Olga pushed aside the report about the sink hole and reached instead for a work-on-the-left item from the wire basket. This time she withdrew a cocktail menu for an American-style hamburger restaurant. The names of the drinks sent her into an immediate state of flummox. Sex on the Beach. Olga glanced at the Topic Guide. Yes, it was a behemoth. But as comprehensive as the Guide was, conspicuous gaps had yet to be filled. Because even though glasnost had come and gone, certain things—sex, for instance—were not to be discussed, not even in dictionaries, those safeguards of thought and propriety. Sure you could find colourful graffiti addressing that topic along the walls of every metro station and on any fence. But a word that could be printed, well, that was another matter. The Russian language was great. Greatly expansive. Even so, she could not think of a single decent word, noun or verb, to describe love-making. She considered—briefly—'Passion on the Sand'. But the word for passion was also the same word for horror and terror, and it didn't seem right to Olga to add to the trauma most women she knew already associated with sex.
The next item on the menu was something called 'Screaming Orgasm', a concoction that featured two forms of alcohol, a juice and fizzy water. An elaborate drink, it sounded like an animal, or perhaps a bodily ailment people in the West suffered from. Olga had heard of this condition—Lyuba in fact-checking claimed to have suffered from it from time to time. But Olga found it altogether suspicious. The deepest physical response one could feel during the act of love was perhaps a great swelling of the heart, a stirring of feeling which one could attribute to passion or to the use of too much cooking grease in one's dinner. All this was to say that Olga had never experienced orgasm and if any woman she knew, except for Lyuba, ever had, certainly they were keeping very quiet about it.
Olga glanced at Arkady, who was at that very moment picking his teeth with the nib of his pencil. They were very good friends, she and Arkady. But he was a man, nonetheless, and asking him for help in this matter was absolutely unthinkable. Also, when Arakdy picked his teeth with his pencil, it meant he was thinking of his most prized possession: a large lump of petrified wood that had been in his family for several generations. If Arkady were ever to sell this wood, he would be a very rich man indeed. At least, that is what Arkady had told Olga about the rare specimen, which he kept wrapped in damp towels in a coat closet.
In desperation, Olga slid out from behind the desk and wandered to the not-so-remote place—that is to say, the toilets, the place where she did all her best work. In the twenty years she'd been at the Red Star she'd learned that if she needed to outsource for alternative definitions, her best bet was to park her broad backside on a commode. Because everyone knew that if something were spoken at the toilets, then most certainly it was true.
Absurdity no. 5
The toilets...
...stretched the limits of olfactory tolerance. But, sadly, it was only there, amid the open unapologetic odour of human waste, that Olga could conduct candid discussion, as few women besides herself and Vera could endure the closed quarters with unambitious ventilation for more than thirty seconds or so. Olga pinched her nose with one hand and pushed open the door to the women's toilets with the other. The searing at the back of her throat, this she ignored as she lowered her head and charged for the reprieve of a cracked window, where Vera stood, a mobile phone jammed against her ear, and a cigarette in her hand—smoking being the only way they knew to counter the virulence of a building plagued with desultory plumbing.
Vera was lucky enough to have natural platinum blonde hair, the colour almost every Russian woman dreams of having. And so why Vera insisted on dyeing it dull black, Olga could not figure. Even worse, Vera tended to let the roots grow out so that with her blue-black eye make-up, she really did resemble a skunk. And this observation carried zero connotation of moral judgement. Because with the exception of Arkady, Olga considered Vera her one and only true friend.
Vera tipped her head and switched her phone from one ear to the other. 'Of course it's true. The birth rate has halved in the last ten years and the mortality rates are soaring. Just don't ask for the numbers—it's too depressing.' Vera slid the phone into her purse and lit a cigarette for Olga. Vera had started as junior fact-checker and over the years moved up the ranks, as evidenced by the blaring crimson rings around her ears—the result of the pressure of a phone constantly applied to one side of her head or the other. This was Vera's official explanation, though Olga wondered if her friend's ears hadn't been permanently stained from what she had to listen to. Then, too, Vera had a penchant for collecting naughty jokes and proverbs and altering them so that they tipped from the naughty to the downright obscene. It was the only way that Vera, assaulted by raw data day after day, could maintain her fragile hold on sanity.
Olga smoked her cigarette down to her fingers, then hiked up her skirt and sat cautiously on the rim of the commode. Here, as in all the stalls, the caretaker had exercised his sense of humour. It was rumoured that he had once worked as a copy-editor but had been demoted, though Olga could not see why. FELLOW SYNTACTIC ENGINEERS: PLEASE FLUSH YOUR DANGLING MODIFIERS, he had written on a placard taped above the place where they used to have real toilet paper. ATTENTION OFFICE STAFF: REGARDLESS OF THE QUALITY OF THE WORK PUT FORTH OR THE EFFORT IT REQUIRED—FLUSH!IF RESULTS EXCEED YOUR HIGHEST EXPECTATIONS, PLEASE USE THE BRUSH.
'I'm so stuck,' Olga said. 'I need some of your valuable directive.'
'You want the plunger or some of my vodka?'
'No. Seriously. I need some advice. How would you translate "screaming orgasm" from English to Russian?'
Vera contemplated the lazy ceiling fan. 'Did you know that alcohol has rendered the typical Russian male unable to perform in such a way that would provoke orgasm on the part of the female participant?'
Olga squeezed her eyes closed as she searched her memory for any such recollections of Zvi. But she could not remember Zvi, at least not in that way.
'It's true.' Vera blew a cloud of smoke into the air. 'The average tryst between a Russian man and woman lasts only eleven minutes. Compare that with the Americans, who clock in at eighteen minutes, and the Italians, who average twenty-one.'
Olga knew that as a fact-checker, Vera was in a unique position to verify such claims. Also, Vera had worn out four husbands trying to find one that would satisfy her. But they'd all been drinkers and Vera could not contain her bitterness on the matter.
'Sergei is practically useless. Last night—nine minutes and he was done! And what does he do with himself after? Nothing. He lays about whining, Sergei does. He won't work. He thinks about working. He imagines what work might feel like. This tires him out. Then he drinks himself into a blind stupor. He says it makes him happy. Then I tell him what I know: as long as a bottle of vodka costs less than a kilo of apples and bread is more expensive than beer, he will die of this happiness. You are so lucky, Olya. You married a real muzhik.'
Olga shifted on the commode. Sometimes it was painful to sit and listen to Vera. The mildly dissatisfied people she knew rarely recognized how burdensome their conversation was, how discussing their problems only increased the heartache of those who had to listen and so revisit again and again their own loss. And the only thing worse than mildly dissatisfied people were happy people. With all sincerity Olga thanked God that at the present time she did not know anyone who was overly happy, or even slightly happy, and certainly she did not know anyone who was happily in love.