'Up! Up! Wake up!' A voice, really a shriek, sharp and sure, pulled Tanya down to her chair anchored now behind the hat/coat-check counter. 'He's coming!' Ludmilla from the ticket office called.
Tanya forced open her eyes. Yes, Head Administrator Chumak was coming. She could hear him labouring down the stairs and the sound of his uncooperative foot lagging: thump, THUMPITY, slide. But he was making good time and as he cleared the stairs the syncopation of his gait quickened. And in that slight skipping triple beat of Head Administrator Chumak's weighted step, Tanya detected the giddy excitement of a man kicking at the threshold of a long-awaited dream. For never in her two years of working at the museum had Tanya heard her boss move with such speed or purpose.
At last he gained the counter.
'Big news,' Head Administrator Chumak gasped. He leaned on his elbows, waiting for his breath to catch up with him. 'They're here, my dear girl, they're here!'
'Who?' Tanya stood and straightened her skirt.
'The Americans of Russian Extraction for the Causes of Beautification! They're here. Well, not here, as in right here.' The heel of Head Administrator Chumak's leaden foot fell with a final thump. 'But they are certainly very nearly here.'
'How near?'
Head Administrator Chumak glanced at his watch. 'They'll be arriving at the airport first thing in the morning, or possibly in the afternoon. It depends. But you, Tatiana Nikolaevna Bobkov,' Head Administrator Chumak's voice swelled with the calibrated mirth of fine-tuned optimism, 'you will be the friendly face of the museum, there to greet them the moment their feet touch the ground.'
Tanya squeezed her throat. 'Oh.'
'Yes, I thought you'd be pleased. And I know you will take good care of our distinguished guests and cultivate in them an appreciation for this museum, for this staff, for this city. I trust you completely. It's a big job, I know, but believe me, you have my hearty endorsement.'
Tanya gulped. Despite her nightmare from moments ago, never had she really believed that their museum would be in the running. Certainly she didn't think the Americans would actually come. When people from the West make promises to visit, her grandmother had assured her all these years, they most certainly do not mean it.
'When they arrive, while you are getting them settled into their lodgings, Daniilov and I will clean the museum like men possessed.' Head Administrator Chumak tipped his head slightly. 'Well, Daniilov will clean, anyway.'
'Lodgings?' Tanya croaked.
'Yes. They're staying with you, remember?'
'But, seriously, wouldn't it be much better if they went to a four-star hotel or something?'
Head Administrator Chumak handed Tanya the file fat with travel itineraries and grinned ferociously. 'Off you go then!'
'But sir, what about transportation? Am I to hire a microvan or perhaps a car?'
'Cars!' Head Administrator Chumak clapped his hands. 'I myself have been thinking of a Zhiguli, or perhaps something German. Of course one must factor in the cost of petrol, spare parts, but still.' Head Administrator Chumak sighed an expansive sigh, smiled at the ceiling.
'My wife has her eye on a pair of leather driving gloves. Imported from Austria.' Head Administrator Chumak snapped his gaze on Tanya. 'Well, don't just stand there like a historical monument. Get moving!' He patted her backside in a manner far too firm to suggest genuine affection.
Tanya pulled on her coat, tucked her colour notebook under her arm and hurried for the metro. The boy with the open violin case blew her kisses, but she was too distracted to contemplate purple and the lining of the boy's violin case. Now she was on a mission. The Americans were coming. With many questions and probing eyes and theories and advice, the Americans were coming. With ultra-white teeth of perfect proportion and baggage stuffed and overstuffed, thrice stuffed with hair dryers and razors equipped with the wrong adapters. With highlighted dictionaries and travel guides. Tourists, not travellers, they will have no intention of blending in, of being inconspicuous. Of travelling lightly or quietly or with subtlety. They will arrive bringing with them their many expectations. Their good intentions. Their endless curiosity. Their needs and unspoken longings to experience things. What things? Tanya knows the list: ambiance, ice cubes in cold drinks, the assurances of quality medical care should the need arise. Private transportation. Extra pillows on their beds. Clean drinking water. Hot water for bathing. Prestige toilet paper for wiping the backside. A serenade by moonlight and girls dancing in folk costume. Black caviar, not red. Cream for their coffee. The moon and stars. They will ask without understanding how impossible their requests are to fill. They will not know how deep and thoroughly devasting the recent crop failures and economic crashes have been, how turbulent the transition from command to market economy. Nor would it be wise for her to point it out. They will want to believe that they are making a sound investment in the future of art, that their dollars will be put to good use, that this is a sure thing.
Tanya sighed and allowed the wind whistling along the streets to propel her over the platform, past the under-stocked kiosks and the vendors shut up tight inside there like walnuts in shells. Several of the kiosks had signs posted to their windows: WE ARE OUT OF EVERYTHING. BY EVERYTHING WE MEAN ALL CONSUMPTIBLES AND EVEN NON-CONSUMPTIBLES—SO DON'T EVEN ASK. WE ARE MOST ESPECIALLY OUT OF BEER AND VODKA. A group of boys in long-sleeved shirts and not a coat between them kicked a ball around in the slushy mud. They were waiting in line anyway. Winter was tipping slowly towards spring and they were taking advantage of the longer light. Tanya knew this feeling—a quiet madness that pulses through the blood and bypasses the brain entirely. When you live in darkness six months of a year, you can't help it. Noticing, that is. The light. And the trees. Naked to the skin only a week ago, now they were studded from trunk to tip with hard yellow buds. In a few weeks they'd explode with green and the whole world would drift into longer light and quieter tempers, into patience.
But right now the ground had warmed to mud. Every side street, every footpath was a dangerous morass. The snow-melt lining each path was a sharp landscape of lost items: the silver spines of an umbrella jutted like oversized needles from an invisible pincushion, a ladies' evening shoe, the heel ground in but the shank jutting viciously from the mud. Tanya skirted the debris and picked up her pace. The heels of her boots issued obscene noises with her every step. And it seemed to her that the street itself was complaining, groaning—she imagined—under her weight. Worse, the kiosk at the end of their street, 'Everything You Covet and Can't Have', that sold women's stockings, chewing gum and vodka—had disappeared altogether. It was not an omen that inspired confidence.
With effort, Tanya lifted her feet from the melting slush and mud and ducked under the stone archway of the courtyard. But it was the same story here too: mud and more mud. The only good thing about this mud was that it was familiar mud and she knew from hard lessons during other thaws just where she should and shouldn't step.
The children picked at the heap with their bare hands, scooped banana skins and orange rinds, empty tins of sprats and tats into small wheelbarrows. Blood oozed from matching open sores on the knees of the Good and Bad Borises. They were working hard, she could see, to improve the ambiance of the courtyard. When they filled their wheelbarrows with refuse, they pushed the load through the mud, past the broken archway and out onto the street where they deposited the trash onto the roadway. Red-haired Gleb blew snot out of his nose with a single blasting honk of mucus. Tanya felt her stomach rolling over.
'Swine!' the oldest girl called.