Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

Pyotr, solemn, sits the tin box on the kitchen table. He pops the lid with one hand, holds the spray bottle with the other. His finger on the trigger, he wishes the cockroach would try to run, display instinctual fear and distrust, like every other living thing. But the insect sits on its newspaper bed, wiggling its antennae. How could such a gentle creature possibly survive in the jungle?

In the corridor, the phone rings.

The grandparents look at each other in relief.

It must be one of their children. How silly the grandparents have been, to think themselves abandoned. How awful to imagine their beloved daughter (or granddaughter!) waiting at the other end of the line, worrying.

Pyotr stays with the roach while Lila hurries down the corridor. She cradles the phone against her cheek.

A deep male voice fills the line. A stranger’s. “Have you taken the jewels off the roach yet?”

Lila’s face contorts. She wants to slam the phone down, free the line for the children’s calls.

The man introduces himself as an employee of the pawnshop the grandparents visited two weeks ago. Good thing his boss jotted down their phone number, the man says, if only to make them go away.

Lila finds her voice again. “We’re just about to take the jewels off.”

“Don’t.” Unlike his boss, this man knows about roach brooches, has seen the catalogs. He’s willing to offer a fine price for it. He just needs her to check one tiny thing.

“I’ll do anything,” Lila says.

“On the roach’s belly, between the front and middle sets of legs, should be a tiny RB. Like a logo plaque inside a Prada bag, proving authenticity.”

From the corridor, Lila yells the instructions to her husband in the kitchen.

“I can’t see its underside,” her husband says.

“Lift it up and take a peek,” she shouts.

“With my hands?”

“With your hands.”

Pyotr holds his breath, hooks his fingers around the carapace. The bits that aren’t encrusted with jewels feel slippery, like polished wood. The heft is surprising, and he wonders how much of the weight belongs to the living part of the brooch. The roach’s legs swivel wildly as he turns it upside down. Its abdomen is composed of tawny segments that slide in and out of each other. He spots the small black head, bowed like a penitent’s, the two matte bumps for eyes.

“I don’t see any mark,” says Pyotr, staring at the belly.

“My husband is still looking,” Lila relays to the pawnbroker.

“It isn’t here,” says Pyotr.

“It got rubbed off,” relays Lila.

“A genuine mark can’t get rubbed off. It’s branded onto the exoskeleton,” the pawnbroker explains. “What you have there is counterfeit, the so-called jewels worthless as pebbles.”

“But the insect—that part is real.”

“Without the jewels,” the pawnbroker says, “it’s just a roach.”

In the kitchen, Pyotr is still holding the insect. He’s entranced by its rear end. There’s something wrong with it. A wet white glob is squeezing out. The roach slips from between his fingers and falls onto Pyotr’s stomach, where it clings to his woolly sweater. Its weight feels both repulsive and comforting. The white mass begins to separate into wiggling fingers, with tiny black dots at the tips. Eyes. The shimmering nymphs are attached to a string, like a crystal garland. Impossible to count them all as they unspool. Fifty, sixty?

Pyotr has never seen anything like it. His own children were born behind closed doors; he had to wait in a hospital corridor with the other expectant fathers, trying to distinguish his wife’s howls from the chorus of other women.

In the light, the babies spring awake, detach themselves from their string. But they don’t just scamper away. They crawl all over the mother, and she becomes furry with antennae. They eat the string that once bound them together. This is how they’ll grow strong. Within an hour, their shells will harden to a caramel color.

At this very moment, the pawnbroker is imploring Lila to get rid of the knockoff as soon as possible. In the factories, the breeders don’t bother to sort the males from the females; often the females are pregnant when sold.

But by the time the grandmother hangs up and reenters the kitchen, the grandfather’s sweater is covered with babies. They eat the crumbs from his breakfast, hardly larger than crumbs themselves. Pyotr looks up at Lila and smiles, eyes shining. She can’t help but smile with him when he says, “Aren’t they beautiful?”

THE ERMINE COAT

On the way back from the bazaar, Aunt Milena points to the cracks under the balconies of our building. She warns me never to walk or stand under them, unlike those pilgrims lined up for the tomb. “Little by little,” she says, “we’re sinking into the soft earth.”