The Russian Dreambook Of Color and Flight

So who were they killing? Yuri asked the targeter. 'Looks like Russians,' he replied. And that was the moment Yuri remembered who he was, that boy who had only wanted to fish, who wanted in that moment to be anything but Russian. And when mortar rounds blew the tank in front of them and gunfire strafed the column of tanks behind them, there was Yuri, miraculously unharmed. Outwardly whole. But inwardly shattered. Shell shock, a triage field doctor pronounced—the last thing, in fact, Yuri could remember anybody saying. And then he was strapped in the open cockpit of a Black Tulip, body bags stuffed stem to stern in the small cargo hold behind him, the dark bags the last thing he remembered seeing.

And then the light crept in on tiptoe.

'What can you see?' the doctors asked, wiggling their fingers in front of his eyes.

'Fingers,' Yuri replied. 'And tracers ghosting arcs through the sky.'

'What do you hear?'

'Spookies hosing down the hills,' he'd answered. 'And a metronome.'

The doctor standing to Yuri's left exchanged a glance with the doctor standing to Yuri's right. And then, as the days passed, he began to hear a sound. Just one. Ticking. And he was recovered, the doctors said, but Yuri was not so sure. His head—it was full of problems—even now the broken radios from the heap spat and chattered at him in the too-familiar language of manoeuvres and codes, all of the noise jostling and colliding so that one problem (Zoya—will she ever be content living in an apartment without a toaster oven?) merged with another (Mother—will she ever be happy? Vitek—will he ever stop pestering me?) and he would give anything to return to that world absent of sound.

Yuri leaned against the thin railing. In the metal he imagined he could feel the vibrations of an aeroplane rumbling overhead. Below him the heap glinted with frost, glistened with hard and hurting objects. And the pile shone and sang and from up here it was not so hard to imagine the allure of a sudden jump.

Yuri cast his fishing wire over the rail and observed its fall and hook around the handle of a Latvian manufactured refrigerator.

'Pssst. Let me give you some advice.'

Yuri whirled on his feet. 'Who's that?'

Yuri watched dumbfounded as a green cockaded service hat crested the service hole. Beneath the hat was the familiar head and face of Mircha. His eyes glittered bright as he hoisted himself up onto the roof, never looking so hale and hearty as now.

Mircha coughed. A polite cough. 'Oh, I like this air. Not as pure as in the uplands, but still, it's good. Smells like snow,' Mircha pointed his nose east and inhaled deeply. The sleeve of Mircha's service coat inflated like a windsock. Mircha looked at the sleeve, then at Yuri. 'Two knots. From the north. Brisk. You know what this air makes me think of?'

Yuri could feel his mouth moving, but he wasn't making a sound, not even a squeak.

'Makes me think of those foil strips they used to drop from planes. Radar jammers. We were all wearing our winter whites and advancing the mountain pass. And silver fell from the clouds, a blizzard of tinsel, shimmering down to the snow.' Mircha looked at the sky then spat over the roof railing. 'Oh, those were confusing times. The good Russian sympathizers and the good ethnic Russians and the good Muslim Soviet citizens hard pressed into a civil faith in civil authorities, all for the common good. Oh, it hurts my liver just thinking of it. Can you imagine the confusion—Laks and Lezghins, and Uzbeks and Ingushetians, and Avars and Kumuks, all of us fighting side by side. We were to defend Soviet interests, which were our interests, we were told. No turning back, Moscow was behind us. So off we went to crush our neighbours. And what were they doing? Singing the zikr and dancing in front of our tanks. Their women and children, too. And goats! Utter chaos, I can tell you.' Mircha rubbed his stump. 'A goat can sing pretty good when it has to.'

Yuri squeezed his eyes shut. 'We laid you out a month ago. Why are you here?'

Mircha smiled a sheepish smile and shrugged. 'That's right. Ask me questions. Go on.'

'Why?'

'Because then I have to answer them.'

'Why?'

Mircha brightened. 'Now you're getting the idea. It's just the way these things work.'

'So, tell me again why you are here.'

'Because I'm not buried. I'm not happy. I'm not happily buried.' Mircha smiled, a lopsided smile. 'At least, I think that's my problem.'

'How's the fishing on the other side?'

Mircha shifted his weight from the bad leg to the good one. 'I don't know,' Mircha sighed. 'I want to fish, but I can't.'

Yuri frowned. 'Why not?'

Mircha hooked his chin towards the edge of the roof. 'Look. What do you see down there?'

Yuri leaned over the concrete barrier. 'There's the heap with the tank and my bike beside the heap.'

'And?' Mircha prodded.

'Snow.'

'Look there at the dark patch next to the heap.'

'Melted snow.'

Mircha groaned. 'Next to the melted snow, what do you see?'

'It looks very muddy from up here.'

Mircha pinched Yuri's neck. 'Look harder.'

Yuri squinted. 'A small trench. A fox hole, but deeper.' Yuri turned to Mircha. 'What's in there?'

Mircha smiled. 'Lost things.'

'Like what?'

Mircha rubbed his stump. 'Arms, maybe. Prosthetic. Pure titanium.'

'You've not been in?'

'No, genius. That's why I'm showing it to you. There's a rule about these things. Living dead people can't go in and dead living people can. Ha! It just kills me!' Mircha leaned over the railing and spat.

'So what do you want me to do?' Yuri rubbed his head. Already he was feeling woozy about this hole business and Mircha who was dead but living. As a Jew, all talk of resurrection made him a little uncomfortable, though he thoroughly longed to believe that the body God had for him after this one expired would not falter and fail him as this one had.

'Get a shovel—a big one. And get busy.'

Mircha stepped away from the ledge then disappeared down the opened roof hatch.

Yuri rubbed his eyes, pulled the flight helmet back on and secured the strap as tight as he could. He took a deep breath, then started down the stairs for his mother's apartment.

'Who's making all that noise upstairs?' Olga called from the kitchen.

Yuri stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the outer room and studied his mother, outlined at the window. 'It's Mircha, Mother. He's on the roof. Again.'

CHAPTER FIVE

Tanya

For the devout Russian orthodox, that tenebrous moment when dark dissolved into day was the very same moment when the knees should touch the floor. This was the moment when the faithful bowed to the red corner, the place in every orthodox home where the family icons and a candle were kept. It was a hard religion for the arthritic and frail, but for as long as Tanya had lived with her grandmother—that is, all of Tanya's life—Lukeria had always been as faithful to these rituals as a barnacle to the bottom of a boat. Every morning Tanya listened to her grandmother roll carefully off her bed and scuffle through the dark to the kitchen. A soft scraping of the legs of the wooden chair, a quiet grunt, and Tanya knew the woman was up. A clatter of metal, a moment of supreme silence, and then—if she listened very hard—something odd: the sound of a kiss. This morning routine had always seemed a great mystery to Tanya. The only icons Tanya had ever seen were wooden ones displayed in a glass cabinet and that was in a church that had been shut down and then reopened as a museum. Kept as they were under lock and key, there was no possibility of owning these relics. Certainly, no one kissed them.