christmas is coming, ze goose is getting fat
drawn in frost and charcoal
r-ish, ~2200
athermal effects. kgb three, sveta/ivan. a badly-disguised night out at an exhibit at the tretyakov state gallery.
advent gift #1, for emma. happy december, beloved.
“A night like this,” says Yuri, stretching his legs in the back of the Chaika, “is a damn gift. God bless Irina.”
Sveta arches her eyebrows at him, her compact open. Her face is pale in the mirror, mouth a lavishly red line. It and she, red hair pulled back, make for the only colour in the car’s black interior. She is wearing sable; the men, suits. Even Yuri’s grin is unconscionably black-though that’s only him, and she makes an amused moue at him from around Ivan.
"Sometimes her assignments sound more like courtesies. Vanya must have sweet-talked her impressively last time."
"That's our Vanya." Yuri thumps his shoulder. "Sweet-talker, exactly."
“I wouldn’t call it an assignment,” Ivan says, voice flat, and Yuri shakes his head.
“Hell, you think I’d be clamoring for a trip to the Tretyakov otherwise? I’m not really a modern art man.”
“You seem pleased enough now.” She leans in again, around the sharp line of Ivan’s shoulder-how is it, she wonders, that Yuri seems to be able to take up so much space in his corner, relaxing in a stretch of legs and a sprawl of elbows, when she and Vanya are so impossibly close; it could drive a girl claustrophobic if she was of the mind. The fur of her collar and sleeves tickles his cheek; she watches him swallow and draws a light line along his cheek where her collar had brushed against him, fingertip and fingernail delicate and teasing down the long line of his cheek. “He’s got an assignation, hasn’t he? Vanya, back me up.”
“He’s getting work done, at least.”
“Work he likes.”
“Useful thing.” He favors her with a smile, even though he persistently won’t look forward; she feels his mouth turn, wry, the corner reaching her fingertip. Idly, she flicks him on the shoulder. Her hand rests there, on the thick dark wool of his coat. Factory-made, she thinks, with a twinge, not far off civilian quality. Ah, Vanya. “Wouldn’t Irina be pleased.”
“Shut up, the pair of you,” Yuri says, “doesn’t ‘clandestine’ mean-”
“Not in an art gallery. Which-really, Vanya-you can’t be a greater philistine than our Yura, I will not be the only person admiring the paintings who’s actually admiring the paintings.”
“I’ll admire,” Vanya says, as if being pressed by a great weight. “Perhaps I’ll even say something nice about the colour composition. Yuri won’t be looking.”
“Pair of you.”
“Darling.” She touches Vanya’s face again, and this time it colours. The thrum of his blood beats under the brush of her fingertip.
She draws her finger back and keeps her hands folded in her lap for the rest of the drive.
The State Gallery is lit up from afar; she sees it painted out the window, ebullient with electricity and searingly white under its glass-windowed top. Outside of the car, heels crunching into the snow, she looks up at the gingerbreaded loveliness of the façade, basks for a moment in the antiquated paint and curl of it all. It doesn’t look real, for a moment: against the pale backdrop of the light-polluted sky and the snowy ground, its color sears in as though it has been painted into place.
Irina sends them here to the most celebrated openings, to keep a weather eye on potentially subversive art, illustrations of potential dissidence, but for all the rhetoric with which they’re sent and all the itineraries that check off their presence, it is tacitly agreed to be something of a vacation. Though she’d never rule it out, it strikes her as unlikely that they’d need to escort any of the artists out of the building. It is a show: they make a good show, moving as three, and among the Party heads that show up at any given celebration, their presence matters. The knife in her stocking, the gun in Vanya’s jacket-less. They might as well be gathering dust, as she stands outside the Tretyakov building and lets her eyes rove over its curved roof.
“Reflective?” Yuri asks. “The bohemian. We’re not even inside.”
“I can do architecture as well as art, given the chance. Dare say, I hope your work is sufficiently impressed.”
“None of that from you,” he says with cheerful equanimity, “in any case, why here more than anywhere else?”
“Look.” She snakes a hand through his elbow. “Old world meeting the new. It’s rather perfect.”
“Someone’s in a patriotic mood!”
He is laughing, breath clouding the air, when Vanya comes round from talking to the driver. “What’s funny?”
“The tsaritsa’s being a sentimentalist.”
“That’s rather good coming from you.”
“Knock the snow off your boots,” Sveta says, averting even a mock spar, the two of them could go at it forever, she knows, and her arms are bare under her fur and even she is sensible to the cold when she’s standing still. The wind, though mild for December, scrapes at her face, sharp and clear. “The both of you-come along, come along, I won’t have you lagging.”
“She leads, we follow.” Yuri tips a hand, touches fingers to temple, and she grimaces. They have pins and papers that make them untouchable, but even he knows to leave his tsaritsa jokes out in the snow.
Their words melt away in the inside hall, as they move toward the central gallery on the first floor. The room thrums vaguely with words that melt like the flakes on her fur into a blur of noise and noise alone; there are drinks on a table at the side made with some fancy liqueur that is sticky and sweet when she picks it up and sips but which immediately warms the back of her throat. She carries it lightly into the room, glancing at the crowd more than the walls. It takes her little time to notice Yuri’s project-the flame-haired woman in the corner, a gravitational force to look at even clad in navy orlon. Biting her lip, her eyes slide away, to the walls at last. The colours are dimmer than the Tretyakov itself, muddy browns and greens, peasant scenes. No Ivan Yakovleviches, she thinks, with vague snobbish irritation, no Ilya Yefimoviches, not tonight.
There were artists when she was younger, writers-when she was much, much younger, when her father was there and speaking French, when there were more musicians than bureaucrats, more poets than officials. She remembers it in a blur of golden heat and speech melting into melody, speech she was too young to understand even when she knew all the languages. She was young, then, only young. She is discerning, now.
The Party is hardly to blame, she would never think-but even so, tonight’s display is hardly a country’s great hope. I am not edified, she thinks tetchily, looking up at a scratchy painting of a kolkhoz under the sun.
Her eyes scry once more through the crowd-Yuri’s hand is on the redhead’s elbow; her smirk bites into the corner of her mouth-until they light on Vanya, looking fixedly at one painting and one alone.
She weaves through the crowd to his side: a Red Army parade, she sees, and the brightest thing in the painting is the soldiers’ smiles, brighter white than their sashes are rad. Their guns are drawn like logs, their bayonets untipped, but they smile at the fore and raise their fist, empty-eyed and sun-mouthed. “Comrade,” she teases, and he shakes his head, once, sharp. His face is pale, ashen beneath the closed lines of his expression.
“I’m going outside for some air. Forgive me, Svetlana Mikhailovna.”
She sets down her drink on the nearest edifice. It holds a sculpture, but an ugly one, brass, and she leaves it quickly behind. “Don’t be silly.” Her heels tap harsh into the tiled floor as she moves, swiftly, at his side. “I could use a breath as well.”
The night air is harsh on her cheeks once more, catching in the back of her throat. She watches him walk out further, tugging his scarf higher up on his throat. The sky is heavy and pale, but they are between storms, at least tonight: his boots, shining, make clear tracks in the fresh snow. “What’s this formality?” she asks, pulling out a pack of cigarettes. Gauloises. She’s willing to take extra missions to Paris just to pick them up by hand. His, that he draws from his pocket, is hand-rolled; he walks back to her with a book of matches and she bends in, lets him light her first. Sucking in the smoke, the ember at the tip flares to life and his face is remade in the light of the flame, drawn into high bones and long shadows.
“It’s nothing,” he says, “nothing-I’m afraid I may disappoint you, though. I have absolutely nothing to say about composition.”
“You’re forgiven.” Her fingers twitch, gloveless yet and chilled, around the cigarette, tapping out ash. Look at me, she thinks, look me in the face, and in the snow and silence with his face clouded in smoke, she thinks of the ballet. She thinks, she lets herself think, think of her mouth opening under his, the crash and clarity of his lips and hands, because she knows, marrow-deep, that he can’t be thinking of anything else. “Vanya, you’re valuable in any guise, but we’ll fail as a team if you can’t look me in the face.”
“I came out here-”
“For sullen silence, yes. I know. And a smoke. You got one, and me.”
“A better bargain?”
She smiles. “You needed me.”
And he turns to her, slow and even, heels almost clicking in the snow as he does. The painted soldiers’ smiles are burned into the backs of her eyelids; she thinks she has never seen Vanya smile like that, not even at his happiest. “It wasn’t a very good painting.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Inexpert, you might say.”
“Inexpert.” She nods, and her hand, her free hand at least, is on the brink of frostbite: she offers it to him, and he reaches, wraps it in a gloved palm. The leather is cold even against her numbed palm; she gives in to a sharp, slow shiver. When she looks up, his eyes are dark, dark even for him and even for night.
Her cigarette burns itself down to the filter, in her hand. Her tongue is dry, and he is silent.
Finally, she flicks the butt down, and he withdraws his hand, as if it is easy, as if it was never meant to be anywhere but at his side. “Back inside?” he asks, looking rueful, and she shakes her head, slowly.
They will not dance around each other; they will not be left making code out of dropped glances. Tonight is Yuri’s mission, if anyone’s. Not theirs.
“I’m going to the powder room,” she says, precisely, “I don’t aim to wait in line-there’s one on one of the upper floors, I know,” and his face is still, mission-still, impassive. Contained, she thinks; afraid, she guesses, and she bites slowly into her tongue in her closed mouth.
“I’ll escort you.”
“Thank you, Vanya,” she says, and he shakes his head.
“No need for thanks.”
Inside, she smiles, lazily, at the security guard bookending the hall, and Vanya moves his scarf aside to calmly stroke the pin on his lapel. They are let through, wordless. The hallways are quieter, darker beyond the gala main; she has been here before, innumerably, but she walks through the paintings as one blind, wending her way toward the bathroom. It’s not far, but their shoes and their breath is the only sound nearby, the crowd fading, fading, and the moment stretches so far she can feel it thinning in her chest.
At last, her hand lights on the door, she pushes it open, it is marble inside, lovely, pale, her fingers draw along a fresh-painted wall, “good man,” she says, "such a manner," she manages to say to him, standing tight at her back, before her hand latches onto the fabric of his lapel and he is crushed against her, into her, the long line of him leaning full and flush against the arch of her.
She doesn’t turn the light on. The door swings shut behind him, and she breathes herself into his mouth, eyes closing, and she hears him make a sharp, harsh sound against her mouth, his hands on the small of her back and his hands on the curve of her hips and her hands cupping her; she hitches herself into him, between him and the sink, and her hips slide up against it, skirt hiking up between alabaster and the crux of them. Her knees raise at his sides and her hands wrap around his neck and her mouth is fierce on his, biting and hot. Her eyes are closed; her eyes stay closed, and the only sound between them is a ragged harmonic edge of breath, sounding only half-natural and belonging, it seems, to neither one of them. His hands are beneath her skirt, running over garter and folded knife. Stroking beneath both to get to skin, and she laughs, and he swallows it, and they ignore the blade, her hand is under his gun in his lapel, and they are natural extensions of each other and they forget.
Her mouth bites at his cheek. In the dark, they are shapes drawn fresh in each other’s hands. The rest-art and setting-is far and silent. And she was taught art as he was taught war and it doesn’t matter, only his hands under her skirt against the tops of her stockings matter, only the heat of skin under hands, only their mouths and where they join, this and this alone.
r-ish, ~2200
athermal effects. kgb three, sveta/ivan. a badly-disguised night out at an exhibit at the tretyakov state gallery.
advent gift #1, for emma. happy december, beloved.
“A night like this,” says Yuri, stretching his legs in the back of the Chaika, “is a damn gift. God bless Irina.”
Sveta arches her eyebrows at him, her compact open. Her face is pale in the mirror, mouth a lavishly red line. It and she, red hair pulled back, make for the only colour in the car’s black interior. She is wearing sable; the men, suits. Even Yuri’s grin is unconscionably black-though that’s only him, and she makes an amused moue at him from around Ivan.
"Sometimes her assignments sound more like courtesies. Vanya must have sweet-talked her impressively last time."
"That's our Vanya." Yuri thumps his shoulder. "Sweet-talker, exactly."
“I wouldn’t call it an assignment,” Ivan says, voice flat, and Yuri shakes his head.
“Hell, you think I’d be clamoring for a trip to the Tretyakov otherwise? I’m not really a modern art man.”
“You seem pleased enough now.” She leans in again, around the sharp line of Ivan’s shoulder-how is it, she wonders, that Yuri seems to be able to take up so much space in his corner, relaxing in a stretch of legs and a sprawl of elbows, when she and Vanya are so impossibly close; it could drive a girl claustrophobic if she was of the mind. The fur of her collar and sleeves tickles his cheek; she watches him swallow and draws a light line along his cheek where her collar had brushed against him, fingertip and fingernail delicate and teasing down the long line of his cheek. “He’s got an assignation, hasn’t he? Vanya, back me up.”
“He’s getting work done, at least.”
“Work he likes.”
“Useful thing.” He favors her with a smile, even though he persistently won’t look forward; she feels his mouth turn, wry, the corner reaching her fingertip. Idly, she flicks him on the shoulder. Her hand rests there, on the thick dark wool of his coat. Factory-made, she thinks, with a twinge, not far off civilian quality. Ah, Vanya. “Wouldn’t Irina be pleased.”
“Shut up, the pair of you,” Yuri says, “doesn’t ‘clandestine’ mean-”
“Not in an art gallery. Which-really, Vanya-you can’t be a greater philistine than our Yura, I will not be the only person admiring the paintings who’s actually admiring the paintings.”
“I’ll admire,” Vanya says, as if being pressed by a great weight. “Perhaps I’ll even say something nice about the colour composition. Yuri won’t be looking.”
“Pair of you.”
“Darling.” She touches Vanya’s face again, and this time it colours. The thrum of his blood beats under the brush of her fingertip.
She draws her finger back and keeps her hands folded in her lap for the rest of the drive.
The State Gallery is lit up from afar; she sees it painted out the window, ebullient with electricity and searingly white under its glass-windowed top. Outside of the car, heels crunching into the snow, she looks up at the gingerbreaded loveliness of the façade, basks for a moment in the antiquated paint and curl of it all. It doesn’t look real, for a moment: against the pale backdrop of the light-polluted sky and the snowy ground, its color sears in as though it has been painted into place.
Irina sends them here to the most celebrated openings, to keep a weather eye on potentially subversive art, illustrations of potential dissidence, but for all the rhetoric with which they’re sent and all the itineraries that check off their presence, it is tacitly agreed to be something of a vacation. Though she’d never rule it out, it strikes her as unlikely that they’d need to escort any of the artists out of the building. It is a show: they make a good show, moving as three, and among the Party heads that show up at any given celebration, their presence matters. The knife in her stocking, the gun in Vanya’s jacket-less. They might as well be gathering dust, as she stands outside the Tretyakov building and lets her eyes rove over its curved roof.
“Reflective?” Yuri asks. “The bohemian. We’re not even inside.”
“I can do architecture as well as art, given the chance. Dare say, I hope your work is sufficiently impressed.”
“None of that from you,” he says with cheerful equanimity, “in any case, why here more than anywhere else?”
“Look.” She snakes a hand through his elbow. “Old world meeting the new. It’s rather perfect.”
“Someone’s in a patriotic mood!”
He is laughing, breath clouding the air, when Vanya comes round from talking to the driver. “What’s funny?”
“The tsaritsa’s being a sentimentalist.”
“That’s rather good coming from you.”
“Knock the snow off your boots,” Sveta says, averting even a mock spar, the two of them could go at it forever, she knows, and her arms are bare under her fur and even she is sensible to the cold when she’s standing still. The wind, though mild for December, scrapes at her face, sharp and clear. “The both of you-come along, come along, I won’t have you lagging.”
“She leads, we follow.” Yuri tips a hand, touches fingers to temple, and she grimaces. They have pins and papers that make them untouchable, but even he knows to leave his tsaritsa jokes out in the snow.
Their words melt away in the inside hall, as they move toward the central gallery on the first floor. The room thrums vaguely with words that melt like the flakes on her fur into a blur of noise and noise alone; there are drinks on a table at the side made with some fancy liqueur that is sticky and sweet when she picks it up and sips but which immediately warms the back of her throat. She carries it lightly into the room, glancing at the crowd more than the walls. It takes her little time to notice Yuri’s project-the flame-haired woman in the corner, a gravitational force to look at even clad in navy orlon. Biting her lip, her eyes slide away, to the walls at last. The colours are dimmer than the Tretyakov itself, muddy browns and greens, peasant scenes. No Ivan Yakovleviches, she thinks, with vague snobbish irritation, no Ilya Yefimoviches, not tonight.
There were artists when she was younger, writers-when she was much, much younger, when her father was there and speaking French, when there were more musicians than bureaucrats, more poets than officials. She remembers it in a blur of golden heat and speech melting into melody, speech she was too young to understand even when she knew all the languages. She was young, then, only young. She is discerning, now.
The Party is hardly to blame, she would never think-but even so, tonight’s display is hardly a country’s great hope. I am not edified, she thinks tetchily, looking up at a scratchy painting of a kolkhoz under the sun.
Her eyes scry once more through the crowd-Yuri’s hand is on the redhead’s elbow; her smirk bites into the corner of her mouth-until they light on Vanya, looking fixedly at one painting and one alone.
She weaves through the crowd to his side: a Red Army parade, she sees, and the brightest thing in the painting is the soldiers’ smiles, brighter white than their sashes are rad. Their guns are drawn like logs, their bayonets untipped, but they smile at the fore and raise their fist, empty-eyed and sun-mouthed. “Comrade,” she teases, and he shakes his head, once, sharp. His face is pale, ashen beneath the closed lines of his expression.
“I’m going outside for some air. Forgive me, Svetlana Mikhailovna.”
She sets down her drink on the nearest edifice. It holds a sculpture, but an ugly one, brass, and she leaves it quickly behind. “Don’t be silly.” Her heels tap harsh into the tiled floor as she moves, swiftly, at his side. “I could use a breath as well.”
The night air is harsh on her cheeks once more, catching in the back of her throat. She watches him walk out further, tugging his scarf higher up on his throat. The sky is heavy and pale, but they are between storms, at least tonight: his boots, shining, make clear tracks in the fresh snow. “What’s this formality?” she asks, pulling out a pack of cigarettes. Gauloises. She’s willing to take extra missions to Paris just to pick them up by hand. His, that he draws from his pocket, is hand-rolled; he walks back to her with a book of matches and she bends in, lets him light her first. Sucking in the smoke, the ember at the tip flares to life and his face is remade in the light of the flame, drawn into high bones and long shadows.
“It’s nothing,” he says, “nothing-I’m afraid I may disappoint you, though. I have absolutely nothing to say about composition.”
“You’re forgiven.” Her fingers twitch, gloveless yet and chilled, around the cigarette, tapping out ash. Look at me, she thinks, look me in the face, and in the snow and silence with his face clouded in smoke, she thinks of the ballet. She thinks, she lets herself think, think of her mouth opening under his, the crash and clarity of his lips and hands, because she knows, marrow-deep, that he can’t be thinking of anything else. “Vanya, you’re valuable in any guise, but we’ll fail as a team if you can’t look me in the face.”
“I came out here-”
“For sullen silence, yes. I know. And a smoke. You got one, and me.”
“A better bargain?”
She smiles. “You needed me.”
And he turns to her, slow and even, heels almost clicking in the snow as he does. The painted soldiers’ smiles are burned into the backs of her eyelids; she thinks she has never seen Vanya smile like that, not even at his happiest. “It wasn’t a very good painting.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Inexpert, you might say.”
“Inexpert.” She nods, and her hand, her free hand at least, is on the brink of frostbite: she offers it to him, and he reaches, wraps it in a gloved palm. The leather is cold even against her numbed palm; she gives in to a sharp, slow shiver. When she looks up, his eyes are dark, dark even for him and even for night.
Her cigarette burns itself down to the filter, in her hand. Her tongue is dry, and he is silent.
Finally, she flicks the butt down, and he withdraws his hand, as if it is easy, as if it was never meant to be anywhere but at his side. “Back inside?” he asks, looking rueful, and she shakes her head, slowly.
They will not dance around each other; they will not be left making code out of dropped glances. Tonight is Yuri’s mission, if anyone’s. Not theirs.
“I’m going to the powder room,” she says, precisely, “I don’t aim to wait in line-there’s one on one of the upper floors, I know,” and his face is still, mission-still, impassive. Contained, she thinks; afraid, she guesses, and she bites slowly into her tongue in her closed mouth.
“I’ll escort you.”
“Thank you, Vanya,” she says, and he shakes his head.
“No need for thanks.”
Inside, she smiles, lazily, at the security guard bookending the hall, and Vanya moves his scarf aside to calmly stroke the pin on his lapel. They are let through, wordless. The hallways are quieter, darker beyond the gala main; she has been here before, innumerably, but she walks through the paintings as one blind, wending her way toward the bathroom. It’s not far, but their shoes and their breath is the only sound nearby, the crowd fading, fading, and the moment stretches so far she can feel it thinning in her chest.
At last, her hand lights on the door, she pushes it open, it is marble inside, lovely, pale, her fingers draw along a fresh-painted wall, “good man,” she says, "such a manner," she manages to say to him, standing tight at her back, before her hand latches onto the fabric of his lapel and he is crushed against her, into her, the long line of him leaning full and flush against the arch of her.
She doesn’t turn the light on. The door swings shut behind him, and she breathes herself into his mouth, eyes closing, and she hears him make a sharp, harsh sound against her mouth, his hands on the small of her back and his hands on the curve of her hips and her hands cupping her; she hitches herself into him, between him and the sink, and her hips slide up against it, skirt hiking up between alabaster and the crux of them. Her knees raise at his sides and her hands wrap around his neck and her mouth is fierce on his, biting and hot. Her eyes are closed; her eyes stay closed, and the only sound between them is a ragged harmonic edge of breath, sounding only half-natural and belonging, it seems, to neither one of them. His hands are beneath her skirt, running over garter and folded knife. Stroking beneath both to get to skin, and she laughs, and he swallows it, and they ignore the blade, her hand is under his gun in his lapel, and they are natural extensions of each other and they forget.
Her mouth bites at his cheek. In the dark, they are shapes drawn fresh in each other’s hands. The rest-art and setting-is far and silent. And she was taught art as he was taught war and it doesn’t matter, only his hands under her skirt against the tops of her stockings matter, only the heat of skin under hands, only their mouths and where they join, this and this alone.