by Maria Reva
“That boy is someone’s son,” I whispered to the hunter.
“He was my sister’s.” Her dark eyes met mine, daring me to utter another rebuke. “Do we have a deal?”
For a second I considered; I desperately needed the money, and it would have pleased me to be rid of the mummy. But selling it to a butcher’s block felt like a renewed violence. The duty of a guard is to guard, not to steal, and especially not from Konstantyn Illych. He had given me the job out of goodwill and I could not betray him. I shook my head.
* * *
—
I decided my pain was a test of will. To distract my thoughts from my mouth, and my stomach—I still couldn’t chew solids—I instituted a Changing of the Guard. If we wanted to build a world-class tomb, I told Konstantyn Illych, we needed the pageantry.
Two minutes and forty-five seconds before the hour, every hour, I held the line. I marched out to the front of 1933 Ivansk, high-kicking Prussian style, upper body stiff while my lower body danced away the pressure that had accumulated during the past fifty-seven minutes and fifteen seconds. The old guard charged around the building. Precisely as the clock struck the hour, the new guard marched in from the opposite side. On occasion a child might call out, “But isn’t that the same man as before?” and a snigger would ripple through the crowd. But I paid no heed. My choreography grew more and more elaborate: all taps, skips, and kicks, a wild whir of legs, as though the earth singed my feet.
Konstantyn Illych encouraged my displays; they were drawing larger crowds, which assembled at the top of the hour to cheer on my footwork. By the end of every shift I would exhaust myself, wanting nothing more than the sweet numbness of sleep. After two weeks, however, my hunger gave way to weakness. I lived with a sharp ringing in my skull, the air having condensed into two drills that bore into my ears. My uniform hung from my thinning limbs. I stumbled through the Changing of the Guard, then reduced its frequency, then gave it up. After that, I simply kept to my post, where the pain awaited me hotly, with pincers for arms and clamps for lips.
* * *
—
A knock on the glass wall startled me awake. The streetlamp illuminated the silhouette of a great hairy beast. It watched me for some time before peeling back the fur from its head. I recognized the naked ears that stuck out.
I heaved myself from my cot and waited out a spell of dizziness before shuffling to the door. I unlocked the dead bolt and cracked open the door, its chain still hinged.
The relic hunter’s floor-length coat rippled in the orange lamplight. “Name your price.”
I’d once heard a pensioner lament that to get your teeth fixed you had to give up a kidney. Without expecting an answer, I asked the hunter how much a kidney cost.
Without a blink she said, “Thirty-five thousand.” She peered at my face. “Why, finally getting those teeth done? For thirty-five thousand, you’ll be good as new.” She thrust her hand through the door crack. “Final offer.”
I cringed at the thought of the saint hacked to pieces. But the saint was already dead, as were the men, women, and children who crawled behind my eyes day and night. And here I was, living.
I gripped the relic hunter’s hand. I wanted that hand, warm and moist, to pull me from the tomb, from my wrecked body.
* * *
—
Victims, the newspaper article had called the perished pilgrims. (The railway report itself had not called them anything, only quantified them.) When dredging up the past, the newspapers attempted to divide its players into victims and villains. My employment at the agency would mark me as the latter. But I had suffered, too. I’d grown up without parents. If a coin flip hadn’t decided their fate, likely the tick of a pen had, or an act similarly arbitrary. After three generations, who were the victims, who the villains? We’d become a formidable alloy, bound by shame. The grand dream of equality realized.
* * *
—
I’d braced myself for the stomatological clinic of my childhood: a warehouse with many rows of barbershop chairs, in which a patient endured not only his or her own (unanesthetized) agony, but that of the other wailing patients.
But here, in the reception room of the new private clinic, a burbling fountain induced calm. Glossy posters attested to miraculous Before-and-Afters. Anything could be erased: nicotine and caffeine stains, calculus so thick it could be mined, maxillofacial birth defects, industrial accidents, head-on collisions.
After I laid out the stacks of bills on the counter, a rosy-cheeked stomatologist led me down a corridor. She lifted her chin and thrust back her broad shoulders with the bravado of an opera singer about to step onto the stage. Then she opened a door to a private sunlit room. A mint-green reclining chair greeted me, curved arms inviting, as though it had been waiting for me all along. The instruments of torture were nowhere in sight.
As she inspected my mouth, the stomatologist made small sounds of anguish. “Poor sir,” she murmured, “poor sir.” I lapped up the words; I hadn’t realized how badly I needed them.
“For a case as severe as yours,” the stomatologist pronounced, “only Western technology will do.” She would extract my remaining teeth, which were past their prime anyway, drill holes directly into my jawbone, screw in implants with titanium rods. I recoiled at the idea, but already she had pressed a button, and the chair reclined until my head felt lower than my feet. My face had lost all color, she reported. She worried I would faint.
“The pain,” I asked, “will it go away?”
The stomatologist waved away the question—it seemed beside the point. I would have the best smile in town, she assured me. She hooked a surgical mask over her ears.
It was not until she latched the anesthesia mask over my nose and instructed me to count down from ten that the instruments scurried from their hiding places. With a hydraulic wheeze, a metal tray rose from behind the chair, containing an assortment of pliers. Then came another tray, with two sparkling rows of drill heads. An oval lamp hovered over my face. I felt myself to be on the belly of a spider, each leg performing a task. The final metal dish slid into view, containing the implants. Panic seized me—I recognized their nacreous gleam.
The saint’s teeth grinned at me from the dish, the full set, their roots now titanium.
I tried to warn the stomatologist about the cursed teeth, but my tongue refused to stir, my lips flapped uselessly. The room contracted around the stomatologist’s blue eyes. They crinkled. Under her mask, she must have been smiling. My fear spiked, then burned away. All I could do was accept what was coming, like the clacks of a train pulled into motion. “You aren’t counting, Mikhail Ivanovich. Start counting down.”
ROACH BROOCH
Those who mourn quietest, mourn deepest.
When the grandson dies, the rest of the family squabbles over his estate, but the grandparents vow not to get involved. (Not all the grandparents—just the maternal set, Pyotr Palashkin and Lila Palashkina, the last of the family to live in glum little Kirovka, while the rest have escaped.) Considering the shedload of money the grandson earned abroad, doing who knows what, he must have written a will, as people abroad do. The grandparents think: The rest of the family will surely respect his wishes.
When the grandson’s parents inherit his apartment and car, Pyotr and Lila don’t grumble that these parents already own a two-room and don’t drive.
When the grandson’s girlfriend inherits the diamond ring he kept in his lockbox, it would be rude to remind her that he hadn’t proposed yet, might’ve changed his mind.
The grandparents don’t mention that they practically raised the grandson while his parents worked. He was the first grandchild, the only one they could help care for before the family dispersed. The child was born joyless, and they would try and try to cheer him up by pointing out small miracles: the first crocus bursting through snow; the newspaper photo of the
crocodile who wears his turtle friend as a hat; the eerie curling of one’s fingers when the inner wrist is pressed. If the grandparents couldn’t make the boy happy, at least they kept him clean, fed—alive.
* * *
—
Everyone in the family is poor, but the grandparents are the poorest. When the Union fell and inflation spiked, their lifelong savings dissolved along with their peaceful retirement. Instead of lounging on his bench in front of 1933 Ivansk—the bench now swallowed by a sea of pilgrims—Pyotr sits with Lila on a pair of children’s foldout chairs at the train station, selling bone albums to tourists on layover. They greet the tourists in a dim underpass that reeks of urine, the bone records spread over a checkered tablecloth on the concrete. Other elderly citizens sell Soviet army regalia, reprinted propaganda posters, painted wooden spoons. To procure the X-rays, the grandparents have to dig through the dumpsters behind the polyclinic, risking infection and grisly new diseases. Pyotr and Lila got into the business when a neighbor, Milena Markivna, posted an ad in the lobby offering her bone music equipment for a reasonable price. Included were a modified gramophone and sixteen vinyl records. The grandparents were overwhelmed with joy the first time they held the albums: Red Poppies! Jolly Fellows! Such ensembles used to perform on television all the time, with their smart suits or matching knit sweaters, bobbing in sync, abstaining from flashy dance. Pyotr and Lila couldn’t hide their disappointment when Milena told them the vinyl sleeves and labels had been a disguise, that the real music only came through when you lowered the needle.
The record player turned out to be in poor condition, likely kept in the damp for years, and the volume knob broke at first touch. It’s still stuck to one level: blaring. The grandparents have to live with Alice Cooper, KISS, Black Sabbath at full growl. It wouldn’t be so bad if they couldn’t understand the words, but Pyotr and Lila are retired English teachers.
“GO TO HELL,” the music advises. “LIE DOWN AND DIE.”
Also, “YOU SHOULD HAVE NEVER HAPPENED.”
But, of small comfort: “I’LL MISS YOU WHEN YOU’RE GONE.”
* * *
—
The family doesn’t think the situation is so bad. After all, the grandparents get to listen to music all day, and make money doing it. Meanwhile the others have to drive trucks across the country, bend over microscopes at catheter assembly lines, check fares on packed trams, hawk bread out of moving trains. And those are just the day jobs.
“Grandfather has a tumor,” Lila likes to remind the family over the phone, whenever they get smug. The tumor sits atop his bladder.
“Benign,” they snap back.
“But growing, crowding out his organs,” she tells them. “Even if very slowly, it will kill him.”
“So get it removed!” The family has been pleading for this to happen for years.
But the situation isn’t as simple as that. The grandparents can’t get the tumor removed because as long as it exists, they’re guaranteed a monthly pelvic X-ray. The shape of the spine and hips in the X-ray reminds the tourists of an electric guitar, and they snap that bone album up right away. The tumor is what feeds the grandparents.
“Why not just make copies of the same X-ray?” This, the snarky uncle.
“Don’t think we haven’t tried,” Lila says. But no one in town will make copies. They’ve even asked the polyclinic receptionist for extras, and the woman in turn asked what they thought she was running, a medical facility or an X-ray press.
* * *
—
Finally the relatives sort out what the grandparents will inherit. Something the grandson must have treasured very much, they promise. They send one of the teenagers over to deliver it. A head taller than the last time the grandparents saw him, and newly handsome, the teenager carries a clear-lidded tin box repurposed from Belgian chocolates. With his stiff posture, bearing the gift in his arms, he looks like a suitor. He won’t come inside, though, says he has to rush off to catch the next train back to his city, a train that doesn’t stop here anymore, not fully—it only slows to a crawl along the platform because the town no longer deserves more than a minute of the train’s time.
Since the major items have already been allotted, the grandparents aren’t expecting an enormous or life-changing gift. They’d be happy with a keepsake, however small.
The tin box in the teenager’s hands has a pinprick hole. Lila takes the box and peers into it, her mouth already set in a smile.
Inside the box is, well, the grandparents aren’t sure what. A silver chain attached to an oblong pile of brown rocks, sitting on a piece of newspaper. It’s roughly the size and shape of a stool. It looks much like the samples the grandson had to produce in his childhood, to be scooped into a matchbox—by the grandmother, who else?—then wrapped in newspaper, then a plastic bag, and submitted to the school nurse, who inspected it for worms. Each looming inspection would make the boy nervous, thus constipated—stage fright, Pyotr called it—and Lila would often have to produce the sample herself. The rest of the family liked to joke that the grandson would one day return the favor.
Is that what the so-called gift is about?
The most disgusting thing about the brown pile: two hairs sticking out of one end.
The grandparents look up from the box, but the teenager has already run off.
The pair of hairs twitches.
In shock, Lila almost drops the box. Now the entire pile lumbers from one side of the box to the other, toward its own reflection.
The grandparents draw their faces closer. The rocks, they realize, are glued to an insect. A giant wingless roach, by the looks of it. The hairs are its antennae.
Is it supposed to be a pet?
An art project?
Just the kind of thing the grandson would waste his money on.
* * *
—
The rest of the family may not know it yet, but Pyotr and Lila have stopped talking to them. If one of the relatives were to call, the grandparents wouldn’t answer.
The grandparents keep up with the bone records. Keep ignoring the doctor’s pleas to remove the tumor. The doctor brings props to the radiology room each month, to demonstrate the tumor’s growth.
He holds up a pea. “Where we started.”
He holds up a glossy chestnut. “Where we’re at.”
He holds up a lemon. “Where we’ll be in a few short years.” Not the regular type of lemon, pale and pitted, Lila notes. This one is dark yellow, taut-bellied. Likely a Meyer, from a pricey store.
“Am I getting through?” the doctor asks. He’s taut-bellied himself, with brown nicotine stains on his lips.
The grandparents nod along, but the gravity of the diagnosis has never quite sunk in. It just doesn’t make sense, how a pea can metamorphose into a chestnut, then a lemon.
“Can we keep the lemon?” Pyotr asks.
* * *
—
At their sales stall, the grandparents keep a pair of flashlights. Tourists shine them through the X-ray records. Sometimes the reason for the X-ray is obvious: a broken limb, a spoon floating in a stomach. Other times, the X-ray shows a subtle swelling, a hairline fracture. The tourists enjoy the detective work.
For the layperson, Pyotr’s tumor isn’t easy to identify. Lila has to trace the faint orb above the bladder with her finger before the tourists say “Ah.” She never attributes the tumor to her husband, sitting right beside her, so as not to dampen anyone’s mood.
As with any growth or deformity, the tourists always want to know: “A victim of…?” The tourists don’t want to say the dirty word themselves, but are itching to hear it, pronounced authentically by this kerchiefed babushka.
Lila casts down her eyes, confirms: “Chernobyl.”
She says this even though her husband never served in Chernobyl or had anything to do with i
t. The most he’d done was help hose off their apartment building, as per government recommendations, but the spray of the garden hose only reached the second floor, and they lived on the third, so who knew how much of the fallout they’d absorbed? The government had also recommended they drink wine to protect against the radiation, but the grandparents didn’t have wine themselves and didn’t know anyone so fancy. Pyotr’s skin hadn’t melted off like that poor woman’s had, the one on the local news—she’d bathed in one of the rivers—but no one can prove that he isn’t a victim. And the people who might take issue with the misuse of the term, the ones most territorial about it, tend to be dead.
Anyway, at the word “Chernobyl,” the tourists have their wallets out.
* * *
—
The grandparents are eating nettle soup when they spot the roach sitting right above them, on the kitchen ceiling. Its silver chain swings back and forth as though to hypnotize them. Pyotr drops his spoon into his soup.
The lid of the tin box must have come open when Lila shoved it into the closet. But she doesn’t want to be the one to put the roach back in the box.
Pyotr won’t put it back either, even though pests are his domain, his only domain, while Lila cooks, cleans, and all the rest.
The roach stays on the ceiling, and the grandparents endure their meal.
They make sure not to leave any food out, hoping that the thing will leave the apartment on its own. But in the coming weeks, every time they think it’s finally gone, it skulks out from under the stove or shoe rack, from between their clothes in the wardrobe, the chain dragging behind it.
