“Quick, Katia—come on,” Tania hisses, forking out the bra. Together they examine the label. GOTHIC, it says. 38C. It doesn’t have foam padding the way their mothers’ bras do; it isn’t soft or clingy at all, but fashioned from harsh, stiff cotton. Even dangling from Tania’s hands like a pair of eyeglasses, the cups jut out into severe triangular points, like miniature pyramids.
“You first,” Katia says.
Tania pulls off her shirt, holding out her arms as if she were a knight donning armour for battle. Impatiently, Katia fastens the hooks, and Tania turns to look at herself in the mirror, both from the back (she bunches up the cups of the bra so that it looks to be a perfect fit) and from the front. This latter view is far less successful: Katia hands her some of Darka’s socks, rolled into tight little balls, and Tania stuffs them into the cups that droop so disconsolately from her chest. It helps, but only moderately so—what Tania sees in the mirror is nothing more than a mutant and unconvincing breed of falsies.
“Here,” Katia says, “put on your shirt—see if that helps.”
Tania buttons the shirt to just above where the bra cups start, then steps back from the mirror and examines herself, in front view and in profile. She puts her hands on her hips, and points one toe; she adjusts one of the cups, in which a sock is starting to come loose from its ball.
“Do you want to have a go?” she asks Katia, who shakes her head. In the yolky light in the small, stuffy room, things have taken on a confusing quality, as if time has suddenly jumped forward. It’s like her father’s home movie projector when a splice comes undone, and the film starts pouring out from the reel, with a stink of burning. What she’s seen in the spotty light of the mirror is not Tania’s reflection but an image of what Tania will be like when she’s grown up, when she stuffs foam rubber instead of socks into her bra. And what she’ll be is nothing more than a version of her mother, full view and profile. They have imagined it so differently; they were going to have adventures, take ocean liners to Shanghai, dig for gold in Siberia: the last thing they would ever do is become their mothers.
“Katia? Are you okay? Then help me get out of this thing.”
They think they hear the screen door slam on the front porch: Katia nearly tears the hooks off the bra trying to undo it. The brassiere is shoved back in the drawer, over the photograph, but the socks lie scattered on the floor where they fell when Tania finally tugged herself free. The girls haven’t noticed: they run wildly out of the room. If they hadn’t imagined the slam, if someone really had been coming home, they would have been caught, red-handed. But all is well: the little ones are still sleeping, Darka and Laura and Sonia are still off on their errands and visits. White faced, hearts pounding, they dash from the cottage. Minutes later, hunkered down behind the sleep-house, they decide that if they’re going to run the kind of risks they just have, they’ll need to get something out of the ordinary at the end of it all. And so they spend the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening devising a strategy for seeing Mrs. Maximoynko’s breasts.
The day after the raid on Darka’s room, the girls abandon the sand dunes behind which they’ve been sunbathing and set off for Venus Variety. Though it’s nearly noon, no one calls after them or is sent to bring them back lest they spoil their appetites; nearly everything happens as easily, as flawlessly as they’d imagined. Having confirmed Mrs. Maximoynko’s presence behind the cash register, and having, to avert suspicion, trailed down the aisles on which all maraschino-cherry-dotted cakes have been replaced by sponge rolls, the girls do not return to the beach when they leave the store with their licorice ropes, but sneak to the back, to the apartment Mrs. Maximoynko has made for herself out of an addition. Tania has a bobby pin at the ready to pick the lock, but the door swings open easily. The girls have an excuse ready if they’re caught: they will say they noticed a smell of burning and rushed in to investigate. After the tarpaper fire, they will say, everyone has to act on even the slightest suspicion.
No excuse is necessary, except, perhaps, on the part of the apartment itself. For it’s such a tiny, dingy space, crammed as it is with an Arborite table and chairs, a fridge and stove and sink, as well as a shower rigged up in a windowless alcove, and a toilet in plain view. What with the bed, the place is so cramped that they can’t imagine how Mrs. Maximoynko manoeuvres in and out; they can’t imagine anyone spending even an hour here. There are a few hooks in the wall, from which hang a dressing gown and nightie; you might have expected a calendar at least, or an ikon, but there’s nothing, just a coat of paint, that robin’s egg blue that Katia always associates with the classrooms in which she’s disgraced herself when asked to recite the tributaries of the Dnipro.
No silks and jewels, no marble bath—none of the trappings of a Cleopatra. Had they really been expecting them? Katia wonders. But what good are breasts like Mrs. Maximoynko’s if all they get you at the end is a shack stuck on to a variety store, and a husband who wholesales fruit on Augusta? And how are they going to get a look at those breasts if there aren’t any hiding places in Mrs. Maximoynko’s apartment? Their plan had called for them to conceal themselves behind a sofa or anything from which they’d have a vantage point for spying when Mrs. Maximoynko closed the shop, as she always did at noon, and lay down for an hour on her bed. They had seen with their own eyes the tightly closed curtains, lots of times; the real reason to shut those curtains, they had reasoned, was not to shut out the light, but because Mrs. Maximoynko took off her clothes for her noontime nap. Certainly they are sweating, now, in their shorts and halter tops; the shack’s tin roof might as well be a burner turned up all the way to high. Surely she’d at least take off her top, unhook her sweat-soaked bra, towel herself dry?
The girls look at one another, shrug. How Mrs. Maximoynko prepares herself for her hour-long siesta, they are in no position to discover. But now that they’re here, it would be a waste to just walk out the door—it would be weak. Tania nods at Katia, who steps up to the bureau, and prepares to pull open the top drawer, in which, they know, they’ll find a heap of brassieres with cups so big you could fit your whole head into each one. But before the drawer can be opened and a bra pulled out, they have registered what’s standing on top of the bureau, exposed for anyone to see.
If God is looking down at them with his big blue eye from the dome of the summer sky, He has decided to be good to them, this once. Mrs. Maximoynko doesn’t come upon them in the act of trespass, because she’s taking longer than she expected talking with Mrs. Senchenko about the supplies needed for Saturday’s party. The women are in the store, by the cash register; everyone else is home eating lunch; there’s no one to hear the girls slip out of the shack or catch them stealing away to Tunnel Road and hiding themselves in the undergrowth on the side farthest from the beach. They have forgotten all their mothers’ warnings about poison ivy and non-existent bears; they have plunked themselves down, catching their breath, unable to meet each other’s eyes.
“Could it have happened in the camp?” Tania asks, her voice streaked with bewilderment. She can imagine no other kind of camp but summer camp.
Katia shakes her head, furious. “That’s not the point.” Tania waits for her to explain, but there’s nothing more, just the echo of anger that Katia knows to be unfair, but cannot apologize for.
She is more than angry; she is terrified at what she’s suddenly been made to learn. For the secret displayed on Mrs. Maximoynko’s bureau isn’t in the order of a boy with a spotted dog and a university banner, or even a Luger, as Yuri would have liked to find. It is something far more potent, having to do with how cruelly the body can change its shape, and why. For anyone who cares to look, there it is: a card in a frame, a card containing a black-and-white photo of a young woman with a heart-shaped face and widow’s peak; a small woman, needle-thin, hollow-cheeked, her chest caved in. She is standing beside a baby lying on a table, a baby decorated with embroidered cloths and paper flowers, holding a cross in its tiny hands. A dead baby whose skel
eton shape no amount of embroidery and flowers can disguise. At the side of the photo is an embossed cross, and words written in Cyrillic, simple words that you could easily spell out: My Baby Marusia, Died January 12, 1946, Germania.
When the girls finally get to their feet, they brush themselves off, though nothing of the woods is caught in their clothes or hair. They don’t even shake hands as they turn in different directions to walk home, to the cottages where their mothers are waiting lunch for them. Neither girl will be able to eat, whereupon their mothers will scold them for ruining their appetites, as well as for running off from the beach, coming home so late, worrying them half to death. (Unlike Sonia, Sasha will say this in what she calls her Sarah Bernhardt voice; unlike Sasha, Sonia will be as furious at her daughter’s misbehaviour as she is relieved to see her safe and sound.) Of their own free will, the girls will go to their rooms to lie down, without any fuss or complaining. So that Laura scarcely feels any pleasure at being free, for once, to come and go while Katia’s condemned to her room. And condemned as she is, it is Laura, not Katia, who must face the interrogation squad of Darka and Sonia, who confront her after lunch with the news that someone’s been sneaking into Darka’s room, going through her drawers, rearranging things.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Sonia says, when Laura starts to protest her innocence. “I don’t care who it was, but it’s going to stop right now, and you are going to apologize to Darka.”
Laura’s about to protest that it’s Katia’s doing (for since it wasn’t her, who else could it be?) when she decides this battle is not worth fighting. So she turns to Darka and says, in the sweetest singsong she can muster, “I’m so terribly sorry, Darka, for not going into your room, and not messing around with your things—as if I’d want to handle them anyway!” And turns and runs, slamming the screen door behind her.
Darka is sitting on the steps off the small porch by the kitchen, thinking over the situation. She has no reason to believe that Sonia would go so far as to actually rummage through her room; besides, Sonia’s too neat-and-tidy to leave sock balls lying under the bed. It has to have been one of the girls. Judging from the performance that’s just taken place, it hadn’t been Laura snooping in her room, so it must have been Katia, conveniently in bed with a tummy ache. Darka hadn’t wanted to get either of them into trouble—though God knows they deserve to be smacked, with all that they get up to. But she has to scare them off. So far she’s been lucky: they haven’t thought to look on top of the wardrobe, or else they haven’t had time to, yet.
Darka sighs, scratching the place in the small of her back that is always so difficult to reach; suddenly she hears a small rip. Kholyera yasna—she will have to mend her blouse again; it tore in that very place just two weeks ago. The same night that Mr. Martyn drove back to the city, after bringing that bitch of a sister to stay. They’d all gone off to look at the sunset—the Martyns, Marta, the children; she hadn’t minded being left out, like some Cinderella with dishpan hands and a khustka on her head. Of all the things worth looking at, for God’s sake, who would waste time on a sunset? She’d decided to race through her chores, then settle down with her stash of movie magazines: it was the best she could do in the entertainment line, stuck up at this nudniy beach. She had started laughing then, knowing what Jamie would do if he could hear her, thinking she’d said not nudniy, or “boring,” but nudie. She’d laughed so hard she’d hugged herself to stop her belly from hurting, and that was when the shirt had ripped, just as it’s done now, under the arm.
That was the reason she hadn’t gone to the door when he’d knocked, asking through the screen if Max was in. She’d just yelled from the sink, “They’re out at Painter’s Point. They’ll be back when it’s dark.”
He hadn’t said anything about waiting, but she’d heard no footsteps going back down the porch steps. She wondered just how long he’d stand there. The latch wasn’t fastened—he could have come in if he’d really had a mind to. But he’d waited—he’d outwaited her—and she’d finally put down the sour-smelling dishcloth, wiped her hands on the sides of her shorts and braved the screen door.
It was Frank Kozak, Lesia Baziuk’s “special friend.” Darka knew what that meant—she wasn’t the fool everyone took her for. From behind the screen his pale-pink skin didn’t stand out so much, nor did the sandy-coloured lashes round his eyes. It had been a nice enough evening, and the kitchen was steamy with dishwashing, so she’d decided to open the door and step out onto the landing. She can’t remember now whether she nodded at him, or ignored him as she made her way down the stairs to the lookout point across the lawn. She does know that she had to brush against him to go down: he took up room, he was like one of those plastic containers filled with gravel or water in which you plant a table umbrella so it doesn’t blow away. She grazed his belly with her arm; she smelled whiskey—a not unpleasant smell, golden, not sour like wine—and felt his breath on her face, her neck, the way you feel the sun on your skin the very moment you realize you’re getting a burn. And then she ran down the steps and leaned over the railing at the lookout, staring through a screen of leaves at the water below.
After a while it occurred to her that he might tell the Martyns she’d been rude to him—disrespectful—so she turned round to where she thought he was standing, but saw no trace of him. Then she guessed he might have gone inside to wait for the Martyns in their living room, reading an old issue of Look or National Geographic as the sunset blazed across the picture window. She thought they might not like her leaving somebody alone in the house like that, even a neighbour, so she ran back to the cottage, tramping up the steps and slamming the screen door behind her as loud as she could, to give him notice of her intentions. But there was no one on the sofa; no one’s feet were up on the coffee table. And then she remembered that she’d left a pot to soak, and that Sonia would get after her about it. It was when she went to finish her chores that she found it on the windowsill, as if it had been waiting for her there all day.
Sphinx Pink. Its metal cap looked like gold; when she pulled it off and swivelled the lipstick up, she saw that it had never been used. It wasn’t Sonia’s, left out by mistake. It was hers.
The very next evening, he’d come by again. This time Sonia had been inside with Marta, and Katia and Laura had been sent to their rooms in disgrace, for fighting at the dinner table. She’d been on the little porch off the kitchen, throwing soapy water onto the parched bed of dill and parsley below: Sonia can’t stand anything to be wasted, even dirty dishwater. Darka paused for a moment, with her elbows on the railing, as if waiting for something—and sure enough, it had come. A movement first, in the bushes beside the sleep-house, and then a soft whistle. She left the basin on the porch and made her way down the steps towards the sleep-house. If Sonia were to see her, she’d tell her the truth: that she was investigating something fishy in the bushes. But Sonia hadn’t been looking; no one was there to witness how he beckoned to her from the side of the sleep-house, and she followed him, walking carefully because of the poison ivy. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask him why he was doing this. She does wonder whether she was just being stupid, or whether she wanted not to know.
Her special friend. He didn’t offer her a drink from the silver flask he carried with him and that she could see in outline beneath his sports jacket. He said he didn’t like to see young women drink—or had it been young ladies, was that what he’d said? He had an air about him, that’s for sure; he was always nicely turned out, smelling of Old Spice as well as the whisky. They stood behind the sleep-house where no one could see them from the cottage. There was a small moon, low in the sky, and it painted rough silver on the leaves of the bushes around them. He didn’t say anything for a long while; then he pulled from his pocket a compact, not plastic, but that same shiny metal as the lipstick tube, and put it in her open hand like a giant coin from some pirate’s hoard.
“They work you hard here?” he asked. With concern, she thought, not just out of curi
osity. She started talking a little, telling him what her chores were, and how boring it was, each day the same. When she told him about how she was made to do the laundry day in, day out, how her knuckles were rubbed raw by the washboard, he asked her where; she’d been about to show him her hands when she understood he was asking where she did the wash. She told him about the cellar, how cool and quiet it was with the pack of them gone down to the beach each morning. And sure enough, when she went off to do the wash right after breakfast the next day she found, propped up on the scrubbing board, a small, prettily shaped bottle of cologne, the glass ribbed and twisty, the cap shaped like a heart.
Later that day, down at the beach she heard the women talking about him—how he was up for his week of holiday, more’s the pity for Lesia Baziuk. “I guess we women are gluttons for punishment,” somebody said, and Darka remembers hugging her knees and smiling, liking the sound of the word glutton, liking even better the secret that none of the women knew she was keeping.
The next day, when she went to the cellar, she nearly jumped out of her skin, opening the door and seeing him there. He was leaning against the wall, his pale skin and sandy hair making him look like a giant mushroom in the cool dark. She’d been about to say something when he put his finger to his lips, pointing upwards: sounds of children running, doors slamming. The family was getting ready to go to the beach, though it would be another ten minutes or so before they’d make their way down.
The Ladies' Lending Library Page 16