Yet in spite of the Topic Guide's conspicuous lapses, they were fortunate, Chief Editor Kaminsky liked to remind them, to have such a guide in the first place.
'How else would we know what to say?' he'd ask with a chuckle. How else would they know, for instance, to rephrase theft of fuel as 'thrift of fuel', Stalin's mass deportations and executions of Jews and Gypsies and other groups of 'rootless cosmopolitans' as 'improving the view', and filtration camps as 'containment resorts'? And without the Topic Guide, how else would they know how to navigate words describing the human body, parts and functions—all of which could be for the naturally sensitive Russian embarrassing, indelicate and undignified? How else would they know that urine was water, and blood nothing more than a nutritive fluid? How else would they know to call forced abortions 'necessary interruptions' (though in the case of Gypsy and other women of swarthy complexion, it was called a 'mop-up', the type of which usually resulted in sterilization)? What would they do without these terms tidily rendering innocuous the words that broadcast to the readership the frailties of this life, a reality they were all doing their level best to ignore?
Olga closed her eyes and thrust her hand into the swirl of papers in the basket, feeling for the least offensive one. At last she withdrew a single curled sheet of fax paper.
Nadezhda Radova Yulpin, a chemical engineer from the Kamchatka region, was charged with disturbing the peace after she slashed part of the right breast belonging to another woman. The victim, her sister, lyuda Radova Yulpin, retaliated by shearing off a portion of her older sister's left breast. Back and forth they went, tit for tat, until both women were rendered entirely breastless.
Fairly painless, as far as translations go, and just the kind of soft feature Chief Editor Kaminsky preferred to run on the front pages so as to dampen the effect of the other bad news. Olga translated the report from Koryak to Russian word by word, only altering the references to body parts while preserving the raw essence of paranoid ethnocentrism: people in the east behaved like animals and should be considered as such. Sadly, in all the offices of the Red Star the general feeling was that if it were happening to the people in the east or the south—that is, to the Mongols, the Uzbeks, the Buryats, the Avars, the Chechens, the Laks, the Lezghins, the Kazakhs—then those savages certainly deserved it. Which explains the newspaper's policy of bestowing upon these events an air of the inculpable, the inescapable and thus unavoidable, at all times suggesting that these atrocities had happened to people who in some way asked for it.
Olga dipped her hand into the basket and withdrew another slip of paper. A recent report of anti-Semitism in the oil-rich Nefteyugansk area. Hardly surprising. Olga bit the nib of her pencil and scribbled a draft copy, writing up the incident as a low-grade malaise of ancient origin with a high nationalistic fibre content. The translation completed, Olga rolled the original work order with her rewrite into a tight scroll and slipped it into a bullet-shaped canister that rested in the open mouth of the howling tubes.
Absurdity no. 4
The tubes...
...consisted of a vascular network of transparent pneumatic tubing that snaked the walls then hooked sharply to disappear into the ceiling and floor. The moment either Arkady or Olga finished translating a report they sent both the original and translated version to Chief Editor Kaminsky for verification and approval. But it was hazardous work, retrieving or sending canisters, and Vera, Olga's best friend and senior fact-checker, told Olga about a former translator who had thrust her head in the open canister dock. Her bosom, which was not insubstantial, had been pulled into the dock. It took three men and all their strength to pry the poor woman free. What bothered the woman most was not the indignities to which her body had been subjected, but that she'd lost her brassiere. Even worse, she had been left with bruises in compromising places. And it took some effort on the part of the internal-memo-translation team to render the on-site production trauma sufficiently oblique in writing as to not make the woman the butt of everyone's break-time jokes.
Yes, the tubes were a danger. Olga herself had witnessed the terrifying sucking power of their internal wind and had seen cufflinks and buttons, even the occasional set of dentures, clatter through the pipes, and heard their clacking and rattling against the sides.
She took a breath, held it, then opened the plastic hatch and slid the canister in, one centimetre at a time. The canister trembled, as if it too were afraid. Then it shot up and away through the tubing, through the hole in the office ceiling built specifically for this device. Olga wiggled her fingers, sighed in relief. A good day, all in all, and taking it as a sign, she decided to quit early while she was still ahead.
Through the snow Olga trudged, dimly aware that in faraway places people spoke with purer words of unvarnished meaning. Or maybe not. Maybe at other news agencies in other countries people simply told more palatable lies. And as she rounded the corner and climbed over the remains of the broken stone archway that marked the entrance to the courtyard, she felt despair sliding down her throat, setting up quick residence in her stomach. Language was, after all, just word-shaped stains, simply another way people hide themselves from one another, one more way to evade and obscure the truth.
And then, perched on the roof of their apartment building, was Mircha, a one-armed weathervane leaning into a thin-set snow. 'Truth,' Mircha shook his fist, 'is a whore! And history,' Mircha stopped to point his finger at Olga, 'is giving me indigestion!'
'Mr Aliyev,' Olga said, both a greeting and a dismissal, 'come down from the rooftop. You are drunk.'
'I am fishing,' Mircha pronounced.
Olga surveyed the heap of refuse glistening under a hard drop of frost. Everyone threw their trash out of their windows onto the heap; given the fact that the wind pushed from the east and that the sanitation crews were on perpetual strike, the window-toss method of garbage collection and containment was as efficient as any other. Also, it served as a visual catalogue of items no longer fit for any earthly purpose: rusted cables, engine blocks, even the burnt shell of a PT-76, an amphibious light tank. Balanced on the roof of this tank sat a typewriter minus the strikers and ribbon. And wedged in the typewriter was a fishing rod. Olga pointed to the ungainly pile. 'But your rod is on the heap.'
Mircha leaned over the edge of the roof. 'Where I am going I have no need for such a rod; what I am fishing for requires a much larger hook.'
Olga dismissed Mircha with a single-handed flick of the wrist and began her climb up the stairs to the third floor. At the threshold of the apartment she shared with her son, Yuri, and his semi-permanent girlfriend, Zoya, she stamped her feet and jangled her keys, wordless noise being the best way of alerting them that she was entering.
In the kitchen Yuri sat at the table as he often did these days, swaying slowly from side to side as if in agony. Yuri, Olga knew, was born to suffer and nothing she'd done for him as a child or a man had deterred him from hewing a path through a thicket of sorrow. But she tried to encourage him. She did not pester him about his hobbies, that assortment of fishing flies, wire, paper clips, and goat hair spread across yesterday's copy of the Red Star which was in turn spread over the kitchen table. She tried not to mind the fact that Zoya spent much of her time in the kitchen, filing her nails, as she was doing at this very moment.