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

the growth. Every day she said this to the twin boys with the transparent skin. Seven she was guessing for those two, because they'd each lost their front teeth, and she was pretty sure they fell out the natural way, though there was no denying that Vitek treated them rough and what with all those fumes they inhaled, and their funny lurching walk, they tended to hurt themselves. Five of them. And they might have been hers. It was easy to think this way. Easy to count them and think of all the children she'd lost, every one of them with skins thin and bones soft. She'd lost them and it was her own fault, her own carelessness that caused it—she understood this now. When her mother told her to hang an unbroken, unknotted skein from the door of the latrine, Azade had laughed. She and Mircha had only been married two years and she didn't know then the importance of unbroken thread, didn't really believe that unbroken thread was life.
    Only after she lost her children did she remember her
mother's advice. They hadn't grown right and when they came, always months too soon, they slid out into the sheets and once into the toilet bowl, fishlike, and so strange, she could hardly see how they could be human. Fish, they were creatures meant for water, but not for this land. Mircha took them in his hands—yes, in those days he had both his arms still—and wrapped them in milling cloth and buried them the mountain way, red string tied around the bundle, pocketing them in barren ground without a marker, without a reminder, so as not to curse the cotton crop or send their spirits into the trees.

    'Not like that, stupid! Like this.' Vitek's voice bounced from wall to wall in the dvor, snapping Azade from her reverie. Vitek shook the boy with the rust-coloured hair and the boy's glasses sailed across the cracked pavement. 'When you rush a tourist, you littler ones should get in front and you,' Vitek pointed to the rust-haired boy and the older girl, 'should stand behind the mark and get your hands in every pocket.'
    Azade shuffled toward the children, taking note of their blank stares. 'You're ruining them,' she said, dumping a handful of salt on Vitek's left shoe.
    Vitek laughed. 'Oh, Ma—it's all fun and games.'
    'These kids need an education, or they'll be good for nothing.' Azade squinted at the kids, who stared back at her with empty eyes.
    'I'm giving them an education,' Vitek said.
    'No. The kind with books and things.'
    Vitek passed his tongue over his gold tooth as he glanced at
the
Material Dialectics
textbook Azade kept stowed near the latrine in the event of big bizness.

    'Books are only good for wiping your ass with. Besides, what I'm teaching them is better than anything you can find in a book. Not a single one of those books will tell you how to get by in this life.'
    'In every equation there is nothing as constant as human cruelty,' Big Anna said.
    'See,' Vitek smiled. 'They know everything kids their age should if they want to survive.'
    Azade shook her head, mumbled some choice words in Kumyk. He could catch crayfish in winter, her Vitek. He could figure the angles in a circle. But for all this cleverness there was something fundamentally wrong with him. For starters, every time he opened his mouth, he broke her heart just a little more. Not his fault, though. Could he help it that nobody, not even his own mother, had wanted him? It's the only way she could explain how he turned up in their courtyard one morning with lice in his hair and scabies on his skin. At seven years old he was already a confirmed alcoholic, and Azade knew that the street had been his mother and it was his good luck to wander under the archway into their dvor to use her Little Necessary the day he did. And she thanked God for him. It was like the ground had finally returned to her what it had taken. A real child, alive and trailing her like a shadow, and she could not have ignored him even if she had wanted to.
    'We can't feed that