Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

“Over here!” Almaza’s hoarse voice reaches Zaya from the grassy knoll—seemingly, from deep inside it.

Zaya rounds the knoll to discover Almaza and all four clients crouching in a narrow, weed-strewn hole, looking small and scared. The hole is just deep enough to trap them. “What took you so long? We were calling for you all night,” Almaza says, hugging her knees to her chest, her long black ponytail draped around her neck like a scarf. The venture capitalist and steel magnate have their arms wrapped around each other. The lifestyle manager picks at a crown of wilted dandelions atop the socialite’s head.

“Is this one of the graves you told me about?” asks Almaza. “The to-be-filled ones?”

“They were never this deep,” says Zaya.

“This one wasn’t deep, at first, either.” Almaza had stumbled into a shallow pit, everyone else had followed, and the ground beneath them caved in. “There are tunnels down here. We’ve been crawling around, trying to find a way out.” Her face strains; she’s on the verge of tears. “We could’ve been eaten by an animal. Or by a hundred spiders, whose venom would slowly predigest us. Something could’ve happened to you, and we’d be stuck here for days and days until our drivers found our hollowed corpses.” As she lists all the ghastly scenarios, the clients nod along, gasping as one might do when presented with an exotic restaurant menu. Almaza delights in her performance, gesticulates wildly in the cramped space. She takes a dramatic pause. “We’d be like the orphans who died here, buried en masse.”

Zaya glares at the clients, suddenly enraged.

She spots a rusty shovel leaning against the wall of the monastery, and uses it to fling a fist-size clod of dirt into the pit. It explodes against the socialite’s knee. Almaza and the clients squeal in mock horror.

Next comes an entire shovelful. The venture capitalist receives the earth spilling over his bald head with rapture, as if it were holy water.

The lifestyle manager moans with pleasure. “I vow to quit my job, take up painting again.”

The steel magnate shouts above them all, “I vow to get my wife and kids back.”

The earth grows soft, welcoming Zaya’s shovel. There’s a rhythm to the slicing, the earth landing with a soft thud. She finds herself counting each stroke. Now the squeals of the clients are turning into screams, but she doesn’t stop, doesn’t break the rhythm. Her anger has ebbed, and is replaced by a logistical curiosity, cold and foreign: How many strokes to fill the pit? She stabs at a weedy ledge and the entire thing comes away, triggers a slide of earth and rocks. The clients try to scramble to their feet but are knocked back down. When the slide settles, they are buried to the chest. Zaya lifts the shovel again; her need to restart the rhythm, the pulse, is dire, desperate—as though her own heart has stopped. Five dirty tear-streaked faces tilt up in a childlike stupor. For a moment Zaya wonders whether they are looking not at her but at some wrathful deity behind her, capable only of destroying.

And yet Almaza says, “Oh, Zaya.” Her voice is awed, naked, and she breaks into a smile. “Couldn’t have planned it better myself.”

“The adrenaline,” whispers the steel magnate.

“We’ll spruce up these graves,” Almaza declares, slowly at first. “We’ll make a maze of the tunnels, for more clients. We’ll fix up your room, have you live here like you own the place.” Almaza wrenches her arms from the dirt, shakes out her ponytail. “Technically you already own it. I bought the internat in your name.”

Zaya feels dizzy, as though sun-stricken. “You did not.”

“Did so. As a foreigner I’d have to pay an extra tax.”

The shovel in Zaya’s hands feels unbearably heavy. Does it, too, belong to her?

Apparently, wreaking terror is all Zaya is good for. Had she forgotten? She thinks of the boot maker again. After the hut had burned down and the woman had delivered Zaya back to the orphanage—this same woman who had found her on the forest floor, gasping for breath, with yellowed eyes and a slit lip that made Zaya look, the woman told her, like a fish dragged from the sea until the hook dislodged; this same woman who had carried Zaya in her arms and nursed her back to health—the abandonment hadn’t hurt. Zaya had felt numb. She hadn’t let herself dream of living with the boot maker. Nor had Zaya, many years later, imagined living with Konstantyn. When she’d spat on the Party members at the pageant, she’d also spat on the possibility (however slim) of a home back in Kirovka. The internat had taught her well: as soon as you want something, you lack it; and if you do get it, it can easily be taken away. But this lesson came at a cost—a dry unfeeling clump had formed in her chest, had grown with age. She wonders now: If she slit her skin open, would nothing but sawdust spill out?

Down in the pit, the clients are bickering.