The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (9 page)

The dead never leave us. She knew that. It was a physical law. No, she never went to university, but she didn't need a PhD to understand the law of conservation of mass. A body never completely disappears; it only changes shape or constitution, reasserting itself elsewhere, boiling over, leaking at the edges. And the dead who remain keep themselves frightfully busy. Her
own father, for instance, walked backwards with his shoes unlaced, treading up and down these very stairs. He had to do this to reverse the indignities his body and soul had suffered while he had been living those last years in the apartment building and tending the Little Necessary, Azade's mother explained. Azade knew it to be true, for she heard her father's heavy tread on the stairs as he corrected the wrongs committed against him and adjusted the wrongs he himself may have committed. He had to walk backwards through every sorrow, every regret, every wound, in order to leave them properly. It took him seven years to do it, but finally, one afternoon in May when the trees along the wide prospects exhaled a blizzard of cotton, her mother flung open the windows so that, at last, her father, his nose finally straight again and pointing true as a needle on a compass, could fly away.

But with Mircha, one sniff told Azade that things were different. Whatever the rules of the afterlife she and her mother had worked out, they did not seem to apply to him. For there his body was, defrosting down there in the shadows of the courtyard, and yet the smell here in the corridor outside their door—colossal! Azade paused outside the door and checked the knots on her rope, for quick verification. Yes, the knots were all there. Her resolve galvanized, Azade leaned into the door.

'Milii! Sweetheart!' At once Mircha's voice assaulted her. Azade peered into the darkness of the room. There he was, in the corner of the room, sitting in that ridiculous claw-footed
bath, wearing a wool sock on his hand and smoking a Turkish cigarette. She had never seen her husband looking so jolly, so alive. So silly.

Azade held her broom aloft as if it were a weapon, or perhaps a talisman, and approached Mircha with caution. The dead, after all, were so unpredictable. But after a moment, her suspicion gave way to curiosity. 'Why did you do it?'

'What?' Mircha's smile loped from one side of his face to the other and she could see that he was drunk.

Azade rolled her eyes to the ceiling. 'Jump.'

Mircha sucked on his cigarette and exhaled a mouthful of rings. 'I was tired of this life and afraid to grow old while living it. I wanted to go with dignity. Not like some of those men shitting themselves to death in their own bed.'

'So then why did you come back?'

Mircha brightened. 'I feel a tremendous urge to express myself in ways I never had before.'

Azade squeezed the neck of her broom. 'Express yourself how?'

Mircha ground his cigarette on his stump then cleared his throat. 'Imagine if you will that I am like a famous prophet risen from the dead. I've come back to rewrite myself, to revise myself. To retell my story with vast scope and with miracle.'

'Is this out of some book you have been reading?'

'I feel this here, in my heart.' Mircha laid a hand over his chest. 'And what I feel I must share.'

'Why?'

'In the fight of cultural and historical ownership of memory one must be vigilant. It's a sacrifice, sure. But one I'm willing to make.'

'I don't understand.'

'I am helping each one of us to revise our personal and collective history. To revise our very lives, as it were,' Mircha said. 'It can be done! I am living proof. With the right attitude and a firm grasp of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, we can alter anything—especially our concept of the past.'

Azade hung her head. The situation was so much worse than even she had imagined. With the handle of her broom Azade lifted Mircha's trousers and carried them into the kitchen, where she dropped them into a pot. 'The more you talk, the worse it smells in here,' Azade mumbled.

Mircha smiled. 'A little vodka would be convivial. If you don't have any vodka, then apple brandy would be all right.'

Mircha's gaze roamed. 'I see you've rearranged things a bit since I died. Where are my long-play records?'

Azade poured lukewarm water into a teacup and handed the cup to him. 'Vitek snapped them in two over his knee. Also the children played games with them, and the goat ate the rest.'

'My war medals?'

'We sold them.'

'And my best suit? The one with the very fashionable pinstripes?'

'It caught fire, but that was an accident. I think.'

'I had no idea how much you hated me.' Mircha stretched
his hand toward Azade as if to touch her cheek, those scars along her jaw. 'I loved you in my own way, you know.' Mircha let his hand fall to his lap.

Azade rubbed her jaw, remembering how he'd fractured it twice in one year. Love hurt and nobody knew it better than Azade. Like the Devil on a holy day, Mircha's rage knew no bounds. And when he beat her, he acted as if it were his duty, as if he were doing her some kind of favour. As if violence were a necessary tool for acquiring wisdom.

And Azade had learned so much at his hands. It was hard to forget the lesson of a broken jaw or ribs. And never had she been so afraid of anyone as she'd been of Mircha. But now he was so different. Gone the familiar rage. Gone the railing anger. And this new Mircha was so foreign, so odd, she didn't know if she should feel even more frightened or relieved.

Azade backed away from the bath, the broom held out in front of her, just in case Mircha made a sudden move.

But Mircha merely broadened his smile. 'I know what you're thinking. You've given me over for hopeless. But good news. People can change.'

'Maybe. But you're not people, you're dead.' Azade stared into Mircha's eyes that were such a reluctant shade of blue they could pass for metal, and waited for the recognition of this reality to register with him. It was, after all, important for the dead to remember their condition. Otherwise they cultivated ideas, knocked on walls, played silly tricks. Wrote novels.
The dead, Azade knew, had to be dispatched. They had to go quietly to their graves and stay there, lest the earth, unable to stifle all their noise and movement, permanently reject them. And yet, Azade worried that this was precisely what was happening with her husband, who was even now lolling and reeking in their cracked claw-footed bath, singing songs he had learned in a workers' camp.

'My story,' Mircha called from the tub, 'has such potential. If told on the uphill climb of a mountain I would call it a story of Frisk and Wonderment. If told on the downhill trek I might simply call it Momentum. Imagine if you will a boy on his name day shooting guns in the air with his uncles. It's a joyous occasion, this day. The cabbage has been brought in and because this boy brought a mountainside of those buggers in by himself he's considered a man now. His family builds the fire and you know how a Lak fire in Dagestan burns brighter than any other.'

'I've heard, I've heard,' Azade mumbled.

'And they eat their watermelon double-salted the way it should be and live on the top of the mountain where the air is thin and the men are thinner and the wind mixes the days of summer with the days of winter. The peak of a mountain divides a man's shadow, with his past falling to one side and his future to the other.

'In winter the man falls in love with a girl who lives in shadow of the mountain. She nibbles his fingers. He gnaws on her ears. They drink wine from each other's mouths. She has
eyes the colour of celery and a voice like a broken road. She is clever as night and beautiful as day and knows how to plait her hair with donkey piss. She's a beauty and the man would give his life for her seven times over. She makes cheese from the milk of her goats and he sells flour, salt and water, things that are weighed and not counted. Are you still listening? Now we get to the good part. The wars the men wage are of the better sort. Everyone comes home a hero and in their absence, instead of cabbage, the hills yield long furrows of arms and legs of perfect proportion, just ripe for the picking.'

Azade grunted. Where the beginning, where the end to this man and his stories?

'You say you've come to tell a better story for each one of us. What is my story, then?' Azade gave Mircha's trousers a final stir in the pot.

Mircha's face fell into a jumble of furrows. 'It's harder for you. You have so much further to go. There's the matter of your family situation, which was somewhat respectable before the forced relocation. But now, of course, your position is so low, of such little consequence. And then, there's the fact of your womanhood. If you were a man, say, you'd have ever so much more potential to rise. It may be uncouth to say it, but it is the reality of revision. And finally, and I think this will be of no surprise to you, there's the matter of your hands. So shameful, really. Will you ever be able to rid yourself of the taint?' Mircha smiled in apology. 'It would be different, of course, if your hands did something of consequence, something that mattered.' Mircha slid into the bath and lost himself in another song.

And it was then that Azade understood what a monumental task lay before her. She understood what he needed. Though he couldn't possibly know it, he'd come back for her. He had returned, or merely remained, not for his healing but for hers. After all, the love of a good woman isn't enough for some men. What Mircha needed now was the back-side of her hand, a push from her broom. In short, she would have to prepare Mircha for his death—again—for clearly the earth, and no doubt heaven as well, could not receive him as he was.

For as long as he could remember, Yuri had always imagined that he was a fish.

Inside his mother's stomach he swam in salt water. And by some accident when he was born, God looked away for a moment. Perhaps to set aright a tilted star, perhaps to paint more speckles and spots on the Dolly Varden trout or stitch more whiskers onto the snout of the sturgeon. Something large or small, miraculous or mundane, and Yuri, who should have been an eel, a lamprey, a dace, was instead a mere boy, flailing and kicking about in his ordinary human skin which he'd never felt, not in all his twenty-one years, quite fit him.

Which is why he went to the rivers and canals whenever he could. To the man-made ponds and the natural. To brackish waters and sweet. Wherever there might be fish or the suggestion of fish. Even the memory of fish was enough for him. So when Azade leaned Mircha's rod against his mother's door the day after the wake, Yuri took it as a sign. Two minutes later, with a satchel stuffed with stale dinner buns, he wheeled his old bike through the courtyard and out to the street.

It wasn't perfect, this bike. It was actually two separate
rejects from the local bike factory, disassembled and recombined to make one working bike. But the parts didn't fit together precisely and somehow he'd reassembled the handlebars out of alignment with the frame. Now the bike tilted to the left and it took a furious effort, powerful strokes with the right leg, to compensate. And with each push from his legs the bike lamented, squeaking such sad complaints that Yuri began to think the bike was the voice of his very own soul, a voice that could only make sound or be heard when under the greatest of outward force.

Then, also, there was the ticking in his head. The sprockets, Zoya maintained, whenever he brought the matter of the incessant noise up with her. But he knew better. The sound was like that of a stuttering oven timer lodged at the base of his cerebellum, which was, come to think of it, not functioning very well and hadn't been, not for a long time. His head, he decided, was a cheap clock that didn't know its own ruin.

Yuri clapped his palm against an ear, as a swimmer forcing out water, then pushed on the pedals. It wouldn't be so bad, this ticking, if it weren't so loud. He had stuffed cotton wool in his ears. He'd fashioned plugs of soft wax. But only two things helped. The first: fishing.

Hardly a surprise. Even before he was called up into the army, before all that business in the south, fishing had been his passion. Fish, Mircha had once told him, formed a connection between the water and air, between our world and theirs. And Yuri preferred their world of water. For water, he had learned
long ago, was a far more forgiving medium than air. The water turned light viscous and noise unraveled in muted threads, as if from the edges of a dream. It was the same sensation he could achieve when he wore his father's souvenir helmet, which was the second course of self-therapy. The helmet was a replica, and not even a good replica, of the type of helmet made famous by the cosmonauts. A horizontal crack stretched from one end of the plastic visor to the other. It had no monetary value whatsoever, or certainly Yuri would have sold or traded it by now, but its sentimental value was unbounded as it was the one and only item that had once belonged to his father that Yuri still had.

As a boy he wore that helmet from the moment school let out in afternoons to the moment it began again in mornings. He even wore the helmet the day his father left them to go to the war. He and his mother, along with the entire city, had turned out to watch the motorized rifle unit leave in a line of transports for the Bakharevka base. And while others waved their paper flags, their eyes covered with handkerchiefs, Yuri, his eyes shielded by the plastic visor, trained his gaze on his father. He watched without blinking as they disappeared behind that thick veil of dust.

And he wore the helmet now. All this to return to a world of diminished illumination. A world discerned only through the cracked visor that weakened light to wavering bands. All this to woo water for its own sake. All this to return to a place where that extra inner padding of the helmet pressed against
his ears, and all noise dampened to the language of water and Yuri could be, once again, a fish.

Yuri leaned the bike against a frozen birch and stepped cautiously over the shore-fast crusts of river ice. The sound of gunshot thundered through the ice. Yuri dropped to his knees, held his breath, counted the ticking in his head. Not gunfire, just ice compressing. Yuri stretched flat over the ice and peered at the darkness below. They were his brothers and sisters huddled down there, whispering secrets about the rest of them and their clumsy paddling over their glass ceiling.
Tell your dream to a fish and he'll carry it for you.
This was another bit of advice that Mircha once gave him. Yuri cupped his hands to his eyes and squinted at the fish below, his mouth moving silently. His dream: if he couldn't be a fish, then he wanted to spend his every waking moment in the company of fish. He was with Mircha and Vitek ten years ago when he first said this. They'd been ice fishing, a first for Yuri, something he had hoped his father would show him when he returned from the war.