The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

by Gina Ochsner

  With effort, Tanya lifted her feet from the melting slush and mud and ducked under the stone archway of the courtyard. But it was the same story here too: mud and more mud. The only good thing about this mud was that it was familiar mud and she knew from hard lessons during other thaws just where she should and shouldn't step.

  The children picked at the heap with their bare hands, scooped banana skins and orange rinds, empty tins of sprats and tats into small wheelbarrows. Blood oozed from matching open sores on the knees of the Good and Bad Borises. They were working hard, she could see, to improve the ambiance of the courtyard. When they filled their wheelbarrows with refuse, they pushed the load through the mud, past the broken archway and out onto the street where they deposited the trash onto the roadway. Red-haired Gleb blew snot out of his nose with a single blasting honk of mucus. Tanya felt her stomach rolling over.

  'Swine!' the oldest girl called.

  'Cow!' the littlest girl joined in.

  A reference to her bovine eyes or her portly bearing? Hard to tell, and Tanya tucked her chin to her chest and kept ploughing towards the stairwell. Love, heart. Start loving, you useless lonely muscle. And then a rock whistled through the air.

  Who said suffer the little children? A stone, big as a plum from the feel of it, pummelled Tanya's backside. Christ said suffer the little children and so she's suffering. He said to love them, too, and so she commanded herself to love, but the rocks, God almighty, had grown teeth and were biting at her now. No chance she'd get past that heap without losing an eye. And that older girl had developed quite an arm. Clearly the children blamed her for adding to their workload, though how they had known before she did that the Americans were arriving was beyond her. Tanya's bowels, knotted with worry, roiled and turned. She shielded her head with her cloud notebook and retreated to the safety of the latrine. And not a moment too soon.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Olga

  In the women's bathroom Olga sat solidly on the commode and fought the urge to fall into a dead sleep. For five hours she'd worked like a maniac. The wire basket, emptied of translation tasks that she had completed the day before, had once again mysteriously filled to capacity and beyond in the middle of the night. And with tidings of the strangest events.

  Manufacture of penguins at a plush toy factory in the Trans-Dneister surpassed all production records to date. In commemoration of this achievement, new currency will be minted, replacing the old currency which was minted last July.

  The explosion at Tomsk-7 chemical separation plant is believed to be responsible for regular sightings of Our lady of Kursk in the low bank of emission clouds.

  And the strangest, news from their own city.

  100 barrels of Georgian white wine from Tbilisi have been hijacked from the train station and held for ransom.

  Why she was being asked to translate such matters, and in the Red Star, a military newspaper of conservative leanings, was beyond Olga's comprehension. She rapped her knuckles against the corrugated metal that divided the bathroom stall she occupied from the one where Vera sat. Olga guessed from the unbroken plume of smoke curling into the air that Vera had nodded off again, this time with a lit cigarette in hand.

  Olga knocked louder, and began reading the sinkhole report. 'I don't think this life could get any more bizarre,' she concluded. 'Do you suppose we will survive any of this?'

  'Oh, cheer up, Olga.' The cigarette hissed as Vera dropped it into the toilet bowl. A small flask of nail polish remover appeared beneath the partition. 'Things aren't so bad. According to a recent World Values Survey, Ukrainians have it, or think they have it, worse than us. Only forty-eight per cent of Ukrainians say they are happy as compared with fifty-one per cent of Russians.'

  'That is a comfort,' Olga conceded.

  'On the other hand, ninety-seven per cent of Icelanders claim to have attained true bliss.'

  Olga sipped at the vial, then slid it back under the metal divider and thought for a moment. 'It must be on account of their warm summers and natural hot water springs. Also, they haven't gone to war in decades. Russia, on the other hand, has a war of some sort going on at all times.'

  'You'd think with all this practice, we'd be better at it,' Vera mused. 'Of course, we did win the Great Patriotic War. But since then there's been Afghanistan, Georgia, Bosnia, Georgia again, and then this business in Chechnya. Our problems in the south, such an embarrassment. The atrocities! Russians setting fire to houses with women and children inside.'

  Olga wagged her head slowly from side to side. It never ceased to amaze her what the human animal was capable of. What great acts of generosity and cruelty. And how a human could harbour the inclination for both within the same heart! She wished she could say it was beyond her. But it wasn't, because she felt it, too: compassion and rage, love and hate. Even good people could—and did—commit acts of cruelty. Even people like Olga. How many times had she wished Afghanistan and everyone in it would simply fall off the map?

  'I cannot reconcile myself to it,' Olga said at last.

  'To what?'

  'This job. This work. What we do here. What we see and hear and what we pass on and how we pass it. What about truth?'

  Vera snorted. 'Truth doesn't bother me. It's the incontrovertible insistence of certain facts that wakes me up in the middle of the night. Did you know that in the twentieth century, thirty to fifty million Soviets died as a result of war?'

  'No,' Olga said dully.

  'Well then maybe you already knew that Mafiya-related economic activity accounts for forty per cent of the total economy?'

  'So we are more economically healthy than we know?'

  'Healthier than what's good for us,' Vera said, lighting another cigarette. 'But get this—every two out of three male workers is drunk on the job. The third worker is hungover.'

  'Sad.' Olga clucked her tongue.

  'Sad, nothing. Joint Military Generals set a draft goal of 140,000 for this fall.'

  'This war is not over then, is it?'

  'Good Lord, no. We've only just begun to kill each other off!'

  'I worry about my Yuri,' Olga whispered.

  'And well you should! Statistically he has a one in three chance of reintegrating in a useful manner into society. Let's not forget the number of vets who've committed suicide. Not an insignificant figure, by the way.'

  Olga shook her head. 'I'll tell you, it makes one wonder just what humans are made of. We're not human, that's what I think. We're dogs or maybe worse.'

  'Why would you say that?'

  'Because,' Olga crouched over the bowl and carefully wiped her backside with strips of the previous day's copy of the Red Star, 'dogs only behave the way they do to survive. They are beyond malice.'

  Vera laughed. 'Let me tell you what the city engineers have known for years and dare not say. In a decade the dogs will rule the cities. They outnumber us now three to one. They'll eat every last one of us for sport. Don't talk to me about malice.'

  Vera tapped the temperamental trigger of the commode. Olga stood and did the same. Together they listened to the plumbing labour—a slow-moving sound, and Olga imagined that Fact itself, the visceral substantiation of every ugly reality they'd just discussed, had clogged the pipes. At last, with a loud gulp, the bowls emptied.

  'Well, that's that.' Vera stood at the sink and wiggled her fingers under a trickle of murky water.

  'I suppose,' Olga said, and watched Vera exit the bathroom. Olga stood at the sink and scrubbed her hands vigorously. Her hands red from her efforts, she at last gave up. In twenty-odd years of using the Red Star lav, she'd noticed that no amount of washing could keep the lavatory reek from following her into the corridor.

  Inside the narrow glass office Arkady sat behind the desk and raked his fingernails ferociously over the mottled skin of his left arm. What Olga had all this time thought were bite marks made by his ersatz wife, she realized with a jolt was in actual fact a service tattoo. She eyed the pneumatic tubes warily and slid
into her folding chair. The tubes hissed like a tyre leaking pressure and Olga was trying hard to ignore this sound —that and the way blood and dark ink bled from the corners of Arkady's tattoo.

  Arkady lifted his nose and sniffed prodigiously in her direction. 'Is that a new scent you are wearing?' he asked.

  'No,' Olga said.

  Arkady sniffed again. All the same, you wear it very well.'

  He was flirting with her, again. It occurred to her how very lonely Arkady must be, how very alone he was with only this desk and that enormous Topic Guide and his tea to keep him company, his pencils with the bite marks. Olga looked past Arkady to the darkened glass. 'Do you think often of your wife?' Olga ventured.

  'Who?' Arkady squinted.

  'The woman you married. Can you recall her?'

  'Only all too well! I'm trying to surpress the memories. Such teeth—like shrivelled olive pits. Why do you ask?' Arkady blinked rapidly behind his glasses.

  Olga turned her gaze to the dim panes. 'The thing is, I can't at all recollect my Zvi.'

  'Who's that?'

  'My husband. I can't remember him. Not a bit. This is cause for dilemma. Am I missing him properly if I can't recollect him fully?'

  Just then the grey teletype in the corner spat and spluttered. For several minutes the machine spewed a torrent of paper out of its yammering maw. And then, just as suddenly as it started up, it fell quiet again. Arkady looked at the machine and then at Olga. The plastic tubes whistled a grim melody. Neither of them made a move towards the machine.

  Chief Editor Kaminsky materialized in the open doorway. His gaze shifted to the teletype, then to Olga. Standing as he was so close to the tube hatch, his pale blue tie and the two strands of his comb-over slowly lifted toward that source of immense suction power. To Olga's way of thinking, it lent to Chief Editor Kaminsky the look of a human windsock. Or perhaps a kite. And she observed again how very much his eyebrows resembled the typesetter's steep-pitched insert symbol and how opaque the lenses of his glasses were, so that even though she was close enough to him to smell the tomato and pickled herring he'd had for lunch, she could not see his eyes.

  'How are things?' Chief Editor Kaminsky asked.

  'Normal,' Olga said. 'I think.'

  Chief Editor Kaminsky aimed a meaningful glance at the machine, then looked at Olga. 'Olga, to tell you the truth, I'm getting concerned. You look pale, and then again, sometimes quite flushed. You look as if you've lost a great deal of weight, or possibly gained. Clearly you are a walking manifestation of internal and external contradiction.' With both his hands, Chief Editor Kaminsky slapped at the errant strands of hair and held them tight to his head. His hands otherwise engaged, there was nothing he could do about that dull blue tie pulling him slowly towards the tube hatch. 'Probably there's not a thing in the world I can do to help, but I feel compelled to offer my assistance anyway.'

  Olga glanced at the report still lodged in the teletype. It, too, flapped in the direction of the mighty tube system.

  'Is it trouble at home?' Chief Editor Kaminsky leaned towards Olga.

  Olga extricated herself from her chair and stood. She tapped her forehead. 'My body is in an uproar. I can't sleep at night. I'm seeing strange things at the apartment building, stranger than usual. And I'm smelling things, too.'

  'Go on, go on,' Chief Editor Kaminsky murmured.

  'I am forgetting things and,' Olga paused and glanced at Arkady, 'sometimes, I am terribly afraid that my semi-truthful rendering of fact will carry disastrous consequences.'

  'Olga, Olga.' Chief Editor Kaminsky draped his arm over her shoulder. 'You are investing far too much thought into your work. You aren't being paid to think about the deep meanings of words and draw profound connections between them. Your job, more or less, is to cast upon facts and figures the penumbric shadow of neutrality and normality so that nothing, not a word, not a thought nor an idea unduly shocks the eye of the reader. Always remember that the written word is fact in itself. Especially when it is written with confidence!'

  Olga nodded. It was a simple enough sounding procedure in theory. In practice she wanted desperately to chew off her hands. She wished she had five sets of hands so that she could chew off each and every pair. Chief Editor Kaminsky shifted more of his weight onto his arm and leaned into Olga.

  'Always remember, the Russian language and, therefore, print media itself, abhors a vacuum. Your job is to keep filling the blanks with vague substitutes, to euphemize anything that carries a disturbing tone. The trick is to make sure your deft substitutions don't lack in subtlety. Here's where your gift for humour is so necessary. See?'

  'But sir, truth is a transcendent value; it matters what we say and how we say it.'

  Chief Editor Kaminsky paled slightly. It may have been her imagination, but it seemed to Olga that the howling from the tubes grew higher pitched. And most certainly Chief Editor Kaminsky's arm had grown heavier, its weight now driving her heels into the floor.

  'Good God, woman. You know that and I know that. But that doesn't mean you have to go about repeating it! After all, we have our readership to think of.' At this, Chief Editor Kaminsky cupped his free hand under Olga's elbow and gave a panicked squeeze.

  'Right, then!' Chief Editor Kaminsky spun on his heels. He glided through the open door and down the hallway, the whole way his tie whipping over his shoulder and fluttering towards the open mouth of the tube hatch.

  'Everyone knows that paid fools are no better than the ones we get for free,'Arkady said. He rose, ripped the paper from the teletype, scanned it briefly and handed it to Olga.

  Olga read the report quickly. Then she started back at the top and re-read slowly, her eyes drinking in line by line her every worst fear confirmed: name after name of the dead and the missing. Her heart pounded in her ears, her eyes watered and blurred. There were over a hundred names. And in the report conclusion even worse news. The President was calling for unilateral draft with no exemptions or exceptions, a request that had been enthusiastically passed in the Duma.

  Olga sank into her chair. What to do? Forget rendering the facts harmless by means of deft and draughty euphemism. This was her boy they were talking about. Her boy who would be sent out in a ground infantry unit. Her boy who would be sent back in an open rail carriage stuffed with bodies. Olga laid her forearms on the desk and cradled her head in her hands.

  'What shall I do?' Olga turned to Arkady.

  Arkady speared the report with his pencil and examined it at arm's length for several minutes. At last he cleared his throat. 'You've suggested now and again that your son may be a bit of an, er, how shall I say? Idiot? Did you mean that in the literal or euphemistic sense?' he asked cautiously.

  'Well,' Olga bit her lip. Yuri was more of a balbess, a dunderhead, which, as far as she knew, didn't carry a definite clinical classification, though perhaps it ought to. But her Yuri—an idiot? She could say yes. Her situation—his situation—was that desperate. But it wouldn't be true. And wasn't she the one who held forth her internal appeal for the truth made external? For telling a truth so pure it could not be heightened or dampened by people like her? Or was this one of those rare moments in a mother's life where she would and should break every rule for her children?

  'He is an idiot in his own fashion,' she said at last, the sound of her voice in her ears foreign and strained.

  'But do you have any proof of it? Anything in particular that is strange or crazy?'

  'He fishes from the rooftop.'

  'Does he catch anything?' Arkady sounded genuinely interested.

  Olga shook her head. 'No, but he wears a souvenir cosmonaut's helmet day and night.'

  'Yes, I knew about that,' Arkady said. 'Sadly, a lot of young people are dressing in odd ways. We need something more definitive. Something hugely idiotic—in writing, say. A silly love poem or poorly constructed joke?'

  Olga squeezed her eyes shut, thinking. The tubes whistled and the sound was slightly obscene, like a low wolf call. '
Of course!' She opened her eyes. 'Mircha!'

  'Who?'

  'The Manifesto!' Olga dug through her plastic bag and withdrew Mircha's semi-transparent papers. Carefully, so that the shaky writing would not crumble at her feet, she began to read aloud:

  Today a boy explains to his father how feathers on a chicken grow. Today a man looks over his shoulder and says nothing is impossible.

  'Ah,' Arkady muttered.

  'Wait. There's more,' Olga continued to read:

  Today a woman washing shirts in a bucket of bleach watches the skin from the tips of her fingers disappear. Enough, she says. Today an old man with a violin breaks his bow and says now. Today I rattle every door handle of the city looking for the one still warm from the touch of my lover's hand and I say, I will never stop looking.

  Arkady's eyes brightened. 'It has a nice poetic odour of sentimentality. And absolutely no meaning. None. Only an idiot could write this.'

  Olga nodded sombrely.

  'I know people who know people. People who know idiocy when they see it. People who can do things to care for such idiots.'

  Olga clutched the Manifesto. 'Things? What things? You don't mean an institution?'

  'Lord no! Those places are reserved for the truly handicapped—Gypsies and Grades One and Two Idiots, for instance. But Grade Three idiocy is another matter entirely. A Grade Three Idiot is eligible for food and medicine coupons and could ride the metro for free. Yes, the benefits of being an imbecile are too numerous to count.'