Good Citizens Need Not Fear

by Maria Reva

  “The time isn’t right for a move,” she had told her daughter the last time they spoke. “I’m too busy.”

  “Busy with what?” Her daughter didn’t know about the bone business. “You’re all alone over there!”

  Smena took this to mean, “You’re going to die alone over there,” which was where the conversation always headed, and promptly hung up.

  Smena’s mother had birthed six other children before she had Smena, and had made a point of telling her that a husband and children were the best insurance against dying alone. The family had lived in a crumbling clay house. One day, when Smena’s father was at work and she and her siblings were at school, Smena’s mother took her metal shears and slashed away at the tall grass outside the window. The blades crunched into an electric cable. Smena was the one who found her mother’s body in the weeds. Smena remembered how her own throat had contracted in shock, how her scream had come out as a hiccup. For a long time Smena had studied her mother’s face, which was set in a wild openmouthed grin, as if she were biting into the sweetest happiness on Earth. Seven children, eighteen years of cleaning, chiding, spanking, loving, pea soup making, and what did it matter? Smena’s mother had died alone, and seemed to have fared all right. Before the accident, Smena had imagined death as a send-off, a majestic ship to board while your party of relatives crowds at the port ledge, waving goodbye. The higher the attendance, the more valued your life. Now, she imagined something more private. Once you got past the ugly physicality of death, you were left with a single boat, a cushion. Room to stretch out the legs.

  * * *

  —

  The second time Nika knocked on the door, she returned the cloves in their newspaper pouch. From the doorway she beamed up at Smena, as though she had proven herself by fulfilling her ridiculous promise. She produced a baking tray of buns from her cloth sack. Fragrant, buttery, they bulged out of the tray in a tight grid, ready to spring into Smena’s mouth. Each had a neat hole on top, from a clove.

  “Borrower’s interest,” Nika joked. Her speech had slowed since the last visit, her syllables become more labored.

  Smena didn’t know whether it was the hunger, or the shock at this small act of kindness—albeit suspect kindness—that made her say, “Come in for some tea?” before she could stop herself.

  “Oh no, thank you. I couldn’t.” But already Nika was kicking off her clogs. “Just for a minute.” She was wearing the same faded socks, with her toe sticking out. Smena offered a pair of furry dalmatian-print slippers, ones Milena usually wore during their meetings.

  As Smena brewed tea, Nika separated the buns and arranged them in a circle on a glass platter—also conjured from the magical sack. “Got any butter?” She was quick, antlike, and before Smena could intervene, she opened the refrigerator. The expanse of white gaped at her, empty. With horror Smena imagined this detail registering in the neatly categorized inventory of Nika’s mind, and wanted to snatch it back out.

  Without comment Nika turned and marched out of the apartment, leaving Smena to wonder if the state of the refrigerator had offended her. But a few minutes later Nika returned bearing not only butter, but also bread, eggs, and a pat of lard wrapped in a plastic bag, for frying. She began piling the supplies into the refrigerator.

  “You don’t have to do that,” said Smena. “I was going to go to the Gastronom tomorrow.”

  “So was I. We’ll go together?”

  Smena pretended to consider it. “Actually, tomorrow’s no good.”

  “The day after.”

  “I’m tied up.”

  Nika shut the refrigerator, gave its handle a conciliatory stroke. “The benchers told me they haven’t seen you leave the building in months,” she said softly. “They only see your visitors, not you.”

  Blasted benchers, Smena thought. Nothing better to do. “Most of those old stumps are half-blind,” she said. “And I move very fast.” She pulled a bill from a metal tin on the counter, knowing she risked insulting the woman. But Nika only laughed, swatted the money away. “Please,” she said. “Kak auknetsja, tak i otkliknetsja.” Do as you would be done by.

  The women sat down together. Smena’s discomfort melted away when she took her first bite of bun. Its thin caramelized crust, where egg whites had been painted on in crisscross, protected a warm flaky interior. The best bun she had ever tasted.

  Nika ran her hand along the chrome length of the table. “This is nice. Quiet. Where I live it’s a zoo. Fourteen people, another one in my daughter-in-law’s belly. Imagine! Despite his position, my son and his family still haven’t been assigned their own peace.”

  Smena wondered if she meant “place,” and if the tumor was pressing a fibrous finger on just the wrong spot. “Which factory does he work for?”

  “Timko works for the government.” She let the last word fall heavily, significant.

  Perhaps this was a threat? Working for the government meant anything from licking envelopes to spying on high-profile citizens.

  “A nice two-room, is that so much to ask?”

  Smena wasn’t sure to whom, exactly, the woman was directing the question. But there it was: the dying woman’s motive. A lovely two-room for her lovely family. Her legacy secured. If Smena were to be imprisoned for the bone business, Nika’s growing, government-affiliated family would be next in line for her apartment. Smena wanted to jump up, scream “Gotcha!” like she’d seen a man do at the bazaar once, after he’d stabbed his finger into a vendor’s pot of golden honey to reveal the cheap sugar syrup underneath.

  Before Nika left, she placed a second sheet of black film on the table, without inquiring about the first.

  An hour later, the new scan glowed on the kitchen window. Smena wanted to track the progression—again, for curiosity’s sake.

  The sun’s rays showed more thinning of the bone as the tumor burrowed toward the spinal column. Smena couldn’t help being impressed by the thing—an organism living by its own will, clawing for space in the tight dome of the skull.

  * * *

  —

  The next meeting, Larissa forgot about the bread and eggs, but did bring two albums by John Coltrane.

  “Never heard of him,” said Milena, who stood at the window, left thigh resting on the sill.

  Larissa straightened the velvet lapels of her blazer and looked up at Milena. “John Coltrane,” she explained, “was one of the most prominent jazz musicians of the twentieth century.” Her nose and cheeks were red and puffy. Despite her best efforts to appear composed, she looked in danger of crumpling to the floor any moment.

  “How am I supposed to know? No one’s ever asked for a Coltrane,” said Milena. She eyed the tray of buns poking over the top of the refrigerator, then glanced at Smena for permission. Smena nodded—she regretted not having offered them herself.

  “You’re supposed to know what you’re selling,” said Larissa, hoarse voice rising. Smena shushed her. “How else do you test for fake clients, impostors?” Larissa whispered.

  “Speaking of,” Milena said through a mouthful of bun.

  Smena and Larissa turned to her.

  “It’s probably nothing,” Milena tried.

  “Tell us the nothing,” said Smena.

  Milena scratched a spot of grime off the window with her fingernail. “I was at the park, my usual spot by the thousand-year oak, when a guy came up to me. Skinny, with a sad attempt at a mustache. Asked for a KISS. Like the group. The music group.”

  “Very good,” said Larissa, rolling her eyes.

  “I started to grill him,” Milena continued. “Year the band got together, band leader’s middle name, year of their breakout single, whichever useless facts Larissa shoves down my ear.” She winked at Larissa, who turned away in a huff. “The guy was doing well, seemed to know everything. Then he started grilling me. Asked why Ace Frehley added eyeliner t
o his iconic ‘Space Ace’ makeup design. What was I supposed to do, look stupid? I played along, answered best I could, but when I asked, ‘So are you buying the album or not?’ he only said, ‘Nah, I got what I came for.’ ”

  “And then?” asked Smena.

  “He just walked off.”

  Milena helped herself to another bun. She mashed the entire thing into her mouth, and Smena watched her masticate it without any apparent enjoyment. There were only four buns left, and she imagined what would happen once they were all gone, how she’d gnaw on laurel leaves, suck peppercorns for taste.

  After a while Milena said in a low voice, “It’s what they do. Play with you first, see you flail, knowing you have nowhere to go.”

  “Play is all it is,” countered Larissa. “No one gets sent to the camps anymore. Human rights,” she proclaimed, chin tilted up, “are in vogue.”

  “My sweet thing,” cried Milena. She sank down to the stool beside Larissa, grasped the young woman’s hand. At first Smena took Milena’s outburst for sarcasm, but Milena seemed genuinely shocked by Larissa’s innocence, as if she’d discovered a kitten playing in a dumpster. Larissa blushed, but did not retract her hand before Milena let go.

  When Smena had starting making bone records, in the fifties, the risks were clear, the boundaries stable. Now an invisible hand was loosening the screws, but it was impossible to tell which screws, and for how long the loosening would last. Although no one got sent to the camps (for now), every citizen was able to imagine more clearly than ever before what might await them in those very camps; the newspapers had begun publishing prisoners’ accounts, down to the gauge of the torture instruments.

  “Camps or no camps,” Milena said, “prison wouldn’t be fun either.” She turned to Smena. “So what do we do?”

  “You didn’t show the man any of the albums?” Smena asked. “You kept them inside your coat the whole time?”

  Milena nodded. “He saw nothing.”

  While the possible punishment was unclear, something else was not: they all needed the money.

  Larissa turned to Milena. “When the man asked why Ace started using eyeliner, what did you say?”

  “To keep the silver face paint out of his eyes. He’s become allergic.”

  Larissa smiled proudly.

  * * *

  —

  Now Nika visited Smena every week. She would bring soup or cabbage pie, and the pair would sit down for a midday meal followed by tea. Each time Nika knocked, Smena vowed to confront her. If Nika really was looking to extort her, Smena was willing to preempt, negotiate, even give her a cut of the bone music profits. But confronting Nika would also mean admitting to the business, and what if the woman wasn’t willing to negotiate? And, a distant possibility: What if Nika wasn’t trying to extort her at all? More and more, Smena was willing to believe it.

  In truth, she didn’t mind Nika’s visits. The woman’s chatter offered a lens into the outer world that the newspapers—which Smena had mostly stopped reading anyway—could not. From Nika, Smena learned that the irises were blooming, the flowers floppy as used handkerchiefs; that it was the time of year when woodpeckers drummed on utility poles down by the river, to woo their mates. Nika exclaimed, “Can you imagine the ruckus?” Yes, Smena could.

  Week to week, Smena watched the change in Nika over the rim of her teacup. One visit, Nika’s slur was so pronounced Smena could barely understand her, and the pair sat in silence, pretending nothing was wrong. Another visit, Nika regaled Smena with jokes, but as she spoke her face lacked expression, as though she were posing for a government identification photo.

  “You keep giving me a funny look,” Nika remarked on that occasion.

  Smena tried to brush it off. “I’m impressed. You tell a joke but keep such a straight face.”

  “I’m losing feeling in my face.”

  “Oi.”

  “My daughter-in-law says it’ll do wonders for the wrinkles.”

  “The brat.”

  “I’ll look all the better when they bury me.” A strand of hair fell over Nika’s eyes and her hand pecked at her forehead, trying and failing to find the strand.

  “You should be in the hospital, Nika.”

  The women locked eyes.

  “So you’ve looked at the scans,” said Nika.

  “I don’t know why you keep giving them to me.”

  Nika shrugged. “They’re as useless to me as they are to the doctors who order them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The polyclinic has quotas for tests, so they do tests. Or they just make the numbers up to fill the quotas, so their money and supplies don’t get cut. The polyclinic’s filled with these ghost patients and can’t admit new ones.”

  “You have a growth in your brain the size of a lemon and they can’t admit you?”

  “They can’t admit me because of the lemon. I’m not a viable patient.”

  “With your new face I can’t tell when you’re joking.”

  “Really, Smena, when was the last time you went out into the world?” Nika sighed, as if she were about to explain basic arithmetic. “The polyclinic doesn’t want to exceed their death quota.”

  “Which I’m sure they’ve made up.”

  “Doesn’t matter. The nurse said if they exceed the quota, they get investigated, and if they get investigated, it’s worse for all of us.”

  “How nice of her to give you an explanation.”

  “It was,” she said softly. “I gave her chocolates.”

  Smena looked at her neighbor. She was a shell of the woman who had first come to Smena’s door two months ago, determined to get her way.

  “At least you can make something useful out of the scans,” said Nika. “Something beautiful.”

  Smena heaved herself to her feet. A vertiginous feeling overwhelmed her. She saw herself on the edge of a precipice, its bottom beckoning. She feared heights, perhaps because she also loved them—she always wondered what would happen if she jumped.

  Smena swung open the cabinet above the fridge. She retrieved the five albums she had made for Nika and spread them out on the table in chronological order. She pointed to the first, the Megadeth. “You won’t like this one at first but it’ll grow on you. Listen to it when you’re alone, and imagine the sounds pouring from your own mouth.” She pointed to the rest: “Pink Floyd, to relax to. Suzi Quatro and Julio Iglesias, to cheer up to.” Nika studied the scans on the table, the ripening shadow at the base of the cranium.

  Smena set the fifth, Coltrane, on the record player, and watched Nika see her skull spin into a milky blur as the needle sucked music from the grooves. The horn section came in, ecstatic, then melted away into the oily tones of solo sax. Nika closed her eyes, swayed lightly to the music. At the end of the song Smena lifted the needle from the record. She searched her friend’s face for a twitch, a nudge, but was met with an unsettling blankness.

  Nika opened her eyes. “Thank you.”

  Smena gathered up the bone albums. “Take them, they’re yours.”

  “I said you were a good watermelon. Didn’t even have to thump you to know it. Didn’t I tell you?” Nika took the scans, placed them in her cloth sack with great care.

  Smena wasn’t sure what to say, or why she settled on “Cut me up and eat me.”

  “Don’t think I won’t.”

  “I’m all seed.”

  “I’m smiling, Smena. You just can’t tell.”

  When Nika made to leave shortly afterward, Smena asked, “No more scans for me this week?”

  Nika shook her head. “No more.”

  * * *

  —

  A few days later, Smena woke to hurried knocking on her door. On the other side of the peephole: Milena. Smena checked herself in the hallway mirror, discerned the blurry shape of her body
through her thin cotton nightgown. She swung a fur coat over her shoulders before unhinging the locks.

  “Heading out?” Milena asked when she stepped inside.

  “Yes,” Smena lied. “You’d better make this quick.”

  Milena locked the dead bolt behind her. “I got approached again,” she said, her posture unusually straight. “Not by the same guy as last time, but this one was just as wormy. He gave me a record.” From her long raincoat Milena produced a yellow vinyl sleeve, the same type Smena used for distribution. She slid out a bone album, set it on the record player. Smena recognized the perky melody. The Beach Boys. The quality of the copy was poor, mostly scratching and bubbling, as though the singers were being drowned.

  After a few seconds, the music cut out.

  A man’s voice came on, in low and booming Russian. Came for the latest tunes? You’re done listening. A slew of curses dipped in and out of the hisses and pops.

  Smena let out a bark of nervous laughter. “Hardly the latest tune. That song is almost twenty years old.”

  “Smena Timofeevna.” Milena hadn’t used Smena’s patronymic in years, and the sudden formality was more frightening than the cursing still blasting from the player. Milena slowed the record to a stop with her thumb. “We’re fucked.”

  She looked at Smena, expecting instruction.

  Smena picked up the X-ray record and did what she did with every new X-ray that fell into her hands: she hung it on her kitchen window. The morning light shone strong enough for her to make out a pair of lungs and a shadow of a heart. The center hole of the record had been burned through the aorta. With a sickening familiarity, she saw the tiny bulbous alveoli filled with mucus, laced around the bottom of the right lung. Pneumonia. Right where her own had been, a couple years ago. Since the corners of the film had been cut off, she couldn’t check for the patient’s name. Many people get pneumonia, she thought. This could be anyone’s scan. Still, she couldn’t shake the suspicion it was hers. It made her uneasy, to think of looking at her insides outside her own body, as though she were being dissected. She felt a peculiar wringing in her chest, a hand palpating her organs. She thought about the few people in her life who knew she’d been sick: her daughter. And, most recently, Nika.