The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (8 page)

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 turned 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.

Azade tried for years to figure the alchemy. Maybe it was because of his missing arm. Maybe because he hated his work at the factory. Maybe because there was not enough beer or vodka to make the world beautiful enough. It was so hard to say with Mircha where all the rage came from. All she could attest to was how little it took to incite his fury: a shift in the light, the noise of a bulldozer nuzzling a pile of rubble, the flies buzzing at the window, Vitek mumbling over the chessboard. Azade remembered most of the beatings, but it was with shame she recalled her own cowardice, her complicity. Once she busied herself at the stove simply to steer clear of Mircha, leaving Vitek, lost in thought over a game of chess, to fend for himself. Mircha had pounded his fist on the cardboard box that held the playing board. Up went the chessmen and up went Mircha's fist, catching Vitek on the ear, causing him to fall over and without so much as a whimper curl into the foetal position in preparation for what was coming next. Azade had dragged the kettle over the ring so as to disguise the noise of Mircha punching Vitek with an enthusiasm that went beyond the requirements of punishment meted for purely instructive purposes.

Oh, he liked to hit the boy, kept on hitting him even after he promised Azade he'd stopped. Azade knew it, though Mircha and even Vitek pretended otherwise, violence having forged a secret alliance between them.

But she did manage her quiet revenges. With sour cream a day or two past being bad, with reduced meat from the street market, shiny at the edges where it had started to turn. With an inner guilty joy, Azade would smile with her split lips and Vitek's swollen eyes would shine as they watched Mircha hop from the divan and race for the commode, which in those days still worked. She can remember Mircha gripping the rim of the toilet—'
Waaaaah! Hummmmm!
'—and emptying the contents of his stomach with such a high degree of unswerving perseverance that sometimes Azade almost felt sorry for Mircha.

'Sweetheart,' Mircha would call from the toilet. 'Some water or a snort of vodka. I beg you!' And by the next morning Mircha, broken in body, would turn gentle, so large in his promises, so expansive in his remorse, that Azade could extract almost anything—a bottle of Russian Forest perfume, the alcoholic content of which she knew made a handy supplement should the vodka fail; a trip to the dentist to replace a broken tooth; even the assurance that the beatings would stop.

Azade turned her gaze to the kids. They were almost playing, mock-punching one another, leaping from the heap. The red-haired boy, Gleb, skirled around Vitek, then reached for Vitek's vodka. Vitek pushed the boy to the ground and pinned him with his knee, then brought back his fist. 'Don't!' Azade shouted.

Vitek stood, straightened his leather jacket, smiled, and ran his tongue over his chipped front tooth. With his thumb and
forefinger he made a gun, pointed it at her, cocked his thumb and fired.

Azade slumped against the latrine. She had ruined him. She saw that now. She'd indulged him in the strange way mothers, against their better instincts, sometimes do. With a lopsided attentiveness, she had tried to make up for her failures and shortcomings. After Mircha beat the boy, Azade brooded and hovered with aspirins and ice, was careful to keep Vitek out of Mircha's sight for a few days. But she'd not stopped Mircha and told herself it was out of love for her husband, when really it was cowardice. Worse: to make up for Mircha's harsh treatment, she'd spared her son necessary corrections. He'd always been a cheat, a bully, and even a liar. But she'd not punished him. And now he was a grown man, still behaving shamefully. And this was her fault. This was how love, or rather the lie of love, had made her, a well-intentioned mother, raise a perfect monster. A perfectly lovable, fearsome monster.

Koza, her goat, hiked his snout in the air and bleated mournfully. Azade pointed her nose in the same direction. With her true and precise olfactory powers, Azade detected a sharp-edged malevolent odour unlike those that ordinarily swelled out of the latrine. That she could smell anything at all in this cold, which had a way of crimping smell to tight radii, was a testament to the largesse of the odour.

In Mircha's boots, Azade walked the perimeter of the stink. She scattered lime in a rough concentric circle. She counted the neat little piles of human excrement the kids had left. Their
droppings were too tidy, too frozen to be responsible for this newer, more aggressive stench. Azade sniffed at the heap, but frost had trapped all the smells of rotting peelings deep inside its throbbing heart. Azade shuffled to the back side of the heap and that's when she saw it: a dark gash in the ground. How it got there and how she could not have noticed it before Azade could not fathom. Azade dropped to her knees, lowered her nose to the trembling gash and took a deep and substantial whiff. Nothing. Just the smell of wet mud, which, if anything, held a round organic scent of soft ooze. Azade straightened and headed for the bank of snow that contained her husband. Yes. Absolutely this was the source of the stink and it was phenomenal. Azade sprayed her lemon-scented fumigant around the bank of snow. But it was as if the odour doubled in strength as if it were swelling with outrage, as if it were indignant that someone as low as she might try to combat it. Azade narrowed her eyes. With her broom she swept at the top layers of snow. It was then that she saw Mircha's boots were unlaced and on backward—not at all the way they had left him. Azade tightened her grip on her broom and headed for the stairs, with each step a chill climbing the rungs of her spine.