She stepped back to sit up on the table. Her skin rubbed on it now.
As soon as Valentina was settled, the doctor turned around. She was dressed in white with a blue cap covering her hair. “No one’s with you?” she asked. Valentina shook her head. “And you didn’t bring clean clothes? A gown? That’s all right,” the doctor said. “It’s not so important.”
The doctor came close enough that they could smell each other: the doctor sharp with antiseptic wipes, cold circulated air, the waxed fruit flavor of lip balm tucked underneath, and Valentina slippery with nervousness. Valentina had skipped lunch. She was empty as a box bobbing in the sea. Bending, the doctor studied the blister; she touched it with her dry fingers. Then, carefully, she palpated Valentina’s neck, jaw, ears. She felt the span of Valentina’s chest and spent a long time pressing Valentina’s right armpit.
“What’s the matter?” Valentina said.
“We don’t know yet.”
Valentina studied the doctor’s face to see if that was a lie. “Dr. Popkov said it was serious.”
“Who?”
“My doctor. From the Medline clinic. He sent me here.”
The doctor straightened. Even hunched on the table, Valentina was a little taller. The doctor’s lips were pink and her cheeks were broad, giving her a sweet, apple-faced quality that belied the firmness in her fingertips. “He was right. We’re going to take it out,” she said. “Come with me.”
Valentina pushed herself off the table. She moved toward her clothes.
The doctor said, “No, we have to keep it sterile there. Leave your things in this room.”
But Valentina was exposed from her sagging neck to her frozen feet. Blister and breasts and ass and pubic hair. This was different from a bedroom or a bathhouse. Not even her husband had seen her like this—bare under fluorescent lights. Salt-covered. Filled with cancer—she could be filled with it. A naked patient in the regional hospital.
How many doors did she go through to get to this room? She could not remember. She wanted back the native nurse, who had looked at her humanely. The men waiting downstairs—had they also been shown into examining rooms? Were they sitting, round and jaundiced, just outside?
“I must have misheard you,” Valentina said. Her teeth were chattering.
“It has to stay sterile and you have no gown. It’s only a meter or two,” the doctor said. “Come on.” She was finished with Valentina’s body, ready to move on.
Valentina was not. “Shouldn’t I—”
The doctor was opening the door.
“I should bring my jacket,” Valentina said.
The doctor shook her head. “This is no time to be modest. You are going into the operating room.”
Naked, Valentina followed the doctor out into the short passageway with the red bins. If they walked straight, they would enter the hall, which had been empty before and now could hold—anything. Anyone. Instead they turned left, toward a double doorway. Valentina’s ID, her money, her keys, her clothing: all her things were in the room. She covered her chest with her arms but air poured across her hips and thighs. The doctor didn’t pay any attention.
Valentina held herself together as much as she could. Only two meters to cross. Under her feet, the passage’s floor was gritty. The number of dirty bodies that must have gone this way before. Was this how everyone else she knew had entered surgery—naked, frozen? At the limited mercy of authority. Even Valentina’s grandmother had died with more pride.
She gripped her own arms. Squeezed the muscle, stemmed the thought. Died. No. Yes, her grandmother had died, but Valentina was living, she had a job, a family, chores to finish, calls to make. She did everything right. Tragedy belonged to other people.
Yet she was going to the operating room. Her smallest toes were bent with age. Valentina’s mother had raised her to wear slippers indoors…to keep their house clean, to keep them safe. Her mother warned her that cold traveled up a woman’s feet to the rest of her body. That’s how girls go barren, her mother had said. Valentina had repeated the same warning to Diana, along with cautions against strangers and lessons on friendship. Family over everything, Valentina said. But cold feet might not matter anymore.
A meter ahead, the double doors. The doctor silent at her side. The passage leading them to surgery was lined by red buckets. They contained…what? Blood? Gauze? Cut-out growths? They likely contained body parts, discarded nightmares. Valentina cast her eyes down at the floor. An animal smell, like dirt, waste, death, was thick in her face and on her bare skin. She did not deserve this. She was not prepared. Seized by fear, she looked again at the row of closed bins and pictured entrails.
Her feet moved her. Somehow, she walked. Her private clinician and the solemn nurse and this doctor here had directed her this way, toward these twin doors, so she continued, repeating to herself that this was what she must do. The passageway was already ending. The doctor put her hands on the doors. “Valentina Nikolaevna,” she said, and Valentina looked up. A little kindness broke into the doctor’s round face. “Don’t worry. They’ll numb you.”
The doctor pushed the doors open. Valentina found a team of strangers waiting in gloves, gowns, and masks. Her life was left somewhere behind.
“Go ahead,” the doctor said.
Valentina was so cold. The smell from the passage had sunk into her tongue, so she tasted soil, tasted blood.
She thought, In an hour this will be over; she thought, Everything is going to be fine. It will. It has to be. No more blister. No more cancer, if it was cancer—it’ll be plucked out at the root. She told herself it would pass quickly. She thought, After this is done, I will never tell anyone about what has happened. No one at the office, and not the detective, not my husband, not my daughter. I will come back to the woman I was.
DECEMBER
Ksyusha always knew about the dancers—growing up in Esso, she saw troupes perform at every minor holiday—but she was not interested in them for herself until her cousin came down from their village. Then Ksyusha’s desires began to shift. The cousin, Alisa, had enrolled in the same Petropavlovsk university where Ksyusha was now entering her fourth year. For safety in the city, their mothers decided that the cousins should live together. The two girls rented a one-bedroom apartment at the bottom of a city hill and moved their things in: Ksyusha’s neat from the tiny room she had kept in the dormitory, Alisa’s dust-covered after the twelve-hour bus ride south from home.
The state of their suitcases wasn’t their only difference. Alisa was only seventeen, with hair highlighted from black into orange-yellow above an adorable face. She had enrolled in school for philology, while Ksyusha studied accounting. During their first week of classes, Alisa met more people and learned more gossip than Ksyusha had over the last three years. And sometimes Alisa stayed out late. Once or twice, ignoring the missing-person posters that went up around the city that August, Alisa chose not to come home at night at all.
“I don’t like it,” Ruslan said.
He was still back home in Esso. This far into Ksyusha’s long-distance study, she and Ruslan had worked out a system. They talked on the phone every morning, every night, and he made the long drive down to visit at the end of every month. They kept that schedule for both their harmony and Ksyusha’s supervision; ever since she moved to Petropavlovsk, he had made sure to remind her how quickly a girl could get lost. His warnings got even louder after descriptions of the Golosovskaya sisters crept three hundred kilometers north to their village. Now Ruslan, in hearing of her cousin’s social life, had one more reason for concern.
“Alisa’s trustworthy. You know her,” Ksyusha said into her cell. She was home in her pajamas, gray sweatpants and a navy tank top, though the sun had not yet set outside the apartment windows. It was early September. The fall semester had barely begun and he was already finding faults.
“Alisa was al
ways a little loose. Maybe she’s gone crazy in the city,” he said.
“She didn’t. She just has lots of friends.”
“Is she out right now?”
Ksyusha was silent.
“Where are you?” Ruslan asked.
“I’m home,” she said. “I told you.” The line was fuzzy with his breath. She went over to the microwave, set it for one second, and let it go off. “See?” she said over the beeping.
“All right,” he said, calmed. The microwave, the TV, or Ksyusha’s guitar—these were the domestic sounds that now gave him comfort. When Ksyusha was in the dormitory he had relied on the voice of her roommate. In the days before this school year started, when the apartment was brand-new, Ksyusha had tried to put her cousin on the phone for support, but Ruslan never believed what Alisa said. “Is anyone over?” he would ask. “Is anyone over? Is anyone over?” So Ksyusha mastered different alibis.
* * *
·
In the middle of September, Alisa decided to join the university dance troupe. She had already gone to one practice and liked it enough for both of them. This group was small, far from the professional ensembles that traveled the country showing off Kamchatka’s native folk dances to packed halls. It was more like a home troupe—it was just for fun. “We need this,” Alisa argued to Ksyusha. It would be a way, she said, to spend more time together, to honor their roots. “And a way to get you out of the apartment in the afternoons.”
“I can’t dance,” Ksyusha told her. They were in the kitchen waiting for their soup to finish simmering. The room smelled like hot cabbage, sorrel, salted butter, and chicken broth.
“Sure you can,” Alisa said. “Even if you can’t, it doesn’t matter. You’ll stand in the middle and look beautiful.” She lifted her palms to Ksyusha’s cheeks. “Look at you, Ksenyusha. You’ll be our star.”
Ksyusha withdrew. “Don’t make fun of me.” Ksyusha looked like their grandmother, pure ethnic Even, with bones broad, eyes hooded, brows faint, and nose turned up. Her face was too native, she knew, and hips too thick for stardom.
“I’m not.” When Ksyusha shook her head, Alisa shook hers back without stopping, then started drawing her hands in rhythm through the steaming air.
“I don’t know,” Ksyusha said. “I don’t want to.” Even so she had to smile.
“You don’t know or you don’t want to?” Alisa beckoned, her fingers slim as little fish.
“I’m not good at that sort of thing.”
“Neither am I!” This wasn’t true—Alisa had danced as a child in one of the village troupes and knew the old steps. Having said this once, though, Alisa would never take it back. She did not accommodate.
All Ksyusha could do was make a face in response. “Stop messing around,” she said, though she liked it, Alisa’s stubborn body and skinny, quick arms.
“This troupe’s all students. It’s nothing special. Come on, let’s see you give it a try.”
Ksyusha, lifting the ladle, nodded along to her cousin’s movements. Three years into university—classes each day on management or statistics, course work every afternoon, oral exams ending her semesters with the validation of top grades so she could maintain her scholarship, and her thrills relegated to summers in Esso, winter holidays in Esso, and the single weekend each month when Ruslan drove down—Ksyusha wouldn’t mind trying something new. Still, she said, “I’m not going to.”
“See you bob your head. You already are.”
This was how Alisa changed her: not with invitations to go out but with the joy she carried in. “Ruslan won’t let me,” Ksyusha said, as her last protest. But as soon as Alisa’s mouth twisted up, Ksyusha saw those words were a betrayal.
* * *
·
He was her first and only love. At night, Ksyusha passed into sleep by remembering his qualities. The scratch of his voice, the bunched cords of his muscles, the hair under his navel, the deepening creases of his eyelids. Seven years Ksyusha’s senior, Ruslan used to come over to play video games with her older brother, Chegga, and she would sit behind them to stare at Ruslan’s back. That sunburned neck above a baggy T-shirt. She used to dream about being old enough to kiss him, and now she was, and did, and it was everything she had hoped for.
The next Friday that Ruslan came, she wrapped herself around him on the futon. Alisa entered the apartment that night, unlaced her sneakers, and passed the couple on her way into the bedroom; she didn’t shut the door fully as she changed out of her street clothes. “Did Ksyusha tell you about the dancers?” she called.
Ruslan tipped his face down at Ksyusha. His mouth was already thinner, expecting bad news.
Alisa came back out in leggings. “We have a university ensemble,” she said over the noise from the TV they had been watching. “They’re looking for more girls. Wouldn’t she be perfect?”
“She doesn’t know how to dance,” Ruslan said.
“Oh, she could,” said Alisa. “You just show up, anyway. You don’t have to be any special talent for this one. They take whoever arrives.”
He scoffed at that. “I don’t remember any university ensemble,” he said—he had studied in the city for a couple years, before he and Ksyusha started dating, when he was still Chegga’s video-game friend and she was still a schoolgirl. Though Ruslan left before receiving his degree, he found himself a decent job with Esso’s public utility, where he ran waste pipes and rebuilt the rotting wooden bridges that crisscrossed their village’s rivers. Ksyusha’s parents liked him now even more than they had when he was young.
“The group’s been around a while, but it’s not for white kids,” said Alisa. “That’s probably why.”
“Alisa,” Ksyusha said.
“He doesn’t mind.”
“So it’s that kind of group,” he said. “Drums and skins.” He squeezed Ksyusha’s shoulders, then released her and stood. “You don’t think they’d take me?”
“Not unless you got a really good tan,” Alisa said.
He squatted and held out his arms. “Even if I show them what I can do? Hey!” Stomped forward in imitation of the dancers they grew up watching. With one fist, he mimed holding the straps of a frame drum, and he swung his other hand out wide to pound its face.
Alisa jumped toward him. Her hands lifted. She twisted in place, head sliding one way over shoulders sliding the other, and so on down the length of her body, hips swinging, knees together swaying, heels lifting, and feet pivoting in harmony. She whooped while Ruslan stomped around, singing loud in a nonsense version of the Even language, and Ksyusha laughed because they wanted her to laugh, although the way they moved gave her pause. The way they looked—Ruslan strong and wiry, the stubble copper on his jaw, and Alisa synchronized before him. Natural partners.
Ksyusha reached out to grab her cousin’s elbow. She stopped Alisa, without seeming to try. “Is that how the troupe does it?”
“Something like that,” Alisa said, plopping down on the futon beside her. “You’ll see for yourself.” Alisa lifted her gaze to Ruslan. “Unless she’s not allowed?”
He straightened. “What does that mean?”
“I thought maybe you wouldn’t let her.” Ksyusha stared at her cousin, but Alisa was refusing to turn from Ruslan.
“That’s not how this works,” he said. To Ksyusha, he asked, “Do you want to join this thing?”
She was struck, nervous, trying to measure the flush under his eyes. “I don’t know. I thought you might—I thought it might be a good way to stay connected. To keep myself thinking of home.”
“Do you need extra help thinking of home?” he said. “Fuck. Go on and do it, then. Who am I, your father? Have I ever told you how to spend your time?”
* * *
·
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon, the troupe met in a university music room. Ksyusha repor
ted back to Ruslan after the first practice: “It was fine. Awkward.” Alisa had made everyone shake Ksyusha’s hand. Some of the group members were at the pedagogical university, like the two cousins, but a couple others studied at the technical university up the hill, and one boy was only in year ten of high school.
“How many guys in this group?” Ruslan asked.
Ksyusha didn’t know how accurately to answer. “Maybe it’s half and half,” she said. Everyone indigenous: Even, Koryak, Itelmen, or Chukchi. Black-haired, brown-eyed.
“Watch out for yourself,” Ruslan said. “They’d love to be company for my native queen.”
He was the only white person who could tease her that way. He grew up with her family, after all. Her first week in the city, when she was Alisa’s age, some other students had mocked her. “Where are you from?” one asked before class. “From Esso,” she started to say. “From the reindeer herds,” someone else said under her words. And then they laughed.
She sat in mortified silence for a moment before raising her fingers to her cheeks. Pressed them there, cold circles against flushed skin.
She, who won a gold medal for academic excellence at her high school graduation and earned a funded spot in the university’s accounting course, was laughed at. It was her voice. The bouncing intonation of her sentences—she sounded northern. And her skin, her hair, the angle and narrowness of her eyes. They recognized her immediately, these city kids. They spoke to her like she was part herd animal herself.
At home, everyone knew Ksyusha and her brother not as a future banker and a photographer but as herders’ children. Her family was one of too many sources in Esso for meat and pelts. Her grandparents and father lived in the tundra with their animals year-round, while her mother stayed with her and Chegga in Esso until classes ended. Then it was back out to the wilderness. Ksyusha had missed every school vacation when young, yanked with the rest of her family to work in the empty rangelands while the white kids in the village got to play soccer in the streets and duck under roofs when it rained. Esso in the summertime was beautiful—cottages were repainted in primary colors, gardens grew dense with vegetables, the rivers ran high, and the mountains that surrounded the village turned dark with foliage. Ksyusha did not get to appreciate the sight until she was seventeen years old. Instead, the demands of herding ruled her summers: kilometers on horseback, legs aching, back sore; mosquitoes crawling under her clothes and staining her skin with her own blood; hurried baths taken in freezing river water; Chegga’s teasing; her mother’s resentment; her grandmother’s reprimands; the men’s arguments over money they should’ve earned at last year’s slaughter and debts they planned to pay off at this one; the way Ksyusha’s mind itched for a book or a pop song or a television show, anything to break up the monotony of the landscape, grass and hills and shrubbery and antlers and horizon; the rich metallic taste of reindeer meat in her mouth for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for days, weeks, for months, until they got to go home again.
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