Tanya wrinkled her nose.
Vitek slid the vial back into his coat. 'In that case, I'll come to the point quickly, and incidentally,' Vitek pulled at a greasy forelock, 'I beg your pardon for bringing up the indelicate matter of money.'
Tanya glanced at the city inspector's yellow line of tape. 'You can't collect rent on a condemned building.'
'You aren't supposed to be living in a condemned building.' Vitek shrugged. 'You see the difficult position I'm in.'
'But you live in this building, too. So does your mother.'
'It's a complication, all right.' Vitek smiled.
Lukeria threw open a window. Autocracy! Nationality! Orthodoxy!' she shouted, her voice as subtle as a poke in the eye. It was an old saying, something Lukeria liked to shout whenever she saw Tanya talking to anyone she considered suspicious, a saying that marked Lukeria as completely anti-cosmopolitan in her leanings. Which was to say, Lukeria didn't like Jews, Gypsies, Asians, or anyone not personally known to her for less than forty years. Which was to say, living in this building with Yuri and Olga, Jews both, Azade and Mircha, Muslims railed in from the Caucasus, and Vitek, whose facial features hinted at Mongol inclinations, Lukeria was completely friendless.
Vitek rolled his eyes toward the windows and snorted. 'We all have to listen to that, you know.'
Tanya pressed her mouth into a flat line, handed over a crumpled ten-rouble note, and turned for the stairs. The problem with her grandmother was that she sincerely believed that if orthodoxy should ever fall, the world would collapse with it, that it was the secret reservoir of the faithful that had kept the heart of Mother Russia beating during all these troubled years. And according to Lukeria, it was an orthodox sun that shone quietly over their cold land, an orthodox light that provided the necessary illumination to properly see this world by, though most people did not even know it.
But on evenings like these, Tanya wished her grandmother would progress with the times. They were, after all, new Russians, no matter what the red-browns and other reactionaries were saying. All you had to do was look around and you could see times had changed and in ways none of them had ever imagined. Now a hundred grams of cheese cost fifty roubles instead of ten. The rise and fall of inflation could be tracked in the price of chewing gum and chocolates, the morale of the country measured by the price of vodka, which was never more than the price of bread. And where old pensioners like Mircha and her grandmother once could count on a monthly salary, it was now up to the new Russians like Tanya, who made less than the workers at the western-style coffee shops, to look after their own. No wonder her grandmother was so nostalgic for the past.
'Doors!' Lukeria shouted from her perch at the window. It was an orthodox greeting meant to hurry Tanya from the corridor lest the Devil come in on a draught and blow out the candle.
Tanya scuttled into the apartment. She kicked her boots off, and looped her scarf and her plastic bag with Head Administrator Chumak's file over a nail in the wall. Then she folded her coat and carried it to the claw-footed bath where they kept all their necessary clothing.
Lukeria squinted at the dark window. 'Who was the first exile to Siberia?' Tanya shuffled into the kitchen, where she put the kettle on the ring. 'The bell of Tobolsk,' Tanya said. This was the beginning of a long catechism of calls and responses, a test designed to gauge Tanya's appreciation of all things orthodox.
'Seven hundred pounds it weighed when it was cast. Six hundred and eighty after Boris Godunov had it flogged and its clapper ripped out. Exiled to Tobolsk, it sits silent, still forbidden to ring.'
The point of the bell Tanya couldn't quite follow, only that making a lot of noise and suffering for it later seemed an integral part of orthodoxy. The kettle shrieked. Tanya poured hot water over the strainer, aligned cup and saucer, and walked, as carefully as a trained high-wire artist, to where her grandmother brooded. Tanya placed the teacup on top of the steamer trunk that doubled as their supper table, then slid the thin Bible Lukeria liked to use as a coaster under the saucer. This Bible had been given to Tanya by some Baptist minister at the bus station. Because of this, even though the Bible was the verbal icon of Christ, Lukeria announced that it could be used for any domestic purpose except biblical study.
Lukeria slid her chair closer to the tiny fortochka, a small hinged glass pane lodged at the corner of the larger window. It opened separately, a convenience Tanya appreciated, as large-boned girls like her tended to wilt on winter days inside the apartment where the central heating could not be adjusted. Her grandmother, she knew, kept the fortochka cracked open less for Tanya's benefit than for her own: Lukeria sat here to smoke and the open window allowed for convenient eavesdropping on all courtyard conversations. But Lukeria was hard of hearing and the only help available was a toilet-bowl plunger, the bulb of which she'd dismantled and now held to her ear so that she could shamelessly listen in on Olga's Sabbath preparations that wafted up from her downstairs kitchen window, which was also opened a crack. On this night - a gasp from the matches, the lighting of candles, and then the prayer, musical words in a language Tanya did not know.
Tanya tipped her head listening to the plaintive sound of Olga's voice. Lukeria leaned to the window and her features seemed to soften. It may have been the effect of the words. Or maybe it was the way that the yellow orthodox glow of the candlelight made all things more beautiful in the textured bathy haze.
'Jews. They pray well enough.' Lukeria leaned and lit a cigarette from the candle's flame, inhaled deeply. 'Still,' she spoke on the exhale, a long ribbon of blue wafting from her mouth, 'I am sick to death of hearing about their problems. Their persecution. Their obsession with history. If they are so unhappy, they should not be living here. After all, Perm is the heart of orthodoxy. Perm is the bear that carries the orthodox cross on its back, the great white bear that will rise up with a roar.'
'Hmmmmm.' Tanya opened her sky notebook. Most evenings Lukeria's words were easy for Tanya to dismiss. Words of a woman whose world was one of diminished proportion that had collapsed to a single point: this apartment, those suitcases, her trunk full of letters and that newspaper.
'There are, after all, other cities people can live in, these days. Jews don't have to stay here and be persecuted anymore if they don't want to be persecuted.' Lukeria's voice fell to a distant rumble, a hollow knocking that became one and the same with the thuds and pings of the heating pipes.
'Who says they're the only ones on the whole planet who have suffered? Does anyone ask me what I lived through during that war? I was seven. I watched my mother starve. We ate book binding and wallpaper paste. Does anyone ask me about it?'
Tanya kept her pencil moving over the open page of her notebook. 'No,' Tanya said dully. 'Nobody asks.'
'Who decided some people's suffering was more insufferable than other people's?' Lukeria pushed her chin towards the window pane and the skin of her neck pulled tight. 'It makes me want to choke.'
Instead Lukeria began to cough. And cough. Her face turned violet. Tanya ran for the bottled water kept for such emergencies.
'Do you want me to call Father Vyacheslav?' Tanya held the water to Lukeria's lips.
Lukeria batted it away with surprising strength. 'Him!' she spluttered. 'How can I trust a priest whose beard hasn't even grown in properly?'
'It's not his fault. He's only twenty-one.'
'Exactly.' Lukeria's nickel-coloured eyes bore holes into Tanya's. 'Young people don't know anything anymore. And I don't want him anywhere near me.'
Lukeria stood and Tanya assisted her to the shabby fold-out couch. Divan, Lukeria preferred to call it, a more nostalgic nomenclature suggesting elegance and culture they'd both read about in books but had never actually experienced. To this end, Lukeria had collected fragments of lace and doilies and scattered them like cobwebs over the back and arms of the couch. And now, creak by groan, she slowly lowered herself onto the fold-out.