PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (6 page)

The cloth had belonged to a favorite, long-outgrown and long-outworn dress. As she returned through the early morning chill to the house, Anzhelika tried to smooth out the suspicious bulge in the lap of her uniform. It resisted elimination. Uncle Fedya, still unshaven, passed her in the hallway and halted. He pushed his eyeglasses up the long bridge of his nose, contemplating what was different about her. His breath that morning ascended from somewhere unspeakably deep within his body.

She turned, threw her coat over her shoulders, and rushed from the house before she would have to speak with him or anyone else.

Outside, past the front gate, she was alone again. She stood for a moment with a single foot in the street, as if caught between one place and another entirely different. Then she ventured onto the blackened ice and the fossilized imprint of a truck tire. The neighbors were already picking their way across the road that led to the dairy. They passed before her like shadows, weightless and speechless. The town’s small homes and buildings were composed of the same wan, chipped concrete as the sky.

Anzhelika arrived well before the first bell and opened her coat, checking for stains on her uniform. She entered the classroom and carefully took her place, intent on maintaining the position of the cloth between her legs, which was bunched not quite flush against her. She shifted and it squirmed slightly, like a small animal. The regard of the other girls, her enemies, as they came into the room was neither casual nor blind, but direct and knowing. Blood again: Anzhelika heard it coursing through her cheeks and ears.

The torrent deafened her. She was unaware of Aleksandra Semyonovna’s entrance until her benchmate Masha swung open her desk and rose with the class. Anzhelika stood abruptly and the cloth slipped a little. It was horrible, the blood had wadded it.

The teacher carried a pointer and immediately began poking it at a large map of the world. With long auburn hair, a bright complexion, and slim, long legs, she was the prettiest woman Anzhelika had ever known. She liked Anzhelika. Once, when the girl had volunteered the correct answer to a difficult geography question—she almost never spoke in class, unless directly called upon—Aleksandra Semyonovna had stepped behind her bench and squeezed her by the shoulders. The answer was Paris. According to Masha, Aleksandra Semyonovna had been jilted by a cavalry officer from Ufa, a lieutenant with a clipped blond moustache. Anzhelika had once thought of growing her hair long like her teacher’s, but her mother objected. She said it would get dirty and tangled.

The memory of her teacher’s caress suggested to Anzhelika that she could be an ally, but the form and
even the purpose of the alliance eluded her. Gazing ahead as the lesson began, Anzhelika recalled the steppe and the house she shared with Samoilov. Aleksandra Semyonovna also lived on the steppe, in another house across the way, still pining for her cavalry officer. Anzhelika and Aleksandra would borrow eggs and cheese from each other, and sometimes each other’s dresses, and comb each other’s hair, and in summer they’d sit on the porch waiting for their lovers to ride up on horseback.

But Boris Sergeyevich arrived instead, at the door to the classroom, his youthful, unlined face bleached, his expression grim. Aleksandra Semyonovna fell silent and the class, which had been listening attentively, found a level of stillness that approached the absolute. The principal beckoned the teacher. She took a lingering look at her students before she stumbled from the room.

The children were alone. An excited murmur rose from the seats and benches, like the humming of an engine. Its heat fell upon Anzhelika’s back and the exhaust singed the hairs on her neck. The girls behind her snickered. She stared into her desk, focusing on a single scratch in the wood dashed across the grain, an imperfection less than a millimeter wide, and forced all her being into it. Drifting down the crevice, she bumped against its ragged walls and settled onto a ledge. Rapidly moving water rushed below her and foamed crimson against the rocks.

She luxuriated there in the heat fed by the springs below. Her feet dangled over the ledge. The light descending from above the desk was softened by its fall,
and sound could not reach her at all. She dozed, making up for the previous night’s sleeplessness, until a shiver, Masha’s, was telegraphed through the bench.

Aleksandra Semyonovna had returned to the classroom, soaked in tears. The humming ceased abruptly. The teacher’s face appeared to have been broken in two, skewing the bones of her nose and jaw. Her pale blue eyes, framed in fear, rested for a moment on Anzhelika. She looked as if she were about to speak, but surrendered instead to a fresh, disfiguring storm of tears. The students were paralyzed by the spectacle.

Something emerged from her trembling lips that Anzhelika could not hear. A wind swept through the room, cold and fetid, carrying the gasps and moans of the children and then the children themselves. As notebooks and papers gusted against the windows and walls, Anzhelika and her classmates were lifted from their benches and borne to the general purpose room.

The boys in their year were crying as they poured into the hall alongside Anzhelika’s class, as were many of the older children. Boris Sergeyevich stood before them, tears streaming from his eyes. Anzhelika had never before seen a man cry, hardly knew it was possible. Something warm tickled the inside of her thighs.
Please stop please,
she prayed against the flow of his tears and her blood.

The day passed without any sense of movement. A few teachers attempted to make speeches, but most of what they said made no sense, as if the speeches were about why the sun had risen in the west, bearded, or why a cow drove the trolleybus on the left side of the street, rather than the right. Most of that day the children were not
spoken to, they remained in their places, sniffling. Elsewhere grown men and women took their own lives. Others mutilated themselves to show penance. Candles were lit in churches and prayers were said in mosques and synagogues. In the Far East, political prisoners wept. Two days later, panic would seize a grieving crowd in Moscow’s Trubnaya Square and more than five hundred people would either be trampled to death or suffocated.

The schoolchildren didn’t stir in their seats, but they never expected to be dismissed. They bathed in the liquids of eternal purgatory. No bells ended the schoolday. At some undefined, unclocked moment, several children rose and filed out. Others followed, Anzhelika with them. Aleksandra Semyonovna was no longer present, but other teachers were at the door, embracing their favorite, most affected students. Outside the school, adults waited in the yard, and they too were embracing each other, talking in low tones. Not a single one was without a cigarette. As Anzhelika passed them, every chafing stride announced that the insides of her thighs were wet.

Little Kolya was with his friends again. This time the boys didn’t have a stick, but they were standing around the same oily puddle between the two houses. Anzhelika went by and they turned with her. Their faces were as dead as walls, but their little bird eyes stayed alert and predatory.

She didn’t enter the house but went right to the privy and closed the door. Reaching over her head, she fastened the hook into the bolt, forcing it deep into the eye. She opened her coat. In the gray light admitted over the top of the door, she could not determine whether the
uniform was stained. She removed her coat and hung it on a nail. After hitching up her dress and dropping her underwear, she pulled on the rag. She shuddered as it slithered out of her. Thoroughly soaked, it dropped into the privy hole without returning a sound. Anzhelika tried to make out the lower portion of her body, but couldn’t. She let go of the hem of her uniform and stood there, her underpants around her ankles.

A kind of noise surrounded her now, a ringing sheath that insulated her and deadened her senses to the privy’s odors and the stickiness. She heard music, from “The Fall of Berlin”:

The song was punctuated by footsteps, recognizable by their echoing tread. They stopped and the door to the privy creaked and heaved. The little hook tugged on the screw and even in the gloom she could see the screw give. The plank to which the screw was fastened yawned away from the doorframe.

Too frightened to move, she didn’t lift her underpants. The door hook was pulled hard to the horizontal, spanning a chasm of daylight, before it fell back into place. After a moment of silence, a fist thumped twice against the door. The privy’s timbers rattled like the bones of a skeleton. She made a choked, wordless sound, signaling herself. Father left.

She would need another piece of cloth. This morning
she had seen in her mother’s sewing basket a second scrap alongside the yellow cloth, a piece of her old nightdress. Why hadn’t she taken both of them? She wished she could travel back in time and steal the second piece of cloth, or better yet ... further back, to prevent everything that had happened. Using what was left of the newspapers (there would be complaints), she wiped herself. Tossed off its cinderblocks, the privy was spinning now, she was sure her father would return any minute. Why was he home so early? What time was it anyway? Was her mother home? If she could get past him, she could steal what was left of the old nightdress.

She quickly pulled up her underwear and, forgetting her coat, hurried from the privy. Father wasn’t waiting on the steps. She went around to the front of the house. She stepped through the door, removed her galoshes, and shuffled through the hallway, unaware of the swelling music. Her progress carried her to the door of the front room. Uncle Fedya and Aunt Olya’s big glass doors, usually shut and curtained, had been swung open. Anzhelika stopped. Surprise carried her hands to her face.

All the adults who lived in the house were there, sitting around a circle in the failing light, listening to Uncle Fedya’s radio. They had never done that before, they disliked each other too much. Still wearing her dark blue smock from the dairy, her mother cradled her head in her hands as if it were a cabbage. In the dusk, her person seemed no more substantial than an image in an old photograph, and that is how Anzhelika would remember her. Uncle Fedya sat alongside her mother, and on the other
side were arrayed Aunt Olya, Aunt Vera, Uncle Adik, and then Father, occupying the place closest to the door.

In sacred devotion to their grief, they were all perfectly still, except Father, who was clenching and unclenching his fists. The tendons rose in his arms and neck. The choir continued,
Forever he is true to that vow, which he gave Lenin.
Only gradually did the adults’ eyes register the child’s presence, at first with indifference. And then a few eyes widened and held their gaze. Father turned in his chair. He was red in the face, which was greasy with sweat. His eyes were raw. He too had been crying.

It was only then that Anzhelika realized that her fingertips had been wet and that now her cheeks were wet as well. She glanced to the right. Across the room, the full-length mirror of the 1879 wardrobe neatly framed her. She was betrayed in it, what was left of the day coalescing around her like a spotlight. The blood was all over, streaked brown across her face, up and down her legs, and across her bare left arm. The uniform was stained too, finally, in her lap and in a big swipe across her chest. There were even dried bits of blood caught in her hair. Her body lifted from the floor, buoyed away on a rush of sorrow. New tears flooded her face: she could taste the blood with them. She gasped for breath. The adults didn’t move.

“It was me,” she sobbed. “It’s my fault!”

Father’s blow, when it came, was like a bolt of divine lightning.

Birobidzhan

Israel’s prayers were answered.

A young woman stood in the shadows, hugging herself as if she were cold, though body heat and the fire of political dispute had steamed the flat’s windows. Against the imagined chill she wore a shapeless brown cardigan that ended high above the waist of a long, incongruously flouncy blue dress. She was tall and almost swaybacked, with slender, bony limbs. Clearly a city girl, probably a student, possibly a Party worker. A casual glance might not have discovered her prettiness in the angular thrust of her jaw or in the firm, unsmiling set of her mouth, but he appraised her with the care of a jeweler. What summoned his attention was the penumbra of loneliness that extended from her person and merged into the room’s dim places. In its indeterminate contours, he perceived the precise impress of his own need.

He had stepped from the kitchen only to stretch his legs (and to register his disgust with the course of the conversation). The flat’s former dining room had been turned, or requisitioned, into the living space for a family of five. This evening it had been requisitioned yet again. Its fine parquet, shadowed by Chinese lanterns, now served as a dance floor. A gramophone recording
unwound a length of insistently jazzy music, not quite current. In the center of the room a young red-haired student was trying to show her partner and another couple a new dance step, but she was unsure of it herself. Now she laughed at her own ineptitude.

“Back left foot, Israel? Side right foot and then the glide?”

He smiled distractedly, his gaze on the woman in the corner. She was staring into the room as if watching an entirely different scene, something unpleasant. Israel now noticed the menorah behind her, the
shammes
candle askew and a single light burning beneath it. The menorah was the only religious artifact in the room, even though Hanukkah was the Cultural Traditions Committee’s ostensible reason for the party.

“Yes, but you must lift your arms. The gentleman steps, and then follows. No, no,
up.
Back left, side right, chassé,
up.
Here, let me show you.”