Tanya wedged the file into her plastic shopping bag, tiptoed to the door, and stepped into the hallway. Before the door had fallen back into its lock, Head Administrator Chumak was already sound asleep and snoring.
***
Outside, darkness settled on rooftops, gathered in corners. The sodium streetlamps cast a sullen orange haze in the frost-filled air. Tanya stepped around the potholes and asphalt gashes trembling with antifreeze and hurried toward the bus station, a long stretch of sidewalk that disappeared beneath a shelter of tarps and construction scaffolding. Beneath the makeshift awning, kiosks stretched from one end of the platform to the other selling anything from dried fish to hosiery to pirated CDs. Music blared from competing kiosks and, of course, the veterans, pensioners, lame, drunk, and holy stood at either entrance, their cups, caps, or hands held ready. A veteran, too young to have fought in the Great Patriotic War and too old to have done any time on the Chechen fronts, sat in a wheelchair, his service cap balanced on his one remaining leg. Beside him stood a double-sided wooden advertisement.
Calling all Casanovas! Would you like to have biceps every woman from Moscow to Vladivostok will caress with her appreciative glances? Call now for 3.5 kg weights for arms. Ask for Sergei. Speak loudly: the phone is hard of hearing.
On the reverse side, the advertisement was much more to the point:
Ladies: find your rich western prince here. Hurry.
It was considered uncouth to say so in public, but the highest aspiration for many girls since the Soviet Union dissolved was to find a 'sponsor', the richer the better. But when the services screened the female applicants, they were not looking for girls like her. Like everything else in this world, beauty was a test and Tanya knew with a single glance in a mirror whether she was a pass or fail.
The number 77 arrived with a push of wind. The doors hissed open and Tanya allowed herself to be herded inside with the crush of people and their briefcases, newspapers, umbrellas, and many plastic bags full of kiosk purchases. Ordinarily Yuri and Zoya stood beside her and held hands. But her meeting with Head Administrator Chumak had run her just late enough that instead of Yuri and Zoya, a woman of indeterminate age stood behind her, her bosom jostling against Tanya's back. The woman's perfume, though applied generously, failed to mask her powerful female smell. In front of Tanya stood a short man wearing a winter hat, a cheap knockoff meant to resemble an astrakhan. He kept one arm braced against a metal support and clutched in his other arm a fish wrapped in newspaper, the oil of which dripped onto her shoes.
The bus lurched down the street, careened into turns. With so many people crammed together, the air grew thick and the windows slick with condensation. Tanya squeezed toward a window and rubbed a circle clear with her glove. Travelling silently beside them was a trolleybus. Behind the window panes were the tired figures of people just like Tanya and the fragrant woman behind Tanya and the man in front of Tanya.
But the windows were weeping so thoroughly that the faces of the people in the trolleybus were smears, featureless prototypes of people. Disfigured as they were by glass, water, frost, and darkness, they were like unfinished sculptures recently erased and waiting to be rewritten. Above the trolley in the intricate wire webbing blue sparks popped and flashed and then the trolleybus veered away. The bus bumped along in darkness and hissed to a stop. Once again the press of bodies jostling and jiggling behind and around her propelled Tanya through the open doors to the concrete platform. Then, and only then, did she feel her chest loosen, her breath return.
She always felt as if she'd been given her life back and this sensation made her giddy and generous. Each day she'd see the boy with the burnt face sitting on a folding chair, a black violin case open at his feet. Each day she'd deposit five kopeks into that case lined with the same thin purple velour they used for children's caskets. And each day, she'd turn her horizontal gaze from the bright purple cloth to a vertical gaze of the winter sky where evening folded down one bolt at a time, each one deeper than the next. Though it was unwise to stop on a street at twilight, Tanya allowed herself the briefest of scribbles:
Overhead a Norilsk purple (a purple, incidentally nowhere to be found at the All-Russia All- Cosmopolitan Museum), a hue that reflects the ice of the uplands, the place you said your grandfather worked to his death. Above those mines the clouds duplicate the gouges of the ice. The clouds mirror the dark patches of water and leads, the dark oily breaks. This map reflected on the belly of cloud is called the ice blink and in it people read above them how the land and water stretches before them. The point of the story, you told me, was that even in the black gut of a nickel mine, where a man knows he will never leave, he can take a walk in the clouds.
Tanya slid her notebook back into her plastic bag. She scurried under the almost-fallen-over archway that marked the opening to the courtyard that fronted the apartment building where she lived. Yellow tape surrounded the building and fringed the courtyard. Though the building had been scheduled for a pull-down years ago, the yellow tape and sagging structural conditions hadn't inspired any of the residents, herself included, to move. Tanya picked her way through the dvor, a decrepit courtyard of broken concrete slabs and tired rose bushes gone to hips. Grass bleached to the colour of an old wooden spoon grew waist high around the jagged slabs. At the far edge of the courtyard loomed the shabby five-storey apartment building, affectionately known as a Krushchoba, a Krushchev-inspired slum. Nothing but mice and other small animals inhabited the first floor. Azade, the caretaker of the courtyard, and Vitek, her adult son, occupied a few rooms on the second floor. At the opposite end of the building and three floors up, two windows glowed with light. It was Saturday, still the Sabbath, and Olga's curtains were still drawn. Not to be outdone, Tanya's grandmother, Lukeria, had raised her window shade and set her Vespers candle on the windowsill of their fourth-floor apartment. Only Mircha, before his leap from the roof, had lived on the fifth floor and this because, she knew, it was the furthest he could get from his wife, Azade, and Vitek.
From behind the huge mound of metal scrap and potato peelings came the sound of whispering. Then a pebble flew past Tanya's knee. Tanya picked up a small concrete chunk and lobbed it over the mound, where it landed with a thud against some scrap. No, you couldn't be too careful around the young people these days. Take these kids, for instance, street kids. It was their bad luck that of all the buildings and courtyards they could have chosen to set up residence in, they picked this one where the toilets didn't work, the apartments had no heat and the tenants had no heart. Their bad luck that Vitek, their self-appointed sponsor, was teaching them the multifaceted arts of begging and stealing, drinking and glue-sniffing. And Tanya felt sorry for them. They were like those dog-children from the old stories who needed a mother to call them by the right name. Then they would remember their true selves and how to act like children. She would gladly take care of them—all five of them. If only they would stop throwing rocks.
As if on cue, Vitek unpeeled himself from the shadows. Like the Devil in church, he was uncomfortable in his own skin but tried valiantly to hide the fact. He smiled at Tanya and his gold tooth gleamed.
'I'm sorry about your, well, you know,' Tanya said. It had only been seven days since the wake and it was the orthodox way to refrain from a direct mention of the name of the dead until they'd been gone for a full nine days.
Vitek shrugged and withdrew a vial from his coat pocket. 'Have a gargle?' Marsh Lilac, a cheap perfume with a high alcohol content.