Good Citizens Need Not Fear

by Maria Reva

  In his office, Konstantyn listened in disbelief. A legitimate winner. An unprecedented event. Either Konstantyn and his town—his country, even—were being punished, or attendance numbers at Moscow’s many Palaces of Culture had been lagging, too. He was incensed that Irina Glebovna was both crushing the legitimacy of his pageant and copying it. True, he had copied it himself, from the Americans, who had probably copied it from the Europeans, but he had elevated the pageant to a more palatable level by enlisting a philosopher, a painter, a novelist, and an astronomer as judges.

  Normally he would have laughed off the injustice, feeling above the government’s antics; over dinner he would have regaled Milena with his droning impression of the radio announcer. But without Milena, without an audience, to laugh now felt pathetic, akin to drinking alone.

  Konstantyn turned off the radio. The Cultural Club grew silent save for the shuffling footsteps in the hallway outside his office, then the jingle of a fifteen-kopek coin being pumped into Viktorina. He didn’t want to imagine what would happen if the arcade game broke.

  The phone rang again.

  This time, Konstantyn picked up. It was the journalist, a bored-sounding woman with a smoker’s rasp, still looking for that statement about Olga Bondar.

  “Orynko Bondar,” he corrected.

  “Sure,” the journalist said, clearly unhappy to have been assigned a story about some yokel town with ethnically named residents.

  Konstantyn loosened the scarf around his neck, feeling hot. “Not only will Miss Kirovka be keeping her title,” he heard himself declare, “but she’ll be competing in the Miss USSR pageant.” A dizzying array of possibilities opened within him. Yes, Miss Kirovka would go to Moscow. She would not be silenced. Finally he and his town would take pride in something other than the canning combine or the rumored silo under the sunflower fields. “Watch out for Orynko Bondar, representing Ukraine,” he proclaimed, voice rising. “She will win over an entire empire.”

  * * *

  —

  On Thursday morning, upon arriving at the Cultural Club, Konstantyn discovered a man sitting in Konstantyn’s swivel armchair, behind Konstantyn’s oak desk. The surface of the desk had been cleared, the usual piles of documents replaced by a potted African violet.

  The intruder’s magnified eyes swam behind thick glasses. “Do you have an appointment?”

  Konstantyn stood at his office door, kept his hand on the cold metal knob. “Do you?”

  “Ah, Konstantyn Illych.” The man, irritatingly young, hair slick with pomade, gave a tight smile, apparently embarrassed for them both. “Haven’t you received the directive?” When Konstantyn shook his head, the man turned to the telefax machine, flipped through the pages hanging from its mouth, plucked one out, and handed it to Konstantyn. The curt letter informed the Director of the Kirovka Cultural Club of his termination.

  Konstantyn focused his anger on the potted violet on the desk. He wanted to shred its chubby leaves. Instead, he reached forward and grabbed the phone, clamped it between his ear and shoulder—a gesture of importance, of expert phone handling. “If you’ll excuse me.” He didn’t know what he would say to the Minister, exactly. The damage had been done.

  Konstantyn nodded at the door, but the stranger didn’t move.

  “I’m sorry, Konstantyn Illych.”

  For a moment the men stared at each other. Both wore navy industrial-made suits. Konstantyn planted himself in the metal wire chair across from the desk. He had never sat in it before. The chair was angular, possessed bones of its own that poked up to meet the occupants, hurry them out of the office. He must have the chair replaced, he thought, before realizing this would no longer be in his power. He reread the letter and this time its contents sank in. His words came slowly: “I’ve worked here for twenty years. I’m a respected poet. Ten years ago I was named People’s Artist.”

  His replacement gave him a pitying smile. The man’s hand swept around the office, calling attention to the peeling wallpaper, the cracked ceiling—everything that no longer mattered.

  The phone nestled in Konstantyn’s lap beeped impatiently. Dial or hang up. He hung up.

  The new Director busied himself. He pinched a dead leaf off the violet, pocketed it. He slid a document from a drawer and held it in front of his face. Konstantyn pretended to read the words and numbers on the other side of the sheet, hoping the action would render him useful again. The man’s wedding ring drew his gaze. Konstantyn hadn’t stopped wearing his own; it gave a man, especially one along in his years, legitimacy. If a man could keep a companion, surely there was nothing too wrong with him.

  “Whether or not I work here, Orynko will compete for Miss USSR,” Konstantyn vowed. What could he lose?

  “I’m afraid,” the man’s soft voice came from behind the sheet, “the girl is gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Recruited by the Thermometric Academy. All thanks to your pageant. The girl had mentioned her desire to pursue thermophysical study, no?”

  Orynko had indeed mentioned this during her onstage interview, halfheartedly, to please her parents, who cheered her on from the front row. “I’ve never heard of any such academy,” said Konstantyn.

  “Me neither.” The man replaced the document in the wrong drawer and looked toward the exit, likely wondering why Konstantyn still hadn’t used it. “But I can assure you there is such a place.”

  Konstantyn had never felt less assured, but he played along. “I’m sure Orynko can leave for one pageant weekend.”

  “I’m sure, yes.” He paused. “In theory.”

  Konstantyn adjusted himself in the torturous chair, suddenly worried.

  “If the town where she is studying were to have road access,” the man added, “and if the sea route hadn’t just frozen over for the next eleven months.”

  Konstantyn gawked at him. “Where is this place? Siberia?”

  The man remained still as a wax figure, neither confirming nor denying.

  “No.” Konstantyn was breathing quickly. Had the air suddenly thinned? “You can’t just ship people to Siberia,” he blustered, “not anymore.”

  “Certainly not. I am but a humble Cultural Director. What can people like us do?”

  * * *

  —

  Unemployment was not kind to Konstantyn. He spent his days moping around his stuffy apartment, full of books that had once brought him joy but now mocked him, reminding him that the paltry few he’d written had grown just as dusty, yellowed, sour-smelling as the rest. He ate through his kitchen cabinets, went to bed early and woke late, but found little respite in sleep. His thoughts orbited Miss Kirovka, how it was his fault she was exiled, and that he hadn’t a clue how to retrieve her. To make matters worse, while his provocation to the journalist had, predictably, been kept from the state media, his words had still somehow spread across town. Whenever he stepped outside for food or cigarettes—and only after counting and re-counting his cash savings—the benchers would accost him with questions. What would Orynko wear to the Miss USSR pageant, a squat bespectacled woman demanded to know. Was the girl taking singing lessons, a hook-nosed octogenarian inquired. Late one evening, when Konstantyn thought he was safe, a troupe of teenagers in neon windbreakers cheered at him from across the street. He tried to wave back but his hand grew limp, as if the tendons had been snipped. He couldn’t bear to temper the townspeople’s excitement, admit that they had, once again, nothing to hope for.

  More and more, his wife’s clothes haunted him. Blouses, trousers, sweaters spilled from drawers like shed skins. The nightgown he slept with exuded a smell he hadn’t noticed before, spiced, herbal, as though he were a pest to repel.

  Shirt by shirt, sock by sock, he began gathering his wife’s effects into two cloth sacks. Somehow, wherever she was, she would surely feel him moving on, and the realization would hasten her return. He
recalled when he was a boy, and he and his father would wait for his mother to come home from work, the dinner she’d made that morning reheated but cooling again. Only when they gave up and reached for their forks would she march in, as if she’d been at the door the entire time, testing their will. As Konstantyn folded away Milena’s clothes, he couldn’t help cocking his ear every few minutes, listening for the jangle of her keys. When he’d finished, he seated the cloth sacks on the sofa bed, unsure what to do with them. One never got rid of clothes—on the contrary, one spent every effort to acquire them in any size from near-empty shops, or saved them for gifts, or sewed them into different clothes, or, at the very least, repurposed them as rags. Banishing the clothes to his dacha wouldn’t make enough of a statement, but he found he couldn’t throw them away either, as this might anger Milena. Still, he was determined to go through the motions of closure. He would donate the clothes. The more obscure the cause, the more Milena would love him.

  * * *

  —

  The car was borrowed, so Konstantyn took extra care as he drove along the muddy road. He wove over a hilly ridge, passed a rail yard, entered the forest. The orphanage hid deep inside it, 25 kilometers south of Kirovka.

  It had rained the night before and the forest shone in the morning light. While it was a relief to briefly escape the town, to be anonymous again, Konstantyn felt a twinge of trepidation at what lay ahead. He had never visited Internat Number 12 before; the townspeople rarely spoke of it, as though fearful of invoking a ghost. But every time Konstantyn thought of turning back, the curtain of trees would part to reveal a breathtaking vista of hills and rivers; a squirrel would flash its golden tail in benediction; a butterfly would glint past in a streak of yellow and orange; and Konstantyn would remind himself that, after all, he was here to do good.

  A cluster of cupolas peeked above the treetops. They appeared to have been skinned, with only the bulbous metal skeletons remaining. As he drove, the cupolas seemed to retreat into the distance, wary of the approaching stranger, but he soon caught up with them.

  Internat Number 12, Konstantyn discovered, was an old monastery. The edifice sagged as if a great invisible hand were pressing on it from above. One of the towers had crumbled, its ruins laced with the roots of trees.

  Konstantyn parked the rickety Zaporozhets alongside an iron fence. As he retrieved the first cloth sack from the trunk, he felt the weight of many eyes on the back of his neck. He gave a timid wave to the children watching him from arched windows. They kept still, as though painted onto the glass.

  Finding the gates locked, Konstantyn turned to the small white box welded to a fence post, and pressed its red button. After a moment, a low staticky voice, a woman’s, came on. “Yes?”

  “I’d like to donate clothes.” He said this loudly and clearly, as if his wife were hiding behind one of the pines, watching.

  “You’re from the Textile Union?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the organization?”

  “Just a lone citizen.”

  After a pause, she asked, “What is it you want from us?”

  He leaned in, thinking she had misheard. “I’m here to give clothing. To the children.”

  It was then he saw Orynko Bondar.

  Or rather, a flash of Orynko Bondar, in another girl’s face. One of the second-story windows was open, and a teenager rested her chin on the stone sill. Only her buzzed head was visible. Konstantyn thought she perfectly captured the vacant gaze of a fashion model. The orphan wasn’t beautiful like Orynko, but there was something Orynko-ish in her—the dashes of the brows and lips, the jut of the jaw—as if an artist had tried to sketch the beauty queen in not-quite-sufficient light, using the nondominant hand.

  “Leave the clothes by the gates,” the woman instructed through the intercom. “I’ll have someone pick them up.”

  Konstantyn set the sack down, but did not leave. He was still looking at the girl. Now he thought of the Greater Good. The Greater Good mattered most—wasn’t that what he’d been taught his whole life? And so he could be forgiven a bit of deceit. He could slip the Orynko-ish girl into Orynko’s place, to compete in the Miss USSR pageant. He would train her himself. In Moscow’s vast Palace of Culture lectorium, each of the contestants would look no bigger than a pinkie finger onstage. Who could tell who was who, and who wasn’t? As for the television broadcast: one could not overestimate the transformative effect of makeup, the distracting property of glitter. When Orynko had stepped onstage at the local pageant, her face powdered and painted, fake lashes flapping, she hadn’t looked quite like Orynko either.

  “I’d also like to foster a child,” he announced, “for two months.” He imagined the orphan’s gratitude, and felt bolstered by it.

  As the intercom rattled with instructions—forms to procure from the Ministry of Labor and Social Development, signatures to gather, and so on—Konstantyn gazed up, and thought he spotted the woman issuing them. At the fourth-floor window of the nearest tower, a broad-shouldered attendant in a white smock spoke into a phone.

  “I’d like to proceed more quickly,” he interrupted. “I’d be happy to leave the clothes here, but I’d also be happy to take them to another orphanage.” He spoke to her as if she were his counterpart, without malice. They locked eyes in recognition, complicity. They both knew what it was to keep afloat an underfunded institution. Her tone softened. “You have a wife? It’s not just you?”

  “Not just me.” The more he wanted it to be true, the less it felt like a lie.

  “Your wife didn’t come with you.”

  “She’s preparing the extra room.”

  It seemed as if the attendant wanted this to be true, too. Her sigh crackled through the intercom. “Girl or boy?”

  “How about—” Konstantyn feigned deliberation before pointing to the girl at the open window. “Her.”

  From her tower, the woman craned her neck out the window to look at the girl. The girl stared at nothing. For a terrible instant, Konstantyn thought she might be dead.

  “I’ll bring her right out,” the attendant said quickly, her sudden enthusiasm unnerving. She retreated into the dark depths of the building.

  A minute later the girl, too, was gone. The attendant appeared in her place, shut the window. Twenty minutes passed, thirty. Konstantyn considered ringing the intercom, but decided against it. Perhaps the girl was saying her goodbyes to the other children, who must be like brothers and sisters by this point. Perhaps she was tangled in their embraces, navigating the delicate terrain of their envy. Who was he to rush her? The longer he waited, the more he liked the girl.

  At last the tall wooden doors of the monastery swung open. The attendant marched down the weedy brick path, pulling the orphan by the wrist. The girl struggled against the woman’s grip, like a child who had just been woken. With her free hand she clutched a dusty pillowcase containing something bulky. “No lice,” the attendant promised, when the pair reached the iron gates. “You can see for yourself.”

  Up close, in full light, the teenager was not what he had envisioned. The arms and legs that stuck out of her baggy garment were very thin and pale, so pale they had a bluish glow. A thick white scar curdled her skin from nose to upper lip. This, combined with the buzzed head, the rough features, gave her a criminal look. And yet, once more Orynko flitted across the girl’s face. This time the resemblance gave him a queasy feeling, recalled a shape-shifting octopus he had once seen on television, which survived its hostile habitat by mimicking anything from seaweed to a pile of poisonous snakes.

  “Meet Zaya.” The attendant pronounced the name like a challenge.

  The girl regarded Konstantyn not with the timidity he expected of an orphan, but with a fierce intensity, as if she already knew Konstantyn and had decided long ago she disliked him.

  Konstantyn felt his leg take a step back. He wanted to t
ake another step, then another, until he reached the car and drove away. It took a momentous effort to twist his mouth into a smile. He leaned down to address the girl on the other side of the fence, but could not find anything to say. He had already forgotten her name.

  The attendant unlocked the gates, ushered the orphan out, grabbed the sack of clothes Konstantyn had rested on the ground, clacked the gates shut. “Thank you for your kind donation. See you in two months.”

  * * *

  —

  When Konstantyn opened the trunk of the car, the girl drew back, as if he were about to throw her inside it. He gave a small high laugh. “It’s for your things.” He pointed at the remaining sack of his wife’s clothes as an example (he had kept it back at the last moment for pageant needs). The girl gripped her bundle tighter to her chest. When he opened the passenger door, she made no move toward it. He rolled down the window, hoping this, too, would somehow prove the car’s safety. He demonstrated getting in and out of the car while she watched, and thought he caught a cruel curl of her lip. He even suggested she walk beside the moving car as he held her hand—he feared she might run away—anticipating she would eventually tire and get in. But when he extended his hand, she struck it with the back of hers, hard. The orphan’s strength alarmed him. When at last he threatened to drive away, leave her in that terrible place, she glowered at him, daring him to.

  He sank behind the wheel but did not start the engine. With shaking, stinging fingers he tried to light a cigarette. On the fourth try he succeeded, and was about to take a grateful drag, when the cigarette left his lips.