Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

Soon the engineers were yelling at each other, one waving her arms to make herself look larger, the other sitting with arms and legs crossed, unmovable in her granite-gray suit. At last they agreed to flip a coin. If a coin could break the tie between the Soviet Union and Italy in the 1968 European Football Championship, a coin could solve this much simpler matter.

A furious rummaging of pockets ensued.

But no coin!

The engineers turned to the table next to theirs, where I happened to be sitting. Their eyes flitted from my chin, still blotched from a not-unrecent adolescence, to my fish-flake-littered trousers, to the twiggy ankles that stuck out of them. The women’s hard faces thawed with pity. I set my jaw. They must not have known who I was or where I worked.

I slid a copper coin from my pocket.

“If you wouldn’t mind flipping it for us,” said the engineer in the suit, arms still crossed. “We need a neutral arbiter.”

“Oh, I couldn’t.” I was not being bashful—I had never flipped a coin.

A small audience of transport workers gathered around us. I waited for a volunteer to step forward, but none did. The unspoken rule: Your coin, your toss.

“Heads, we build south,” said the engineer in the suit.

“Tails, north,” deduced the other.

The transport workers cheered me on. Emboldened, I shook the coin between my palms like a die. Heads, heads, I chanted in my mind. I flung my hands out, imagining I were releasing a bird. The coin made a lazy arc over my head, bounced off my shoulder, and landed on the engineers’ table, where it rolled on its side, slowly and pathetically, before falling between the wooden slats. A few spectators laughed. Neither of the engineers would deign to stoop for the coin. I did not want to stoop for it either, but soon I was on all fours, crawling under the table as the crowd goaded me on. Blood rushed to my face. The concrete grated my kneecaps. I hated the onlookers but hated myself even more, spineless as usual.

The result: tails.

I’d seen a one-kopek coin countless times before, of course, but now found myself peeved by the look of its squat elaborately serifed number, the folksy ears of wheat encircling it.

As I slowly rose from under the table, coin lodged in my fist, my eyes met the suited engineer’s. My expression must have been apologetic: her shoulders dropped almost imperceptibly—she knew that she had lost.

I focused my gaze on a spot above the crowd, a blemish on the tiled wall behind them. The verdict came meekly, my tongue simply testing it out: “Heads.”

“Heads,” declared the suited engineer, voice hoarse.

“But neither of us saw it,” the other engineer pleaded.

“Heads,” shouted the crowd, over and over.

“Heads,” I shouted with them.

—

The same hardware sales boy as yesterday intercepted me by the glue section of his tent. “Which type you looking for?”

Hundreds of tubes of all sizes and colors hung before me. I pretended to read their labels, wishing the boy would leave me alone.

He asked, “Permanent or semipermanent?”

He asked, “Food grade?”

He asked, “Medical grade?”

He asked, “Spray-on?”

“Just the standard,” I conceded.

He asked, possibly rhetorically, “What is standard?” He unhooked a fat horseradish-colored tube, then a pink thimble-size one. “There’s the standard glue for wood planks, and the standard glue for the heirloom teapot your wife doesn’t know you broke.”

“Closer to the latter.”

The boy chuckled, conspiratorial, as if he himself had been married for years, had shattered many teapots. “Now,” he said in a low voice, “are we talking vitreous porcelain, new Sèvres porcelain, or soft feldspathic porcelain?”

—

Too many minutes later, on my way back to the tomb, I stopped by a news kiosk for an issue of Izvestia. Recently the publication of archives had slowed. Readers were satiated. Back when they knew less, they’d felt safer.

I came upon an article about the rail yard that had been constructed south of Holinka Ridge. I’d almost missed it, wedged as it was between an advertisement for pantyhose and another for tax lawyers. During the rail yard’s twelve-year operation, the article informed its readers, the pilgrims who had died crawling under trains in an attempt to reach the monastery numbered: Men 6 Women 7 Children 2

I hadn’t known the true numbers. Shortly after the construction of the rail yard had begun, my superior had declared the pilgrimage issue solved and taken me off the case. I’d ignored the rumors that there had been injuries, even deaths. Now I stared at the neat stack of numbers, reprinted from a railway report. I wondered, uselessly: Why were the children a separate, ungendered category? But as soon as I thought this, my mind conjured them—two girls, then two boys, then a girl and a boy, darting under the maze of freight cars, losing themselves in their game—and I clamped my eyes shut, as if I could unsee them.