The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight Read Free

'freedom of speech' and 'banking crisis' had no alternate suggestion and therefore were forbidden nomenclature, having been classified as 'Pointless in the context of the editorial mission and policies of a paper such as the
Red Star.'
    Yet in spite of the
Topic Guide's
conspicuous lapses, they were fortunate, Chief Editor Kaminsky liked to remind them, to have such a guide in the first place.

    'How else would we know what to say?' he'd ask with a chuckle. How else would they know, for instance, to rephrase theft of fuel as 'thrift of fuel', Stalin's mass deportations and executions of Jews and Gypsies and other groups of 'rootless cosmopolitans' as 'improving the view', and filtration camps as 'containment resorts'? And without the
Topic Guide,
how else would they know how to navigate words describing the human body, parts and functions—all of which could be for the naturally sensitive Russian embarrassing, indelicate and undignified? How else would they know that urine was water, and blood nothing more than a nutritive fluid? How else would they know to call forced abortions 'necessary interruptions' (though in the case of Gypsy and other women of swarthy complexion, it was called a 'mop-up', the type of which usually resulted in sterilization)? What would they do without these terms tidily rendering innocuous the words that broadcast to the readership the frailties of this life, a reality they were all doing their level best to ignore?
    Olga closed her eyes and thrust her hand into the swirl of papers in the basket, feeling for the least offensive one. At last she withdrew a single curled sheet of fax paper.
Nadezhda Radova Yulpin, a chemical engineer from the Kamchatka region, was charged with
disturbing the peace after she slashed part of the right breast belonging to another woman. The victim, her sister, lyuda Radova Yulpin, retaliated by shearing off a portion of her older sister's left breast. Back and forth they went, tit for tat, until both women were rendered entirely breastless.
    Fairly painless, as far as translations go, and just the kind of soft feature Chief Editor Kaminsky preferred to run on the front pages so as to dampen the effect of the other bad news. Olga translated the report from Koryak to Russian word by word, only altering the references to body parts while preserving the raw essence of paranoid ethnocentrism: people in the east behaved like animals and should be considered as such. Sadly, in all the offices of the
Red Star
the general feeling was that if it were happening to the people in the east or the south—that is, to the Mongols, the Uzbeks, the Buryats, the Avars, the Chechens, the Laks, the Lezghins, the Kazakhs—then those savages certainly deserved it. Which explains the newspaper's policy of bestowing upon these events an air of the inculpable, the inescapable and thus unavoidable, at all times suggesting that these atrocities had happened to people who in some way asked for it.
    Olga dipped her hand into the basket and withdrew another slip of paper. A recent report of anti-Semitism in the oil-rich Nefteyugansk area. Hardly surprising. Olga bit the nib of her
pencil and scribbled a draft copy, writing up the incident as a low-grade malaise of ancient origin with a high nationalistic fibre content. The translation completed, Olga rolled the original work order with her rewrite into a tight scroll and slipped it into a bullet-shaped canister that rested in the open mouth of the howling tubes.

Absurdity no. 4
    The tubes...
    ...consisted of a vascular network of transparent pneumatic tubing that snaked the walls then hooked sharply to disappear into the ceiling and floor. The moment either Arkady or Olga finished translating a report they sent both the original and translated version to Chief Editor Kaminsky for verification and approval. But it was hazardous work, retrieving or sending canisters, and Vera, Olga's best friend and senior fact-checker, told Olga about a