by Gina Ochsner
'This is the strangest story I've ever heard,' the mother mumbled to no one in particular.
Mircha brightened. 'I like this man. But the story—what a mess! It has no complication. No dramatic rise. No denouement. Terrible,' he pronounced, bringing the vial of nail-varnish remover to his lips.
And here Tanya paused. For Azade, now a mere metre away from Mircha, had raised the shovel high. 'Every story, good or bad, must have an end,' Azade said, and swung the blade down hard across his shoulders. Mircha doubled over.
Azade brought the shovel down again and again, breaking bones with every blow. And Mircha, with each blow, sunk a little deeper into the mud. But his mouth worked as well as ever as he registered each hit with a bitter complaint: 'My knees! My shoulder! My back!'
'Why is she doing that?' the grandmother asked.
'She's thrashing the mud. Very routine part of spring cleaning. It brings good luck,' Olga explained.
'Is this normal?' the mother asked.
'Very,' Olga replied. 'We each of us are like olives. Only when we are beaten, trammelled, and utterly crushed do we yield up what is essential and what is the best in us.'
Mircha flailed. 'A story is an arrow, dear girl. It always flies true and once it is spoken it can't be taken back! Tanyechka! Ask me what your future holds. I might tell you!'
Azade handed Tanya the shovel. 'There's on old mountain saying: the man is the head but the woman is the neck.'
Tanya gripped the handle. Her rage, white hot and boiling, the rage she fed with chewing gum and self-loathing, had not evaporated into cloud or into nothing as she had hoped. It was still there, in her arms, her hands. She did not hate this man with his overachieving mouth. She had never allowed herself to hate anyone. Passive by nature, she lacked the energy for pure hatred. But she hated his words, each one a stinging nettle. How dare he taunt her with her knowledge of Marina, her mother, the one subject everyone in the courtyard knew they were never to discuss? How dare he ruin this one chance with the Americans and their no-strings-attached money? Tanya lifted the shovel, so light now in her steady hands it seemed to rise in the air of its own accord. And then it arced, level and straight, and connected with a solid crunch against Mircha's shoulder. The bad one. Mircha yelped. Tanya swung again, this time against the backs of his knees.
'She should have done this a long time ago,' Olga whispered in a confidential tone to the grandmother.
The girl turned to Vitek. 'What is going on here?'
Vitek circled a finger at his ear. 'Beats me. But listen.' Now Vitek had his arm draped over the girl's shoulder. 'You're cute and I'm lonely. Let's you and me go to a club I know run by some very close personal friends of mine. We'll waltz on champagne, we'll feed dancing bears, eat reindeer meat and caviar. We'll...'
'You are utterly repulsive in every way.' The girl shrugged out of Vitek's loose embrace and charged for the bench where Zoya sat, her colour wheel of hair dyes fanned over the stone.
Finally, Tanya threw the shovel at the mud. She rested her hands on her hips, her chest heaving. Mircha lay broken and silent on the surface.
The grandmother consulted her watch. 'If we hurry, we might make the evening train to Ekaterinburg.'
'You're leaving?' Tanya asked in despair.
'You're going east?' Azade and Olga asked in unison.
'Oh, don't go there,' Tanya begged.
'The wolves,' Olga said.
'The thinly veiled malevolence,' Vitek called out.
'The tasteless art,' Zoya chimed.
'The wild savages,' Lukeria hooted. 'Jews, and Russians of Asian Aspect.'
'Give us another chance,' Tanya begged.
'Give! Give!' the children shrieked.
'Clearly we've come at a bad time.' The grandmother gripped the suitcase handles. 'And we have so many other museums to see.'
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Americans of Russian Extraction for the Causes of Beautification stood on the kerb, leaning towards the traffic, their shoulders brushing against one another. Beside them, their baggage reflected their tired and threadbare state. A latch had been damaged in transit, the teeth of a zip pulled from its track, and mud spackled the broad sides. A light rain began to fall, pulling down the sky in particles of thick-grained pollution. The rain and grit had overwhelmed the willpower of the girl's high-altitude hair and it hung sullenly in her eyes. This she seemed to take as a personal slight.
Tanya stood a few paces down traffic, wiggling her fingers, as if they were a lure on a line. A last, she flagged a ride, this time a battered blue Lada. Not all of their luggage fit in the trunk and several pieces had to be tied to the roof rack. But some good news: there was just enough room in the backseat for mother and grandmother and, if she didn't breathe too boldly, for Tanya. In the front seats, plenty of room for the girl and her long legs and, of course, for the driver, a young man who beamed munificently at the girl.
The women rode in silence. The driver engaged the windscreen wipers, an outrageous luxury for such a car, and together they watched the wipers smear the sky across the screen. Tanya was grateful for the wipers' rhythmic whine, for the squeaks piercing the steamy silence between herself and these women whose disappointment was as thick and palpable as the grit spread across the windscreen.
They had wanted to see a museum that resembled those on postcards, a museum like the Hermitage with perhaps a miniature golden carriage and maybe even a Faberge egg. They wanted wide rolling rivers and green fields, or maybe yellow ones of mustard or wheat, sunshine and violins. They had wanted, Tanya realized, to see a Russia that existed only in dreams their grandmothers dreamed and perhaps had never existed at any time—ever. Well, in paintings, perhaps. What they had been shown far and away went beyond the neatly contained disrepair that they had hoped to remedy within the four walls of the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum of Art, Geology and Anthropology.
'You must understand our position. You must grasp how difficult, how very awkward this is,' the grandmother said. 'But we must give where it feels good to give—where and how it feels right to us. That is the privilege of practising micro-managed middle-class benevolence,' she continued. 'And it's always been my contention that money is only as worthwhile and as useful as its recipient.'
'I understand,' Tanya muttered.
'I'm not sure that you do,' the grandmother continued. 'It isn't that the exhibitions, the staging and lighting, the overall presentation and the concept behind them are inferior and unsalvageable, but it is what is exhibited inside your museum that falls so very short of the mark. Exhibits replicating Matisse's work, or Kandinsky or even Chagall—well, that would be acceptable, in your case, laudable. But you must understand, a savage display of humans preserved in glass jars—that's grotesquerie, not art.'
'We are enterprising, absolutely. We put our hearts into our art,' Tanya said dully.
'Your gum and cosmetics, too,' the girl observed.
'It isn't that we don't find the human body palatable.' The mother carefully splayed her fingers over the fabric of her pant suit stretched tight across her knees. 'It's just that some forms are more palatable than others.'
'So, it must be clear, even to you, that when we speak of art and its upkeep, the preservation of the artistic aesthetic, we—that is, you museum people and us—are speaking of something entirely different.'
'And then we must consider what kind of people you are,' the grandmother continued.
'The savage way in which you live and call normal.' The girl aimed her athletic knees in the direction of a gutted trolley that now blocked the road.
Tanya's hands lay limp in her lap. She could say that at least they had TV. They had Turkish tobacco. They had their collective grand and shameful past they shared in every bowl of soup they ate. They had each other. They were living life as well as they knew how. It may not be rich, this way of living, but it was honest, much more so than any exhibition she could show them. At last, Tanya opened her mouth. 'Whether we are savag
e or civilized, I can't say. But we are authentic, this much I know.'
'We can see how grim the palette of your situation is. It isn't as if we haven't eyes in our heads,' the grandmother said.
'Or hearts in our chests,' the mother chimed. 'We want to help. That's why we've come.'
'So, we still have a chance—is that what you're saying?' Tanya hated the pleading sound her voice had acquired, how very much like Mircha begging in the mud she sounded.
The grandmother's jaw set in a way all too familiar, in a way that transcended linguistic boundaries. 'We'll send a letter announcing our decision.'
The mother patted Tanya's knee. 'We'll write.'
At this, a supreme silence fell inside the car.
***
At the train station Tanya and the driver lugged the baggage up the many steps to the platforms. The eastern-bound train sat ready on the tracks. Beside the carriages the sturdy blue-skirted conductresses inspected tickets and stood by, watching passengers struggle with their bags. When the conductress overseeing the sleeper car saw Tanya, saw the oversized luggage, she frowned. It did not look good for the luggage. It did not look good for Tanya, who would have to explain to the American women why it was necessary to buy extra tickets for the luggage. But Tanya needn't have worried; the women stood together on the platform, blissfully unconcerned what troubles their largesse would cause.
'Here, whatever the fare is for ourselves and our luggage, this should take care of it.' The grandmother pressed several bills into Tanya's hand. Too many bills. 'Whatever is left over, give to those poor kids living in that hole.'
Tanya whirled sharply on her heel, grateful for a quick dismissal. Grateful for quick generosity. Angry that a woman who had so much could not have given more. She purchased the tickets and pocketed the change. As she turned for the women she was again reminded of how very much like wooden dolls they were—outwardly lacquered and brittle, inwardly hollow and unfinished somehow. But whereas before, at the airport, they stood so as to occupy as much space as possible, now they huddled together in such a harmonious closeness that Tanya was jealous. Then she felt ashamed of her jealousy. And then, as quickly as it had come, the envy left, leaving only the sooty taste of pure defeat in her mouth. All of which sent her mind reeling back towards the fibrous grey colour of a cloud overstretched. The colour of a shrug. An echo bouncing from corner to corner inside a very large church. The texture of a shadow in early May. The things people remember and will never forget for as long as they live.
She would have written all this down, but the cloud notebook was nowhere to be found. A good thing, really, or she might have missed seeing the grandmother's slight nod, or maybe it was the mother's exhale, an instinctual cue signalling movement. The women linked arms, a completely Russian thing to do, so Russian, so familiar that Tanya almost missed the inky blue wings on the girl's hips unfurling. Pegasus trembled, lifted, took flight, and carried the women up, up, up the carriage steps and through the narrow aisle to their Class K sleeping berth, which, as luck or fate would have it, faced the platform where Tanya still stood, waiting. They looked at each other through the window. It seemed right to Tanya to say goodbye then, though she couldn't imagine quite how to say it without sounding angry, wearied by their visit, or worse, relieved to see them go.
Finally the grandmother slid down the window.
'I can see that you are disappointed, and I don't blame you, dear girl. You are a victim of circumstances. We don't think any less of you than we did before.'
'You could try again in two years. Perhaps with changes in the museum and, er, elsewhere, you'd have a stronger chance,' said the mother, warmth and hope curling the ends of her words.
'I don't believe in chance or luck. Not anymore.' Tanya wagged her head balefully from side to side. 'I've been told that this is a great lack in my repertoire of social conversation and quite possibly an indicator of moral and imaginative failings as well.'
The grandmother squinted at Tanya. 'How old are you?'
'Twenty-four.'
'Oh.' Her voice dampened. 'You have plenty of time for moral failure, dear.'
The train jolted, then slowly began to glide away. Tanya lifted her hand in a limp wave, but the women had already turned their faces eastward towards the tracks. In the set of the grandmother's jaw Tanya could see the recalibration of her charitable vigilance narrowing on new sights. In the mother's face Tanya saw exhaustion. In the girl's face, soft as dough still rising, and fringed now with fallen hair, Tanya could not read a thing.
The mother Tanya would miss, her motherly hand on hers. She would miss her open honest eyes, would miss a woman calling her 'dear' and meaning it. But Tanya could read how already in their bodies, in their forward gazes, they had moved on and she knew they could not see her there on the platform, standing on tiptoe, craning her head in their direction, and holding the sky by the handle of her umbrella.
***
Not far from the lime tree, Yuri lay half-dozing in his mother's claw-footed bath. The lead of his fishing line drifted over the watery skin of the enormous mud swamp that had overtaken the courtyard. The rain had stopped. The clouds, pushed hard by God's invisible hand, hovered now over the Kama River where the rain, tap dancing on the water, would bring out the fish. If only he had a little motivation, he might be there, now, fishing. Instead, Yuri watched Vitek emerge from a bank of smoke within the darkened stairwell. He observed how the kids squatting heapside were also watching Vitek's approach. The canine manner with which they licked their lips put Yuri's teeth on edge.
Vitek paused at the latrine, jostled the latch, then urinated at the base of the lime tree, not more than three metres from Azade's feet. Beside her sat Yuri's own mother, Olga, her gaze resolutely trained on the building which seemed to Yuri not to be sinking so much as it was pushing dark mud from the depth to the light, dredging from an unseen world. Displacement. A principle of physical science, but also of history, love, time and of anything else elemental and elementally tied to physical existence.
Vitek shoved his hands in his pockets. 'Where are the Americans?'
'Gone,' Azade said.
Lukeria coughed and coughed, her chest bent to her knees. 'They were getting on my nerves,' she managed at last.
'I liked the girl,' Vitek said. 'A little snooty, funny hair, but still.'
'What about their money?' Zoya exited the stairwell with a field chair tucked under her arm and a halo of magnesium red toxicity framing her head. Yes, her passions had been stirred and now she would sit and paint her nails with the angriest varnish she could find.
'Gone,' Yuri sang out.
'Who wanted their greasy hard-currency dollars anyway?' Olga asked.
'We did,' Zoya said, unfolding the chair.
Vitek withdrew a bottle of vodka from his waistband. As he drank, he grimaced as if he were taking in an ocean of pain one swallow at a time. When he'd had enough, he strolled towards Yuri and handed him the bottle.
'Drink,' Vitek said.
Yuri drank. Did he swallow a bomb? Or was it a stopwatch he was hearing? Because with that drink came that ticking again, this time from the pit of his stomach.
'I talked to Kochubey this morning. He said you never showed up.' Vitek's body threw a long shadow over Yuri. 'Survival demands that the individual sacrifice his sense of self for the communal group to which he belongs.' Vitek retrieved the bottle. 'I could drain this bottle in a single swallow, if I wanted to. Right now. But that would be selfish. Therefore, I abandon my selfish inclination and consider the group at large. The benefits of this action are manifold.' Vitek took another long drink.
'What benefits are those?' Yuri squinted at Vitek.
Vitek smiled. 'Who's talking here, me or you?'
'You.'
'So, OK. You'd rather not do certain things. I understand. But survival demands that at times we do things that are contrary to our wishes or liking.' Vitek handed back the bottle.
Yuri drank silently.
&n
bsp; 'Do you see what I'm getting at?' Vitek's voice held an edge.
Yuri blinked. It was so hard to think around all the noise within and without.
'What?'
'You should have gone to see Kochubey when I told you to.' As he spoke, Vitek's gold-capped teeth caught the last of the afternoon light.
Yuri took another drink from the bottle. 'I'm not going.'
'What?'
'I'm not going to see Kochubey. I'm not going to re-up. I don't care how much money I could get.'
Vitek's smile vanished. 'Maybe you should think about what you're saying. It's the hasty word that gets a man into trouble.'
'I have thought about it.' Yuri squinted at the kids approaching now on hands and knees. They had a mangy rabid look about them. In school, which one? Number 130? Yuri had learned from his science instructor that the human mouth is the source of all contagion. One bite, a wayward finger caught between overambitious canines, say, and your whole hand would be infected with bacteria. The hand would swell until the fingers split. You could even die from it.
'This isn't about you. This is about the group.' Vitek nodded at Zoya in the field chair. 'Let's face facts. Your net worth is limited to certain profit-producing enterprises. Fishing isn't one of them. The least, the very least you can do for your mother, for your beautiful girlfriend, for everyone in any way associated with you is to go and fight. Now. For Mother Russia.'
Tick. 'But I could die.'
Zoya blew on her slick fingernails. 'You would die a hero. Wouldn't it be wonderful?' Her smile, a kind of ovation, a glorious but terminal shining just before the open door shut.