Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

“Must be how the animals find each other in the snow,” Aunt Milena said. “Tiny flags.”

“It’s how hunters find them,” he said.

My sister reached out to stroke a tail but Volkov shook his head, as though worried the furs would wake.

“Royal furs were made from ermine,” he said. More impressive still: “Marilyn Monroe wore ermine.”

We didn’t know what to do with such narrow pieces. Aunt Milena nailed them to wooden boards for stretching, but they seized up, as though panicked. I dug my fingers into the smalls of their backs, the spot that makes the most skittish dog melt. Nothing worked. I understood: the thought of being sewn to rows and rows of other girls turned my skin stiff, too.

I suggested we sew a girl’s coat, and Volkov loved the idea. One of his buyers, an Italian who lived in Canada (“double foreigner, double rich”), liked to spoil her daughter. As with every coat sold, we’d get a percentage of the profit. The ermine coat would earn a pretty sum. Volkov named a number high enough—in steady U.S. dollars, he assured us—to change a life, even ruin it. But the coat had to be perfect, he warned. The Italian who lived in Canada didn’t just throw her money around. She bred miniature dogs, judged competitions. She could spot a blemish a continent away.

Volkov turned to me. “Her girl’s about your age.” His gray eyes sliced across the key points of my body: chest, waist, hips. Other men had begun looking at me this way on the streets. I’d become the sum of my chest, waist, hips—someone to be assembled. Soon I’d start wearing Aunt Milena’s oversize frocks, wanting to be whole again.

That evening, when Mother pressed the tape measure to my skin, its cold metal lip made me think of Volkov. I conjured the buyer’s daughter instead, soft in her ermine coat. She trudged across a snowy field, no trees or bushes around, not even a speck of dirt, nothing to mark movement except the slow crunch of her feet, and she’d better not slip and fall because no one would find her, despite her tiny flags.

—

Before the Union fell apart, the foreign films that made it into our country were dubbed by the same man. You could hear his dentures slap against his gums. No matter the character—man, woman, toddler—same droning voice. It flattened the characters’ joy and sorrow, made us doubt their confessions. Did the heroine really love that man as much as she said? Vowing to die for him was going a bit far, wasn’t it?

Sometimes the dubbing lagged so far behind, you had to guess who said what, guess how the film ended.

Volkov’s buyers live around the world. Combined, they speak twenty-eight languages. I never met a single one of them, but somehow I knew they possessed that awful voice.

—

As Volkov said, the ermine coat had to be perfect: no visible seams or loose threads, the wooden claw clasps sanded by hand, lacquered without a single bubble. Normally a coat took four days to sew. This one ate up a week, two weeks. The closer Mother and Aunt Milena came to finishing the coat, the more undone they looked. Pins slipped from between their teeth. Their hands pecked at the same spot on the carpet over and over, until my sister or I found the pin for them. They seemed awake only at night, when they clattered around the kitchen chopping and frying whatever they could, mostly beets and onions. Aunt Milena would carry the ermine, a glowing bride in her arms, to the balcony, away from the smell.

—

How Mother and Aunt Milena met again, as told by Mother: Two years ago on her way home from work, her bus broke down near one of the villages. The next bus wasn’t due for another hour, and she had to use the ladies’ room. No such room was in sight, of course, only dirt fields and a few huts, their outhouses fenced off like prized bulls. Never had she relieved herself en plein air, like a brute, and she wasn’t about to start now. She paced the road, every minute stretching longer and longer and her panic building, until finally she sank into a ditch, hitched up her dress, rolled down her tights, and let out a long moan. Only afterward did she realize she had nothing to wipe with. The panties she’d worn that day were more symbol than fabric, and she couldn’t ruin the acorn-pattern tights she had crocheted herself, over five months, stealing time between work, chores, sleep. She would have reached for a leaf, but what was stinging nettle and what wasn’t? She’d rather use the back of her own hand, then lick it clean. So she did. When she straightened up, a voice startled her from above: “Larissa?” A woman was peering into the ditch. Not just any woman, but our former neighbor—now a villager with a rake in hand and a grin so wide that Mother knew she’d witnessed all. Determined to keep a shred of dignity, Mother did what any neighbor, past or present, should do: she invited Aunt Milena over for tea.

If my mother had boarded a different bus? If she’d chosen a different ditch? She’d still be speeding by Aunt Milena’s village.

—