The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

by Gina Ochsner

  Just think bad luck and it is sure to find you. That was another jinn saying her own mother told her, and Azade believed it, for around the toppled stone archway strolled her boy Vitek. Boy!—he was almost thirty, and every day he was the biggest heartbreak of her life. Never lifting a finger to help. And here he came, out of breath and reeking of alcohol. And this at eight-thirty in the morning.

  'Good news!' Vitek waved a newspaper. 'Given the estimated increase in human population, and hence the increase of human shit, latrine-sitting will be a growth industry.'

  'So everything will stink more. That is good news.' Azade swept her twig broom over the tops of Vitek's shoes.

  'Yes, but you're forgetting the principles of supply and demand. The price people will pay for the privilege of stinking with privacy will rise.'

  'Why?'

  'Because it just will. It's so simple, really. Instead of charging ten kopeks, we'll start charging a rouble—maybe even two.'

  Vitek jostled the handle of the locked latrine.

  'One square or two?' Azade held up the wad of paper.

  'Two.'

  'Two roubles, then,' Azade said with a smile and Vitek stomped through the frozen courtyard. One by one, the kids left the heap and followed Vitek through the stairwell, where they reappeared on the roof. The oldest child, a ten-year-old girl, made crude gestures, while the next oldest child, a boy with dark red hair, and Vitek dropped their trousers. Jets of urine arced from the roof and froze mid-air, falling to the ground in hard amber drops.

  Azade whisked the urine into a pile under Lukeria's window, trudged back to her latrine and sat on the toilet with a loud sigh. Vitek. A disappointment, sure. But it was her fault he turned out the way he did. Vitek's trouble started with her, because his trouble, her trouble, was merely a continuation of older troubles, which all began so long ago it was as if they had no beginning because there was never a time when they didn't already exist. And when Azade thought trouble—her trouble, his trouble—she started with the city of her birth, Ordzhonikidze. Some people called it Dzaudzhikau and on Russian maps it was called Vladikavkaz. In her mind it was a city of changing names, a city of changed people, a city she only knew because other people knew it first. Her father described it so many times she felt like it was she, not her father, who hollowed out the graves for good Muslims with a backhoe. Because he told her in such painstaking detail about his days spent turning the dark earth over—the oily smell of clay and the eyeless fish turning beneath their mantles of mud - she felt certain it was she, not he, who listened to those fish quietly marking the minutes and days of each season. She felt certain that it was she, not he, who carefully notched the graves so that the bodies lay on a burial shelf and so that she could stand in the hole with them, her hands clasped in front of her chest. And it was she who bowed to the heaven and to the earth, and toward the Arab countries where their religion, which nobody in her family had ever pretended to completely understand, had come from. It was she, not her father, who wound the bodies in the white cloth and, after placing the body so that the head faced west, intoned the old burial prayers, words they needed to hear to have a proper send-off.

  And because her mother told her about the open bins of cracked coriander, cumin and dried sage, mustard, the stalls of watermelon and cabbage, Azade felt like it had been she, not her mother, who had bartered in the open-air meat market. She who heard the Jewish dogs, who were wiser than the other dogs, bark first at the women with long blue skirts and smart-looking glasses handing out political leaflets. Well, why not? Her mother would say: theirs was still an open city, and as such it was a meeting place, a crossroads in the mountain. Stand at the crossroads and ask what is the good way and follow it. Good mountain advice and in those days the passes were unregulated. Kamyks, Laks, Uzbeks, Georgians, Chechens—even leaflet-distributing Russians—crossed freely from one mountain territory to another. If you were healthy enough for a mountain crossing, nobody stopped you. It was like this through the strange days of the thirties, until that terrible war. Then the city was no longer called Ordzhonikidze, but Dzaudzhikau. Then came soldiers. Security officers. Until then, her mother explained, they had not known they were part of a people's union of soviets. And when her father, a proud man and a fighter at heart, had heard there was a war, he attempted to enlist. Her mother told her this so carefully Azade could see in vivid detail the enrolling officer's amused but weary smile. 'Nyet,' the officer said, pointing to a sheet of paper tacked to the wall. People of questionable ethnicity—that is, anyone who was not originally from northern Russia—were to serve their country by relocating. The officer explained then that the spot had already been picked out for them. The sudden understanding that he would be a stranger wherever he went, that he was considered a stranger already in his own town, was almost too much for her father to take.

  'What if we refuse to go?' her father had asked, a question so direct it earned him a rifle butt in the stomach. According to that sheet of paper, they were to be allowed to take 500 kilograms of their belongings, which, for most families, amounted to a few pots, a blanket, some salt. But everyone was in such a hurry, her mother said, prodded into the cattle cars, packed like animals, they were lucky if they got all their children with them.

  All this her mother told her. Every story Azade had ever known she heard first from her mother. Because this is the way it is with words between parents and children. The stories of the adults are given to the children as a gift, as a blessing, as a reminder, as a curse. And when the story jumps from mouth to mouth, skin to skin, it becomes so fluid and malleable as to sustain numerous retellings in innumerable contexts, stretching so much as to allow a daughter to know all that the mother knew, and in this way to thoroughly become her. Because when her mother told these stories, it was as if Azade became her mother, just as when Azade's father told his stories she felt she had become him. And then it was easy to recall how they'd been packed into the cattle cars with an ox who'd had its knees broken. How the children had to stand on the back of the beast lest they be crushed underfoot. How they looked for sky between the carriage seams. The thirst, her mother told her, was unbearable, and those who could, drank their own urine. The babies had no tears to cry with.

  For three weeks, no food, no water, everyone pressed together so close they could not squat to relieve themselves and so had to shit all over each other's feet. And when the train stopped in Perm it wasn't until the line workers pushed open the doors of the wagons and offloaded those pressed closest to the doors that they could even tell who was dead and who still alive. 'What are all these darkies doing here?' the railway inspector asked, and that is how they learned, blinking in the shock of sudden light, that there had been a huge mistake. They should have been sent to the Sarozek, the Kazakh desert, but somehow they had ended up at the gateway to Siberia, where nobody wanted them. They'd been deposited here to work the jobs real Russians didn't want to do and to occupy the dwellings of recently relocated families who were—impossibly—even more subversive and less Russian-looking than they. And what did they bring with them? The pain of an empty stomach. And shame.

  The officers took turns with the women, her mother even, but not until they'd broken the arms and noses of all the men. The thud of boots. The crack of bones, the muffled cries. With each sound, each push, each tear of fabric, her mother explained how she retreated beneath her skin. Because beneath that skin there was another skin. And beneath that skin was yet another skin. And hiding in the centre of herself where there was nothing, her mother said, only air, a strange alchemy of torment occurred. At the end of her human self and wishing nothing more than for a few moments of flight, misery turned her leaden bones to hollow ones. And then her mother wasn't a woman anymore but a bird. 'This is what you do when something unspeakable happens,' her mother said. 'This is what happens to a girl when something unspeakable is done to her. She turns herself into a bird. This is how she flies away.' And when the men had finished with those women, with her
mother, even as the blood dried along the insides of their legs, the women hugged each other and sang an old song:

  One day I will become a blue dove

  And I will sit in the blue grass

  Do not rush me, oh stranger,

  Do not rush me now.

  A song to numb the senses and dull the dreams. Days passed. Each one another dark bird that rises into a wrinkle and flies away. Her father's nose healed, but now it sat crooked on his face. Her mother, she healed too, in a fashion, the way women do. The song that she sang, it helped as much as any song can, smoothing back old hurt to make way for the new. The stinging hard looks other women gave her in the courtyard as she hung their laundry, the job assignments she could not get, the many kiosk vendors who would not sell to her. It was the same way for her father. The men of the apartment building called him Nose and would not allow him to play chess with them. 'Animals. Godless animals,' her father said. 'Sloppy eaters with foul mouths, most of those men. And their chess moves lack grace.' Azade can remember the indignation her father had felt, her father, who had been proud and devout, prayed seventeen times a day and had the prayer bruise on his forehead to prove it. 'In what way are they better than me?'

  For a year her father appealed to authorities, wrote eloquent letters begging for a chance to work in the universities. Then to the factories. Then to the city services to clean windows. But because the factories manufactured military components and because of her father's subversive skin colour, his every request was denied. It didn't matter that he had a PhD and spoke four languages. 'You can clean a latrine in any language,' a clerk, the lowest clerk, at the city office of work affairs told him. Two years later her father died of shame, the thought and smell of shit on his feet and hands never leaving him.

  All this her mother told her, in her mountain language that no one else in the building would understand. 'He could not travel beneath his skins to find another skin,' she said. 'He could not trade his highlander skin for a Russian skin.' And Azade understood the lesson in that comment, in the example of her father's frustrated life. Azade set out to be the best kind of Soviet—Russian-speaking and hard-working. Docile and doing nothing to arouse suspicion of being in possession of nationalistic ideas or a simple nostalgia for the past, or—God forbid—a memory of a time when her family had had a place of their own and knew it. Even so, it seemed natural to her in the way that the closed knot of a loop makes all things seem inevitable that she inherited her father's duties and took charge of this little latrine and the courtyard. Natural that a man she did not know or want to know, a Caucasian highlander in an army-issue uniform so new that the creases of his trousers held fast when he walked, saw her in the courtyard. He clasped her hand—still dirty from pulling weeds—in his. He did not ask her, but told her, that they would go the civil registry and be married. 'Where did this crazy man come from?' Her mother pitched the question to the ceiling, to the heavens, and Azade had merely shrugged. And because her father wasn't there to object, her mother, such a progressive Muslim, really, for her day, who had herself longed to wear the long blue skirts and smart-looking glasses, encouraged the match. He wasn't an ethnic Russian and he wasn't Christian, and that's all that mattered. 'Marry him, whatever he is,' her mother advised. 'In this Soviet state, it will be better for you, better for your children.' The civil ceremony took only two minutes. The deputy governor pointed to the place on the paper where they were to sign and gave them a bit of wisdom: 'Life is very difficult. Never forget your parents.'

  Azade held open the door of the latrine with her foot and studied the children outside. That's what carried her all these years, the thought of children. But even in that she was cursed with bad luck. Six times, maybe seven, she conceived. But always, always something went wrong. Azade grabbed a bucket and sprinkled salt along the path between the stairwell and the latrine. She counted the children pawing at the heap. The oldest, Big Anna, stood knock-kneed and pawed through the clutter at the base of the heap.

  'Up your mother!' Anna hooted at the twin with the transparent veins that swam under his skin. Bad Boris, Azade had called him, and the name had stuck. 'Your mother twice over!' Bad Boris yelled back at the girl.

  Good Boris, not to be outdone, hawked a jet of mucus at the base of the glistening heap. 'Your mother like this and that!'

  Gleb, the red-haired boy, ran his sleeve under his nose. Eight years old, Azade put him at. 'Your mother up and down and all around.'

  'Your mother and seven crosses on her death bed!' cried the littlest child, the girl with the brown skin. She used to have India-black hair, but now it was orange with malnutrition. Five, Azade guessed her age. Maybe six. It was hard to tell just how old, what with all the glue they'd been sniffing. Stunted the growth. Every day she said this to the twin boys with the transparent skin. Seven she was guessing for those two, because they'd each lost their front teeth, and she was pretty sure they fell out the natural way, though there was no denying that Vitek treated them rough and what with all those fumes they inhaled, and their funny lurching walk, they tended to hurt themselves. Five of them. And they might have been hers. It was easy to think this way. Easy to count them and think of all the children she'd lost, every one of them with skins thin and bones soft. She'd lost them and it was her own fault, her own carelessness that caused it—she understood this now. When her mother told her to hang an unbroken, unknotted skein from the door of the latrine, Azade had laughed. She and Mircha had only been married two years and she didn't know then the importance of unbroken thread, didn't really believe that unbroken thread was life.

  Only after she lost her children did she remember her mother's advice. They hadn't grown right and when they came, always months too soon, they slid out into the sheets and once into the toilet bowl, fishlike, and so strange, she could hardly see how they could be human. Fish, they were creatures meant for water, but not for this land. Mircha took them in his hands—yes, in those days he had both his arms still—and wrapped them in milling cloth and buried them the mountain way, red string tied around the bundle, pocketing them in barren ground without a marker, without a reminder, so as not to curse the cotton crop or send their spirits into the trees.

  'Not like that, stupid! Like this.' Vitek's voice bounced from wall to wall in the dvor, snapping Azade from her reverie. Vitek shook the boy with the rust-coloured hair and the boy's glasses sailed across the cracked pavement. 'When you rush a tourist, you littler ones should get in front and you,' Vitek pointed to the rust-haired boy and the older girl, 'should stand behind the mark and get your hands in every pocket.'

  Azade shuffled toward the children, taking note of their blank stares. 'You're ruining them,' she said, dumping a handful of salt on Vitek's left shoe.

  Vitek laughed. 'Oh, Ma—it's all fun and games.'

  'These kids need an education, or they'll be good for nothing.' Azade squinted at the kids, who stared back at her with empty eyes.

  'I'm giving them an education,' Vitek said.

  'No. The kind with books and things.'

  Vitek passed his tongue over his gold tooth as he glanced at the Material Dialectics textbook Azade kept stowed near the latrine in the event of big bizness.

  'Books are only good for wiping your ass with. Besides, what I'm teaching them is better than anything you can find in a book. Not a single one of those books will tell you how to get by in this life.'

  'In every equation there is nothing as constant as human cruelty,' Big Anna said.

  'See,' Vitek smiled. 'They know everything kids their age should if they want to survive.'

  Azade shook her head, mumbled some choice words in Kumyk. He could catch crayfish in winter, her Vitek. He could figure the angles in a circle. But for all this cleverness there was something fundamentally wrong with him. For starters, every time he opened his mouth, he broke her heart just a little more. Not his fault, though. Could he help it that nobody, not even his own mother, had wanted him? It's the only way she could explain how he turn
ed up in their courtyard one morning with lice in his hair and scabies on his skin. At seven years old he was already a confirmed alcoholic, and Azade knew that the street had been his mother and it was his good luck to wander under the archway into their dvor to use her Little Necessary the day he did. And she thanked God for him. It was like the ground had finally returned to her what it had taken. A real child, alive and trailing her like a shadow, and she could not have ignored him even if she had wanted to.

  'We can't feed that little runt,' Mircha had said. 'Take him to the orphanage, let the state raise him.' It was the one time she defied Mircha. Mircha had just been sent home from the front, missing an arm. And with only one arm to hit her with, she figured she could care for them both, could stand between them and that, in time, because she loved them both, they would for her sake learn how to love each other.

  She should have remembered what mountain women had known for centuries and what her mother tried to teach her: Love made wise people stupid and kind people cruel. And love made the courageous cowardly. This was the only way Azade could explain what happened next. Because the more she cared for Vitek and for Mircha and his weeping stump, the more Mircha drank. And the more Mircha drank the angrier he became. And all that love she thought she had—an ocean of it, the best and purest kind of love—wasn't enough. And beneath her good intentions she was a coward—quiet when she should have made noise. Oh, her mother would have died a second death if she could have seen how her Azade, who had strong arms and the long hair, the source of a highland woman's strength, allowed Mircha with his one arm and fraying hair to push her around. Her mother would have died all over again if she could witness how much of her motherly wisdom Azade had managed to forget. But who really suffered? Why, the boy did, of course. Always it's this way with drinkers and their children. The rage boils out of the body at every chance. And for years Azade had thought that if she kept quiet, silently turning her tears to feathers, Mircha's anger would burn itself out like a match dropped into a deep bucket. But wrath fueled by alcohol never burns out so quickly.