The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight Read Free Page A

former translator who had thrust her head in the open canister dock. Her bosom, which was not insubstantial, had been pulled into the dock. It took three men and all their strength to pry the poor woman free. What bothered the woman most was not the indignities to which her body had been subjected, but that she'd lost her brassiere. Even worse, she had been left with bruises in compromising places. And it took some effort on the part of the internal-memo-translation team to render the on-site production trauma sufficiently oblique in writing as to not make the woman the butt of everyone's break-time jokes.
    Yes, the tubes were a danger. Olga herself had witnessed the terrifying sucking power of their internal wind and had seen cufflinks and buttons, even the occasional set of dentures, clatter through the pipes, and heard their clacking and rattling against the sides.

    She took a breath, held it, then opened the plastic hatch and slid the canister in, one centimetre at a time. The canister trembled, as if it too were afraid. Then it shot up and away through the tubing, through the hole in the office ceiling built specifically for this device. Olga wiggled her fingers, sighed in relief. A good day, all in all, and taking it as a sign, she decided to quit early while she was still ahead.
    Through the snow Olga trudged, dimly aware that in faraway places people spoke with purer words of unvarnished meaning. Or maybe not. Maybe at other news agencies in other countries people simply told more palatable lies. And as she rounded the corner and climbed over the remains of the broken stone archway that marked the entrance to the courtyard, she felt despair sliding down her throat, setting up quick residence in her stomach. Language was, after all, just word-shaped stains, simply another way people hide themselves from one another, one more way to evade and obscure the truth.
    And then, perched on the roof of their apartment building, was Mircha, a one-armed weathervane leaning into a thin-set snow. 'Truth,' Mircha shook his fist, 'is a whore! And history,' Mircha stopped to point his finger at Olga, 'is giving me indigestion!'
    'Mr Aliyev,' Olga said, both a greeting and a dismissal, 'come down from the rooftop. You are drunk.'

    'I am fishing,' Mircha pronounced.
    Olga surveyed the heap of refuse glistening under a hard drop of frost. Everyone threw their trash out of their windows onto the heap; given the fact that the wind pushed from the east and that the sanitation crews were on perpetual strike, the window-toss method of garbage collection and containment was as efficient as any other. Also, it served as a visual catalogue of items no longer fit for any earthly purpose: rusted cables, engine blocks, even the burnt shell of a PT-76, an amphibious light tank. Balanced on the roof of this tank sat a typewriter minus the strikers and ribbon. And wedged in the typewriter was a fishing rod. Olga pointed to the ungainly pile. 'But your rod is on the heap.'
    Mircha leaned over the edge of the roof. 'Where I am going I have no need for such a rod; what I am fishing for requires a much larger hook.'
    Olga dismissed Mircha with a single-handed flick of the wrist and began her climb up the stairs to the third floor. At the threshold of the apartment she shared with her son, Yuri, and his semi-permanent girlfriend, Zoya, she stamped her feet and jangled her keys, wordless noise being the best way of alerting them that she was entering.
    In the kitchen Yuri sat at the table as he often did these days, swaying slowly from side to side as if in agony. Yuri, Olga knew, was born to suffer and nothing she'd done for him as a
child or a man had deterred him from hewing a path through a thicket of sorrow. But she tried to encourage him. She did not pester him about his hobbies, that assortment of fishing flies, wire, paper clips, and goat hair spread across yesterday's copy of the
Red Star
which was in turn spread over the kitchen table. She tried