Yasha 1

A Chapter by CampionWindisch

Moments after a wedding

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They stood slapdash across from Isaakiyevskaya, a mural of limbs variegate and loud against all that passed, waiting, as the rain came slanted on the wind, blind and thin and unexpected. Yasha was in a white tuxedo of imitation silk though he had been sold on silk and paid silk prices. He wore a red tie of same and sharkskin boots which were bona fide and in the hand with which he was not smoking he held a short white tophat a size too small and asymmetrically formed at the flanks where the brim curled up, also white. He had just been married, wed at a smaller church southeast of the Fontanka where the cost was not so high and the waitlist not quoted in decades. His bride wore white gilded taffeta (layer folded) prolixly at the curtain so that it was as if her body beneath suddenly bloused at the midsection. The truth: her hips had begun to spread, perhaps a little early in life, as the bride was stingily aware, the dress was purchased in light tinted by this cloud, if only fool the wedding pictures. Around her mid like a frieze was a broad sash of pink silk embossed in a pattern she had been told signified ‘lucky girl’, but which really signified ‘beloved mother in law’�"a gift from her grandmother to her mother, both of them long dead. She wore pink lace thigh-highs (rayon) despite the threat of cold; her shoes were white clog {pumps} with sinuous ivory heels and brass tips. The ivory was bona fide. Yasha had procured the shoes: �"with luck. Lucky was that they fit.
   Yasha’s suit had gone a vague pink with the rain. Several veins rose on his forehead from the force of the American cigarette. �"Redpack, he said to the smoke. He felt a drive to speak in droves but he did not speak much. He drew a starlet of cottoned spittle to the prow of his tongue and he looked pigeon-eyed at this product and then he spit it to the curb and took up again with his cigarette. His bride stood a head taller than him and held her own umbrella.
   Of the four bridesmaids arrived from the ceremony the pair standing center wore the same dress and the same hair�"women similarly built, with the same basic human features; they were kicking at each others feet and intermittently looking in fuzzy awe at the bride who stood remarkably still, just apart from them, several arm-lengths closer to the curb near her beloved. To the right of this shyly raucous pair stood a stark, leggy woman of a stunning, frigid disposition�"she was apart from the rest in the caliber of her bone structure, natural posture, the impossibility of her bearing�"she was scanning the crush which flowed easily past, looking not into the passing faces but instead just over the tops of the highest heads, squinting at the distance, as if looking for someone on whom she was tragically waiting. There was a cigarette in her left hand, frayed and dissipated from laches. Opposite her on the left flank was a small copper-skinned woman, skin drawn over her bones youthful and efficient, smooth black hair knotted up in such a way as to hint at dizzying length. She was short, and well proportioned, with the eyes of the east and the wending lips of a western european; everything about her bespoke a sort of effortless health, a long quiet life. Her eyes were such�"of a unified color�"that it was difficult to tell exactly where she was looking. She seemed less interested in the ruckus to her left, or even the lofted cupola of Isaakiyevsky set off before her against the rain and the clouds and its grim black facades and colonnades, all of which towered over any structure she knew to exist or could wonder without seeing�"instead she stood dutifully stoic, with both hands through the straps of her purse clutched in front of her, the (toast glass) empty and begrudged, pincered by her middle and ring fingers. But she could have been staring at the dome, fixated.
   Humans passed in lurches and swells. They took long uninhibited looks at the bride and bridegroom and this small retinue protected by the eves above, though no voice rose to offer blessing or good wishes. They had come straight from the civil service, where from impecuniousness no rings were exchanged they were pronounced legally one and sent official into the morning. The sky was all clouds�"shifting, lamellate curtains. A constant soft worry above. Occasional partings in the scales of this buttermilk sea offered hope that the photographs for which they had come might still be taken.
   The bride’s careful braid was beginning to fray at the pate when the groom flicked one cigarette to the curb and took another immediately to his lips and hunched forward to light it. Rising with the ember anew he gave a spastic little cringe and then shaking his head he set the cigarette to his flank and sighed smoke. She switched the umbrella from her right hand to her left and turned back to the bridesmaids and pointed for something.

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