'Don't listen to him,' Azade said to Tanya. 'A fool will say anything.'
'What the girl knows about her mother could fill a thimble,' Mircha continued, completely ignoring Azade's hex-eye glares. 'What she can remember weighs less than a cobweb. Only this: pink rushes of blood behind her mother's fingernails, the soft warm hands and the skin that smelled of woodsmoke.'
'The smell!' The grandmother fanned the air around her nose. 'It's getting worse.'
Tanya hands shook. 'We better keep moving,' she said between clenched teeth.
'Don't you want to know where your mother is?' Mircha pitched his voice towards Tanya. 'Don't you want to know how your story tangles up with hers? I'll bet she's down in this hole with every other unanswered question. Don't you want to know how to live this life abundantly?'
'Enough!' Azade approached the bench with her shovel in hand. 'What makes you think you can tell any of us how better to live?'
'What's she saying?' The mother turned to Tanya for a translation.
'Is she talking to us?' The girl seemed moved, at last, to curiosity.
'What is that woman doing?' Now the grandmother gripped Tanya's arm. 'Why is she waving that shovel around?'
'It's hard to say.' Tanya heard her own voice coiling tight, tight.
'Well, let's reason together.' Mircha tucked his sheaf of papers into his waistband and withdrew a plastic vial of nail-varnish remover. 'You've tried your old housewives' tricks before and not one of them has worked. That's always been your problem, failure to accept complete reality. You see, you can't really make me go away because it's not part of the story. You need me. I am the conflict, the plot complication. I am utterly necessary.' Mircha took a healthy drink.
Azade gripped the shovel handle. 'Let me tell you a story of weight and spectacle. Some people call it the Invention of Zero but I call it the Immeasurable Importance of Wising up to Oneself. One summer all the cucumbers in a man's field went bad. The leaves on the man's prized Persian Ironwood turned black as ravens and then, one day, grew wings and flew, carrying off his ancestral stories and history beyond the four points of a map. He had counted all that could be counted—buckets, stars, wives, feet, lakes, words and devils—and still came up empty. There was nothing to fill that yawning expanse, and so he ate a cabbage, the last one on the last hill of his property.'
The grandmother tugged on Tanya's sleeve. 'Is that woman mad? Is there something we should do to help her?'
'Is there another staircase we can use to get to our rooms?' the mother asked.
All this English and Russian flying willy-nilly from window to broken concrete, mud chasm to heap. The noise and commerce and questions and stories—subversive and malicious—knocking knee to hip to ear. It was enough to throw Tanya into a full spin.
Sensing her suffering, the girl, an expert on the subject, touched Tanya's elbow. 'What's that lady talking about? Tell us.'
Tanya turned to the girl. 'You asked for this,' she said balefully. And then she translated word for word Azade's story.
'The cabbage spoiled inside of him. It curdled his blood and even his very thoughts to the point that even if he wanted to think good, he thought ill, even if he wanted to do right, he did wrong. Everything he touched became contaminated. On shearing day, a time of rejoicing, he shut himself in his house because otherwise the pregnant ewes lost their lambs and the horns of the rams withered on their heads. If the man went fishing, the fish swam sideways and in spring would forget the rivers of their youth. Meanwhile that cabbage in his stomach continued to grow, as if it had a mind and will of its own. Old women teased him mercilessly, for he looked like a woman carrying a terrible burden. The man became weary with this souring weight that pulled his sinew from bone, joint from socket, pulled his body towards the ground. You may be wondering what this man ever did to deserve such luck, and the answer is not so simple. Because the man was like a jinn, or maybe something worse. More air than earth, he was a man in search of new skin to inhabit, new stories to wear. This was why he felt so empty, this was why everything he touched became cursed. But he was not without some charm. He could still talk up the requisite threesome for a round of drinking. And he had a knack for telling stories.'
'This is the strangest story I've ever heard,' the mother mumbled to no one in particular.
Mircha brightened. 'I like this man. But the story—what a mess! It has no complication. No dramatic rise. No denouement. Terrible,' he pronounced, bringing the vial of nail-varnish remover to his lips.
And here Tanya paused. For Azade, now a mere metre away from Mircha, had raised the shovel high. 'Every story, good or bad, must have an end,' Azade said, and swung the blade down hard across his shoulders. Mircha doubled over.
Azade brought the shovel down again and again, breaking bones with every blow. And Mircha, with each blow, sunk a little deeper into the mud. But his mouth worked as well as ever as he registered each hit with a bitter complaint: 'My knees! My shoulder! My back!'
'Why is she doing that?' the grandmother asked.
'She's thrashing the mud. Very routine part of spring cleaning. It brings good luck,' Olga explained.
'Is this normal?' the mother asked.
'Very,' Olga replied. 'We each of us are like olives. Only when we are beaten, trammelled, and utterly crushed do we yield up what is essential and what is the best in us.'
Mircha flailed. 'A story is an arrow, dear girl. It always flies true and once it is spoken it can't be taken back! Tanyechka! Ask me what your future holds. I might tell you!'
Azade handed Tanya the shovel. 'There's on old mountain saying: the man is the head but the woman is the neck.'
Tanya gripped the handle. Her rage, white hot and boiling, the rage she fed with chewing gum and self-loathing, had not evaporated into cloud or into nothing as she had hoped. It was still there, in her arms, her hands. She did not hate this man with his overachieving mouth. She had never allowed herself to hate anyone. Passive by nature, she lacked the energy for pure hatred. But she hated his words, each one a stinging nettle. How dare he taunt her with her knowledge of Marina, her mother, the one subject everyone in the courtyard knew they were never to discuss? How dare he ruin this one chance with the Americans and their no-strings-attached money? Tanya lifted the shovel, so light now in her steady hands it seemed to rise in the air of its own accord. And then it arced, level and straight, and connected with a solid crunch against Mircha's shoulder. The bad one. Mircha yelped. Tanya swung again, this time against the backs of his knees.
'She should have done this a long time ago,' Olga whispered in a confidential tone to the grandmother.
The girl turned to Vitek. 'What is going on here?'
Vitek circled a finger at his ear. 'Beats me. But listen.' Now Vitek had his arm draped over the girl's shoulder. 'You're cute and I'm lonely. Let's you and me go to a club I know run by some very close personal friends of mine. We'll waltz on champagne, we'll feed dancing bears, eat reindeer meat and caviar. We'll...'
'You are utterly repulsive in every way.' The girl shrugged out of Vitek's loose embrace and charged for the bench where Zoya sat, her colour wheel of hair dyes fanned over the stone.
Finally, Tanya threw the shovel at the mud. She rested her hands on her hips, her chest heaving. Mircha lay broken and silent on the surface.
The grandmother consulted her watch. 'If we hurry, we might make the evening train to Ekaterinburg.'
'You're leaving?' Tanya asked in despair.
'You're going east?' Azade and Olga asked in unison.
'Oh, don't go there,' Tanya begged.
'The wolves,' Olga said.
'The thinly veiled malevolence,' Vitek called out.