At that very moment Vitek's pager bleated. 'Big bizness,' he said with a smile, his gold tooth winking. Vitek pushed himself up from the chair with his legs, the whole time keeping his torso straight and level. Still his jacket creaked and complained. He tucked the opened bottle of vodka into his waistband and followed Lukeria and Tanya out the door. The goat trailed at his heels, its thick hooves thudding over the floor.
Azade stood to her feet. She bent over Mircha and looked at him with suspicion. 'Well,' she turned to Olga. 'I better get back to work.' And she shuffled out the door.
Strange, Olga thought as she watched the door fall back into its locks. Strange how they all couldn't help but be ugly at a time when people usually try to offer their best, if only to prove to each other for a short time that they can rise above themselves. It felt strange to recognize that sometimes death did not bring people together, but provided instead one more reason to further the distance between them. It was like digging through her secret stash of socks and boiled sweets only to discover that she'd come up short. That's how she felt: cheated somehow.
And she missed Zvi. Looking at Mircha, dressed in his uniform and stretched over the bath and so still, it was hard not to look at him and think of Zvi. Hard not to wonder what had become of him. She wasn't so lost in her old grief to forget that there were thousands like her in apartment buildings everywhere quietly wondering if their husbands or brothers or sons would miraculously appear. Called out of the dust, from the air, they would somehow be spirited to their doors and they would knock. Weary from their years-long journey they would be faint, tired—but alive. Marvellously alive. Although she knew from her many years at the Red Star where she examined so many reports to the contrary that this wouldn't happen, Olga liked to imagine that it could. Without a dream we are dead. Now she remembered, now she knew who said that. Not Mircha, but Zvi. In his service uniform, one of the last things, in fact, that he had said. And the gummy notion that there must be a vital clue in that bit of advice, something essential that she should have decoded by now, something she'd missed that would tell her how better to live, stuck to her like a bathhouse leaf.
Zoya and Yuri had already retired behind their shared privacy curtain, an intricate arrangement of tablecloths and sheets hung over fishing wire. Olga pulled a sheet over Mircha and blew out the candle. In the morning she would think about what to do with his body. But today, she'd had enough trouble. She gathered the bowls and carried them back to the kitchen, where she filled the sink with a little soap and some water from the kettle. It wasn't fair, this life. All these years Azade stuck with a husband she didn't want and Olga longing for Zvi, whom she did want. It was wrong to be bitter, she knew, but a person can't help feeling the way she does. Olga reached for a bowl. It slid from her hand and dashed against the sink, breaking to shards and cutting her palms.
She leaned her elbows over the sink. The tears were there, she was just that angry and beaten, but on days like these even crying required too much effort. Olga straightened, wrapped her hand in a dishcloth and crossed the darkened room, feeling her way through the strung sheets for her bed. She unbuttoned her sweater and her housedress, and hung them in the tall wardrobe. Lined her slippers carefully at the side of her bed. Then she lay on the mattress and listened to the sounds of her neighbours around her carrying on with their nightly business. Lukeria's heavy breathing rose up through the air vents and from the courtyard she could hear Vitek serenading the moon. Here, inside the apartment from behind the privacy curtains, Zoya and Yuri churned through separate dreams, Zoya murmuring her disapproval, while Yuri called out the names of rivers and the beautiful names of the beautiful fish that swam in them.
Olga's eyes watered. She was lonely. Even in the presence of all these people, all this life, she felt unbearably alone. She passed her hand over her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. Then she felt her blood turn to ice. Perhaps it was a trick of light, her eyes conspiring to organize the dust and grit in the air into strange shapes, but as she stared across the room she swore she was seeing the shape of a man backlit by the light of the moon filtering through the window.
'Zvi?' Olga called as she jumped from her bed, but then he was gone.
CHAPTER TWO
Tanya
There are three secrets at the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum of Art, Geology and Anthropology. The first is that none of the exhibits are authentic. Not a single gessoed canvas, splotch of oil paint, stick of furniture or beaten metal icon is genuine. Everything inside the museum is a replica. Some of the items are replicas of replicas. That is why, where one might expect stern old women ensconced in wooden chairs and strategically positioned in each exhibit hall, there are none. Why no dehu-midifiers, no fans circulating the air in the summer. Why the locking mechanisms on windows and doors have been allowed to gather rust. It is also why the entrance fee is so modest, it explains the second big secret. Out of the six full-time museum employees—Tanya in coat check, old Ludmilla at the ticket counter, Zoya and Yuri as guides—only Head Administrator Chumak, who is, of course, the head administrator, and Daniilov, the caretaker, have been paid in the last three months. This, in turn, explains the third secret, which is a secret not because it's so shocking, but because no one is openly discussing it: the museum toilets. A principal part of the employee benefit package is the free use of the lavs, for as long as they like, as frequently as they like. This explained why Tanya, Yuri, Zoya and perhaps Ludmilla kept working at the museum on Head Administrator Chumak's promise that they would some day (and soon) be paid. The toilets, state of the art and of Finnish design, shone of polished chrome and sleek porcelain. And when you don't live in apartments with running water—Tanya, Zoya and Yuri, and possibly Ludmilla, do not—the importance of the benefits package swells.
Which explains why Tanya patiently put up with her humiliating demotion from the elevated position of museum tour guide to that of basement hat/coat-check attendant. Even so, the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum was still Tanya's life, the ever-shifting canvas of her love story. And while it was true that the exhibits in the museum disappointed—especially the geological display in the basement which consisted of four rocks, three of which Tanya was fairly certain Head Administrator Chumak supplied himself and which looked suspiciously like Violet Crumble chocolate bars, Tanya found herself unable to stop dreaming of upward movement, both in terms of career advancement and also of her actual geographic position. Which explained why Tanya (though she had been made by Head Administrator Chumak to understand the terrible gravity of minding the claim disks, of minding the wooden racks which contained hats and sweaters and satchels that weighed more than any bag ever should) sat in her fold-out chair, her sky-colour notebook open in her lap.
A whole summer Tanya had sat in this cloakroom, carefully inventorying every rain jacket and umbrella, scarf and satchel, lest she make a mistake. She lovingly itemized and described in great detail their fabrics and textures, even going so far as to describe their owners, their bright chatter in exotic and sometimes ordinary languages. But blame it on boredom. Or maybe it was on account of the dim lighting of the museum's underbelly. But always her gaze drifted to the window that ran high and narrow along the upper portion of the basement wall. Framed inside this long box of light, every moment of every day a dance unfolded bolt by feather, and never the same way twice.
But now summer had gone, the doughy cumulus clouds that rose steadily like good piroshki had drifted away and autumn had brought herring-scaled skies. This very morning they'd had their first hard frost. Outside the narrow basement window the clouds congealed like the winter soups with skins so thick the grandmothers could skate over them. By midday the clouds would take on the look of buckwheat porridge, the mere thought of which always wheeled Tanya back to childhood, to sitting at the steamer trunk that doubled as her grandmother's kitchen table and TV stand. Every morning before school Tanya bolted down the kasha, fishing with the spoon for the small dollop of butter. That lump of yellow was the sun, the brightest and best part of the bowl, the bit of fat that gave the kasha any flavour whatsoever.