Tanya closed her notebook and made noises of quiet assent in the back of her throat. Like her morning prayers, Lukeria'a cutting remarks were simply another part of her daily routine that she had to complete in order to iron the wrinkles out of the evening. You cannot bless without cursing, her grandmother sincerely believed, and most days, ignoring her grandmother was easy enough to do: as long as the tea and cigarettes held out, her mouth was otherwise occupied. But in that twenty-second lapse, the time it took to stub out a cigarette and light a new one, her tongue moved unhindered.
'Men followed me everywhere I went. But you, Tanyechka! I think all that university knowledge has ruined your chances. You've got no waistline whatsoever. It's as if everything you learned at school went straight to your hips and thighs. I hope you are trying to do something about that. Twenty years old already and you haven't got a man on the horizon. You haven't got a single plan.' Lukeria jabbed her cigarette at Tanya, then collapsed against the chair, exhausted by her own words.
'I have plans.' Tanya calibrated her voice so as not to betray her faltering self-confidence, her very palpable understanding of her many flaws, and the crushing statistical unlikelihood that her dreams would ever materialize.
'What plans?'
Tanya tugged on the hem of her skirt. 'Aeroflot is hiring.'
'Don't get your hopes up. You're lucky to have work at such a fine museum. It took two pairs of galoshes and my entire secret stash of jellied fruit slab to arrange it. Besides, you have unfortunate dentition. I don't say this to be cruel, only to state the obvious as a nudge to the reality of your situation.'
Like an old combine that moves in one direction and at one speed, her grandmother's commentary faithfully ploughed over the same territory, grinding over familiar furrows.
Lukeria fumbled with another cigarette.
Tanya nudged a small box of matches closer to Lukeria's elbow. As she did, her hand jogged the teacup and the contents spilled onto the Bible.
'Shit!' Tanya jumped and dabbed at the mess with the dishcloth she kept handy for such catastrophes. But already the onion-skin pages of the Bible had swelled like a sponge.
Lukeria narrowed her nickel-coloured eyes, calculating the cost of the loss of tea. 'Shouldn't you be at work?'
Tanya stood, retrieved her notebook, her sweater. Her scarf.
'Another thing. Talk to Chumak.'
Tanya edged towards the door. In her grandmother's rattle-dry voice she could hear the crack and spit of a smouldering fire rekindled.
'Remind him that I knew his mother when she let that dirty pepper-eating Hungarian take her for long walks by the river. Tell him I know things. Tell him you need money for my medicine—the expensive one for my lungs.'
Tanya knotted her scarf around her neck—tight—and pulled the door closed.
Love. That's what Tanya was hearing. Behind the quick fury there had to be love. Fire consumes what it loves. That was another orthodox lesson. What Lukeria was doing was for her own good because had Lukeria poured her love unchecked on Tanya, she might have grown bloated and lazy from it. And her still-hungry but overfed heart would split from the excess, and on it would go, Tanya as a mother overindulging her own child. To what end? One little poke in life, one disappointment—major or minor—and her daughter would be done for, unable to cope with heartbreak. Thank heavens that she, now outwardly stout, inwardly anorexic, was so well acclimatized for a life without love. Yes, Tanya decided as she shoved three sticks of chewing gum into her mouth and turned for the bus stand, she'd been so well schooled in the thrifty economy of the heart, she could go months and even years without a single drop of genuine affection.
On the number 77, Tanya worked the gum between her molars. It was a form of exercise, this gum chewing. And she needed it, exercise, in any form. In twenty minutes she'd have to step on the scales for Head Recruiter Aitmotova. The very thought provoked spastic jaw pumping. In front of her a young mother held a baby. The young woman bent her head to her baby, nuzzling the fuzz of the child's hair, her mouth so close to the child's, it looked as if they were breathing each other's warm air. It was so beautiful, so foreign to Tanya that she could not stop staring. 'Stop!' she wanted to warn that mother. Certainly Lukeria would have. Such affection was precisely the kind of waste that infuriated Lukeria, who believed that mothers cuddling and cooing, showering kisses on the heads of newborns, who'd never know the difference, were spending their love carelessly and would too soon run out. Because love, and Tanya knew this for a certain fact, was not as limitless as people in books and movies liked to suggest. Love was like food, like money. It was so rare, so precious, that it had to be accounted for absolutely. This she learned from Lukeria, who knew how to stretch a single chicken through an entire winter, who had spent a lifetime putting up any wayward piece of fruit or vegetable into glass jars that sat on a shelf as a visual reminder of the importance of thrift, the importance of preserving what was authentic and true for a day when it was needed. And as beautiful as this mother and child were, as pure and spontaneous as the woman's love was, Tanya was glad her grandmother wasn't there to see it.
Outside the recruiting office, Tanya spat the wad of gum into a dirty drift of snow, ducked under the door's low overhang, and leaned heavily into the door.
'Sit.' Head Administrator Aitmotova pointed to a tiny three-legged stool positioned beside an oversize scale. 'How many languages do you speak?' She assumed a look of grave interest in Tanya.
'Three, plus I know at least half a dozen universal gestures of varying degrees of vulgarity.'
Head Recruiter Aitmotova scribbled on her clipboard and smiled. 'That's wonderful. Now, drop your coat and step onto the scales, please.'
Tanya held her breath and lifted her arms, as if that might prevent the needle's steady sweeping march across the number dial. Head Recruiter Aitmotova noted the measurement with a click of her tongue and a sigh. 'Big thighs and a big butt aren't big assets with Aeroflot. If you could just lose two stone and about five centimetres off each thigh, your chances would increase dramatically,' she said, offering Tanya several more packs of Juicy Fruit chewing gum. 'It's really quite simple,' she smiled. 'Just don't eat so much. Try following the zero-one-zero plan.'
Tanya slid out of the recruiting office and trudged towards the museum. Eating nothing for breakfast or dinner and relying on a single midday meal was a fine idea, as fine a method of weight loss as any. But not every girl has the willpower to simply stop eating for days on end like Zoya had. And Tanya had never gone in for hawking into toilets. What a waste of good food!
Tanya stood outside the employee entrance to the museum and leaned against a piece of metal twisted in a huge Russian 'R'. It had been donated to the museum in commemoration of the possible resurrection of the Russian rouble. It was modern art. That meant it was OK for Tanya to push her gum into hard rivets along the metal undersides and kick her heels against it to knock the ice loose from her boots.
She pushed through the glass door and waved her badge at Ludmilla. Tanya's first stop, always, was the basement-floor exhibit of curiosities. Not the tiny storage room where they kept the rocks meant to be representative of the kinds of geological samples one could actually find underneath Perm, but the larger exhibit room with the dark green walls and the torches Tanya had strategically placed to achieve optimal atmospheric effect. This was where they kept the pseudo-Kuntskamera collection, their most popular exhibit with museum-goers. The exhibit consisted of a collection of spontaneously aborted neonates that Peter the Great had obtained from a Dutch doctor. All of the foetuses possessed alarming defects: a third arm, missing legs, no eyes. She and Yuri and Ludmilla had studied the photos of the real exhibit that sat in the Kuntskamera building somewhere in St Petersburg. Then they had lovingly fashioned the babies out of foam, submerged them in jars of orange-flavoured Fanta and artfully draped several of Lukeria's doilies and scarves around the jars—all of which had also been co-opted for the cause. All this in a bid to attract more visitors to the museum.