Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

The more Konstantyn occupied himself with training Zaya, the less he thought about his wife. One hour, two hours, would pass by without Milena flitting through his mind. When he woke in the morning, he no longer had to remind himself why she was not lying beside him.

—

“What’s the one thing people don’t know about you?”

Zaya stood atop a chair, her makeshift stage, holding a wooden spoon as a microphone. They hadn’t rehearsed this interview question before. “What people?”

“Friends, family.” He’d uttered the second word without thinking. She let him wallow in his own shame for a moment. “People at the internat,” he amended.

“You can’t take a squat there without an audience. Everyone knows everything about everyone.”

“Some hidden talent,” he ventured. “A secret wish.”

Zaya peeled off her wig, rubbed her bristly scalp. The effect of the rich stews was beginning to show: no longer did shadows fill her cheeks, hang from her jutting collarbones. She resembled the teenage boys who roamed the neighborhood at night, scrawny but not skeletal.

“Sometimes I wish I’d never learned to talk,” she told him. “What’s the point?”

“We’re talking now, aren’t we?”

She nodded at the window. “But out there it’s dead space. No use running your tongue because who listens? It’s worse to know it.” She turned back to him. “But I can’t say that at the pageant.”

If it were up to him, he wanted to assure her, she could. Instead, he said, “The judges want something hopeful.”

“Hopeful.” Zaya flashed a plastic smile. “How about a poem?” She lifted the microphone-spoon to her lips, launched into a recitation. “Belts bearings cab chassis / Decals duals dewy in the sun / Engine hitch…”

It took a moment for Konstantyn to recognize the poem as one of his own. What were meant to be free-flowing lines, carried by intuition and inspiration, were chopped up, forced into the metered lilt of a nursery rhyme. He’d been proud of that poem, how it concluded with the setting sun painting the metals red—a delicately hidden representation of rust, or societal decay. Now the words made him cringe.

“I read it in one of your books last night, while you were asleep,” Zaya said. “But I already knew it. A sanitarka used it to teach us tractor parts.”

“Tractor parts!” He found himself yelling. “It isn’t about tractor parts.”

Zaya descended from the chair and slumped down into it, arms hanging between thighs. Her expression was mean and satisfied; the insult had hit its mark.

“Sit up straight.” He threw back his shoulders as an example, to no effect. “The sanitarki taught you tractor parts but not the order of the days of the week?”

“Want me to recite the one about gears?”

He put out a hand to stop her. He realized he preferred to think no one read his poetry anymore.

—

Makeup proved to be a challenge. Konstantyn hoped that, by virtue of being a girl, Zaya held some innate ability to apply it. From the depths of the bathroom cabinet he dug out a nub of lipstick, a tiny jar of flesh-colored paste, a tube of mascara—remnants from the rare times he and his wife had gone out. He placed the objects on the kitchen table, in front of Zaya. She uncapped the mascara, smelled the unsheathed brush. He realized she hadn’t a clue what it was.

“To darken your eyelashes. Let me,” he offered, taking the brush. He instructed her to look up at the ceiling, open her mouth.

“Why?”

He didn’t know. It was how his wife had always arranged her face to apply mascara. “Just don’t blink.” But when he brought the brush to her eye, she threw her head back as though he held a weapon. He tried again, with the same result.

“Do it to yourself first,” she ordered.

“It’s not for me.”

She crossed her arms. “You have eyelashes.”

He sighed, and held up the compact mirror. He watched himself bring the brush to his right eye. The lashes were thin and straight and stuck downward. He’d never paid attention to them before. He applied the clumpy purplish black paste. A few times he missed, and grazed his eyelid. He tried to wipe the marks off but ended up smearing them further, giving himself a black eye.

“See? Nothing to it.” He smiled meekly, holding up his hands to prove he was unarmed.

Zaya leaned in to study his work. Her brown irises were flecked with amber, like sparks about to ignite. He cast down his eyes to avoid them. To his relief, she took the brush, but instead of using it on herself she lifted it to his left eye. Now he was the one who wanted to squirm from the brush. He willed himself to keep still, to show that he trusted her even though he didn’t, not quite.

As she worked, the heel of her hand rested on his cheek like a cool stone. He held his breath, immobilized by her touch. He tried to remember when he had last been in such proximity to another person, and his mind slid back in time, trying and failing to latch onto some distant memory.

“Your eyes are all wet,” she remarked.

“Must be mascara in them.”