The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight by Gina Ochsner Read Free Book Online Page A

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