The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight Read online

  Azade tried for years to figure the alchemy. Maybe it was because of his missing arm. Maybe because he hated his work at the factory. Maybe because there was not enough beer or vodka to make the world beautiful enough. It was so hard to say with Mircha where all the rage came from. All she could attest to was how little it took to incite his fury: a shift in the light, the noise of a bulldozer nuzzling a pile of rubble, the flies buzzing at the window, Vitek mumbling over the chessboard. Azade remembered most of the beatings, but it was with shame she recalled her own cowardice, her complicity. Once she busied herself at the stove simply to steer clear of Mircha, leaving Vitek, lost in thought over a game of chess, to fend for himself. Mircha had pounded his fist on the cardboard box that held the playing board. Up went the chessmen and up went Mircha's fist, catching Vitek on the ear, causing him to fall over and without so much as a whimper curl into the foetal position in preparation for what was coming next. Azade had dragged the kettle over the ring so as to disguise the noise of Mircha punching Vitek with an enthusiasm that went beyond the requirements of punishment meted for purely instructive purposes.

  Oh, he liked to hit the boy, kept on hitting him even after he promised Azade he'd stopped. Azade knew it, though Mircha and even Vitek pretended otherwise, violence having forged a secret alliance between them.

  But she did manage her quiet revenges. With sour cream a day or two past being bad, with reduced meat from the street market, shiny at the edges where it had started to turn. With an inner guilty joy, Azade would smile with her split lips and Vitek's swollen eyes would shine as they watched Mircha hop from the divan and race for the commode, which in those days still worked. She can remember Mircha gripping the rim of the toilet—'Waaaaah! Hummmmm!'—and emptying the contents of his stomach with such a high degree of unswerving perseverance that sometimes Azade almost felt sorry for Mircha.

  'Sweetheart,' Mircha would call from the toilet. 'Some water or a snort of vodka. I beg you!' And by the next morning Mircha, broken in body, would turn gentle, so large in his promises, so expansive in his remorse, that Azade could extract almost anything—a bottle of Russian Forest perfume, the alcoholic content of which she knew made a handy supplement should the vodka fail; a trip to the dentist to replace a broken tooth; even the assurance that the beatings would stop.

  Azade turned her gaze to the kids. They were almost playing, mock-punching one another, leaping from the heap. The red-haired boy, Gleb, skirled around Vitek, then reached for Vitek's vodka. Vitek pushed the boy to the ground and pinned him with his knee, then brought back his fist. 'Don't!' Azade shouted.

  Vitek stood, straightened his leather jacket, smiled, and ran his tongue over his chipped front tooth. With his thumb and forefinger he made a gun, pointed it at her, cocked his thumb and fired.

  Azade slumped against the latrine. She had ruined him. She saw that now. She'd indulged him in the strange way mothers, against their better instincts, sometimes do. With a lopsided attentiveness, she had tried to make up for her failures and shortcomings. After Mircha beat the boy, Azade brooded and hovered with aspirins and ice, was careful to keep Vitek out of Mircha's sight for a few days. But she'd not stopped Mircha and told herself it was out of love for her husband, when really it was cowardice. Worse: to make up for Mircha's harsh treatment, she'd spared her son necessary corrections. He'd always been a cheat, a bully, and even a liar. But she'd not punished him. And now he was a grown man, still behaving shamefully. And this was her fault. This was how love, or rather the lie of love, had made her, a well-intentioned mother, raise a perfect monster. A perfectly lovable, fearsome monster.

  Koza, her goat, hiked his snout in the air and bleated mournfully. Azade pointed her nose in the same direction. With her true and precise olfactory powers, Azade detected a sharp-edged malevolent odour unlike those that ordinarily swelled out of the latrine. That she could smell anything at all in this cold, which had a way of crimping smell to tight radii, was a testament to the largesse of the odour.

  In Mircha's boots, Azade walked the perimeter of the stink. She scattered lime in a rough concentric circle. She counted the neat little piles of human excrement the kids had left. Their droppings were too tidy, too frozen to be responsible for this newer, more aggressive stench. Azade sniffed at the heap, but frost had trapped all the smells of rotting peelings deep inside its throbbing heart. Azade shuffled to the back side of the heap and that's when she saw it: a dark gash in the ground. How it got there and how she could not have noticed it before Azade could not fathom. Azade dropped to her knees, lowered her nose to the trembling gash and took a deep and substantial whiff. Nothing. Just the smell of wet mud, which, if anything, held a round organic scent of soft ooze. Azade straightened and headed for the bank of snow that contained her husband. Yes. Absolutely this was the source of the stink and it was phenomenal. Azade sprayed her lemon-scented fumigant around the bank of snow. But it was as if the odour doubled in strength as if it were swelling with outrage, as if it were indignant that someone as low as she might try to combat it. Azade narrowed her eyes. With her broom she swept at the top layers of snow. It was then that she saw Mircha's boots were unlaced and on backward—not at all the way they had left him. Azade tightened her grip on her broom and headed for the stairs, with each step a chill climbing the rungs of her spine.

  The dead never leave us. She knew that. It was a physical law. No, she never went to university, but she didn't need a PhD to understand the law of conservation of mass. A body never completely disappears; it only changes shape or constitution, reasserting itself elsewhere, boiling over, leaking at the edges. And the dead who remain keep themselves frightfully busy. Her own father, for instance, walked backwards with his shoes unlaced, treading up and down these very stairs. He had to do this to reverse the indignities his body and soul had suffered while he had been living those last years in the apartment building and tending the Little Necessary, Azade's mother explained. Azade knew it to be true, for she heard her father's heavy tread on the stairs as he corrected the wrongs committed against him and adjusted the wrongs he himself may have committed. He had to walk backwards through every sorrow, every regret, every wound, in order to leave them properly. It took him seven years to do it, but finally, one afternoon in May when the trees along the wide prospects exhaled a blizzard of cotton, her mother flung open the windows so that, at last, her father, his nose finally straight again and pointing true as a needle on a compass, could fly away.

  But with Mircha, one sniff told Azade that things were different. Whatever the rules of the afterlife she and her mother had worked out, they did not seem to apply to him. For there his body was, defrosting down there in the shadows of the courtyard, and yet the smell here in the corridor outside their door—colossal! Azade paused outside the door and checked the knots on her rope, for quick verification. Yes, the knots were all there. Her resolve galvanized, Azade leaned into the door.

  'Milii! Sweetheart!' At once Mircha's voice assaulted her. Azade peered into the darkness of the room. There he was, in the corner of the room, sitting in that ridiculous claw-footed bath, wearing a wool sock on his hand and smoking a Turkish cigarette. She had never seen her husband looking so jolly, so alive. So silly.

  Azade held her broom aloft as if it were a weapon, or perhaps a talisman, and approached Mircha with caution. The dead, after all, were so unpredictable. But after a moment, her suspicion gave way to curiosity. 'Why did you do it?'

  'What?' Mircha's smile loped from one side of his face to the other and she could see that he was drunk.

  Azade rolled her eyes to the ceiling. 'Jump.'

  Mircha sucked on his cigarette and exhaled a mouthful of rings. 'I was tired of this life and afraid to grow old while living it. I wanted to go with dignity. Not like some of those men shitting themselves to death in their own bed.'

  'So then why did you come back?'

  Mircha brightened. 'I feel a tremendous urge to express myself in ways I never had before.'

 
Azade squeezed the neck of her broom. 'Express yourself how?'

  Mircha ground his cigarette on his stump then cleared his throat. 'Imagine if you will that I am like a famous prophet risen from the dead. I've come back to rewrite myself, to revise myself. To retell my story with vast scope and with miracle.'

  'Is this out of some book you have been reading?'

  'I feel this here, in my heart.' Mircha laid a hand over his chest. 'And what I feel I must share.'

  'Why?'

  'In the fight of cultural and historical ownership of memory one must be vigilant. It's a sacrifice, sure. But one I'm willing to make.'

  'I don't understand.'

  'I am helping each one of us to revise our personal and collective history. To revise our very lives, as it were,' Mircha said. 'It can be done! I am living proof. With the right attitude and a firm grasp of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, we can alter anything—especially our concept of the past.'

  Azade hung her head. The situation was so much worse than even she had imagined. With the handle of her broom Azade lifted Mircha's trousers and carried them into the kitchen, where she dropped them into a pot. 'The more you talk, the worse it smells in here,' Azade mumbled.

  Mircha smiled. 'A little vodka would be convivial. If you don't have any vodka, then apple brandy would be all right.'

  Mircha's gaze roamed. 'I see you've rearranged things a bit since I died. Where are my long-play records?'

  Azade poured lukewarm water into a teacup and handed the cup to him. 'Vitek snapped them in two over his knee. Also the children played games with them, and the goat ate the rest.'

  'My war medals?'

  'We sold them.'

  'And my best suit? The one with the very fashionable pinstripes?'

  'It caught fire, but that was an accident. I think.'

  'I had no idea how much you hated me.' Mircha stretched his hand toward Azade as if to touch her cheek, those scars along her jaw. 'I loved you in my own way, you know.' Mircha let his hand fall to his lap.

  Azade rubbed her jaw, remembering how he'd fractured it twice in one year. Love hurt and nobody knew it better than Azade. Like the Devil on a holy day, Mircha's rage knew no bounds. And when he beat her, he acted as if it were his duty, as if he were doing her some kind of favour. As if violence were a necessary tool for acquiring wisdom.

  And Azade had learned so much at his hands. It was hard to forget the lesson of a broken jaw or ribs. And never had she been so afraid of anyone as she'd been of Mircha. But now he was so different. Gone the familiar rage. Gone the railing anger. And this new Mircha was so foreign, so odd, she didn't know if she should feel even more frightened or relieved.

  Azade backed away from the bath, the broom held out in front of her, just in case Mircha made a sudden move.

  But Mircha merely broadened his smile. 'I know what you're thinking. You've given me over for hopeless. But good news. People can change.'

  'Maybe. But you're not people, you're dead.' Azade stared into Mircha's eyes that were such a reluctant shade of blue they could pass for metal, and waited for the recognition of this reality to register with him. It was, after all, important for the dead to remember their condition. Otherwise they cultivated ideas, knocked on walls, played silly tricks. Wrote novels. The dead, Azade knew, had to be dispatched. They had to go quietly to their graves and stay there, lest the earth, unable to stifle all their noise and movement, permanently reject them. And yet, Azade worried that this was precisely what was happening with her husband, who was even now lolling and reeking in their cracked claw-footed bath, singing songs he had learned in a workers' camp.

  'My story,' Mircha called from the tub, 'has such potential. If told on the uphill climb of a mountain I would call it a story of Frisk and Wonderment. If told on the downhill trek I might simply call it Momentum. Imagine if you will a boy on his name day shooting guns in the air with his uncles. It's a joyous occasion, this day. The cabbage has been brought in and because this boy brought a mountainside of those buggers in by himself he's considered a man now. His family builds the fire and you know how a Lak fire in Dagestan burns brighter than any other.'

  'I've heard, I've heard,' Azade mumbled.

  'And they eat their watermelon double-salted the way it should be and live on the top of the mountain where the air is thin and the men are thinner and the wind mixes the days of summer with the days of winter. The peak of a mountain divides a man's shadow, with his past falling to one side and his future to the other.

  'In winter the man falls in love with a girl who lives in shadow of the mountain. She nibbles his fingers. He gnaws on her ears. They drink wine from each other's mouths. She has eyes the colour of celery and a voice like a broken road. She is clever as night and beautiful as day and knows how to plait her hair with donkey piss. She's a beauty and the man would give his life for her seven times over. She makes cheese from the milk of her goats and he sells flour, salt and water, things that are weighed and not counted. Are you still listening? Now we get to the good part. The wars the men wage are of the better sort. Everyone comes home a hero and in their absence, instead of cabbage, the hills yield long furrows of arms and legs of perfect proportion, just ripe for the picking.'

  Azade grunted. Where the beginning, where the end to this man and his stories?

  'You say you've come to tell a better story for each one of us. What is my story, then?' Azade gave Mircha's trousers a final stir in the pot.

  Mircha's face fell into a jumble of furrows. 'It's harder for you. You have so much further to go. There's the matter of your family situation, which was somewhat respectable before the forced relocation. But now, of course, your position is so low, of such little consequence. And then, there's the fact of your womanhood. If you were a man, say, you'd have ever so much more potential to rise. It may be uncouth to say it, but it is the reality of revision. And finally, and I think this will be of no surprise to you, there's the matter of your hands. So shameful, really. Will you ever be able to rid yourself of the taint?' Mircha smiled in apology. 'It would be different, of course, if your hands did something of consequence, something that mattered.' Mircha slid into the bath and lost himself in another song.

  And it was then that Azade understood what a monumental task lay before her. She understood what he needed. Though he couldn't possibly know it, he'd come back for her. He had returned, or merely remained, not for his healing but for hers. After all, the love of a good woman isn't enough for some men. What Mircha needed now was the back-side of her hand, a push from her broom. In short, she would have to prepare Mircha for his death—again—for clearly the earth, and no doubt heaven as well, could not receive him as he was.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Yuri

  For as long as he could remember, Yuri had always imagined that he was a fish.

  Inside his mother's stomach he swam in salt water. And by some accident when he was born, God looked away for a moment. Perhaps to set aright a tilted star, perhaps to paint more speckles and spots on the Dolly Varden trout or stitch more whiskers onto the snout of the sturgeon. Something large or small, miraculous or mundane, and Yuri, who should have been an eel, a lamprey, a dace, was instead a mere boy, flailing and kicking about in his ordinary human skin which he'd never felt, not in all his twenty-one years, quite fit him.

  Which is why he went to the rivers and canals whenever he could. To the man-made ponds and the natural. To brackish waters and sweet. Wherever there might be fish or the suggestion of fish. Even the memory of fish was enough for him. So when Azade leaned Mircha's rod against his mother's door the day after the wake, Yuri took it as a sign. Two minutes later, with a satchel stuffed with stale dinner buns, he wheeled his old bike through the courtyard and out to the street.

  It wasn't perfect, this bike. It was actually two separate rejects from the local bike factory, disassembled and recombined to make one working bike. But the parts didn't fit together precisely and somehow he'd reassembled the handlebars out of al
ignment with the frame. Now the bike tilted to the left and it took a furious effort, powerful strokes with the right leg, to compensate. And with each push from his legs the bike lamented, squeaking such sad complaints that Yuri began to think the bike was the voice of his very own soul, a voice that could only make sound or be heard when under the greatest of outward force.

  Then, also, there was the ticking in his head. The sprockets, Zoya maintained, whenever he brought the matter of the incessant noise up with her. But he knew better. The sound was like that of a stuttering oven timer lodged at the base of his cerebellum, which was, come to think of it, not functioning very well and hadn't been, not for a long time. His head, he decided, was a cheap clock that didn't know its own ruin.

  Yuri clapped his palm against an ear, as a swimmer forcing out water, then pushed on the pedals. It wouldn't be so bad, this ticking, if it weren't so loud. He had stuffed cotton wool in his ears. He'd fashioned plugs of soft wax. But only two things helped. The first: fishing.

  Hardly a surprise. Even before he was called up into the army, before all that business in the south, fishing had been his passion. Fish, Mircha had once told him, formed a connection between the water and air, between our world and theirs. And Yuri preferred their world of water. For water, he had learned long ago, was a far more forgiving medium than air. The water turned light viscous and noise unraveled in muted threads, as if from the edges of a dream. It was the same sensation he could achieve when he wore his father's souvenir helmet, which was the second course of self-therapy. The helmet was a replica, and not even a good replica, of the type of helmet made famous by the cosmonauts. A horizontal crack stretched from one end of the plastic visor to the other. It had no monetary value whatsoever, or certainly Yuri would have sold or traded it by now, but its sentimental value was unbounded as it was the one and only item that had once belonged to his father that Yuri still had.