Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

Inside the box is, well, the grandparents aren’t sure what. A silver chain attached to an oblong pile of brown rocks, sitting on a piece of newspaper. It’s roughly the size and shape of a stool. It looks much like the samples the grandson had to produce in his childhood, to be scooped into a matchbox—by the grandmother, who else?—then wrapped in newspaper, then a plastic bag, and submitted to the school nurse, who inspected it for worms. Each looming inspection would make the boy nervous, thus constipated—stage fright, Pyotr called it—and Lila would often have to produce the sample herself. The rest of the family liked to joke that the grandson would one day return the favor.

Is that what the so-called gift is about?

The most disgusting thing about the brown pile: two hairs sticking out of one end.

The grandparents look up from the box, but the teenager has already run off.

The pair of hairs twitches.

In shock, Lila almost drops the box. Now the entire pile lumbers from one side of the box to the other, toward its own reflection.

The grandparents draw their faces closer. The rocks, they realize, are glued to an insect. A giant wingless roach, by the looks of it. The hairs are its antennae.

Is it supposed to be a pet?

An art project?

Just the kind of thing the grandson would waste his money on.

—

The rest of the family may not know it yet, but Pyotr and Lila have stopped talking to them. If one of the relatives were to call, the grandparents wouldn’t answer.

The grandparents keep up with the bone records. Keep ignoring the doctor’s pleas to remove the tumor. The doctor brings props to the radiology room each month, to demonstrate the tumor’s growth.

He holds up a pea. “Where we started.”

He holds up a glossy chestnut. “Where we’re at.”

He holds up a lemon. “Where we’ll be in a few short years.” Not the regular type of lemon, pale and pitted, Lila notes. This one is dark yellow, taut-bellied. Likely a Meyer, from a pricey store.

“Am I getting through?” the doctor asks. He’s taut-bellied himself, with brown nicotine stains on his lips.

The grandparents nod along, but the gravity of the diagnosis has never quite sunk in. It just doesn’t make sense, how a pea can metamorphose into a chestnut, then a lemon.

“Can we keep the lemon?” Pyotr asks.

—

At their sales stall, the grandparents keep a pair of flashlights. Tourists shine them through the X-ray records. Sometimes the reason for the X-ray is obvious: a broken limb, a spoon floating in a stomach. Other times, the X-ray shows a subtle swelling, a hairline fracture. The tourists enjoy the detective work.

For the layperson, Pyotr’s tumor isn’t easy to identify. Lila has to trace the faint orb above the bladder with her finger before the tourists say “Ah.” She never attributes the tumor to her husband, sitting right beside her, so as not to dampen anyone’s mood.

As with any growth or deformity, the tourists always want to know: “A victim of…?” The tourists don’t want to say the dirty word themselves, but are itching to hear it, pronounced authentically by this kerchiefed babushka.

Lila casts down her eyes, confirms: “Chernobyl.”

She says this even though her husband never served in Chernobyl or had anything to do with it. The most he’d done was help hose off their apartment building, as per government recommendations, but the spray of the garden hose only reached the second floor, and they lived on the third, so who knew how much of the fallout they’d absorbed? The government had also recommended they drink wine to protect against the radiation, but the grandparents didn’t have wine themselves and didn’t know anyone so fancy. Pyotr’s skin hadn’t melted off like that poor woman’s had, the one on the local news—she’d bathed in one of the rivers—but no one can prove that he isn’t a victim. And the people who might take issue with the misuse of the term, the ones most territorial about it, tend to be dead.

Anyway, at the word “Chernobyl,” the tourists have their wallets out.

—

The grandparents are eating nettle soup when they spot the roach sitting right above them, on the kitchen ceiling. Its silver chain swings back and forth as though to hypnotize them. Pyotr drops his spoon into his soup.

The lid of the tin box must have come open when Lila shoved it into the closet. But she doesn’t want to be the one to put the roach back in the box.

Pyotr won’t put it back either, even though pests are his domain, his only domain, while Lila cooks, cleans, and all the rest.

The roach stays on the ceiling, and the grandparents endure their meal.

They make sure not to leave any food out, hoping that the thing will leave the apartment on its own. But in the coming weeks, every time they think it’s finally gone, it skulks out from under the stove or shoe rack, from between their clothes in the wardrobe, the chain dragging behind it.

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