Good Citizens Need Not Fear

by Maria Reva

  Almaza turned to Zaya, as though remembering that she had been a child once, too. “Where did you grow up?”

  Zaya told her.

  “How awful,” Almaza whimpered. “Just dreadful.” And then, gleeful: “I can’t imagine a worse place.”

  * * *

  —

  Is this where Zaya went wrong? Is it because she evoked for Almaza the tall iron fence, the dark cavernous halls of the monastery, is this how she is being reeled back in now?

  But maybe, even if she hadn’t told Almaza about the internat, she’d be driving along this gravel road just the same, drawn in by some other conspiracy of circumstances. She can’t escape the internat’s magnetic pull. It must be fated, like the lifelong slide toward death.

  * * *

  —

  After hearing about Zaya’s childhood, Almaza said: “What you need to do is harness all that authentic trauma into something great. A waste of trauma not to.” She suggested Zaya could invent a raw new dance style. Immortalize her woes in a brutal tile mural. She could write a memoir.

  “Just look at that other orphan, the one all over the news,” Almaza reminded Zaya. The girl had grown up in an internat like Zaya’s, and couldn’t walk. Not that it stopped her from dreaming. She got herself adopted by a Finnish philanthropist, endured ten spinal surgeries, regained a bit of feeling in her right leg, and became a Paralympic gymnast. Inspired the whole country. She even posed for a beauty magazine, her long legs model thin.

  * * *

  —

  Upon arrival at the internat, Zaya is disappointed to find the place intact. Even though she’d been absent for a short three years, she’d imagined coming upon a pile of bricks and plaster, impossible to reassemble. But the building stands; lush vines seal its cracks, cushion the iron fence. The vines shroud the mounds where the children were buried, and the unfilled pits, too—a relief, for Zaya. As a child, she had feared being mistaken for dead, waking up buried in one of these pits.

  Now the grounds look charming, with the buttercups dotting the wild grass, the gates thrown open in welcome.

  The clients—a venture capitalist, a socialite, a steel magnate, a lifestyle manager—are due to arrive the next morning. In preparation Zaya oils the gates’ locks, mops the floors, stocks the canteen with food, straightens the rows of beds in the nave of the monastery. Cold, dim, with spider egg sacs suspended in the stone moldings, the hall still possesses an underground quality.

  Zaya tries to remember which bed was hers. To pass the time as a child she’d stand on her bed, use a sharp rock to scratch open the tight-lipped mouths of the men frescoed on the walls. But it appears that other children took up the practice after her time: now every mouth within reach is agape, as if the painted figures are shocked to find themselves, after so many centuries, in the same stultifying place.

  Roaming the chambers and corridors, Zaya feels a sudden absence on her hip, as though something has been carved from her side. She recalls she used to carry the mummified saint, in a pillowcase propped on her hip, not because she wanted its companionship day and night—the creature smelled like a stale dishrag—but to keep the other children from stealing it, yanking its hair.

  In the back of the building, Zaya discovers a small cell-like room with bare plaster walls and an adult-size bed, likely for a sanitarka. She rolls out a sleeping bag. The thin straw mattress, ripping at the seams, is just as hard as the ones on the children’s beds.

  * * *

  —

  What about that other famous orphan, Almaza has reminded Zaya. When that girl’s orphanage ran out of money, the sanitarki chopped off the children’s braids and sold them to an Italian wig maker. Virgin hair, untouched by chemicals or curling irons. So what did this girl do when she got out? She started her own wig-making business, and partnered with a temple in India where the women cede their braids by choice, as an offering. Almaza herself owned one of these wigs back in Moscow. Finely woven, by three-strand bunches. It cost her fifteen thousand USD for one wig. Now the orphan drives a nice car, owns an apartment with French doors.

  What does Zaya think of that? What’s Zaya’s excuse for her life?

  * * *

  —

  The next day, a silver SUV deposits Almaza and the clients at the internat. Two men and two women, not including Almaza. The men are fleshy, grayish, the women tall and narrow with cinched, dehydrated looks. As instructed, everyone wears sensible shoes.

  Zaya wears a white sanitarka dress—or rather, the company designer’s interpretation of that uniform: a sculpted top half, double-breasted, vaguely military, with a long billowing skirt that drags in the wild grass, collecting spiny seeds.

  After ushering the group into the courtyard and locking the gates behind them, Zaya orders everyone to make a line in front of her. Almaza, orphan-chic in her long black pigtails, distressed jeans, and threadbare cotton shirt, asks, “Make a line by height, net worth, or…?”

  “By age,” Zaya improvises. “Oldest at the back.”

  But no one wants to admit their age, not even Almaza, who hardly looks older than Zaya. One of the clients, a leggy socialite whose tanned skin appears poreless, jokes with the group that she is ageless—her two pregnancies only made her look better, not worse. The clients shuffle on the spot until Zaya threatens to sort them herself, using the dates of birth on the IDs they submitted.

  At last, everyone in a crooked formation, Zaya distributes to each client the single garment for their ten-day stay, as well as a garbage bag for their clothes, wallets, and other personal effects. They won’t have access to their belongings until they leave, Zaya reminds them.

  The clients take turns changing in the outdoor shower (out of service, they will soon discover). When the men and women reconvene in the courtyard, looking like a bridal party in their matching periwinkle frocks, they place their garbage bags at Zaya’s feet.

  “Phones, too,” Zaya tells the impeccably postured lifestyle manager, who clutches a handset, the latest model. With a sigh the woman presses the phone against her hip to retract the telescopic antenna, then thrusts the bulky device into Zaya’s outstretched hand.

  The clients await further instruction.

  Zaya hasn’t thought of anything beyond this part. Usually Almaza supplies her with an itinerary of activities. But now, Almaza is regarding her with the same excited obedience as the others.

  A nightingale sings from a nearby bush. A butterfly circles the steel magnate’s parched knee.

  Zaya struggles to remember how the sanitarki would entertain the children. Her mind leaps over long expanses of formless time. She slings the garbage bags over her shoulder and follows the brick path toward the arched entrance of the building, hoping for an idea along the way. The group trails her. She hears the steel magnate remark, “A shame this place closed down.”

  * * *

  —

  Apart from setting out food at mealtimes (a vat of rehydrated sea cabbage, with a tube of liver paste) and restocking the latrine with toilet paper (newspaper), Zaya keeps to her room. She lies in bed, blinking at the low vaulted ceiling. Like the clients, she came here expecting to feel something. Instead, she has found her senses dulled.

  Maybe it’s because she knows the escape hatch.

  Or at least, the possibility of one.

  She knows she could walk the 25 kilometers to Kirovka and stay with Konstantyn. Three months ago she saw a photo of him in a newspaper, standing in front of his apartment block, arms crossed. He’d bought up an additional suite, the article informed her, which he converted into a tomb for the saint.

  “He’s ruining the neighborhood,” commented Lila Palashkina, 73, longtime tenant. “All these noisy fanatics, crowding in.”

  “The saint and I are not going anywhere,” responded Konstantyn Illych Boyko, 50, business owner and poet, none of whose books remai
n in print.

  White-haired with dark bulges under his eyes, he had looked tired in the photo, and much older than the last time Zaya had seen him. The building didn’t look great either, blotchy, riddled with cracks. She wished for a photo of the saint as well, just to see it again; the article had mentioned a linen sheet covering the saint, and said that the tomb’s guard refused to remove it.

  If Konstantyn had taken Zaya in before, surely he wouldn’t object to her presence now, for another day or two? Another expended bowl of pork stew, lusciously greasy? She could use him like he’d once used her. So long as she considered it a simple transaction, not a favor, she could let herself knock on his door.

  * * *

  —

  “Maybe this is the point,” the clients whisper outside Zaya’s window on the second morning. “Maybe we’re supposed to feel abandoned.”

  They take the initiative, find their own ordeals.

  “That grassy knoll?” says the stocky venture capitalist, pointing. “To the invalids who lived here, it must have seemed a mountain.” He braids wild grass into ropes, with which he ties thick branches to the sides of his legs, rendering his knees unbendable.

  “A few of the orphans might have never even seen it.” The socialite rips a strip off the bottom of her frock, blindfolds herself.

  The steel magnate plugs his ears with poplar fluff.

  Almaza fills her boots with gravel.

  * * *

  —

  On the third morning, when setting out the latrine newspaper (one broadsheet per day), Zaya comes upon a second article about Konstantyn and the tomb, published a week ago.

  The saint’s tomb had caved in, the article reports. Sheets of vinyl flooring, rugs, furniture, appliances, hot-water radiators, framed photographs, toys, a porcelain dish set, jars of fermented tomatoes—all this piled into the tomb from the apartment above, along with a family of three, shocked but unharmed, their mouths, allegedly, still full of breakfast. Luckily, that morning the tomb was closed, its live-in guard having been fired for undisclosed reasons.

  “Must be the shifting earth, the encroaching marshes,” commented Konstantyn Illych Boyko, who had failed to insure his business and, the newspaper noted, had also failed in marriage.

  “Must be those inner walls Konstantyn Illych knocked out,” stated the former guard, who had been intercepted at the train station on his way to Kiev, where he would seek employment in customer service. The man, endowed with impeccably white teeth, wished to remain anonymous.

  Zaya examines the accompanying photo. She wonders if the apartment block is wide enough for the rest of the structure to remain sound.

  “You might want to clear out,” Almaza tells Zaya from the doorway of the latrine. She has tied an off-center knot at the hem of her frock, for a fitted faux-slit look. “I slipped laxatives into the clients’ breakfast. Dysentery day.”

  * * *

  —

  On the fourth evening at the internat, visitors start emerging from the forest, crowding the iron gates. Three at first, then five more follow. Most are around Zaya’s age. Among the visitors is a teenage boy, orange-maned, laden with a tattered gym bag. His right eye is pressed deeper into his head than the left. He tells Zaya that he and the others had grown up at the internat, and heard it was reopening. They’d been living on the streets, and now they want back in. When Zaya tries to turn them away, the boy says, “But we walked all the way here.” They’d started at sunrise, and now it was almost sundown. They’d been stalked by a wild boar, dive-bombed by crows. A bunch of them had turned back already. “But we made it,” the boy insists.

  Before this job, Zaya herself had been living on the streets, in Moscow’s labyrinthine suburbs, huddling up to the warm aboveground pipes that fed wastewater from power plants to household radiators. “I’m sorry,” Zaya says, but she isn’t. She wants these visitors to go away. It’s as if the internat is rebuilding itself, and soon the real sanitarki will return, a director will materialize.

  A round-faced woman among the crowd at the gates smooths her dirty wrinkled blouse over her stomach, as if the blouse is the problem. She points toward Almaza and the clients, who are limping around the courtyard with their legs in splints, pebbles spilling from their shoes. “But you let them in.”

  “They paid to be here.”

  The group awaits an explanation.

  After a pause, Zaya says, “I don’t understand it either.”

  “Hey,” says the woman in the wrinkled blouse, “I remember you.”

  On second look, Zaya remembers the woman, too, but she feigns ignorance. As a girl, this woman used to follow the sanitarki around, asking for the tips of their braids to make into hair dolls. Now the woman has a pair of thin braids of her own, wispy ends dusting her shoulders. Zaya, on the other hand, has kept her hair buzzed; any time it grows out, the strands feel like fingers on her nape, threatening to stretch around her neck.

  “How’d you get to be a sanitarka?” asks a man with pink heart-shaped glasses too small for his face. Despite the bushy beard, Zaya recognizes him as well.

  “I’m not a real one,” Zaya says, more forcefully than she’d intended.

  * * *

  —

  The clients are not yet asking for their money back, exactly, but would any of them recommend the place? Of all the other trips the company offers? Sure, the child-size beds are lumpy, the food lousy, the latrines reek, but no one has been properly traumatized. No one is falling apart or pulling themselves back together. And despite efforts to keep busy, the past four days have been downright dull.

  It’s also awkward for the clients to be forced to look at all those sad people loitering at the gates. More and more keep showing up. They sleep under sagging tarps. How many now, fifteen? Can’t Zaya get rid of them? It doesn’t help that Almaza barters with them through the gates. She trades slices of the liver paste for their coffee, fresh off their camping stove. She sighs at them in regret. “Honey,” she tells the teenager with the pressed-in eye, “if only we could trade places.”

  * * *

  —

  On the fifth day, when Zaya sets out moldy bread and rancid margarine for breakfast, the clients don’t show up. Zaya scopes out the building and the sunny meadow behind it, calling Almaza’s name.

  “Over here!” Almaza’s hoarse voice reaches Zaya from the grassy knoll—seemingly, from deep inside it.

  Zaya rounds the knoll to discover Almaza and all four clients crouching in a narrow, weed-strewn hole, looking small and scared. The hole is just deep enough to trap them. “What took you so long? We were calling for you all night,” Almaza says, hugging her knees to her chest, her long black ponytail draped around her neck like a scarf. The venture capitalist and steel magnate have their arms wrapped around each other. The lifestyle manager picks at a crown of wilted dandelions atop the socialite’s head.

  “Is this one of the graves you told me about?” asks Almaza. “The to-be-filled ones?”

  “They were never this deep,” says Zaya.

  “This one wasn’t deep, at first, either.” Almaza had stumbled into a shallow pit, everyone else had followed, and the ground beneath them caved in. “There are tunnels down here. We’ve been crawling around, trying to find a way out.” Her face strains; she’s on the verge of tears. “We could’ve been eaten by an animal. Or by a hundred spiders, whose venom would slowly predigest us. Something could’ve happened to you, and we’d be stuck here for days and days until our drivers found our hollowed corpses.” As she lists all the ghastly scenarios, the clients nod along, gasping as one might do when presented with an exotic restaurant menu. Almaza delights in her performance, gesticulates wildly in the cramped space. She takes a dramatic pause. “We’d be like the orphans who died here, buried en masse.”

  Zaya glares at the clients, suddenly enraged.

  Sh
e spots a rusty shovel leaning against the wall of the monastery, and uses it to fling a fist-size clod of dirt into the pit. It explodes against the socialite’s knee. Almaza and the clients squeal in mock horror.

  Next comes an entire shovelful. The venture capitalist receives the earth spilling over his bald head with rapture, as if it were holy water.

  The lifestyle manager moans with pleasure. “I vow to quit my job, take up painting again.”

  The steel magnate shouts above them all, “I vow to get my wife and kids back.”

  The earth grows soft, welcoming Zaya’s shovel. There’s a rhythm to the slicing, the earth landing with a soft thud. She finds herself counting each stroke. Now the squeals of the clients are turning into screams, but she doesn’t stop, doesn’t break the rhythm. Her anger has ebbed, and is replaced by a logistical curiosity, cold and foreign: How many strokes to fill the pit? She stabs at a weedy ledge and the entire thing comes away, triggers a slide of earth and rocks. The clients try to scramble to their feet but are knocked back down. When the slide settles, they are buried to the chest. Zaya lifts the shovel again; her need to restart the rhythm, the pulse, is dire, desperate—as though her own heart has stopped. Five dirty tear-streaked faces tilt up in a childlike stupor. For a moment Zaya wonders whether they are looking not at her but at some wrathful deity behind her, capable only of destroying.

  And yet Almaza says, “Oh, Zaya.” Her voice is awed, naked, and she breaks into a smile. “Couldn’t have planned it better myself.”

  “The adrenaline,” whispers the steel magnate.

  “We’ll spruce up these graves,” Almaza declares, slowly at first. “We’ll make a maze of the tunnels, for more clients. We’ll fix up your room, have you live here like you own the place.” Almaza wrenches her arms from the dirt, shakes out her ponytail. “Technically you already own it. I bought the internat in your name.”