Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

Each shift stretched longer and longer. My fingers fidgeted with the hole in my pants pocket, worrying it larger. I counted and re-counted the pilgrims. Counting was not part of the job. I did not like the crowd, and quantifying it made it seem even larger, but I couldn’t help myself. I counted the men in sixes. The women in sevens. The children in twos. I imagined them crawling. Flat on the ground.

—

Thanks to the linen sheet, the relic hunter whispered in my ear, no one would know if they were appealing to a saint or a pile of sandbags. And wasn’t that the power of prayer? The woman brought her taper candle closer to her face, the light from its flame stretching shadows across her features. She kept on: If a saint, no, half a saint, brought this much hope, imagine what would happen if that saint were divided further, into many pieces, displayed in many glass boxes across many churches and homes. Didn’t I want to maximize hope? She offered me a fine price. Would even throw in the sandbags.

It was a Sunday evening, which was when Konstantyn Illych habitually kept the tomb illuminated with sixty candles for sixty minutes. The weekly vigil coincided with the blackouts, which had started up again for the first time in years, but only in small towns like ours.

From her purse the relic hunter slid a yellowed portrait of a boy posing with a poodle. She positioned it among the other photographs on the display case. Likely she’d bought her prop at a flea market, to help her impersonate a pilgrim. The relationship was almost believable: the relic hunter and the boy in the photo shared pointed, elfish ears.

By the cash register, Konstantyn Illych’s head craned over the crowd. His gaze landed on us. He shook his head at me in sympathy. They can be so chatty, he seemed to say. So whiny.

“That boy is someone’s son,” I whispered to the hunter.

“He was my sister’s.” Her dark eyes met mine, daring me to utter another rebuke. “Do we have a deal?”

For a second I considered; I desperately needed the money, and it would have pleased me to be rid of the mummy. But selling it to a butcher’s block felt like a renewed violence. The duty of a guard is to guard, not to steal, and especially not from Konstantyn Illych. He had given me the job out of goodwill and I could not betray him. I shook my head.

—

I decided my pain was a test of will. To distract my thoughts from my mouth, and my stomach—I still couldn’t chew solids—I instituted a Changing of the Guard. If we wanted to build a world-class tomb, I told Konstantyn Illych, we needed the pageantry.

Two minutes and forty-five seconds before the hour, every hour, I held the line. I marched out to the front of 1933 Ivansk, high-kicking Prussian style, upper body stiff while my lower body danced away the pressure that had accumulated during the past fifty-seven minutes and fifteen seconds. The old guard charged around the building. Precisely as the clock struck the hour, the new guard marched in from the opposite side. On occasion a child might call out, “But isn’t that the same man as before?” and a snigger would ripple through the crowd. But I paid no heed. My choreography grew more and more elaborate: all taps, skips, and kicks, a wild whir of legs, as though the earth singed my feet.

Konstantyn Illych encouraged my displays; they were drawing larger crowds, which assembled at the top of the hour to cheer on my footwork. By the end of every shift I would exhaust myself, wanting nothing more than the sweet numbness of sleep. After two weeks, however, my hunger gave way to weakness. I lived with a sharp ringing in my skull, the air having condensed into two drills that bore into my ears. My uniform hung from my thinning limbs. I stumbled through the Changing of the Guard, then reduced its frequency, then gave it up. After that, I simply kept to my post, where the pain awaited me hotly, with pincers for arms and clamps for lips.

—

A knock on the glass wall startled me awake. The streetlamp illuminated the silhouette of a great hairy beast. It watched me for some time before peeling back the fur from its head. I recognized the naked ears that stuck out.

I heaved myself from my cot and waited out a spell of dizziness before shuffling to the door. I unlocked the dead bolt and cracked open the door, its chain still hinged.

The relic hunter’s floor-length coat rippled in the orange lamplight. “Name your price.”

I’d once heard a pensioner lament that to get your teeth fixed you had to give up a kidney. Without expecting an answer, I asked the hunter how much a kidney cost.

Without a blink she said, “Thirty-five thousand.” She peered at my face. “Why, finally getting those teeth done? For thirty-five thousand, you’ll be good as new.” She thrust her hand through the door crack. “Final offer.”

I cringed at the thought of the saint hacked to pieces. But the saint was already dead, as were the men, women, and children who crawled behind my eyes day and night. And here I was, living.