Free The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight by Gina Ochsner

adults are given to the children as a gift, as a blessing, as a reminder, as a curse. And when the story jumps from mouth to mouth, skin to skin, it becomes so fluid and malleable as to sustain numerous retellings in innumerable contexts, stretching so much as to allow a daughter to know all that the mother knew, and in this way to thoroughly become her. Because when her mother told these stories, it was as if Azade became her mother, just as when Azade's father told his stories she felt she had become him. And then it was easy to recall how they'd been packed into the cattle cars with an ox who'd had its knees broken. How the children had to stand on the back of the beast lest they be crushed underfoot. How they looked for sky between the carriage seams. The thirst, her mother told her, was unbearable, and those who could, drank their own urine. The babies had no tears to cry with.
    For three weeks, no food, no water, everyone pressed together so close they could not squat to relieve themselves and so had to shit all over each other's feet. And when the train stopped in Perm it wasn't until the line workers pushed open the doors of the wagons and offloaded those pressed closest to the doors that they could even tell who was dead and who
still alive. 'What are all these darkies doing here?' the railway inspector asked, and that is how they learned, blinking in the shock of sudden light, that there had been a huge mistake. They should have been sent to the Sarozek, the Kazakh desert, but somehow they had ended up at the gateway to Siberia, where nobody wanted them. They'd been deposited here to work the jobs real Russians didn't want to do and to occupy the dwellings of recently relocated families who were—impossibly—even more subversive and less Russian-looking than they. And what did they bring with them? The pain of an empty stomach. And shame.

    The officers took turns with the women, her mother even, but not until they'd broken the arms and noses of all the men. The thud of boots. The crack of bones, the muffled cries. With each sound, each push, each tear of fabric, her mother explained how she retreated beneath her skin. Because beneath that skin there was another skin. And beneath that skin was yet another skin. And hiding in the centre of herself where there was nothing, her mother said, only air, a strange alchemy of torment occurred. At the end of her human self and wishing nothing more than for a few moments of flight, misery turned her leaden bones to hollow ones. And then her mother wasn't a woman anymore but a bird. 'This is what you do when something unspeakable happens,' her mother said. 'This is what happens to a girl when something unspeakable is done to her. She turns herself into a bird. This is how she flies away.' And when the men had finished with those women,
with her mother, even as the blood dried along the insides of their legs, the women hugged each other and sang an old song:

One day I will become a blue dove

And I will sit in the blue grass

Do not rush me, oh stranger,

Do not rush me now.
    A song to numb the senses and dull the dreams. Days passed. Each one another dark bird that rises into a wrinkle and flies away. Her father's nose healed, but now it sat crooked on his face. Her mother, she healed too, in a fashion, the way women do. The song that she sang, it helped as much as any song can, smoothing back old hurt to make way for the new. The stinging hard looks other women gave her in the courtyard as she hung their laundry, the job assignments she could not get, the many kiosk vendors who would not sell to her. It was the same way for her father. The men of the apartment building called him Nose and would not allow him to play chess with them. 'Animals. Godless animals,' her father said. 'Sloppy eaters with foul mouths, most of those men. And their chess moves lack grace.' Azade can remember the indignation her father had felt, her father, who had been proud and devout, prayed