The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

by Gina Ochsner

  Inside their apartment Lukeria, in her best polyester dress, sat at the window as she always did this time of day. A copy of Pamyat, 'Remembrance', a reactionary news magazine noted for its anti-cosmopolitan leanings, was spread over her lap and the bulb of the plunger held to her ear. Another ritual. Lukeria was remembering the good days when she sat in the station room for her twenty-minute breaks and sifted through the news brought from the borders: which crops they were railing in, which base metals were going out, which group of undesirables was being relocated. How diminished her horizons now, collapsed to the four corners of a small window overlooking a dingy courtyard.

  On the table Lukeria had laid out a dish called 'Fruit of the Chicken a la Varit'. Which was to say, boiled eggs. Again. Tanya let her keys drop on the table.

  'Oh, it's you,' Lukeria said, leaning closer to the window. She frowned and straightened. 'That Yuri,' she circled a finger at her ear. 'I think he's coming off the rails—even now he's on the rooftop talking to himself. And then there's the way he mopes around, looking like he's just seen a ghost.'

  As a matter of fact, he says he's seen Mircha.'

  Lukeria shook her head. 'Well, he's always been a little fragile, mentally, I mean. Take, for example, that space helmet he wears. At least he's grown into it now. Remember when his head was a little smaller and the helmet was too heavy for him, dragging his head towards the ground?'

  'I remember.' Tanya edged stoveward where the kettle waited on the ring.

  'Good thing I put a stop to that. What would your life be, living with a man like that, an expert in the make and model of other people's bootlaces? You working like a dog so he can find his feet in this life. He's just the sort to sit on the stove all day, thinking to hunt up the magical pike that will solve every problem.' Lukeria wagged her head, a human metronome of complete disapproval.

  'Jews. When life gets rough, they are the first to leave the country. I know, I watched it happen. They live with their bags packed in readiness. Why don't they stay and suffer with the rest of us?'

  'You keep your suitcases packed,' Tanya observed.

  'That's different. Altogether different. But you wouldn't understand.'

  No. She doesn't understand, not one bit. And she has tried. She has tried to see beyond the strangeness she was born into and to understand a world of dim light and half-answers. She has tried to understand this woman before her, utterly divided. How is it, for instance, she could sit there with a steamer trunk full of letters, none of them belonging to her? And the buttons! She's seen them, several envelopes of buttons, the dark threads trailing from the eyes. They came from the trousers of the male prisoners. After all, a man can't run if his trousers drop, and only guards wear belts. These buttons were put in envelopes and sent in the mail as messages to families that the prisoner had not run, would never run, would never again wear trousers that required buttons.

  Tanya could not fathom how many buttons there might be in envelopes in trunks or boxes or bedside stands or suitcases all over Russia. How many letters. How many such reminders that long outlived the men and women who once lived and ate and dreamed and loved. They turned the soil over with their feet and uttered prayers and wrote letters that were as beautiful as any poem Tanya had ever read.

  Lukeria lifted the newspaper, held in front of her like a beacon. Americans. They just make me want to spit. First they take all our money, the filthy cheats. Then they take our dignity. Now they want to steal all of our history, too. They suffer from Convenient Amnesia. They think they own the world, doling out their money to whom they see fit, ignoring others who need it far worse.'

  'They're not all like that.'

  Lukeria smiled a savage smile. 'No?'

  Tanya played with the handle of her teacup. 'Some people give money just to give. Because they believe in a cause.'

  'What people? What cause?'

  'Art-loving people who believe in beauty.' And though it may be unwise, though she'd probably regret it every day of her life for as long as the two of them lived together, Tanya opened her mouth and told Lukeria everything she knew about the Causes of Beautification.

  Lukeria shook her head as if this were the funniest joke she'd ever heard. Her bony shoulders quaked with mirth. 'You are such a little fool!' She'd been a beautiful woman once, but when she got into these moods, it was so much harder to see it, even in the forgiving light of the candle. 'Oh, my lungs.' Lukiera batted at the air around her face.

  From Olga's apartment below came the sound of soft murmuring, voices drifting up through the heating vents. Tanya withdrew her sky notebook and application form from her plastic bag.

  Through the heating vents Tanya could hear Yuri and Zoya. They were in full rut, the metal frame of the bed squeaking and groaning. It was enough to make her want to shove her pencil in an ear.

  'There he goes again—talking to a ghost!' Lukeria pronounced.

  'That's not a ghost he's with,' Tanya said. 'And they're not talking.'

  'Oh.' Lukeria tipped her head and listened. 'Oh,' she said, rolling her gaze to the ceiling.

  Tanya squeezed her eyes closed. The problem with clouds was that they so rarely made sounds. So rarely could you count on a cloud to fill your ears with cotton when you needed them to. And then there was the insistent pinchings from her bladder. Tanya made her way to the courtyard where overhead the moon was no thicker than an eyelash. That is to say, the night was dark as a cow's liver. Which is why she did not at first notice Vitek emerging from the latrine. But then he burped and she smelled the sub-grade vodka on his breath, saw his sloppy salute with the open bottle.

  Vitek gazed at the windows of the third floor where Yuri and Zoya were still trysting and where Olga was, presumably, sleeping through it. 'Ah, love,' Vitek said with an air of wistfulness.

  'Yes.' Tanya ground her molars. 'The walls are thin.'

  Vitek smiled. 'The windows, too. Incidentally, I accidentally overheard you talking about that grant thing.'

  Tanya pulled at the neck of her sweater. 'That's to remain a secret.'

  Vitek shrugged and smiled, pointed to the fortochka. 'Nothing is a secret. Not here.' Though he was spectacularly drunk, his words still maintained a husk of logic. 'Anyway, it occurred to me that you—that is, you museum people, which includes but is not limited to yourself, Zoya, and Yuri—need me.'

  Tanya stepped inside the latrine and locked the door. 'Why?'

  'For managerial purposes. I can help you.'

  'How?' Tanya, now finished with her business, was back outside the latrine.

  'I have skills. I have know-how. Connections. I am a businessman. Allow me to demonstrate.' Vitek smiled and held out his open hand. 'You owe two kopeks for use of the latrine.'

  Tanya cursed quietly and dug into her pocket for a coin.

  'See how easy that was? But seriously, you need a man to arrange entertainment. Big-shot westerners have expectations. They cannot stand to be bored. They must have constant movement and noise. They will want to see the circus, the nightclubs, the discos, the bars, the dancing bears, a ballet—but only if it's a short one—and they will want to see women reaping in the fields with those hook things.'

  'You mean a scythe?'

  'Precisely! I knew you'd see it my way.' Vitek downed the last of the vodka and pitched the bottle onto the heap, where it bounced and shattered into a melody of breaking glass.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Azade

  Though Azade had smelled the upside-down dreams of bats and the warm and weedy dreams of eels, nothing reeked as much as the dreams of humans. This was why angels do not visit us while we sleep—from fear they may carry our stench up their ladders to heaven. And in the same way that a glistening map tells of a snail's night-time journeys, dreams—having all night to gather strength—spill out and follow the dreamer wherever he or she goes, as a wet vapour trailing each step, as oil clinging to the skin. This was why at night Azade kept a tuck of salt under her tongue before careening towards sleep and
why she washed her hands so thoroughly and so often as soon as she woke up in the morning. For what people dreamt was not only announced with an overwhelming odour, but also in sweat, tears, and urine, all the body's efforts to slough off what was no longer needed.

  And where do people go to get rid of what they don't need? The toilet, of course. Stationed at her post, Azade has detected every souring dream, every curdled nightmare. In Olga's cautious turds, so typical of a woman who has a hard time letting go, Azade smelled Olga's longing for her husband who has long ago left this land and Olga's terrible desire to know precisely where his body lay. Gut the memory and the man. This was the advice Azade kept at the tip of her tongue and she would have said if it were not for Yuri. Every morning at 8.10, his hands still slick from a full night of fishing, Yuri sat on the commode and dumped his aching need for a father, a desire that carried the stagnant aroma of duckweed and stale dinner buns, the scent of a young man unable to leave his childhood. She could detect anxiety coiling deep in Lukeria's bowels and her farts told of her old woman's utter terror at being left alone. Then there was Tanya, embarrassed by her body, sitting in the latrine far longer than she needed to. Always the girl dreamt a translation of her days into the language of clouds, believing that by describing every skyscape she would make her life a beautiful knowable thing. But these days Azade was smelling more gas from the girl. Something was bothering her, something that wouldn't work out tidily in that notebook she always carried. It was as if the girl had swallowed sky and now was bloated with the shapes her longing assumed inside her swelling body.

  Azade's odours, on the other hand, and this she readily admitted, were typical—heralding ordinary longings that smelled of her own skin, of woodsmoke, and of soil. Her night-time dreams were to see Mount Kazbek, the holy mountain rising into the purer, thinner air of Vladikavkaz and the foothills driving up the blue mists. She wanted to go to a place where winter stole the days from spring, and the snap of cold forced her breath inside out. She wanted to run her fingers over the silver fur of the kale leaves and to return to a land where there were bees instead of mosquitoes, dizzying heights instead of these low hills, and where the dust was of the cleaner sort. She had heard that chewing a single shiny rhododendron leaf would sustain a body through a hard mountain crossing. She wanted to see if this were true. And did the shadow of the mountain shelter at the same time two countries to the south and one to the east? Another question only her own eyes could answer.

  The soles of her feet itched for the hard soil of the marketplace where she could hear fifty languages amid the raucous bellows of camels. For the market where frozen milk was sold and carried as a block, a piece of winter hauled on the back. She wanted to see for herself that there still existed a place where people had the good sense to keep the radishes next to the cinnamon and the lamb near the coffee and where the Korean jostled the Turk and everything that was simple rubbed against the complicated and the beautiful and ugly. She wanted to hear the women working the stalls, the canting and calls. She wanted to see their bright skirts, compassion the needle that sewed the waistband, humility the hem, strength the sleeves and kindness behind every stitch. She would sit and listen to the sound of the bells sewn to the hems of their skirts heralding their every movement. And when the market closed, she wanted to hear them turn the day under their feet, tamping the dust to the road, the bells marking an internal music every woman is born with, but few remember.

  Most of all, she wanted to see for herself the graveyard her father had so lovingly cared for and the place he had wanted to be buried. And so sharp were these longings, so pungent the smell of them in her nostrils, that on mornings when the only sound in the dvor was her own breath in her ears and the sweep of her broom, these yearnings for what she had lost mingled with a desire for what she'd never had, and she could no longer distinguish between the two. All of which led her to believe that her dreams were true, shaped either by actual memory or by prophetic vision—how else, Azade asked herself daily, could she dream with such clarity?

  How could she feel this nostalgic for a city she'd not seen since she was a child? A question for her father, who knew how to explain anything in four languages. And when she asked, so many years ago that the question itself had faded to a dim echo knocking from wall to wall, Why? Why did we have to leave?, he rubbed his forehead, his fingers worrying his faint prayer bruise.

  When she was older, sometime after her father had been denied a position with the last school—a local high school known for employing complete dimwits—and before he'd been assigned to work the latrine, he gave her the answer. His answer could have been told in any number of languages, any number of ways, for it was a story he used to tell his students in Vladikavkaz.

  A true fiction,' he said. Always he prefaced the tale this way for his students. True because this story had been proven and lived out so many times, it didn't require the names of actual people or places. The truest stories never do, her father liked to say. And it was a good story because like the finest prayer rugs, it was a braided tale, which meant you could tell it forward or backward or start someplace in the middle, weaving in at all times an understanding of the past rolled against the present, which so very often suggested the future.

  But telling stories this way, and listening to them told this way, required a patience most people didn't have. It's why she couldn't get three words out with Vitek before he threw his hands up and shouted, 'Ma, enough!' and stomped to the other side of the dvor, his hands pressed to his ears. So she told the story anyway, to her goat, Koza, because at the sound of her voice he snuffled obediently at the hem of her skirt. She told it to the children because if she gave them honey sticks or sunflower seeds they could be quite good listeners. She told it to the hole in the latrine because if the Devil had crawled in there in the middle of the night the truth of this story would have turned his teeth to rubber and rendered him harmless. She told the story to herself because being so far from her homeland she felt she had forgotten what was important and true. Case in point, ever since her father and then her mother passed on, she'd forgotten how to pray, though, in truth, she'd only known three, maybe four prayers to begin with. Furthermore, a good mountain Muslim could recite family history seven generations back. Her father could tell ten generations' worth. But he died too soon and now Azade could only remember three generations. Having lost the trail of ancestors, having lost the prayers, Azade clung tenaciously to what she did have and hoped that in the mountain tradition her fervour would turn this story into a prayer the way over time soft pitch becomes amber.

  There was once a mad prince who wanted to subdue the land as far as it stretched from the frozen marshes of the north to the impassable mountains in the south. But the people from region to region loved their land more than they loved the mad prince and his strange plans. Even after hearing the prince's many promises of a better life in better lands, his royal subjects flatly refused to move. 'This is our home. Here our bones flourish like herbs. Here we buried our grandfathers. Every good memory we have is here. Besides, this is the only land we know how to live on,' the people explained.

  But the prince was not deterred. With the brilliance of a mad mind the prince moved the people of the verdant mountains to the infertile plains, the people of the rivers to the ice and the plains people to the hills in an effort to confuse their language, their memory. Though all this movement muddled their language and even their religion, it wasn't enough to completely erase their memory. Because during their forced travels, the people bit their thumbs and wrote their names in their blood on the bark of trees and on stones. And every step they took only imprinted on the bottoms of their feet an indelible map spelling the way back to their ancestral homes.

  Infuriated, the prince devised another plan. He sent his royal tailors and seamstresses from village to village, aul to aul, where they skinned each and every royal subject. And then the seamstresses sewed a new skin taken from someone else living far away onto each fla
yed body. It was an excruciatingly painful process and many people died before the tailors and seamstresses perfected the technique, as some skins were sewn too tight and some too loose. And no amount of sawdust could completely absorb the standing blood.

  Men and women wept at the seams—the eyes and the mouth and fingertips, and the bottoms of their feet. But this suited the mad prince. Now his royal subjects could barely move within these skins that chafed their restless souls. The prince then nailed to the very trees that once bore bloody thumbprints royal proclamations assuring his subjects that these sacrifices were socially necessary and completely normal; their pain was of an ordinary type that fell into perfectly tolerable limits.

  Still, nothing could account for the terrible itches and longings their bodies beneath their new skins still had for their old skins. And nothing could cure it but to sink their feet with these foreign skins in their own old familiar soils of their walnut orchards or high mountain cabbage rows or the steppes stippled with rapeseed and wormwood. It was a complication the mad prince, in spite of his genius, had not considered: bodies beneath the skin might retain a permanent memory oftheir homeland.

  There was more to the story, but her father explained that it couldn't be told because the other half hadn't been walked out with the feet yet. All of them, displaced into this concrete city of leaden skies, were those royal subjects skinned by the mad prince whose madness passed from ruler to ruler. It was up to her, he said, to live out the second half. Up to her, he said, to remember the family and return them to their ancestral home. Only then could the spell be broken. All those years of hearing her father tell that story to anyone who would listen and even those who wouldn't had made Azade impatient in her muscles. As a girl she knew with a certainty that defied her age that she would do it, she would walk the story backward, walk it to the beginning, to Mount Kazbek where the world began. But she was not a girl anymore. Her father was gone. Her mother, too. The years had ground her down one vertebra at a time. And though she still wanted the mountains, now it was only in her dreams she remembered that old desire. The only way to force clarity of desire was to remember the old pain, the hurt of one skin chafing against the other. The only way to force the memory was to plunge her hands in a pot of boiling water. Like the thin sleeves covering garlic, her own skin curled to paper and peeled. But days later, when her burns began to heal, she scratched and clawed at her skin—a miserable relief, because it only made her skin ache even more.