The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight by Gina Ochsner

Author:Gina Ochsner
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2011-11-24T05:26:42+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Azade

Though Azade had smelled the upside-down dreams of bats and the warm and weedy dreams of eels, nothing reeked as much as the dreams of humans. This was why angels do not visit us while we sleep—from fear they may carry our stench up their ladders to heaven. And in the same way that a glistening map tells of a snail's night-time journeys, dreams—having all night to gather strength—spill out and follow the dreamer wherever he or she goes, as a wet vapour trailing each step, as oil clinging to the skin. This was why at night Azade kept a tuck of salt under her tongue before careening towards sleep and why she washed her hands so thoroughly and so often as soon as she woke up in the morning. For what people dreamt was not only announced with an overwhelming odour, but also in sweat, tears, and urine, all the body's efforts to slough off what was no longer needed.

And where do people go to get rid of what they don't need? The toilet, of course. Stationed at her post, Azade has detected every souring dream, every curdled nightmare. In Olga's cautious turds, so typical of a woman who has a hard time letting go, Azade smelled Olga's longing for her husband who has long ago left this land and Olga's terrible desire to know precisely where his body lay. Gut the memory and the man. This was the advice Azade kept at the tip of her tongue and she would have said if it were not for Yuri. Every morning at 8.10, his hands still slick from a full night of fishing, Yuri sat on the commode and dumped his aching need for a father, a desire that carried the stagnant aroma of duckweed and stale dinner buns, the scent of a young man unable to leave his childhood. She could detect anxiety coiling deep in Lukeria's bowels and her farts told of her old woman's utter terror at being left alone. Then there was Tanya, embarrassed by her body, sitting in the latrine far longer than she needed to. Always the girl dreamt a translation of her days into the language of clouds, believing that by describing every skyscape she would make her life a beautiful knowable thing. But these days Azade was smelling more gas from the girl. Something was bothering her, something that wouldn't work out tidily in that notebook she always carried. It was as if the girl had swallowed sky and now was bloated with the shapes her longing assumed inside her swelling body.

Azade's odours, on the other hand, and this she readily admitted, were typical—heralding ordinary longings that smelled of her own skin, of woodsmoke, and of soil. Her night-time dreams were to see Mount Kazbek, the holy mountain rising into the purer, thinner air of Vladikavkaz and the foothills driving up the blue mists. She wanted to go to a place where winter stole the days from spring, and the snap of cold forced her breath inside out.

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