'My, dear. Are you all right?' Now the mother had her moist hand on Tanya's wrist. Tanya felt her face going to fire again. But there was something comforting in that warm hand on her arm; she didn't want the mother—Livia? Lidia?—to withdraw her touch, so motherly, so genuine the urgent concern signalled in the pressure of her hand.
Tanya brought a paper napkin to her mouth. 'Fine,' she mumbled behind the greasy veil of paper. The girl and the grandmother had averted their gazes, startled and embarrassed by Tanya's hunger exposed.
Tanya gathered her notebook. Her museum senses fully engaged, her script galloping at full speed, she stood and brushed greasy crumbs from her lap.
'Perhaps you'd like to see the basement now. It contains the hat/coat-check room as you know, and then, of course, our famous Permian rock exhibit. Then there's the last exhibit, a real crowd-pleaser and my personal favourite.' Tanya smiled wide, wider, until the tall girl could not bear her faulty Slavic dentition any longer. Numbly the women followed her through the corridor and down the narrow staircase to the basement where Ludmilla sat coughing.
Tanya held a finger to her lips. 'Peter the Great was great for many reasons: his love of starting and finishing wars, building up the fleet and opening new ports. But he also possessed a boundless curiosity for the sciences and in his lifetime he amassed marvellous collections of animals, insects, flora and fauna. One of his oddest collections is now housed in the Kuntskamera building in St Petersburg and people travel hundreds of miles just to see it. Unfortunately, we could in no way obtain the original collection, and therefore we worked very hard to recreate specimen by specimen a reproduction of the famous Kuntskamera collection.' Tanya tiptoed into the darkened room and switched on the torches. Then she gestured as elegantly as she knew towards the glowing orange liquid exhibit.
The women circled the exhibit slowly. Tanya knew that she wasn't the only one who looked at these interrupted bodies and tried to complete them: a week's worth of fingerprints spanned the glass. In the wood veneer schoolchildren had traced their names in the dust. Their own names, or the names they would have given these foetuses had they been real, had they lived, Tanya did not know.
Tanya leaned her forehead against the glass and peered at two tiny bodies, the one climbing over the back of the other, and not a head to share between them. They were beautiful in their excess, beautiful in their lack. They were a good idea split in the middle and gone wrong. And Tanya couldn't help feeling that warm maternal swell behind her chest. Not cloud, this time, but love, the genuine article.
'Horrible.' The girl turned her back to the exhibit.
'They're absolutely monstrous,' the grandmother breathed. Her jaw hung slack in astonishment. 'Why in the world would anyone collect them?'
Tanya's stomach bunched and dropped. With effort she forced the words. 'For instructive purposes, I think.'
'But what on earth could be learned from collecting deformed foetuses and displaying them in glass jars?' The grandmother's repulsion knew no bounds.
'It's so sad,' the mother said.
'They're not real,' Tanya said. 'Just stretchy foam replicas.'
'I'm going to be sick,' the girl mumbled.
'The toilets!' Tanya's heart leapt within her chest. 'You must visit our toilets, then. They are of superior design. They're Finnish and absolutely stunning.'
'I think we've seen enough,' the grandmother said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Olga
'Olga Semyonovna!' Chief Editor Kaminsky barked from the open door of the Red Star translation office. His face was flushed but the lobes of his ears looked pale as puffball mushrooms. The two major strands of his hair stood at attention. 'Good news. I'm not going to fire you on account of that most unusual report—you know the one I'm talking about.' Here, Chief Editor Kaminsky attempted to rein in his hair, pressing the dark strands against the crown of his head. 'Bad news is, I have to let you go anyway. It seems the press has run out of ink.' Behind the sound of his words the tubes howled and shrieked. 'Yes, it's a complete mystery -even to those of us who know things—but that is the position we are in. And because I in no way want to appear capricious or feckless I'm letting you go, too, Arkady.' Chief Editor Kaminsky handed over the termination slips, small as postage stamps and completely devoid of ink. 'Believe me when I say I will write the most glowing of recommendations for both of you should you seek employment with another newspaper.'
Olga drifted to the windows, spread her hands over the smoky glass. Arkady stood at the desk, looking at Olga. Below her the print drums slowly turned. Editor-in-Chief Mrosik's braying, steady as the honk of a swishy Mafiya sedan in panic mode, rattled the window. Behind them the wind howled through the pneumatic tubes. Olga's wedding ring was somewhere whizzing through these tubes. Also a glass eye belonging to that copy-editor they were under no circumstances to mention by name. And yet, hearing these noises, the sounds of her world as she knew it falling about her ears, made the fleeting trumpet blasts of Editor-in-Chief Mrosik, the quick exit of Chief Editor Kaminsky, strangely comforting.
'What next?' Olga's breath fogged the window.
Arkady smiled. 'We go.'
***
'Perhaps you could show us something of the city. A monument or something,' the grandmother suggested. They stood outside the museum. Head Administrator Chumak's shiny pate appeared from behind his office window. Tanya could almost hear him clasping and unclasping his hands.
After all, we are as interested in the museum environs as we are in the museum,' the mother said, attempting to interject bright tones into her words.
The spikes of the girl's hair had started to droop. The sky turned wet and wobbled. The cottonwoods, oh how Tanya hated them, exhaled their white fluff. It was called Stalin's snow, but she preferred to think of it as the Devil's dandruff. If she had a match, she'd set it all on fire. Instead she sneezed. The grandmother groped for a tissue.
'I could show you a war cemetery,' Tanya said between sneezes. 'It's quite green this time of year and very popular with newlyweds.'
A central concrete walkway divided the cemetery into two halves and low cement jetties rising from the grass separated one massive plot from another. The dead were buried in groups of hundreds and large stone slabs in front of each plot noted the year and month each group had died. Except for the stone slabs standing no higher than Tanya's knee, there were no other markers. Just the stand of birch which had gone from their characteristic whips and tails to tiny new leaves of a shade of green Tanya could only call hesitant. And, of course, the grass. Long, wide swathes of it, verdant and lush, vibrantly alive as only grass fed by the dead can ever become.
Orchestral music blared from speakers strategically located in the linden trees. This prevented serious discussion unless it was carried at a shout. Tanya scrambled for her notebook. An inopportune moment, perhaps, but surely a little scribble here, a little scribble there could do no harm.
The bones of your grandfather, the one who worked in the silver mine and survived only to die of black lung and the bones of my great grandmother who was taken in the middle of the night for singing seditious songs about saints, perhaps they