The women gazed at the windows. Tanya couldn't decide if they were merely baffled or in a state of extreme consternation. But as they'd passed the latrine, Tanya decided to keep them moving through the courtyard. A good plan. And it would have worked, too, if only the women didn't have the Western lolling gaze so perfectly honed. For with every step they took, Tanya could see that they were taking in detail after detail, absurdity stacked upon absurdity. No matter where they looked, they saw something Tanya knew fell outside the realm of what they had hoped to see. True to her word, Zoya had hung the best of her laundry: her sheer nightgowns and tights. Then there was Yuri sitting on an overturned bucket beside the gaping hole, a fishing rod in his hand, his whole face tortured by thought.
Though the sun was not bright, the girl shaded her eyes with a hand and squinted ferociously. 'What is the matter with him?'
'He's fishing,' Tanya said.
'He looks like he is in great pain,' the grandmother remarked.
'He is a thinker,' Tanya explained.
'He is, in fact, sick in the head,' Zoya called from the stairwell, 'if not in body.'
'He is an idiot,' Olga said.
'Is that a fact?' Now the grandmother squinted at Yuri.
'Oh, yes.' Olga laid a palm solemnly across her bosom.
At this the grandmother exchanged a significant look with the mother.
'I know what you must think,' Olga said. 'But I have to face facts. Facts are the building blocks of larger truth. And what is truth but a tall tower casting a very long shadow? And what is shadow but a terrible darkness for some but a restful shade for others?'
Vitek unpeeled himself from the side of the building and strolled towards the women. 'This is what comes of applying oneself to the rigours of metaphor.' His voice acquired a well-lubricated quality and his English flowed smooth as motor oil. 'It makes people ask absurd questions.'
'Yes, but is that normal?' the mother asked.
'It's extremely normal. Better than that, it's as Russian as birch bark shoes, I assure you,' Tanya said.
'I assure you,' Vitek mocked gently.
'Right.' Tanya wiped her hands along her skirt. 'It's been a long day packed full of, er, sights. Let's see the rooms now.'
She steered the women towards the stairwell. It looked as if they might follow, too, the grandmother double-timing it behind Tanya, the mother behind the grandmother, and the long-legged daughter behind her mother. At the rear, Yuri had dropped his rod and shouldered up their many bags. But then the grandmother stopped short. Mother collided with grandmother, daughter against mother, Olga into the winged rump of the girl and Yuri into Olga. All of whom were overtaken by the baggage, which flew, as fate or luck would have it, to the foot of the heap.
'What is that?' The grandmother wrinkled her nose and pointed to the heap.
'We don't have regular sanitation service. Therefore, it is customary for us to throw our rubbish out the window.'
'Is that what I'm smelling?' The girl pinched her nose.
Just then the twins, Good Boris and Bad Boris, emerged from the open chasm. They circled the luggage, their heads lowered, their teeth bared. Good Boris unzipped his trousers and peed on the mother's leather suitcase. Or quite possibly it was the grandmother's suitcase. It was hard for Tanya to say with certainty. She was far too distracted by the twins' teeth, which were definitely longer and sharper today than they were yesterday.
'Do they bite?' the girl asked.
'No, but they throw rocks and metal scrap pretty well,' Tanya conceded.
'Whose children are these?' The mother turned to Olga.
'Nobody's. That is, to date, no one has claimed them,' Olga said.
'They are community property,' Vitek added. 'The future of our great country.'
The twins straightened and Good Boris adjusted his zip. Bad Boris bent from the waist in a stiff half-bow.
The grandmother walked purposefully towards the children. Though she didn't speak a word of Russian, her posture conveyed with a clarity that needed no interpretation her firm intention; she would transcend any barrier—hygienic, linguistic, or otherwise. Her mission: this child. Not the one that had micturated upon her fine luggage. But this one, still bowing.
'Come here, child.' The grandmother bent and held her hand out as if coaxing a dog. 'Someone ought to be taking care of you.'
Bad Boris's gaze darted from one woman to the next. 'It is in the shape of the Lord God's emptiness that we are made,' Bad Boris said in perfect English, his pure tenor voice rising high as notes taking flight in a tall cathedral.
Just then Big Anna emerged from the hole, a bullhorn held to her mouth. 'Queue up, you creeps! Buy your trinkets and authentic Siberian souvenirs here!'
'Pay no attention to her.' Tanya stepped between the women and the heap and the chasm and the girl, but the women moved towards Big Anna, pulled by a force Tanya could not name nor fathom nor stop.
The mother placed her warm hand on Tanya's wrist. Again with that warm and comforting gesture. 'Please tell me, dear girl, that these children don't live in that hole.'
'Why not?' Vitek smiled. 'It's prime real estate. Very spacious. Growing more so with every passing second. And the things these little shits are unearthing! Just yesterday I found a full set of dentures. Beautiful. You should really take a look.'
'Since when do these kids speak English? And with such grammatical precision?' Olga addressed no one in particular.
Now grandmother, mother and daughter all stood precariously at the edge of the chasm, each of them peering into the darkness.
'I can't see a thing. What's down there?' The girl craned her neck.
'Everything you covet!' the children screamed in unison. From their pockets they produced war medals and tiny metal icons, the kind soldiers going into battle wore around their necks, striped navy shirts, and the hats and stoles made of prized sable fur—not those made of soggy rabbit fur that smell of damp forests.
'Down there is everything elemental. Smokeless fire. Fear.' Azade walked the perimeter of the chasm. She lifted her nose and sniffed at the air with grave suspicion.
'I'll tell you what's down there. It's an old story. As old as east and west,' Olga said. 'It's a story about mud because that's where every story begins and every story ends. Beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. Because mud is like love, constantly asserting itself. One day God awoke from troubling dreams and realized that He was lonely. He had mud in his beard and mud under his fingernails. And that's when He got an idea. Out of the mud He made man.'
'To the rooms!' Tanya cried, sweeping her arm in the general direction of the stairwell. If she could get them out of the courtyard, away from the chaos, then she could show them their lives behind closed doors, the lives as she wished them to be, as she wished them to see—the kettle whistling on the hotplate, the postcards from beautiful places on their walls, the claw-footed baths.
The mother straightened suddenly and waved her hand in the air as if conducting an orchestra. 'Such a punchy odour,' she observed. 'There must be a septic tank nearby.'
Vitek leaned in the direction of the hole and sniffed mightily as if his nostrils were as sensitive as a canary to coal gas. Tanya closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. And then she prayed. To her heavenly father. Dear God, if you love me even just a little bit, make him go away. When she opened her eyes it was just as she expected, things could not get any worse: Mircha stood beside the hole and was reading from a ream of papers tucked into an old philological textbook, the kind of material Azade normally doled out for use in the latrine. As Mircha finished with each page, he peeled it from the binding and let it fall, as a petal from a blowsy flower.
Mircha licked a finger, peeled another sheet from the stack and levelled his gaze on Tanya. 'The best story, by far, is yours, dear girl. A heartbreaker, too, a real three-hankie affair, five if you are easily moved. Imagine a girl haunted by her mother. The mother was water and her daughter was air. Even though the two were elementally composed of the same matter, at all times they were fundamentally separate.'