The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (30 page)

'What does that mean, exactly?' the mother asked.

'To be frank, I am not completely certain. But it is a statement that frequently appears in the history exams,' Tanya conceded.

***

Inside the museum café Tanya stood at the counter and paid for their lunch order: pelmyeni, pirogi, small bowls of borscht. She felt proud of herself that she had resisted the urge to load the tray with tumblers of vodka and sweets—a typical breakfast for those far too young to quit working and too old to give a serious thought to their figure. Tanya carried the trays to a table where the women waited.

'Try the pelmyeni,' Tanya said. 'They're quite good, even by museum standards.'

'What is it?' The mother reached for one and took a bite.

'They're like dumplings with meat, and the pirogi is like a meat pie, usually with ham and with onions.'

The girl eyed the plate. 'This world is a cruel one for animals.'

'She won't eat meat,' the mother said.

Or anything else, for that matter. For nothing on the trays — not even the borscht, which was primarily a winter root vegetable dish, nor the horseradish-tongue-mayonnaise salad — met with the girl's approval.

'Vegans don't eat any product that is derived from an animal,' the girl explained wearily

The mother reached for another pelmyeni. 'Also she's developed an allergic reaction to those things.'

'Ah,' Tanya nodded.

The grandmother swallowed a spoonful of borscht. 'But you may have noticed that she wears make-up.'

The girl rolled her eyes. 'That's different.' She stood and with one hand slid the waistband of her jeans past a hip. 'My body is my art.'

Tanya blinked. And what a canvas! A winged horse, not at all unlike the Chestnut Grey, spanned the small of her back, the strong wings unfurling over her hip and the hooves dipping into the dark crevice of her rump. The girl hiked her jeans over her hips, turned and bent at the waist. Her shirt gaped open and between her breasts, for everyone to see, a red rose. All in all the horse and rose looked pretty good now, but Tanya had to wonder how well the wings would hold up, how long that short stem rose would grow over the next twenty years. Skin, by and large, made a poor medium, the tensile capacity being woefully comprised when a woman hits her forties and sometimes, Tanya sighed, much sooner.

Finally, the girl sat down.

'She's always making a spectacle of herself,' the grandmother said through a fierce smile.

'What about you?' The mother sipped at her tea. 'You must be some kind of artist or something - you know so much about the exhibits. And there's that very interesting notebook you carry with you.'

Tanya's face burned. She gratefully accepted the mother's query as a way to salvage the lunch break.

She could say she wanted to write pliant phrases that hummed bright and vibrant; to do with words what the masters did with colour and placement, painting a dot of red next to a dot of blue and in this way allowing the viewer's gaze to turn the eyes of the angels violet. There were the clouds, her dreams of flight. And then, of course, she wanted to be everywhere Yuri was. But these were not the things she could say aloud, not what people want to hear about even when they assure you that they do.

Tanya rubbed her hand over the colour notebook and smiled bashfully. 'Colour is life. It's how we bend light into laughs. And also shades of weeping.' She could feel her own face burning, could not bear to bring her gaze to the woman's and settled instead on turning to the girl's untouched food.

'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.

'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.'