The wooden sticks having been shaved and glued to cardboard, Tanya then draped scraps of cloth over the sticks. Over all of this she then slathered a gooey layer of primer: a mixture of glue and powdered crushed chalk. OK, not glue, but these eggs and chalk. Depending on whether or not the upper floor had heat that day, it might take two, maybe three hours for this binding mixture to dry. During this time Tanya tried to make herself useful, in accordance with her theology of love. After all, Daniilov, who so often climbed the cork and suffered the dizzying effects afterwards, needed her help. For this reason Tanya cleaned the glass surrounds of the Kuntskamera exhibit and the paltry geology exhibit. She would have skipped the toilets, but nature urged and while she was there, her conscience pinched. Before she knew what she was doing, she was bent over, scrubbing with the brushes, spraying with the sanitizers, aware that if she didn't do it, quite possibly no one else would or could.
When three hours, maybe four, had passed, when the chalk and glue had dried, then Tanya could draw a design incised on the surface with a penknife. Once she had been so bold as to mention in passing to Father Vyacheslav that she might like to learn to paint icons for the church some day. He had assumed a look of umbrage and wagged a finger in the air. Such a stuffy gesture for a man who hadn't quite outgrown the pimples on his face. 'One does not paint icons,' he said. 'One writes an icon. It is an inspired expression affording a glimpse into heaven.' Never was she more aware of this than now, as the knife quavered in her hand. Tanya pulled a sharp breath through her nose, held it. She studied the face of the Mother of God. Then she exhaled, slow and steadily, and let the long lines of her serene sorrow guide her hand.
There. A woman had emerged before her. Then the child. They were not perfect, but they did not have to be. They only had to represent—however crudely—the human form, a receptacle for the God story that was a light so lovely the viewer would gaze in wonder, longing to learn the source of it.
From out of the box Tanya withdrew the rest of her supplies. This was what she came for, for this part of the story She spread the contents of the box on the floor and blew on her hands. If God is light, then God is colour. This much she had gathered from the Baptist Bible and what she remembered from that lone general chemistry course. Red she loved. In particular, Siberian red, a lead chromate that can be made to dance the scales of colour from lemon yellow to chrome orange to a disturbing blood hue. Also she was fond of oxide viridian, so beloved by Cézanne. So glad she was to see something like these colours in Zoya's arsenal of industrial make-up. And blue. Tanya sighed. One musn't ever rush blue. Certainly one musn't rush blue eye-shadow. Here's the thing: if the world were perfect, if she had money and the shops had supplies, she would buy tempera paints, powdered colours mixed with egg yolk and beer. But the economy being what it was, a mysterious game of constant disappointments, Tanya had learned how to make do with what was available: Zoya's nail varnishes and make-up, Lukeria's tea, shoe polish, chewing gum of assorted colours and flavours, and the occasional beer borrowed for the cause from Daniilov's private stash.
Tanya knelt on the floor and surveyed her landscape of materials. Egg, fork, bowl. She cracked the eggs into the bowl and whisked with vigour. What few people knew was how great a binder egg really was. Egg and beer together would glue the colour fast to the cloth strips. At least, this is what she had read in a pamphlet explaining how the old fathers made icons out in the woods. But this pamphlet was written in Old Slavonic. Quite possibly she didn't understand the recipe fully. But this was the Russian way: substituting at all times one thing for another and calling it good, very good, or at least commendable.
Consider colour, for instance. Tanya mashed the chalk into separate piles. A vegetable broth bouillon cube smashed under her fist into one pile made an earthy brown. The turquoise green oval and boot blacking crushed in the next chalk pile made for a brilliant iridescent blue. With cosmetic brushes she mixed the egg mixtures and chalks, then applied the colours to her canvas. To the Mother of God she gave a brilliant blue veil, the symbol of humility, doleful brown eyes, and pale skin. Ditto for the child, except instead of a veil she left a blank space for a gold nimbus. This required gold foil. Fortunately, Tanya came prepared: inside her coat pocket she kept a candy bar for emergency artistic purposes. Tanya unwrapped the candy bar, carefully flattened the foil, and with the penknife cut a snood of gold to fit around the baby Jesus' head.
The last step, the very last thing, was to seal and fix the colour and the foil with a quick shot of hair spray, which would give the icon the trademark high shine glossy effect commonly associated with lacquered antiquities. Tanya propped the cardboard against a chair leg and sprayed in slow arcs. That done, she rested on her heels, the dreambook open across her lap, and munched the chocolate bar thoughtfully:
Gold was mustard gone fallow in the long fields. Gold was the falling notes of the bells from the church. Gold the sound carried over the river, troubling the water so that things long forgotten at the depths swilled up briefly only to be pulled back under. Gold the flecks in the Colour of your eyes. The distance of many miles. Where are you now? I ask. What are you remembering? You can tell me. What you say is like a whisper inside a church, it is between us, neVer to be repeated.' Bells you said. A call to prayer. In Grozny. Where there are good Russians and bad. And wolves and whistles. And ticking.
And then disaster. The blue of the veil weeping. The eye-shadow and beer and glue and flour mixture sliding, sliding. Falling. The flour, egg, beer, cosmetic mixture in all its bright bubbly glory was a blue-green smear and the Mother of God looked like an absinthe-stained impressionistic experiment. The Christ child resembled a sickly watermelon in her arms.
Tanya's eyes burned. Always this was what came of her attempts to think in hues and gradations of saturation; this was what happened when she tried to knuckle an understanding of her own life as it ticked from shade to hue. This was what came of her attempt to depict love in any form, even if it was from stuff as low and humble as wet coloured flour smeared on ice-cream sticks.
***
Tanya trudged home, pulling the shovel behind her over the snow. From across the Kama a high series of yodels rose in the darkness. People believed these were the sounds of wild dogs crying for their human mothers. The old story said that wild dogs could be tamed and turned back to their child selves again if only their mothers would cry out their human names. It was a good story that bore repeating. In fact she had heard it many times carried up through the heating pipes of their building, and with each recitation it became that much more true.
In front of the apartments the children lobbed ice chunks at each other and scaled the snow-covered heap with angry shrieks. With her broad frame Tanya knew she was an irresistible target. If that gaping hole existed as Yuri said it did, skirting the heap and taking cover inside the latrine was out of the question. Tanya forged toward the stairwell, keeping a close eye on the oldest girl, who gripped the neck of an empty bottle. The girl, Tanya noted, never blinked and Tanya found this unnerving. It suggested she understood far more than she should at that age. And then there were the things the children said and how they said them, each child picking up where the other left off:
'Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,' a tiny voice sang out from the stairwell.