by Maria Reva
The girl leaned in through the open passenger window. His cigarette hung from her mouth. She took a long, delicious pull before exhaling politely away from the car.
“I have more.” He brandished the box, tapped the cartoon rocket shooting across its front. He hated himself for stooping so low.
At last the girl took the front seat. She sat her bundle on her lap.
During the drive, all conversation remained determinedly one-sided. Mostly, Konstantyn pointed at forest and meadow, saying, “See that big oak.” “See that patch of daisies.” “See those mushrooms, very poisonous.” The girl kept her eyes on the muddy road.
He tried to ignore the smell of her, sweet and rank, like barley fermenting in urine. Keeping one hand on the wheel, he lit a second cigarette, inhaled. “Where’d you pick up the habit? From the older children?”
She shook her head.
“From the sanitarki?”
She nodded.
“You can talk to me. I don’t bite.”
She shot him a look: I do.
Konstantyn laughed; the girl did not. A rabbit dashed across the road. Her name came back to him. “What happened to your lip, Zaya?”
She said nothing.
“A bad fall,” he guessed.
She shook her head.
“Thorny branch.”
No.
“Fishhook.”
No.
“Angry bird.”
She took another pull. No.
“A three-headed dog you fought off valiantly.”
No response.
“I thought so,” said Konstantyn.
“An old baba sewed it up.” The girl slurred her words. “She made leather boots.”
Konstantyn winced. He didn’t want to know more, but after a moment, he did. “This wasn’t at the internat?”
She shook her head again. “I ran away, she took me in. Her hut burned down, she brought me back.”
The forest receded. They drove between the sunflower fields in silence. Soon Kirovka welcomed them with its bent metal sign framed by rusty braids of wheat. Konstantyn felt lighter. At least the girl could speak.
* * *
—
That night Konstantyn woke to a pinprick of orange light, felt nicotine breath on his face. He made out the girl’s silhouette, bent over him. He jolted upright.
“Keep sleeping,” she whispered.
He flicked on his reading lamp. No trace of Orynko in this girl’s face. This stranger was wearing his wife’s billowy dress shirt, which he’d lent her the evening before. She had brought no clothes of her own, had told him that her bundle contained only a saint, which had originally come with a hat before one of the other orphans stole it. A doll, not a saint, he assumed she’d meant.
“How long have you been sitting there?” he asked.
“Never seen a man sleep.” She crossed one bare leg over the other, and stared at his mouth. “Odd, what lips are. Where you turn inside out.”
Konstantyn tucked his lips between his teeth, protectively. The calm of her voice terrified him. She seemed capable of anything: she might break into dance or smash his skull with a skillet. He thought of the boot maker who had taken her in, could imagine the seed of the catastrophe: the girl gazing at a candle with the same cold fascination, wondering how the flame would look if it engulfed an entire house.
After that night he slept fitfully. He would wake up, listen for the girl’s breathing, make sure that the breathing was at a suitable distance, that it came from the cot on the other side of the room, on the other side of the linen sheet he’d hung between them.
* * *
—
Of course, Konstantyn hadn’t forgotten about the original Miss Kirovka. An encyclopedic search proved that the Thermometric Academy did indeed exist, in Norgorsk, deep within the Arctic Circle; the town was known for its smelting factory, which colored the snow pink, yellow, and black, and scented the air with chlorine and sulfur. In the early mornings, while the orphan slept, he wrote letters to Irina Glebovna and to the Chairman of Council of Ministers and his First Deputy Chairmen, State Committee Chairmen, and select members of the Presidium, calling for the beauty queen’s repatriation. He’d received no response yet.
As for Miss Kirovka’s double: before he could begin training her for the speech, the interview, the gown round, the bathing suit round—the radio announcement had not mentioned a talent round—the girl had to be caught up on the basics of civilized living. She never closed the bathroom door and he’d caught her squatting atop the toilet, feet on the seat. She balked at the idea of leg and armpit hair removal, saying that a buzzed head was enough to keep the lice away. She ate with agonizing slowness, inspecting each ingredient on her spoon with suspicion, yet she swallowed prune pits without a second thought. She feared the height of the balcony, and kept away from the windows. She slept with her dusty bundle at her side, refused to have it washed. She could recite the days of the week, but paid no heed to their order. If he thought he knew a subject, she probed him, out of curiosity or cruelty, until he reached the limits of his understanding. He could tell her about planets, how they were made of dirt or gas and moved in circles, but could not explain why they did so, only that gravity was involved. He couldn’t tell her if time had a shape, or if the present and future could exist at once. She wanted to learn how a plane flies; he wanted her to learn to wash herself.
It took Konstantyn the first full month to broach the subject of the pageant. He led her to the park, where they sat on a pair of truck tires painted with polka dots. She no longer glared at strangers as if she wanted to maul them, which was no small improvement. The bundle lay at her side, appearing even dustier than usual in contrast to the pin-striped work shirt she was wearing (Konstantyn’s). He divulged his plan: how she would be representing all of Ukraine as Miss Kirovka—more precisely, as Orynko Bondar, a girl who couldn’t attend herself, although no one would know the difference. All Zaya had to do onstage, apart from twirl around in a pretty gown, was unfurl the sash emblazoned with MISS KIROVKA—he would make the sash himself, in whichever color she wanted—and wear Miss Kirovka’s crown. An exact replica of the crown, rather. He told her about the judging panel of celebrated artists and Party members, about how every young woman dreamed of this kind of opportunity.
“I don’t dream of it.”
“Think of how pretty you’ll be.” He quickly added, “On top of how pretty you already are.”
She watched a sparrow bathe in a murky puddle.
“You’ll get to see Moscow. It’s a hundred times bigger than Kirovka.”
“This is why you came to the internat,” she concluded. “Lucky me.”
He swept his arm around the park, which was empty save for a few young mothers walking their strollers. “The country needs you.”
The words had an effect on her, but not the one he’d intended. She stood up, and kicked the tire she’d been sitting on. “The sanitarki used to tell me, If you’re so unhappy, send a letter to Brezhnev. And then it was Andropov, then Chernenko. They kept dying and we kept dying and I kept writing letters. Send a pair of stockings. Send iodine. I waited—not even a letter back. And now the country needs me.” She pulled at the stiff collar of the work shirt, and set off in the direction of the apartment. He followed her, pleading. They were on the same side, he assured her, no one answered his letters either. But the girl marched on.
* * *
—
That night Konstantyn woke again. He listened for the girl’s breathing, but heard only silence. He poked his head over the hanging sheet. Both the girl and the bundle were gone. They weren’t in the kitchen or bathroom. He checked her cot again in the absurd hope he’d missed her the first time. He then stepped out onto the balcony, sick with panic. In the courtyard below, under the orange light of a streetlamp, he s
potted the orphan squatting in an overgrown flower bed. She appeared to be digging. Her shoulder blades jutted out through her nightgown like the stumps of wings. The loyal bundle lay at her side. When he called her name, she froze for a second, then resumed digging with renewed vigor. He didn’t want to approach her any more than he would a feral animal, but reminded himself that, regrettably, she was his charge. So he stuffed his feet into a pair of loafers, and raced down the concrete steps.
The girl didn’t look up when Konstantyn reached her. She had already dug an impressive hole using a flat stone. He demanded an explanation, but she gave none. When he begged her to come back inside, she ignored him. He took hold of her arm; she screamed. His hand jerked away as if scalded.
Several stories above, a window slammed shut.
For some time, Konstantyn watched her dig. If he were her father, he wondered whether he would know what to do. People with children always seemed to know.
A tuft of yellow hair poked out from the pillowcase. It looked remarkably real. Konstantyn sat on his haunches, pulled back the fabric. A face squinted up at him, brown and shriveled. Not a doll—human. Very dead. Oddly short. “What did you do?” he stammered at the girl, as though she had just murdered the thing, hacked half of it off, and was attempting to bury the evidence.
She grabbed a broken beer bottle by its neck, and brandished it at Konstantyn. He tipped backward.
“Use this,” she explained. She was worn out, her breathing heavy.
It was then that Konstantyn felt something inside him melt. The bottle was not meant to be a threat—the girl was asking for help. For the first time, Konstantyn found he was not repulsed by her. He could sympathize with her as he was supposed to. Bolstered by his newfound virtue, he slowly reached for the broken bottle, the fragile offering. He began to dig alongside the orphan, averting his eyes from the mummified creature—“a saint,” he remembered now. Not wishing to spoil the moment, he posed no further questions.
The night sky faded to a grayish green. When the girl stopped digging, so did he. With great care she lowered the bundle into the pit, which they then refilled with dirt. She pressed the fresh earth with her palms, and pulled dried weeds over it like a blanket.
They sat beside each other on the edge of the flower bed, silent. The girl’s usual scowl had softened. She regarded the novostroïki enclosing the courtyard as though they had done something to disappoint her.
“Pageant or no pageant,” she said in her slurring voice, “you want to take me back to the internat.” There was no plea in her tone, only resigned observation. Konstantyn couldn’t bring himself to lie. As he fumbled for the right words, she spoke again. “I’ll go to Moscow.”
This surprised him. He hadn’t expected her to change her mind. “You’ll run away.”
“Already tried. I’ll just end up back at the internat.”
“Then why?”
She scraped dirt from under her nails. “Why not.”
“We have three weeks. A lot of work ahead of us.”
The orphan gave Konstantyn a searing smile. Her teeth were nightmarishly crooked, as though she had stuck them in herself as a toddler. “I’m your girl.”
* * *
—
After that night, Zaya became surprisingly agreeable. She ate whatever Konstantyn cooked with a methodical determination: fatty cutlets, greasy stews, fried potatoes and pork rinds doused in sour cream. She plodded through tongue twisters to sharpen her diction. She attempted to straighten her teeth by pressing on them with the back of a spoon. She spent the crisp spring afternoons tanning her towel-wrapped self on the balcony—smoking dulled her fear of heights—and her bluish pallor gave way to a soft buttermilk. (Zaya still considered the issue of bodily hair moot, but Konstantyn made peace with this, not wanting to strain the fragile alliance.) To practice pivoting in heels, she wobbled around the apartment in a pair of velvet pumps Konstantyn found at the back of the closet—Milena’s, surely, though he’d never seen her wear them. Konstantyn borrowed a silvery wig from a neighbor who had worn it during chemotherapy, and Zaya pulled it onto her shorn head and flicked the locks over her shoulders, like the actresses she observed on television. She rehearsed the speech he’d written for her: “My name is Orynko Bondar, from Kirovka, Ukraine,” she would begin. Though Konstantyn felt strange hearing her use another’s name, Zaya herself seemed unfazed, as though identity were nothing more than a hat she could slip on and off. “I love the sea and the smell of rain,” she would chant at him. “I love animals, especially dogs.” She would exclaim, “Beauty will save the world,” almost as if she believed it.
For the gown round, Konstantyn unearthed a mustard-yellow dress with extra-wide bishop sleeves that gathered into elastic cuffs, gifted to Milena from his mother for their marriage registration.
Konstantyn fashioned the crown and sash replicas from the same materials he’d used for the originals: a three-liter tin can dipped in glitter, a polyester only-for-guests tablecloth. Zaya practiced the grand reveal. Upon reaching the end of the catwalk (corridor), she slid the crown and sash from her sleeves, put them on, pretended to bask in the applause, and strutted back.
The bathing costume, also Milena’s, was a thick wool tunic with knee-length bloomers, possibly procured from the Victorian era. Bloated with ruffles and pleats, the garment perplexed both Zaya and Konstantyn. “Even if I knew how to swim, I’d drown in this thing,” she said the first time she donned it. Konstantyn, however, appreciated the full coverage. Though his own pageant had included a bathing suit round, he felt a moral discomfort about the impending one in Moscow. He did not like to imagine the leering eyes of the entire Union on the contestants, and on this contestant in particular, whose qualities could not be assessed by mere stage light.
The more Konstantyn occupied himself with training Zaya, the less he thought about his wife. One hour, two hours, would pass by without Milena flitting through his mind. When he woke in the morning, he no longer had to remind himself why she was not lying beside him.
* * *
—
“What’s the one thing people don’t know about you?”
Zaya stood atop a chair, her makeshift stage, holding a wooden spoon as a microphone. They hadn’t rehearsed this interview question before. “What people?”
“Friends, family.” He’d uttered the second word without thinking. She let him wallow in his own shame for a moment. “People at the internat,” he amended.
“You can’t take a squat there without an audience. Everyone knows everything about everyone.”
“Some hidden talent,” he ventured. “A secret wish.”
Zaya peeled off her wig, rubbed her bristly scalp. The effect of the rich stews was beginning to show: no longer did shadows fill her cheeks, hang from her jutting collarbones. She resembled the teenage boys who roamed the neighborhood at night, scrawny but not skeletal.
“Sometimes I wish I’d never learned to talk,” she told him. “What’s the point?”
“We’re talking now, aren’t we?”
She nodded at the window. “But out there it’s dead space. No use running your tongue because who listens? It’s worse to know it.” She turned back to him. “But I can’t say that at the pageant.”
If it were up to him, he wanted to assure her, she could. Instead, he said, “The judges want something hopeful.”
“Hopeful.” Zaya flashed a plastic smile. “How about a poem?” She lifted the microphone-spoon to her lips, launched into a recitation. “Belts bearings cab chassis / Decals duals dewy in the sun / Engine hitch…”
It took a moment for Konstantyn to recognize the poem as one of his own. What were meant to be free-flowing lines, carried by intuition and inspiration, were chopped up, forced into the metered lilt of a nursery rhyme. He’d been proud of that poem, how it concluded with the setting sun painting the metals red—a deli
cately hidden representation of rust, or societal decay. Now the words made him cringe.
“I read it in one of your books last night, while you were asleep,” Zaya said. “But I already knew it. A sanitarka used it to teach us tractor parts.”
“Tractor parts!” He found himself yelling. “It isn’t about tractor parts.”
Zaya descended from the chair and slumped down into it, arms hanging between thighs. Her expression was mean and satisfied; the insult had hit its mark.
“Sit up straight.” He threw back his shoulders as an example, to no effect. “The sanitarki taught you tractor parts but not the order of the days of the week?”
“Want me to recite the one about gears?”
He put out a hand to stop her. He realized he preferred to think no one read his poetry anymore.
* * *
—
Makeup proved to be a challenge. Konstantyn hoped that, by virtue of being a girl, Zaya held some innate ability to apply it. From the depths of the bathroom cabinet he dug out a nub of lipstick, a tiny jar of flesh-colored paste, a tube of mascara—remnants from the rare times he and his wife had gone out. He placed the objects on the kitchen table, in front of Zaya. She uncapped the mascara, smelled the unsheathed brush. He realized she hadn’t a clue what it was.
“To darken your eyelashes. Let me,” he offered, taking the brush. He instructed her to look up at the ceiling, open her mouth.
“Why?”
He didn’t know. It was how his wife had always arranged her face to apply mascara. “Just don’t blink.” But when he brought the brush to her eye, she threw her head back as though he held a weapon. He tried again, with the same result.
“Do it to yourself first,” she ordered.
“It’s not for me.”
She crossed her arms. “You have eyelashes.”
He sighed, and held up the compact mirror. He watched himself bring the brush to his right eye. The lashes were thin and straight and stuck downward. He’d never paid attention to them before. He applied the clumpy purplish black paste. A few times he missed, and grazed his eyelid. He tried to wipe the marks off but ended up smearing them further, giving himself a black eye.
