Disappearing Earth

by Julia Phillips

  Dirty. Stupefying. That herding camp stink—smoke, meat, mildew—had somehow followed her all the way down here.

  At least she had Ruslan. The rest didn’t matter. Ksyusha passed her days waiting for his texts, drifted away from other students when classes were dismissed, looked forward to two-hour-long phone calls, and fell into bed thinking of him. Her look, her sound, her smell—he was used to it. No one else would love her like he did.

  * * *

  ·

  The troupe’s director, Margarita Anatolyevna, was a short Koryak woman who kept her hair pulled back with a scarf. The dances she taught were traditional ones, and she instructed the group as if they all led traditional lives; after she passed out leather straps to the boys for the herders’ dance, where they squatted and kicked and spun the straps in the air, she yelled over the music to be heard. “Higher! How do you lasso deer like that?” In the tundra, Ksyusha’s father, uncles, and grandfather stepped into a whirling herd of thousands, snared running bulls, and wrestled the animals to the ground. But some of these dancing boys had never lassoed anything. They let the leather go slack in their hands. City people, Ksyusha’s father would say if he saw.

  Yet not all of them were that way. There was Alisa, and a couple of girls from settlements near Esso. A graduate student named Chander from Palana, far north, beside the Sea of Okhotsk—Ksyusha’s brother had met his current girlfriend in the fishing camps up there. One boy studying at the technical university came all the way from Achavayam. His face was flat and frown permanent. He hardly spoke enough for Ksyusha to hear his accent.

  Being with the troupe was both engaging and awful. It was fun, for the first time since Ksyusha moved to the city, to tell Ruslan about something beyond her classes, even if that something had to do with a high school kid and a bunch of fake lassos. At practices, she took the spot behind Alisa and concentrated on matching her cousin’s movements. Legs together. Toes planted. Heels raised. Knees bent. The music, recordings of drums and buzzing mouth harps, was just a little too loud, and Margarita Anatolyevna yipped along to keep the beat. In her jeans and knit sweater, Ksyusha, dancing, sank out of her thoughts. Into her body. Her breath, her muscles, the throb of her blood. Ahead of her, Alisa’s sunny hair swished in time.

  But the group also made things more complicated by swallowing her once predictable days. Margarita Anatolyevna had a no-distraction policy, so Ksyusha was forced to keep her phone in her bag through every practice. For the first couple weeks, Ksyusha kept coming back to a screen clogged with messages. What are you doing now? Important. If you don’t answer me…

  Hard to miss Ruslan’s texts, hard not to check in with him, hard to let him pass out of her mind when the percussion started through the speakers and then let him back in when the music switched off. Hard to master the movements—Margarita Anatolyevna showed the girls how to fall to their knees, bend backward, arch their spines until their ponytails brushed their calves. The boys worked on making their drums thud in unison, and Margarita Anatolyevna shouted at them to work harder. In the evenings, Ksyusha and Alisa shimmied across their bedroom.

  And hard to try to make friends. Alisa seemed as ever to manage fine, but Ksyusha couldn’t remember trying before. Everyone else in the world Ksyusha cared about had known her since she was a little girl.

  She liked them, though, the other dancers. Despite the gaps in their knowledge—the fact that some of them had never been near a wild animal and others had enrolled in university before seeing a public bus—the group members felt more familiar than the other people she’d met over these years in Petropavlovsk. Understandable in a way the white kids were not. And she liked Margarita Anatolyevna, who encouraged them to chirp like baby birds calling for food. Out of anyone else’s mouth, that description might have sounded ludicrous, but Margarita Anatolyevna said these things without seeming silly. The dances had old names, pagan ones, about gods and nature, so Margarita Anatolyevna taught them how to move in pagan ways. This one requires that you all look like fish, she said, so push your arms back. Wriggle. Open your throat, wide, wide, and drink seawater down.

  * * *

  ·

  For the partner dances, Ksyusha was paired with Chander, the one from Palana. Of all the boys, he seemed the best. He was smart, earning his doctorate by writing a dissertation on Paleosiberian language families, and he paid attention when the director gave instructions. He was tall, he moved well. That first practice when Alisa pushed Ksyusha’s hand into everyone else’s, a few of the kids had tried to flirt: “Does every woman in your family look so good?” one had said. But Chander only asked where she was from and said the group was glad to have her.

  Alisa, meanwhile, was paired with the student from Achavayam. They were an unlikely match, with him tense, taciturn, and Alisa so talkative she was studying German and English to give herself multiple languages to converse in. Sometimes she slipped steps from childhood into routines they were learning, and he noticed, and they argued, Alisa spilling out three defenses for his every critique. Alisa said she couldn’t stand him, though Ksyusha believed that wasn’t true. It probably flattered Alisa to have someone pay such chaste yet close attention.

  Still, Ksyusha wouldn’t have wanted to dance across from Alisa’s partner, with his narrow-eyed focus and his disapproving mouth. Instead, Chander showed her the way. In one dance, the girls stood and the boys knelt before them. They bent into each other, the girls stroking the air to draw their partners closer to their waists. Through the minutes the music played, Chander kept the same easy look he’d had on the first day they met. His face, from smooth forehead to straight eyebrows to high lifted chin, was undisturbed. Once they went through the routine a few times, he got up, the knees of his jeans whitened from dust, and said, “You’re getting a lot better, Ksyusha.” She was practically panting from the movements. But she agreed.

  * * *

  ·

  “Tell me about today,” Ruslan said.

  Ksyusha was under her sheets in the dark. The phone balanced against her cheek and her hands rested on the little hill of her stomach. Her cousin’s bed across the room was empty. “It was crazy,” she said. “Margarita Anatolyevna yelled at Alisa, and I thought for a second Alisa might yell back. She had that look.” The city around Ksyusha was filled with what was sure to provoke him: those two little girls disappearing by the shoreline weeks earlier, photocopies of their class pictures tacked to the university bulletin boards, civilian search parties climbing the hills, and policemen watching Ksyusha on the street like she was the dark-skinned villain responsible. Ksyusha wanted Ruslan to think of her protected. She wanted the same with her parents, her brother, so she kept any calls with them mild. Better not to speak of what might worry them. Stories of school and dance were all she offered.

  * * *

  ·

  The afternoon break between classes ending and practice beginning lasted an hour and a half. Alisa and some of the other group members used this time to go to a café, where they shared a slice of cake or a pot of black tea, but Ksyusha couldn’t afford that. Anyway, part of her understanding with Ruslan was that they informed the other person wherever they went. Visiting a café with others would lead to too many questions. So she came to the practice room early instead, and sat outside it doing homework until Margarita Anatolyevna arrived to unlock the door.

  One October Wednesday, Chander also came early. Ksyusha saw two legs in athletic pants over her textbook and looked up to find him standing there. “What are you reading?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  He sat down next to her, his long body folding. His bag was dropped between them. He reached over to take her book. “Not nothing,” he said, turning it in his hands. “Econometrics.” He gave the book back, took out a notebook of his own, and started to work.

  * * *

  ·

  Chander was the son of a fishing family. In his ho
metown, they went out in the winter for seal, the spring for pollock, the summer for flounder, the fall for crab. “Anatolyevna would call it traditional,” he said.

  Ksyusha had never tasted crabmeat. Chander rested his head on the hallway’s tile wall. They were alone as always outside the locked practice room. “Next time I go back,” he said, “I’ll bring you some.”

  She had never had a friend like him. So comfortable, so quickly—out of all the people Ksyusha grew up with and the classrooms full of student strangers, Chander became the exception.

  During practices, he was polite to the other members. Margarita Anatolyevna liked him especially, and corrected him quietly when she would not hesitate to shout at anyone else. But he didn’t seem close to anyone in the troupe but Ksyusha. When Margarita Anatolyevna switched on the music for the herders’ dance, he glanced at Ksyusha and raised his leather strap, which he knew irritated Ksyusha, which he knew made her laugh. In moments like this, she thought, We’re friends. The idea came as a surprise and a comfort every time.

  She looked forward to tasting crab. She asked Chander for more stories about Palana: if he wished he were still living there, if his family ever came to Petropavlovsk to visit, if he had ever met her brother’s girlfriend. No, no, and no, Chander said, though he softened those answers with tales from childhood. He described a place, four hundred kilometers north of Esso, with a population a fraction the size of Petropavlovsk’s but apartment blocks built just as tall. It was cased in ice in the winter and had a windy avenue leading straight to the sea. Pylylyn, he told her, was the town’s Koryak name. Meaning “with a waterfall.” His language came from farther back in the throat than the Even she had grown up hearing from her grandparents. When she tested its vowels out, he smiled.

  He talked to her about Esso, too. The one land route south from Palana was a snow road passable only from January to March, yet Chander had been in Ksyusha’s village dozens of times, because the flights he took between Petropavlovsk and Palana were often grounded in bad weather at Esso’s tiny airport. Chander had spent days in her village waiting for storms to settle. When she showed him a picture her brother had taken of the house they grew up in, he took her phone in both hands, zoomed in with his thumbs, and peered at the screen. The hall was warm. They were sitting on their jackets.

  “I’ve seen this house before,” he said. “Do you have a cat?”

  Ksyusha squinted at him. “We used to.”

  “A black and white one. I remember.”

  She drew back. “No, you don’t,” she said to test him.

  “I do.” Infallible. Was this how all doctoral students behaved? He tapped on the screen to bring the picture back to normal size. “A blue house with a black and white cat sitting on the fence.”

  “And me inside.”

  “And a Ksyusha inside.”

  Letting him scroll through the rest of her phone’s camera roll, she explained each image. “My mother, in our kitchen, making dinner…She doesn’t like this picture. She doesn’t like, in general, to be photographed. She doesn’t consider herself pretty.” Chander shook his head in silent comment on the wrongness of that, and Ksyusha was grateful once more for how appropriate he was. The picture only showed her mother’s profile. Disagreeing out loud would have been too much. She flicked to the next image. “This is home, again, the same night, the meal she made.” Chander looked hard at the food, the furniture, before flicking to the next. “Ruslan,” she said.

  In the picture, Ruslan was in a white undershirt, close to her camera, half-stern, half-smiling. She had straddled his lap to take it. She hoped Chander couldn’t tell. Heat rose to her cheeks as she attempted to look at the shot like it was new.

  “He’s handsome,” Chander said.

  Again, the right response. Her nervousness left her. “He is.” They went through her phone until Margarita Anatolyevna reached over their heads with the key to the practice room.

  * * *

  ·

  Chander, too, had dated a Russian. A white girl. In the city, while he was an undergraduate—they were together four years. “I loved her,” he said. Ksyusha was looking at the side of his face, the line of his jaw, his high cheeks, and his blunt nose. “She was willful, though, and we would fight—she finished university the year before me, with a degree in international relations, and she wanted to leave Kamchatka for work, but I—”

  “Nymylan,” she said. Another Koryak word Chander taught her. It meant “settled”; he taught her “nomad,” too, when she first told him how her grandparents moved with the deer. (He had asked her for Even words in return, but while she understood her family’s language fine, all she could confidently pronounce was the vocabulary she’d been taught in elementary school. Asatkan, nyarikan: “girl,” “boy.” Alagda. “Thank you.”)

  Chander turned his head toward her. His eyes were dark gloss. “Exactly,” he said. “I couldn’t do it.” His voice was as gentle as a finger down her spine. He turned back to face the tiles, which reflected spots from the overhead lights. “I was supposed to move into her apartment when I graduated, but she kept talking like that would only be the first of many moves. First Petropavlovsk, then Khabarovsk, then Korea or something, some new frontier. I told her I needed time to think. She said, Fine, take all the time in the world, we’re done, and I said, Fine, if that’s the way it is. I took my final exams and went back home to help my father. She and I didn’t talk for a month and a half. As the summer was ending, I started to call her, but her phone was never on. I thought she’d blocked my number.” His eyelashes were straight, short, dry. “Know where she was?”

  “No.”

  “Australia.”

  “Australia!”

  “Australia,” he said. “She went to be an au pair. Her friends told me, eventually. One called me…I’ll never forget that conversation. She’s still there. In the end of ends, I heard she got married.”

  This girl was unimaginable. Ksyusha and Ruslan had not yet started dating when she applied to university, but if they had, she would’ve kept living in Esso and enrolled in distance learning instead. As it was, she thought of dropping out her whole first year. Her parents had insisted on her taking the scholarship, and she did want to get a diploma with honors, and Ruslan agreed to keep an eye on her—those were her only reasons to stay this far from home. Anyway, she was almost done. Only a year and a half until graduation.

  “Australia,” Ksyusha said. “Do you miss her?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m done with that.”

  “What, with dating?”

  “With those girls.” His calm look. A top lip with no bow, and stubble dotting black under the skin. “With Russians.”

  Ksyusha had heard her people talk like that before. She pushed her head back hard against a tile. “You don’t mean it.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, you should be smarter.”

  “Uh-huh. You haven’t noticed by now that you can’t trust them? They don’t care about us the same way they care about themselves.” Ksyusha waited for Chander to voice an exception: Ruslan. He did not. In her thoughts, Ruslan slipped from a man she should defend to a man who might abandon—Ruslan could leave her so much more easily than she could leave him. Chander was talking about something other than love now, though. “Something happens in the north,” he said, “and no one pays any attention. Then the same thing goes on down here and it’s news. When we had the fuel crisis in ’ninety-eight—remember? At home we had a solid year without power. People froze to death in Palana. But the ones in the city talk like it was just three or four months of cold, like the rest of the time didn’t matter because it only happened to us.”

  Ksyusha hadn’t heard about this. During the fuel crisis, she was barely old enough to form memories.

  “Or the two Russian girls who went missing over the summer,” Chander said. “The media report
on it constantly. They show us the police officers and the girls’ mother until I know those faces better than I knew my own neighbors growing up. But what about that Even girl who disappeared three years ago? Who covered that? Who even thinks about her anymore?”

  “The girl from Esso?” Ksyusha asked. “Lilia.”

  He paused. “You knew her.”

  “No,” Ksyusha said. “Not really. Her brother worked in our herd one summer, that’s all. How would you know her?”