Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

By the time I stumbled back to the tomb, my entire body felt seared with pain. When I turned on the bathroom light, a bloated, scratched face stared at me from the mirror. A criminal’s face. The lips oozed blood. I willed the mouth to open, but now my jaws were stuck shut. This was partly a relief—I did not want to see the damage my tongue had already rooted out. Rotten from a lifetime of avoiding stomatologists, my front teeth had given way easily. Their absence felt vertiginous. My tongue kept back, as though it, too, were in danger of tumbling out, and pressed itself against the molars. A few of these were fractured, their edges jutting sharply.

I opened the saint’s display case, yanked off the linen sheet. Now the saint’s crinkled eyes and thrown-open mouth seemed to be laughing. I knew then where the teeth had been leading me: not just to the flower bed, but also to the notch in the pavement.

I uncapped the tube of glue. Its cloying smell spiked my headache, brought on a wave of nausea. I reached into my breast pocket, unwrapped the kerchief. Inside, I found only a hole. With increasing horror, I discovered that the pocket, too, had a new hole. This time I could not chalk up the loss to bad luck: the teeth had gnawed through both layers of lining. And yet again they were at large, free to wreak havoc upon me.

—

When a locomotive begins to pull its train, the couplers between the cars tighten with a clack. The clack skips all the way down the train, head to tail, like the cracking of a spine.

When a locomotive begins to pull its train, and a person happens to be crawling under it, they hear the clacks pass over them. A warning: get out, get out, get out. Yet these pilgrims, these men, women, children, had crept on. In their final moments, did they regret what they were doing? Did they still believe that something better waited on the other side?

—

“Are you in trouble?” Konstantyn Illych asked me the following morning. “I don’t want trouble in my tomb.”

It was fifteen minutes before opening. I tried to ignore the many pairs of eyes trained on me through the glass wall. The swelling of my face and hands had grown overnight. A magenta bruise extended from the corners of my scabbed lips, giving me a clown’s smile. My gums still leaked blood. Konstantyn Illych did not seem to believe a flower bed could do this much damage.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell Konstantyn Illych the truth: yes, I was in trouble, just not the kind of trouble he meant. “I told you. I tripped,” I mumbled. I still could not open my mouth more than a few millimeters.

A freckled teenage boy knocked on one of the glass panes, trying to catch my attention.

“If Zaya comes back and I’m not here, she’ll see your face and run again,” said Konstantyn Illych.

“I’ll run after her.”

“You haven’t seen her run.” He gazed at me as if we were separated by a great gulf; he had someone to love and I didn’t.

“You never told me where Zaya got the saint.” By now I had a hunch, and I dreaded the answer.

Konstantyn Illych scowled, pretending not to understand my muffled speech. I repeated the question, and he shrugged. “Her orphanage.”

“You mean that former monastery?”

He glanced at the pilgrims. “Keep those pretty lips sealed. I hear the Church is trying to reappropriate what it can.”

I began to shiver, and longed to run from the tomb, into the warm sunlight.

Konstantyn Illych slapped my shoulder affectionately. The muscles at the back of my neck locked in spasm. “You can take the day off, but I can’t promise to pay you for it.” He urged me to go see a stomatologist, but we both knew this was impossible. The last public clinic in town had closed, and few could afford the glittering private one.

I stayed in the tomb. We opened on time.

—

The duty of a guard is to be still, to be present with the world. But over the next several days I could not keep still. Every cell in my body howled. The bruising and swelling began to subside, but the pain did not. Its hooks jerked at my gums, at the exposed nerves of my shattered teeth. I subsisted on potato broth and sour cream, and my stomach wrung itself with hunger.

When I wasn’t thinking of my teeth, I thought of the saint’s. I feared their reappearance, their reassembly. I feared they would punish me, as the noose had punished my ex-colleague. The teeth would gnash me to bits. There were moments when, as if on cue, a pilgrim would turn toward me and I’d catch an opaline glint. In the evenings, I shook out my slippers, felt under my pillow. I even peeked under the saint’s shroud, hoping the teeth had tired of their wanderings and resumed their post. But the saint remained as gap-mouthed as a child.