'And then it could be the recipe itself,' Olga said. 'After all, certain soups cannot suffer a change of continent. Not even a change of city. For instance, Gypsy salt is not the same as Jewish salt.'
Azade smiled. 'And a cabbage grown in the mountains tastes different from a cabbage grown in the flats.'
Olga nodded her head. 'Exactly! And the seasoning, you may as well know, comes from the cook's tears.'
'But if you cry too much or too often, the soup cannot bear it. This is why God sets a limit to one's sorrow, lest it become too bitter to serve to others,' Azade said.
'I have no idea what the two of you are talking about, but it's making me hungry,' Lukeria said.
Azade scoped the courtyard. Three baths, still there. One goat. Two pots. Several jars of cabbage.
As if reading her mind, Olga recited her ingredients list. 'You must throw everything in the pot and hold nothing back: shoelaces, potatoes, moss, boot blacking, vodka.'
'We don't have much,' Azade said. 'But we have those things.' Azade leaned forward and pulled at her boots. 'And we have plenty of spoons.'
***
Tanya took her time walking home from the train station. She would have to face Chumak, his starchy disappointment, his shiny forehead glowing pink, then burning red like the bulb of a thermometer. She practised different apologies, variations of the same theme, really. Nothing in this world was as sure and stable as anyone had once thought or hoped. She could say this. It would be true. Tanya surveyed the street. If all these wooden kiosks painted in the Byzantine colours of gold and cerulean blue and verdant greens of larch forests, if these hinged huts of colour and wax and lipstick and smoked herrings pounded flat as an onion skin could slide off the pavement into wide flats of a deep and bottomless black, then what made her think the museum wouldn't be halved, then quartered, then completely taken by the mud, their best exhibits gone? Even the bright blue and orange Aeroflot recruiting office was not immune to sudden shifts. As she walked past the headquarters, Tanya peered through the small windows. Where she would have expected to see Head Recruiter Aitmotova dusting glossy brochures with a handkerchief, Tanya saw instead that a man and a woman, both of them wearing blue tracksuits and new trainers, had taken over the office. Open Aeroflot application forms littered the floor and a few caught in the updraught swirled like bits of paper inside a glass globe. The man caught a piece of paper as it whirled by and he wiped his nose on it. A single display shelf held three open relief boxes full of individually wrapped sugar-iced fruit slab from the UK, a jar of red peppers bearing the label 'Good', a can of flake coffee stretched with powdered milk, and three rolls of Very Soft, the most highly sought-after toilet paper in all of Russia. The prices had been marked in black wax on a white placard and when she made out the prices of items, Tanya jumped back as if she'd been stung by a wasp. Only criminals could become successful business people. Tanya understood that ordinary people like her would never fare well in a world like this one.
Tanya pulled her scarf tighter around her head and walked even slower than before, her shoulders collapsed under the weight of her iron-clad dreams. And then, too, it was really important to mind where she stepped—the mud was just that aggressive. With each step it tugged at her boots and she had to fight, pulling and thrashing to shake free. Never in her memory of spring thaws had the ground been this greedy. She rounded the corner of her street where bulges of mud pushed over the kerbs and up against ground-floor windows. The stone archway had crumbled. In the courtyard the situation had rapidly deteriorated. Only the top floor of the building remained visible above the mudline. On the roof, which was so low now that she could see every passing change on the wet canvas of sky, the heating stack and TV tower leaned at an unnatural angle. It was hard to look at the building and not think of sinking disasters: the Titanic, the Komsomolets, the Karluk.
Adding to the devastation was her grandmother packed tight between Olga and Azade on the bench. When they saw her, Azade and Olga did their best to make room for her, wedging their bodies into Lukeria, whose gaze was fixed on the widening hole and the bright, hard country deep within.
Tanya perched her backside on the open space of bench and listened to Azade and Olga discussing vegetables—namely, the prowess of the parsnip over the turnip when boiled side by side in a pot. Four claw-footed baths anchored the corners of the courtyard. Into the one nearest the bench, the women had stowed all of their earthly belongings. The heap was gone entirely, as was the latrine. Zoya had vanished, along with her fleet of high heels. But Vitek remained, lashed tightly to the lime tree.
'Hey, Fatty!' Vitek called. 'Man cannot live on bread alone. For ten roubles I'll gladly explain what that means.'
Tanya studied Vitek. A splintered broom handle and bits of cardboard had been strategically stacked around his shoeless feet. Obviously he'd been thrashing for some time. Sweat and cheap hair dressing ran down the back of his neck and his hands were chafed where they were bound. Quite likely he'd never worked so hard at anything in his whole life. Not far from Vitek stood Good Boris, both his feet stuffed into one of Vitek's dress shoes. Bad Boris wore the other shoe. The twins stood side by side, jumping like pogo sticks. The boy with the hair the colour of a pollution sunset and the girl Anna kept their gazes on Vitek.
'You are tied to the tree,' Tanya observed at last. 'You are in no position to barter.'
Vitek smiled. His bronze skin had taken on a sharp brassy colour. She couldn't be sure whether it was due to the sudden shock of sun or something else more primal, like rage or fear. Vitek opened his mouth.
'Blessed are the poor in spirit. They shall inherit what is left of the earth. Blessed are the ignorant. What they can't know they won't miss. Blessed are...' Vitek yelped and whipped his head to the side. A chunk of concrete smashed against the trunk of the tree. And then came another rock, this time catching Vitek. An angry gash opened above his left eye.
Tanya felt her stomach fold and her face turn pale as a rusk.
'Well, excuse me, but a man will bleed,' Vitek said, maintaining that smile.
'This life,' Big Anna leveled her watery pink eyes on Vitek's, 'what's it for? Tell me the truth now.'
'Tell us what we want to know,' Gleb said, raising a plastic water bottle filled with rock and rusted metal. 'Or else.'
Vitek attempted a laugh. 'Why don't you go and blow up a skip or something?' Vitek pumped his shoulders and tried to work a hand free. 'Or how about this—I've got a pack of herbal cigarettes in my coat pocket. Why don't we go and smoke ourselves silly? It'll be therapeutic.'
'Give us cognac,' Good Boris said, hopping a few metres closer to Vitek.
Bad Boris closed the gap with a single jump. 'Now,' he said. The twins kicked out of the shoes and circled the tree. Their teeth! Definitely longer and sharper now than last week. And was that foam in the corners of Big Anna's mouth?
'Kids.' Vitek smiled weakly and hooked his chin towards Tanya. 'They've got the entrepreneurial spirit. But they're amateurs. They're in way over their heads.' Vitek freed a hand. And not a moment too soon. Big Anna lobbed another chunk of concrete.
Vitek ducked and the chunk sailed past his head. 'Listen, you little glue-sniffing shits. I taught you everything you know.' And here Vitek yelped, a sound of genuine pain, for a whole fleet of smooth objects and edged, flat and round objects, forks and spoons, ladies' compact mirrors and men's bootjacks, rained down on him.
Tanya opened her umbrella and charged at Big Anna. 'Stop!' Tanya bellowed. And incredibly, the girl froze. Dropped the rock. Took a step backwards.
Big Anna looked at Tanya. Though her eyes were pink, smeared and bleary, there was something open, almost wholesome to them.