by Gina Ochsner
'Look,' Tanya sighed. 'You're all smart kids. Each of you has a bright future, er, somewhere doing something. Don't you want to go out and do some good—change the world?'
Gleb and the twins tipped their heads. Their eyes clouded, their pupils pinpointing in and out of focus.
'The past outstrips the future. The future consumes the past. All that is left is the present.' Big Anna had her hand on Tanya's umbrella. 'We don't want to change the world. We want to conquer it.'
Tanya shook her head, trying in vain to keep the words from finding her ears. These were not the sayings of a ten-year-old girl.
'All we have is what we can see. What we can take. And only what has been bought with blood has value,' the girl intoned. 'This is why suffering in the New Russia is the truest commodity.'
Tanya's throat tightened. That their suffering had no better, higher meaning—unthinkable. Unbearable. Even if it were true, she would not say it. Not to this child. 'No,' Tanya shook her head slowly now, with deliberation. 'That's not true.'
'Then prove to me otherwise.' Big Anna let go of the umbrella and rolled up her sleeves. The twins, snuffling and oozing from their eyes and ears, closed in on the flanks.
'I can't. But I know that you are wrong. You have to be wrong,' Tanya said. 'All I have is what I have lived, what I've seen. And of course, my colour and cloud observations,' her voice trailed.
From behind the toppled archway came a horse-like combi nation of snorts and whinnies. Vitek. Laughing. At her. Tanya had never been so grateful for that laugh. Never so grateful for the way that noise instantly recast the spell.
Big Anna lifted her nose towards the arch. And then she was off, loping in long dog-like strides. Gleb followed, a piece of rusty cable dangling from his belt loops. Only Good and Bad Boris remained.
And Yuri, sitting upright in the far tub, woozy from an afternoon of a fisherman's sweet repose. He hooked a leg over the rim of the bath. Tanya helped him over, steadying him on a patch of solid ground.
Yuri lifted the visor. 'I had a dream,' he said. 'A bomb exploded in the ground. I was thrown clear. I sailed through the air. I flapped my arms and for a moment, I was flying. Until I fell. At which time, I died. The orderly, who looked a lot like Mircha, by the way, told me to take heart because nothing stays dead in Russia. And then I travelled from death to life, one windowpane of light at a time.'
'That was not a dream,' Tanya said. 'All those things really happened to you.' Tanya rested her forehead on his shoulder. Took in the smell of his dream-soaked shirt. 'You sailed through the air. In Grozny. For a brief time, you flew.'
'But I'm not dead.'
'No. You're very much alive.'
Yuri sighed. 'What a relief.' He turned his head first one way and then the other, taking in the open architecture of the courtyard.
'Where's Zoya?'
'Gone. I think.'
'Vitek?'
'Gone.' Tanya dusted the shoulders of his shirt with her fingers. A convoy of army trucks rumbled in the distance.
Yuri cranked his head sideways. He bent at the waist and slowly straightened.
'The ticking?' Tanya ventured.
Yuri grinned. 'Gone.'
Together they sat on the bench and watched Good and Bad Boris, paddling in the mud shallows. The boys scooped at the mud, flinging handfuls of it at each other. And they were laughing as only children do during pure play.
'Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?' Yuri slung his arm around Tanya's shoulders.
She thought of Big Anna, then. She wished that the girl could have seen what they were seeing now: the twins playing, the women sitting together on the bench, the sky unfurling in colours there were no names for, their building sinking. 'No,' Tanya said at last. Over the low and widening horizon they could see that other buildings were sinking, too. The old news building, the former KGB offices, the old pavilion of media and art, the prison, the All-Russia Museum—all of them, large concrete structures the ground could no longer shoulder. Strains of Swan Lake floated in the air.
'Look!' Good Boris elbowed Bad Boris.
'Listen!' Bad Boris hopped up and down.
The mud made a gulping sound as if it were drinking down the building, as though it had waited decades for this moment. Yuri and Tanya sat frozen, watching the slow spectacle. The metal heating vent snapped and the TV antenna, angled towards the horizon like the bowsprit of a ship, disappeared metre by metre. And after it went, the mud kept pulling with the same kind of steady patient force that would, some day years from now, push the bones of prophets, convicts and slaves to the surface. But for now there was only wet darkness breathing quietly. A darkness so deep that it could have been the same dark over which God hovered before there was anything. And from that deep came life. Light. Colour. Cloud and sky.
It could happen here too. Russia was just that kind of place. They could start over. In certain hills, Tanya knew, green shoots were already pushing through the soil. And the discovery that there could be something new, something better rising from the earth and that it started with them, with her and Yuri, was itself a cause for something like joy. And that she could even feel joy, that it could come crawling on knuckles and knees, come knocking this way was such an astonishment that Tanya had to surrender her analyzing, lest this feeling, so wholly unfamiliar and foreign, evaporate.
'What will happen next?' Yuri wondered.
Above them the news helicopters ploughed through the strange and shifting sky. With the horizon opened, Tanya imagined she could see cotton, the stuff of her dreams and Yuri's, could see this visible realm breathing on the horizon, fainting, reviving, then fainting again.
Tanya closed her eyes. 'The inert elements will sublime. Certain stars will bow out. But the universe will keep expanding. Not long from now the sorrel will overtake spring. The wheat and mustard will volunteer along the verge. The fish will bite without even wondering why.'
Yuri pushed open his visor. 'That was very artistic.'
Tanya opened her eyes. 'Thank you.'
'Don't you want to write some of that down?'
'No.' Tanya breathed.
'What then?'
Tanya spread her fingers across the yoke of Yuri's shirt. 'Take off that ridiculous helmet.'
Yuri removed the helmet.
'Now,' Tanya leaned closer. 'Kiss me.'
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Endless gratitude to Philip Gwyn Jones, who brought this book into the world and never once doubted. Thanks to Julie Barer and Caspian Dennis for creating safe passage, and special thanks to Willing Davidson for his keen eye and kind heart. Deepest thanks to Jenna Johnson for making the impossible possible.
Grateful thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Oregon Arts Commission, and Literary Arts, Inc., for awards that supported the writing of these stories.
My enduring thanks to the Luftmenschen for their collective wisdom, and to the Chrysostom Society.
Thanks to my family for their support, patience, and many prayers. Thanks also to Louise T. Reynolds.
Special thanks to Al and Carolyn Akimoff, Nathan and Sheree Johnson, Andrei Zoryn, Dale Tubbs, and Lana Serotsin for help with vital research.
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