by Maria Reva
“Konstantyn Illych?” Orynko shouted from the row of contestants.
Konstantyn reeled around. He could not let Orynko out of his sight now, lest she disappear again. He ran to her, grabbed her by the wrist, and set off after Zaya. The girl was already halfway across the lectorium, weaving between the spectators crowding into the aisle. A mustachioed man tried in vain to catch her. Konstantyn cursed the crowd, but was grateful for the added commotion, which sheltered him, and the contestant he had just whisked offstage, from the guards. By the time Konstantyn, still pulling Orynko in his wake, had waded to the exit, he’d lost track of Zaya. Outside, a bitter wind dashed between the tall stone buildings, slapped his and Orynko’s faces. He thought he saw a streak of yellow, and ran after it. But one cavernous street opened up to another, unfolding endlessly.
“My feet hurt,” Orynko protested, struggling to keep up in her stilettos. Passersby gawked at her, an apparition from another world. “Can’t we go home?”
“One more street,” Konstantyn promised. “Just one more.”
As they searched, he thought of the moment Zaya had last looked at him, onstage. He conjured the expression on her face over and over, but each time her gaze changed. In one version, she was charmed but confused by the sight of Konstantyn racing toward her, calling her name as though she were the one who would save him; in another version, she struggled to remember who he was; in another, her face regained life and she found something to run for—Konstantyn, and their shared future. This was the version he held on to, in the years to come.
* * *
—
Orynko Bondar’s homecoming was magnificent. The townspeople filled the platform of the Kirovka train station, and applauded as Orynko and Konstantyn descended the steep steps of the passenger car. Never before had Konstantyn seen such a crowd in his town. He hadn’t slept the whole trip back. His eyes were red, heavy-lidded. Strangers slapped his back, shook his limp hand. He wished they would all go away.
Orynko’s parents—short-haired, wearing practical footwear—wrapped themselves around the teenager, kissed her face. Konstantyn heard her father whisper in her ear, “But the Academy!” A small boy in a dress shirt thrust a bouquet of pink dahlias into Orynko’s hands. A canister of home brew made the rounds.
Brave girl, foolish girl, the townspeople exclaimed. When had Miss Kirovka learned to spit with such aim, such force? From this, Konstantyn understood that the broadcast of the Moscow pageant had cut out right after Zaya spat on the judges. He found himself enraged at the townspeople. How could they have mistaken Zaya for Orynko, when she was so obviously Zaya? How could they have failed to recognize the real Orynko as the contestant from Norgorsk? Had the camera not zoomed in on the girls’ faces, or had the townspeople simply wanted to believe the impossible? His convoluted plan had succeeded, and he hated himself for it.
Her name is Zaya, he wanted to shout, Zaya from Internat Number 12. An adept sprinter, a reciter of poems.
But now the townspeople pressed around Orynko and Konstantyn. They took Orynko’s reticence for modesty, Konstantyn’s red eyes for fatigue. As the pair stumbled out of the station, the crowd followed, boisterous as a victory parade.
PART
TWO
After
the
Fall
LUCKY TOSS
I’d been working as a guard at the saint’s tomb for eighteen months before the trouble began. Konstantyn Illych paid me little but provided free lodging—an army cot and stove I could fold out in the corner of the tomb each night. The job consisted of telling pilgrims to keep hands out of pockets and lips off the display case. Sometimes children rapped the glass, bored by the saint’s inactivity, and I would remind them that we were not a zoo.
The saint’s display case, which Konstantyn Illych bought from a defunct delicatessen shop at quarter price, boasted a curved glass front and a steel ledge with tracks for plastic trays. Normally the saint basked under the fluorescent lamp like a glazed roast, but that particular day the bulb began to flicker, making the creature look as though it were twitching awake. At first the effect pleased Konstantyn Illych, who wanted the crowd of pilgrims to grow even thicker, but after the second pilgrim fainted he asked me to procure a replacement bulb—though not before we closed the tomb, at 18:30.
The tomb was a low-ceilinged concrete room in the crumbling building known as 1933 Ivansk. The room was bare as a bunker, containing only the display case, a narrow counter for the cash register, and a small bathroom (not for public use). Before being a tomb it had been a hair salon and before that, a ground-level suite. The owner of the salon had knocked out the street-facing wall and replaced it with glass panes. When Konstantyn Illych bought the space, he knocked out the inner walls, too, to make room for the pilgrims. That the rest of 1933 Ivansk had not yet collapsed on us almost made me believe in the saint.
I’d approached Konstantyn Illych about the position after the Union fell and job prospects plummeted. He had already fired two guards for their substandard work ethic. Despite our unfortunate history—the letter of apology he never wrote or signed—we had reached a truce; I blamed him for ruining my career at the agency, and he blamed his failed marriage on the distress I’d caused, and so we were even. Even, but not equal, and Konstantyn Illych enjoyed reminding me of this fact: as my new boss he reveled in assigning me pointless tasks, such as dusting the insides of locks and buffing the stainless steel screws of the display case. I’d reached a similarly uneasy peace with Milena Markivna, who had returned to the building but not to Konstantyn Illych. For the past few months she’d been living on the ninth floor with a stylish young woman named Larissa and her two daughters, but Konstantyn Illych’s repeated assertions that the women were merely roommates made me suspect they were more. Of course, I dared not ask Milena Markivna myself. The only time she and I had spoken since her return, she’d joked that I had finally realized my dream of becoming an Honor Guard. But I sensed my presence embarrassed her—I was a sticky residue from a past she longed to forget.
Most of the tomb’s visitors were women and children. They laid portraits of men atop the display case. When the town’s canning combine had closed, the men had taken to the sunflower fields, drinking cheap perfumes with flip-top caps, the brightly colored bottles shaped like grenades. Now, every evening, the men’s portraits rustled like dead leaves as I swept them away.
We permitted photography inside the tomb. Konstantyn Illych believed it helped spread the word. Visitors loved snapping close-ups of the saint’s teeth, a speckless set of ivories better preserved than any other saint’s and certainly than any Kirovkavite’s, dead or living. We townspeople all carried stomatological trauma, our mouths junk heaps of lead fillings, wire bridges, steel crowns, plastic prostheses. When the pilgrims peered into the saint’s mouth—eternally thrown open, a model patient—they must have been transported to a happier time.
Most of the attention in the tomb centered on the saint, but on occasion I’d catch a pair of eyes on me. A glint of recognition, and perhaps contempt. Likely I imagined this. When the newspapers had begun publishing lists of names from declassified archives, I’d searched for mine but had not seen it. I did find an ex-colleague’s name, from the agency. He must have found it, too—or worse, his family had. The next time his name appeared in the paper, it was to announce that he had hanged himself, “unable to bear the burden of his crimes.” He had been much older than I, had operated in a different time. My tasks had been confined to the desk, and I’d never wielded anything larger than a pen.
* * *
—
Spotlights, striplights, pot lights, floodlights. There are myriad ways to illuminate a delicatessen display case, I learned at the hardware tent at the bazaar.
Most of the concrete storefronts sat empty, as they had before the Union’s collapse, but the tents of the bazaar now sprawled ten blocks, selling anything from c
ow hooves to floppy disks. These tents sprouted and folded at an alarming speed; if one waited too long, it was impossible to find the same vendor twice. I hated this place, with its tantalizing colors and wafts at ever-inflating prices. I always came away feeling poorer, even if I hadn’t spent a single kupon. The conundrum of former times—having money with nothing to spend it on—had been cruelly inverted.
“Are you displaying meat or fish?” the hardware sales boy yelled at me over the rattle of the electric generator by his feet. “Pastries? Greens?” He looked about fourteen and smelled of pomade. Behind him, a wall of shelves gleamed with a dizzying array of light fixtures. A few blinked and/or changed colors.
I didn’t want to explain. “Meat.”
“Fresh or cured?”
“Cured.”
The sales boy warned against fluorescent bulbs, which made meat look blue; high-UV lights drained flesh to an unlively gray; incandescent bulbs promoted rotting. He insisted on halogen, which reacted with tungsten and brought out meat’s natural blush. To demonstrate, he posed his face beside a bulb shaped like a tiny satellite dish. Indeed, a before-unseen pimple on his chin glowed a freshly squeezed red. “A halogen bulb sells your product for you,” he assured.
A halogen bulb cost two hundred kupony and Konstantyn Illych had given me fifty.
“A regular bulb will do,” I said.
The boy puckered his lips, now crimson, as if painted with lipstick. “A halogen bulb pays for itself,” those lips promised.
When I showed the boy my lone bill, his enthusiasm wilted. Again I missed the years when one had fewer choices, fewer ways to disappoint.
* * *
—
The next day I woke at dawn. Konstantyn Illych had instructed me to change the bulb before the crowds of pilgrims arrived outside the tomb and gathered along the glass wall, so as not to detract from the mystique of the saint. I had several times suggested installing curtains to pull over the glass, but Konstantyn Illych said he did not have the money. I doubted this was true. All those coins, warm from pilgrim palms, must have amounted to a weighty sum. And I knew Konstantyn Illych was currently renovating his suite nine stories above. He had wedged an extra room into it, for his runaway foster child. She’d been gone for over a year, but Konstantyn Illych awaited the girl like the pilgrims awaited their savior. He’d even bought her a new wardrobe, in four different sizes, anguished that he couldn’t know how much she had grown.
I unlocked the saint’s display case, slid open its rear door. The smell of oil and dirt burst forth, as if something had been uprooted from the parched earth. I tried to unscrew the spent bulb, contorting my arms to avoid grazing the body, but the bulb had fused to its rusty socket. I could not work while the saint remained inside the case.
I paused and considered the wretched creature: legless, not much larger than a toddler, it screamed at me soundlessly, brown skin taut around its lipless mouth. Konstantyn Illych had told me that the saint belonged to his foster child, but not how she’d gained possession of it, and I had no desire to inquire further.
Things I’d have rather touched: a lamp full of dead insects, swamp scum, the raw cavern of an alley cat’s ear, the slimy inside of a toilet plunger in a public bathroom that had run out of soap. I could have spent the morning bargaining against my fate, if only there had been someone to bargain with.
(I had watched the pilgrims trying to bargain with the saint all the time. They would bend over the glass, inspecting the saint’s nostrils, eyes, ears, for bleeding. Rumors had circulated about the saint’s powers—Tinnitus, soothed! Eczema, cleared! Drinking habit, broken!—but I did not believe them. To me the saint seemed wholly occupied by its century-long scream. Or yawn. I could never decide which.)
I averted my eyes from the mouth, and considered the saint’s torso, hips, the bluish twist of robes where the legs would have been. I wondered if these limbs had broken off postmortem, when the catacombs were ravaged. If the saint had sensed the turbulence in its monastery above. If, in that particular monastery, the monks had been shot on the spot or if they’d had to dance through the town first. If those who’d refused to dance had had the soles of their feet singed with a branding iron, until at last it appeared as if they were dancing. Or had the monks been taken into the forest, away from the resisting townspeople, where only the pines witnessed their transformation: golden crosses torn from necks, rings wrenched off fingers, long hair and beards shaved to render them indistinguishable from the other bodies waiting in the pit graves. I did not want to know any of it, but the questions kept marching into my head until I seized the mummy, pulled it out of the case, and set it on the steel ledge. The body was surprisingly light, as though stuffed with straw. It gave off a sour dust that assailed the back of my throat like a long hairy tongue.
Coughing, sneezing, I attacked the old lightbulb. I pulled, pushed, wriggled, cursed until, at last, my arm shot back with the freed bulb.
I saw it then: the saint teetered on the ledge, tipped toward the floor. I dove to catch it—too late. For such a light object, the crash was momentous, as though the saint had resolutely hurled itself to the ground.
I stared in disbelief as this alleged producer of miracles, the rising star of saints of Ukraine, lay facedown on the floor.
The ledge had been wide enough for the saint—more than wide enough, or I would not have placed the bundle of bones upon it. My exertions with the bulb must have caused the entire counter to shake, and the saint to shimmy toward the edge.
Where the saint’s face had made contact with the tiles lay its teeth. Nine of them, nacreous as pearls, roots curved like claws. Without question I would have to glue them back in. The teeth were integral to the saint’s reputation, which was integral to me keeping my job.
Carefully, I stowed the saint back inside the display case, my palm beneath its head. The skin under the sparse hair felt leathery, like the rind of a baked ham.
Since I did not have glue, the teeth touch-up would have to wait until evening. Soon the pilgrims would start lining up, clutching coins for admission, and Konstantyn Illych’s keys would scratch at the door’s many locks. The austere tomb lacked a suitable hiding spot for the teeth—the saint’s robes, perhaps, but I could not bring myself to rummage through them—so I slipped the teeth into my pants pocket for the day.
I noticed a few straw-yellow hairs clinging to my palm. I shook my hand, my arm, my entire body, until I was free of them.
* * *
—
Back when I asked Konstantyn Illych for the guard job, he’d inquired if I had experience managing crowds. I assured him I did. During my time at the agency, I’d even worked with pilgrims. “You mean, worked against,” presumed Konstantyn Illych, but neither of us were in the mood to quibble over semantics.
What I meant was that, at the agency, one of my tasks had been to regulate pedestrian traffic to Udobsklad, a fuel and artificial fertilizer storage facility that had once been a monastery. “Regulate” meant “stop”—a tedious task no one else at the agency wanted, so it was dumped on me, a novice at the time. Every spring, small groups of pilgrims would make an illegal procession of 25 kilometers, sneaking through Kirovka, through the forest, to the arched gates of Udobsklad. This they did in spite of the clearly marked signs warning of hazardous material. At the gates, the pilgrims would sing songs, as they had allegedly done for the past six hundred springs. They still considered the storage facility the holy site of some ancient, highly improbable event. The town council had tolerated the procession until we made an embarrassing discovery: among these fanatics figured respectable citizens—two factory directors and a senior lieutenant. Every spring henceforth I had to intercept groups traveling through Kirovka and fine them. One group tried to pass themselves off as a touring choir, another as a foreign delegation; most of the pilgrims, however, were candid about their purpose of travel, and their loyal
ty to their cause baffled me. At the end of the day I would trudge back to the office, my suit dusty and shoes scuffed, and my colleagues would make me recount all my dealings with the pilgrims while they laughed. Before long it occurred to me that my colleagues were laughing not at the pilgrims but at me, for having to chase after them.
When, after a few years, the Ministry of Labor and Social Development converted the storage facility into a psychoneurological internat and erected a tall iron fence around it, pilgrimage numbers did drop. But the hardiest pilgrims persisted. They set up at the iron gates and, worst of all, drew in orphans to sing with them.
If I issued too few fines, my superior questioned my vigilance; too many fines, and my superior scolded my stale thinking. And still the pilgrims crept back, year after year.
* * *
—
“Who said you could redecorate?” Konstantyn Illych stood at the doorway of the tomb, nodding at the linen sheet over the saint. Konstantyn Illych’s hair was uncombed, still ruffled from sleep. The previous year it had turned white in one burst, like a dandelion gone to seed.
“Why not try it for a day?” I suggested. “Divinity needs a bit of mystery.”
Konstantyn Illych closed the door behind him. The pilgrims lined up along the glass wall outside were eyeing the sheet, too. Like Konstantyn Illych, they did not look thrilled by its addition.
“Didn’t Zaya keep the saint covered, in a pillowcase?” I reminded him. I’d never met the girl, or the pillowcase, but Konstantyn Illych had supplied me with plenty of details.