Olga bobbed her head meekly as Chief Editor Kaminsky backed out of the office and into the corridor. 'Oh, the tyranny of rock-solid certainties,' he mumbled. 'Oh, help.'
With a trembling hand Arkady set another cup of tea at her elbow. 'I think that went over really well,' Arkady whispered. Together they sat in silence watching the clock. Four fifty-nine. They studied the slow sweep of the second hand and waited for the minute hand to move. Five times the second hand swept the face of the clock before the minute hand finally moved.
Arkady jumped from his seat and bowed gallantly. 'I absolutely applaud and salute your bravery. You are a real woman, Olga Semyonovna. A gem in the rough. A diamond amongst the turds.' Arkady reached for her hand and kissed it.
Only then did Olga notice that her wedding ring had been lost in the tubes.
***
Outside, the smell of old snow and diesel fumes settled in her mouth. Every swallow brought the taste of rusty coins and grit. It was sad to think what her life had become: churning out sludge, trying in vain to make bad news more palatable. It was hard to keep at it without succumbing to complete self-loathing. Two things sustained her: Olga's fragile hope that there was a heaven for translated words. That somewhere every edited thought and sentiment, every bit of raw truth, was catalogued and preserved, kept safe from the meddling hands of humans. And the second thing: her Yuri.
Miraculously he'd been returned to her from Grozny, unharmed, catapulted clear from the only tank in the column that did not explode. How lucky she was—she did not have to travel hundreds of miles to the train station in Mozdok, where the bodies of Russian soldiers were packed in open railway carriages. But her relief was surprisingly short-lived. What with all these reports coming in over the teletype, who knew what would happen to her boy now? If God would just smile in her direction. If she could be a little more clever, could work a little harder, longer, she might think of a way to save her Yuri, for it was becoming clearer to her each day that Yuri was incapable of saving himself. He would always need a mother, always a woman to look after him, a mother and a wife. If she were very lucky, Yuri would marry a woman who would be both.
In the square a gathering of Red-Browns, hardliners and reactionary communists, young unemployed punks, and old men waved paper flags. Just the type who'd vote for a man like Zhirinovsky, a Jew-hating loudmouth who couldn't wait to orchestrate another world war.
A man wearing a leather jacket with the slogan of a rock band on the back side held up a bullhorn. 'And who will clean up the cities and countryside? Who will settle once and for all the question of foreigners?'
'Zhirinovsky!' the old men and the young men cried.
'And who will erect giant fans and blow all the toxic fumes and pollution from our great country into the pathetic Baltic states?'
'Zhirinovsky!'
Olga ducked her head and concentrated on her feet. Some days the snow crunching beneath her boots and the blast of cold air were the only things that made any sense to her. She passed beneath the stone archway and entered the courtyard. Yuri and Vitek stood next to the heap and sawed at a fish with a butter knife.
'What's the news?' Vitek pointed his nose in her direction.
Olga snorted. 'More than you can bear.' She trained her eyes on the snow and kept charging for the open stairwell, and pretended she could not hear the nonsense spewing out of Vitek's mouth.
'Because, you see, Yuri, you are making no money at the museum. But the Russian army, they pay brilliantly for people like you. Even a child can do the sums.'
'I don't know.' Yuri's voice followed her up the stairs.
'Listen, boy-o. I can't do all the thinking around here. I am whacked as it is, bottling air and selling it as medicinal oxygen. Just the other day I had to beat up an old man who forgot to pay me rent for the privilege of begging on our street. I mean, how much can one person do?'
Olga kicked off her boots and let herself into the apartment. She smelled Zoya before she saw her, the girl's laundry boiled and bubbled in a pot on the stove. And then her voice, plaintive and sharp.
'All the best people have toaster ovens these days,' Zoya said, the trumpet of the phone held tight to her ear.
Olga let her keys fall to the kitchen table with a clatter, but it was no use. Once Zoya got onto the subject of Things She Wanted, it was nearly impossible to derail her. Aiding and abetting the girl's folly was a western magazine, glossy and slick with advertisements for things they could never afford. Where Zoya got the money for the magazine, Olga could not even fathom, though she suspected the Korean-owned kiosk at the end of the street might be to blame for the magazine.
'You know,' Zoya dropped her voice to a mumble. 'If I were to get pregnant, then we'd qualify for a better apartment. Maybe even one with a balcony. What a position of status we would occupy then. And, of course, I would be so much happier if I could hang my laundry outside with a view of more sophisticated trash.'
The smell of the kitchen, the sounds issuing from Zoya's mouth, it was all too much for Olga to bear. She spun on her heels and headed for the stairs, where it was a short climb up the metal ladder that opened onto the roof. The smell might not be much better out of doors than in, but at least she could have the illusion of privacy.
She lit a cigarette. She pulled hard and exhaled a long jet of smoke. By the end of the day, thinking of her responsibilities to the dead wore her out. And more absurdity: she actually envied the women who'd lost their husbands in the war and had the red star on a cupboard shelf to prove it. Better to know what happened than to be stranded amid the rigours of the imagination. Because as long as Olga didn't have Zvi's body, as long as his name didn't appear on any list, she both hoped and despaired. And because hope is stupid and stubborn, Olga couldn't help but conjure him out of the nighttime darkness in the apartment; and by day her eyes couldn't help but parse him from a city of eyebrows, ears and noses.
She blew another cloud of smoke.
'I beg your pardon most sincerely,' a man's voice called from behind the heating stack.
Olga dropped her cigarette. 'Zvi?'
The man coughed politely. 'Not quite.' The man stepped forward and Olga could see that it was not a man, but Mircha. The lights of the TV tower flickered behind his body, which had shape but no substance. She knew she should have found the fact that Mircha was there on the rooftop surprising, or at the very least strange, but strangely, she did not. Nothing—not the purely disastrous, nor the monstrous, nor evidence of the supernatural seemed to move her any more. She might have included the miraculous on this list but it had been such a long time since God had sent a true miracle that she was no longer sure she'd recognize one if she saw it. Certainly what she observed winking at her now was no miracle.
Olga sniffed. 'You have acquired a strange odour.'
Mircha cupped a hand to his ear. 'What's that?'
'You stink.'
Mircha hiked his nose into the air and breathed mightily.
'Why don't you settle down now and go away quietly? We gave you a good wake.'
'I can't go away. These thoughts ... these ideas ... they torment me.'
'What thoughts? What ideas?'
Mircha withdrew a faded piece of paper from his pocket, pinched a corner and slowly whipped it open with a flourish as a maître d' presented a fine linen napkin, though Olga could see twilight through the creases. 'I am seeing things so much more clearly now that I'm dead. The mysteries—why we suffer, what use sorrow is and the causes of hatred—I see, now that I am dead, how each of us should live this life. You, dear lady, for instance. You are only living half a life.'