by Maria Reva
She says, “I wish I could keep you for myself.”
She says, “They told your mother to try again.”
* * *
—
The director of the baby house is young, eager, and progressive. He’s the darling of the Ministry of Health. The beam of light piercing the fog. The broom battling the cobwebs. Within the first year of his tenure, he urged the Ministry to take a holistic approach to the issue of invalid care. Since adult invalids are classified as Group Ones, Twos, and Threes according to labor capacity, the director believes each baby’s group number can be predicted—projected—at birth. That way the Ministry can anticipate the resources necessary for lifelong collective care.
According to the director’s classification of infants, the Threes have a minor defect. It may be cosmetic—webbed fingers, a misshapen ear—but when has that helped a person land a job? Even the outwardly normal babies pose a risk. Abandonment is taxing, and there is always the chance of a depressive mother, an alcoholic father lurking in the genes. So the director deems the healthy but abandoned babies Threes, just in case.
Twos are blind and/or deaf. Skin disorders and ambiguous genitalia fit the criteria, too.
Ones simply lie there.
An aerial view of the baby beds looks like this:
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This year, the Ones, Twos, and Threes sleeping in their beds look like this:
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The director would deny any pattern to the distribution of the babies. If the healthier babies lie next to the great bright windows where they can chatter with the magpies, and next to the doors where the occasional Ministry inspector can see them best, it’s surely a coincidence. Pick any other room, where the older children sleep—though they rarely sleep, not all at once—and try to find a pattern in that jumble.
And anyway, it’s the sanitarki who assign the babies to their beds, not he.
In this particular batch of babies, the loudest voice comes from row three, bed seven. The puzzle pieces of her face hadn’t sealed together in her mother’s womb. A cleft begins at her right nostril, plunges down the upper lip and into the hole of her mouth. A boisterous Three, just on the edge of invalidity, this girl is one of the favorites. She coos and babbles and peekaboos, flirts with the sanitarki, grips their fingers with an iron strength when they peer in at her.
* * *
—
At six to ten months, the babies begin to crawl. Hands and knees patter on the vinyl floors. Today the distribution of the crawling babies looks like this:
On the far right, the lone baby: she’s the lively Three. Faster than the others, the girl has slipped out of the baby house. She’s cruising along the wooden picket fence, eyes set on a gap wide enough to squeeze through. Pine trees tower beyond it, beckon her with their syrupy smell. Four pickets to go, three, two…The same sanitarka who found the girl inside the medicine cabinet yesterday, an overturned dustbin the day before, catches up to her now. As the girl sticks her head through the gap—the air feels different on the other side, less dense—she feels her romper tighten around her neck, pull her backward. The pines slide away.
The sanitarka is doubled over, panting. “You’ll be the end of me.” She lets go of the romper. The baby looks up at her and a flutter of giggles escapes her mouth, wins her captor over like it did yesterday and the day before.
A small, secret relief for the overworked attendants: not all the babies learn to crawl. This failure is only natural for those with clubfeet or spinal conditions. And if some of them aren’t let down from their beds, it’s because they’ll never be able to walk anyway. Beds take up most of the space, and there aren’t enough sanitarki eyes to watch over everyone. If all the babies learned to crawl, where would they go?
* * *
—
The older children name her Zaya. Little rabbit. Her mouth is a crooked assemblage of teeth and gums. As the teeth grow, they poke through the slit in her lip. At breakfast, half her porridge oozes from her nose.
The name starts with a letter she can’t pronounce, and the other children delight in hearing her try. There are many letters the girl can’t pronounce, because they require both sets of lips and a complete upper jaw.
Whenever a sanitarka goes for a smoke in the courtyard, Zaya follows. Most of the time the woman sits in silence, staring at the wall opposite, taking grateful pulls on her cigarette. On good days she reads a magazine; on the best days she reads aloud to Zaya, who learns to follow the words. Topics covered: newly released books, home remedies, the latest five-year economic plan, hat etiquette.
* * *
—
Every New Year’s Eve, the baby house receives a donation from the Transport Workers’ Union. A six-wheel truck sighs to a stop in front of the gates, enveloping the waiting children in a great diesel plume. Grandfather Frost—whom a recently orphaned boy calls “Saint Nicholas” before receiving prompt correction—descends from the passenger side. He wears a tall boyar hat, a long white beard, a blue velvet coat, and felt boots.
Grandfather Frost beams down at the children. “Who’s been good this year?”
The children shrink back, alarmed by the question.
Grandfather Frost recoils, too, unaccustomed to children afraid of the prospect of gifts. He whistles up to the pock-faced man behind the wheel, who wears a plastic crown festooned with a shiny blond braid—Snow Maiden. The bed of the truck lifts, dumps a pile of old tires over the fence. Grandfather Frost uses shears to cut the tires into swans.
“It’s a miracle,” says a sanitarka, and so it is. The children keep silent, watch the miracle unfold. This is how Grandfather Frost does it:
Soon the courtyard is littered with dusty brown swans. The children paint the swans red or blue or yellow. At first Zaya mixes red and yellow in her tin to make a radiant orange, but an experimental dab of blue turns the mixture brown.
When the director of the baby house comes to Zaya’s swan, he says, “That’s a shame. Grandfather Frost gave you three bright colors to choose from.”
Zaya invents an explanation, one the director would find very clever, and would surely repeat to his colleagues at the Ministry, who would find it very clever also—but of the sounds that slosh out of Zaya’s mouth, the director understands none.
So he asks, “Why not just paint the swan yellow?”
* * *
—
Every spring, the sanitarki trim the hedges along the building, pull weeds around the tulips. They bleach and starch the curtains, pour ammonia over the floors, shine the doorknobs, wipe the babies down.
And every spring, the Psychological-Medical-Pedagogical Commission of the Ministry of Education arrives in a procession of three cars. Zaya and the other four-year-olds press themselves against the windows of the baby house, watching the procession in a quiet panic. They are about to be redistributed.
The Threes shouldn’t worry. Unless they freeze up during the test, they’ll move on to the children’s house.
The Ones don’t yet know they should worry. They can’t even get out of their beds, and no one can do anything about that now, so they’ll be transferred to the psychoneurological internat.
“What’s at the internat?” asks a pudgy-cheeked boy, twice caught wearing a dress in the laundry room.
“It’s a delightful place where children run barefoot, pick berries,” says the director, who has popped in for the day. “Communicate with nature, and so on.”
A sanitarka starts to weep.
“Happy tears,” the director explains.
The Twos are the wild cards. Sometimes the Commission sends them to the children’s
house, sometimes to the internat.
Zaya, our solid Three just a few months back, has regressed to a Two. She has abandoned speech in favor of writing, but few of the children know how to read yet, so most of the time she points and grunts.
When it’s Zaya’s turn with the Commission, the director escorts her to the back of the building, to a small room that smells like moldy onions. The Commission members sit at the head of a long table. They’ve arranged themselves in descending order of height, like nesting dolls. The largest man, who has a thick mustache cascading from his nostrils, asks Zaya to confirm her name.
Zaya hopes this isn’t part of the test, but knows she must answer every question, without exception. She fears that her bottom is about to give out like a trapdoor, jams her knees together, afraid of wetting herself. To deflect, Zaya does what she saw a sanitarka do once, with the director, to get an extra day off. She twists her finger in her curls, peeks at the men through her thick lashes. She leans in, coy, as if she wants to tell them a secret. The men lean in, too. First she raises three fingers, then seven. When no one says anything, Zaya forces out a giggle: Silly, can’t you understand?
The largest man looks down at the file in front of him and laughs. “Row three, bed seven. Her sleeping assignment.” This answer satisfies the Commission.
The man in the middle, with oily porous cheeks, pushes four puzzle pieces across the table. Zaya fits them together. It’s a picture of a cat, dog, and parrot.
“Can you tell us what you see?”
Zaya stares at the cat, dog, and parrot. She feels the shape of the first word inside her mouth, whispers it into her hand. It doesn’t come out right, so she moves on to the next word, then the next.
CAT
DOG
PARROT
BIRD
THING
WITH
FEATHERS
PETS
ZOO
ANIMALS
FLUFFY
FRIENDS
The Commission watches the clock above the girl’s head. The inside of Zaya’s palm is warm and wet from her breath. At last the smallest of the men says, “One more question and you’re free to go. What’s the weather like outside?”
Zaya swivels around, looks out the window. All she wants is to run out of the building, out to where the weather is. Instead, she turns back to the Commission, presses her hands to her ears to keep from hearing herself, starts pushing the first word out. Its mangled syllables resonate between her palms. She wishes the Commission wouldn’t look at her. She shuts her eyes, bangs her fist against the table, louder, louder to keep from hearing herself, until the pressure in her chest breaks and the words fire out. “How bright and beautiful the sun,” she cries, “not one cloud can cover it up!”
* * *
—
The psychoneurological internat stands at the edge of a cliff, overlooking the Dnieper River. Patches of white plaster flake off the walls to reveal pink brick underneath, as if the building suffers from a skin condition. Long ago, before its gold-plated cupolas were dismantled and its eighteen copper bells melted down to canteen pots, before its monks were shot, it was a monastery. An iron fence, a recent addition, surrounds the grounds, its spiked rods rising high enough to keep in the tallest of the children, the space between the rods narrow enough to keep in the smallest.
The fresh batch of five-year-olds arrives in the back of a decommissioned camo truck, hair and faces dusty from the road. A tall woman in a dark green suit—their new director—orders the children to gather round in the courtyard. Her large smooth forehead emits a plastic sheen. One hand rises in greeting as the other does a head count. The children who can stand prop up those who can’t against the fence.
Zaya watches a group of teenagers blow dandelion fluff at each other in the distance, two of them barefoot, just as the previous director promised. She scans the courtyard for tire animals, sees in their stead fresh mounds of earth.
The woman points to a sheet-metal sign nailed to the arched entrance of the decommissioned monastery. “Can anyone tell me what that says?”
When no volunteers come forward, she reads the sign herself: “THERE IS NO EASY WAY FROM THE EARTH TO THE STARS.”
The reedy boy beside Zaya asks what stars are.
“To reach the stars you need to build a rocket. And we did that,” the new director says. “But let me tell you a secret.” She lowers her voice, and the circle of children tightens around her. “To build a rocket you need parts, and sometimes you get a crooked bolt, a leaky valve. These have to be thrown away. If they aren’t, the rocket won’t launch. Even if it does launch, it might explode into a million pieces.”
The children nod along.
“That’s just the way it is, when you’re reaching for the stars.” She casts a magnanimous gaze over the group. “Sometimes you get defective parts.”
The children nod along.
“But we don’t throw people away. We take care of them. You can bet on that for the rest of your life.” She straightens up. “Something to think about, when you’re feeling blue.”
The children follow the director into the building. They file along a corridor, past the canteen; past a storage room containing a blackboard; past the latrine where a bald boy squats in the shadows, gargoyle-like, his shoulder blades jutting out; past a pair of twin girls balancing on one leg each; past a door with a tiny square window too high for Zaya to see through. They reach a cavernous hall crowded with beds and children. The painted walls are crowded, too, with scenes of wrath and deliverance: flames rise from the floor; a red snake coils up a wall and wraps its tongue around a thrashing figure; above are curly clouds, men with wings, men without wings, disembodied wings twisting around each other, stretching to the domed ceiling, at the center of which is a woman cradling a baby. The baby stares down at Zaya day and night wherever she is in the hall, its hand up, on the verge of uttering something important.
In the following months, Zaya adds to the pictures to pass the time. Using a sharp stone, she scratches the men’s mouths open to let them speak. She wishes she could reach the never-sleeping baby, but it sits too high.
* * *
—
When winter comes, cold whistles through the cracks in the windows and into the lungs of the children.
It begins with a cough. The tickle in Zaya’s throat burrows into her chest, blossoms into double pneumonia. She drifts in and out of a fevered fog. Noises filter into her dreams—the ruffle of sheets, snot bubbling up and down endless nasal passages, the distant cowbells from a village, the clack of trains from a rail yard.
Outside the window, a couple of older, healthier children chatter as they dig another pit. When she hears them shoveling earth back into the hole, Zaya feels for damp soil on her own hot face. But it isn’t there; it’s for someone else.
* * *
—
Green buds erupt on the branches outside. Sunrays on bedsheets shine brighter.
When Zaya wakes between fevers, she sees a pair of withered arms and legs on her bed. She tries to move; the matchstick limbs answer. She covers them with her sheet.
Zaya looks at the beds around her. The room is hushed, so she’s surprised to find most of her neighbors awake, blinking at the ceiling. She’s in a different room than before, a white-tiled room—the room on the other side of the door with the tiny square window.
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Zaya could try walking again, but where would she go? Everything aches, as if a fire has ravaged her insides. She lays her head down and goes back to sleep.
She wakes when a pair of fingers press on her wrist, checking for a pulse.
She wakes when the corners of her sheet lift and she floats in the air for an ins
tant. She screams and falls back down on the mattress.
She wakes writhing in hot wet sheets. Something hard slams into her side. When she disentangles herself, she is on the floor. Her sweaty palms slip on pale pink vinyl as she crawls to the door with the square window. She tries the knob, beats her fists against the door. She slumps back down to the floor, a heap of bones. Coughs erupt through her mouth and nose in painful spasms, expelling a frothy pus—not into her hand, but in the crook of her elbow, as she has been taught. Two limp-faced girls gaze down at her from their own beds, peaceful. All she needs to do is let it happen, their heavy-lidded eyes tell her. Give in, melt into the floor. Isn’t that what this room is for—a long rest? Her lungs will unclench, fill to the brim like two bottles of milk, and the sanitarki will take her away. That’s when the parents come at last. Zaya has seen them visit once their child is safe in a small box. A nurse might even sew up her lip for the occasion.
Her head rolls to the right. In the corner of the room, a crack in the vinyl floor glows.
What she has to do is crawl toward that crack. The need is bodily, instinctual. She has seen it in every moth and mosquito bewitched by a flame.
Right hand, left knee, left hand, right knee. Her joints grind painfully, her elbows buckle, but she keeps moving.
Zaya lifts the corner of the vinyl. It peels away easily, revealing a pair of short loose planks. The glow beckons her from beneath them. Panting, she pulls the planks aside. A small hole in the floor opens up to a set of stone steps leading underground. The tunnel’s cool breath gives the girl a burst of strength. She stands on shaky legs. Strings of cobweb cling to her arms and face as she follows the light down the cold steps, which level out into a chamber. Long narrow shelves are carved into the stone walls. Broken candles and vases litter the floor—remnants of pillage. The air smells sweet, like a baby’s mouth after feeding.
