Vitek gazed at the windows of the third floor where Yuri and Zoya were still trysting and where Olga was, presumably, sleeping through it. 'Ah, love,' Vitek said with an air of wistfulness.
'Yes.' Tanya ground her molars. 'The walls are thin.'
Vitek smiled. 'The windows, too. Incidentally, I accidentally overheard you talking about that grant thing.'
Tanya pulled at the neck of her sweater. 'That's to remain a secret.'
Vitek shrugged and smiled, pointed to the fortochka. 'Nothing is a secret. Not here.' Though he was spectacularly drunk, his words still maintained a husk of logic. 'Anyway, it occurred to me that you—that is, you museum people, which includes but is not limited to yourself, Zoya, and Yuri—need me.'
Tanya stepped inside the latrine and locked the door. 'Why?'
'For managerial purposes. I can help you.'
'How?' Tanya, now finished with her business, was back outside the latrine.
'I have skills. I have know-how. Connections. I am a businessman. Allow me to demonstrate.' Vitek smiled and held out his open hand. 'You owe two kopeks for use of the latrine.'
Tanya cursed quietly and dug into her pocket for a coin.
'See how easy that was? But seriously, you need a man to arrange entertainment. Big-shot westerners have expectations. They cannot stand to be bored. They must have constant movement and noise. They will want to see the circus, the nightclubs, the discos, the bars, the dancing bears, a ballet—but only if it's a short one—and they will want to see women reaping in the fields with those hook things.'
'You mean a scythe?'
'Precisely! I knew you'd see it my way.' Vitek downed the last of the vodka and pitched the bottle onto the heap, where it bounced and shattered into a melody of breaking glass.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Azade
Though Azade had smelled the upside-down dreams of bats and the warm and weedy dreams of eels, nothing reeked as much as the dreams of humans. This was why angels do not visit us while we sleep—from fear they may carry our stench up their ladders to heaven. And in the same way that a glistening map tells of a snail's night-time journeys, dreams—having all night to gather strength—spill out and follow the dreamer wherever he or she goes, as a wet vapour trailing each step, as oil clinging to the skin. This was why at night Azade kept a tuck of salt under her tongue before careening towards sleep and why she washed her hands so thoroughly and so often as soon as she woke up in the morning. For what people dreamt was not only announced with an overwhelming odour, but also in sweat, tears, and urine, all the body's efforts to slough off what was no longer needed.
And where do people go to get rid of what they don't need? The toilet, of course. Stationed at her post, Azade has detected every souring dream, every curdled nightmare. In Olga's cautious turds, so typical of a woman who has a hard time letting go, Azade smelled Olga's longing for her husband who has long ago left this land and Olga's terrible desire to know precisely where his body lay. Gut the memory and the man. This was the advice Azade kept at the tip of her tongue and she would have said if it were not for Yuri. Every morning at 8.10, his hands still slick from a full night of fishing, Yuri sat on the commode and dumped his aching need for a father, a desire that carried the stagnant aroma of duckweed and stale dinner buns, the scent of a young man unable to leave his childhood. She could detect anxiety coiling deep in Lukeria's bowels and her farts told of her old woman's utter terror at being left alone. Then there was Tanya, embarrassed by her body, sitting in the latrine far longer than she needed to. Always the girl dreamt a translation of her days into the language of clouds, believing that by describing every skyscape she would make her life a beautiful knowable thing. But these days Azade was smelling more gas from the girl. Something was bothering her, something that wouldn't work out tidily in that notebook she always carried. It was as if the girl had swallowed sky and now was bloated with the shapes her longing assumed inside her swelling body.
Azade's odours, on the other hand, and this she readily admitted, were typical—heralding ordinary longings that smelled of her own skin, of woodsmoke, and of soil. Her night-time dreams were to see Mount Kazbek, the holy mountain rising into the purer, thinner air of Vladikavkaz and the foothills driving up the blue mists. She wanted to go to a place where winter stole the days from spring, and the snap of cold forced her breath inside out. She wanted to run her fingers over the silver fur of the kale leaves and to return to a land where there were bees instead of mosquitoes, dizzying heights instead of these low hills, and where the dust was of the cleaner sort. She had heard that chewing a single shiny rhododendron leaf would sustain a body through a hard mountain crossing. She wanted to see if this were true. And did the shadow of the mountain shelter at the same time two countries to the south and one to the east? Another question only her own eyes could answer.
The soles of her feet itched for the hard soil of the marketplace where she could hear fifty languages amid the raucous bellows of camels. For the market where frozen milk was sold and carried as a block, a piece of winter hauled on the back. She wanted to see for herself that there still existed a place where people had the good sense to keep the radishes next to the cinnamon and the lamb near the coffee and where the Korean jostled the Turk and everything that was simple rubbed against the complicated and the beautiful and ugly. She wanted to hear the women working the stalls, the canting and calls. She wanted to see their bright skirts, compassion the needle that sewed the waistband, humility the hem, strength the sleeves and kindness behind every stitch. She would sit and listen to the sound of the bells sewn to the hems of their skirts heralding their every movement. And when the market closed, she wanted to hear them turn the day under their feet, tamping the dust to the road, the bells marking an internal music every woman is born with, but few remember.
Most of all, she wanted to see for herself the graveyard her father had so lovingly cared for and the place he had wanted to be buried. And so sharp were these longings, so pungent the smell of them in her nostrils, that on mornings when the only sound in the dvor was her own breath in her ears and the sweep of her broom, these yearnings for what she had lost mingled with a desire for what she'd never had, and she could no longer distinguish between the two. All of which led her to believe that her dreams were true, shaped either by actual memory or by prophetic vision—how else, Azade asked herself daily, could she dream with such clarity?
How could she feel this nostalgic for a city she'd not seen since she was a child? A question for her father, who knew how to explain anything in four languages. And when she asked, so many years ago that the question itself had faded to a dim echo knocking from wall to wall, Why? Why did we have to leave?, he rubbed his forehead, his fingers worrying his faint prayer bruise.
When she was older, sometime after her father had been denied a position with the last school—a local high school known for employing complete dimwits—and before he'd been assigned to work the latrine, he gave her the answer. His answer could have been told in any number of languages, any number of ways, for it was a story he used to tell his students in Vladikavkaz.
A true fiction,' he said. Always he prefaced the tale this way for his students. True because this story had been proven and lived out so many times, it didn't require the names of actual people or places. The truest stories never do, her father liked to say. And it was a good story because like the finest prayer rugs, it was a braided tale, which meant you could tell it forward or backward or start someplace in the middle, weaving in at all times an understanding of the past rolled against the present, which so very often suggested the future.