Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

A few days later, Smena woke to hurried knocking on her door. On the other side of the peephole: Milena. Smena checked herself in the hallway mirror, discerned the blurry shape of her body through her thin cotton nightgown. She swung a fur coat over her shoulders before unhinging the locks.

“Heading out?” Milena asked when she stepped inside.

“Yes,” Smena lied. “You’d better make this quick.”

Milena locked the dead bolt behind her. “I got approached again,” she said, her posture unusually straight. “Not by the same guy as last time, but this one was just as wormy. He gave me a record.” From her long raincoat Milena produced a yellow vinyl sleeve, the same type Smena used for distribution. She slid out a bone album, set it on the record player. Smena recognized the perky melody. The Beach Boys. The quality of the copy was poor, mostly scratching and bubbling, as though the singers were being drowned.

After a few seconds, the music cut out.

A man’s voice came on, in low and booming Russian. Came for the latest tunes? You’re done listening. A slew of curses dipped in and out of the hisses and pops.

Smena let out a bark of nervous laughter. “Hardly the latest tune. That song is almost twenty years old.”

“Smena Timofeevna.” Milena hadn’t used Smena’s patronymic in years, and the sudden formality was more frightening than the cursing still blasting from the player. Milena slowed the record to a stop with her thumb. “We’re fucked.”

She looked at Smena, expecting instruction.

Smena picked up the X-ray record and did what she did with every new X-ray that fell into her hands: she hung it on her kitchen window. The morning light shone strong enough for her to make out a pair of lungs and a shadow of a heart. The center hole of the record had been burned through the aorta. With a sickening familiarity, she saw the tiny bulbous alveoli filled with mucus, laced around the bottom of the right lung. Pneumonia. Right where her own had been, a couple years ago. Since the corners of the film had been cut off, she couldn’t check for the patient’s name. Many people get pneumonia, she thought. This could be anyone’s scan. Still, she couldn’t shake the suspicion it was hers. It made her uneasy, to think of looking at her insides outside her own body, as though she were being dissected. She felt a peculiar wringing in her chest, a hand palpating her organs. She thought about the few people in her life who knew she’d been sick: her daughter. And, most recently, Nika.

Since Nika’s first visit, Smena had known that she’d been caught. But she’d been foolish enough to believe the woman wouldn’t follow through with her scheme. She’d allowed herself to forget: neighbors never visited each other.

She curled her fingers into fists, uncurled them, let her hands flop to her sides. “We’ll need to warn Larissa.”

“I just did. She almost seemed happy about it, our little martyr. Made me promise to teach her sparring techniques.” Milena saw the pained look on Smena’s face. “Don’t worry about her. She comes from a model family with a squeaky-clean record. Worry about yourself.”

Smena walked around the room, aimless. She took vinyl albums from the bookshelf at random, put them back. With Larissa’s careful hands, each original sleeve and center label had been replaced with state-approved ones, from acts like Jolly Fellows, Good Guys, Contemporanul, Red Poppies. That Smena’s music library presented as perfectly flavorless had always amused the three women, an inside joke. Perhaps she could keep just one or two albums? She briefly let herself entertain the possibility, then admonished herself. If back in the fifties keeping one album would have been as risky as keeping one hundred, why should things be different now? She turned to Milena, who was stationed by the balcony door, watching in silence. “We’ll need to get rid of the equipment,” Smena said. “And the music.”

Milena gave a curt nod. “Leave it to me, Smena Timofeevna.”

From her wardrobe Smena retrieved a linen sheet. She wrapped it around the record player and phonograph. “Wouldn’t want them to get scratched.” With utmost care she placed the cutting lathe and its metal arm into a pillowcase. She slipped the forbidden vinyls into another, trying not to think of the effort Larissa had put into procuring them. It would only take Milena two trips to her husband’s beat-up Kombi, parked in the courtyard, to make the bone music studio disappear.

When Milena came up to get the second load, Smena asked, “What will you do with yourself now?”

“Leave town, get lost in the countryside. Something I’ve been saving up for anyway.” Milena was trying to sound casual, but Smena thought she detected a tremor in her voice.

“Hard to imagine your husband in the country.” The last time Smena had seen him two balconies over, polishing a loafer, she’d marveled at his delicate hands.

“Isn’t it.” Milena shot Smena a sly look, and for one moment Smena thought she intended to leave him behind.