But these expansive feelings of near-contentedness she kept to herself. She'd seen the way the other women in the building looked at her. She knew what they were saying and thinking. For at least two reasons, maybe three, she knew she was considered very bad luck. In the city where she was born people who tended latrines or graveyards were always considered the worst kind of bad luck. The rumour, according to her mother, who knew all the old stories and understood how people thought, was that only jinns—genies—lived or worked in such places. This was why people who work at public rest-rooms or who keep latrines were never invited to share prayers, were never the guest of unexpected hospitality, as the worst thing that could happen to a devout believer—whatever his brand of religion—was to inadvertently shake hands over the threshold with a jinn. Because jinns, made of fire and air and longing to be more human, will leap into any body they can touch. This was why the faithful hung knotted ropes from their doorways. Why knowledgeable Orthodox Russians arranged fish bones in the shape of a cross over their front and back doors. Why a rabbi blessed the entry way of a home belonging to a Jew anytime a member of the family has used an outdoor latrine or walked past a cemetery. Why Azade's father and mother, good people both of them, were never asked into the homes of their neighbours.
It's why even now, living here in this nearly abandoned apartment building where everyone was almost as poor and as desperate as she, her status was of the lowest sort. No matter what she might say or do, she, regardless of her silver hair—her dignity - plaited and wound around her head and covered by a bright cap, she was and would always be considered a dikii, a savage.
This must be why Lukeira spoke to her as if she were a small child, her words over-enunciated and loud, though Azade's hearing and understanding of Russian was nearly perfect. In fact, she felt like Russian was her second skin, though when she wore it, it chafed against the mountain skin underneath. Scratch a Russian and you'll find a Tatar. This is a true saying and one more reason the other women of the building didn't like her: she had wide-set eyes and dark skin and nothing, she knew, could make her more suspect. It didn't matter to them that Azade could write Russian as fine as the next person. It did not matter to them that she could curse in Ossetian and bless in Kumyk, those fibrous languages of mud and straw. Nor was anyone impressed that she knew how to read the moods of her goat, Koza, by observing the movement of his ears. She could speak the language of dogs. She knew what they thought about while they slept, what extraordinary soil their feet ploughed during their dreams. From her mother who taught her to read the Urals, she learned how to gauge sunset by the lengthening of shadowfall, and by the smell of the dust she could tell how many days they'd been without rain. She had learned from her mother, too, who took her to the banya where she worked, that other women did not care about these things. Nobody talked about shadows and rainfall, clouds or mountains. Who looked up to the mountains when the very earth beneath their feet was so unsteady?
'It's this ground,' her mother whispered into her dark hair. 'It's sour. Full of sulphurous gas. And the Kama—pure poison.' That was Perm in those days. A closed city, a red circle on the map. A city of fly ash and coal, salt and tanks, bicycle parts and sighting mechanisms. Smoking hills of mine waste. A city of bad luck.
Just think bad luck and it is sure to find you. That was another jinn saying her own mother told her, and Azade believed it, for around the toppled stone archway strolled her boy Vitek. Boy!—he was almost thirty, and every day he was the biggest heartbreak of her life. Never lifting a finger to help. And here he came, out of breath and reeking of alcohol. And this at eight-thirty in the morning.
'Good news!' Vitek waved a newspaper. 'Given the estimated increase in human population, and hence the increase of human shit, latrine-sitting will be a growth industry.'
'So everything will stink more. That is good news.' Azade swept her twig broom over the tops of Vitek's shoes.
'Yes, but you're forgetting the principles of supply and demand. The price people will pay for the privilege of stinking with privacy will rise.'
'Why?'
'Because it just will. It's so simple, really. Instead of charging ten kopeks, we'll start charging a rouble—maybe even two.'
Vitek jostled the handle of the locked latrine.
'One square or two?' Azade held up the wad of paper.
'Two.'
'Two roubles, then,' Azade said with a smile and Vitek stomped through the frozen courtyard. One by one, the kids left the heap and followed Vitek through the stairwell, where they reappeared on the roof. The oldest child, a ten-year-old girl, made crude gestures, while the next oldest child, a boy with dark red hair, and Vitek dropped their trousers. Jets of urine arced from the roof and froze mid-air, falling to the ground in hard amber drops.
Azade whisked the urine into a pile under Lukeria's window, trudged back to her latrine and sat on the toilet with a loud sigh. Vitek. A disappointment, sure. But it was her fault he turned out the way he did. Vitek's trouble started with her, because his trouble, her trouble, was merely a continuation of older troubles, which all began so long ago it was as if they had no beginning because there was never a time when they didn't already exist. And when Azade thought trouble—her trouble, his trouble—she started with the city of her birth, Ordzhonikidze. Some people called it Dzaudzhikau and on Russian maps it was called Vladikavkaz. In her mind it was a city of changing names, a city of changed people, a city she only knew because other people knew it first. Her father described it so many times she felt like it was she, not her father, who hollowed out the graves for good Muslims with a backhoe. Because he told her in such painstaking detail about his days spent turning the dark earth over—the oily smell of clay and the eyeless fish turning beneath their mantles of mud - she felt certain it was she, not he, who listened to those fish quietly marking the minutes and days of each season. She felt certain that it was she, not he, who carefully notched the graves so that the bodies lay on a burial shelf and so that she could stand in the hole with them, her hands clasped in front of her chest. And it was she who bowed to the heaven and to the earth, and toward the Arab countries where their religion, which nobody in her family had ever pretended to completely understand, had come from. It was she, not her father, who wound the bodies in the white cloth and, after placing the body so that the head faced west, intoned the old burial prayers, words they needed to hear to have a proper send-off.
And because her mother told her about the open bins of cracked coriander, cumin and dried sage, mustard, the stalls of watermelon and cabbage, Azade felt like it had been she, not her mother, who had bartered in the open-air meat market. She who heard the Jewish dogs, who were wiser than the other dogs, bark first at the women with long blue skirts and smart-looking glasses handing out political leaflets. Well, why not? Her mother would say: theirs was still an open city, and as such it was a meeting place, a crossroads in the mountain. Stand at the crossroads and ask what is the good way and follow it. Good mountain advice and in those days the passes were unregulated. Kamyks, Laks, Uzbeks, Georgians, Chechens—even leaflet-distributing Russians—crossed freely from one mountain territory to another. If you were healthy enough for a mountain crossing, nobody stopped you. It was like this through the strange days of the thirties, until that terrible war. Then the city was no longer called Ordzhonikidze, but Dzaudzhikau. Then came soldiers. Security officers. Until then, her mother explained, they had not known they were part of a people's union of soviets. And when her father, a proud man and a fighter at heart, had heard there was a war, he attempted to enlist. Her mother told her this so carefully Azade could see in vivid detail the enrolling officer's amused but weary smile. 'Nyet,' the officer said, pointing to a sheet of paper tacked to the wall. People of questionable ethnicity—that is, anyone who was not originally from northern Russia—were to serve their country by relocating. The officer explained then that the spot had already been picked out for them. The sudden understanding that he would be a stranger wherever he went, that he was considered a stranger already in his own town, was almost too much for her father to take.