Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

The next day, a silver SUV deposits Almaza and the clients at the internat. Two men and two women, not including Almaza. The men are fleshy, grayish, the women tall and narrow with cinched, dehydrated looks. As instructed, everyone wears sensible shoes.

Zaya wears a white sanitarka dress—or rather, the company designer’s interpretation of that uniform: a sculpted top half, double-breasted, vaguely military, with a long billowing skirt that drags in the wild grass, collecting spiny seeds.

After ushering the group into the courtyard and locking the gates behind them, Zaya orders everyone to make a line in front of her. Almaza, orphan-chic in her long black pigtails, distressed jeans, and threadbare cotton shirt, asks, “Make a line by height, net worth, or…?”

“By age,” Zaya improvises. “Oldest at the back.”

But no one wants to admit their age, not even Almaza, who hardly looks older than Zaya. One of the clients, a leggy socialite whose tanned skin appears poreless, jokes with the group that she is ageless—her two pregnancies only made her look better, not worse. The clients shuffle on the spot until Zaya threatens to sort them herself, using the dates of birth on the IDs they submitted.

At last, everyone in a crooked formation, Zaya distributes to each client the single garment for their ten-day stay, as well as a garbage bag for their clothes, wallets, and other personal effects. They won’t have access to their belongings until they leave, Zaya reminds them.

The clients take turns changing in the outdoor shower (out of service, they will soon discover). When the men and women reconvene in the courtyard, looking like a bridal party in their matching periwinkle frocks, they place their garbage bags at Zaya’s feet.

“Phones, too,” Zaya tells the impeccably postured lifestyle manager, who clutches a handset, the latest model. With a sigh the woman presses the phone against her hip to retract the telescopic antenna, then thrusts the bulky device into Zaya’s outstretched hand.

The clients await further instruction.

Zaya hasn’t thought of anything beyond this part. Usually Almaza supplies her with an itinerary of activities. But now, Almaza is regarding her with the same excited obedience as the others.

A nightingale sings from a nearby bush. A butterfly circles the steel magnate’s parched knee.

Zaya struggles to remember how the sanitarki would entertain the children. Her mind leaps over long expanses of formless time. She slings the garbage bags over her shoulder and follows the brick path toward the arched entrance of the building, hoping for an idea along the way. The group trails her. She hears the steel magnate remark, “A shame this place closed down.”

—

Apart from setting out food at mealtimes (a vat of rehydrated sea cabbage, with a tube of liver paste) and restocking the latrine with toilet paper (newspaper), Zaya keeps to her room. She lies in bed, blinking at the low vaulted ceiling. Like the clients, she came here expecting to feel something. Instead, she has found her senses dulled.

Maybe it’s because she knows the escape hatch.

Or at least, the possibility of one.

She knows she could walk the 25 kilometers to Kirovka and stay with Konstantyn. Three months ago she saw a photo of him in a newspaper, standing in front of his apartment block, arms crossed. He’d bought up an additional suite, the article informed her, which he converted into a tomb for the saint.

“He’s ruining the neighborhood,” commented Lila Palashkina, 73, longtime tenant. “All these noisy fanatics, crowding in.”

“The saint and I are not going anywhere,” responded Konstantyn Illych Boyko, 50, business owner and poet, none of whose books remain in print.

White-haired with dark bulges under his eyes, he had looked tired in the photo, and much older than the last time Zaya had seen him. The building didn’t look great either, blotchy, riddled with cracks. She wished for a photo of the saint as well, just to see it again; the article had mentioned a linen sheet covering the saint, and said that the tomb’s guard refused to remove it.

If Konstantyn had taken Zaya in before, surely he wouldn’t object to her presence now, for another day or two? Another expended bowl of pork stew, lusciously greasy? She could use him like he’d once used her. So long as she considered it a simple transaction, not a favor, she could let herself knock on his door.

—

“Maybe this is the point,” the clients whisper outside Zaya’s window on the second morning. “Maybe we’re supposed to feel abandoned.”

They take the initiative, find their own ordeals.

“That grassy knoll?” says the stocky venture capitalist, pointing. “To the invalids who lived here, it must have seemed a mountain.” He braids wild grass into ropes, with which he ties thick branches to the sides of his legs, rendering his knees unbendable.

“A few of the orphans might have never even seen it.” The socialite rips a strip off the bottom of her frock, blindfolds herself.