Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

I gripped the relic hunter’s hand. I wanted that hand, warm and moist, to pull me from the tomb, from my wrecked body.

—

Victims, the newspaper article had called the perished pilgrims. (The railway report itself had not called them anything, only quantified them.) When dredging up the past, the newspapers attempted to divide its players into victims and villains. My employment at the agency would mark me as the latter. But I had suffered, too. I’d grown up without parents. If a coin flip hadn’t decided their fate, likely the tick of a pen had, or an act similarly arbitrary. After three generations, who were the victims, who the villains? We’d become a formidable alloy, bound by shame. The grand dream of equality realized.

—

I’d braced myself for the stomatological clinic of my childhood: a warehouse with many rows of barbershop chairs, in which a patient endured not only his or her own (unanesthetized) agony, but that of the other wailing patients.

But here, in the reception room of the new private clinic, a burbling fountain induced calm. Glossy posters attested to miraculous Before-and-Afters. Anything could be erased: nicotine and caffeine stains, calculus so thick it could be mined, maxillofacial birth defects, industrial accidents, head-on collisions.

After I laid out the stacks of bills on the counter, a rosy-cheeked stomatologist led me down a corridor. She lifted her chin and thrust back her broad shoulders with the bravado of an opera singer about to step onto the stage. Then she opened a door to a private sunlit room. A mint-green reclining chair greeted me, curved arms inviting, as though it had been waiting for me all along. The instruments of torture were nowhere in sight.

As she inspected my mouth, the stomatologist made small sounds of anguish. “Poor sir,” she murmured, “poor sir.” I lapped up the words; I hadn’t realized how badly I needed them.

“For a case as severe as yours,” the stomatologist pronounced, “only Western technology will do.” She would extract my remaining teeth, which were past their prime anyway, drill holes directly into my jawbone, screw in implants with titanium rods. I recoiled at the idea, but already she had pressed a button, and the chair reclined until my head felt lower than my feet. My face had lost all color, she reported. She worried I would faint.

“The pain,” I asked, “will it go away?”

The stomatologist waved away the question—it seemed beside the point. I would have the best smile in town, she assured me. She hooked a surgical mask over her ears.

It was not until she latched the anesthesia mask over my nose and instructed me to count down from ten that the instruments scurried from their hiding places. With a hydraulic wheeze, a metal tray rose from behind the chair, containing an assortment of pliers. Then came another tray, with two sparkling rows of drill heads. An oval lamp hovered over my face. I felt myself to be on the belly of a spider, each leg performing a task. The final metal dish slid into view, containing the implants. Panic seized me—I recognized their nacreous gleam.

The saint’s teeth grinned at me from the dish, the full set, their roots now titanium.

I tried to warn the stomatologist about the cursed teeth, but my tongue refused to stir, my lips flapped uselessly. The room contracted around the stomatologist’s blue eyes. They crinkled. Under her mask, she must have been smiling. My fear spiked, then burned away. All I could do was accept what was coming, like the clacks of a train pulled into motion. “You aren’t counting, Mikhail Ivanovich. Start counting down.”

ROACH BROOCH

Those who mourn quietest, mourn deepest.

When the grandson dies, the rest of the family squabbles over his estate, but the grandparents vow not to get involved. (Not all the grandparents—just the maternal set, Pyotr Palashkin and Lila Palashkina, the last of the family to live in glum little Kirovka, while the rest have escaped.) Considering the shedload of money the grandson earned abroad, doing who knows what, he must have written a will, as people abroad do. The grandparents think: The rest of the family will surely respect his wishes.

When the grandson’s parents inherit his apartment and car, Pyotr and Lila don’t grumble that these parents already own a two-room and don’t drive.

When the grandson’s girlfriend inherits the diamond ring he kept in his lockbox, it would be rude to remind her that he hadn’t proposed yet, might’ve changed his mind.