'Oh I get it. So that's why there's the war in Chechnya, for oil?' The girl in the front seat turned her head slightly to address Tanya.
Tanya gulped at the air, swallowing invisible cloud. It felt wrong to contradict her visitors and possible benefactors, and yet she was not in the habit of drawing such connections. At last Tanya settled for diplomacy, and pressed her palm hard against her sternum and shrugged.
'Commerce stalled for lack of fuel. That's a crying shame,' the grandmother broke in. 'This would never happen in America. In America if people want something, they get it. And at decent prices, too.'
'You don't mean war?' Tanya couldn't help asking.
The grandmother looked at Tanya as if she were in sudden breach of good manners, or perhaps incredibly stupid. 'No dear, milk.'
'Though some of us choose not to drink it,' the girl added.
At this, the car lurched to a halt in front of the All-Russia Museum.
The driver hopped out. He followed the women down the steps to the museum ticket entrance, leaving Tanya, again, with the luggage. A suitcase under each arm and in each hand, and a carry-on slung around her neck, she just managed to squeeze through the basement door, past Ludmilla coughing behind the glass ticket office, and to the hat/coat-check counter. And then the awkward moment: what to pay the driver. Tanya dashed to the ticket office and retrieved a roll of tickets—a lifetime of visits to the museum—and from her own purse she withdrew a bottle of apple brandy and a pack of cigarettes.
The driver pocketed the items without a word, as if he'd expected all along to be shorted. But as he pushed open the door to leave, he stopped, fixed his gaze on Tanya and opened his mouth. A tirade of obscenity spewed forth—curse stacked upon curse. Add to this the fact that the man was a multilingual curser, swearing fluidly in German, Russian and even English. Having exhausted his supply of invectives, the driver at last left for his car.
The mother turned to Tanya. 'Does everyone here talk like that?'
Tanya pulled their luggage behind the counter and piled it on to shelves.
'The execution of obscenity is, for many Russians, a form of art in itself,' she improvised. 'Some say this is what makes our language so mighty.'
'Interesting.' The grandmother reproportioned her smile to express a measure of appreciation. The granddaughter adjusted her hair. Clearly, if Tanya was to cultivate in these women an understanding of the mystery of the Russian soul as expressed in art, as evidenced in this very museum, she had to get them upstairs. And fast.
'Shall we?' Tanya attempted a smile of utter serenity and pointed to the stairs where she spied Head Administrator Chumak looming. Apparently he'd been there all along, soundlessly observing her all these minutes.
'Ladies!' Head Administrator Chumak bellowed. 'How wonderful, how completely fabulous that you are here at last!'
The women climbed the stairs and surrounded Head Administrator Chumak. The eldest Barker—Ernestine? Clarine? Tanya would never remember, she knew this already—thrust her hand toward Chumak. A case of unfortunate timing, for Chumak was in mid-execution of a deep-waisted bow. The woman's hand glanced of Chumak's shiny pate and she brought her hand to her chest as if she'd been touched by electricity.
The mother brought her hands to her face and sneezed. And sneezed. 'Such dust!' she exclaimed between sneezes.
Head Administrator Chumak, too, was temporarily overcome. Apparently Daniilov had finally run a cloth over the many faux marble statues and now ten years' worth of museum dust cluttered the air. Head Administrator Chumak produced a white handkerchief from his pocket and secured it to his face.
'I like to think of it as ambiance,' he said between sneezes. 'Some people say that the Russian soul doesn't exist. But when I look around at this spectacular museum, my nose tells me there is spirit in excess.' Here Head Administrator Chumak began another low bow.
Tanya pointed towards another set of stairs and the women began climbing. 'The top floor is, in my opinion, the best place to begin. All of history east and west hangs on the walls which are,' here Tanya paused on the landing to catch her breath, 'just that much closer to the heavens and thus, God himself.'
'So you've got religious art here?' The mother paused on the landing.
'All art is religious, but yes,' Tanya continued the climb and tried hard to focus, 'some art, the subject matter, say, is more so than others.' At the top of the stairs Tanya gestured towards a second-rate reproduction. 'Take, for instance, this diptych of the brothers and saints, Boris and Gleb.'
'What did they do?' the girl asked, shoving a stick of chewing gum into her mouth.
Fully prepared and willing to launch with the approved and earnest explanation, Tanya's mouth opened. Closed. Then opened. 'Nothing, really,' Tanya said. 'Sometimes in Russia that is all it takes to become famous, though it helps if you die a miserable death.'
'They were martyred then?' the mother asked.
'Oh, yes. But they maintained their blissful countenance through it all.'
'How exhausting,' the girl said.
Tanya gestured towards the opposite wall, populated by more martyrs. And that was all it took, that sweeping gesture with her arm, and her mouth went round and open, flowing with the well-oiled speech she'd memorized for just this occasion.
'Why do we start our discussion of the third-floor exhibit with the east wall?' Tanya asked. And because she never allowed more than a hair width's pause before answering her rhetorical questions, the words kept tumbling: 'We start our discussion of the third-floor exhibit with the east wall because Orthodoxy began in the east, where the sun rises and all things begin.' She pointed to the ninth-century fresco of Saints Cyril and Methodius. 'And who are these saints and why are they important? These saints are the beloved brothers Cyril and Methodius. The genius brothers are important because they brought Byzantine Orthodoxy to the Slavs and bridled the wild Slavonic tongue to a written alphabet. Also, they were formidable chess players and mathematicians.'
The girl scowled at the genius saints. They were not the best examples of Tanya's finest work: the linseed oil egg binding hadn't quite taken hold, which gave the brothers an oily look to them.
'And now we turn our attention to the west wall, which is reserved for fading things, for boundaries of place and time, which are continually rewritten, and for man. Why? Because even men such as those shown in these portraits—kings and princes and warriors—are only temporarily on this earth, a mere illusory shadow of spiritual events.' Tanya's voice took on a round and draughty quality she'd learned to imitate by listening to so many lectures delivered by art history scholars. And like those scholars, if her listeners showed any signs of distress or confusion, she would not stop or slow down, but merely charge ahead, forward at all costs. 'Notice the oil reproduction of Prince Vladimir, whose father, Svyatoslav, kicked down the gates of the mysterious Volga Khazars. Why did he kick down those gates? Because the Khazars were Jews who had acquired more power than was good for them and so Svyatoslav had to defeat them. Afterwards, the Khazars disappeared so thoroughly, they took their graveyards with them. Not a trace of their dead, their strange-shaped currency, or even their language remained.'
At this point Tanya resurfaced just long enough to gather her air before plunging back into her script.
'Pardon me,' the mother touched Tanya's elbow, 'but I have a question.'
Tanya shook off the moist hand. A discussion of Russian Orthodoxy was like the Trans-Sib freight line—you don't stop it on a sneeze.
'After Svyatoslav died, his successor, Prince Vladimir, considered accepting Judaism as the state religion, but rejected it. Why did he reject Judaism? Because he had observed how scattered throughout the world Jews had become. He contemplated adopting Islam, but rejected that, too. Why did he reject Islam? Because Prince Vladimir knew that no Russian man could ever be happy without alcohol. Then he remembered Cyril and Methodius. He admired them for being men whose intellect sharpened their faith and their ability to drink wine and solve difficult maths problems. He recalled, too, their reverence of icons, which were known to produce miracles on the battlefield. And this was the deciding point for Vladimir. He believed in miracles almost as much as he loved playing chess and drinking vodka. So Orthodoxy it was, and a very good choice, too. Just think,' Tanya leaned forward, her finger outstretched in a gesture she'd borrowed from Lukeria, 'what would have happened a hundred years later to the men of Novgorod under attack by the Suzdalites if the priest had not carried the icon Our Lady of the Sign into battle. The outnumbered and ill-equipped inhabitants of Novgorod would have been slaughtered. When the first arrows flew across the battlefield, one of them struck the icon, lodging into Mary's eye. The priest, leaving the arrow as it was, lifted the icon high overhead. The men of Suzdal took one look at that image of Mary, bleeding from her eye, and were blinded, down to the last man.'