Arkady's eyes brightened. 'It has a nice poetic odour of sentimentality. And absolutely no meaning. None. Only an idiot could write this.'
Olga nodded sombrely.
'I know people who know people. People who know idiocy when they see it. People who can do things to care for such idiots.'
Olga clutched the Manifesto. 'Things? What things? You don't mean an institution?'
'Lord no! Those places are reserved for the truly handicapped—Gypsies and Grades One and Two Idiots, for instance. But Grade Three idiocy is another matter entirely. A Grade Three Idiot is eligible for food and medicine coupons and could ride the metro for free. Yes, the benefits of being an imbecile are too numerous to count.'
Olga glanced at the tube. 'But the draft.'
Arkady scratched at his arm. 'That is just it: Grade Three Idiots can't be drafted. Most certainly arranging for the necessary documentation, that is, the Grade Three Idiot ID card, will take a little time and money, but we've nothing to lose.'
'Money?' Olga whispered. 'But I don't have any money. None of us do.'
Arkady shifted his weight from foot to foot, slowly, but with deliberation as if he were wrestling with something inside himself. At last he stood still, closed his eyes and spoke in a breathless monotone.
'I will sell my near-priceless petrified log. On the Internet. To the highest bidder.'
'No,' Olga gasped. 'You can't! It is all you have, this highly collectible item that has been in your family for generations.'
After a long moment Arkady opened his eyes. 'I've decided. My mind is made up.' He nodded to the Manifesto. 'Desperate times call for great sacrifices. Besides, something isn't priceless if someone will pay money for it. And if your son is the idiot I think he may be...'
Olga clamped her teeth and handed over the Manifesto. Still, she could not help thinking again of the lie in which she was participating. Was her son really an idiot? There was no denying he had been altered by the war, but then that was true of any veteran of the Russian army who survived a tour of duty. He was childish. A shirker. He would lie about on a stove and gather cobwebs if he could, but that was no more idiotic than anything else other people did. And the fact was just this: he was her son, flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone. If she allowed Yuri to be drafted he would die a certain death. If not at the hands of the enemy than certainly at the hands of the other veteran soldiers who had no patience for combat-shy recruits, even those who rotated in voluntarily. Olga studied Arkady, who even now was drafting the letters to the appropriate people on behalf of her Yuri, and on company time! They were doing something to save her boy. So why didn't she feel any better?
She ran her fingers over the report curling over the desk. All these boys, these other mothers' sons. She couldn't do a thing, not one thing to save them. She looked at the report again, the water in her eyes brimming. Sometimes only tears restore the heart's equilibrium. Her mother used to say that. Her mother also used to say that the sun would stop rising if we forgot the names of our dead. This was why her mother made her memorize the names of the dead from her village. This was why every night in the darkness of her corner of the apartment, in that dim space between wakefulness and sleep, Olga added the names she read here in this office to that growing lexicon of the dead. And at night she stitched those names to an old melody every mourner knows. Each night, the same song, only each night it took just a little longer to sing it, this song built of names. Every name became a musical phrase, and every phrase was a life that had ended and shouldn't have, and Olga wanted to remember every single one.
Olga's fingers tapped the keyboard. Name after name, she saw these boys, every one of them a boy from her town, the boy who sat behind her at school, the boy who tied her shoelaces together and cried later when she wouldn't forgive him. The boy with the stutter, the boy with the girlish lips, the boy whose father jumped from the bridge. All these boys and more, she set down in print. Gone her subtle sense of humour that turned the edges of an atrocity-in-progress into a general's folly, easily forgiven. Gone her desire to dampen. Loss divided was still loss, after all. She would tell what she knew, and more. She would say with as much certainty as she dare and more everything she'd kept hidden. God—she had to believe because the prophet Isaiah declared it—would write their names on the palms of His hands. But she would type their names on this report.
Vladimir Gregarovich Aitmotov
Alexander Andreyevich Akimoff
Vyacheslav Stepanovich Aliev
Boris Vladiromich Anichov
She had no idea there could be so many names. And still, she kept typing. What would happen to her next she didn't much care. She had lied to save her son. There was nothing honourable in that. And these boys on her list, they were beyond saving. But at least they might be remembered.
Twenty minutes passed. Thirty. Olga kept typing. At first, the pneumatic tubes whistled merrily as if nothing important, nothing any different than usual, were happening at the scuffed metal desk. But as the minutes ticked by, thirty, then forty, a low growl boiled up through the pipes. By the time Olga finished with the last of the names, all two hundred and sixteen of them, the growl had risen into a full howl, like that of an animal in great pain. She pulled the last sheet of paper from the typewriter carriage. She scanned the pages and rolled them, placing them carefully into the canister. As if it could read her translation, the tube howled an octave higher.
Olga lifted the hatch. A secondary, and her favourite, definition of the word 'translate' was to convey to heaven without death. Olga eyed the canister and wiggled her fingers at the hatch. It could happen, should happen. The world was just that strange. She squeezed her eyes closed, thrust the canister into the tube. With a jerk at her hands, the canister whizzed through the tubing and disappeared, leaving Olga stuck and dangling at the hatch. The wind rushing through the pipe tugged at her shirt sleeve, pulled savagely at her arm, all the while a loud shrieking coursing through the piping. Arkady stared in bewilderment at the tube and Olga, held fast as a fish on a hook. Only two words came to her.
'Help me.'
CHAPTER TWELVE
Azade
After a week of hard rain, the, suggestion of sun, especially spring sun, lured everyone but Lukeria out of their apartments and into the courtyard. Vitek lounged in a cracked plastic chair and barked at the children. Big Anna, Good Boris, Bad Boris, and Gleb, the red-haired boy with the glasses, barked back, shouting obscenities at anything that moved. The littlest girl had disappeared. No amount of crooning at the heap or at the lip of the hole (the hole! Oh how she hated it!) coaxed her out and Azade had to consider the possibility that the girl had gone underground to live there permanently or perhaps had gone to live in the sewers. Or perhaps the other children had driven her off. Street kids were like that. They had maintained a hierarchy, like dog packs. Also, the boys preferred now to lift their legs when they peed.
Yuri lay on the stone bench. Zoya sat in the stairwell, the trumpet of a phone pinched between her shoulder and the side of her face while she painted her fingernails. Yes, she was a talent, that girl. And she knew how to talk. 'Really?' Even now her voice filled the stairwell, spilled into the courtyard. 'Because if Lara would consider knocking twenty roubles off the microwave, I'd colour her hair and throw in a manicure.'
Even Mircha was out, in both body and spirit. Though the mud had thawed and Azade had been digging with her little shovel for three days, she'd still not properly deposited Mircha's body into the ground. But it wasn't her fault. The spring thaw was not cooperating with her in the least. The entire courtyard was a boggy morass of mud. The heap of trash and metal scrap listed dangerously towards the ever-widening chasm, but wouldn't quite topple in. The mud seemed deliberately contrary, possessing a stubborn, sullen, petty willfulness she could only consider Soviet in nature; every attempt to move the mud around with that shovel she'd borrowed from Yuri came to nothing.