by Anna Tambour
The client was not chuckling, nor smiling, nor looking relieved or the least bit thankful. His strides had increased in length.
“So is your question answered?” said the Omniscient, somewhat tersely.
“I think so,” said Faldarolo, but by the time he’d said that, the old man had stomped off.
An expert is someone who always makes sure of the spelling.
—The Onuspedia
Cookies and dog tails
“RICK?” said the woman on the other side of a heavy new security door at a house with a shiny new sign out front—WEE CARE SMALL ANIMAL BOARDING. “What you want with Rick?”
“This is the residence of Richard K. Stubbs, is it not?” said the Muse uncomfortably. She didn’t know if the woman recognised her, but she recognised her. And she remembered quite clearly that Stubbs’ wife’s regard for him matched her own.
“Not any more, lady. Now, unless you got a ferret in your bag . . . But I see you don’t carry a bag,” said the woman quite pointedly.
“What do you mean by that?”
“What work you dressed for?”
The Muse smiled. She hadn’t changed her clothes for this client, but if she had, the diaphanous gown might have attracted more hostility.
“I was helping him with his manuscript,” she said.
“Bungendore!”
“Yes,” the Muse said simply.
“Well, do come in. And call me Melissa. I was his wife.”
“I didn’t think he had it in him,” said the Muse.
“You can say that again! Have another cookie.”
“No thank you,” said the Muse. She had travelled here in a kind of exploration of self-hate, wanting to take a bath forever, but deciding instead, to visit those clients she’d resented and felt dirtied from the most, just to—I dunno, make myself hate myself more.
“What’s wrong?” The woman who had cooked, by her estimate, twelve thousand meals for her late husband, chose a frosted cream cheese brownie and picked off some hairs. “Watching your figure?”
The Muse blinked. “That hadn’t occurred to me.”
“I bet,” said Melissa. “You must be some helluvan editor.”
“Yeah,” said the Muse, “to get Richard K. Stubbs.”
“Hey sister,” sniggered Melissa. “Gimme a hug. At least you did it for the money.”
The Muse was halfway out of the front security door, her arms full of a bag of cookies, a pack of Size 1 Gourmet Peanut Flavor Chew Bones, and a pile of brochures for Wee Care, when Melissa said, “I forgot to ask . . . ”
“Yes?”
Melissa dropped her voice to a whisper. “Do you want the manuscript?”
“What for?” whispered the Muse diplomatically.
“Don’t you want to get it published?”
“Why should I want that?”
“Gawd!” Melissa tried to subtly pull the Muse back inside, but the Muse subtly resisted.
“Okay,” said Melissa. “But don’t blame me if the neighborhood has ears . . . ”
But her guest was not going to go back inside, so Melissa dropped her head so that no one could lip read from across the street. “You know what it’s worth.”
“Why don’t you finish it?” said the Muse. “You said that you changed back to your maiden name, which would look good on a cover, so?”
“I can’t do that,” laughed Melissa Rowe. “I’m not creative like you.”
“I’m not creative,” laughed the Muse.
“However, if you were to—”
“Sorry, I’m late for my next appointment,” said the Muse, rushing off as if she were.
Cracking
The Woman in red caught the train with one hand and swung on, her long hair snapping. Only a passing lark saw her board but the fact that the train had not slowed was of no interest to the bird any more than it was to Valentin, who had crouched next to the samovar in Carriage 3 for so long, waiting for her to come back from wherever it was on the train that she had—that unbearably tantalising woman of mystery—hidden herself (to do what?)—that his knees had almost locked.
She rushed past him into 3C. He’d already spied on that compartment (because the door to 3C was hanging open and, for once, her companion was absent, but Valentin had no time to waste, as wherever the old man was on the train, it couldn’t be far—and whatever he was doing, it couldn’t be for long, as he seemed to have no other purpose than to accompany this woman).
So Valentin crept forward extra fast and extra low, the better for him, once in 3C, to spring to his full height and lock the door and leap upon her and have his way with her, and after that he planned to rush out of 3C (he was vague about how he would incapacitate her, but thought it most likely that she would be lying in a lazy swoon, not knowing that she was missing anything at all) and then he would leap off the train into the unknown to escape so fast and so thoroughly that no one would ever find him. Farewell, comrades who know nothing but work! Farewell, the carriage life!
So Valentin crept forward one step, and crunch went his foot. Savva, you pig! Valentin froze, but she must not have heard him. She didn’t look out of 3C. In fact, he could see her now. She was staring at her companion’s empty upper bunk.
“Gorgonna!” she cried, wonderfully covering the sound of Valentin’s rush forward which was so fast that he almost ran into her, but she didn’t notice him as she stumbled blindly out of 3C and into the smoking section between the cars.
“Fate smiles upon me,” declared Valentin. A more perfect place for his raid, he could not imagine.
He watched through the window as, with a shaking hand, she reached into one of her hidden pockets and produced a box of matches and a battered packet. She extracted one bent cigarette, lit it, and drew deeply, lifting her beautiful face and closing her eyes.
“Now!” cried Valentin as he reached out to wrench open the door, but his undisciplined cry was covered by the blurt of the train’s horn, and he would have been thrown backward and fallen or his head would have smashed against wall of Carriage 3 if Yuri Shurov had not been the great train driver that he was.
In no time, the train came to a complete stop in the considerate way that a train should, and the woman in red tossed her cigarette out onto the steps and reached for the door, and Valentin scurried off into the first place he could find, which was the toilet, where he locked himself in, and if you’d been listening at the door you would have heard a long, muffled, spluttering hiss of filthy curses, but why would you be listening to that when you’ve got the uplifting sight of Yuri Shurov, the great train driver, striding down the hall?
C!
YURI SHUROV might have looked like a model worker, but his soul had always lurked, waiting for its moment.
He had been trained to be a train driver and decorated for his skill, but driving was, to Yuri Shurov, a function of his autonomic nervous system. He didn’t need to think of levers to pull, gauges to watch. He just drove. And he certainly didn’t value the honours heaped upon him as a model work unit member, not when no Plan called for him to achieve what his soul cried out for. Revolution!
To make every effort to make the train journey as pleasant and blissful as the joy of reaching the destination.
And now that his soul had been handed the means, nothing was going to stop him. He was on his Way. He touched his breast pocket in thanks. This wasn’t just Revolution! It was CВОБОДА! Freedom!
And since that way was no longer the track way (not even a track distinguished by over twelve years of neglect) he drove the train where he would, to fulfil his Plan, for, after all, he was the greatest train driver in (yes, it must be said though he wouldn’t have because he was a modest man) the world—but that to him, was only a means to an End.
He smiled cordially at the female passenger who was loitering in the passage (and he noted that she looked unhappy, and this made him most unhappy).
“Though it might seem a featureless landscape, there are several places of interes
t here,” he said. “It would be my pleasure to be your guide. You will be welcomed with refreshments and will be both stimulated and relaxed so that when you resume your journey with us, you will be in that state of blissful joy that is so necessary for a peaceful mind.”
The female tourist regarded him with such a complicated set of expressions that he didn’t quite know how to satisfy her every whim, so he turned slightly, just enough to see into 3C without being intrusive. But her companion was not there, so he could not have heard Yuri Shurov’s maiden speech.
He blushed, remembering the newspaper scraps in the toilet and wondering how he would ever find whisper-soft toilet paper and soaps scented with lilac and leather; and he looked down at the carpet and tsked. But to get back to the moment, he smiled at the female in a reassuring way and waited without seeming to wait, for the old man to get out of the toilet, for he must be there and old men can take forever in the toilet; and in the silence he heard a stream of filthy curses coming from there and he blushed bright red, for probably Savva had left the hook naked of newspaper scraps.
He was ravaged by conflict. “Your companion?”
“He’s indisposed.”
Yuri Shurov was devastated. “I hope it’s not food poisoning.”
“It’s only his soul,” she said in a loud, strained voice, hoping that wherever he was, he’d hear her, feel her pull, if he remembers me.
“Let’s go,” she said, smiling bleakly.
The virgin guide smiled as confidently as he could. “Rest assured, if Comra, uh, your companion wishes to join this tour,
I will have him brought to you at no inconvenience to yourself, and—”
“I’m sure,” she said, working him up into a new frenzy of insecurity. Her eyes were dull as crushed expectations.
And so, after he ran to the restaurant car and shoved a note under the door, he helped the female tourist off the train in the manner no one had ever taught him, but that he had dreamed.
Mackerel must be perfectly fresh, or it is a very indifferent fish.
—Inquire Within Upon Everything
The maiden tour
THE PLACES OF INTEREST were a short walk away, just over the hill enough to be hidden as the hopes that had flourished in Yuri Shurov’s soul. Yes, he had loved Galina with a fierce, protective passion, so much so that he had planned to give her his only precious possession—it had once belonged to his mother—the tin of “CВОБОДА” dental powder that he carried next to his heart. He still did love Galina, but he wanted her, above all, to be happy, and what was he compared to Savva?
So Yuri Shurov was happy, in a way, that he had seen Savva’s superiority with his own eyes—and that his failure as a lover had led to this.
Their heels crunched through snow till they reached the steps of a grand pink and white building with lots of carved gingerbread around the windowsills.
“I hope that I am not assuming,” he told his tour of one as he held the massive door open for her and closed it so gently it sighed, “that you value places of great cultural significance. No?”
“You are a privileged visitor,” he whispered, “to gain entry to this unique polytechnic.”
“What is it?” whispered the Muse, amused despite her heartsickness.
“The Philological Institute of Advanced Art.”
“Sounds fascinating.”
“But you’ve probably read all about it,” said Yuri Shurov, suddenly riveted in place by the thought, What if she is bored?
“I’m not well read,” she said.
He beamed at this model tourist and led the way to Room 1, where they stood just inside the doorway and watched.
“It must be an advanced class,” whispered Shurov.
“How do you know?”
“No professor.”
Indeed, there was no standing, nor was there any chatter. The twenty students were arranged in neat rows, each with a canvas, paints and paintbrush, etc. laid out on the floor.
The Muse had only seen pictures of flounders before, so when the distraction of the visit caused their eyes to move, she had to suppress a giggle.
“They’re kind of adorable, don’t you think?”
Shurov couldn’t answer for a moment, but then he rebounded. “They revolutionized art.”
“Them?” She looked at the white canvases. “They don’t seem to have produced much.”
“Well, not them.”
“That’s good,” she laughed. “Humour always arrives when one least expects it,” she said at the same time as he said, “Their great grandfathers,” so both drowned out the other’s revelation.
He showed her into Room 2 where the stories Hurry to Do Good and Dad will Come Today and Nothing Special were said to have been planned, but she yawned.
Panicking, he rushed her out of the polytechnic, though he’d planned the visit to take an hour and fifteen minutes.
“You must be hungry,” he said, as he led the way to what looked like a collection of long igloos.
“Welcome,” he said with a flourish, “to the world’s most northerly Tropical Plant Institute.”
He grunted as he yanked open the door, its hinges stiff with ice. Inside, a profusion of plants tangled up and around the glass walls, and everything—grossly thick vines, leaves large as tables, gorgeously vulgar flowers—everything was frozen stiff. The Muse pulled an icicle off an orchid and tasted it. She touched a leaf, and her finger made an imprint in the rime.
“The coal must have been cut off again,” said her guide. He looked angry.
“Come,” he ordered.
The next greenhouse was exactly the same.
“I’m terribly sorry,” he said, “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t mention it,” said the Muse, looking behind her despite her instinct. Where are you?
“Third time lucky,” she said, not meaning it but trying to help this really quite sweet man out. He’s a loser of the first order, but then, what am I?
He opened the door to the next greenhouse, already apologising. But his words froze. You should be fired for your pessimism, he warned himself, smiling broadly for his tour of one.
“Close the door,” shouted a woman in white.
“And this, as I’m sure you know,” said the white-coated Dr. Irina Platinov, the director, “is our Monstera deliciosa.”
“Please tell me,” said the Muse, suppressing a yawn.
Dr Platinov raised one eyebrow, but her passion got the best of her.
“As you can see,” she said, pointing to the long curved thing that looked like a cross between a bright green crocodile and a bright green banana, “the fruit is unripe. Feel it,” she ordered.
The Muse touched it obediently, but with such a lack of enthusiasm that Yuri Shurov shuffled from foot to foot, trying to think how to break into this tour and whisk this thoroughly bored tourist away.
“Hard, isn’t it?” smiled the doctor. “It’s exquisite torture, you know.”
“Torture?” asked the Muse, and Yuri Shurov almost fell to the ground with thanks at the look on her face.
The Muse, Yuri Shurov, Dr. Irina Platinov and the four other white- coated fanatics who peopled the Institute of Tropical Plants were seated around a table.
The Muse picked up the first piece of the torture fruit that the doctor had cut from the vine just for the pleasure of giving this adventuress the taste she sought.
The skin was a plasticky green, and the inside was gold flecked with black, as if pieces of burnt paper had become caught inside the fruit when it was born.
“That black stuff is the glass,” said the doctor.
“Good, said the Muse, and she popped it in her mouth.
It was torture. In the moment of impact, every part of her mouth felt slashed by a thousand cuts.
She took the next piece, and repeated her act.
Tears came to her eyes, and still she ate, masticating slowly so that each piece’s particles sloshed around her mouth before she swallow
ed and they serrated her throat and she felt them pierce her insides so she hurt everywhere inside equally.
She was halfway through, her eyes now closed, when Savva opened the greenhouse door—verrrry quietly—and ushered in the Omniscient, who stood in the doorway even more quietly. They were unobserved, as all eyes were on the woman in red who was eating something that was causing her such pain that she was crying, yet eating it as if she could never get enough.
When she finished the last piece, Dr. Platinov led the cheer, and in the rush of her colleagues to jump up and surround this hero of dangerous gastronomy, Savva and the Omniscient exited as unnoticed as they had arrived.
Dr Platinov blew her nose as she stood in the snow, waving goodbye to the woman who was now no longer the visitor in red, but an honorary colleague in a starched white coat. It was a strangely humble request that the visitor had made (which only made Platinov cry more) when Platinov had impetuously offered the hero “anything” for her bravery. “Anything the Institute can award.”
She stepped back into the greenhouse in her quick, practiced way.
“Tear that,” she said, turning to her senior colleague, but she didn’t need to, as the team was already using the red dress in the form of lagging strips to protect the precious pipes from the cold.
Yuri Shurov almost floated back to the train, so delirious was he, and relieved, that his first tour group had enjoyed itself so much. The group was of only one person, and that person had strange tastes. But we must begin somewhere!
As he handed her up to her Carriage, he was encouraged enough to ask: “Where would you like to go?”
“To drown myself,” she said, giving him quite a challenge.
Best wishes
IT SO HAPPENED that Burhanettin, Faldarolo, Ekmel and the donkey reached the top of the last rise before the valley of the town of their destination, just as dawn silhouetted them magnificently against the sky. Of course they paused, and though they didn’t see themselves as a stirring tableau, Ekmel said: