The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

by Gina Ochsner

  'I couldn't possibly eat this,' the girl said, pushing the bowls in front of Tanya. The potential waste. That's what provoked her instantaneous steady rhythm between spoon and bowl. And then her thoughts - they were not arty at all, not focused. Too fascinated she was by the intricacies of motherhood and daughterhood. It was all so foreign to her and yet within elbow's reach, jostling against her, played out across the table top. Tanya's furry eyebrows beaded into tight concentration. The parries and barbs between grandmother and granddaughter, the quick looks of irritation, the silent nudge of the salt and pepper packets across the table. Is this what it meant to love and be loved, or at least to care about one another? Oh, how Tanya wished she could know. How she wanted to ask this mother whose wide open cornflower gaze suggested the best of all Tanya had read and wanted to believe to be true about wide open Western benevolence. Tanya's stomach seized and rolled. Oh, how desire is so terrible when it is served up before you and you are so terribly hungry. She reached for another bowl of borscht.

  'My, dear. Are you all right?' Now the mother had her moist hand on Tanya's wrist. Tanya felt her face going to fire again. But there was something comforting in that warm hand on her arm; she didn't want the mother—Livia? Lidia?—to withdraw her touch, so motherly, so genuine the urgent concern signalled in the pressure of her hand.

  Tanya brought a paper napkin to her mouth. 'Fine,' she mumbled behind the greasy veil of paper. The girl and the grandmother had averted their gazes, startled and embarrassed by Tanya's hunger exposed.

  Tanya gathered her notebook. Her museum senses fully engaged, her script galloping at full speed, she stood and brushed greasy crumbs from her lap.

  'Perhaps you'd like to see the basement now. It contains the hat/coat-check room as you know, and then, of course, our famous Permian rock exhibit. Then there's the last exhibit, a real crowd-pleaser and my personal favourite.' Tanya smiled wide, wider, until the tall girl could not bear her faulty Slavic dentition any longer. Numbly the women followed her through the corridor and down the narrow staircase to the basement where Ludmilla sat coughing.

  Tanya held a finger to her lips. 'Peter the Great was great for many reasons: his love of starting and finishing wars, building up the fleet and opening new ports. But he also possessed a boundless curiosity for the sciences and in his lifetime he amassed marvellous collections of animals, insects, flora and fauna. One of his oddest collections is now housed in the Kuntskamera building in St Petersburg and people travel hundreds of miles just to see it. Unfortunately, we could in no way obtain the original collection, and therefore we worked very hard to recreate specimen by specimen a reproduction of the famous Kuntskamera collection.' Tanya tiptoed into the darkened room and switched on the torches. Then she gestured as elegantly as she knew towards the glowing orange liquid exhibit.

  The women circled the exhibit slowly. Tanya knew that she wasn't the only one who looked at these interrupted bodies and tried to complete them: a week's worth of fingerprints spanned the glass. In the wood veneer schoolchildren had traced their names in the dust. Their own names, or the names they would have given these foetuses had they been real, had they lived, Tanya did not know.

  Tanya leaned her forehead against the glass and peered at two tiny bodies, the one climbing over the back of the other, and not a head to share between them. They were beautiful in their excess, beautiful in their lack. They were a good idea split in the middle and gone wrong. And Tanya couldn't help feeling that warm maternal swell behind her chest. Not cloud, this time, but love, the genuine article.

  'Horrible.' The girl turned her back to the exhibit.

  'They're absolutely monstrous,' the grandmother breathed. Her jaw hung slack in astonishment. 'Why in the world would anyone collect them?'

  Tanya's stomach bunched and dropped. With effort she forced the words. 'For instructive purposes, I think.'

  'But what on earth could be learned from collecting deformed foetuses and displaying them in glass jars?' The grandmother's repulsion knew no bounds.

  'It's so sad,' the mother said.

  'They're not real,' Tanya said. 'Just stretchy foam replicas.'

  'I'm going to be sick,' the girl mumbled.

  'The toilets!' Tanya's heart leapt within her chest. 'You must visit our toilets, then. They are of superior design. They're Finnish and absolutely stunning.'

  'I think we've seen enough,' the grandmother said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Olga

  'Olga Semyonovna!' Chief Editor Kaminsky barked from the open door of the Red Star translation office. His face was flushed but the lobes of his ears looked pale as puffball mushrooms. The two major strands of his hair stood at attention. 'Good news. I'm not going to fire you on account of that most unusual report—you know the one I'm talking about.' Here, Chief Editor Kaminsky attempted to rein in his hair, pressing the dark strands against the crown of his head. 'Bad news is, I have to let you go anyway. It seems the press has run out of ink.' Behind the sound of his words the tubes howled and shrieked. 'Yes, it's a complete mystery -even to those of us who know things—but that is the position we are in. And because I in no way want to appear capricious or feckless I'm letting you go, too, Arkady.' Chief Editor Kaminsky handed over the termination slips, small as postage stamps and completely devoid of ink. 'Believe me when I say I will write the most glowing of recommendations for both of you should you seek employment with another newspaper.'

  Olga drifted to the windows, spread her hands over the smoky glass. Arkady stood at the desk, looking at Olga. Below her the print drums slowly turned. Editor-in-Chief Mrosik's braying, steady as the honk of a swishy Mafiya sedan in panic mode, rattled the window. Behind them the wind howled through the pneumatic tubes. Olga's wedding ring was somewhere whizzing through these tubes. Also a glass eye belonging to that copy-editor they were under no circumstances to mention by name. And yet, hearing these noises, the sounds of her world as she knew it falling about her ears, made the fleeting trumpet blasts of Editor-in-Chief Mrosik, the quick exit of Chief Editor Kaminsky, strangely comforting.

  'What next?' Olga's breath fogged the window.

  Arkady smiled. 'We go.'

  ***

  'Perhaps you could show us something of the city. A monument or something,' the grandmother suggested. They stood outside the museum. Head Administrator Chumak's shiny pate appeared from behind his office window. Tanya could almost hear him clasping and unclasping his hands.

  After all, we are as interested in the museum environs as we are in the museum,' the mother said, attempting to interject bright tones into her words.

  The spikes of the girl's hair had started to droop. The sky turned wet and wobbled. The cottonwoods, oh how Tanya hated them, exhaled their white fluff. It was called Stalin's snow, but she preferred to think of it as the Devil's dandruff. If she had a match, she'd set it all on fire. Instead she sneezed. The grandmother groped for a tissue.

  'I could show you a war cemetery,' Tanya said between sneezes. 'It's quite green this time of year and very popular with newlyweds.'

  A central concrete walkway divided the cemetery into two halves and low cement jetties rising from the grass separated one massive plot from another. The dead were buried in groups of hundreds and large stone slabs in front of each plot noted the year and month each group had died. Except for the stone slabs standing no higher than Tanya's knee, there were no other markers. Just the stand of birch which had gone from their characteristic whips and tails to tiny new leaves of a shade of green Tanya could only call hesitant. And, of course, the grass. Long, wide swathes of it, verdant and lush, vibrantly alive as only grass fed by the dead can ever become.

  Orchestral music blared from speakers strategically located in the linden trees. This prevented serious discussion unless it was carried at a shout. Tanya scrambled for her notebook. An inopportune moment, perhaps, but surely a little scribble here, a little scribble there could do no harm.

  The bones of your grandfather, the one
who worked in the silver mine and survived only to die of black lung and the bones of my great grandmother who was taken in the middle of the night for singing seditious songs about saints, perhaps they are buried together somewhere in a grave like this one. Perhaps in a deep warren of mud they found each other. Perhaps it is they who breathe and tell the grass to grow in such sharp hues to remind us that we are the temporal ones. We are the ghosts fading.

  'How does one locate any one individual within this mass group?' the mother shouted at Tanya.

  'One doesn't.' Tanya shouted back, slipping the notebook into her plastic bag.

  'In the States,' the grandmother shouted, grave severity amplifying every word, 'each serviceman gets his own cross. A white one.'

  'Well, not always—not at every cemetery,' now the girl piped up.

  'You mean, they can get other colours if they want?' Tanya asked.

  The grandmother opened her mouth as if to reply. She then seemed to think better of it and clamped her mouth shut.

  Outside the memorial entrance they had to compete with a bridal entourage for a ride. They had no chance whatsoever, as the groom was well stocked with spirits and even some hard currency. Just when Tanya had all but given up a microvan careened toward them and the driver, a middle-aged man with a munificent smile of all gold teeth, urged them in, even going so far as to help with their luggage.

  Once settled into the seat next to Tanya, the girl touched Tanya's elbow. 'Weren't there prison camps in this area?'

  'McKayla has visited several concentration camps as part of her graduate thesis studies,' her mother explained. 'She is a student of atrocity, suffering, and other chaos.'

  'She can't get enough of it,' the grandmother observed dryly.

  Tanya felt the girl stiffen. 'Suffering—if beautifully done—is an art form.'

  'If suffering is what you want to see, then Russia is full of it,' Tanya said carefully.

  'But what about the camps? There were camps,' the girl persisted.

  In the rear-view mirror Tanya saw the driver's eyes boring a hole in her forehead.

  'There are still stories of such places,' Tanya whispered. 'Of course people don't like to talk, don't like to remember. Historical memory is not necessarily a blessing.'

  'But it is your birthright,' the girl said, squaring her shoulders.

  The driver ground the gears and the car rounded the corner to her street. Tanya's thoughts were a whirl. Acid rose to the back of her mouth. This girl sitting beside her—what a confusion, what a piece of chaos, what a strange contradiction she was. The babies, or rather, the foam replicas of the babies, whose lives had simply been foreshortened but were now remembered and loved by everyone who saw them, repulsed her utterly. But she couldn't wait to get out to Perm-36 where she would no doubt touch the fences where prisoners were routinely lined up and shot. This girl would fold her so-tall body into an isolation cell to see what such torture felt like for a mere twenty seconds and she'd look at the glass display case of bones and hair, shoes and glasses—the things that outlasted the men and women who'd died so horribly in a place that was nothing short of hell on earth. She would do this, and if not here in Perm, then somewhere else, Tanya was certain of it, because she felt entitled by distant heritage to some portion of collective suffering, as if suffering were something one could lay claim to and collect. As if this kind of suffering were something one should wish to remember.

  The microvan suddenly lurched for the kerb. The driver hopped out as if his shoes were on fire. He opened the hood of the car and inspected the engine. There wasn't a thing in the world wrong with it, Tanya knew. He was simply feigning a breakdown so that he could affect a miraculous repair at the sight of a few extra roubles.

  'What's wrong?' the grandmother asked.

  'A small paper shortage,' Tanya said, climbing out. She fished in her purse and retrieved all the items she'd co-opted in the event of such an emergency: one of Zoya's bottles of nail-varnish remover, a vial of Russian Forest perfume, one of Daniilov's beloved wrenches. But the driver shook his fist and cursed bitterly at her anyway. They'd run out of petrol, really and truly, and nothing short of fuel falling from the sky would console him now. From a box beneath the dash, he withdrew three bottles of vodka and a garden hose, currency he'd co-opted in the event of such an emergency, and stood in the street, waving the bottles at passing cars.

  'What now?' the mother asked.

  'We walk,' Tanya said.

  'But our bags,' the girl said.

  Tanya hefted a bag onto her shoulder. 'They'll have to walk, too.'

  ***

  Outside the news building the pigeons lifted from the trees. The skins of the lime trees had thawed and the sun shone horizontally just as it should this time of year. Whatever disaster was brewing inside the Red Star offices, it had not stalled the cautious approach of a new season. Olga trudged through the muddy square behind Arkady, who slowed every now and then to offer her his arm. When they reached the metal bench, Olga brushed aside some trash and sank down gratefully. Though sitting on metal benches, according to Vera, put the ovaries in jeopardy, Olga was long past the age of caring about such things. And sitting, she'd learned from her years at the Red Star, made a shaky situation more stable, dropping nearly any disaster to a more manageable altitude.

  Arkady lowered himself carefully beside Olga. 'Thank God!' he sighed. 'I hated that job.'

  Olga started. 'I thought you liked that job!'

  'I hated every minute of it. The only reason I have stayed on this long is because of you. Because, Olga Semyonovna, I have always liked you.'

  Olga stared mutely at Arkady.

  'In fact,' Arkady continued, 'from the first day I saw you, I loved you. All these years I have pried myself out of bed and trudged to work only because I knew you would be there. That we would talk, however briefly. That we would drink a little tea, however lukewarm, together.'

  'I had no idea, no idea whatsoever,' Olga muttered, her numb gaze trained on Arkady's shoes.

  'You possess a rare and noble soul and though I cannot offer you much, you have my heart, if you want it, and of course, my unfailing admiration.'

  'Why?'

  Arkady blinked rapidly. 'Because of the nature of our work and the quintessential nature of who we, Jews, are—lovers of words and seekers of wisdom. We have suffered alongside each other and, therefore, we understand each other.'

  As he was speaking something liquid shifted behind Olga's ribs, something anciently familiar, light and heavy at the same time. Olga jolted upright on the bench for sheer shock of it. Could she really be feeling the first giddy rushes of the possibility of love? And for such a man as Arkady? And Olga could not help allowing herself to smile. 'It's quite a lot to consider. All at once, that is,' Olga managed at last.

  Arkady rose to his feet and laid his gloved hand over hers. 'That is all I ask. Consider it. Incidentally, this is for you.' Arkady withdrew an envelope from his coat pocket, then pulled his coat collar around his neck and walked across the square.

  Olga watched him go. Then she looked at the envelope, considering just what might be inside. At last she opened it. Inside was an official-looking letter and attached to the letter an official-looking card. The idiot card.

  At the edge of the square Arkady had stopped to look at her sitting there on the bench, the letter opened on her lap, the card in her hand. They observed each other from across the square. Olga tipped her head, considering Arkady. That word consider tied her eyebrows in a knot. Built from the Latin root siderus, the word rested on two meanings. Just like the old parables in which two images lie next to each other and forced meaning from the ground between them, this word demanded that she reconcile two seemingly unlike meanings from the common core: 'to observe the stars'. But the other meaning: 'desire'. The very thought of the word was enough to make the ovaries jump—and her on a cold metal bench!

  Olga lifted her hand in a wave. Arkady raised his arm, then turned and trudged on. Olga hopped
to her feet, slid the card between her bra and breast, and hurried for home. All these years she'd looked at Arkady as a friend, durable as the desk they shared, faithful but unimaginative as an oar to a lock. The idea that Arkady could provide, for her and her son, in such a significant and tangible way was such a surprise to Olga, who had learned over the years to expect so little from people, especially those who meant well. The idea that Arkady could surprise her, and that she might like this, that she could feel something for him and on such a hairpin turn, made her wonder what else about Arkady—about herself—she had miscalculated.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Azade

  Azade leaned on her shovel and squinted at the festering heap. A real puzzle there, Mircha. Not at all following the rules of the old stories. She'd broken him with the needle. And in his body she could see that he was diminished. He clung to a rusted pogo stick anchored in the heap, looking very much like a human accordion bent by the wind. But his mouth! It still moved. And his voice carried all too well.

  'Capitalism is brushing its teeth! Global corporate domination is on the march!' Mircha hooted towards the stairwell where Zoya emerged wearing a strapless dress with a bra that wasn't, as was the fashion. She stomped across the marshy courtyard to the latrine, where she rattled the handle.

  Azade could smell the thermometer warming in the girl's pocket, the biting odour of mercury, and her quick irritation, which, as all things do, worked its complement through the bowels. Which is why Azade did not need to ask to know that Zoya would require ten squares of paper, at the very least.

  Azade unlocked the door and held it open for Zoya.

  Mircha cupped his hand to his mouth and hooted in their direction. 'Behold, we stand at the crossroads. I speak to you as a prophet! The Japanese are stealing our icebergs and auctioning them on the Internet!'