Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

Shirt by shirt, sock by sock, he began gathering his wife’s effects into two cloth sacks. Somehow, wherever she was, she would surely feel him moving on, and the realization would hasten her return. He recalled when he was a boy, and he and his father would wait for his mother to come home from work, the dinner she’d made that morning reheated but cooling again. Only when they gave up and reached for their forks would she march in, as if she’d been at the door the entire time, testing their will. As Konstantyn folded away Milena’s clothes, he couldn’t help cocking his ear every few minutes, listening for the jangle of her keys. When he’d finished, he seated the cloth sacks on the sofa bed, unsure what to do with them. One never got rid of clothes—on the contrary, one spent every effort to acquire them in any size from near-empty shops, or saved them for gifts, or sewed them into different clothes, or, at the very least, repurposed them as rags. Banishing the clothes to his dacha wouldn’t make enough of a statement, but he found he couldn’t throw them away either, as this might anger Milena. Still, he was determined to go through the motions of closure. He would donate the clothes. The more obscure the cause, the more Milena would love him.

—

The car was borrowed, so Konstantyn took extra care as he drove along the muddy road. He wove over a hilly ridge, passed a rail yard, entered the forest. The orphanage hid deep inside it, 25 kilometers south of Kirovka.

It had rained the night before and the forest shone in the morning light. While it was a relief to briefly escape the town, to be anonymous again, Konstantyn felt a twinge of trepidation at what lay ahead. He had never visited Internat Number 12 before; the townspeople rarely spoke of it, as though fearful of invoking a ghost. But every time Konstantyn thought of turning back, the curtain of trees would part to reveal a breathtaking vista of hills and rivers; a squirrel would flash its golden tail in benediction; a butterfly would glint past in a streak of yellow and orange; and Konstantyn would remind himself that, after all, he was here to do good.

A cluster of cupolas peeked above the treetops. They appeared to have been skinned, with only the bulbous metal skeletons remaining. As he drove, the cupolas seemed to retreat into the distance, wary of the approaching stranger, but he soon caught up with them.

Internat Number 12, Konstantyn discovered, was an old monastery. The edifice sagged as if a great invisible hand were pressing on it from above. One of the towers had crumbled, its ruins laced with the roots of trees.

Konstantyn parked the rickety Zaporozhets alongside an iron fence. As he retrieved the first cloth sack from the trunk, he felt the weight of many eyes on the back of his neck. He gave a timid wave to the children watching him from arched windows. They kept still, as though painted onto the glass.

Finding the gates locked, Konstantyn turned to the small white box welded to a fence post, and pressed its red button. After a moment, a low staticky voice, a woman’s, came on. “Yes?”

“I’d like to donate clothes.” He said this loudly and clearly, as if his wife were hiding behind one of the pines, watching.

“You’re from the Textile Union?”

“No.”

“What’s the organization?”

“Just a lone citizen.”

After a pause, she asked, “What is it you want from us?”

He leaned in, thinking she had misheard. “I’m here to give clothing. To the children.”

It was then he saw Orynko Bondar.

Or rather, a flash of Orynko Bondar, in another girl’s face. One of the second-story windows was open, and a teenager rested her chin on the stone sill. Only her buzzed head was visible. Konstantyn thought she perfectly captured the vacant gaze of a fashion model. The orphan wasn’t beautiful like Orynko, but there was something Orynko-ish in her—the dashes of the brows and lips, the jut of the jaw—as if an artist had tried to sketch the beauty queen in not-quite-sufficient light, using the nondominant hand.

“Leave the clothes by the gates,” the woman instructed through the intercom. “I’ll have someone pick them up.”

Konstantyn set the sack down, but did not leave. He was still looking at the girl. Now he thought of the Greater Good. The Greater Good mattered most—wasn’t that what he’d been taught his whole life? And so he could be forgiven a bit of deceit. He could slip the Orynko-ish girl into Orynko’s place, to compete in the Miss USSR pageant. He would train her himself. In Moscow’s vast Palace of Culture lectorium, each of the contestants would look no bigger than a pinkie finger onstage. Who could tell who was who, and who wasn’t? As for the television broadcast: one could not overestimate the transformative effect of makeup, the distracting property of glitter. When Orynko had stepped onstage at the local pageant, her face powdered and painted, fake lashes flapping, she hadn’t looked quite like Orynko either.