'Inconsequential,' Zoya sighed and continued thumbing through a western magazine. All the best people have toaster ovens these days. And dryers.' Zoya shifted in her chair to contemplate her laundry in full bloom over the gills of the radiator. 'And babies. Every one of my friends has a baby. Even Galya from number thirteen. In fact she has two. You remember Galya—the girl with the pickle nose?'
'Having babies is not a competition. It's not some kind of measure of success. I mean, any idiot can have a baby.'
Zoya turned her shining wistful eyes on him. 'I know, isn't it wonderful? More good news.' Zoya withdrew a thermometer from her purse and waved it in the air. 'I took my temperature, and today is the right day.'
Yuri swallowed and tasted blood. Not the kind of talk that inspired phenomenal feats of gymnastic love-making.
Zoya raked her fingers through her vermilion hair. 'I think your mother is having a nervous breakdown. She's been talking to herself in the kitchen. A baby would be a good thing. She could take care of it and have someone to talk to. A baby would elevate our deflated social position.'
'Don't joke about a baby.'
'Who's joking?' Zoya stood on tiptoes and licked his eyebrows.
'We cannot raise a baby here. We have nothing to give a baby.'
'We have the grant.' Zoya bit his ear.
'We don't have the grant. Not yet.' Yuri placed a hand on each of Zoya's shoulders. 'We have five glue-sniffers living in the courtyard nobody cares for.'
'I will not live as if I am dead already.' Zoya clutched Yuri's hand and pulled him through the maze of laundry lines and sheets to their cot. 'I want life, a life of my own. In my hands. At my breast.' Zoya pulled her dress over her head. 'You don't know what that means to a woman.' Zoya pushed Yuri to the cot and pulled off his shoes. 'Unbuckle your belt,' she said.
'I think I may have a bruised rib.'
'Take off that belt and let's take a look.' Zoya smiled.
And Yuri did. The socks, they came off without a complaint and the pants flew off the ends of his feet as a silly dance step that ended in a low kick under the cot. And then it was all systems go. His face? His jaw? Hurting? Hell, yes. But again, the value of vodka be praised, the pain had dulled to a heavy weight, had dulled his hands and his face so that he could even endure the attentions of a bitter woman turned sweet. Somehow he would get through it. Zoya would see to that, Zoya shrieking his name as if it might mean something to her: 'Yur—I! Yur—I!' How manly does this make him feel? Ver—y, ver—y.
'OK, then.' Zoya rolled off Yuri and reached for the thermometer. 'I feel better now.'
Yuri rubbed his jaw.
'I'm glad we talked this matter through so thoroughly. Now we understand one another.' Zoya hung her stockings and dress over a laundry line.
'Absolutely.'
'Because, Yuri, this business in Chechnya—everyone knows it'll be over in no time. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain.'
'That's what everyone said about Afghanistan.'
Zoya clicked her tongue and looked askance at Yuri. 'That was just practice, a drill. This time it will go better. The Russian Army will put those mangy rebels in their place and fast.'
With each word the liquid ticks grew louder and the throb in his jaw and cheekbones more insistent. 'Could we talk about something else? Please?' Yuri reached for the bottle of Crowbar.
Zoya pulled on her nightgown, a thick and matronly garment. 'Did you know that the Yenisei is so contaminated that it doesn't even freeze anymore?'
'I thought it was just the Ob and the Lena that didn't freeze anymore.'
'Yes, and then there's the nickel poisoning in the Arctic. The reindeer herds have dropped like flies.'
'We're lucky, I suppose, by comparison. We're still alive,' Yuri said.
'Yes, but can you really call this living?' Zoya circled her hand at the wrist, indicating their cot, the sheets hanging from the line. 'I want things.'
From TV came the melodramatic swell of sentimental music. Yuri glanced at his flight helmet. The ticking, it was back. 'We have things.' Yuri looked at Zoya. 'We have each other.'
Zoya wrinkled her nose. 'I don't want to guide tours in a dusty museum for ever. I want a life of my own.' Without warning, she began to cry, softly at first and then, taking her cue from the TV programme, her cries swelled to sobs and then to full-scale wails, her shoulders shaking, her mascara coursing in black rivulets over her cheeks. It was such a grand, mysterious, and sudden show of utter despair that Yuri didn't know how or even if he should try to console Zoya. It was a weeping that defied consolation, sounds he'd heard Mother make, and before she died, Grandmother Ruzya, but in all cases he, a boy then, had dismissed their cries as a peculiarity of the female of the species. And because in all cases after such jags his mother had worn a determined smile on her face, maintaining a posture of complete cheerfulness, she'd made it easy for Yuri to believe that what he'd heard, those cries, were slips, mistakes, unintended lapses that he was not to take seriously.
Yuri waited until Zoya's sobs quieted before offering her squares of Azade's prestige tissue. 'Now, now,' Yuri patted Zoya's shoulder cautiously. Zoya honked and snuffled, then tucked her knees to her chest and promptly fell asleep, her breath whistling through her red and swollen nose the only indication that just five minutes before she'd suffered a major emotional moment.
That was the other thing about women and tears. Once they'd cried them out, they usually felt heaps better. Not so with men. Men took all their sorrows and complaints and insults and added them to the already mountainous pile of shit they carried around. It would be easier if men were allowed the occasional crying jag too, but the last time Yuri had succumbed to that kind of emotional freedom (in the yard of School Number 13) he had paid for it dearly. It was unmanly to wear your sorrows on your sleeve, Vitek said all those years ago in the schoolyard, and even then, Vitek had a way of driving a lesson home.
Yuri spied the bottle of Crowbar on the windowsill. An opened bottle of vodka must be finished. That was another rule. He poured a shot into a teacup, dipped a handkerchief into the liquid and dabbed at his cuts. Vodka was healing, was the silvery light of the moon in a bottle, was the tears he and every other vet he knew would cry if they thought they could get away with it. Yuri tipped the downed bottle on its side. Fallen soldier—that's what you called a dead bottle. And then you waited for the last drops to collect on the glass, and drank those down too, the final salute.
A rattle at the door and then Mother came into the apartment. Yuri listened to her find her way through the dark to the divan that folded out into a bed. He listened to her hang her coat over a line and her purse and scarf on a nail. He listened to the slide of her shoes stowed in the cupboard. He counted the ticks in his head and at thirty he heard the sniffling, Mother crying in the dark. She couldn't help it, he knew. She brought her work home with her, in her purse, under her arms, carried it word for word in her head, and now in the quiet of a darkened apartment with nothing but the hours, she was parsing through each and every phrase and sentence.
Yuri rearranged his body along the narrow mattress, willing sleep to drag him to darkness. Zoya mumbled. Angry words about electric beaters and their bright silver dashers. Because it is universally true that people dream what they want, dream what they can't have, he knew she was dreaming of a fleet of them, shiny as steelhead and moving away from her, to spawn upriver. Mother was breathing deep and evenly now. He imagined the she dreamt of manna on the tongue, of living on the bread of faithful speech.
Yuri curled his body around Zoya's. But the ticks, the throbs, they were a hook snagged in his cheek. A convenient image. The very thought of which inspired more thoughts of hooks and flies he longed to tie. Which took him to the world of fish. To rivers in the south. To ancient seas and seabeds, to the grandfather sturgeon who lived in the Caspian Sea.