The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight Read online

  Violet in early November, shirring the sightline. Day and night meet in that hue for five minutes. With their barks the dogs in their courtyards measure the lengths of their chains. Outside the city the hills burn with trash fires and the smell of outdoors creeps indoors. This is the smell of the service coat, the one you were wearing when you came home. The patch with your name burned to a crisp and you asked me if I could tell you who you were.

  Had she remained more alert she might have detected the sounds of umbrellas scraping the walls as the students from number 37 came bursting through the lower entrance of the museum and filed past the ticket-counter kassa, where phlegmatic Ludmilla slid their tickets under a window. Then she might have heard their stamping and tromping of their many boots and galoshes, the thump of book bags unstrapped and dumped on the long wooden counter that separated her world from theirs.

  At the same instant that the children of number 37, in a wave of human noise and coats, pressed against her counter, Yuri's group of tourists—all fifteen of them—descended from the stairs that funnelled past the lavs and deposited them directly in front of Tanya's counter.

  'Wake up!' a teacher barked, her brows stitched together in permanent disapproval.

  'Devushka!' another woman shouted with the too-stern tone of a teacher. Tanya jolted and her notebook slid from her lap to the floor. Strange how with the simple word 'girl!' her body snapped to the posture of primary school, her legs lifting her up and out of the chair, though her ears knew already from the sound of the woman's voice that it was too late—she had already failed.

  'Hey!' Two men in suits, regulars who only came to the museum on account of the chess sets in the mezzanine café, waved their claim disks at her.

  'Please!' a woman shepherding two humpbacked pensioners cried. Adding to the bleating of the women was the din of the children, elbowing one another, jockeying for counter space, enthralled at the spectacle of noise.

  At the end of the hallway, Head Administrator Chumak materialized, a severe expression gathering on his face, his clipboard pressed to his side—the result being that Tanya, who tended to fluster easily anyway, went completely off the rails, handing the contents of rack 1131 to the holder of disk 1311 and the overcoat with the drooping buttons, 1717, to the bearer of disk 1771. To the businessman went the woman's shawl and to the wilting attendant of the old ladies, the most businesslike worsted wool coat. And on and on until the crush of human bodies, coats and noise dissipated and Tanya was left with Yuri, standing at the foot of the stairs and systematically wringing his hands. Next to him, shifting his substantial weight from his good foot to his leaden prosthetic foot, was Head Administrator Chumak.

  Head Administrator Chumak studied her for a long moment. Then he began—thump—slide, thump—slide—to climb the stairs. 'Follow me,' he called over his shoulder.

  Tanya collected her purse, her notebook, her coat, the packets of sugar she'd taken from the café, everything she'd need and possibly would not be allowed later to retrieve once he'd fired her.

  Inside Head Administrator Chumak's office the interior gloom dampened the attempts of the last light at the windows. Tanya stood at the threshold and waited for Head Administrator Chumak to position himself with dignity behind his desk. He snapped on his desk lamp. From behind the desk loomed a tall soap carving of a frowning Zhilinsky, a painter Tanya had never liked.

  'Sit down there, dear.' Head Administrator Chumak's face softened and Tanya noticed for the first time that the splotches dotting his shiny head were, in actual fact, freckles.

  Chumak opened her work file. 'I see you've completed university studies and received some medium-high marks.'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'You have guide licences for several state museums and even a cemetery.'

  Head Administrator Chumak nodded at her notebook, still clutched to her side. 'And clearly you've found a way to use your free time. But, I'm afraid it's a black mark for you. Your job performance is not up to standard. Did you know that in one day alone you made seventeen mistakes?'

  Tanya glanced at the window and bit her lip. In the newspapers—well, not Olga's Red Star, but the others—they were predicting the coldest winter on record. Already geometric patterns of hoar frost latticed Chumak's office window.

  Head Administrator Chumak rubbed his hands together and nodded at the miniature rock collection already shrouded in condensation. 'This museum. These exhibits. They are absolutely unique.'

  Tanya nodded solemnly. Having fashioned from stretchy foam the entire basement Kuntskamera exhibit and having spent the better part of the previous spring dipping wrinkled paper bags in wet flour paste to make faux-sculptures, no one knew this better than Tanya.

  'It's so hard these days to run a museum such as this one funded completely by the kindness of friends and strangers. And employees.' Head Administrator Chumak wagged his head balefully from side to side. 'That's why we all have to work much much harder. That's why I need much much more from you.'

  'More?' Tanya croaked.

  'But at least we have art and beauty on our side.' Chumak directed his gaze at Tanya. 'At least there are people who still believe in beauty, such as it is. And they are even willing to pay for it, too.'

  'What people?'

  Head Administrator Chumak opened another work file and withdrew a single sheet of paper. He smiled beatifically. Americans of Russian Extraction for the Causes of Beautification. They are coming here. Possibly. Maybe. Yes, here.' Head Administrator Chumak peered at Tanya.

  'Why?'

  The question pushed Head Administrator Chumak's entire face into a pinch. He reached for his reading glasses and read from an official-looking letter printed on fine linen paper. '"The Americans of Russian Extraction for the Causes of Beautification are committed to preserving, protecting and promoting art among the people. Specifically we believe in the power of art to motivate, educate and illuminate the human soul. It is a challenge we wish to embrace with a deserving partner museum in Russia."

  'Do you understand what this means?'

  Tanya suddenly felt as if her teeth had turned to glass. 'Motivate' and 'challenge' were English words having no direct or at least relevant translation into Russian. Certainly Head Administrator Chumak knew that she, given her medium-high marks in school, knew this. 'This means that I should not mix up their coats and claim disks when they come?' Tanya asked carefully.

  'Yes,' Head Administrator Chumak drew the word out. 'But there's more. We need to submit a completed application form, which incidentally requires composition-style answers. All we have to do is beat out four—maybe five—other museums for their grant money. But am I worried? No. And why am I so untroubled?'

  'I don't know, sir.' There was something about the even cadence gluing his words together, uncannily similar to her own scripted question-answer patter, that made Tanya very uneasy.

  Head Administrator Chumak handed Tanya the file. 'Because you, Tatiana Nikolaevna Bobkov, are a girl of enormous substance.' Head Administrator Chumak laced his fingers together and circled one thumb around the other. It was a completely unnerving gesture from a man himself so portly.

  'But, sir, I am the hat/coat-check girl. If I'm not fit to lead the tours, how could I be qualified to fill in the application form?'

  Head Administrator Chumak's smile broadened. 'That's why I know you can pull this off—you ask the most interesting questions. And if you can manage questions so creatively, I can't wait to see how you'll handle the answers.'

  'But...'

  Head Administrator Chumak held up his hands. 'I can't ask Daniilov, anyway, he's far too busy cleaning. It's all Ludmilla can do to sit behind the ticket office. Zoya, though artistic in her own fashion, is limited to a discussion of art as it pertains to hair styling. And Yuri, well, he's Yuri. So you see, it has to be you. And if you do a good job, I might even be able to do something about those black marks on your work record. If we get the grant, I could even get your wages caught up. Just think how all o
f our situations would improve. So be creative,' Head Administrator Chumak finished with a knowing wink, 'but not too creative.' He slid the thick manila envelope across the desk. Then he laced his fingers over his chest, tipped back in his chair and closed his eyes.

  Tanya wedged the file into her plastic shopping bag, tiptoed to the door, and stepped into the hallway. Before the door had fallen back into its lock, Head Administrator Chumak was already sound asleep and snoring.

  ***

  Outside, darkness settled on rooftops, gathered in corners. The sodium streetlamps cast a sullen orange haze in the frost-filled air. Tanya stepped around the potholes and asphalt gashes trembling with antifreeze and hurried toward the bus station, a long stretch of sidewalk that disappeared beneath a shelter of tarps and construction scaffolding. Beneath the makeshift awning, kiosks stretched from one end of the platform to the other selling anything from dried fish to hosiery to pirated CDs. Music blared from competing kiosks and, of course, the veterans, pensioners, lame, drunk, and holy stood at either entrance, their cups, caps, or hands held ready. A veteran, too young to have fought in the Great Patriotic War and too old to have done any time on the Chechen fronts, sat in a wheelchair, his service cap balanced on his one remaining leg. Beside him stood a double-sided wooden advertisement.

  Calling all Casanovas! Would you like to have biceps every woman from Moscow to Vladivostok will caress with her appreciative glances? Call now for 3.5 kg weights for arms. Ask for Sergei. Speak loudly: the phone is hard of hearing.

  On the reverse side, the advertisement was much more to the point:

  Ladies: find your rich western prince here. Hurry.

  It was considered uncouth to say so in public, but the highest aspiration for many girls since the Soviet Union dissolved was to find a 'sponsor', the richer the better. But when the services screened the female applicants, they were not looking for girls like her. Like everything else in this world, beauty was a test and Tanya knew with a single glance in a mirror whether she was a pass or fail.

  The number 77 arrived with a push of wind. The doors hissed open and Tanya allowed herself to be herded inside with the crush of people and their briefcases, newspapers, umbrellas, and many plastic bags full of kiosk purchases. Ordinarily Yuri and Zoya stood beside her and held hands. But her meeting with Head Administrator Chumak had run her just late enough that instead of Yuri and Zoya, a woman of indeterminate age stood behind her, her bosom jostling against Tanya's back. The woman's perfume, though applied generously, failed to mask her powerful female smell. In front of Tanya stood a short man wearing a winter hat, a cheap knockoff meant to resemble an astrakhan. He kept one arm braced against a metal support and clutched in his other arm a fish wrapped in newspaper, the oil of which dripped onto her shoes.

  The bus lurched down the street, careened into turns. With so many people crammed together, the air grew thick and the windows slick with condensation. Tanya squeezed toward a window and rubbed a circle clear with her glove. Travelling silently beside them was a trolleybus. Behind the window panes were the tired figures of people just like Tanya and the fragrant woman behind Tanya and the man in front of Tanya.

  But the windows were weeping so thoroughly that the faces of the people in the trolleybus were smears, featureless prototypes of people. Disfigured as they were by glass, water, frost, and darkness, they were like unfinished sculptures recently erased and waiting to be rewritten. Above the trolley in the intricate wire webbing blue sparks popped and flashed and then the trolleybus veered away. The bus bumped along in darkness and hissed to a stop. Once again the press of bodies jostling and jiggling behind and around her propelled Tanya through the open doors to the concrete platform. Then, and only then, did she feel her chest loosen, her breath return.

  She always felt as if she'd been given her life back and this sensation made her giddy and generous. Each day she'd see the boy with the burnt face sitting on a folding chair, a black violin case open at his feet. Each day she'd deposit five kopeks into that case lined with the same thin purple velour they used for children's caskets. And each day, she'd turn her horizontal gaze from the bright purple cloth to a vertical gaze of the winter sky where evening folded down one bolt at a time, each one deeper than the next. Though it was unwise to stop on a street at twilight, Tanya allowed herself the briefest of scribbles:

  Overhead a Norilsk purple (a purple, incidentally nowhere to be found at the All-Russia All- Cosmopolitan Museum), a hue that reflects the ice of the uplands, the place you said your grandfather worked to his death. Above those mines the clouds duplicate the gouges of the ice. The clouds mirror the dark patches of water and leads, the dark oily breaks. This map reflected on the belly of cloud is called the ice blink and in it people read above them how the land and water stretches before them. The point of the story, you told me, was that even in the black gut of a nickel mine, where a man knows he will never leave, he can take a walk in the clouds.

  Tanya slid her notebook back into her plastic bag. She scurried under the almost-fallen-over archway that marked the opening to the courtyard that fronted the apartment building where she lived. Yellow tape surrounded the building and fringed the courtyard. Though the building had been scheduled for a pull-down years ago, the yellow tape and sagging structural conditions hadn't inspired any of the residents, herself included, to move. Tanya picked her way through the dvor, a decrepit courtyard of broken concrete slabs and tired rose bushes gone to hips. Grass bleached to the colour of an old wooden spoon grew waist high around the jagged slabs. At the far edge of the courtyard loomed the shabby five-storey apartment building, affectionately known as a Krushchoba, a Krushchev-inspired slum. Nothing but mice and other small animals inhabited the first floor. Azade, the caretaker of the courtyard, and Vitek, her adult son, occupied a few rooms on the second floor. At the opposite end of the building and three floors up, two windows glowed with light. It was Saturday, still the Sabbath, and Olga's curtains were still drawn. Not to be outdone, Tanya's grandmother, Lukeria, had raised her window shade and set her Vespers candle on the windowsill of their fourth-floor apartment. Only Mircha, before his leap from the roof, had lived on the fifth floor and this because, she knew, it was the furthest he could get from his wife, Azade, and Vitek.

  From behind the huge mound of metal scrap and potato peelings came the sound of whispering. Then a pebble flew past Tanya's knee. Tanya picked up a small concrete chunk and lobbed it over the mound, where it landed with a thud against some scrap. No, you couldn't be too careful around the young people these days. Take these kids, for instance, street kids. It was their bad luck that of all the buildings and courtyards they could have chosen to set up residence in, they picked this one where the toilets didn't work, the apartments had no heat and the tenants had no heart. Their bad luck that Vitek, their self-appointed sponsor, was teaching them the multifaceted arts of begging and stealing, drinking and glue-sniffing. And Tanya felt sorry for them. They were like those dog-children from the old stories who needed a mother to call them by the right name. Then they would remember their true selves and how to act like children. She would gladly take care of them—all five of them. If only they would stop throwing rocks.

  As if on cue, Vitek unpeeled himself from the shadows. Like the Devil in church, he was uncomfortable in his own skin but tried valiantly to hide the fact. He smiled at Tanya and his gold tooth gleamed.

  'I'm sorry about your, well, you know,' Tanya said. It had only been seven days since the wake and it was the orthodox way to refrain from a direct mention of the name of the dead until they'd been gone for a full nine days.

  Vitek shrugged and withdrew a vial from his coat pocket. 'Have a gargle?' Marsh Lilac, a cheap perfume with a high alcohol content.

  Tanya wrinkled her nose.

  Vitek slid the vial back into his coat. 'In that case, I'll come to the point quickly, and incidentally,' Vitek pulled at a greasy forelock, 'I beg your pardon for bringing up the indelicate matter of money.'

&nb
sp; Tanya glanced at the city inspector's yellow line of tape. 'You can't collect rent on a condemned building.'

  'You aren't supposed to be living in a condemned building.' Vitek shrugged. 'You see the difficult position I'm in.'

  'But you live in this building, too. So does your mother.'

  'It's a complication, all right.' Vitek smiled.

  Lukeria threw open a window. Autocracy! Nationality! Orthodoxy!' she shouted, her voice as subtle as a poke in the eye. It was an old saying, something Lukeria liked to shout whenever she saw Tanya talking to anyone she considered suspicious, a saying that marked Lukeria as completely anti-cosmopolitan in her leanings. Which was to say, Lukeria didn't like Jews, Gypsies, Asians, or anyone not personally known to her for less than forty years. Which was to say, living in this building with Yuri and Olga, Jews both, Azade and Mircha, Muslims railed in from the Caucasus, and Vitek, whose facial features hinted at Mongol inclinations, Lukeria was completely friendless.

  Vitek rolled his eyes toward the windows and snorted. 'We all have to listen to that, you know.'

  Tanya pressed her mouth into a flat line, handed over a crumpled ten-rouble note, and turned for the stairs. The problem with her grandmother was that she sincerely believed that if orthodoxy should ever fall, the world would collapse with it, that it was the secret reservoir of the faithful that had kept the heart of Mother Russia beating during all these troubled years. And according to Lukeria, it was an orthodox sun that shone quietly over their cold land, an orthodox light that provided the necessary illumination to properly see this world by, though most people did not even know it.