'Cow!' the littlest girl joined in.
A reference to her bovine eyes or her portly bearing? Hard to tell, and Tanya tucked her chin to her chest and kept ploughing towards the stairwell. Love, heart. Start loving, you useless lonely muscle. And then a rock whistled through the air.
Who said suffer the little children? A stone, big as a plum from the feel of it, pummelled Tanya's backside. Christ said suffer the little children and so she's suffering. He said to love them, too, and so she commanded herself to love, but the rocks, God almighty, had grown teeth and were biting at her now. No chance she'd get past that heap without losing an eye. And that older girl had developed quite an arm. Clearly the children blamed her for adding to their workload, though how they had known before she did that the Americans were arriving was beyond her. Tanya's bowels, knotted with worry, roiled and turned. She shielded her head with her cloud notebook and retreated to the safety of the latrine. And not a moment too soon.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Olga
In the women's bathroom Olga sat solidly on the commode and fought the urge to fall into a dead sleep. For five hours she'd worked like a maniac. The wire basket, emptied of translation tasks that she had completed the day before, had once again mysteriously filled to capacity and beyond in the middle of the night. And with tidings of the strangest events.
Manufacture of penguins at a plush toy factory in the Trans-Dneister surpassed all production records to date. In commemoration of this achievement, new currency will be minted, replacing the old currency which was minted last July.
The explosion at Tomsk-7 chemical separation plant is believed to be responsible for regular sightings of Our lady of Kursk in the low bank of emission clouds.
And the strangest, news from their own city.
100 barrels of Georgian white wine from Tbilisi have been hijacked from the train station and held for ransom.
Why she was being asked to translate such matters, and in the Red Star, a military newspaper of conservative leanings, was beyond Olga's comprehension. She rapped her knuckles against the corrugated metal that divided the bathroom stall she occupied from the one where Vera sat. Olga guessed from the unbroken plume of smoke curling into the air that Vera had nodded off again, this time with a lit cigarette in hand.
Olga knocked louder, and began reading the sinkhole report. 'I don't think this life could get any more bizarre,' she concluded. 'Do you suppose we will survive any of this?'
'Oh, cheer up, Olga.' The cigarette hissed as Vera dropped it into the toilet bowl. A small flask of nail polish remover appeared beneath the partition. 'Things aren't so bad. According to a recent World Values Survey, Ukrainians have it, or think they have it, worse than us. Only forty-eight per cent of Ukrainians say they are happy as compared with fifty-one per cent of Russians.'
'That is a comfort,' Olga conceded.
'On the other hand, ninety-seven per cent of Icelanders claim to have attained true bliss.'
Olga sipped at the vial, then slid it back under the metal divider and thought for a moment. 'It must be on account of their warm summers and natural hot water springs. Also, they haven't gone to war in decades. Russia, on the other hand, has a war of some sort going on at all times.'
'You'd think with all this practice, we'd be better at it,' Vera mused. 'Of course, we did win the Great Patriotic War. But since then there's been Afghanistan, Georgia, Bosnia, Georgia again, and then this business in Chechnya. Our problems in the south, such an embarrassment. The atrocities! Russians setting fire to houses with women and children inside.'
Olga wagged her head slowly from side to side. It never ceased to amaze her what the human animal was capable of. What great acts of generosity and cruelty. And how a human could harbour the inclination for both within the same heart! She wished she could say it was beyond her. But it wasn't, because she felt it, too: compassion and rage, love and hate. Even good people could—and did—commit acts of cruelty. Even people like Olga. How many times had she wished Afghanistan and everyone in it would simply fall off the map?
'I cannot reconcile myself to it,' Olga said at last.
'To what?'
'This job. This work. What we do here. What we see and hear and what we pass on and how we pass it. What about truth?'
Vera snorted. 'Truth doesn't bother me. It's the incontrovertible insistence of certain facts that wakes me up in the middle of the night. Did you know that in the twentieth century, thirty to fifty million Soviets died as a result of war?'
'No,' Olga said dully.
'Well then maybe you already knew that Mafiya-related economic activity accounts for forty per cent of the total economy?'
'So we are more economically healthy than we know?'
'Healthier than what's good for us,' Vera said, lighting another cigarette. 'But get this—every two out of three male workers is drunk on the job. The third worker is hungover.'
'Sad.' Olga clucked her tongue.
'Sad, nothing. Joint Military Generals set a draft goal of 140,000 for this fall.'
'This war is not over then, is it?'
'Good Lord, no. We've only just begun to kill each other off!'
'I worry about my Yuri,' Olga whispered.
'And well you should! Statistically he has a one in three chance of reintegrating in a useful manner into society. Let's not forget the number of vets who've committed suicide. Not an insignificant figure, by the way.'
Olga shook her head. 'I'll tell you, it makes one wonder just what humans are made of. We're not human, that's what I think. We're dogs or maybe worse.'
'Why would you say that?'
'Because,' Olga crouched over the bowl and carefully wiped her backside with strips of the previous day's copy of the Red Star, 'dogs only behave the way they do to survive. They are beyond malice.'
Vera laughed. 'Let me tell you what the city engineers have known for years and dare not say. In a decade the dogs will rule the cities. They outnumber us now three to one. They'll eat every last one of us for sport. Don't talk to me about malice.'
Vera tapped the temperamental trigger of the commode. Olga stood and did the same. Together they listened to the plumbing labour—a slow-moving sound, and Olga imagined that Fact itself, the visceral substantiation of every ugly reality they'd just discussed, had clogged the pipes. At last, with a loud gulp, the bowls emptied.
'Well, that's that.' Vera stood at the sink and wiggled her fingers under a trickle of murky water.
'I suppose,' Olga said, and watched Vera exit the bathroom. Olga stood at the sink and scrubbed her hands vigorously. Her hands red from her efforts, she at last gave up. In twenty-odd years of using the Red Star lav, she'd noticed that no amount of washing could keep the lavatory reek from following her into the corridor.
Inside the narrow glass office Arkady sat behind the desk and raked his fingernails ferociously over the mottled skin of his left arm. What Olga had all this time thought were bite marks made by his ersatz wife, she realized with a jolt was in actual fact a service tattoo. She eyed the pneumatic tubes warily and slid into her folding chair. The tubes hissed like a tyre leaking pressure and Olga was trying hard to ignore this sound —that and the way blood and dark ink bled from the corners of Arkady's tattoo.
Arkady lifted his nose and sniffed prodigiously in her direction. 'Is that a new scent you are wearing?' he asked.
'No,' Olga said.
Arkady sniffed again. All the same, you wear it very well.'
He was flirting with her, again. It occurred to her how very lonely Arkady must be, how very alone he was with only this desk and that enormous Topic Guide and his tea to keep him company, his pencils with the bite marks. Olga looked past Arkady to the darkened glass. 'Do you think often of your wife?' Olga ventured.