'You know, Tanyenchka, the real problem of this world is that there are simply too many people living on it.' Lukeria's voice trailed after her like a noxious vapour. 'Why should we all try to get along? What use is that? Where does it say that we should all like, or, God forbid, love one another? Let's say someone annoys me like an old headache, then just answer me this: why should I have to start liking them? Doesn't that strike you as false?' Now Lukeria lay on her left side so as to regain her air.
Tanya tucked a blanket around Lukeria's bony shoulders. These things she said came as a result of seeing and knowing more than a person ought to, of ageing quickly and alone, and with a heightened sense of how little time she had left. All of this, in turn, provoked a terrible need to deliver every scathing remark and cutting observation she'd quietly kept to herself through the years, lest she'd not get another chance.
These things she said, harsh as they sounded in Tanya's ear, were like the old church bells that could be heard every now and then if the wind blew just right; the deep tolling was not a pretty sound, but there was something to the low tones that seemed true and right and somehow beyond question.
Who said to love one another? Well, Jesus. But where was he right now? In heaven, loving everybody and loved by everybody. And here the rest of us were, waiting down below. And what had we been commanded to do while we waited? Love love love. Where were we supposed to go to get this extra love? And what an enormous burden, this business of loving, especially when Tanya had worn herself out loving people who wouldn't or couldn't love her back. Especially when she herself had been given so little, she could ill afford to part with any extra.
Tanya withdrew the application envelope from her plastic purse and returned to her chair at the window. It was hard to read the instructions, what with only one candle to read by and it guttering already. She squinted at the first question.
1. If you were stranded on an island and were allowed to have with you three pieces of art, which pieces would you choose and why?
Tanya blinked. She flipped the paper over in disbelief. This could not possibly be the correct application form. Perhaps this was Head Administrator Chumak's idea of a joke, and yet, there was no mistaking the dead earnest tone in his voice, no questioning how very important it was that she complete this application form, and satisfactorily. Tanya skipped Question One and read the next question.
2. Describe what team spirit and cooperation mean to you.
She could read English as well as the next person, but this was not the English she'd learned in books. Tanya shook her head slowly from side to side, her eyes stinging with tears.
CHAPTER THREE
Azade
Because Perm was the fifth, coldest city in all of Russia, it was certainly as cold as the Daghestani uplands or North Ossetia, the places where Azade's family had originally come from. Too cold to make a ground burial possible. Especially if you didn't have a backhoe, and Azade did not have a backhoe. Nor did she have a pick, trowel or spade. She had a smallish-sized shovel and this nyuzhnik, the Little Necessary, also known as the latrine—small mercies each. If she really wanted to sit down and take a rest she could; she was in custody of the only key and had the broad authority to use as many squares of tissue paper as she might need. Another comfort: mornings like these when the temperature was a near balmy minus fifteen degrees Celsius, the warmer fumes rising up from the latrine made a small dent in the otherwise flat landscape of cold. And here, in her little brown portable Necessary, she had all the time in the world to consider the gravity of her situation—namely, she had a dead husband to bury. A month had passed since Mircha's wake and Azade, a good wife, a respecter of people both dead and alive, was coming off the rails. When somebody died, her father always said the Al-Fatiha over the body. The Sura Al-Fatiha was only seven verses long, but Azade had never been able to learn it by heart. She was, after all, a girl, and unclean. In the mountains girls could pray by memory, but were not allowed to touch the Holy Book.
In the old days, in Vladikavkaz, where her father tended the Muslim graveyard, when somebody died all you had to do was go to the civil registry bureau and before the sun set that very day someone would send a truck around for the body. This the state did, her father explained, because in Vladikavkaz, a town divided between Ossetes—Armenian Christians, Orthodox Russians, Muslims and Jews—it was universally agreed that the worst thing you could do was to leave a body lying about, unburied. And Azade knew this because her father, who had studied mountain history so thoroughly that he received a PhD in the subject, told her how during the mountain wars, the famous Murid warriors would die trying to retrieve a body rather than let it remain above ground.
All this because the unburied were known to visit the living while they slept and bite them all over their bodies or scratch them with their long, claw-like fingernails. It's why, even if she were to travel to Moscow, even if she were to receive a pension so large as to allow such a journey to such an important city, she would not—repeat, not—visit Lenin's tomb. It was craziness—an invitation to disaster—to stuff such a man, paint him with make-up and display him like a puppet under glass. And what has come of it? Nothing but badness. The man still haunted the country, skating with his girl-sized feet into people's dreams, yes, between lovers in their beds. He wasn't biting and scratching, but his memory, and an inexplicable nostalgia for the man, was like yeast, constantly reasserting itself. In conversation. In recycled pedagogy and rusty ideas. In latent bigotries stirred by the crashing economies. Each passing day as Azade stood in the looming shadow of the apartment building, she heard that old ideology, which once was for her family the meaning of their toil and the substance of life, knock from window to wall and wall to window. Oh, yes, she was almost certain Lenin haunted Mircha in his last months. It was the only way she could explain his leap from the rooftop.
Azade stamped her feet and forced the blood to bite in her toes. So put the man to rest, she wanted to tell the world. The man was tired. His words were weary. Bury him, and we will all be better for it, she wanted to tell this new president of the New Federated Russia, whose troubles were really a predictable extension of older troubles that Lenin—for all his greatness and polished thoughts within his shiny head—could not have predicted, let alone prevented. Bury him. No, bury both of them, and quick. That's all she wanted. But it was winter already and she was old. Her joints hurt. The roots of her teeth ached in their sockets. Business at the latrine had fallen off in the sharp cold, the inhabitants of the building preferring to use pots than brave sub-zero temperatures for the courtyard latrine.
This struck Azade as somewhat unfair: she'd never overcharged anyone. She only asked for ten kopeks. Twenty kopeks if the visitor required the use of a socialist textbook or the napkins she pilfered from the pricey western coffee shop. Also she made sure to keep the lid of the commode shut, as the Devil looked for open holes to hide in. This was a service she provided for free. Most days it was lonely work, situated here at the far end of the courtyard under the frozen lime tree, and of course, no one was ever happy to see her, and under no circumstances did anyone touch her hands.
In mornings, if they came, Lukeria would arrive first, supported by her granddaughter Tanya, and a few minutes later Olga would appear. Always they walked with their heads down, their eyes trained on their boots. They were angry. They were broken. Their building had been without sewer service for over four months. They needed her Little Necessary, and this they found an embarrassment. Well, so did Azade. It never seemed right to her to make people pay for what a body naturally had to do. But it was a job, and it did have a certain appeal. This job got her out of the apartment. It kept her close to human warble and bustling and their careening stench. And here was a funny thing: when she sat on the cracked seat of the latrine, as, say, a queen on her throne, she was almost content. On her perch she could survey the entire courtyard, seeing without being seen. She could watch the street kids, all five of them, drift from window to window on the second floor where she'd laid out blankets and set out bowls of steaming kasha, and if she could find it, milk. She could keep on eye on her son, Vitek, lounging in the stairwell. And as long as she worked she was eligible for a pension and one doctor's visit per year. At least this is what Vitek, who fancied himself everyone's business advisor, said.