CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Tanya
When she says the first line of the Lord's Prayer, Our Father, existing pure in heaven, she thinks of the old story of Chestnut Grey, the mighty horse who flies through the air unhindered, powered by the great gusts of steam from his nose. Of fathers she knows very little, but of the sky, so much more. At the approach of Chestnut Grey, the clouds buck and pearl, then cool to the colour of birch bent by ice. The colour of God's pockets turned inside out. It was the only story Lukeria ever read to her as a girl and for this reason Tanya has invested in the tale great symbolic value. What that symbolism is, Tanya can't really say, though as she hurried for the bus she fingered her cloud notebook and imagined she was that horse: large and powerful, enlisted to aid others who cannot help themselves. She is the work horse necessary to further the plot, though it has not escaped her notice that in the old story once the peasant and princess unite, Chestnut Grey spends most of his time eating apples and making the wishes of others come true.
Much better to be the steam. Far better to be the cloud. Much better to be exactly who she was, a girl in love with sky, swallowing every cloud and telling herself she was satisfied, her empty stomach full. Tanya pulled at her short skirt and clung for dear life to the black strap dangling from the carriage ceiling. The air inside the bus was dense and weepy like boiled chicken bones. Her eye make-up, which Zoya had generously applied, was already rising to a sweat on her skin. A twinge against her calves and behind her knees confirmed that new ladders had climbed up her fishnet stockings, the most stylish hosiery she owned. Despite her zero-one-zero diet, she'd not lost a single kilo of weight, and in fact, she seemed thicker than ever. To make matters worse, the American art-lovers had arrived at the airport and she was late for the meet and greet. Naturally.
Inside the arrivals lobby it was a job finding the Americans. A load of Germans and Australians from the Lufthansa flight burst through the lobby and spilled out onto the pavement, where they haggled with the taxi drivers. A pointless prospect, Tanya wanted to tell them. Most of the drivers were Armenian, and such fierce negotiators that God didn't even haggle with them. Another plane, a TU-204 from Tashkent, brought a load of Koreans and Uzbeks, the women wearing bright coats and trousers and wrapped in scarves. It took a while for Tanya to separate out east from west in the lobby, but finally, when there was only herself and three other women, the same women she'd noticed waiting through the waves of human arrivals, a terrible knowing gathered across her features. These were her Americans. And so odd looking they were!
All three wore trousers. Well, not trousers, not the kind with buttons, anyway. Trousers with zips. She knew it was the style in the States for women to look like men, but these three had pushed the style to limits. They wore their hair cropped shorter than Tanya had ever seen on a woman. And the colour, at least on the two older women, was not grey, but silver. Bright silver. In Tanya's experience only the poorest of the grandmothers wore her age in her hair. But from the way in which the two women ensconced themselves within a ring of luggage—sturdy leather suitcases with stout clasps—Tanya knew they weren't poor. Nor were they comfortable being in this lobby in such close proximity to so many others who were. Twice the oldest of the two, a small but sturdy-looking woman, touched her necklace and watch, as if to verify that her valuables were still on her. Standing a few paces away, as if to distance herself from her companions, the tallest of the women, a girl really, looked at travel glossies. She stood at least six feet tall, six three if one took into account her spiky hair. Her hair! Clearly an experimental work in progress. Short, purple-black and well articulated. A good deal of hair spray and egg whites had clearly gone into this risible project.
Tanya hurried towards the women as fast as her high heels would allow and stretched her lips over her faulty teeth. She did not want them to see her crooked dentition, not yet, anyway, and also, she was making a valiant attempt at inhabiting the future of the handshake in her very walk—that is, embodying the very metaphor she imagined they wanted to see. Artistic firm intention and goodwill, style and grace at a gallop over wide open spaces. Hard to do in high heels. But she was determined. 'Good morning. You must be the Americans of Russian Extraction for the Causes of Beautification. I am so very glad to meet you.' Tanya thrust her hand towards the oldest woman with the shortest, sharpest hair.
The woman took a step forward, her eyes measuring Tanya. In her long gaze, Tanya detected a windswept quality that she wanted very much to believe spoke of the woman's ability—or even better, desire—to see potential in the openness of an empty canvas. Or, at least, the ability to look past Tanya's flimsy attire and see potential in a sub-standard museum. Or in her attempt at the graceful galloping handshake.
'Justine Barker,' the woman said at last. She gripped Tanya's hand and pumped it strong and hard. 'I'm the eldest Barker and this is my daughter Livia, and over there,' Mrs Barker hooked her chin toward the girl, 'is my granddaughter, McKayla.'
'Ah.' Tanya nodded at each of the women. Grandmother, mother, daughter. A matryoshka in reverse, with the granddaughter being the largest, the empty shell, and the capable mother easily fitting inside her large daughter, and the grandmother a snug fit inside the mother.
The grandmother looked at her watch and shook her head. 'We're on a schedule. Perhaps you'll take us directly to the museum now?'
Tanya smiled wide. Then she remembered her teeth and adjusted her face.
'Of course.' She gestured toward the open door and the women moved through it, leaving Tanya, in a skirt far too short for the task, to manage all five pieces of their luggage.
Outside the airport a light rain began to fall. The women stood on the walkway, their umbrellas held in such a way as to ensure maximal harm to passersby. Meanwhile, Tanya attempted to flag a ride. Though it was a short distance from the airport to the museum, the rain made for hard competition. The Aeroflot flight crews in their smart uniforms and heels had no problem stopping cars. Tanya jutted her hip out a few extra spine-wrenching millimetres and wiggled her fingers in desperation. When she had all but given up, a maroon Sputnik lunged for the kerb.
'This doesn't look like a typical taxi,' the grandmother observed as they piled in the backseat, the grandmother and mother flanking either side of Tanya and the girl with her moose legs sitting in the front passenger seat.
'In Russia every car is a taxi,' Tanya explained, the whole time pulling savagely at her skirt.
The driver turned to the backseat and grinned. Then he touched his finger to the wooden icon of St George wedged in the open ashtray. 'For good luck,' he said in English to the girl. Then he ground the gear and the car charged over the roadside potholes. Though Tanya had heard that shock absorbers were standard issue on most modern cars, they seemed conspicuously absent on this one. Three times the girl's spikes brushed the roof of the car and each time the girl's mother's face took on a deeper shade of grey-green.
Only the grandmother seemed to take interest in the city, her wide and roving gaze taking in every broken window, every pile of rubbish floating in slush, each veteran begging on the corner: all the signs of a developed country unable to recover from the shock of a sudden free-market economy.
After they passed the third tanker—this one full of spoiled milk, judging from the rank odour—the grandmother pinched her nose.
'Why doesn't someone move that truck?'
'It's cheaper to let it sit and spoil. Petrol prices are astronomically high,' Tanya explained. 'So, until we get fuel, we go without.'