The Best American Short Stories 2019

by Anthony Doerr

  I parked at the flood line, where five rowboats were moored: two green, two blue, one white, none black. Our usual mode of transportation was black. I leaned on the warm hood of my car (black) and plucked clean a cattail as I deliberated what to do next. I decided on the innocuous white; anyway I did not want to frighten Konstantyn Illych and cause him to flee by appearing in a black one.

  The dachas were poorly numbered and I had to ask for directions, which was not ideal. One man was half-deaf and, after nodding through my question, launched into an account of his cystectomy; another elderly man, who clearly understood what I was saying, rudely responded in Ukrainian; one woman, after inquiring what in hell I was doing in her brother’s rowboat, tried to set her German shepherd on me (thankfully, the beast was afraid of water). I was about to head back to the car when an aluminum kayak slid out of the reeds beside me, carrying two knobble-kneed girls. They told me to turn right at the electric transformer and row to the third house after the one crushed by a poplar.

  A few minutes later I floated across the fence of a small dacha, toward a shack sagging on stilts. On the windowsill stood a rusted trophy of a fencer in fighting stance, and from its rapier hung a rag and sponge. When no response came from an oared knock on the door, I rowed to the back of the shack. There sat Konstantyn Illych and, presumably, his wife, Milena Markivna, both of them cross-legged atop a wooden table, playing cards. The tabletop rose just above water level, giving the impression that the couple was stranded on a raft at sea. The poet’s arms and shoulders were small, boyish, but his head was disproportionately large, blockish. I found it difficult to imagine the head strapped into a fencing mask, but that is beside the point.

  “Konstantyn Illych?” I called out.

  “Who’s asking?” He kept his eyes on the fan of cards in his hands.

  I rowed closer. The wood of my boat tapped the wood of the table. “I’m Mikhail Igorovich. Pleased to meet you.”

  Konstantyn Illych did not return my politesse, did not even take the toothpick out of his mouth to say, “You here for electric? We paid up last week.”

  His wife placed a four of spades on the table. Her thick dark hair hung over her face.

  I told Konstantyn Illych who I was and that the agency had received reports of how he had publicly disseminated wrongful evaluations of the leaders of the Communist Party and the Soviet society at large, and that I was here to have a conversation with him. Konstantyn Illych set his cards facedown on the table and said in a level tone, “All right, let’s have a conversation.”

  I had conducted dozens of these conversations before and always began from a friendly place, as if we were two regular people—pals, even—just chatting.

  “Quite the flood,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Konstantyn Illych, “the flood.”

  “I’ll bet the children love it here.”

  “No children.”

  Usually there were children. I stretched my legs out in the rowboat, which upset its balance, jerked them back.

  “No parents, grandparents, aunts, or uncles either,” said Milena Markivna. Her upper lip curled a little—the beginning of a sneer, as if to say, But you already knew that, didn’t you?

  There had indeed been mention of a mass reprimand of Milena Markivna’s relatives in the fifties, but amid all the other facts about all the other citizens of Kozlov—all their sordid family histories—the detail had slipped my mind. Still, the woman did not need to dampen the spirit of the conversation.

  Konstantyn Illych broke the silence. “So what’s the joke?”

  “I haven’t made a joke,” I said.

  “No, the joke I supposedly told about the Party.”

  Already he was incriminating himself. “The term I used was wrongful evaluation, but thank you for specifying the offense, Konstantyn Illych.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said, unexpectedly. “What was it?”

  “I cannot repeat the joke.” I admit I had searched Konstantyn Illych’s file for it, but one of the typists had already redacted the words.

  “You can’t repeat the joke you’re accusing me of telling?”

  “Correct.” Then, before I could stop myself: “Perhaps you could repeat the joke, and I’ll confirm whether or not it’s the one.”

  Konstantyn Illych narrowed his eyes.

  “We aren’t moving any closer to a solution, Konstantyn Illych.”

  “Tell me the problem first,” he said.

  A brown leaf, curled into the shape of a robed figurine, floated by Milena Markivna’s foot. She pressed the leaf into the murky water with her thumb before turning to her husband. “Just say sorry and be done with it.”

  I thanked her for her intuition—an apology was precisely what was in order, in the form of a letter within thirty days. Milena Markivna advised me not to thank her since she hadn’t done anything to help me, in fact she hated officers like me and it was because of officers like me that she had grown up alone in this world, but at least she had nothing to lose and could do anything she wanted to: she could spit in my face if she wanted to, which I did not recommend.

  Konstantyn Illych was tapping his fingernails on the table. “I’m not putting anything in writing.”

  It is usually at this point in the conversation, when the written word comes up, that the perpetrator becomes most uncomfortable, begins to wriggle. Most people fail to grasp the simple logic of the situation: that once a transgression occurs and a case file opens, the case file triggers a response—in this case, a letter of apology. One document exposes the problem, the second resolves it. One cannot function without the other, just as a bolt cannot function without a nut and a nut cannot function without a bolt. And so I told Konstantyn Illych, “I’m afraid you don’t have a choice.”

  He reached for the small rectangular bulge in his breast pocket. “Ever read my poetry?”

  I expected him to retrieve a booklet of poems and to read from it. Dread came over me; I had never been one to understand verse. Thankfully he produced a packet of cigarettes instead.

  “Come to my next reading,” he said. “You’ll see I’m as ideologically pure as a newborn. Then we’ll talk about the letter.”

  Normally I’d have a letter of apology written and signed well under the thirty-day deadline and I took pride in my celerity. Even the most stubborn perpetrators succumbed under threat of loss of employment or arrest. The latter, however, was a last resort. The goal now was to reeducate without arrest because the Party was magnanimous and forgiving; moreover prisons could no longer accommodate every citizen who uttered a joke.

  In Konstantyn Illych’s case, next came gentle intimidation. If Konstantyn Illych stood in line for sausage, I stood five spots behind him. If Konstantyn Illych took a rest on a park bench, I sat three benches over. He pretended not to see me, but I knew he did: he walked too fast, tripping on uneven pavement; bills and coins slipped from his fingers regularly. His head jerked right and left to make sure he never found himself alone on the street. He needn’t have worried—always the odd pedestrian around—and anyway I did not intend to physically harm or abduct Konstantyn Illych, though that would have been simpler for both of us. My older colleagues often lamented the simpler times.

  Four days passed without a word exchanged between us.

  On the fifth day I went to see Konstantyn Illych give his poetry reading at the Kozlov Cultural Club. I took a seat in the front row of the lecture hall, so close to the stage I could see the poet’s toes agitate inside his leather shoes. In the dim light I was able to transcribe some of his poetry:

  Helical gears, cluster gears, rack gears,

  bevel and miter gears, worm gears, spur gears,

  ratchet and pawl gears, internal spur gears,

  grind my body

  meat grinder

  grinds

  gr gr grrr

  ah ah ah

  aah aah aah

  ah haaaaaahh

  And also:

  The bear

 
; bares his flesh

  skinless, bears the burden

  of the air wooooooooooooooosh

  And also:

  Dewy forget-me-not

  not me forgets.

  Stomp.

  I cannot guarantee I transcribed the onomatopoeic bits with accuracy; Konstantyn Illych’s reading gave no indication of the number of a’s and o’s, etc.

  At the end of the reading the poet placed his pages at his feet, unbuttoned his faded blue blazer, addressed the audience: “Time for a little trivia. I’ll recite a poem and one of you will guess who wrote it. Get it right and everyone here will admire you, get it wrong and you’ll be eternally shamed.” A few people laughed.

  Throughout the challenge poets such as Tsvetaeva, Inber, Mayakovsky, Shevchenko (this one I knew), and Tushnova were identified. The audience expressed their enjoyment by whooping and clapping between names.

  Konstantyn Illych waited for the lecture hall to quiet down before he leaned into the microphone. “Who, whom?”

  This apparently was also a poem; the crowd erupted in fervid applause. I made a mental note to alert my superiors that local culture was going down the chute.

  Konstantyn Illych scanned the audience until his eyes locked with mine. “The gentleman in the front row, in the black peacoat,” he said. “Who wrote that poem?”

  Once more the hall fell silent.

  I turned right and left, hoping to find another man wearing a black peacoat in my vicinity, when I saw Konstantyn Illych’s wife sitting behind me. She crossed her arms, her great bulging eyes on me, beckoning me to answer. One of her hands, nestled in the crook of her arm, resembled a pale spider waiting to pounce.

  Konstantyn Illych’s voice boomed above me. “The greatest poet of all time, Comrade, and you do not know? I’ll give you three seconds. Three . . .”

  I froze in my seat. The man to my right, whose nose looked like it had been smashed many times, nudged me in the ribs.

  “Two . . .”

  The man whispered, “Grandfather Lenin!” which I found absolutely in poor taste.

  “One!” Konstantyn Illych bellowed. “Who was it, esteemed audience?”

  The words rose up from the crowd in a column. “Grandfather Lenin!”

  Konstantyn Illych looked down at me from the stage, tsked into the microphone. Each tsk felt sharp, hot, a lash on my skin.

  It was around this time I began to suspect that, while I had been following Konstantyn Illych, his wife had been following me. I forced myself to recollect all I could of the preceding week. Milena Markivna never figured in the center of the memories—the bull’s-eye had always, of course, been Konstantyn Illych—but I did find her in the cloudy periphery, sometimes even in the vacuous space between memories. If I stood five spots behind Konstantyn Illych in line for sausage, the hooded figure four spots behind me possessed Milena’s small, narrow-shouldered frame; if I sat three benches from Konstantyn Illych, the woman two benches over had the same pale ankle peeking out from under the skirt. I began to see the task of retrieving the letter of apology in a new light.

  What I suspected: It was not about the letter, rather the lengths I would go to retrieve it.

  What I suspected: I was being vetted for a position of great honor.

  What I knew: “Who, whom?” had been a simple test, and I had failed it.

  What I knew: My mother had been subjected to the same tests as a young woman, and had succeeded.

  When I was a child, my mother was invited to join the Honor Guard. According to my father, she had always been a model student, the fiercest marcher in the Pioneers, the loudest voice in the parades. She was the champion archer of Ukraine and had even been awarded a red ribbon by the Kozlov Botanist Club for her Cactaceae collection. One evening, an officer came to our door and served my mother a letter summoning her to the Chief Officer’s quarters. Within six months she was sent to Moscow for special training, as only special training would suffice for the Guard that stands at the mausoleum of Lenin. Since our family was not a recognized unit—my parents hadn’t married because my paternal grandparents (now deceased) didn’t like my mother—my father and I could not join her in Moscow. I was too young to remember much about this period, but do have two recollections: one, I could not reconcile the immense honor of the invitation with the grief that plagued the family; two, my father assumed care of my mother’s cactus collection and every evening, when he thought I was asleep on the sofa bed beside him, wrapped his fingers around the spines of the plants and winced and grit his teeth but kept them there until his whole body eased into a queer smile. For many months his hands were scabbed and swollen. Within a year my father was gone also; he had at last been able to join my mother in Moscow and my grandparents told me that one day I too would join them.

  When Milena Markivna entered my life, I felt I had finally been noticed. The vetting process for the Honor Guard was still possible. My reassignment to Moscow to see my mother and father was still possible. I believed it was possible to make gains with hard work.

  From that point on I followed Milena Markivna’s husband with greater vigilance and Milena Markivna followed me with greater vigilance. If Konstantyn Illych riffled through his pockets for a missing kopek for a jar of milk, Milena Markivna’s voice behind me would say, “Surely you have an extra kopek for the man,” and surely enough, I would. If I dropped a sunflower-seed shell on the floor while pacing the corridor outside the couple’s apartment, behind the peephole of Suite 76 Milena Markivna’s voice would say, “It’s in the corner behind you,” and surely enough, it was. She was a master observer, better than me.

  (It should not go unsaid that, beyond mention of the reprimand of Milena Markivna’s family, her file contained little information. This may have been because she was born in the province surrounding Kozlov and not in the city itself, but I suspected it was a matter of rank: if Milena Markivna were indeed my superior, tasked with the observation of my conduct and aptitude for ceremonial duty, I would not have access to her full history. Information is compartmentalized to mitigate leaks, much like compartments are sealed off in ships to prevent sinking.)

  Konstantyn Illych, in turn, grew accustomed to my omnipresence, even seemed to warm to it. After a bulk shipment to the Gastronom, I watched him haul home a thirty-kilogram sack of sugar. By the time he reached his building, the sack had developed a small tear, which meant he could not haul the sack up to the ninth floor without losing a fair share of granules. The elevator was out of the question due to the rolling blackouts and so I offered to pinch the tear as he carried the load over his shoulder, and he did not decline. Many minutes later we stood in front of Suite 76, Konstantyn Illych breathless from the effort. Since I was there I might as well come in, he said, to help with the sack. He unlocked the steel outer door and the red upholstered inner door, then locked the doors behind us. The apartment was very small, surely smaller than the sanitary standard of nine square meters allotted per person. After we maneuvered the sack to the glassed-in balcony, I scanned the suite for a trace of Milena Markivna—a blouse thrown over a chair, the scent of an open jar of hand cream, perhaps—but saw only books upon books, bursting from shelves and boxes lining the already narrow corridor, books propping up the lame leg of an armchair, books stacked as a table for a lamp under which more books were read, books even in the bathroom, all of them poetry or on poetry, all presumably Konstantyn Illych’s. A corner of the main room had been spared for a glass buffet of fencing trophies and foils, and on the top of it stood a row of dusty family portraits. I tried to find Milena Markivna in the photographs but these, too, were Konstantyn Illych’s—the large head made him recognizable at any age. I wondered if she lived there, if she was even his wife.

  Milena Markivna entered the apartment a few minutes after us, with a soft scratch of keys in the locks. She appraised me as I imagined she might appraise a rug her husband had fished out of a dumpster. Would the piece be useful, or would it collect dust and get in the way? Her express
ion suggested the latter, but her husband was leading me into the kitchen, the point of no return. Once a guest steps into the kitchen, to have them leave without being fed and beveraged is of course unconscionable.

  Milena Markivna leaned her hip against the counter, watching Konstantyn Illych mete out home brew into three cloudy shot glasses. “Lena, fetch the sprats, will you?”

  Milena Markivna said she needed the stool, which I immediately vacated. She stepped on the stool to retrieve a can from the back of the uppermost cupboard and set the can down on the table, with some force, and looked at me, also with some force, as if daring me to do something about the unopened sprats. I produced the eight-layer pocketknife I always kept on my person. In an elaborate display of resourcefulness, I flicked through the screwdriver, ruler, fish scaler and hook disgorger, scissors, pharmaceutical spatula, magnifying lens, hoof cleaner, shackle opener and wood saw, before reaching the can opener. Its metal claw sank into the tin with so little resistance, I could have been cutting margarine. Milena Markivna must have noticed the surprise on my face, asked if I knew about the exploding cans.

  I conceded I did not.

  “It’s something I heard,” she said, “something about the tin, how they don’t make it like they used to. People are getting shrapnel wounds.” After a moment she gave a dry mirthless laugh and so I laughed as well.

  Before Konstantyn Illych passed around the shots, I laid a sprat on my tongue and chewed it slowly to let the bitter oil coat the inside of my mouth and throat to minimize the effects of alcohol.

  Milena Markivna also chewed a sprat before the first shot, which I did not fail to notice.

  Three rounds later, Konstantyn Illych spoke of the tenets of Futurist philosophy and was about to show how he employed them in his poetry when I asked about the letter of apology, due in fifteen days.

  “Mikhail Igorovich,” he said. “Misha. Can I call you Misha?”

  “You may.” The home brew was softening my judgment and there was only one sprat left.