The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

by Gina Ochsner

  Olga glanced at the tube. 'But the draft.'

  Arkady scratched at his arm. 'That is just it: Grade Three Idiots can't be drafted. Most certainly arranging for the necessary documentation, that is, the Grade Three Idiot ID card, will take a little time and money, but we've nothing to lose.'

  'Money?' Olga whispered. 'But I don't have any money. None of us do.'

  Arkady shifted his weight from foot to foot, slowly, but with deliberation as if he were wrestling with something inside himself. At last he stood still, closed his eyes and spoke in a breathless monotone.

  'I will sell my near-priceless petrified log. On the Internet. To the highest bidder.'

  'No,' Olga gasped. 'You can't! It is all you have, this highly collectible item that has been in your family for generations.'

  After a long moment Arkady opened his eyes. 'I've decided. My mind is made up.' He nodded to the Manifesto. 'Desperate times call for great sacrifices. Besides, something isn't priceless if someone will pay money for it. And if your son is the idiot I think he may be...'

  Olga clamped her teeth and handed over the Manifesto. Still, she could not help thinking again of the lie in which she was participating. Was her son really an idiot? There was no denying he had been altered by the war, but then that was true of any veteran of the Russian army who survived a tour of duty. He was childish. A shirker. He would lie about on a stove and gather cobwebs if he could, but that was no more idiotic than anything else other people did. And the fact was just this: he was her son, flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone. If she allowed Yuri to be drafted he would die a certain death. If not at the hands of the enemy than certainly at the hands of the other veteran soldiers who had no patience for combat-shy recruits, even those who rotated in voluntarily. Olga studied Arkady, who even now was drafting the letters to the appropriate people on behalf of her Yuri, and on company time! They were doing something to save her boy. So why didn't she feel any better?

  She ran her fingers over the report curling over the desk. All these boys, these other mothers' sons. She couldn't do a thing, not one thing to save them. She looked at the report again, the water in her eyes brimming. Sometimes only tears restore the heart's equilibrium. Her mother used to say that. Her mother also used to say that the sun would stop rising if we forgot the names of our dead. This was why her mother made her memorize the names of the dead from her village. This was why every night in the darkness of her corner of the apartment, in that dim space between wakefulness and sleep, Olga added the names she read here in this office to that growing lexicon of the dead. And at night she stitched those names to an old melody every mourner knows. Each night, the same song, only each night it took just a little longer to sing it, this song built of names. Every name became a musical phrase, and every phrase was a life that had ended and shouldn't have, and Olga wanted to remember every single one.

  Olga's fingers tapped the keyboard. Name after name, she saw these boys, every one of them a boy from her town, the boy who sat behind her at school, the boy who tied her shoelaces together and cried later when she wouldn't forgive him. The boy with the stutter, the boy with the girlish lips, the boy whose father jumped from the bridge. All these boys and more, she set down in print. Gone her subtle sense of humour that turned the edges of an atrocity-in-progress into a general's folly, easily forgiven. Gone her desire to dampen. Loss divided was still loss, after all. She would tell what she knew, and more. She would say with as much certainty as she dare and more everything she'd kept hidden. God—she had to believe because the prophet Isaiah declared it—would write their names on the palms of His hands. But she would type their names on this report.

  Vladimir Gregarovich Aitmotov

  Alexander Andreyevich Akimoff

  Vyacheslav Stepanovich Aliev

  Boris Vladiromich Anichov

  She had no idea there could be so many names. And still, she kept typing. What would happen to her next she didn't much care. She had lied to save her son. There was nothing honourable in that. And these boys on her list, they were beyond saving. But at least they might be remembered.

  Twenty minutes passed. Thirty. Olga kept typing. At first, the pneumatic tubes whistled merrily as if nothing important, nothing any different than usual, were happening at the scuffed metal desk. But as the minutes ticked by, thirty, then forty, a low growl boiled up through the pipes. By the time Olga finished with the last of the names, all two hundred and sixteen of them, the growl had risen into a full howl, like that of an animal in great pain. She pulled the last sheet of paper from the typewriter carriage. She scanned the pages and rolled them, placing them carefully into the canister. As if it could read her translation, the tube howled an octave higher.

  Olga lifted the hatch. A secondary, and her favourite, definition of the word 'translate' was to convey to heaven without death. Olga eyed the canister and wiggled her fingers at the hatch. It could happen, should happen. The world was just that strange. She squeezed her eyes closed, thrust the canister into the tube. With a jerk at her hands, the canister whizzed through the tubing and disappeared, leaving Olga stuck and dangling at the hatch. The wind rushing through the pipe tugged at her shirt sleeve, pulled savagely at her arm, all the while a loud shrieking coursing through the piping. Arkady stared in bewilderment at the tube and Olga, held fast as a fish on a hook. Only two words came to her.

  'Help me.'

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Azade

  After a week of hard rain, the, suggestion of sun, especially spring sun, lured everyone but Lukeria out of their apartments and into the courtyard. Vitek lounged in a cracked plastic chair and barked at the children. Big Anna, Good Boris, Bad Boris, and Gleb, the red-haired boy with the glasses, barked back, shouting obscenities at anything that moved. The littlest girl had disappeared. No amount of crooning at the heap or at the lip of the hole (the hole! Oh how she hated it!) coaxed her out and Azade had to consider the possibility that the girl had gone underground to live there permanently or perhaps had gone to live in the sewers. Or perhaps the other children had driven her off. Street kids were like that. They had maintained a hierarchy, like dog packs. Also, the boys preferred now to lift their legs when they peed.

  Yuri lay on the stone bench. Zoya sat in the stairwell, the trumpet of a phone pinched between her shoulder and the side of her face while she painted her fingernails. Yes, she was a talent, that girl. And she knew how to talk. 'Really?' Even now her voice filled the stairwell, spilled into the courtyard. 'Because if Lara would consider knocking twenty roubles off the microwave, I'd colour her hair and throw in a manicure.'

  Even Mircha was out, in both body and spirit. Though the mud had thawed and Azade had been digging with her little shovel for three days, she'd still not properly deposited Mircha's body into the ground. But it wasn't her fault. The spring thaw was not cooperating with her in the least. The entire courtyard was a boggy morass of mud. The heap of trash and metal scrap listed dangerously towards the ever-widening chasm, but wouldn't quite topple in. The mud seemed deliberately contrary, possessing a stubborn, sullen, petty willfulness she could only consider Soviet in nature; every attempt to move the mud around with that shovel she'd borrowed from Yuri came to nothing.

  She had, however, located a copy of the Qur'an (stashed at the bottom of the heap, of all places!) and had memorized the Al-Fatiha. She'd bowed to the east, to the west—in all directions, actually, as she did not have a compass and could not say for certain in which direction Mecca lay. All this she'd done to dispatch her husband and put him both bodily and in spirit to rest. But still he lurked in doorways and behind windows, the steam from his palms fogging the panes. Worse, she noticed that at night he crept about the courtyard, silently returning all the garbage the children had removed during the day, rebuilding the heap to its former glistening putrid dimensions. She would have tried to stop him, would have shouted from her window, but she didn't want to wake the children. And, too, there was such a dogged gait to his shuffling, such deter
mination in his carrying the rusted cables, the prosthetic leg, and even the cracked Moskvich engine from the street all the way into the courtyard, that she knew there was no point in objecting. For all his talk of revision, Mircha seemed determined to repeat the meaningless tasks as if it was repetition itself that held value.

  But at the moment it was Tanya that Azade was worried about. Two hours she'd been in the latrine and making the strangest noises. When two hours turned to three, Azade knocked cautiously on the plastic door.

  'Are you all right?'

  Tanya's arm emerged slowly from between the plastic jamb and the door. 'Extra paper,' she whispered. 'Please.'

  Azade handed over the roll and sniffed mightily in her direction. 'You should have told us about the foreigners sooner. I could have cleaned a little more.' Azade leaned on her broom.

  Lukeria threw open her window. 'What foreigners?'

  Tanya emerged from the latrine, her hem muddy from where it had grazed the plastic floor. 'Art-loving Americans of Russian Extraction with money are coming to the museum tomorrow,' Tanya explained, and it seemed to Azade that the very idea had wearied the girl already. Azade could smell exhaustion, the kind that comes from inside the bones and from the roots of the hair and follows a woman to her bed and back.

  Olga, having become so adept at tiptoeing in the presence of potentially bad news, appeared at the latrine. 'What's so bad about that?'

  Lukeria planted her elbows on the sill of the opened window. 'I like Americans. They have nice luggage. Strong zips and good solid stitching.'

  'They want to spend the night and live like real Russians, here in this apartment building,' she said with a deep and profound sigh. And in her long exhalation, Azade's keen nose deciphered the true and multi-faceted nature of Tanya's predicament, which Azade understood was, collectively, their predicament.

  'Oh.' Olga's face blanched to the colour of split almonds. 'Disaster.'

  Azade took a liberal sniff of the courtyard air. She could detect Tanya's flagging optimism, and behind it, a whiff of reality. Their chances were not good. Only with monumental orchestration between all the factious residents of their apartment building would they manage a solid wall of goodwill and unbrooked good manners. Or at least a lack of bad manners. And even then they would likely fail.

  'We must construct the Russia of their expectations,' Tanya said in a solemn tone.

  'Definitely then, I will hang out my best laundry,' Zoya announced.

  'We can work together and do this.' Tanya pitched her voice towards the heap and the old woman's window, her voice warbling on the last words. 'After all, we've come a long way from the days when we'd spit into each other's tea water and salt each other's food mercilessly.'

  'Speak for yourself!' Lukeria leaned over her elbows.

  Tanya consulted her tattered notebook. 'For starters, no more visits to this latrine. We've got to save room for the Americans. Everyone knows that their turds are the biggest in the world.'

  Tanya glanced at the heap, at the hole behind the heap. The hole was now a chasm of profound dimension. The children had erected a water-resistant tarp over the opening and installed a ladder. How they had managed it was beyond Azade's comprehension, for she herself each evening did her very best to fill the hole and keep it covered with metal sheeting.

  'We have to cover that hole. Someone will fall in. And we must get rid of that stinking heap. It implies all the wrong things about us.' Tanya turned to Vitek. 'Weren't you supposed to handle this?'

  'I have. I mean, the kids are. Every day.' Vitek swept his arm through the air. 'Can't you see the difference?'

  Tanya squinted at the heap. 'No.'

  'I don't understand,' Vitek said. 'I've personally supervised their daily heap hauling. I've watched them dump the rubbish on the street.' He ran his fingers through his hair in rapid succession. It was a gesture Azade knew he had borrowed from a character on a daytime television soap opera that he liked to watch. The character was a Mafiya thug who was always killing the wrong people and then had to kill some more people to make up for it. For some reason Vitek found this an admirable trait.

  Vitek shoved his hands in his pockets. 'So, OK. It's a joke somebody's playing on me. I get it. But you'll be happy to know I've got a full evening of entertainment lined up for our visitors.'

  Olga groaned quietly.

  'First we'll arrange to have a car pick them up and take them to Lapyushka for drinks and whatever.'

  'Isn't that a gentlemen's club?' Zoya asked, looking up from her fingernails.

  Vitek grinned. And then I know a Gypsy guy who's got a dancing bear. For the right money, he'll lend it to us. They'll love it. Trust me. And then after that, we'll go to the pigeon races. All the best people follow the races.'

  Azade narrowed her eyes. She saw now Vitek's true problem. Which, she admitted, again, started with her. She was like the woman who, mistaking an agate for an egg, swallowed a stone. The next morning she opened her legs and out slid that same stone. Only it had grown in the night, had acquired the shape and properties of a stone boy. It had agate-coloured eyes, small pebbles in its ears. And in place of a heart, more stone. She was that woman always mistaking one thing for another. So why was she so dismayed when her boy lived up to the story that seemed to have been told specifically about him?

  'Capitalism is brushing its teeth,' Mircha bellowed. 'The dollar is on the march, but we shall overcome. The rouble will stabilize, we shall secure all that's been lost! Our history belongs to us, but only if we are willing to reclaim it!'

  'Hear, hear!' Lukeria shrieked.

  Everyone except Vitek looked to the rooftop. Azade could sense more than see that Tanya was biting her lip, probably drawing blood. It would not do to let him weave about on the rooftop broadcasting his ignorance as loudly as possible.

  'Come down here. We need to talk,' Azade called to the rooftop.

  'Is that you love? My pigeon? My sweet paw?' Mircha disappeared for a moment then re-emerged at the stairwell, his eyes too bright to inspire trust. He was drunk. Again. How he managed it, Azade could not imagine.

  Azade pinched her nose. The stink. Really, it was hard to work around and no amount of Russian Forest perfume sprayed fore and aft head to toe had helped.

  'You really smell bad. You need to wash yourself. With real soap.'

  'That hurts. Right here in my heart,' Mircha said. 'But I forgive you. You see, I'm a better person now that I'm dead.' Mircha smiled a wobbly smile. 'I want to set things right. I want to make everything up to you.' He shuffled toward her, his arm outstretched, his lips puckered for a sloppy kiss.

  Azade sidestepped Mircha. 'Listen. You heard the girl. People with money are coming to visit. If you really want to do something that matters, you'll settle down and be quiet. No more big ideas from the rooftop. And stop hauling all that crap back into the courtyard.'

  'That is not crap. Those items are of inestimable value. They represent every good thing of our former country. Those rusting items are our national treasures, our identity, our cultural historical identity. Just look at them!'

  Azade surveyed the glistening heap. There was that cracked Moskvich motor, several pairs of crutches, a pirated copy of Rambo, clocks that ticked out of time, rusted scythes, ripped flags belonging to the southern republics—items of high symbolic content and laden with nostalgic overtones, even she could see that. But still.

  'You have no country anymore. The villages we grew up in have been bombed out for years, razed to the ground. Only a few old-timers still speak our languages. It's pointless, what you are doing.' Azade folded her arms across her chest.

  Mircha thumped his chest with his fist. 'For the first time, I have purpose, I know what it is I am about. Why should I settle down and be quiet when I feel this good? Even my stump feels good!' Mircha swayed slightly as he took a few steps towards Azade. His boots were too big now for him and he had to slide them across the concrete, the laces trailing as afterthoughts.

  'You'
ll ruin everything in spite of yourself. You can't stay. It's not natural,' Azade said, making a last attempt at reason. The problem with the dead was that they lived to unfix what others had fixed, to undo what others were trying to do. The dead untied knots. They climbed staircases the wrong way and, in so doing, turned time backwards on a clock. Shout 'Stop!' to a dead man and he keeps moving. Shout 'Listen!' and he will merely point to his ears filled with words fibrous as cotton and round as pebbles.

  Never in her life had she wanted much. Never had she been able to do much. But hope had whittled her desire to a sharp slender point, shaved it to a mere sliver. And now she knew what she wanted and, more importantly, was ready to cast that sliver in the direction where it would do the most good. She would have to get rid of him once and for all.

  As if he could read her mind, Mircha gave Azade a bitter look and drew himself to his full height. The blue vein alongside his neck stood to attention. Mircha assumed his posture of rage, clenched his hand into a fist. Azade understood the momentum of instinct and emotion, how easy it was for a man like Mircha to work himself in a blink from feeling hurt to feeling pure rage. Even now he towered over Azade, his brow drawn into a scowl. The muscles in his jaw pumped mightily 'I won't go,' he said.

  Azade leaned on her shovel. Who was it who told her that a woman's strength lies in her hair and her hands? Her fingers moving independently of thought tugged the long darning needle out of the bun fastened to the top of her head. A thick rope of hair tumbled past her shoulder and her fingers combed through it.