Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

The power cuts out every evening, but the moment of failure still catches me by surprise. Some secret flits between the lamps, refrigerator, television, the mixer in my mother’s hand, and everything falls silent. The silence scares me more than the dark. Should we take cover, too? From what? From whom?

In our daily blind spells we’ve learned the geography of our apartment. The matches live two steps from the kitchen, in the bathroom cabinet, bottom shelf, but I’m not allowed to touch them anymore. The first candle: three steps down the corridor, to the left of the record player. The second candle: four steps to the right, on the windowsill by the onions sprouting from mayonnaise jars. To pass the time Aunt Milena sings folk songs she learned in the village. My sister and I belt along, garbling the Ukrainian words, understanding few of them. I had a favorite song, an especially cheery one, until Aunt Milena told me what it was about. Two Cossacks take a girl into the dark forest and tie her to a pine by her own braids and set the pine on fire—the pine burns, burns and won’t go out, and the girl cries, cries and won’t quiet down. After that, I want to cut off my braids but Mother won’t let me. She says I’ll need them, although she won’t say what for. I tuck them under my collar and never ask Aunt Milena what the words in the other songs mean.

—

When the coat was finished, I tried it on for the last time. The red silk lining—bought from one of Mother’s old schoolmates, a urologist who also bred silkworms and therapeutic leeches—felt slippery and warm, as if the ermine had been freshly skinned. Volkov always said a good coat ought to feel like a second skin. This one became my own skin. To peel it off was painful. I’d briefly forgotten how cold the air felt, how sharp.

That evening, when my sister was safely asleep, Aunt Milena and Mother sat me down at the kitchen table, and spoke in stilted turns. They must have rehearsed who would say what. Aunt Milena: We’ll use the money from the coat to get you, your sister, and your mother out of the country. Mother: They need chemists like me in the oil fields in Canada. Aunt Milena: It’s so safe there, people leave their cars unlocked. (Mother, to Aunt Milena, voice low, off script: To provide pedestrians shelter from the polar bears.) (Aunt Milena, to Mother: Only in one town, up north.) Aunt Milena: Who knows, maybe one day you’ll meet the girl in the ermine coat. Mother: You’ll be wearing one just as lovely. Aunt Milena: Lovelier.

I asked why Aunt Milena wouldn’t come with us.

“Canada will only take people who are related,” Aunt Milena said, her voice suddenly hard, as if she herself had made the rules and the rules were perfectly sensible.

I waited to hear the rest of the plan.

Mother’s teeth were clenched, her smile rigid.

Aunt Milena looked silently at a point above my head, maybe at an older, taller version of me, who might one day come back for a visit and thank her for letting us go, and say, “Yes, dear Aunt Milena, surely it was all for the best.”

—

Back when we’d received our first batch of pelts, Aunt Milena had plucked a hair from one of them, held the hair over a lit match. It crackled, then burned back a few millimeters, into a neat nub.

“It smells just like burning human hair,” she told me, “which smells like burning fat, only sweeter. Fake fur will stink like plastic and curl into little beads. That’s how you can tell.”

I remembered these words when, alone in the apartment the day after I was told about the plan, I let the flame eat away at the ermine coat. The angry fur sputtered in the bathtub, its many ermine backs arching and twisting until, all at once, with a last sigh, they gave in to the flame. Later that evening, when my mother slapped me raw, I lied and said I was only trying to see if the fur was real. It had smelled just like Aunt Milena promised.

—

Now and then, we still find slick black hairs on the sofa bed or on our clothes, and sometimes even a soft white hair. The hairs remind us of Volkov, the debt we owe him, as though he himself shed them for this purpose.

—

This is what I remember most: Before the blackouts. Before the ermine coat, before even the black coats. Aunt Milena’s bag by the door, still unpacked. The four of us squeezed around the kitchen table. We had turned the lights off, lit the candles. Candlelit dinners were a luxury then. I’d learned a new song at school that day, and I taught it to my sister between forkfuls of fried cabbage. Mother got up, drew the curtains, and pulled Aunt Milena to her. As my sister and I sang, they clutched each other, tilting this way and that, as though to keep each other from falling. My sister turned to me, her face a question. “Silly,” I said to her, “they’re dancing.”

HOMECOMING

Yet again, Zaya is returning to Internat Number 12.

Even as a nineteen-year-old, practically an adult, with a job, three changes of clothes, a new driver’s license, and a rented room back in Moscow.