Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

The venture capitalist asks Almaza why she bought the monastery instead of leasing it. Almaza tells him she doesn’t like leasing things. Does she lease the penthouse she sleeps in? The jewelry she wears? The meals she eats?

Zaya considers. She can fill the pit, finish them all off. She has no doubt now she is capable of this. Tantalized, she has unlocked a secret chamber within herself, discovered its horrors.

She drops the shovel, backs away.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Almaza calls from the pit. “Get us out.”

The soiled skirt of her white dress bunched under one arm, Zaya crosses the grounds like a runaway bride. She heaves open the iron gates, steps between the orphans sleeping on the dewy grass, still waiting to be let in. She climbs into the black cargo van and honks the horn, waking the campers.

“Get in,” she calls from her rolled-down window. “We’re getting out of here, for good.”

The campers squint at her sleepily. The orange-maned teenager props himself up on his elbows, nods toward the gates. “She left it open,” he tells the others.

“Don’t even try,” Zaya warns. “Get in or I’m rolling over you.”

“Where are you taking us?” asks the teenager.

Zaya thinks on it. “Wherever you were before.”

No one moves.

“You get fired?” asks the woman with the wispy braids, adjusting her rucksack under her head.

“I’m trying to help you.” Zaya is unsure, precisely, how. She slumps in her seat, suddenly exhausted.

“Does anyone else hear the screaming?” asks the man with heart-shaped glasses.

“I bet if you grow your hair out you’ll get another job,” the teenager says to Zaya, smiling shyly.

The others study Zaya’s face, her botched lip, and keep silent.

Zaya backs the van onto the road in a swift arc, hoping to make plain her threat of leaving them behind. She begins to roll away, glancing in the rearview mirror, expecting the campers to jolt up, pile into the van with their tents and tarps and camping stoves. But they don’t. One by one, they walk in the other direction, enter the gates.

—

The rest of the drive is a breathless full-throttle dash, Zaya narrowly making the curves in the road. This deep dread is what freedom feels like, she tells herself. She feels it every time she runs away.

She imagines what she’ll tell Konstantyn. This stolen van is all she has to show for herself, unlike the superorphans Almaza is always raving about. Zaya hasn’t remade her life into an inspiring lesson, hasn’t grown rich or famous—and literally, she hasn’t grown at all. Perhaps the fact that she remains small will also be a disappointment.

—

Kirovka looks more ratty than Zaya remembers it, its roads cratered, its lamp poles a drunken procession leaning in every direction. Only the banks and pharmacies appear new—almost every block has one or the other—their respective aprons of sidewalk freshly tiled. Zaya weaves along the town’s streets, searching for Konstantyn’s building. In the center of the tree-lined plaza, she spots a concrete pedestal, from the old Lenin statue. Only his feet remain now, big as bathtubs, rusty rebar curving from them like veins.

At last Zaya parks in front of 1933 Ivansk.

She beholds the sight, trying to make sense of it. Konstantyn’s tenth-floor suite—she recognizes the red-and-white-checkered curtains—is the last left hanging intact between two pillars of rubble. She can see cornflower-blue sky through a gap in the center. The edifice seems, understandably, abandoned.

Still, Zaya calls his name.

A piece of debris flakes off Konstantyn’s apartment, hurtles to the ground, and smashes into a fine dust.

Zaya doesn’t know if it is hope, or the devastating absence of it, that makes her take a step toward the building.

Another step, tentative, as if she is approaching a sleeping bear.

Once inside, though, she bounds up the dusty staircase. An unsettling draft blows through the many cracks in the walls. A pair of roaches the size of her hand skitter down a dark corridor—no, surely just rats?—but still she climbs.

When she reaches Suite 76—its steel outer door freckled with rust—she lifts the heavy knocker and raps. After a moment she hears the click of the inner door’s dead bolt. A familiar sound—yet under the circumstances, miraculous. She hears the inner door squeal open—its red faux-leather upholstery surfaces in her mind—then the ticking of more locks, like clockwork, followed by the gravelly melody of the chain sliding along its track, and dropping. At last the steel door swings open.

For a moment Konstantyn stands there, blinking, a dripping wooden spoon in hand.

He doesn’t look at her with fear, as the clients did, but regards her with simple recognition. She feels herself shrinking, suddenly powerless, but also—with relief—less monstrous.

“Just in time for lunch,” Konstantyn announces. His eyes flit over her billowy white dress but, mercifully, he doesn’t ask questions. He steps aside to let her in, as if she’s just returned from a stroll, as if he’d been expecting her.