by Maria Reva
My superior’s scowl softened. “I still have that pillowcase, starched and ironed for her return.” His eyes darted about the tomb, as though the girl might materialize at any moment. I suspected that his ex-wife’s new living arrangement added to his anguish. He’d once told me that women only turn to each other when there is a dearth of sensible men—“And am I not sensible?”—but I believed the core of his heartbreak lay elsewhere. While Milena had gained two children, who trailed around her in their school pinafores, braids bouncing—he had lost one. Surely he dreamed of walking Zaya to school, no matter her age, her hand clasped in his.
Konstantyn Illych unlocked the cash register and broke a roll of coins into it. He turned back to the shrouded mummy. “Nice not to have to look at that thing,” he conceded.
“Or have it look at you,” I muttered.
He placed a stack of laundered kerchiefs on his counter, available for rent to women who wished to cover their hair for worship but had forgotten to bring their own—a new addition to his business, following repeated requests.
“So long as the sheet doesn’t affect attendance,” Konstantyn Illych warned.
* * *
—
At the agency, we’d shared a courtyard with the Transport Workers’ Union. One afternoon, on break, I’d overheard two railway engineers debate the best location for a new freight rail yard. The first potential spot sat north of Kirovka and would require the construction of a bridge. The second sat south of Kirovka, over Holinka Ridge, and would require the dynamiting of a tunnel. At the mention of Holinka Ridge, I put down my fish sandwich. The pilgrimage route I’d been monitoring passed over Holinka Ridge. Twenty rows of freight cars would lob off the procession, remove the need for policing any fence. I envisioned myself free from the tedium of chasing down pedestrians, promoted to more rewarding work.
Soon the engineers were yelling at each other, one waving her arms to make herself look larger, the other sitting with arms and legs crossed, unmovable in her granite-gray suit. At last they agreed to flip a coin. If a coin could break the tie between the Soviet Union and Italy in the 1968 European Football Championship, a coin could solve this much simpler matter.
A furious rummaging of pockets ensued.
But no coin!
The engineers turned to the table next to theirs, where I happened to be sitting. Their eyes flitted from my chin, still blotched from a not-unrecent adolescence, to my fish-flake-littered trousers, to the twiggy ankles that stuck out of them. The women’s hard faces thawed with pity. I set my jaw. They must not have known who I was or where I worked.
I slid a copper coin from my pocket.
“If you wouldn’t mind flipping it for us,” said the engineer in the suit, arms still crossed. “We need a neutral arbiter.”
“Oh, I couldn’t.” I was not being bashful—I had never flipped a coin.
A small audience of transport workers gathered around us. I waited for a volunteer to step forward, but none did. The unspoken rule: Your coin, your toss.
“Heads, we build south,” said the engineer in the suit.
“Tails, north,” deduced the other.
The transport workers cheered me on. Emboldened, I shook the coin between my palms like a die. Heads, heads, I chanted in my mind. I flung my hands out, imagining I were releasing a bird. The coin made a lazy arc over my head, bounced off my shoulder, and landed on the engineers’ table, where it rolled on its side, slowly and pathetically, before falling between the wooden slats. A few spectators laughed. Neither of the engineers would deign to stoop for the coin. I did not want to stoop for it either, but soon I was on all fours, crawling under the table as the crowd goaded me on. Blood rushed to my face. The concrete grated my kneecaps. I hated the onlookers but hated myself even more, spineless as usual.
The result: tails.
I’d seen a one-kopek coin countless times before, of course, but now found myself peeved by the look of its squat elaborately serifed number, the folksy ears of wheat encircling it.
As I slowly rose from under the table, coin lodged in my fist, my eyes met the suited engineer’s. My expression must have been apologetic: her shoulders dropped almost imperceptibly—she knew that she had lost.
I focused my gaze on a spot above the crowd, a blemish on the tiled wall behind them. The verdict came meekly, my tongue simply testing it out: “Heads.”
“Heads,” declared the suited engineer, voice hoarse.
“But neither of us saw it,” the other engineer pleaded.
“Heads,” shouted the crowd, over and over.
“Heads,” I shouted with them.
* * *
—
The same hardware sales boy as yesterday intercepted me by the glue section of his tent. “Which type you looking for?”
Hundreds of tubes of all sizes and colors hung before me. I pretended to read their labels, wishing the boy would leave me alone.
He asked, “Permanent or semipermanent?”
He asked, “Food grade?”
He asked, “Medical grade?”
He asked, “Spray-on?”
“Just the standard,” I conceded.
He asked, possibly rhetorically, “What is standard?” He unhooked a fat horseradish-colored tube, then a pink thimble-size one. “There’s the standard glue for wood planks, and the standard glue for the heirloom teapot your wife doesn’t know you broke.”
“Closer to the latter.”
The boy chuckled, conspiratorial, as if he himself had been married for years, had shattered many teapots. “Now,” he said in a low voice, “are we talking vitreous porcelain, new Sèvres porcelain, or soft feldspathic porcelain?”
* * *
—
Too many minutes later, on my way back to the tomb, I stopped by a news kiosk for an issue of Izvestia. Recently the publication of archives had slowed. Readers were satiated. Back when they knew less, they’d felt safer.
I came upon an article about the rail yard that had been constructed south of Holinka Ridge. I’d almost missed it, wedged as it was between an advertisement for pantyhose and another for tax lawyers. During the rail yard’s twelve-year operation, the article informed its readers, the pilgrims who had died crawling under trains in an attempt to reach the monastery numbered:
Men 6
Women 7
Children 2
I hadn’t known the true numbers. Shortly after the construction of the rail yard had begun, my superior had declared the pilgrimage issue solved and taken me off the case. I’d ignored the rumors that there had been injuries, even deaths. Now I stared at the neat stack of numbers, reprinted from a railway report. I wondered, uselessly: Why were the children a separate, ungendered category? But as soon as I thought this, my mind conjured them—two girls, then two boys, then a girl and a boy, darting under the maze of freight cars, losing themselves in their game—and I clamped my eyes shut, as if I could unsee them.
If the rail yard had been built instead in the northern spot, zero pilgrims would have died. But the engineer who had vied for the southern rail yard had been the more charismatic, resolved one—surely she would have won, even without a coin toss, even without me skewing the result.
* * *
—
I waited until nightfall to mend the mummy. Inside the tomb, I kept the lights off to avoid attracting attention; a nearby streetlamp provided just enough illumination and, for the finer work, I was armed with a key chain flashlight. Glue at the ready, I reached into my pants pocket for the saint’s teeth, but found only a small hole where before there had been none. I searched the other pants pocket, then all four pockets of my coat. My hand returned to the first pocket, to confirm the teeth were still missing.
If the hole had already been there, before the teeth, surely I would h
ave caught it—the pants were my last remaining pair presentable enough for work, and I was vigilant about identifying and repairing any damage—and I would not have used a compromised pocket for valuables. For a moment I entertained the possibility that the teeth had chewed their way out. But no, I told myself, this was simply a case of bad luck, even if I did not believe in luck, bad or good.
I dreaded explaining the saint’s disfigurement to Konstantyn Illych. I could not keep it hidden under the linen for much longer—Konstantyn Illych had asked to check on the saint the next morning, and I’d lied and said I’d temporarily misplaced the sole key to the case. If he saw that the teeth were missing, perhaps he’d think I gouged them out, and sold them on the black market. On occasion, relic hunters did visit the tomb. They were easy to spot. They’d kneel the lowest, pray the loudest, before offering money for a tuft of holy hair, a sliver of ear. From their corner-mouth whispers I had learned that five heads of St. John the Baptist were in circulation; thirteen palms, nineteen feet, and twenty-one skull fragments of Jezebel—whatever the dogs didn’t eat; the foreskins of Christ and His footprints were particularly popular, as were the moans of David, the shivers of Jehovah.
Just then, between two floor tiles, an incisor twinkled in the lamplight.
I fell to my knees, ready almost to kiss this relic. This time I wrapped the tooth in one of the rental kerchiefs from the counter, and stowed it in my double-lined breast pocket.
Another tooth, longer, fanglike, winked at me by the exit. I collected it, stepped outside. One by one the saint’s teeth appeared like stars in a darkening sky.
The third tooth glowed from a crack in the pavement.
The fourth and fifth teeth sat at the rusty foot of a seesaw.
They led me further and further from the tomb. I expected the teeth would retrace the route I’d taken earlier that day from the bazaar, but instead they led me in the opposite direction, toward an unlit park, as though someone had rearranged them as a sinister joke. It was imprudent to be out after sunset, when only thieves and thugs stalked the streets, but I kept on. I tried to imagine myself as a lover, following rose petals to a bed, but couldn’t help feeling like a rodent, lured by crumbs to a trap.
The sixth tooth lounged on a tree root.
The seventh spilled from a half-eaten bag of chips.
The eighth bounced between a stray cat’s paws.
I stopped there. I’d reached the perimeter of the park. Its patchy lawn sloped down to a copse of oaks and a well that had run dry. I needed that last tooth, but was afraid of where it might appear—at the bottom of the well? Under a sleeping pack of dogs? I inhaled the cool night air, tried to compose myself. These were only teeth, after all; I’d been living with a set of my own for forty years. I set off at a trot, down a paved path. When I spotted the ninth tooth roosting in an old flower bed under the oaks, lucent as its siblings, the tightness in my chest broke into laughter. Was this where the teeth had been leading me? To a patch of weeds? Carried by a senseless impulse to catch the tooth before it got away, I lunged forward. My foot caught a notch in the pavement. As I hurled to the ground, my screaming jaws bit into the concrete rim of the flower bed.
I do not know how long I lay in the dark, swallowing blood.
My heart climbed into my head and pounded at my eardrums, seeking escape. My jaws ground at the hinges. I spat out what I hoped was gravel. I clutched the saint’s last tooth. Its claw sank into my palm.
By the time I stumbled back to the tomb, my entire body felt seared with pain. When I turned on the bathroom light, a bloated, scratched face stared at me from the mirror. A criminal’s face. The lips oozed blood. I willed the mouth to open, but now my jaws were stuck shut. This was partly a relief—I did not want to see the damage my tongue had already rooted out. Rotten from a lifetime of avoiding stomatologists, my front teeth had given way easily. Their absence felt vertiginous. My tongue kept back, as though it, too, were in danger of tumbling out, and pressed itself against the molars. A few of these were fractured, their edges jutting sharply.
I opened the saint’s display case, yanked off the linen sheet. Now the saint’s crinkled eyes and thrown-open mouth seemed to be laughing. I knew then where the teeth had been leading me: not just to the flower bed, but also to the notch in the pavement.
I uncapped the tube of glue. Its cloying smell spiked my headache, brought on a wave of nausea. I reached into my breast pocket, unwrapped the kerchief. Inside, I found only a hole. With increasing horror, I discovered that the pocket, too, had a new hole. This time I could not chalk up the loss to bad luck: the teeth had gnawed through both layers of lining. And yet again they were at large, free to wreak havoc upon me.
* * *
—
When a locomotive begins to pull its train, the couplers between the cars tighten with a clack. The clack skips all the way down the train, head to tail, like the cracking of a spine.
When a locomotive begins to pull its train, and a person happens to be crawling under it, they hear the clacks pass over them. A warning: get out, get out, get out. Yet these pilgrims, these men, women, children, had crept on. In their final moments, did they regret what they were doing? Did they still believe that something better waited on the other side?
* * *
—
“Are you in trouble?” Konstantyn Illych asked me the following morning. “I don’t want trouble in my tomb.”
It was fifteen minutes before opening. I tried to ignore the many pairs of eyes trained on me through the glass wall. The swelling of my face and hands had grown overnight. A magenta bruise extended from the corners of my scabbed lips, giving me a clown’s smile. My gums still leaked blood. Konstantyn Illych did not seem to believe a flower bed could do this much damage.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell Konstantyn Illych the truth: yes, I was in trouble, just not the kind of trouble he meant. “I told you. I tripped,” I mumbled. I still could not open my mouth more than a few millimeters.
A freckled teenage boy knocked on one of the glass panes, trying to catch my attention.
“If Zaya comes back and I’m not here, she’ll see your face and run again,” said Konstantyn Illych.
“I’ll run after her.”
“You haven’t seen her run.” He gazed at me as if we were separated by a great gulf; he had someone to love and I didn’t.
“You never told me where Zaya got the saint.” By now I had a hunch, and I dreaded the answer.
Konstantyn Illych scowled, pretending not to understand my muffled speech. I repeated the question, and he shrugged. “Her orphanage.”
“You mean that former monastery?”
He glanced at the pilgrims. “Keep those pretty lips sealed. I hear the Church is trying to reappropriate what it can.”
I began to shiver, and longed to run from the tomb, into the warm sunlight.
Konstantyn Illych slapped my shoulder affectionately. The muscles at the back of my neck locked in spasm. “You can take the day off, but I can’t promise to pay you for it.” He urged me to go see a stomatologist, but we both knew this was impossible. The last public clinic in town had closed, and few could afford the glittering private one.
I stayed in the tomb. We opened on time.
* * *
—
The duty of a guard is to be still, to be present with the world. But over the next several days I could not keep still. Every cell in my body howled. The bruising and swelling began to subside, but the pain did not. Its hooks jerked at my gums, at the exposed nerves of my shattered teeth. I subsisted on potato broth and sour cream, and my stomach wrung itself with hunger.
When I wasn’t thinking of my teeth, I thought of the saint’s. I feared their reappearance, their reassembly. I feared they would punish me, as the noose had punished my ex-colleague. The teeth would gnash me to bits. There were moments when
, as if on cue, a pilgrim would turn toward me and I’d catch an opaline glint. In the evenings, I shook out my slippers, felt under my pillow. I even peeked under the saint’s shroud, hoping the teeth had tired of their wanderings and resumed their post. But the saint remained as gap-mouthed as a child.
Each shift stretched longer and longer. My fingers fidgeted with the hole in my pants pocket, worrying it larger. I counted and re-counted the pilgrims. Counting was not part of the job. I did not like the crowd, and quantifying it made it seem even larger, but I couldn’t help myself. I counted the men in sixes. The women in sevens. The children in twos. I imagined them crawling. Flat on the ground.
* * *
—
Thanks to the linen sheet, the relic hunter whispered in my ear, no one would know if they were appealing to a saint or a pile of sandbags. And wasn’t that the power of prayer? The woman brought her taper candle closer to her face, the light from its flame stretching shadows across her features. She kept on: If a saint, no, half a saint, brought this much hope, imagine what would happen if that saint were divided further, into many pieces, displayed in many glass boxes across many churches and homes. Didn’t I want to maximize hope? She offered me a fine price. Would even throw in the sandbags.
It was a Sunday evening, which was when Konstantyn Illych habitually kept the tomb illuminated with sixty candles for sixty minutes. The weekly vigil coincided with the blackouts, which had started up again for the first time in years, but only in small towns like ours.
From her purse the relic hunter slid a yellowed portrait of a boy posing with a poodle. She positioned it among the other photographs on the display case. Likely she’d bought her prop at a flea market, to help her impersonate a pilgrim. The relationship was almost believable: the relic hunter and the boy in the photo shared pointed, elfish ears.
By the cash register, Konstantyn Illych’s head craned over the crowd. His gaze landed on us. He shook his head at me in sympathy. They can be so chatty, he seemed to say. So whiny.
