by Maria Reva
* * *
—
What if something were to happen to the grandparents? Say they were to perish in a fire. Just last month, a sickeningly sweet smoke rose through the vents from one of the suites below, pouring into theirs, and Lila threw her best linens from the balcony to save them. Or the grandparents might succumb to gas poisoning. At this very moment, they could be two blue corpses splayed out on the floor—and the rest of the family wouldn’t know it.
These past few weeks, no one has checked in.
Or maybe the family has tried to check in but the grandparents couldn’t hear the phone ring over the roaring music.
“YOU’RE A TENDER LILY,” the record player shrieks, “STUCK TO THE BOTTOM OF MY BOOT.”
Maybe the family tried sending a letter, but the new mailman can’t find the grandparents’ building because some idiot chiseled the numbers out of the concrete beside the entrance all those years ago. Pyotr borrows a pink piece of chalk from the children hopscotching on the road, braves the crowd of pilgrims at the front of the building, and writes a large blocky “1933” above where the stenciled numbers used to be.
The family may even have tried to visit, but didn’t knock loudly enough. Lila posts a note on the door: KNOCK LOUDLY. The grandmother’s own grandmother had a sign like that on her gate in the village: KNOCK HARD OR THROW A ROCK AT THE DOG. At least she had a dog. All the grandparents have is this oversize roach.
And don’t any of their children have a spare key? Maybe Lila should mail one of the daughters a spare key—just a key, no note or any other sign of life.
“Maybe we should just call everyone,” Pyotr suggests. “Make sure they haven’t been trying to check on us.”
“Then what? They’ll hear from us and won’t need to check on us.”
By having all these children, Pyotr and Lila thought they’d buffered themselves against isolation. Instead, the grandparents don’t have friends because of all the time they put into the children. First came the sons, which Pyotr and Lila kept having until, finally, came the daughters. Daughters are supposed to stick around, help out. But now all the daughters live just as far away as the sons, in big cities with job prospects, busy caring for their own children, believing those children will stick around.
* * *
—
Maybe it’s a law of physics. Once a baby is expelled, it will keep moving away at a constant speed unless acted upon.
Not that the grandparents will act first.
* * *
—
To repurpose the tin box, Lila yanks out the newspaper lining. Under the lining she discovers a glossy pamphlet featuring a photo of a fine-boned man in a plum blazer. Tethered to his lapel is a rock-laden insect just like the one the grandparents received. It emits a dull sheen, like a dusty brooch. Lila can’t understand why anyone would wear a cockroach.
The Madagascar hissing cockroach, the manual explains. They breed under rotting jungle logs. The embellishments on their carapaces are among the rarest gems in the world: serendibite, in its uncut form.
“Serendibite,” Lila repeats.
Rarer than diamonds, the manual insists. Infinitely more valuable. And on your pet, priceless.
* * *
—
When was the last time the grandparents saw the roach? Last week? Last month? They’re ready to tear the whole apartment apart.
“The last piece of our grandson,” Lila laments.
“His most beloved pet,” says Pyotr. “And we lost it.”
They find it two minutes later, drinking from a leaky valve under the kitchen sink. Lila plucks the roach off by the chain and it pirouettes in the air. In the strong midday light, its gems give off a bronze glint. The grandparents marvel at them.
When Lila lowers the insect into its tin box, Pyotr asks, “What now?”
“We care for it like we cared for our grandson,” says Lila. Unpleasant as the grandson was as a child—with his mercurial stomach, his bulge-eyed tantrums—they never gave up.
* * *
—
The Madagascar hissing cockroach makes the easiest pet, the manual assures the grandparents. The Madagascar hissing cockroach is perfectly content with the simplest foods, like carrots! But it always loves a taste of home: guavas and papayas, lightly rotten.
The grandparents don’t know what guavas and papayas look like, so assume they are expensive.
Provide plenty of water, to be replaced daily, the manual instructs. To mitigate the risk of drowning, place a sponge in the bowl, to be replaced weekly.
The grandparents don’t use sponges themselves, only rags from old underwear.
The Madagascar hissing cockroach does not like direct sunlight, the manual warns. Wear the roach brooch only at night, otherwise your pet will burrow down your collar or into your hair.
Oh, and the Madagascar hissing cockroach is very clean, cleaner than people, but if kept under less-than-ideal conditions it is known to harbor up to fourteen species of mold, some of which are potent allergens. In the event of a mold outbreak, simply place the roach into a plastic bag with a half cup of extra-fine flour, gently shake the bag to dislodge the fungal roots—you may even have to rub the roach a little—transfer the roach to a sieve deep enough to prevent escape, and repeat as many times as needed to remove all the mold. Don’t forget to vacuum the carpets, linen, and furniture to get any straggling spores, run an air purifier/dehumidifier, throw all your clothes into the laundry, and, finally, scrub your hair and skin. Reevaluate why you had the outbreak in the first place, and find ways to improve your cleanliness.
* * *
—
What the grandparents reevaluate: the grandson’s wishes. What he truly wanted for them wasn’t a pet cockroach, but a better life, a peaceful retirement. He would have wanted them to give up the bone record business, get that tumor removed. Turn that dreadful music off.
* * *
—
The pawnshop owner, a hulking man in a squeaky leather jacket, won’t touch the roach brooch.
“Roach brooches are the rage in the highest fashion circles,” Lila insists. She shows him the photograph of the model wearing a roach, but the pawnshop owner doesn’t seem to know about these fashion circles.
“The gems are among the rarest in the world,” says Pyotr. “Serendibite.”
The pawnshop owner laughs, as if Pyotr has made up a word.
Later that week in the train station underpass, the grandparents try to sell the roach brooch to a French tourist, a rich-looking one. The woman has a mink fur coiled around her neck, the animal’s tiny jaws clasped to its own rear. Lila tells the tourist that this is one of those mutant Chernobyl cockroaches, the ones there are rumors about.
“But why glue rocks onto it?” the French tourist asks.
“Serendibite,” Pyotr shouts.
At last the grandparents find a jeweler two towns over, an ancient man whose skin hangs from his face and arms in doughy sheets. When he opens the box to appraise the contents, the roach gives a loud hiss, like an old bus when its brake is released, and scrambles up the jeweler’s sleeve. The jeweler screams, slaps his arm, then elbow and shoulder, as though to put out a fire. He stops screaming only when he frees himself from his shirt and locks himself in the bathroom. It takes Pyotr and Lila half an hour to coax the roach from under the cabinet using crumbs and lint from their pockets.
“So long as the gems are touching that thing,” the jeweler declares behind the bathroom door, “I’m not touching the gems.”
* * *
—
Never attempt to remove the gems from the insect, the manual warns. Madagascar hissing cockroaches have a natural waxy covering, and the patented technology used to attach the gems took months to develop. They won’t come off without harm to your pet.
Of course, the
grandparents don’t want to do harm.
Even in the labor camps, the guards would wait until a prisoner died before gouging out a golden tooth—or so Pyotr and Lila read. The rules of civility hold.
Roaches don’t live very long anyway. In the past, whenever the apartment had an infestation of the lowly local ones, their corpses soon turned up everywhere.
* * *
—
The best thing about the Madagascar hissing cockroach, the manual proclaims: it can live up to five years!
* * *
—
If the grandparents stop putting carrot peels in the roach’s box, or refilling the water, it isn’t on purpose. They can be so forgetful, with their busy days, with the tumor, with the music that drowns out the tinny scratches coming from the box.
“I’LL BE THERE FOR YOU,” the music promises, “WHEN THE FLAMES GET HIGHER.”
The scratches may cease any day now.
* * *
—
Which family member will call first? One of the daughters, surely. But which?
Whichever daughter calls first will get a share of the money from the serendibite. Of course, this will be a surprise. Pyotr and Lila wouldn’t want the money to be the main draw. They witnessed the greedy frenzy after the grandson died, and wouldn’t want to repeat it.
* * *
—
Maybe nature isn’t a circle of life, but a circle of abandonment.
* * *
—
It’s true what they say about roaches surviving anything. Even without food or water, this one is looking as if it will survive both the grandparents.
The grandparents can’t bring themselves to smash the roach with a frying pan. They can’t fathom killing the last remnant of their grandson so violently, or risk damaging the jewels.
They can’t bring themselves to drown it either. Or freeze it. Or suffocate it in a plastic bag.
The only sensible way to deal with it: treat the roach brooch like the insect that it is, and spray it with insecticide.
In a spray bottle, Lila mixes baking soda, chili pepper, soapsuds, and sunflower seed oil (this last one, to block breathing pores).
She turns to her husband. “I cooked, you serve.”
Pyotr, solemn, sits the tin box on the kitchen table. He pops the lid with one hand, holds the spray bottle with the other. His finger on the trigger, he wishes the cockroach would try to run, display instinctual fear and distrust, like every other living thing. But the insect sits on its newspaper bed, wiggling its antennae. How could such a gentle creature possibly survive in the jungle?
In the corridor, the phone rings.
The grandparents look at each other in relief.
It must be one of their children. How silly the grandparents have been, to think themselves abandoned. How awful to imagine their beloved daughter (or granddaughter!) waiting at the other end of the line, worrying.
Pyotr stays with the roach while Lila hurries down the corridor. She cradles the phone against her cheek.
A deep male voice fills the line. A stranger’s. “Have you taken the jewels off the roach yet?”
Lila’s face contorts. She wants to slam the phone down, free the line for the children’s calls.
The man introduces himself as an employee of the pawnshop the grandparents visited two weeks ago. Good thing his boss jotted down their phone number, the man says, if only to make them go away.
Lila finds her voice again. “We’re just about to take the jewels off.”
“Don’t.” Unlike his boss, this man knows about roach brooches, has seen the catalogs. He’s willing to offer a fine price for it. He just needs her to check one tiny thing.
“I’ll do anything,” Lila says.
“On the roach’s belly, between the front and middle sets of legs, should be a tiny RB. Like a logo plaque inside a Prada bag, proving authenticity.”
From the corridor, Lila yells the instructions to her husband in the kitchen.
“I can’t see its underside,” her husband says.
“Lift it up and take a peek,” she shouts.
“With my hands?”
“With your hands.”
Pyotr holds his breath, hooks his fingers around the carapace. The bits that aren’t encrusted with jewels feel slippery, like polished wood. The heft is surprising, and he wonders how much of the weight belongs to the living part of the brooch. The roach’s legs swivel wildly as he turns it upside down. Its abdomen is composed of tawny segments that slide in and out of each other. He spots the small black head, bowed like a penitent’s, the two matte bumps for eyes.
“I don’t see any mark,” says Pyotr, staring at the belly.
“My husband is still looking,” Lila relays to the pawnbroker.
“It isn’t here,” says Pyotr.
“It got rubbed off,” relays Lila.
“A genuine mark can’t get rubbed off. It’s branded onto the exoskeleton,” the pawnbroker explains. “What you have there is counterfeit, the so-called jewels worthless as pebbles.”
“But the insect—that part is real.”
“Without the jewels,” the pawnbroker says, “it’s just a roach.”
In the kitchen, Pyotr is still holding the insect. He’s entranced by its rear end. There’s something wrong with it. A wet white glob is squeezing out. The roach slips from between his fingers and falls onto Pyotr’s stomach, where it clings to his woolly sweater. Its weight feels both repulsive and comforting. The white mass begins to separate into wiggling fingers, with tiny black dots at the tips. Eyes. The shimmering nymphs are attached to a string, like a crystal garland. Impossible to count them all as they unspool. Fifty, sixty?
Pyotr has never seen anything like it. His own children were born behind closed doors; he had to wait in a hospital corridor with the other expectant fathers, trying to distinguish his wife’s howls from the chorus of other women.
In the light, the babies spring awake, detach themselves from their string. But they don’t just scamper away. They crawl all over the mother, and she becomes furry with antennae. They eat the string that once bound them together. This is how they’ll grow strong. Within an hour, their shells will harden to a caramel color.
At this very moment, the pawnbroker is imploring Lila to get rid of the knockoff as soon as possible. In the factories, the breeders don’t bother to sort the males from the females; often the females are pregnant when sold.
But by the time the grandmother hangs up and reenters the kitchen, the grandfather’s sweater is covered with babies. They eat the crumbs from his breakfast, hardly larger than crumbs themselves. Pyotr looks up at Lila and smiles, eyes shining. She can’t help but smile with him when he says, “Aren’t they beautiful?”
THE ERMINE COAT
On the way back from the bazaar, Aunt Milena points to the cracks under the balconies of our building. She warns me never to walk or stand under them, unlike those pilgrims lined up for the tomb. “Little by little,” she says, “we’re sinking into the soft earth.”
Knowing what comes next, I lift my net sack to my chest, hide behind the leafy beet stalks. Over the past month Aunt Milena has used any excuse to remind me that our family’s misfortune is my fault. Even the rat-size cockroach she was trapped with in the elevator last week—also, apparently, my doing. If it weren’t for my misbehavior, my mother, sister, and I could have left this collapsing building, this collapsing country.
But Aunt Milena must be feeling generous today. Instead of scolding me, she sits on her haunches, studies her own boot print in the mud. “There used to be a village here,” she says, and I imagine one no larger than her foot. She tells me the villagers spoke Ukrainian and picked cranberries for a living. Then the marshes were drained, sunflowers sown for oil, the villagers pried from their dung huts and stacked on top of
each other. Many of them refused to move into the high-rises, never having lived so far from the earth. “The village was called Ivankiv,” she says. “It lives on as our street name, but Russified.” When she lived in the countryside, doing farmwork in exchange for a bed, the villagers would pass down secret lore.
Aunt Milena moved in with us two years ago, after Grandmother died. All she’d brought with her: the clothes on her back, a rapier, a record player and phonograph, and sixteen vinyl records for Mother to sell (but Mother refused, saying the records wouldn’t be worth much these days anyway).
Some mornings I find Mother and Aunt Milena twisted around each other on the foldout, mouths agape, as though they escaped the same nightmare, just barely.
Like Mother, Aunt Milena is tall with a long pale face. She and Mother could be sisters. When they drop me and my sister off at school, no one asks, and we don’t tell. The neighbors might whisper, but what can they do? Mother says we’re living in an age of freedom. Aunt Milena says we’re living in an age of fifteen brands of sausage, which is not the same thing as freedom. When I ask where are these fifteen brands of sausage, Mother says we need only visit Kiev to find them. Aunt Milena says no Kirovkavite can afford such an indulgence. But whatever the argument, Aunt Milena never wins, because when Mother takes Aunt Milena’s face in her hands and beams her brightest smile, Aunt Milena breaks every time.
* * *
—
Last year, for a five-month stint, Mother and Aunt Milena sewed fur coats for the black market. Mother was already a master seamstress, and Aunt Milena caught on quickly. A large sweaty man whose face hung slack like a bulldog’s would come for the coats on Mondays. Volkov never wore fur himself, only velvet tracksuits, usually maroon. After inspecting the coats, he’d toss stacks of kupony to Mother and Aunt Milena. Twenty, thirty stacks a week. The new currency looked like play money, with its picture of the Sofia Cathedral getting sucked into a flower-shaped black hole, and Aunt Milena told me it was worth about as much. Volkov would drop the next batch of pelts onto the kitchen table. Always the same slick black pelts, as if Volkov had ripped out the stitching from the week before and returned the pieces to be resewn, over and over. No one knew what type of animal they’d belonged to. Something long, caged. Its thick hairs snuck between our bedsheets, under our eyelids and tongues. I worried I’d start coughing up slimy ropes, as our neighbor’s cat was known to do. We picked at our limbs, scratched our scalps. My schoolmates told the nurse I had lice, and if not lice, then definitely worms.