Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

Zaya urged on the cleanup crew as their faux radiation gauges beeped. They had to shovel sand over any debris they couldn’t lift. One woman, a TV personality with cherry lipstick still caked in the corners of her mouth, fell to her knees in exhaustion. Zaya bent close to the woman’s grimy face, considered her wide dark eyes. “Want pretty blue eyes instead?” she offered, her voice sickly sweet. “I’ll reassign you to Reactor Four. The radiation inside is so high, I hear it does wonders.” The woman stood up, knees shaking.

“My problem?” Almaza went on. “I was embraced too tightly as a child.” Her parents had loved her in a simple, predictable way, giving her everything she wanted. As a result, she didn’t have the capacity to do anything as poetic as burn down a village.

Almaza turned to Zaya, as though remembering that she had been a child once, too. “Where did you grow up?”

Zaya told her.

“How awful,” Almaza whimpered. “Just dreadful.” And then, gleeful: “I can’t imagine a worse place.”

—

Is this where Zaya went wrong? Is it because she evoked for Almaza the tall iron fence, the dark cavernous halls of the monastery, is this how she is being reeled back in now?

But maybe, even if she hadn’t told Almaza about the internat, she’d be driving along this gravel road just the same, drawn in by some other conspiracy of circumstances. She can’t escape the internat’s magnetic pull. It must be fated, like the lifelong slide toward death.

—

After hearing about Zaya’s childhood, Almaza said: “What you need to do is harness all that authentic trauma into something great. A waste of trauma not to.” She suggested Zaya could invent a raw new dance style. Immortalize her woes in a brutal tile mural. She could write a memoir.

“Just look at that other orphan, the one all over the news,” Almaza reminded Zaya. The girl had grown up in an internat like Zaya’s, and couldn’t walk. Not that it stopped her from dreaming. She got herself adopted by a Finnish philanthropist, endured ten spinal surgeries, regained a bit of feeling in her right leg, and became a Paralympic gymnast. Inspired the whole country. She even posed for a beauty magazine, her long legs model thin.

—

Upon arrival at the internat, Zaya is disappointed to find the place intact. Even though she’d been absent for a short three years, she’d imagined coming upon a pile of bricks and plaster, impossible to reassemble. But the building stands; lush vines seal its cracks, cushion the iron fence. The vines shroud the mounds where the children were buried, and the unfilled pits, too—a relief, for Zaya. As a child, she had feared being mistaken for dead, waking up buried in one of these pits.

Now the grounds look charming, with the buttercups dotting the wild grass, the gates thrown open in welcome.

The clients—a venture capitalist, a socialite, a steel magnate, a lifestyle manager—are due to arrive the next morning. In preparation Zaya oils the gates’ locks, mops the floors, stocks the canteen with food, straightens the rows of beds in the nave of the monastery. Cold, dim, with spider egg sacs suspended in the stone moldings, the hall still possesses an underground quality.

Zaya tries to remember which bed was hers. To pass the time as a child she’d stand on her bed, use a sharp rock to scratch open the tight-lipped mouths of the men frescoed on the walls. But it appears that other children took up the practice after her time: now every mouth within reach is agape, as if the painted figures are shocked to find themselves, after so many centuries, in the same stultifying place.

Roaming the chambers and corridors, Zaya feels a sudden absence on her hip, as though something has been carved from her side. She recalls she used to carry the mummified saint, in a pillowcase propped on her hip, not because she wanted its companionship day and night—the creature smelled like a stale dishrag—but to keep the other children from stealing it, yanking its hair.

In the back of the building, Zaya discovers a small cell-like room with bare plaster walls and an adult-size bed, likely for a sanitarka. She rolls out a sleeping bag. The thin straw mattress, ripping at the seams, is just as hard as the ones on the children’s beds.

—

What about that other famous orphan, Almaza has reminded Zaya. When that girl’s orphanage ran out of money, the sanitarki chopped off the children’s braids and sold them to an Italian wig maker. Virgin hair, untouched by chemicals or curling irons. So what did this girl do when she got out? She started her own wig-making business, and partnered with a temple in India where the women cede their braids by choice, as an offering. Almaza herself owned one of these wigs back in Moscow. Finely woven, by three-strand bunches. It cost her fifteen thousand USD for one wig. Now the orphan drives a nice car, owns an apartment with French doors.

What does Zaya think of that? What’s Zaya’s excuse for her life?

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