Good Citizens Need Not Fear

by Maria Reva

  Since Nika’s first visit, Smena had known that she’d been caught. But she’d been foolish enough to believe the woman wouldn’t follow through with her scheme. She’d allowed herself to forget: neighbors never visited each other.

  She curled her fingers into fists, uncurled them, let her hands flop to her sides. “We’ll need to warn Larissa.”

  “I just did. She almost seemed happy about it, our little martyr. Made me promise to teach her sparring techniques.” Milena saw the pained look on Smena’s face. “Don’t worry about her. She comes from a model family with a squeaky-clean record. Worry about yourself.”

  Smena walked around the room, aimless. She took vinyl albums from the bookshelf at random, put them back. With Larissa’s careful hands, each original sleeve and center label had been replaced with state-approved ones, from acts like Jolly Fellows, Good Guys, Contemporanul, Red Poppies. That Smena’s music library presented as perfectly flavorless had always amused the three women, an inside joke. Perhaps she could keep just one or two albums? She briefly let herself entertain the possibility, then admonished herself. If back in the fifties keeping one album would have been as risky as keeping one hundred, why should things be different now? She turned to Milena, who was stationed by the balcony door, watching in silence. “We’ll need to get rid of the equipment,” Smena said. “And the music.”

  Milena gave a curt nod. “Leave it to me, Smena Timofeevna.”

  From her wardrobe Smena retrieved a linen sheet. She wrapped it around the record player and phonograph. “Wouldn’t want them to get scratched.” With utmost care she placed the cutting lathe and its metal arm into a pillowcase. She slipped the forbidden vinyls into another, trying not to think of the effort Larissa had put into procuring them. It would only take Milena two trips to her husband’s beat-up Kombi, parked in the courtyard, to make the bone music studio disappear.

  When Milena came up to get the second load, Smena asked, “What will you do with yourself now?”

  “Leave town, get lost in the countryside. Something I’ve been saving up for anyway.” Milena was trying to sound casual, but Smena thought she detected a tremor in her voice.

  “Hard to imagine your husband in the country.” The last time Smena had seen him two balconies over, polishing a loafer, she’d marveled at his delicate hands.

  “Isn’t it.” Milena shot Smena a sly look, and for one moment Smena thought she intended to leave him behind.

  Milena stalked down the hall with the rest of the equipment, her footsteps eerily quiet. Smena wondered if she would ever see her neighbor again. Then she imagined leaving her own apartment, sharing a sofa bed with her daughter again, and her daughter’s husband, and her daughter’s husband’s family, and all those lovely, spirited grandchildren, and the knobby cats they brought home from the streets. She wept into the sleeve of her fur coat.

  * * *

  —

  Smena was searching her apartment for tools or X-rays she might have overlooked when she heard the wail of a siren. She dropped to the floor. Her heart flapped against the linoleum, loose and arrhythmic. She wanted to shush it so the downstairs neighbors wouldn’t hear. The siren grew louder, until it reached their building, then cut out. Hurried footsteps echoed from the depths of the building, but never reached her floor. Smena crawled to her bedroom window, peeked out. The source of the siren was not the police but an ambulance. After a few minutes, a pair of paramedics emerged from the building’s entryway carrying a stretcher, and on the stretcher lay Nika. Sunlight glimmered on her cherry-red hair as the paramedics loaded her into the ambulance. Smena wanted to rush downstairs and—what? Strangle the woman? Embrace her? Both?

  The vehicle lurched into motion, rounded the street corner, and disappeared.

  Smena stood back from the window. She was still wearing the fur coat. The coat would have to do. The polyclinic was only four blocks away, but she thought she might be away for longer than the four blocks and so made preparations. She retrieved her reserve of cash from a jar hidden in the toilet tank, packed a few changes of clothing into a duffel bag. A dull ache set into her knees and hips from the earlier drop to the floor, from the crawling, but she quickened her movements, ignoring the pain.

  Smena swung her door open, and stepped over the threshold. The exterior corridor was cold, dimly lit, smelled of stale tobacco. The damp climbed her calves and thighs, made her shiver in her coat. She wanted to turn around, banish the hostile world with a flick of the dead bolt. But her apartment had lost the protection it once held.

  Taking the elevator was out of the question. Clutching the rickety metal banister, Smena descended one step at a time. She tried not to look at the cracks in the walls. A piece of candy perched on a stair and she reached for it before thinking, hungry, but the puffy wrapper was hollow inside, a child’s trick. The entranceway at the ground floor greeted her with the stench of garbage and urine, a waft of boiled potatoes.

  Smena stepped outside and, for the first time in more than a year, felt live air move across her face. Her windows and glassed-in balcony had been sealed against drafts—she’d forgotten that drafts could feel nice, like a gentle tickling. She parted her lips, let the warm autumn light fill the cavity of her mouth and throat.

  “I’ll be damned! She’s alive,” exclaimed one of the pensioners on the bench outside. The man had acquired a new sprinkling of moles and sun spots on his face since the last time she’d seen him. “How long’s it been, Smena Timofeevna?”

  “Too long, Palashkin,” she answered.

  She shuffled on, her feet unsteady on the cracked slabs of the sidewalk. The concrete ten-stories around her were identical to the one she had just exited, and Smena had the impression she was walking the same block over and over. She kept her eyes on the ground. She stepped on a curled dry leaf and its crunch underfoot delighted her. She stepped on another, then another, progressing leaf to leaf. Parts of the roads sagged. The edge of the town, where the sunflowers normally grew, was being closed in by cattails. Let it all sink, she thought. She imagined herself and the townspeople on the bottom of a great marsh, to be discovered centuries later, open-eyed, their skin blue, hair orange from the gases, preserved for eternity.

  The next time she looked up, she stood in front of the building she thought might be the polyclinic. The gleaming white-tiled edifice in her memory cowered under the poplars, its walls matte with graffiti, many of the tiles missing.

  Inside, wooden benches lined the walls of a small lobby. A nurse pushed a mop around the floor, transferring dirty water from one corner of the room to another. It didn’t take long to find Nika, who lay on a wheeled bed in a corridor off the lobby. The two paramedics who had collected her were arguing with the receptionist. As Smena approached Nika, the expression on her neighbor’s face transformed from happy surprise to terror. By the time Smena reached her bed, Nika had lifted the covers over her nose, as though expecting to be hit.

  Smena stepped back. She’d been feared before, certainly—by Milena and Larissa, whenever she chastised them for an oversight—but not like this. It stung. “You can move your face again,” she observed, attempting a level tone.

  “Now it’s my feet.”

  “Where’s your son and the rest of them?”

  “Work, the park, and the belly,” said Nika. “But you came.” It sounded like a question, Nika wondering aloud which version of Smena had come: the vengeful or the forgiving one. Smena still wasn’t sure herself.

  “So they’re finally admitting you,” said Smena.

  Nika nodded at the men and receptionist yelling at each other. “To be decided.” She lowered the cover from her face. The skull with which Smena had become so well acquainted shone under Nika’s pale, cracked skin, its outline disturbingly visible, now in three dimensions.

  Nika gave a nervous laugh. “This is a bed, Smena. Look at it. It doesn’t fold into anything
. It’s not a couch or a desk or a storage box. It’s a bed and you don’t feel bad lying in it. Try it.”

  “What?”

  “This bed. You’re going to try this bed.” Nika pushed her head and shoulders into her pillow, wriggled the rest of her body toward the rail at the edge of the bed. Smena thought Nika was playing a joke until a pale leg poked out from under the sheets and draped itself over the rail.

  “No, Nika—” She grabbed Nika’s bony ankle. Nika swung a second leg over the rail, and now Smena held on to both ankles. “Keep down, will you?”

  “You can’t know till you’re in it.”

  Nika’s breaths were heavy, rasping, and Smena now saw the immense strength Nika’s seemingly whimsical gesture had required. She heaved Nika’s legs back onto the bed, rearranged the sheets.

  “Tell you what,” said Smena. “When you’re well again and ready to go home, we’ll get you a real bed. A big one. Have your son and his family move into my apartment. I don’t need the space anymore. And as for me, if you want, I mean, only if the prospect doesn’t sound too awful—”

  “You’ll move in with me.” Nika’s face softened. “It’ll be like back in the dorms,” she said. “But only the best parts. No exams. And you’ll take the bed. I’ll take the foldout.”

  “We’ll get two beds. They’ll take up the whole room.”

  “What if one of us takes a lover?”

  “We’ll work out a visitation schedule.”

  Nika looked up at the ceiling, spread her arms and legs out, letting herself float in the daydream. “If only we’d decided all this sooner.”

  “It’s not too late.” It felt so easy now, to play along, to plot their future together. Smena stroked her friend’s hair. The roots were oily and she longed to grab them by the fistful, let the musky sheen settle between her fingers.

  The nurse with the mop was eyeing them. Smena said, “I have to go.” Where, she wasn’t sure. It would be midday, the sun at its warmest. She could go to the bazaar, buy something to eat right from the stalls. Fried dumplings, filled with mushrooms or ground beef. Or sour cream, fatty yellow and runny, which she’d drink straight from the jar. And afterward? She could go anywhere, board any bus or train. The thought was terrifying and thrilling.

  “Wait till I’m asleep,” said Nika.

  Smena didn’t have to wait long.

  MISS USSR

  On Monday morning, the phone on Konstantyn Illych’s desk rang. He reached for the receiver without taking his eyes off the budget sheets spread before him.

  “You didn’t alert us to the beauty pageant,” said a woman on the other end of the line. She introduced herself as Irina Glebovna, the new Minister of Culture—his most superior superior. Never before had a Minister called the lowly Kirovka Cultural Club. He turned down the steady prattle of the radio, welcoming the interruption.

  “My sincerest apologies,” he offered. “Did you want to enroll?”

  She ignored this. “Contestants lined up around the block. A victory parade. A marching band, Konstantyn Illych? With what funds?” She drew out her vowels but swallowed the word endings, exaggerating a posh Muscovite accent.

  “People volunteered. Civic duty.”

  “I heard a recording of the winner’s talent routine.” She was referring to Orynko Bondar’s singing of “The Glory and the Freedom of Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished,” once the anthem of Ukraine, banned by Moscow since 1922. “The singing,” Irina Glebovna remarked, “it wasn’t very good.”

  Konstantyn did not disagree. He hoped this was all the Minister had to say on the subject.

  “I can’t help but think”—here her voice sharpened, a butter knife swapped for a boning knife—“that the girl, your Miss Kirovka, earned her title on political grounds.”

  Aesthetic grounds, Konstantyn wanted to argue. Orynko possessed an outlandish beauty: moonlit teeth, freakishly large amber eyes, long silvery hair that doused her back and shoulders like mercury. But Konstantyn, being what he was—a slouchy forty-seven-year-old male with an uncertain marital status—thought better than to extol a teenager’s looks. He settled on “The judges chose her, not I.”

  “You must be pleased with yourself.” The Minister’s tone suggested the opposite. “Your counterpart in Kiev was so charmed by your contest, she was about to organize one at the national level—Miss Ukraine SSR.”

  “Whatever Kiev is planning, I have nothing to do with it.” Yet Konstantyn couldn’t help chuckling, proud his pageant idea had caught on.

  “Kiev is no longer planning,” the Minister corrected. “But next thing we know, it’ll be Miss Estonia SSR. Miss Latvia SSR. Miss Georgia SSR. Miss Chechen-Ingush ASSR.” Konstantyn knew that each of the countries she listed had been the site of recent mass demonstrations, calling for independence.

  “And so? You can’t stop them all.” He regretted the words as soon as they tumbled from his mouth, knowing he’d gone too far.

  After an awful pause, the Minister’s words were soft, measured: “You’ll make an announcement revoking the girl’s title.”

  Konstantyn waited, hoping the Minister would break into laughter. This was the sort of thing the preceding Minister of Culture was rumored to have done: pretend to bestow punishment, then tease his victim for being so easily duped.

  “I understand it’s a difficult time.” The Minister’s speech had regained its false drawl. “When was it your wife left you? Three months ago?”

  Three months and six days; how did the Minister know? Konstantyn had come home from work to discover the Kombi gone, along with Milena’s fencing gear and a few items of clothing. Milena’s departure had left him spinning like a leaf blown from its branch; he stopped writing, relegated himself to mundane administrative tasks. Their marriage had never been passionate, but he’d envisioned her always being there, stoic and dependable, like a grandfather clock. Whenever he fell ill, she’d leave a pot of broth on the stove before work, and whatever it lacked in taste it made up for in nutrition. When he wrote a new poem, she was the first to hear him recite it, dutifully setting her book on her lap, even though her eyes might not have left its pages.

  “At least, no children to split,” the Minister kept on, in studied sympathy. “No need to prove yourself to anyone, Konstantyn Illych. I’ll have a journalist give you a call. One small correction and you’re done.”

  When the phone rang again an hour later—likely the journalist—Konstantyn did not pick up. He would wait this one out. Surely the press and the Minister had more important matters to attend to, and would soon forget about his dethroning statement, his backwater town.

  * * *

  —

  Konstantyn had reverse-engineered the Miss Kirovka pageant from its American equivalent. He’d heard the broadcast of Miss America 1989 on Radio Liberty that autumn, dubbed in Russian. It was the applause that caught his ear: the thunderous volume suggested an audience numbering hundreds, even thousands. All the while his Club’s attendance had been dwindling for years, along with state funding. There was a time when the lectorium would fill for history talks and poetry readings; now the one meager draw of the Kirovka Cultural Club was Viktorina, an arcade game that tested a player’s ability to identify traffic warning signs.

  On a sheet of graph paper, Konstantyn had taken note of the Miss America pageant’s key parts: the talent round, the bathing suit round, the gown round. He’d jotted down bits of contestants’ speeches, observing how each sentence inflected upward, toward a bright future. Konstantyn had inferred, from the exclamations of the judges, the geometry of contestants’ bathing suits. As he’d listened, he couldn’t help imagining one of those Yankee county fairs he’d read about, with their livestock breed shows, but pushed this thought from his mind. He hadn’t cared for the banter of the host, who seemed to forget that this was above all a competition, but such details could be tweaked. What was impo
rtant was the applause. And the admission fee.

  As it turned out, Konstantyn was among the many Kirovkavites who had tuned in to Miss America. What was American was countercultural, which made it trendy: Levi’s and Coca-Cola had found their way into Soviet homes; the opening of a McDonald’s in Moscow was less than a year away. So it was that Kirovkavites met the news of their very own pageant with a cautious, tight-lipped excitement. On the morning of the event, contestants of all ages—Konstantyn hadn’t thought to specify an age range—formed a line in front of the Cultural Club, a line modest in length but not in coloration. One middle-aged contestant sported a tweed suit, as though about to deliver a lecture; another contestant, around eleven or twelve, wore her newly starched school pinafore; another shivered in a strapless sequin gown, her wide-eyed toddler chewing the hem. And of course, there was Orynko Bondar, who opted for full folk: embroidered blouse, sheepskin vest, poppy-red skirt and boots, a headdress of wheat stalks that stuck out like sunbeams. The contestants shot embarrassed glances at one another to determine which of them had misinterpreted the dress code.

  When the contestants’ friends and relatives began showing up—not just from Kirovka but from the surrounding towns and villages—Konstantyn had begun to feel hopeful. His event would be well attended, his Cultural Club once again the center of activity. A beauty pageant would hardly be the pinnacle of the Club’s achievements, but Konstantyn had to be patient. Poetry camps don’t organize or fund themselves overnight.

  * * *

  —

  On the Wednesday morning after the Minister’s call came a special All Union First Radio program announcement. The same nasal voice that intoned Party proceedings and member passings informed Citizens that in eight weeks, in celebration of the mighty Union, an unprecedented event would take place: a Miss USSR beauty competition. Young women from every republic—aged sixteen to eighteen, in good moral standing—were invited to Moscow to take part, and the legitimate winner would be crowned at the Yuon Palace of Culture.