Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

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This year, the Ones, Twos, and Threes sleeping in their beds look like this:

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The director would deny any pattern to the distribution of the babies. If the healthier babies lie next to the great bright windows where they can chatter with the magpies, and next to the doors where the occasional Ministry inspector can see them best, it’s surely a coincidence. Pick any other room, where the older children sleep—though they rarely sleep, not all at once—and try to find a pattern in that jumble.

And anyway, it’s the sanitarki who assign the babies to their beds, not he.

In this particular batch of babies, the loudest voice comes from row three, bed seven. The puzzle pieces of her face hadn’t sealed together in her mother’s womb. A cleft begins at her right nostril, plunges down the upper lip and into the hole of her mouth. A boisterous Three, just on the edge of invalidity, this girl is one of the favorites. She coos and babbles and peekaboos, flirts with the sanitarki, grips their fingers with an iron strength when they peer in at her.

—

At six to ten months, the babies begin to crawl. Hands and knees patter on the vinyl floors. Today the distribution of the crawling babies looks like this:

On the far right, the lone baby: she’s the lively Three. Faster than the others, the girl has slipped out of the baby house. She’s cruising along the wooden picket fence, eyes set on a gap wide enough to squeeze through. Pine trees tower beyond it, beckon her with their syrupy smell. Four pickets to go, three, two… The same sanitarka who found the girl inside the medicine cabinet yesterday, an overturned dustbin the day before, catches up to her now. As the girl sticks her head through the gap—the air feels different on the other side, less dense—she feels her romper tighten around her neck, pull her backward. The pines slide away.

The sanitarka is doubled over, panting. “You’ll be the end of me.” She lets go of the romper. The baby looks up at her and a flutter of giggles escapes her mouth, wins her captor over like it did yesterday and the day before.

A small, secret relief for the overworked attendants: not all the babies learn to crawl. This failure is only natural for those with clubfeet or spinal conditions. And if some of them aren’t let down from their beds, it’s because they’ll never be able to walk anyway. Beds take up most of the space, and there aren’t enough sanitarki eyes to watch over everyone. If all the babies learned to crawl, where would they go?

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The older children name her Zaya. Little rabbit. Her mouth is a crooked assemblage of teeth and gums. As the teeth grow, they poke through the slit in her lip. At breakfast, half her porridge oozes from her nose.

The name starts with a letter she can’t pronounce, and the other children delight in hearing her try. There are many letters the girl can’t pronounce, because they require both sets of lips and a complete upper jaw.

Whenever a sanitarka goes for a smoke in the courtyard, Zaya follows. Most of the time the woman sits in silence, staring at the wall opposite, taking grateful pulls on her cigarette. On good days she reads a magazine; on the best days she reads aloud to Zaya, who learns to follow the words. Topics covered: newly released books, home remedies, the latest five-year economic plan, hat etiquette.

—

Every New Year’s Eve, the baby house receives a donation from the Transport Workers’ Union. A six-wheel truck sighs to a stop in front of the gates, enveloping the waiting children in a great diesel plume. Grandfather Frost—whom a recently orphaned boy calls “Saint Nicholas” before receiving prompt correction—descends from the passenger side. He wears a tall boyar hat, a long white beard, a blue velvet coat, and felt boots.

Grandfather Frost beams down at the children. “Who’s been good this year?”

The children shrink back, alarmed by the question.

Grandfather Frost recoils, too, unaccustomed to children afraid of the prospect of gifts. He whistles up to the pock-faced man behind the wheel, who wears a plastic crown festooned with a shiny blond braid—Snow Maiden. The bed of the truck lifts, dumps a pile of old tires over the fence. Grandfather Frost uses shears to cut the tires into swans.

“It’s a miracle,” says a sanitarka, and so it is. The children keep silent, watch the miracle unfold. This is how Grandfather Frost does it:

Soon the courtyard is littered with dusty brown swans. The children paint the swans red or blue or yellow. At first Zaya mixes red and yellow in her tin to make a radiant orange, but an experimental dab of blue turns the mixture brown.