'She's an old woman, you have to forgive her,' Tanya said finally.
'But not crazy.' Yuri kept his gaze trained on the darkness of the stairwell.
'No, not yet.'
'What, then?'
Tanya shrugged. 'You know how it is. She's just repeating the things she hears. She's traditional.' Another way of saying that Lukeria was conventional, which was to say not even if Tanya and Yuri were the last two humans on the planet would Lukeria approve of such a union.
Yuri squared his shoulders, planted a single kiss on Tanya's forehead. Goodbye, he was saying with that kiss, and then he retreated down the stairway for his mother's apartment.
'Don't let your face get narrow about it,' Lukeria said later, after Vespers prayers and three cigarettes. 'Pearls and swine—it's just something people say.' She thrust her chin forward, pulling her back so straight as to suggest not in all her days as a railway worker, as Tanya's surrogate mother, as a tenant in this crumbling apartment building, had Lukeria ever once adjusted to the idea that she might be wrong.
'Besides, it's bad luck to fall in love with a man who dreams with his shoes on,' she added, another reference to Yuri's Jewish blood, and a warning: he would wander, just wait and see, wandering being the Jewish blessing and curse.
'Enough,' Tanya had said, suddenly wearied of orthodoxy, of nationalism, of being raised so thoroughly Russian, and that had been the end of that. Not long after that Yuri had met Zoya at the museum. And whatever hopes Tanya had for a life with Yuri she kept contained within her cloud notebook.
CHAPTER SIX
Olga
Olga's boots punched through the hard crusts of snow as she crossed the square in front of the stout news bureau building. It looked precisely like every other building in a twenty-block radius: glum paperweights holding the pavements and old drifts of snow down.
For three decades only two building designs in all of the Soviet Union had been approved and could be manufactured: tall and ugly or squat and ugly. This lent, according to Zvi, whose work in the military had afforded some opportunity to travel, a mind-numbing sameness to the larger cities. But the buildings had to be made this way to achieve maximum symbolic potential—that is to say, according to old Soviet logic, the bigger the concrete building, the better. Mercifully, the Red Star building was of the latter design and so filled up less of the skyline.
An old man sat on a bench in the square and smoked with relish an invisible cigarette. Scraps of newspaper swirled like tufts of hair around his ankles. Though the sun was most definitely not shining, Olga shielded her eyes with a hand and squinted. This man looked uncannily similar to a war hero about whom she'd once written a composition when she was a schoolgirl. She felt very sorry for him now, his head bowed under the weight of his service cap cluttered with its many war medals. A new rule had been passed that no one was to throw scraps of bread or give money to the army pensioners any longer because so many of them had been gathering near the steps of the Red Star. Some had even been observed crapping behind the building and now the sanitation crews refused to pick up the turds.
'What's new?' the old man called out in military tones.
'Oh, nothing,' Olga replied mechanically
'And how is your nothing?'
Olga dug in her plastic bag and gave the man a boiled egg. As black as soot.' Olga turned for the building. One look at the man and Olga knew she did not have to tell him anything he didn't already know. It was all there swirling at his feet: how the old pensioners had lost their entire life savings in recent crashes, banking scams and hyperinflation. This Olga and Arkady had dubbed 'elastic economics'. But their job was to shield harsh realities in language so diffuse and vague that the veterans would never know how people like them had edited them out of history books. Her job was to spin the news with stretchy fibrous words of euphemism so that young people like her son, Yuri, and his live-in-girlfriend, Zoya, would never know just how very bleak their situations had really become. Her job was to do all this, and then dispense boiled eggs afterwards.
Olga paused at the lift, contemplated it for its metaphoric value. Then she thrust her head inside. Someone had pasted an advertisement—on the ceiling no less. Quite a gymnastic feat. WILL BUY VOUCHER FOR 10,000R. It was a joke, surely, for someone else had already scribbled beside it some handy advice: Take your voucher, and shove it up your ass. No, this doesn't mean you are BARKING MAD. It just means you're like the rest of us—screwed.
In the office of translation Arkady was already ensconced behind his side of the desk. This was what she liked about him: he was such a hard worker and so rarely did he ever complain. Sometimes he even offered helpful suggestions.
Olga forced her ample backside behind the desk. On the blotter lay a new work order awaiting translation.
A prestige apartment building in the Novyye Lyady district and a tank factory in the Industrialny district collapsed into a morass of mud in the early morning hours. In the Kirovsky district near the Upper Kama, two female pensioners disappeared into a sink hole while walking their dogs. Neither the bodies of the women nor their dogs have been recovered. City officials advise residents to avoid the out of doors at all costs. If one must walk about, then he or she should do so in a state of high alert. If one should find him or herself mud-bound by no means should he or she thrash about. 'it's best to let nature take its course,' advises Osip Gregorovich Shudno, a sink-hole expert with special training in loon-muck survival strategies and marsh water recovery. 'But if you can raise your hips into a horizontal position, then you have a 67% chance of remaining afloat until help arrives. Under no circumstances should one drink the water.'
'Is this a joke?' Olga looked slyly at Arkady. Since his wife left him all those years ago it had become Arkady's habit to tease Olga now and then—his way of flirting, she supposed. If he wasn't dangling exotic facts from far-flung corners of the map, then he sometimes placed on the desk news items Olga suspected came straight out of his inexhaustible imagination.
With his thumb Arkady pushed his glasses higher onto the bridge of his nose. His eyes swam behind his glasses. 'Not a joke, I'm afraid.' Arkady dug into his trousers and withdrew a handkerchief. 'Kaminsky asked me for a translation but I can't do it. Those old ladies. Well, not the ladies, but their dogs, I had grown very fond of.' Arkady honked into his hankie.
Olga reached across the desk and touched Arkady's sleeve. 'I am so very sorry,' she murmured. Arkady sniffed and pulled his chair closed to the window overlooking the production floor. Below them the huge wheels churned the paper rolls in a deafening roar. How could they stand it down there, pummelled by the noise of all those words, none of them quite accurate? Olga wondered. And just what was she to do with this latest bit? When the very earth beneath your feet could not be trusted, what then? Certainly she could not write what she knew to be true: that the ground they lived on had been completely overmined and undersupported. The last time she wrote up a translation a little too truthfully, she'd nearly given Arkady an ulcer. But it was quite by accident.
She'd meant to write up the first attack on Grozny as a sudden climatic shift in the far south. But knowing that her son, a boy in heart and mind, had until just recently himself been out there fighting in this war so few of them cared for and understood far less had incited her instinct for truth, and out it came—colossal and unexpected defeat of the Russian army due to incompetence.
Not a minute later, Chief Editor Kaminsky appeared in the doorway of their tiny office, his eyebrows lowered in a tight band above his nose. 'Very creative work, Olga Semyonovna,' he pronounced, his voice atonal and flat as if the words were produced by something mechanical lodged inside his throat. Olga had cringed. Chief Editor Kaminsky, as every other boss she'd ever worked for, only called a woman by her first name and patronymic when she'd fallen into his extreme disfavour. Olga realized then than too many more transparent flashes of creativity and she'd be given the boot.