Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

The girl leaned in through the open passenger window. His cigarette hung from her mouth. She took a long, delicious pull before exhaling politely away from the car.

“I have more.” He brandished the box, tapped the cartoon rocket shooting across its front. He hated himself for stooping so low.

At last the girl took the front seat. She sat her bundle on her lap.

During the drive, all conversation remained determinedly one-sided. Mostly, Konstantyn pointed at forest and meadow, saying, “See that big oak.” “See that patch of daisies.” “See those mushrooms, very poisonous.” The girl kept her eyes on the muddy road.

He tried to ignore the smell of her, sweet and rank, like barley fermenting in urine. Keeping one hand on the wheel, he lit a second cigarette, inhaled. “Where’d you pick up the habit? From the older children?”

She shook her head.

“From the sanitarki?”

She nodded.

“You can talk to me. I don’t bite.”

She shot him a look: I do.

Konstantyn laughed; the girl did not. A rabbit dashed across the road. Her name came back to him. “What happened to your lip, Zaya?”

She said nothing.

“A bad fall,” he guessed.

She shook her head.

“Thorny branch.”

No.

“Fishhook.”

No.

“Angry bird.”

She took another pull. No.

“A three-headed dog you fought off valiantly.”

No response.

“I thought so,” said Konstantyn.

“An old baba sewed it up.” The girl slurred her words. “She made leather boots.”

Konstantyn winced. He didn’t want to know more, but after a moment, he did. “This wasn’t at the internat?”

She shook her head again. “I ran away, she took me in. Her hut burned down, she brought me back.”

The forest receded. They drove between the sunflower fields in silence. Soon Kirovka welcomed them with its bent metal sign framed by rusty braids of wheat. Konstantyn felt lighter. At least the girl could speak.

—

That night Konstantyn woke to a pinprick of orange light, felt nicotine breath on his face. He made out the girl’s silhouette, bent over him. He jolted upright.

“Keep sleeping,” she whispered.

He flicked on his reading lamp. No trace of Orynko in this girl’s face. This stranger was wearing his wife’s billowy dress shirt, which he’d lent her the evening before. She had brought no clothes of her own, had told him that her bundle contained only a saint, which had originally come with a hat before one of the other orphans stole it. A doll, not a saint, he assumed she’d meant.

“How long have you been sitting there?” he asked.

“Never seen a man sleep.” She crossed one bare leg over the other, and stared at his mouth. “Odd, what lips are. Where you turn inside out.”

Konstantyn tucked his lips between his teeth, protectively. The calm of her voice terrified him. She seemed capable of anything: she might break into dance or smash his skull with a skillet. He thought of the boot maker who had taken her in, could imagine the seed of the catastrophe: the girl gazing at a candle with the same cold fascination, wondering how the flame would look if it engulfed an entire house.

After that night he slept fitfully. He would wake up, listen for the girl’s breathing, make sure that the breathing was at a suitable distance, that it came from the cot on the other side of the room, on the other side of the linen sheet he’d hung between them.

—

Of course, Konstantyn hadn’t forgotten about the original Miss Kirovka. An encyclopedic search proved that the Thermometric Academy did indeed exist, in Norgorsk, deep within the Arctic Circle; the town was known for its smelting factory, which colored the snow pink, yellow, and black, and scented the air with chlorine and sulfur. In the early mornings, while the orphan slept, he wrote letters to Irina Glebovna and to the Chairman of Council of Ministers and his First Deputy Chairmen, State Committee Chairmen, and select members of the Presidium, calling for the beauty queen’s repatriation. He’d received no response yet.