Tanya noted that the women had a trapped look about them, the daughter's gaze lifting to the illuminated exit sign.
'The cross is mightier than the sword, is that what you're saying?' the grandmother asked, peering at the icon.
Tanya, still mindful of her teeth, smiled carefully. 'Exactly. Not only are holy relics potent salves, but when used properly, powerful weapons as well.'
'Do you believe miracles can happen—even today?' the mother asked, her wet eyes searching Tanya's.
'Oh, yes. Each of these icons is a miracle,' Tanya breathed, squaring her shoulders to the icons. Because here's the strange thing: she meant exactly what she said. When she stood there among the faux icons she herself had lovingly crafted out of gutter flashing and chewing gum, she did not see the silver halos she'd fashioned from the wrapper of the many chocolate bars she'd eaten. Nor did she see the used toothpicks that radiated in all directions from baby Jesus' head which spoke of his sharp radiance. When she stood here she saw the icons as they were intended to be perceived—masterful copies of the copies shown in her art books and duplicated on her assortment of museum postcards. And looking at these icons and paintings with this hope-infused vision, they were not cheap, amateurish attempts, but the real thing. Like the subjects they depicted, these items were made of humble stock but in all ways suggested the divine.
The grandmother squinted, touched her finger to the gold frame. 'Is this cardboard?'
Tanya grimaced. 'Cardboard of the highest quality. The Director knows a man who knows a manufacturer of high-end cardboard picture frames.'
The mother tapped a fingernail at the glorious cloud of effervescence backing Our Lady of the Sign. 'And this?'
'Tobacco stains.'
'And this?' The girl leaned toward a mosaic made entirely of chewing gum.
'I wouldn't touch that one,' Tanya warned.
The third-floor tour complete, Tanya escorted the women to the second floor, where she extolled the virtues of each shabby exhibit, including the rooms full of pseudo antiquities and indigenous art, comprised chiefly of faded wooden spoons, and then to the mezzanine where a four-metre iron Yermak loomed in chain mail. Yermak was the last in a long line of busts and partial busts, and because this replica was intact—except for his axe, which went missing sometime last year—Tanya felt expansive. If only she could explain why Yermak, though a Cossack and therefore a savage, was so wonderful and terrible and terribly important, hacking hip and thigh through other more savage savages to extend Russia's borders, then she would have accomplished something, however small. And so she talked, as expansively as possible, until the women could take no more.
The grandmother folded her arms across her small chest. 'Such hard and cruel people,' she said, her voice conveying admiration or nostalgia, Tanya could not say for sure which.
Tanya stretched her upper lip across her upper teeth, carefully, carefully. 'History is not carried in the smile, but in the teeth.'
'What does that mean, exactly?' the mother asked.
'To be frank, I am not completely certain. But it is a statement that frequently appears in the history exams,' Tanya conceded.
***
Inside the museum café Tanya stood at the counter and paid for their lunch order: pelmyeni, pirogi, small bowls of borscht. She felt proud of herself that she had resisted the urge to load the tray with tumblers of vodka and sweets—a typical breakfast for those far too young to quit working and too old to give a serious thought to their figure. Tanya carried the trays to a table where the women waited.
'Try the pelmyeni,' Tanya said. 'They're quite good, even by museum standards.'
'What is it?' The mother reached for one and took a bite.
'They're like dumplings with meat, and the pirogi is like a meat pie, usually with ham and with onions.'
The girl eyed the plate. 'This world is a cruel one for animals.'
'She won't eat meat,' the mother said.
Or anything else, for that matter. For nothing on the trays — not even the borscht, which was primarily a winter root vegetable dish, nor the horseradish-tongue-mayonnaise salad — met with the girl's approval.
'Vegans don't eat any product that is derived from an animal,' the girl explained wearily
The mother reached for another pelmyeni. 'Also she's developed an allergic reaction to those things.'
'Ah,' Tanya nodded.
The grandmother swallowed a spoonful of borscht. 'But you may have noticed that she wears make-up.'
The girl rolled her eyes. 'That's different.' She stood and with one hand slid the waistband of her jeans past a hip. 'My body is my art.'
Tanya blinked. And what a canvas! A winged horse, not at all unlike the Chestnut Grey, spanned the small of her back, the strong wings unfurling over her hip and the hooves dipping into the dark crevice of her rump. The girl hiked her jeans over her hips, turned and bent at the waist. Her shirt gaped open and between her breasts, for everyone to see, a red rose. All in all the horse and rose looked pretty good now, but Tanya had to wonder how well the wings would hold up, how long that short stem rose would grow over the next twenty years. Skin, by and large, made a poor medium, the tensile capacity being woefully comprised when a woman hits her forties and sometimes, Tanya sighed, much sooner.
Finally, the girl sat down.
'She's always making a spectacle of herself,' the grandmother said through a fierce smile.
'What about you?' The mother sipped at her tea. 'You must be some kind of artist or something - you know so much about the exhibits. And there's that very interesting notebook you carry with you.'
Tanya's face burned. She gratefully accepted the mother's query as a way to salvage the lunch break.
She could say she wanted to write pliant phrases that hummed bright and vibrant; to do with words what the masters did with colour and placement, painting a dot of red next to a dot of blue and in this way allowing the viewer's gaze to turn the eyes of the angels violet. There were the clouds, her dreams of flight. And then, of course, she wanted to be everywhere Yuri was. But these were not the things she could say aloud, not what people want to hear about even when they assure you that they do.
Tanya rubbed her hand over the colour notebook and smiled bashfully. 'Colour is life. It's how we bend light into laughs. And also shades of weeping.' She could feel her own face burning, could not bear to bring her gaze to the woman's and settled instead on turning to the girl's untouched food.
'I couldn't possibly eat this,' the girl said, pushing the bowls in front of Tanya. The potential waste. That's what provoked her instantaneous steady rhythm between spoon and bowl. And then her thoughts - they were not arty at all, not focused. Too fascinated she was by the intricacies of motherhood and daughterhood. It was all so foreign to her and yet within elbow's reach, jostling against her, played out across the table top. Tanya's furry eyebrows beaded into tight concentration. The parries and barbs between grandmother and granddaughter, the quick looks of irritation, the silent nudge of the salt and pepper packets across the table. Is this what it meant to love and be loved, or at least to care about one another? Oh, how Tanya wished she could know. How she wanted to ask this mother whose wide open cornflower gaze suggested the best of all Tanya had read and wanted to believe to be true about wide open Western benevolence. Tanya's stomach seized and rolled. Oh, how desire is so terrible when it is served up before you and you are so terribly hungry. She reached for another bowl of borscht.