Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

Konstantyn sat on his hands, trying to contain his excitement. He couldn’t imagine a happier ending to the evening. The moment the pageant ended he would seek out Orynko and Zaya, and the three of them would return to Kirovka.

It was a pretty thought. Konstantyn held on to it even when, minutes later, between the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth contestants, Zaya kicked off her pumps and broke from the line. She crossed the stage at a slow, deliberate pace, impervious to the unease passing through the other contestants. She stopped in front of the judges’ table. As she considered the Party members one by one, they blinked back at her, shifted in their seats. The Procurator General, white-haired with opulent jowls, leaned toward the girl in the quaint yellow dress, ready to receive her message.

The audience fell silent then, ready for her message, too. The last chords of the orchestral piece hung in the air, and the conductor looked up from the pit to the announcer, unsure whether to continue. The twenty-sixth contestant, a tall Estonian in a gauzy dress, halted midstrut.

“If you could keep the runway circulation moving,” the announcer told the Estonian.

Go back, Konstantyn mouthed to Zaya, his lips still curled in a frozen smile. Go back go back. She stood just a few meters away from where he sat—he could see the tip of her ear poke through her wig. If only she would turn to him.

Irina Glebovna sat very still.

Konstantyn could just make out Zaya’s words. “You never answered my letters.”

The wet lips of the Procurator General parted into a grin meant for a small child. He said something Konstantyn couldn’t hear. Zaya flicked her chin up. The Procurator General jerked back, his mouth open. He touched his cheek.

It took Konstantyn a moment to realize that she had spat on him. The hall erupted in gasps, jeers.

Irina Glebovna made a slicing motion at the camera crew.

Now the State Committee Chairman twisted back, as if slapped.

As Zaya was sucking in her cheeks, drawing up saliva for a third attack, two men in uniform entered the lectorium from a side door. For a moment Zaya watched them approach, her face slack and her eyes deadened—the way they had been back at the internat, Konstantyn remembered. She seemed ready to accept whatever punishment these men threatened; it could be no worse than the one she had already been dealt.

Konstantyn sprang to his feet. He tore down the row of seats, treading on polished shoes and pedicured toes, and bounded up the steps to the stage as the guards closed in on Zaya. When her eyes met Konstantyn’s, she jolted awake. Her lithe body slipped from the guards’ hands, and she raced to the edge of the stage, toward the audience. Konstantyn glimpsed the pink underside of her foot as she launched herself into the air, leaping over the orchestra pit. For a moment he feared she wouldn’t clear it, imagined the pit sucking her in. Her dress parachuted out as she landed—to Konstantyn’s relief—in the carpeted space between the pit and the first row of petrified spectators. She took a second or two to steady herself, before she bolted up the aisle, heading for the exit.

“Konstantyn Illych?” Orynko shouted from the row of contestants.

Konstantyn reeled around. He could not let Orynko out of his sight now, lest she disappear again. He ran to her, grabbed her by the wrist, and set off after Zaya. The girl was already halfway across the lectorium, weaving between the spectators crowding into the aisle. A mustachioed man tried in vain to catch her. Konstantyn cursed the crowd, but was grateful for the added commotion, which sheltered him, and the contestant he had just whisked offstage, from the guards. By the time Konstantyn, still pulling Orynko in his wake, had waded to the exit, he’d lost track of Zaya. Outside, a bitter wind dashed between the tall stone buildings, slapped his and Orynko’s faces. He thought he saw a streak of yellow, and ran after it. But one cavernous street opened up to another, unfolding endlessly.

“My feet hurt,” Orynko protested, struggling to keep up in her stilettos. Passersby gawked at her, an apparition from another world. “Can’t we go home?”

“One more street,” Konstantyn promised. “Just one more.”

As they searched, he thought of the moment Zaya had last looked at him, onstage. He conjured the expression on her face over and over, but each time her gaze changed. In one version, she was charmed but confused by the sight of Konstantyn racing toward her, calling her name as though she were the one who would save him; in another version, she struggled to remember who he was; in another, her face regained life and she found something to run for—Konstantyn, and their shared future. This was the version he held on to, in the years to come.

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