Fundamental particle: A particle with no internal substructure. In the standard model the quarks lepton, photons, muons, W+, W—Bosons are fundamental. All other objects are made from these. It is pointless to ask how.
Olga re-emerged from the non-functioning lift and began the long climb up the steps to the fourth floor. When she reached the translation office, she stood at the threshold, out of breath, her bosom heaving, the straps of her plastic bag—every working woman's purse and briefcase—digging into the flesh of her hands. She was waiting for the jabbing pain behind her ribs to ease into a dull ache. Only then could she start breathing normally. Olga sucked in her stomach and eased her backside onto her metal folding chair stationed behind a small metal desk.
Absurdity no. 2
The desk...
...would be ample, spacious even, if she didn't have to share it with Arkady, who was at this very moment on his hands and knees fumbling with the power cord to the hot plate. For nearly twenty years—Olga sitting on one side and Arkady the other—they had shared bad jokes, flu remedies, family secrets and access to the enormous Topic Guide, a bulwark of a book fastened to the centre of the desk by a thick chain. They spent the better part of each day trying not to nudge or bump knees or trample each other's feet. Difficult to do, as Olga, rounded and padded, in every way resembled more and more a matryoshka. Yes, she was fat. And where she had extra padding, Arkady had none. Arkady had the look of a deprived dog, painfully thin, abused by this life and well aware of it. And where Olga had henna-dyed hair, the only colour of dye she could get, Arkady's hair was a dull brick red salted with grey. This hair—curly no less—together with his slightly olive skin tone, was further visual confirmation of Arkady's line-five nationality status of Jew.
The hotplate plugged in and a small kettle balanced on the plate, Arkady—now repositioned behind the desk—passed gas with gusto. For a long time they sat ignoring the robust odour and looking at the large windows that afforded an expansive view of the rolling paper wheels and cutting blades of the newspaper work floor.
Ach!' Arkady scratched a circular bruise on his forearm that bore the distinct look of a full set of bite marks. He did this, Olga knew, when he was feeling nostalgic and thinking of his wife, who had run off nearly thirty years ago. She woke in the middle of the night and bit Arkady on the arm and in other places unmentionable and then went dashing off—nude—into the forest, where she later contracted rabies and died.
'Oy!' Now Arkady ran his fingers through what remained of his hair.
Olga peered around the Topic Guide, a dictionary of military, economic, and ethnic and cultural nomenclature.
'I thought we agreed last week that we wouldn't discuss our family problems,' she said, pushing the Memos that Can't Be Ignored to Arkady's side of the desk. Arkady sniffed and pushed them back. This was part of their daily ritual which over the course of twenty years they had groomed and perfected as a married couple who, so accustomed to one another, had little need to actually speak to one another. The physical arrangement of the office space only reinforced their protracted silences; the super-sized Topic Guide created a metre-high barrier between them, while an oversize wire egg basket dangling from the particle board made eye contact almost impossible.
Absurdity no. 3
The wire basket.
...was, according to Arkady, God's way of reminding them to be humble and keep their heads lowered. He said this because by the end of any given day, Olga, in a hurry for the lavs, would stand too quickly and bash her head into the basket at least five times, usually six. For this reason Olga deduced that the basket was Chief Editor Kaminsky's idea of a practical joke. Or perhaps it was the visual representation of a rusty metaphor straining too hard for the literal. The basket, Chief Editor Kaminsky told her all those years ago on her first day of work, had been salvaged from a defunct Kolkoz farm. It was now meant to inspire a sense of nostalgia for all things lost, which included but was not limited to the collective farms and perhaps the memory of the former brilliance of the collective Soviet state. That is to say, a time when the shops had butter and sausage and workers like her had just enough money to buy some of it. Olga could still remember that first day when Chief Editor Kaminsky tapped the basket with his corrector's blue pen. 'This is why Red Star workers shouldn't mind working for little or no pay. Sacrifice is the stone that paves the road to glory.' Olga couldn't see the connection between the oversize wire basket and their empty wallets, but Chief Editor Kaminsky seemed untroubled by her confusion. In all honesty, it had been hard enough for her to pay any attention to his words. Everything about Chief Editor Kaminsky's appearance reminded her of an editing sample gone awry. He had two typesetter's bushy insertion marks—sharp mountains—for eyebrows. He was entirely bald except for two long patches of hair—exclamation points—that he tried to subdue with hair dressing. But when he walked the two swatches flopped this way and that. And his eyes! Olga had always believed the tired cliché that the eyes were the window to the soul, an invitation to look and contemplate. But in Chief Editor Kaminsky's mercury-coloured irises, a strange non-reactive colour, Olga could not read a thing.
'Do you see what I mean?' Chief Editor Kaminsky asked, his hands joined behind his back and his pear-shaped body swaying from side to side, his whole body marking the time of his words.
'No. Not at all,' Olga admitted.
Chief Editor Kaminsky smiled. 'You don't understand now,' he rocked on his heels, 'but you will. Later.'
And Olga bobbed her head in assent. It was, perhaps, the longest conversation they'd ever had. And ever since then, each morning, as if by magic, new assignments appeared in the basket which swung, ever so slightly, as if gently pushed by an invisible hand.
The items that found their way to the basket ranged from Letters to the Editor, to soft features like local weather reports and current events (last week she translated the election results of the Magadan Oblast, where a dog had been elected mayor, and from the Amur region, with its sightings of werewolves in nightgowns), to 'work-on-the-left' assignments. The Letters to the Editor, very often discussions of opinions regarding such volatile matters as foreign policy or ethics in time of war, were promptly gathered and trundled off to the women's lavs where they were recycled in a most environmentally sound and utilitarian fashion. That is, they were used for toilet paper. The soft features she and Arkady had permission to translate as transparently as they wished. Harder to handle were the work-on-the-left assignments, which were given, she knew, as a way to generate a little extra money to keep the newspaper afloat in these unbuoyant times. But here again, more absurdity; the translators—that is, Olga and Arkady—never saw a single rouble for all their troubles.
For this reason, when these left-work assignments arrived mysteriously in the egg basket, it was Arkady and Olga's long-established habit to leave them exactly where they lay in the hopes that Editor-in-Chief Mrosik would forget he'd assigned them in the first place. The curled yellowed pages lining the bottom of the basket were, in fact, the text of a children's primer. It had been in the basket for well over a year and Olga knew why: they had been asked to rewrite the history portions so that they more accurately reflected an interpretation of events everyone could more comfortably live with. This, she knew, would involve constant consultation of the massive Topic Guide. Every news agency had such a guide, which was really a hernia-inducing dictionary replete with recommendations to the media on how to describe or define various terms. Certain phrases like 'protest demonstrations', 'miners' hunger strike', 'freedom of speech' and 'banking crisis' had no alternate suggestion and therefore were forbidden nomenclature, having been classified as 'Pointless in the context of the editorial mission and policies of a paper such as the Red Star.'