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

seventeen times a day and had the prayer bruise on his forehead to prove it. 'In what way are they better than me?'
    For a year her father appealed to authorities, wrote eloquent
letters begging for a chance to work in the universities. Then to the factories. Then to the city services to clean windows. But because the factories manufactured military components and because of her father's subversive skin colour, his every request was denied. It didn't matter that he had a PhD and spoke four languages. 'You can clean a latrine in any language,' a clerk, the lowest clerk, at the city office of work affairs told him. Two years later her father died of shame, the thought and smell of shit on his feet and hands never leaving him.

    All this her mother told her, in her mountain language that no one else in the building would understand. 'He could not travel beneath his skins to find another skin,' she said. 'He could not trade his highlander skin for a Russian skin.' And Azade understood the lesson in that comment, in the example of her father's frustrated life. Azade set out to be the best kind of Soviet—Russian-speaking and hard-working. Docile and doing nothing to arouse suspicion of being in possession of nationalistic ideas or a simple nostalgia for the past, or—God forbid—a memory of a time when her family had had a place of their own and knew it. Even so, it seemed natural to her in the way that the closed knot of a loop makes all things seem inevitable that she inherited her father's duties and took charge of this little latrine and the courtyard. Natural that a man she did not know or want to know, a Caucasian highlander in an army-issue uniform so new that the creases of his trousers held fast when he walked, saw her in the courtyard. He clasped her hand—still dirty from pulling weeds—in his. He did not ask
her, but told her, that they would go the civil registry and be married. 'Where did this crazy man come from?' Her mother pitched the question to the ceiling, to the heavens, and Azade had merely shrugged. And because her father wasn't there to object, her mother, such a progressive Muslim, really, for her day, who had herself longed to wear the long blue skirts and smart-looking glasses, encouraged the match. He wasn't an ethnic Russian and he wasn't Christian, and that's all that mattered. 'Marry him, whatever he is,' her mother advised. 'In this Soviet state, it will be better for you, better for your children.' The civil ceremony took only two minutes. The deputy governor pointed to the place on the paper where they were to sign and gave them a bit of wisdom: 'Life is very difficult. Never forget your parents.'

    Azade held open the door of the latrine with her foot and studied the children outside. That's what carried her all these years, the thought of children. But even in that she was cursed with bad luck. Six times, maybe seven, she conceived. But always, always something went wrong. Azade grabbed a bucket and sprinkled salt along the path between the stairwell and the latrine. She counted the children pawing at the heap. The oldest, Big Anna, stood knock-kneed and pawed through the clutter at the base of the heap.
    'Up your mother!' Anna hooted at the twin with the transparent veins that swam under his skin. Bad Boris, Azade had called him, and the name had stuck. 'Your mother twice over!' Bad Boris yelled back at the girl.
    Good Boris, not to be outdone, hawked a jet of mucus at the base of the glistening heap. 'Your mother like this and that!'

    Gleb, the red-haired boy, ran his sleeve under his nose. Eight years old, Azade put him at. 'Your mother up and down and all around.'
    'Your mother and seven crosses on her death bed!' cried the littlest child, the girl with the brown skin. She used to have India-black hair, but now it was orange with malnutrition. Five, Azade guessed her age. Maybe six. It was hard to tell just how old, what with all the glue they'd been sniffing. Stunted