'It gets worse,' Tanya said. 'Part of the selection process involves a visit from the Americans. They want to observe us. In our natural environment.'
'Oh.' Zoya's eyes glazed.
'Yes.' Tanya nodded her head balefully.
'They can't visit the apartments,' Yuri said. 'There's Mircha holding forth from the rooftop. And then there's that big hole.'
Zoya laid her palm on Yuri's forehead, as if to check for a fever. 'Well.' She stood and brushed invisible crumbs from her skirt. Yuri stood and helped her into her coat. 'I guess it all depends on you, then, Tanya.' Zoya took Yuri's hand in hers, and together they moved towards the mezzanine staircase.
Every man in the café, even those engaged in crucial endgame moves, looked up, fingers suspended in mid-air, while their eyes measured Zoya's legs, her backside. Tanya rolled her eyes heavenward. She took another swallow of air, of cloud. Willed herself towards a more buoyant outlook, and withdrew the application form from the envelope. A simple test and this time, she'd pass. Tanya reviewed the instructions on the cover page of the application form.
Please type all answers to questions on separate sheets of paper (20 lb rag-linen content) in 12 pt. font size, leaving one-inch margins on all sides. No answer should exceed one page in length. Photos and narrative are encouraged.
Twenty-pound rag weight? Tanya pinched the bridge of her nose between her forefinger and thumb. There was a paper shortage in all of Russia. Certain newspaper agencies were offering vouchers and even cash for used paper of any sort. People were even pulping their precious war-time letters and hardbound classics for mere kopeks. The Americans of Russian Extraction for the Causes of Beautification could not possibly know this, and Tanya decided it was prudent not to waste what little paper she did have explaining the shortage. Also, pencils were in short supply. But a Russian can produce a monkey out of a pipe cleaner. That is to say, if anything, she was resourceful. Tanya retrieved an eyebrow pencil from her purse, whittled it between her teeth to a point and considered the question: What is your favourite colour?
Random phrases from past exams, compositions she'd written for university classes she'd never completed immediately trotted to the surface of her memory and Tanya's eyebrow pencil scuttled over her notebook.
When one discusses colour and particularly when one assigns value to Colour one must first exer—cise great care in the naming and distinguishing of one colour from the other. Consider, for example, the vast difference between Ukrainian blue and Prussian blue. Ukrainian blue leans toward the hues of Siberian iris in early May, at skies cooling above the vast steppe, as say in the work of Isaak Levitan (see, for example, the
Vladimirka,
which is, unfortunately, not at the present moment on exhibit at the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan). Prussian blue, on the other hand, suggests a darker full-bodied blue that painters in France used to call Berlin blue and painters in Germany used to call Paris blue because it is an unpredictable and risky mixture of hues that tended to crack as it dried.
On the opposite side of the colour wheel, yellow holds an indispensable position in modern art. Levitan found he could not paint the wide open spaces of the steppe without it and had to cut his yellows with iodine. Some painters, like Cezanne, preferred brighter, thicker yellows such as the Indian Yellow made from the urine of dogs force-fed mango leaves. Without a doubt the most important colour to consider when discussing Russian landscape painting is white fake. Get it
into a cut on your finger and you might as well start digging your own grave. However, any Russian painter will tell you it is the queen of colours on the palette if you want to give density and texture to clouds in a Russian sky.
Utter nonsense, what she was writing. But it sounded arty. And that was what mattered. If there was one thing she had learned while garnering mediocre marks in university, it was how to answer exam questions without really answering them. With the greatest of ease she answered the other questions: Americans of all varieties they absolutely adored. If stranded on an island she would take anything of Chagall's. Always somebody floated free of their cluttered foreground, as if gravity were a force designed for everyone else the artist knew, but not these people he loved in his paintings. Never them.
Ridiculous. Tanya shook her head and stuffed the application form back into its folder.
Outside the museum Tanya walked past the city park, a popular place for newlyweds to stroll with their wedding party, the groom with a blue sash around his chest, the bride carrying a bouquet of silver balloons or carnations. Today a limousine sidled up to the kerb, a wedding doll tied to the grill. As Tanya approached, the limo shot from the kerb, spraying her with muddy ice water while the doll whistled through her painted plastic smile.
'Oh, up yours,' Tanya mumbled, her mood having turned on a tight hairpin. She was jealous and could admit it. Jealous and angry. Angry that anybody could experience marital bliss or any form of happiness when she couldn't. Angry with herself for being the child that she was, is. Angry that she had so completely fallen for Yuri and allowed herself to imagine that her loving Yuri was all it would take to provoke a similar response from him.
God had given him the artist's eye, but not a steady hand. That's why she was convinced they belonged together, he with his imagination, and she with her vocabulary of colour and cloud. Together they would paint the fish of the world. Which is what she told Yuri in the stairwell one evening. Sentimental, sure, but hers was a clumsy heart that too quickly betrayed her longings. He'd just come back from hospital and was shaky as ever. For one glorious week he allowed her to steady him. And Tanya didn't ask questions, so glad was she that he'd returned, safe and sound in body, if not in spirit. He had not yet met Zoya, and it was a glorious week of possibility, a world without other women or the knowledge of other women, a simple world where two people, friends in life, would become friends in love.
And it had almost happened! Yuri bent his head toward her and with deliberation backed her against the wall. And she thought, at last—it took fifteen years and another war—but at last he was looking beyond that cracked visor and finally seeing her as she was: the upstairs girl who had loved him all her life. And why had she loved him all her life? Because he was like her, missing a parent and feeling the lack. And she had thought that he without his father and she without her mother, leveled equally by their losses, would be perfectly matched. But then of course—of course—Lukeria, whose troubling bladder had always squeezed and pinched at the most inopportune times, chose that precise moment to use the latrine. The door flew open and Lukeria caught them in the near act of kissing. Tanya jumped as if she'd been stung with a jolt of electricity.
'Disgraceful!' Lukeria pronounced with all her former authority of a railway passport controller, accustomed to denying people on sight. Lukeria slammed the door closed. Then she flung open the door again. 'Casting your pearls before swine! You know he's not a real Russian.' Which was her grandmother's way of reminding them all that Jewish blood raced undiluted through his veins and rendered him, to her way of thinking, only slightly more valuable than an ox or a cow, an ox or a cow being more useful and possibly more intelligent.
'Well, he just completed a tour! Certainly he's patriotic for not being a real Russian,' Tanya said.
Lukeria's face flushed beetroot red with rage. 'Just shows how expendable some people really are,' she returned, pulling the door shut.
Tanya and Yuri stood there stunned by Lukeria's words, which were so open, so frank, and so anti-cosmopolitan—that is to say, so anti-Semitic. Never in her life had Tanya doubted that the hand of the Creator shaped the heavens. But having lived every day of her life with Lukeria, Tanya had her doubts about this earth, and specifically about certain people on it.