by Gina Ochsner
Azade tipped her head, considering the largesse Mircha had acquired in death. Bodily he was smaller, dwarfed inside his service coat, but the sheer verbage issuing from his mouth and the stink of it—their little courtyard filled as it was with the heap—could barely contain it all.
'A story! A story! This one I think you will like.' Mircha balanced on the top of the pile. 'Actually it's several stories bleeding into one, a popular architecture, and none of the stories really finishes, but that just proves the best stories are like life, completely unresolved.'
After a few moments Zoya emerged from the latrine. She shielded her eyes and gazed at the heap.
'God, what a nuisance,' she said, dropping fifty kopeks into Azade's collection tray with one hand and pinching her nose with the other. 'If he doesn't shut up, he'll ruin what little chance we have for the grant.'
***
Yuri stretched his body over the bench and listened to the clouds. They spoke to him in familiar voices. Correction. They spoke in a familiar voice. Just one. Mircha's. Yuri opened an eye.
Mircha sat on the heap and made music with empty tins of sprats. 'Fish are birds without wings!'
Yuri smiled at the noise. Who would have thought the man had done so much thinking in his as-yet short afterlife! And it was all so very profound!
'Yu—ri!' Zoya's voice rang out shrill and sharp, breaking his name into jagged halves. Yuri raised himself onto an elbow and listened to the sound of Zoya's shoes punching angry holes in the soft mud. Punch—squish, punch—squish. Heel—toe. Heel—toe. How she managed that full-throttle approach, complete with her trademark hip thrust and wearing those shoes in this mud—and all without a single break in her stride—it was enough to send him reeling. And then there she was, bench-side and not a bit out of breath. Under the May slant light her hair cast a metallic borscht-coloured sheen. Yuri winced.
Mircha flung his arm at Zoya. 'The Mongolians are bottling ordinary air and peddling it as medicinal oxygen!'
Zoya pointed her chin towards Mircha. 'Some people just don't know when to quit.'
'Oh, I don't know.' Yuri inhaled deeply. 'Even a fool can have a moment of primal wisdom.'
Zoya sat next to Yuri. 'But he doesn't make any sense.'
'Few prophets do. At least he's keeping all his clothes on.'
'Speaking of which,' Zoya said, whipping out her thermometer from her open purse. 'Look! I am ovulating. Right now.' Zoya hooked her finger between a shirt button and pulled. 'As in this moment exactly.' Now she had a hand on his knee. Who was this vixen with the sharp tongue and radiating hair, pulling on his shirt, yanking at his belt buckle?
Tick.
Yuri blinked.
Heapside, Mircha bellowed: 'Be a man! Fulfill your calling!'
Tick. Yuri blinked again. Yes, the ticking was back. Distinct as ever. 'Now? This moment exactly?'
'Yes!' Zoya and Mircha cried in unison.
Tick.
Yuri held his hands up, as if in protest. Or maybe surrender. 'But the art-loving Americans are coming.'
'Yes. I know. They want to see how real Russians live.' Zoya smiled and slid her hand along Yuri's thigh.
He swallowed. His voice shook. 'But the timing is so delicate and the need for social graces so severe. I mean, honestly, how would it look?'
Zoya leaned and licked first one eyebrow and then the other. Yuri felt his chest tighten, his heart gallop. 'Who cares?' Zoya unhitched his belt and pulled him towards the darkened stairwell where his muscles seemed to move of their own volition.
Off went the belt. Down came the trousers. And then they were doing what two young people do when they are in love, or at least amiable towards the idea of togetherness even if it has nothing to do with love. And then: horrors. Malfunction. Negative lift. Complete and absolute system failure.
With a snort Zoya pushed Yuri. 'You really are worthless, you know.' Zoya sidled her dress over her hips.
'I'm sorry.' Yuri tried steadying his hands over his knees. 'I just can't. Something's wrong, I don't know what. It might be that ticking.'
'Your problem is that you think too much. Or maybe not enough. Either way, you better pull your head out of your ass and soon!'
Yuri stood and yanked his trousers waistward. His face contorted with shame and more thinking. Yuri pulled on his space helmet. What did she mean, he did not think enough or possibly too much?
***
At the edge of the courtyard Tanya hesitated. Her every instinct told her to turn back now before it was too late. To herd the women to the city's only three-star hotel, where an earnest brass band and recently laundered bed sheets awaited them.
'Well,' the grandmother prompted.
Tanya cleared her throat. 'I suppose there are a few, er, things, I should mention.'
'Things? What things?' the mother asked, craning her neck.
The girl gazed over the top of Tanya's head for an unobstructed view of the portable latrine and Azade ferociously sweeping at the mud in front of it. Olga sat on the bench and contemplated the latest issue of the Red Star, the pages of which were utterly blank.
Lukeria leaned out her open window and shouted in English, 'Hey! American ladies! Are your suitcases made from real leather? Or are they Chinese imitations?'
The grandmother looked at the mother and the mother looked at Tanya.
'She says things. She is very ill,' Tanya whispered.
'Watch out for those conniving Jews!' Lukeria hooted. 'They engineered the revolution, you know.'
The girl turned to Tanya. 'Which revolution is she talking about?'
Tanya sighed. 'All of them, I think.'
The mother touched Tanya's elbow. 'Why don't you take her to the hospital?'
'Unthinkable.' Tanya shook her head. 'She'd never make it. One has to be extraordinarily healthy to survive a stay in a Russian hospital.'
The women gazed at the windows. Tanya couldn't decide if they were merely baffled or in a state of extreme consternation. But as they'd passed the latrine, Tanya decided to keep them moving through the courtyard. A good plan. And it would have worked, too, if only the women didn't have the Western lolling gaze so perfectly honed. For with every step they took, Tanya could see that they were taking in detail after detail, absurdity stacked upon absurdity. No matter where they looked, they saw something Tanya knew fell outside the realm of what they had hoped to see. True to her word, Zoya had hung the best of her laundry: her sheer nightgowns and tights. Then there was Yuri sitting on an overturned bucket beside the gaping hole, a fishing rod in his hand, his whole face tortured by thought.
Though the sun was not bright, the girl shaded her eyes with a hand and squinted ferociously. 'What is the matter with him?'
'He's fishing,' Tanya said.
'He looks like he is in great pain,' the grandmother remarked.
'He is a thinker,' Tanya explained.
'He is, in fact, sick in the head,' Zoya called from the stairwell, 'if not in body.'
'He is an idiot,' Olga said.
'Is that a fact?' Now the grandmother squinted at Yuri.
'Oh, yes.' Olga laid a palm solemnly across her bosom.
At this the grandmother exchanged a significant look with the mother.
'I know what you must think,' Olga said. 'But I have to face facts. Facts are the building blocks of larger truth. And what is truth but a tall tower casting a very long shadow? And what is shadow but a terrible darkness for some but a restful shade for others?'
Vitek unpeeled himself from the side of the building and strolled towards the women. 'This is what comes of applying oneself to the rigours of metaphor.' His voice acquired a well-lubricated quality and his English flowed smooth as motor oil. 'It makes people ask absurd questions.'
'Yes, but is that normal?' the mother asked.
'It's extremely normal. Better than that, it's as Russian as birch bark shoes, I assure you,' Tanya said.
'I assure you,' Vitek mocked gently.
'Right.' Tanya wiped
her hands along her skirt. 'It's been a long day packed full of, er, sights. Let's see the rooms now.'
She steered the women towards the stairwell. It looked as if they might follow, too, the grandmother double-timing it behind Tanya, the mother behind the grandmother, and the long-legged daughter behind her mother. At the rear, Yuri had dropped his rod and shouldered up their many bags. But then the grandmother stopped short. Mother collided with grandmother, daughter against mother, Olga into the winged rump of the girl and Yuri into Olga. All of whom were overtaken by the baggage, which flew, as fate or luck would have it, to the foot of the heap.
'What is that?' The grandmother wrinkled her nose and pointed to the heap.
'We don't have regular sanitation service. Therefore, it is customary for us to throw our rubbish out the window.'
'Is that what I'm smelling?' The girl pinched her nose.
Just then the twins, Good Boris and Bad Boris, emerged from the open chasm. They circled the luggage, their heads lowered, their teeth bared. Good Boris unzipped his trousers and peed on the mother's leather suitcase. Or quite possibly it was the grandmother's suitcase. It was hard for Tanya to say with certainty. She was far too distracted by the twins' teeth, which were definitely longer and sharper today than they were yesterday.
'Do they bite?' the girl asked.
'No, but they throw rocks and metal scrap pretty well,' Tanya conceded.
'Whose children are these?' The mother turned to Olga.
'Nobody's. That is, to date, no one has claimed them,' Olga said.
'They are community property,' Vitek added. 'The future of our great country.'
The twins straightened and Good Boris adjusted his zip. Bad Boris bent from the waist in a stiff half-bow.
The grandmother walked purposefully towards the children. Though she didn't speak a word of Russian, her posture conveyed with a clarity that needed no interpretation her firm intention; she would transcend any barrier—hygienic, linguistic, or otherwise. Her mission: this child. Not the one that had micturated upon her fine luggage. But this one, still bowing.
'Come here, child.' The grandmother bent and held her hand out as if coaxing a dog. 'Someone ought to be taking care of you.'
Bad Boris's gaze darted from one woman to the next. 'It is in the shape of the Lord God's emptiness that we are made,' Bad Boris said in perfect English, his pure tenor voice rising high as notes taking flight in a tall cathedral.
Just then Big Anna emerged from the hole, a bullhorn held to her mouth. 'Queue up, you creeps! Buy your trinkets and authentic Siberian souvenirs here!'
'Pay no attention to her.' Tanya stepped between the women and the heap and the chasm and the girl, but the women moved towards Big Anna, pulled by a force Tanya could not name nor fathom nor stop.
The mother placed her warm hand on Tanya's wrist. Again with that warm and comforting gesture. 'Please tell me, dear girl, that these children don't live in that hole.'
'Why not?' Vitek smiled. 'It's prime real estate. Very spacious. Growing more so with every passing second. And the things these little shits are unearthing! Just yesterday I found a full set of dentures. Beautiful. You should really take a look.'
'Since when do these kids speak English? And with such grammatical precision?' Olga addressed no one in particular.
Now grandmother, mother and daughter all stood precariously at the edge of the chasm, each of them peering into the darkness.
'I can't see a thing. What's down there?' The girl craned her neck.
'Everything you covet!' the children screamed in unison. From their pockets they produced war medals and tiny metal icons, the kind soldiers going into battle wore around their necks, striped navy shirts, and the hats and stoles made of prized sable fur—not those made of soggy rabbit fur that smell of damp forests.
'Down there is everything elemental. Smokeless fire. Fear.' Azade walked the perimeter of the chasm. She lifted her nose and sniffed at the air with grave suspicion.
'I'll tell you what's down there. It's an old story. As old as east and west,' Olga said. 'It's a story about mud because that's where every story begins and every story ends. Beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. Because mud is like love, constantly asserting itself. One day God awoke from troubling dreams and realized that He was lonely. He had mud in his beard and mud under his fingernails. And that's when He got an idea. Out of the mud He made man.'
'To the rooms!' Tanya cried, sweeping her arm in the general direction of the stairwell. If she could get them out of the courtyard, away from the chaos, then she could show them their lives behind closed doors, the lives as she wished them to be, as she wished them to see—the kettle whistling on the hotplate, the postcards from beautiful places on their walls, the claw-footed baths.
The mother straightened suddenly and waved her hand in the air as if conducting an orchestra. 'Such a punchy odour,' she observed. 'There must be a septic tank nearby.'
Vitek leaned in the direction of the hole and sniffed mightily as if his nostrils were as sensitive as a canary to coal gas. Tanya closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. And then she prayed. To her heavenly father. Dear God, if you love me even just a little bit, make him go away. When she opened her eyes it was just as she expected, things could not get any worse: Mircha stood beside the hole and was reading from a ream of papers tucked into an old philological textbook, the kind of material Azade normally doled out for use in the latrine. As Mircha finished with each page, he peeled it from the binding and let it fall, as a petal from a blowsy flower.
Mircha licked a finger, peeled another sheet from the stack and levelled his gaze on Tanya. 'The best story, by far, is yours, dear girl. A heartbreaker, too, a real three-hankie affair, five if you are easily moved. Imagine a girl haunted by her mother. The mother was water and her daughter was air. Even though the two were elementally composed of the same matter, at all times they were fundamentally separate.'
'Don't listen to him,' Azade said to Tanya. 'A fool will say anything.'
'What the girl knows about her mother could fill a thimble,' Mircha continued, completely ignoring Azade's hex-eye glares. 'What she can remember weighs less than a cobweb. Only this: pink rushes of blood behind her mother's fingernails, the soft warm hands and the skin that smelled of woodsmoke.'
'The smell!' The grandmother fanned the air around her nose. 'It's getting worse.'
Tanya hands shook. 'We better keep moving,' she said between clenched teeth.
'Don't you want to know where your mother is?' Mircha pitched his voice towards Tanya. 'Don't you want to know how your story tangles up with hers? I'll bet she's down in this hole with every other unanswered question. Don't you want to know how to live this life abundantly?'
'Enough!' Azade approached the bench with her shovel in hand. 'What makes you think you can tell any of us how better to live?'
'What's she saying?' The mother turned to Tanya for a translation.
'Is she talking to us?' The girl seemed moved, at last, to curiosity.
'What is that woman doing?' Now the grandmother gripped Tanya's arm. 'Why is she waving that shovel around?'
'It's hard to say.' Tanya heard her own voice coiling tight, tight.
'Well, let's reason together.' Mircha tucked his sheaf of papers into his waistband and withdrew a plastic vial of nail-varnish remover. 'You've tried your old housewives' tricks before and not one of them has worked. That's always been your problem, failure to accept complete reality. You see, you can't really make me go away because it's not part of the story. You need me. I am the conflict, the plot complication. I am utterly necessary.' Mircha took a healthy drink.
Azade gripped the shovel handle. 'Let me tell you a story of weight and spectacle. Some people call it the Invention of Zero but I call it the Immeasurable Importance of Wising up to Oneself. One summer all the cucumbers in a man's field went bad. The leaves on the man's prized Persian Ironwood turned black as ravens and the
n, one day, grew wings and flew, carrying off his ancestral stories and history beyond the four points of a map. He had counted all that could be counted—buckets, stars, wives, feet, lakes, words and devils—and still came up empty. There was nothing to fill that yawning expanse, and so he ate a cabbage, the last one on the last hill of his property.'
The grandmother tugged on Tanya's sleeve. 'Is that woman mad? Is there something we should do to help her?'
'Is there another staircase we can use to get to our rooms?' the mother asked.
All this English and Russian flying willy-nilly from window to broken concrete, mud chasm to heap. The noise and commerce and questions and stories—subversive and malicious—knocking knee to hip to ear. It was enough to throw Tanya into a full spin.
Sensing her suffering, the girl, an expert on the subject, touched Tanya's elbow. 'What's that lady talking about? Tell us.'
Tanya turned to the girl. 'You asked for this,' she said balefully. And then she translated word for word Azade's story.
'The cabbage spoiled inside of him. It curdled his blood and even his very thoughts to the point that even if he wanted to think good, he thought ill, even if he wanted to do right, he did wrong. Everything he touched became contaminated. On shearing day, a time of rejoicing, he shut himself in his house because otherwise the pregnant ewes lost their lambs and the horns of the rams withered on their heads. If the man went fishing, the fish swam sideways and in spring would forget the rivers of their youth. Meanwhile that cabbage in his stomach continued to grow, as if it had a mind and will of its own. Old women teased him mercilessly, for he looked like a woman carrying a terrible burden. The man became weary with this souring weight that pulled his sinew from bone, joint from socket, pulled his body towards the ground. You may be wondering what this man ever did to deserve such luck, and the answer is not so simple. Because the man was like a jinn, or maybe something worse. More air than earth, he was a man in search of new skin to inhabit, new stories to wear. This was why he felt so empty, this was why everything he touched became cursed. But he was not without some charm. He could still talk up the requisite threesome for a round of drinking. And he had a knack for telling stories.'
