by Gina Ochsner
Vitek winked at Yuri. 'You see, she understands sacrifice.'
Tick.
'Maybe,' Yuri conceded. Certainly she understood leanness of affection. Also she knew how to catch crayfish in winter. That is to say, she was clever. She recognized the appalling shortage of age-appropriate men who were intact in the essential ways a man must be in order to start and maintain a family. Hey, he may be an idiot, but he wasn't a fool. Hers was a practical love forced from necessity and desperation. But, Yuri wondered as he took another drink, was that real love or merely pragmatism wearing an affectionate face? Yuri sat up in the bath and reached for his helmet.
'This is the only way, Spaceboy.' Vitek helped Yuri out of the bath, then pressed his forehead to Yuri's.
'I've racked my brains thinking it through. I even almost managed to have one of your kidneys harvested—for the greater good, of course—but there were certain equipment shortages to consider. So believe me when I say this war is the only way to realize your full potential.'
It may have been his imagination, but whereas the building once had five storeys, Yuri could now only count four. The unoccupied ground floor had disappeared entirely. Yuri tipped his head, recounted. Yes, it was gone. Sunk, he decided, under the weight of its many contradictions. And then there were the kids, bless them. Hunkered behind Vitek and looking long of tooth.
Yuri pulled free from Vitek's arm. 'I told you. I'm not going. I don't want to come home in a zinc coffin with a red star.'
Vitek paled. 'Listen, you stupid zhid. Who do you think you are? Who gives a shit what you want? I'm in up to my ass with Kochubey. You have to go. I'll kill you myself if you don't.'
Yuri smiled. A man condemned twice has nothing to lose. If he goes and fights, he will die. If he stays behind, he'll be killed. Should he escape imminent death, he will certainly die at some later date. Everyone does. Yuri straightened, utterly liberated by the existence of so much possibility. How free he felt! Inwardly he soared, though outwardly he was falling down down down under the pounding of Vitek's hard fists.
'For God's sake!'
Yuri lifted his head. It was Mircha calling out, Mircha still giving advice from his dark warren of mud, Mircha bleating willfully like a broken alarm clock. 'Be a man!'
Be a man. Isn't that what he wanted, all along? To know who he was and how to be? A man who knows the value of his own life. A man who will defend that life. His muscles remembered what his mind could not. Yuri pushed himself to his knees, pushed himself to his feet, the whole time keeping his back to Vitek, dear Vitek, who'd always been a slack-jaw mouth breather. One kick, a sloppy donkey kick, and Vitek went down. And that was the signal the kids had been waiting for. As Vitek fell, they bore down, tightening the ring of their circle. It was every man for himself, and Yuri—call him a coward and he would gladly agree—fled for the nearest bath.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
By late afternoon, the sun was a low-wattage bulb hung from a short string, sinking into a purple bank of clouds. Lukeria, Azade and Olga sat side by side on the waiting bench and gazed at the oversized pieces of luggage resting in Lukeria's claw-footed bath. There were four baths in the courtyard now, all four of them filled with suitcases, books, glass jars of pickled cabbage, and iron pots. Koza, never happier, stood by a tub and gnawed at the handles of Olga's ancient valise.
The apartment building had sunk, or perhaps the mud had risen. It was hard to say, for the heap was gone now, and with it, Mircha. Like the wooden figurehead jutting from the prow of a doomed vessel, he disappeared first by feet, then hips, and torso, and finally, the mud folded over his lone arm reaching for the sky. He was at last put to rest, but not altogether quiet, for Olga and Azade and even Lukeria could hear the soft burring of his snores.
Which in no way competed with Vitek's loud yelps. Good and Bad Boris had pinned Vitek against the lime tree. With deft and quick movements, Big Anna tied him fast to the trunk while the red-haired boy swabbed iodine circles on Vitek's abdomen. Where the boy found the iodine and how he knew precisely where the vital, harvestable organs were located, Azade could not even begin to guess.
The women listened to Vitek cajoling, bargaining with the children as the building lost another floor and their horizon gained another five or six metres.
'Maybe we should do something,' Olga suggested at last.
'For thirty years, I've smelled the future in his shit,' Azade said. 'They won't hurt him. At least not badly. They're having far too much fun tormenting him. Besides,' she said, exhaling. 'I am tired of helping a boy on whom all help is lost.' Azade's chin trembled. And then her shoulders caved.
Olga linked her arm through Azade's. 'There is some good in him. Somewhere.'
'If so, those kids will find it. Eventually,' Lukeria observed.
Azade wiped at her eyes with her handkerchief. 'Nobody knows sorrow but the mother of a son.'
Lukeria shook her head from side to side. 'At least you have your son. He is here. That is some comfort. What do I have?'
Olga brightened. 'Your suitcases. Your maps and railway schedules...'
'Nostalgia is a bitter taste in the mouth.' Lukeria waved her hand towards the mud. 'I pushed those suitcases into the hole.' Lukeria squinted at the chasm as if seeing it for the first time, as if she'd just realized the finality of what she'd done. A loose rumble grew in her chest, a phlegmatic sound that immediately gave way to a spate of coughing. With each cough her body curled another several centimetres. When she recovered her breath, her mouth was a flat line. 'I've felt autumn in the legs, winter in my blood, and now spring is in my lungs. I am ready for the next place.'
Olga nodded in agreement. 'None of us are getting any younger.'
'Which is not to say that I am unafraid,' Lukeria said.
'We are all afraid.' Azade scanned the horizon. When the end of the world comes, it will first burst at the seams. It will swallow what is no longer needed, leaving a landscape of water and mud, this much Azade knew. Sirens from an ambulance wailed from several street blocks away. In the newly opened horizon she spied a stand of birch she'd never before known existed. Beside the trees the old church of St Seraphim squatted in the mud. For many years the church had been used as a Komsomol meeting hall, and then, later, as a petting zoo. All that was visible now was the rounded dome, cracked like the shell of an enormous egg. The gold cross strung tight with guy wires on the dome still held, but whether it would make it through the night was anyone's guess. Somewhere to the north was the last standing Gulag tower and it, too, would sink to the mud and nobody would miss it.
Olga observed Yuri, still in the bath and half-heartedly casting and recasting in an attempt to snag a ladies' evening shoe. From the looks of the ferocious shank, she guessed it to be one of Zoya's. 'The worst has happened. It can only get better from here,' Olga said.
Lukeria's head wobbled over her knees. 'We live in a fallen world. As in collapsed. This world is a miserable place and it is only becoming more miserable.'
'The outward, visible world is miserable. I'll give you that,' Olga said. 'But there is an ocean of buoyancy in the unseen places of the human heart.'
Lukeria craned her head. 'What the hell are you talking about?'
'I am in love,' Olga stated.
'Olga Semyonovna!' Lukeria spluttered.
'I never smelled it on you—not even once!' Azade blinked rapidly.
'I myself just discovered it. Today, as a matter of fact.'
'This man, he's not rich,' Lukeria said.
'Heavens, no!' Olga laughed. 'But he is clever. He has managed to obtain an idiot card in the third degree for Yuri.' Olga withdrew the card from her bosom.
'That is no small thing,' Azade said, her emotions again roiling like water in a pot over the ring. Every joy carries a shadow of a former sorrow. Sure, she was glad for Olga, for Yuri, that was the joy; the shadow, her loud and angry Vitek, bound to the lime tree and not a bit wiser for it. She could boil rice in her own tears, for all her weeping, but it would d
o no good.
'What about you? What will you do?' Olga ventured.
Azade raised her gaze to the listing radio tower and studied it for a long moment. 'The latrine is gone, my husband, gone, my son,' Azade wagged her head. 'I think I will go to the mountains. To Mount Kazbek. I have always wanted to breathe that air.'
'Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn,' Olga said.
'That's very nice,' Azade said. 'Did you compose that just now?'
'No. The prophet did. Isaiah.'
'He's got some talent.'
Lukeria rested her head on her knees. 'What about work?'
Azade kept her gaze at the skyline. 'You may not have ever guessed, to look at my hands, but there was a time when I could really cook. Soups, in the main.'
'Soups!' Olga exclaimed.
Azade pointed her chin towards Olga. 'As a matter of fact, I have been meaning to ask you. For months now. About your soup—you know, the one you made for the wake.'
Olga lowered her head. 'A family recipe. I don't know why it burned.'
Azade nodded towards the building. 'I thought it was wonderful. I have never tasted such a soup.'
'It could have been a trouble with the heating ring, they are so temperamental in these buildings,' Lukeria offered.
The two women glanced at Lukeria and quickly looked away. It was as if those coughing fits had broken the woman's back, and her customary ill-will had been broken as well. Now they weren't quite sure how take her sudden and small gestures of goodness.
'And then it could be the recipe itself,' Olga said. 'After all, certain soups cannot suffer a change of continent. Not even a change of city. For instance, Gypsy salt is not the same as Jewish salt.'
Azade smiled. 'And a cabbage grown in the mountains tastes different from a cabbage grown in the flats.'
Olga nodded her head. 'Exactly! And the seasoning, you may as well know, comes from the cook's tears.'
'But if you cry too much or too often, the soup cannot bear it. This is why God sets a limit to one's sorrow, lest it become too bitter to serve to others,' Azade said.
'I have no idea what the two of you are talking about, but it's making me hungry,' Lukeria said.
Azade scoped the courtyard. Three baths, still there. One goat. Two pots. Several jars of cabbage.
As if reading her mind, Olga recited her ingredients list. 'You must throw everything in the pot and hold nothing back: shoelaces, potatoes, moss, boot blacking, vodka.'
'We don't have much,' Azade said. 'But we have those things.' Azade leaned forward and pulled at her boots. 'And we have plenty of spoons.'
***
Tanya took her time walking home from the train station. She would have to face Chumak, his starchy disappointment, his shiny forehead glowing pink, then burning red like the bulb of a thermometer. She practised different apologies, variations of the same theme, really. Nothing in this world was as sure and stable as anyone had once thought or hoped. She could say this. It would be true. Tanya surveyed the street. If all these wooden kiosks painted in the Byzantine colours of gold and cerulean blue and verdant greens of larch forests, if these hinged huts of colour and wax and lipstick and smoked herrings pounded flat as an onion skin could slide off the pavement into wide flats of a deep and bottomless black, then what made her think the museum wouldn't be halved, then quartered, then completely taken by the mud, their best exhibits gone? Even the bright blue and orange Aeroflot recruiting office was not immune to sudden shifts. As she walked past the headquarters, Tanya peered through the small windows. Where she would have expected to see Head Recruiter Aitmotova dusting glossy brochures with a handkerchief, Tanya saw instead that a man and a woman, both of them wearing blue tracksuits and new trainers, had taken over the office. Open Aeroflot application forms littered the floor and a few caught in the updraught swirled like bits of paper inside a glass globe. The man caught a piece of paper as it whirled by and he wiped his nose on it. A single display shelf held three open relief boxes full of individually wrapped sugar-iced fruit slab from the UK, a jar of red peppers bearing the label 'Good', a can of flake coffee stretched with powdered milk, and three rolls of Very Soft, the most highly sought-after toilet paper in all of Russia. The prices had been marked in black wax on a white placard and when she made out the prices of items, Tanya jumped back as if she'd been stung by a wasp. Only criminals could become successful business people. Tanya understood that ordinary people like her would never fare well in a world like this one.
Tanya pulled her scarf tighter around her head and walked even slower than before, her shoulders collapsed under the weight of her iron-clad dreams. And then, too, it was really important to mind where she stepped—the mud was just that aggressive. With each step it tugged at her boots and she had to fight, pulling and thrashing to shake free. Never in her memory of spring thaws had the ground been this greedy. She rounded the corner of her street where bulges of mud pushed over the kerbs and up against ground-floor windows. The stone archway had crumbled. In the courtyard the situation had rapidly deteriorated. Only the top floor of the building remained visible above the mudline. On the roof, which was so low now that she could see every passing change on the wet canvas of sky, the heating stack and TV tower leaned at an unnatural angle. It was hard to look at the building and not think of sinking disasters: the Titanic, the Komsomolets, the Karluk.
Adding to the devastation was her grandmother packed tight between Olga and Azade on the bench. When they saw her, Azade and Olga did their best to make room for her, wedging their bodies into Lukeria, whose gaze was fixed on the widening hole and the bright, hard country deep within.
Tanya perched her backside on the open space of bench and listened to Azade and Olga discussing vegetables—namely, the prowess of the parsnip over the turnip when boiled side by side in a pot. Four claw-footed baths anchored the corners of the courtyard. Into the one nearest the bench, the women had stowed all of their earthly belongings. The heap was gone entirely, as was the latrine. Zoya had vanished, along with her fleet of high heels. But Vitek remained, lashed tightly to the lime tree.
'Hey, Fatty!' Vitek called. 'Man cannot live on bread alone. For ten roubles I'll gladly explain what that means.'
Tanya studied Vitek. A splintered broom handle and bits of cardboard had been strategically stacked around his shoeless feet. Obviously he'd been thrashing for some time. Sweat and cheap hair dressing ran down the back of his neck and his hands were chafed where they were bound. Quite likely he'd never worked so hard at anything in his whole life. Not far from Vitek stood Good Boris, both his feet stuffed into one of Vitek's dress shoes. Bad Boris wore the other shoe. The twins stood side by side, jumping like pogo sticks. The boy with the hair the colour of a pollution sunset and the girl Anna kept their gazes on Vitek.
'You are tied to the tree,' Tanya observed at last. 'You are in no position to barter.'
Vitek smiled. His bronze skin had taken on a sharp brassy colour. She couldn't be sure whether it was due to the sudden shock of sun or something else more primal, like rage or fear. Vitek opened his mouth.
'Blessed are the poor in spirit. They shall inherit what is left of the earth. Blessed are the ignorant. What they can't know they won't miss. Blessed are...' Vitek yelped and whipped his head to the side. A chunk of concrete smashed against the trunk of the tree. And then came another rock, this time catching Vitek. An angry gash opened above his left eye.
Tanya felt her stomach fold and her face turn pale as a rusk.
'Well, excuse me, but a man will bleed,' Vitek said, maintaining that smile.
'This life,' Big Anna leveled her watery pink eyes on Vitek's, 'what's it for? Tell me the truth now.'
'Tell us what we want to know,' Gleb said, raising a plastic water bottle filled with rock and rusted metal. 'Or else.'
Vitek attempted a laugh. 'Why don't you go and blow up a skip or something?' Vitek pumped his shoulders and tried to work a hand free. 'Or how about this—I've got a pack of herbal cigarettes
in my coat pocket. Why don't we go and smoke ourselves silly? It'll be therapeutic.'
'Give us cognac,' Good Boris said, hopping a few metres closer to Vitek.
Bad Boris closed the gap with a single jump. 'Now,' he said. The twins kicked out of the shoes and circled the tree. Their teeth! Definitely longer and sharper now than last week. And was that foam in the corners of Big Anna's mouth?
'Kids.' Vitek smiled weakly and hooked his chin towards Tanya. 'They've got the entrepreneurial spirit. But they're amateurs. They're in way over their heads.' Vitek freed a hand. And not a moment too soon. Big Anna lobbed another chunk of concrete.
Vitek ducked and the chunk sailed past his head. 'Listen, you little glue-sniffing shits. I taught you everything you know.' And here Vitek yelped, a sound of genuine pain, for a whole fleet of smooth objects and edged, flat and round objects, forks and spoons, ladies' compact mirrors and men's bootjacks, rained down on him.
Tanya opened her umbrella and charged at Big Anna. 'Stop!' Tanya bellowed. And incredibly, the girl froze. Dropped the rock. Took a step backwards.
Big Anna looked at Tanya. Though her eyes were pink, smeared and bleary, there was something open, almost wholesome to them.
'The laws of prosperity permit the daughter to eat her mother,' Big Anna said. It was then that Tanya could see that she was wearing Zoya's most prized out-of-door high heels.
Just then Vitek worked his other hand loose. And it was as if some kind of spell had been broken or temporarily suspended, for the children didn't seem to notice him backing away from the tree and smiling as he disappeared beyond the crumbled archway. Instead, they dropped their arsenal of rocks and circled Tanya, closing her in the ring of their bodies. Behind Tanya the women kept at their soft talk of vegetables, forging some kind of cultural compromise of history and God as understood through their making and consuming of certain soups.