The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (35 page)

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.

'Look,' Tanya sighed. 'You're all smart kids. Each of you
has a bright future, er, somewhere doing something. Don't you want to go out and do some good—change the world?'

Gleb and the twins tipped their heads. Their eyes clouded, their pupils pinpointing in and out of focus.

'The past outstrips the future. The future consumes the past. All that is left is the present.' Big Anna had her hand on Tanya's umbrella. 'We don't want to change the world. We want to conquer it.'

Tanya shook her head, trying in vain to keep the words from finding her ears. These were not the sayings of a ten-year-old girl.

'All we have is what we can see. What we can take. And only what has been bought with blood has value,' the girl intoned. 'This is why suffering in the New Russia is the truest commodity.'

Tanya's throat tightened. That their suffering had no better, higher meaning—unthinkable. Unbearable. Even if it were true, she would not say it. Not to this child. 'No,' Tanya shook her head slowly now, with deliberation. 'That's not true.'

'Then prove to me otherwise.' Big Anna let go of the umbrella and rolled up her sleeves. The twins, snuffling and oozing from their eyes and ears, closed in on the flanks.

'I can't. But I know that you are wrong. You have to be wrong,' Tanya said. 'All I have is what I have lived, what I've seen. And of course, my colour and cloud observations,' her voice trailed.

From behind the toppled archway came a horse-like combi
nation of snorts and whinnies. Vitek. Laughing. At her. Tanya had never been so grateful for that laugh. Never so grateful for the way that noise instantly recast the spell.

Big Anna lifted her nose towards the arch. And then she was off, loping in long dog-like strides. Gleb followed, a piece of rusty cable dangling from his belt loops. Only Good and Bad Boris remained.

And Yuri, sitting upright in the far tub, woozy from an afternoon of a fisherman's sweet repose. He hooked a leg over the rim of the bath. Tanya helped him over, steadying him on a patch of solid ground.

Yuri lifted the visor. 'I had a dream,' he said. 'A bomb exploded in the ground. I was thrown clear. I sailed through the air. I flapped my arms and for a moment, I was flying. Until I fell. At which time, I died. The orderly, who looked a lot like Mircha, by the way, told me to take heart because nothing stays dead in Russia. And then I travelled from death to life, one windowpane of light at a time.'

'That was not a dream,' Tanya said. 'All those things really happened to you.' Tanya rested her forehead on his shoulder. Took in the smell of his dream-soaked shirt. 'You sailed through the air. In Grozny. For a brief time, you flew.'

'But I'm not dead.'

'No. You're very much alive.'

Yuri sighed. 'What a relief.' He turned his head first one way and then the other, taking in the open architecture of the courtyard.

'Where's Zoya?'

'Gone. I think.'

'Vitek?'

'Gone.' Tanya dusted the shoulders of his shirt with her fingers. A convoy of army trucks rumbled in the distance.

Yuri cranked his head sideways. He bent at the waist and slowly straightened.

'The ticking?' Tanya ventured.

Yuri grinned. 'Gone.'

Together they sat on the bench and watched Good and Bad Boris, paddling in the mud shallows. The boys scooped at the mud, flinging handfuls of it at each other. And they were laughing as only children do during pure play.

'Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?' Yuri slung his arm around Tanya's shoulders.

She thought of Big Anna, then. She wished that the girl could have seen what they were seeing now: the twins playing, the women sitting together on the bench, the sky unfurling in colours there were no names for, their building sinking. 'No,' Tanya said at last. Over the low and widening horizon they could see that other buildings were sinking, too. The old news building, the former KGB offices, the old pavilion of media and art, the prison, the All-Russia Museum—all of them, large concrete structures the ground could no longer shoulder. Strains of
Swan Lake
floated in the air.

'Look!' Good Boris elbowed Bad Boris.

'Listen!' Bad Boris hopped up and down.

The mud made a gulping sound as if it were drinking down the building, as though it had waited decades for this moment. Yuri and Tanya sat frozen, watching the slow spectacle. The metal heating vent snapped and the TV antenna, angled towards the horizon like the bowsprit of a ship, disappeared metre by metre. And after it went, the mud kept pulling with the same kind of steady patient force that would, some day years from now, push the bones of prophets, convicts and slaves to the surface. But for now there was only wet darkness breathing quietly. A darkness so deep that it could have been the same dark over which God hovered before there was anything. And from that deep came life. Light. Colour. Cloud and sky.

It could happen here too. Russia was just that kind of place. They could start over. In certain hills, Tanya knew, green shoots were already pushing through the soil. And the discovery that there could be something new, something better rising from the earth and that it started with them, with her and Yuri, was itself a cause for something like joy. And that she could even feel joy, that it could come crawling on knuckles and knees, come knocking this way was such an astonishment that Tanya had to surrender her analyzing, lest this feeling, so wholly unfamiliar and foreign, evaporate.

'What will happen next?' Yuri wondered.

Above them the news helicopters ploughed through the strange and shifting sky. With the horizon opened, Tanya imagined she could see cotton, the stuff of her dreams and
Yuri's, could see this visible realm breathing on the horizon, fainting, reviving, then fainting again.

Tanya closed her eyes. 'The inert elements will sublime. Certain stars will bow out. But the universe will keep expanding. Not long from now the sorrel will overtake spring. The wheat and mustard will volunteer along the verge. The fish will bite without even wondering why.'

Yuri pushed open his visor. 'That was very artistic.'

Tanya opened her eyes. 'Thank you.'

'Don't you want to write some of that down?'

'No.' Tanya breathed.

'What then?'

Tanya spread her fingers across the yoke of Yuri's shirt. 'Take off that ridiculous helmet.'

Yuri removed the helmet.

'Now,' Tanya leaned closer. 'Kiss me.'

Endless gratitude to Philip Gwyn Jones, who brought this book into the world and never once doubted. Thanks to Julie Barer and Caspian Dennis for creating safe passage, and special thanks to Willing Davidson for his keen eye and kind heart. Deepest thanks to Jenna Johnson for making the impossible possible.

Grateful thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Oregon Arts Commission, and Literary Arts, Inc., for awards that supported the writing of these stories.

My enduring thanks to the Luftmenschen for their collective wisdom, and to the Chrysostom Society.

Thanks to my family for their support, patience, and many prayers. Thanks also to Louise T. Reynolds.

Special thanks to Al and Carolyn Akimoff, Nathan and Sheree Johnson, Andrei Zoryn, Dale Tubbs, and Lana Serotsin for help with vital research.