Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

His replacement gave him a pitying smile. The man’s hand swept around the office, calling attention to the peeling wallpaper, the cracked ceiling—everything that no longer mattered.

The phone nestled in Konstantyn’s lap beeped impatiently. Dial or hang up. He hung up.

The new Director busied himself. He pinched a dead leaf off the violet, pocketed it. He slid a document from a drawer and held it in front of his face. Konstantyn pretended to read the words and numbers on the other side of the sheet, hoping the action would render him useful again. The man’s wedding ring drew his gaze. Konstantyn hadn’t stopped wearing his own; it gave a man, especially one along in his years, legitimacy. If a man could keep a companion, surely there was nothing too wrong with him.

“Whether or not I work here, Orynko will compete for Miss USSR,” Konstantyn vowed. What could he lose?

“I’m afraid,” the man’s soft voice came from behind the sheet, “the girl is gone.”

“Gone?”

“Recruited by the Thermometric Academy. All thanks to your pageant. The girl had mentioned her desire to pursue thermophysical study, no?”

Orynko had indeed mentioned this during her onstage interview, halfheartedly, to please her parents, who cheered her on from the front row. “I’ve never heard of any such academy,” said Konstantyn.

“Me neither.” The man replaced the document in the wrong drawer and looked toward the exit, likely wondering why Konstantyn still hadn’t used it. “But I can assure you there is such a place.”

Konstantyn had never felt less assured, but he played along. “I’m sure Orynko can leave for one pageant weekend.”

“I’m sure, yes.” He paused. “In theory.”

Konstantyn adjusted himself in the torturous chair, suddenly worried.

“If the town where she is studying were to have road access,” the man added, “and if the sea route hadn’t just frozen over for the next eleven months.”

Konstantyn gawked at him. “Where is this place? Siberia?”

The man remained still as a wax figure, neither confirming nor denying.

“No.” Konstantyn was breathing quickly. Had the air suddenly thinned? “You can’t just ship people to Siberia,” he blustered, “not anymore.”

“Certainly not. I am but a humble Cultural Director. What can people like us do?”

—

Unemployment was not kind to Konstantyn. He spent his days moping around his stuffy apartment, full of books that had once brought him joy but now mocked him, reminding him that the paltry few he’d written had grown just as dusty, yellowed, sour-smelling as the rest. He ate through his kitchen cabinets, went to bed early and woke late, but found little respite in sleep. His thoughts orbited Miss Kirovka, how it was his fault she was exiled, and that he hadn’t a clue how to retrieve her. To make matters worse, while his provocation to the journalist had, predictably, been kept from the state media, his words had still somehow spread across town. Whenever he stepped outside for food or cigarettes—and only after counting and re-counting his cash savings—the benchers would accost him with questions. What would Orynko wear to the Miss USSR pageant, a squat bespectacled woman demanded to know. Was the girl taking singing lessons, a hook-nosed octogenarian inquired. Late one evening, when Konstantyn thought he was safe, a troupe of teenagers in neon windbreakers cheered at him from across the street. He tried to wave back but his hand grew limp, as if the tendons had been snipped. He couldn’t bear to temper the townspeople’s excitement, admit that they had, once again, nothing to hope for.

More and more, his wife’s clothes haunted him. Blouses, trousers, sweaters spilled from drawers like shed skins. The nightgown he slept with exuded a smell he hadn’t noticed before, spiced, herbal, as though he were a pest to repel.