And it worked. People did come to see the exhibit, out of moribund curiosity, out of boredom, Tanya couldn't say. She herself, for a reason that defied human logic, took comfort looking at them in their glass jars. If she had not known they were meant to be human, she might have considered them beautiful for their excesses and lacks. Especially the boy who had no arms or legs. Having only a head and torso, he was unfinished, as if a seamstress had run out of stuffing and stitched shut his tapered torso. But the real boy, whose picture she'd memorized, had developed enough to grow a short tuft of red hair on his head and wore the sweetest smile on his face. Did his mother love him any less because he was monstrously malformed? Tanya wondered. Or how about the twins, turned toward each other, clasping one another with arms and legs, sharing the same heart and head? Sharing every secret and every thought. Possessing enough between them, what need did they have for this world that would only tear them apart? And yet, did their mother grieve their passing any less? Would not these women have cradled them to the breast and called them perfect? Tanya pressed her fingers to the glass. She knew this much: she would have called them perfect because they'd have been hers.
And if we, each, of us still children in our own ways, you missing your father and me having never known a mother, were to have a child it would be whole. Between us, we would be gloriously whole, perfectly completed, giving this child the things we never had or knew. You would teach him to fish and I would explain to her the theology of love unbounded. You could arrange the scales of the trout in intricate patterns that mirror the constellations and I would teach her the importance of sorting the greens when making sorrel soup.
Her pencil flying across the page, Tanya almost didn't hear gathering in the stairwell the trademark sounds of Head Administrator Chumak working himself up the steps: thump-slide, thump—slide, thump—slide. First his head appeared, brilliant beetroot red, then his thick torso, his legs, and at last, that leaden foot.
'Oh, Tanya! There you are!' Head Administrator Chumak reached the top of the landing. His face burned through the shades of magenta and then as it cooled through the pinks, his freckles slowly reasserted themselves.
'How are you doing with that application form?'
Tanya bit her lip. 'Some of the questions are giving me a little trouble. The one about handshakes, for instance.'
A smile blazed across Chumak's face. 'I love a good handshake, don't you?'
'That's just it. I don't know what a handshake is meant to signify.'
Silence. As thick as calf's liver.
'A handshake signals firm intention, goodwill, and trustworthiness in commercial transactions.'
'Oh.' Tanya rolled her gaze to the ceiling. 'Then I'd say the handshake is most definitely on the wane.'
'Don't write that. An application is an occasion for optimism at all costs,' Chumak said through that blazing smile, but his eyes were steely like flint. 'Any other, er, problems?'
An affectionate pass of her hands over her notebook, a hard swallow. Optimism.
Tanya patted her notebook affectionately and swallowed hard, thinking optimism. 'No. Almost finished.'
'Wonderful! Because there is so much at stake, for all of us.' Head Administrator Chumak eyed Tanya's notebook. 'And that's why I believe in you, Tatiana Nikolaevna Bobkov. I believe because you are a little like me—a person of great substance, placed under great pressure, and we all know what that produces!' Another savage grin galloped across Head Administrator Chumak's face.
'Ulcers?' Tanya ventured.
'Ha,' Head Administrator Chumak laughed—a single combustive bark. From his file, he withdrew a fax, a single thin sheet of paper that curled in the air, and began reading.
A delegation of the Americans of Russian Extraction for the Causes of Beautification will visit the museum that submits the best application and demonstrates the greatest need and greatest potential for development. Also the benefactors wish to observe the museum workers in their natural environment.
Tanya's stomach seized. 'You don't mean...?'
Head Administrator Chumak nodded gravely. 'Precisely. If they come, then they will want to spend a night with you and Zoya and Yuri—in your apartments.'
'But, sir. Our apartments are in no condition to be seen and certainly in no condition to live in.'
Head Director Chumak grimaced. 'Oh, I know. I faxed them most emphatically, but these people are quite determined. They wish to.' Head Administrator Chumak squinted fiercely at the fax: '"Experience first hand how living as you do, amidst the intersection of art and life, defines your artistic aesthetic."' Head Director Chumak winced. Apparently this is quite important in their selection process. So it will be up to you to make the apartments habitable.'
Head Administrator Chumak stretched his lips into another flinty smile, then turned and began his long thump and slide back down the stairs.
***
At the far end of the museum café Zoya and Yuri sat behind a small metal table. To get there Tanya had to skirt around a series of tables pushed together into a long line. A local chess club was practising for a simultaneous chess tournament. Five men brooded over five different chessboards while the other five men roamed from board to board. With each move of a chess piece, Tanya could hear their excited misery and terrible human longings amplified by the strange acoustics of the café: too old for the army, too young to retire, too beat up by life to find a job and keep it, too broke for a bottle.
Zoya blew clouds of cigarette smoke above Yuri's head. Yuri, a metronome out of kilter, tipped his head first to one side, then the other. His colour was off, more sallow than usual. When Yuri saw Tanya, he hopped up and pulled out a chair for her.
'Are you all right?' Tanya asked Yuri.
Zoya laid a hand across Yuri's forehead, a gesture borrowed from Olga. 'It's just that shell shock again. You know—he hears things.'
'Oh. The ticking,' Tanya suggested.
Yuri's shoulders lifted and fell as he sighed. 'Last night I saw Mircha on the roof.'
'But he's dead,' Tanya said.
'But not buried,' Yuri said.
Tanya bit her lip. 'I wonder what he wants.' Everybody knew the dead only lingered out of spite. Or sometimes a deeply held nostalgia for the tangible provoked their return. A beloved handbag. A pair of shoes.
'We stood together on the roof and he pointed down to our frozen dvor and the scrap heap and to a place beside the heap and that's when I saw something I had never noticed before.'
'What?'
'A black open gouge in the ground. A big dark opening.'
'How did it get there?' Tanya whispered.
'I don't know. But he told me that beneath this world was another world. A bright country of lost things.' Yuri swayed slightly in his chair.
'We live on top of a marsh. Try to be relevant.' Zoya tugged at her hair, which was dyed a brassy brick red.
Yuri's gaze locked on Tanya's. 'You believe me, don't you?'
Tanya blinked. 'Oh, absolutely.'
'Good. Because I need you to ask Daniilov for his shovel.'
'What's wrong with Azade's?'
'No good, Mircha says. It's not big enough.'
'Oh, for God's sake.' Zoya stood and ordered a coffee.
She was, Tanya decided, an impatient woman, lacking in common compassion. She could not suffer any deviation in the conversation. Which was to say, if Zoya were present, all conversation revolved solely around herself. And she was plagued by the artistic temperament. She abhorred all art except her own, found recognition of any other artist or any other unattached female morally reprehensible. Working these days, as she did, in the museum, if Zoya weren't taking a cigarette break or with Yuri, she was extremely miserable. Her only recourse was to dye her hair as often as possible in the most brilliant hues possible. When her hair, brittle and frayed, could not possibly sustain another dye job, she turned her artistic sensibilities upon family and co-workers.