately wished he hadn't.

  At the sound of his steps, two men leaning against a doorway straightened and approached Yuri. They had a sleek and sporty air to them Yuri had learned to recognize as Mafiya. Probably they had been like him once, vets of an unpopular military action, but unlike him, they had the broad shoulders of wrestlers or near-champion boxers. And unlike Yuri, they wore slick tracksuit trousers with long stripes up the leg and expensive sports shoes, the hallmarks of eager recruits who understood that violence was necessary for their career advancement. And cruelty was inexpensive entertainment. Experience had taught Yuri that the only hope for a guy like him was to stick himself to shadow and disappear. Or walk straight up to them, and get it over with. Yuri lifted his visor and smiled. He knew they were considering his suspicious features, the unusual length of his face, his jaw. His blaring cuts and bruises that advertised his victim status.

  Yuri unstrapped the rod and tucked it behind his trouser leg. 'Please fellows, take the bike. It may not look like much, but part by part, it is of extreme value.'

  'Bargaining already?' the leader, a tall man in an Adidas sports jacket said.

  Yuri sighed. 'Please, fellows. I don't wish to be hit in the face. Or the knees either.'

  'Life is full of hard decisions, isn't it?' Adidas ran his tongue over his gold tooth.

  Where it started—with his ribs—he could recall, but where it ended, how many blows to the back and kidneys, Yuri lost count. That they'd found his fishing rod was not in doubt: he heard it whistle through air and land some distance away in the snow. Then came the pounding of fists. His head felt like a big empty box hit with a stick, but never the same way twice. The important thing was not to beg for mercy, or they'd kill him. Also, it was important not to appeal for help to any passersby. A street beating in Russia was purely a spectator sport. Possibly the next Olympic event. In no circumstances would anyone help out his fellow brother being thrashed within a micrometre of his life. That being said, when Yuri spotted Mircha, materializing from behind a lamp post, Yuri could not help himself: 'Do something.' Penny whistles between his cracked teeth.

  'Me?' Mircha mouthed, thumping his own chest with a thumb.

  His attackers took Yuri's words as a sign. That is, they fell to beating him even harder. Yuri lay still as a fish beneath ice. Because a man who doesn't moan, doesn't complain, must be dead.

  At last, when they'd got their wind up, they quit. Yuri heard the ticking of his bike as they wheeled it around the corner and then Mircha reappeared, steam rising from his hands.

  Mircha cradled Yuri's head in his lap, withdrew a bottle of vodka and administered the remedy, a capful at a time, into Yuri's mouth.

  With a splutter, Yuri revived.

  'Where is your backbone?' Steam rose from Mircha's palms. 'I've been studying you at the river, at the museum, here on the street. Everybody walks all over you, even the women! You have to stand up for yourself, fight like a man. Right now, it's like you're only half a man. Maybe only a quarter.'

  Yuri held his head in his hands. 'Look at you. You can't even fix a lottery or steal a windscreen wiper. Or scare away street thugs. All you can do is talk. And write.'

  'OK. So, OK. I can see that you're bitter. We'll talk more when you've assumed the correct emotional posture. But honestly, Yuri. How can anyone have any respect for a man who doesn't act like a man?'

  'I don't know.' Yuri touched his face cautiously. The nose, still there. The ears, there. Front teeth, chipped but there. A side tooth, definitely missing. 'What is a man, anyway?' Yuri swallowed a mouthful of blood.

  'Nonsense. You're supposed to shout—no, no—to protest: "I'm a man!" Whatever that is.'

  'Sure,' Yuri patted his legs, arms. Intact. Pain level seven and rising.

  Mircha looked at his hands, the steam curling skyward. 'I see that I have quite a lot to write. When men don't know what it means to be a man. When they forget how to fight, what it means to live with honour. The importance of kicking ass. Keeping promises. By the way, I'm anxious about that titanium arm. Did you dig out the hole like I asked you to?'

  Yuri blinked. 'I've had sightings of a shovel, but whenever the slender neck is almost in my grasp, the damn thing disappears.'

  Mircha slapped the back of Yuri's head with the palm of his hand. 'This is the fate of a prophet—to be abused at the hands of my disciples. To dispense wisdom that people, and by people I mean you, disregard. It's quite a sad and sorry state.' Mircha handed Yuri the flight helmet, then retreated into the lowering frost.

  At the courtyard Yuri sat on the bench and packed ice around his nose. The twins were out and in high spirits. They took turns harassing Zhytka, Vitek's dog, first patting and then pinching it. The dog, confused, alternated between wagging his tail and whining happily, then hurting. Happy, hurting. The dog understood the dualities of life, the hardship and inherent humiliations and
contradictions of existence. Good Boris tickled the dog's stomach. Bad Boris lit a red-tipped match and fed it to him.

  Yuri pulled the metal bench behind the heap. Though dusk had yielded to true darkness, he could see that the hole had grown much larger, longer and deeper. He lit a match. A placard in neat script read 'who hath made foolish the wisdom of this world?' and a trail of sunflower seeds teetered at the hole's edge. Quite obviously the children lived down there. Yuri peered inside the hole and spied a pile of shoes and galoshes of all sizes and umbrellas in varying states of decline tucked to one side. He dropped his line, dragged it carefully through a channel of wet mud.

  'Five roubles if you want to fish here,' a child's voice sang from the rooftop.

  Vitek joined Yuri on the bench, his palm held in readiness. Without a word, Yuri handed over the five-rouble note. Yuri could see that Vitek had stuffed more padding into the shoulders of his leather coat. Despite this effort, Vitek had acquired a strange two-dimensional look to his body. But then, given the day's events, his swelling face, it was quite possible that Yuri had lost sight in one eye.

  Vitek scrutinized Yuri. 'Boy-o. Do you look beat.' Vitek ran his tongue over his gold teeth. Security, those teeth. It was fashionable for street businessmen to cap their teeth in as much gold as they could afford. It would buy a good funeral some day, provide for nonexistent heirs. Give the doctor something to dance about. But just now, the way they caught the moonlight so peculiarly, it only made Yuri's aching head hurt a little more. 'Listen. I can help you.' Vitek opened a fresh bottle of Crowbar. 'We're a team, you and I.'

  Yuri quelled the urge to shudder. In actual fact, Vitek was the kind of guy who could crawl up a man's ass without using soap. Even so, vodka-drinking protocol dictated that one must never refuse it, regardless of its source. 'We are?' Yuri took the bottle and swallowed long.

  'We are the men of the building, after all.' Vitek studied Yuri's shrinking posture, the stove-in chest, the sagging shoulders, the flight helmet resting against his ankles. 'Well, I'm the man, anyway. And with some work, you will have manly moments. Just consider how manly you'll feel in the hull of a tank sighting down the enemy.'

  'How manly?'

  'Very,' Vitek assured him with another pass of his tongue over his teeth.

  'And consider how manly you will feel bringing home a tank gunner's wages.'

  'How manly?'

  'Extraordinarily manly. A successful operation gets each soldier three million roubles. Knocking out an enemy firing position would get you three million more. Knock out a tank and get a voucher for another three million.'

  'What if I die?'

  Vitek's smile broadened. 'Fabulous news! You'd get 130 million roubles.'

  Yuri took another healthy drink, wiggled his line. 'Where do you come by your vast reservoir of information?'

  Vitek held up the latest issue of the Red Star and smiled a smile as shiny as an oil slick.

  'I don't know.' Yuri shook his aching head slowly from side to side. 'What do we need to go down there for? Give me another reason.'

  'I can give you millions of reasons. There's millions of litres of oil down there. And if that doesn't make a man rich, then I don't know what does.'

  'What about the Far East? We've got so much oil in Nefteyugansk, we could swim in it for years and never come up for air.' Yuri stood and tucked his helmet under his arm. 'I just don't see.'

  'Oh, you don't see? Well, that makes everything all right, then, doesn't it?' Vitek's voice was pure acid.

  Yuri blinked in surprise.

  Vitek draped an arm around Yuri's shoulder. 'Here's where the dog has teeth.' Now Vitek was all honey, his boyhood best friend again. 'How old are you?'

  'Twenty-one.'

  'How many arms have you got?'

  'Two.'

  'Legs?'

  'Two.'

  Vitek smiled. 'Here's the thing. You being so gloriously whole, you'll likely be called up anyway. So why not beat the crowd to the punch? Voluntary re-uppers get paid more.'

  'I'll think about it,' Yuri said, pulling in the line.

  Vitek strolled toward the stairwell. 'Think, but not too hard.'

  Dangling from the line was a small silvery-coloured fish. All bone, no flesh. This fish, he had heard, lived at the bottom of the world. It measured time by turning quietly in the mud, but nobody believed that this fish really existed. And here it was, gasping for air at the end of his line. Yuri carefully pulled the hook out and threw the fish back into the hole, which looked all the world to him now like a huge wound, dark and weeping.

  Yuri trudged up the stairs. The noise of the pounding of drums in his head was terrific. The noise outside his head was colossal. For here was Zoya's voice falling like a sledgehammer from the windows. 'Plums! Plums!' She believed eating fruit out of season would increase her chances of conceiving. Ditto for eating liquored cherries that came in fancy boxes. Did it matter to her that these were deficit items, and therefore nearly impossible to find in the shops, even if they did have the money to buy such items?

  'Cherries!' Zoya yelled and pulled the windowpane closed.

  Apparently not.

  Yuri pushed open the door to the apartment and stood on the threshold, scanning the apartment. Mother not in sight. The little Latvian TV in the kitchen spluttered and cracked, and in between the static Yuri detected the sound of women greatly vexed, speaking rapidly and without pause. It was the Spanish soap opera Zoya loved to watch, The Rich Also Cry.

  Yuri walked to the kitchen, sat heavily in the chair and worked the helmet over his head painful centimetre by painful centimetre. 'I ran into some trouble today.' Yuri set the flight helmet on the table with a loud thunk. 'I got beat. Twice. And I lost my bike, and a tooth. But then a miracle, of a sort. There is a hole behind the heap. It is quite large and possibly growing. And I don't care if you believe me or not. I dropped my line in and caught a small silver fish. It smelled bad so I threw it back.'

  'Inconsequential,' Zoya sighed and continued thumbing through a western magazine. All the best people have toaster ovens these days. And dryers.' Zoya shifted in her chair to contemplate her laundry in full bloom over the gills of the radiator. 'And babies. Every one of my friends has a baby. Even Galya from number thirteen. In fact she has two. You remember Galya—the girl with the pickle nose?'

  'Having babies is not a competition. It's not some kind of measure of success. I mean, any idiot can have a baby.'

  Zoya turned her shining wistful eyes on him. 'I know, isn't it wonderful? More good news.' Zoya withdrew a thermometer from her purse and waved it in the air. 'I took my temperature, and today is the right day.'

  Yuri swallowed and tasted blood. Not the kind of talk that inspired phenomenal feats of gymnastic love-making.

  Zoya raked her fingers through her vermilion hair. 'I think your mother is having a nervous breakdown. She's been talking to herself in the kitchen. A baby would be a good thing. She could take care of it and have someone to talk to. A baby would elevate our deflated social position.'

  'Don't joke about a baby.'

  'Who's joking?' Zoya stood on tiptoes and licked his eyebrows.

  'We cannot raise a baby here. We have nothing to give a baby.'

  'We have the grant.' Zoya bit his ear.

  'We don't have the grant. Not yet.' Yuri placed a hand on each of Zoya's shoulders. 'We have five glue-sniffers living in the courtyard nobody cares for.'

  'I will not live as if I am dead already.' Zoya clutched Yuri's hand and pulled him through the maze of laundry lines and sheets to their cot. 'I want life, a life of my own. In my hands. At my breast.' Zoya pulled her dress over her head. 'You don't know what that means to a woman.' Zoya pushed Yuri to the cot and pulled off his shoes. 'Unbuckle your belt,' she said.

  'I think I may have a bruised rib.'

  'Take off that belt and let's take a look.' Zoya smiled.

  And Yuri did. The socks, they came off without a complaint and the pants flew off the ends of his
feet as a silly dance step that ended in a low kick under the cot. And then it was all systems go. His face? His jaw? Hurting? Hell, yes. But again, the value of vodka be praised, the pain had dulled to a heavy weight, had dulled his hands and his face so that he could even endure the attentions of a bitter woman turned sweet. Somehow he would get through it. Zoya would see to that, Zoya shrieking his name as if it might mean something to her: 'Yur—I! Yur—I!' How manly does this make him feel? Ver—y, ver—y.

  'OK, then.' Zoya rolled off Yuri and reached for the thermometer. 'I feel better now.'

  Yuri rubbed his jaw.

  'I'm glad we talked this matter through so thoroughly. Now we understand one another.' Zoya hung her stockings and dress over a laundry line.

  'Absolutely.'

  'Because, Yuri, this business in Chechnya—everyone knows it'll be over in no time. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain.'

  'That's what everyone said about Afghanistan.'

  Zoya clicked her tongue and looked askance at Yuri. 'That was just practice, a drill. This time it will go better. The Russian Army will put those mangy rebels in their place and fast.'

  With each word the liquid ticks grew louder and the throb in his jaw and cheekbones more insistent. 'Could we talk about something else? Please?' Yuri reached for the bottle of Crowbar.

  Zoya pulled on her nightgown, a thick and matronly garment. 'Did you know that the Yenisei is so contaminated that it doesn't even freeze anymore?'

  'I thought it was just the Ob and the Lena that didn't freeze anymore.'

  'Yes, and then there's the nickel poisoning in the Arctic. The reindeer herds have dropped like flies.'

  'We're lucky, I suppose, by comparison. We're still alive,' Yuri said.

  'Yes, but can you really call this living?' Zoya circled her hand at the wrist, indicating their cot, the sheets hanging from the line. 'I want things.'