by Maria Reva
The glow emanates from a corner of the chamber, from underneath a gray pile of robes. Zaya unwraps them—the cloth’s folds retain a bluish luster—and the unsettled dust brings on another coughing fit. Inside is a mummified body. Or, half of one. The legs appear to have been snapped off. The brown leathery face squints up at Zaya. Its mouth, petrified midscream or midyawn, suggests the creature met its end in wretched terror or sublime repose. Its hair and beard are the yellow of dead grass, but its teeth gleam white. The hands cross at the chest, skin stretched between knuckles like a bat’s wings. Beside the creature lies a dark red cylindrical hat Zaya has seen before, atop the bishops painted on the monastery walls—but on this hat, the jewels have been picked out.
Zaya beholds the shriveled face, and determines from its gaze that something awaits her, something important. The saint, she knows, doesn’t want to be buried at the internat any more than she does.
Zaya tugs the hat over its shiny forehead. The hat is fetching. A waste indeed, to be a saint stuck underground with such a hat.
She gathers the saint in her arms. Centuries of desiccation have made its body very light. The saint pulls forward, as though tied to a string. The pair make their way through the tunnels, turning right here, left there, the bundle leading her through the dark, urging her toward the miracle of escape. They totter up a set of steps, toward an opening. Zaya smells the leaves before she sees them. Gripping the saint with one hand, pulling the branches and weeds apart with the other, she climbs over a clutch of tree roots.
The blue sky greets them.
Zaya leaps forward, ready to run from the internat, run as far as her aching legs will take her. But then she stops.
They’re outside the building, but still inside the tall iron fence.
Before Zaya can feel the blow of defeat, the bundle pulls her back into the tunnel—and Zaya follows.
Down the tunnel they go, then to the left, right, left again. They reach an opening in the cliff face. The only way down here is a fall to the jagged rocks below. Back into the tunnel they go. The saint’s pull is stronger now, the pruney creature in Zaya’s arms frantic to perform its marvel, and she frantic to witness it. Right, left, another left.
They’re outside again, but still inside the fence, this time just a few steps shy of the forest beyond.
Zaya waits for direction. The saint, now inert, gives none. She shakes it. In the daylight, its parched features look exhausted, accepting their fate. At least one of them can escape, Zaya thinks. She thrusts the bundle over the fence. The saint lands faceup on the wild grass, hat uncapped in salute.
Zaya hears a sanitarka call her name, turns to see the woman racing toward her. Just a few meters away now, the woman’s creamy arms are spread wide enough for an embrace.
When Zaya slides her leg between the rods of the fence, she doesn’t expect the rest of her body to follow—but it squeezes right through. She picks up the saint, and runs for the pines.
LETTER OF APOLOGY
Don’t think.
If you think, don’t speak.
If you think and speak, don’t write.
If you think, speak, and write, don’t sign.
If you think, speak, write, and sign, don’t be surprised.
* * *
—
News of Konstantyn Illych Boyko’s transgression came to us by way of an anonymous note deposited in a suggestion box at the Kirovka Cultural Club. According to the note, after giving a poetry reading, Konstantyn Illych disseminated a political joke as he loosened his tie backstage. Following Directive No. 97 to Eliminate Dissemination of Untruths Among Party Cadres and the KGB, my superior could not repeat the joke, but assured me it was grave enough to warrant our attention.
One can only argue with an intellectual like Konstantyn Illych if one speaks to him on his level. I was among the few in the Kirovka branch of the agency with a higher education; the task of reeducating Konstantyn Illych thus fell to me.
Since Konstantyn Illych was a celebrated poet in Ukraine and the matter a sensitive one, I was to approach him in private rather than at his workplace, in case the joke had to be repeated. Public rebuke would only be used if a civil one-on-one failed. According to Konstantyn Illych’s personal file (aged forty-five, employed by the Cultural Club), the poet spent his Sundays alone or with his wife at their dacha in Uhly, a miserable swampland 30 kilometers south of town.
Judgment of the quality of the swampland is my own and was not indicated in the file.
The following Sunday I drove to Uhly, or as close as I could get to Uhly; after the spring snowmelt, the dachas were submerged by a meter of turbid water and people were moving between and around the dachas in rowboats.
I had not secured a rowboat for the task as the need for one was not mentioned in Konstantyn Illych’s file, nor in the orders I was given.
I parked at the flood line, where five rowboats were moored: two green, two blue, one white, none black. Usually, our mode of transportation was black. I leaned on the warm hood of my car (black) and plucked clean a cattail as I deliberated what to do next. I decided on the innocuous white; I did not want to frighten Konstantyn Illych, and cause him to flee, by appearing in a black rowboat.
The dachas were poorly numbered and I had to ask for directions, which was not ideal. One man I spoke to was half-deaf and, after nodding through my question, launched into an account of his cystectomy; another elderly man, who clearly understood Russian, rudely responded in Ukrainian; one woman, after inquiring what in hell I was doing in her brother’s rowboat, tried to set her Rottweiler on me (fortunately, the beast feared water). I was about to head back to the car when an aluminum kayak slid out of the reeds beside me, carrying two knobby-kneed girls. They told me to turn right at the electric transformer and row to the third house after the one crushed by a poplar.
A few minutes later I floated across the fence of a small dacha, toward a shack sagging on stilts. On the windowsill stood a rusted trophy of a fencer in fighting stance, and from its rapier hung a rag and sponge. When no response came from an oared knock on the door, I rowed to the back of the shack. There sat Konstantyn Illych and, presumably, his wife, Milena Markivna, both of them cross-legged atop a wooden table, playing cards. The tabletop rose just above water level, giving the impression that the couple was stranded on a raft at sea. The poet’s arms and shoulders were small, like a boy’s, but his head was disproportionately large, blockish. I found it difficult to imagine the head strapped into a fencing mask, but that is beside the point.
“Konstantyn Illych?” I called out.
The poet kept his eyes on the fan of cards in his hands. “Who’s asking?”
I rowed closer. The wood of my boat tapped the wood of the table. “My name is Mikhail Ivanovich. Pleased to meet you.”
Konstantyn Illych did not return my politesse, did not even take the toothpick out of his mouth to say, “You here for electric? We paid up last week.”
His wife placed a four of spades on the table. Her thick dark hair hung over her face.
I told Konstantyn Illych who I was and that the agency had received reports of how he had publicly disseminated wrongful evaluations of the leaders of the Communist Party and Soviet society at large, and that I was here to have a conversation with him. Konstantyn Illych set his cards facedown on the table and said in a level tone, “All right, let’s have a conversation.”
I had conducted dozens of these conversations before and always began from a friendly place, as if we were two regular people—pals, even—just chatting.
“Quite the flood,” I remarked.
“Yes,” confirmed Konstantyn Illych, “the flood.”
“I’ll bet the children love it here.”
“No children.”
Usually there were children. I stretched my legs out in the rowboat, which upset its balance, and jerked th
em back.
“No parents, grandparents, aunts, or uncles either,” said Milena Markivna. Her upper lip curled—the beginning of a sneer, as if to say, But you already knew that, didn’t you?
There had indeed been mention in the file of a mass reprimand of Milena Markivna’s relatives in the fifties, but amid all the other facts about all the other residents of Kirovka, with all their sordid family histories, the detail had slipped my mind. Still, did the woman need to dampen the spirit of the conversation?
Konstantyn Illych broke the silence. “So what’s the joke?”
“I hadn’t made a joke,” I said.
“No, the joke I supposedly told about the Party.”
Already he was incriminating himself. “The term I used was ‘wrongful evaluation,’ but thank you for specifying the offense, Konstantyn Illych.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, unexpectedly. “What was it?”
“I cannot repeat the joke.” I admit I had searched Konstantyn Illych’s file for it, but one of the typists had already redacted the words.
“You can’t repeat the joke you’re accusing me of telling?”
“Correct.” Then, before I could stop myself: “Perhaps you could repeat the joke, and I’ll confirm whether or not it’s the one.”
Konstantyn Illych narrowed his eyes, but said nothing.
“We aren’t moving any closer to a solution, Konstantyn Illych.”
“Tell me the problem first,” he said.
A brown leaf, curled into the shape of a robed figurine, floated by Milena Markivna’s foot. She pressed the leaf into the murky water with her thumb before turning to her husband. “Just say sorry and be done with it.”
I thanked her for her intuition—an apology was precisely what was in order, in the form of a letter within thirty days. Milena Markivna advised me not to thank her since she hadn’t done anything to help me; in fact, she hated officers like me and it was because of officers like me that she had grown up alone in this world, but at least she had nothing to lose and could do anything she wanted to: she could spit in my face if she wanted to. This, I did not recommend.
Konstantyn Illych was tapping his fingernails on the table. “I’m not putting anything in writing.”
It is usually at this point in the conversation, when the written word comes up, that the perpetrator becomes most uncomfortable, begins to wriggle. Few people grasp the simple logic of the situation: once a transgression occurs and a case file opens, the case file triggers a response—in this case, a letter of apology. One document exposes the problem, the second resolves it. One cannot function without the other, just as a bolt cannot function without a nut and a nut cannot function without a bolt. And so I told Konstantyn Illych, “I’m afraid you don’t have a choice.”
He reached for the small rectangular bulge in his breast pocket. “Ever read my poetry?”
I expected him to retrieve a booklet of poems and to read from it. Dread came over me; I had never been one to understand verse. Fortunately he produced a packet of cigarettes instead.
“Come to my next reading,” he said. “You’ll see I’m as ideologically pure as a newborn. Then we’ll talk about the letter.”
* * *
—
Normally I had a letter of apology written and signed well under the thirty-day deadline. I took pride in my celerity. Even the most stubborn perpetrators succumbed when threatened with loss of employment or arrest. The latter, however, was a last resort. The goal these days was to reeducate without arrest because the Party was magnanimous and forgiving; furthermore, prisons could no longer accommodate every citizen who uttered a joke.
In Konstantyn Illych’s case, next came gentle intimidation. If Konstantyn Illych stood in line for sausage, I stood five spots behind him. If Konstantyn Illych took a rest on a park bench, I sat three benches over. He pretended not to see me, but I knew he did: He walked too fast, tripping on uneven pavement; bills and coins slipped from his fingers regularly. His head jerked right and left to make sure he never found himself alone on the street. He needn’t have worried—there was always the odd pedestrian around—and anyway, I did not intend to physically harm or abduct Konstantyn Illych, though that would have been simpler for both of us. My older colleagues often lamented the loss of simpler times.
Four days passed without a word exchanged between us.
On the fifth day, I attended Konstantyn Illych’s poetry reading at the Kirovka Cultural Club. I took a seat in the front row of the lectorium, so close to the stage I could see the poet’s toes agitate inside his leather shoes. In the dim light, I was able to transcribe some of his poetry:
Helical gears, cluster gears, rack gears,
bevel and miter gears, worm gears, spur gears,
ratchet and pawl gears, internal spur gears,
grind my body
meat grinder
grinds
gr gr grrr
ah ah ah
aah aah aah
ah haaaaaah!
And also:
The bear
bares his flesh
skinless, bears the burden
of the air wooooooooooooooosh
And also:
Dewy forget-me-not
not me forgets.
Stomp.
I cannot guarantee I transcribed the onomatopoeic bits with accuracy; Konstantyn Illych’s reading gave no indication of the number of a’s and o’s, et cetera.
At the end of the reading the poet placed his pages at his feet, unbuttoned his faded blue blazer, addressed the audience: “Time for some trivia. I’ll recite a poem and one of you will guess who wrote it. Get it right and everyone here will admire you, get it wrong and you’ll be eternally shamed.” A few people laughed.
Throughout the challenge poets such as Tsvetaeva, Inber, Mayakovsky, Shevchenko (this one I knew), and Tushnova were identified. The audience expressed their enjoyment of correct answers by whooping and clapping between names.
Konstantyn Illych waited for the lectorium to quiet down before he leaned into the microphone. “Who, whom.”
This, apparently, was also a poem; the crowd erupted in fervid applause. I made a mental note to alert my superiors that local culture was going down the chute.
Konstantyn Illych scanned the audience until his eyes met mine. “The gentleman in the front row, in the black peacoat,” he said. “Who wrote that poem?”
Once more the hall fell silent.
I turned right and left, hoping to find another man wearing a black peacoat in my vicinity. That’s when I saw Konstantyn Illych’s wife sitting behind me. She crossed her arms, her great bulging eyes on me, beckoning me to answer. One of her hands, nestled in the crook of her opposite arm, resembled a pale spider waiting to pounce.
Konstantyn Illych’s voice boomed above me. “The greatest poet of all time, Comrade, and you do not know? I’ll give you three seconds. Three…”
I froze in my seat. The middle-aged man to my right, whose nose looked like it had been smashed many times, nudged me in the ribs.
“Two…”
The man whispered “Grandfather Lenin!”—a mockery that I found in poor taste.
“One!” Konstantyn Illych bellowed. “Who was it, esteemed audience?”
The words rose from the crowd in a column. “Grandfather Lenin!”
Konstantyn Illych looked down at me from the stage, tsked into the microphone. Each tsk felt sharp, hot, a lash on my skin.
* * *
—
It was around this time I began to suspect that, while I had been following Konstantyn Illych, his wife had been following me. I forced myself to recollect the preceding week. Milena Markivna never figured in the center of my memories—the bull’s-eye had always, of course, been Konstantyn Illych—but I did find her in the clo
udy periphery, sometimes even in the vacuous space between memories. If I stood five spots behind Konstantyn Illych in line for sausage, the hooded figure four spots behind me possessed Milena’s tall narrow-shouldered frame; if I sat three benches away from Konstantyn Illych, the woman two benches over had the same pale ankle peeking out from under the skirt. I began to see my task of retrieving the letter of apology in a new light.
What I suspected: My mission was not about the letter, but about the lengths I would go to retrieve it.
What I suspected: I was being vetted for a position of great honor.
What I knew: “Who, whom” had been a simple test, and I had failed it.
What I knew: My mother had been subjected to the same tests as a young woman, and had succeeded.
When I was a child, my mother was invited to join the Honor Guard. According to my father, she had always been a model student, the fiercest marcher in the Pioneers, the loudest voice in the parades. She was the champion archer of Ukraine and had even been awarded a red ribbon by the Kirovka Botanist Club for her Cactaceae collection. One evening, an officer came to our door and served my mother a letter summoning her to the Chief Officer’s quarters. Within six months she was sent to Moscow for special training, as only special training would suffice for the Guard that stands at the mausoleum of Lenin. Since our family was not a recognized unit—my parents hadn’t married because my paternal grandparents (now deceased) didn’t like my mother—my father and I could not join her in Moscow. I was too young to remember much about this period, but do have two recollections: one, I could not reconcile the immense honor of the Invitation with the grief that plagued the family; two, my father assumed care of my mother’s cactus collection, and every evening, when he thought I was asleep on the sofa bed beside him, wrapped his fingers around the spines of the plants and winced and grit his teeth but kept them there until his whole body eased into a queer smile. For many months his hands were scabbed and swollen. Within a year my father was gone also; he had at last been able to join my mother in Moscow. My grandparents told me that one day I, too, would join them.
