Good Citizens Need Not Fear

by Maria Reva

  Zaya feels dizzy, as though sun-stricken. “You did not.”

  “Did so. As a foreigner I’d have to pay an extra tax.”

  The shovel in Zaya’s hands feels unbearably heavy. Does it, too, belong to her?

  Apparently, wreaking terror is all Zaya is good for. Had she forgotten? She thinks of the boot maker again. After the hut had burned down and the woman had delivered Zaya back to the orphanage—this same woman who had found her on the forest floor, gasping for breath, with yellowed eyes and a slit lip that made Zaya look, the woman told her, like a fish dragged from the sea until the hook dislodged; this same woman who had carried Zaya in her arms and nursed her back to health—the abandonment hadn’t hurt. Zaya had felt numb. She hadn’t let herself dream of living with the boot maker. Nor had Zaya, many years later, imagined living with Konstantyn. When she’d spat on the Party members at the pageant, she’d also spat on the possibility (however slim) of a home back in Kirovka. The internat had taught her well: as soon as you want something, you lack it; and if you do get it, it can easily be taken away. But this lesson came at a cost—a dry unfeeling clump had formed in her chest, had grown with age. She wonders now: If she slit her skin open, would nothing but sawdust spill out?

  Down in the pit, the clients are bickering.

  The venture capitalist asks Almaza why she bought the monastery instead of leasing it. Almaza tells him she doesn’t like leasing things. Does she lease the penthouse she sleeps in? The jewelry she wears? The meals she eats?

  Zaya considers. She can fill the pit, finish them all off. She has no doubt now she is capable of this. Tantalized, she has unlocked a secret chamber within herself, discovered its horrors.

  She drops the shovel, backs away.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Almaza calls from the pit. “Get us out.”

  The soiled skirt of her white dress bunched under one arm, Zaya crosses the grounds like a runaway bride. She heaves open the iron gates, steps between the orphans sleeping on the dewy grass, still waiting to be let in. She climbs into the black cargo van and honks the horn, waking the campers.

  “Get in,” she calls from her rolled-down window. “We’re getting out of here, for good.”

  The campers squint at her sleepily. The orange-maned teenager props himself up on his elbows, nods toward the gates. “She left it open,” he tells the others.

  “Don’t even try,” Zaya warns. “Get in or I’m rolling over you.”

  “Where are you taking us?” asks the teenager.

  Zaya thinks on it. “Wherever you were before.”

  No one moves.

  “You get fired?” asks the woman with the wispy braids, adjusting her rucksack under her head.

  “I’m trying to help you.” Zaya is unsure, precisely, how. She slumps in her seat, suddenly exhausted.

  “Does anyone else hear the screaming?” asks the man with heart-shaped glasses.

  “I bet if you grow your hair out you’ll get another job,” the teenager says to Zaya, smiling shyly.

  The others study Zaya’s face, her botched lip, and keep silent.

  Zaya backs the van onto the road in a swift arc, hoping to make plain her threat of leaving them behind. She begins to roll away, glancing in the rearview mirror, expecting the campers to jolt up, pile into the van with their tents and tarps and camping stoves. But they don’t. One by one, they walk in the other direction, enter the gates.

  * * *

  —

  The rest of the drive is a breathless full-throttle dash, Zaya narrowly making the curves in the road. This deep dread is what freedom feels like, she tells herself. She feels it every time she runs away.

  She imagines what she’ll tell Konstantyn. This stolen van is all she has to show for herself, unlike the superorphans Almaza is always raving about. Zaya hasn’t remade her life into an inspiring lesson, hasn’t grown rich or famous—and literally, she hasn’t grown at all. Perhaps the fact that she remains small will also be a disappointment.

  * * *

  —

  Kirovka looks more ratty than Zaya remembers it, its roads cratered, its lamp poles a drunken procession leaning in every direction. Only the banks and pharmacies appear new—almost every block has one or the other—their respective aprons of sidewalk freshly tiled. Zaya weaves along the town’s streets, searching for Konstantyn’s building. In the center of the tree-lined plaza, she spots a concrete pedestal, from the old Lenin statue. Only his feet remain now, big as bathtubs, rusty rebar curving from them like veins.

  At last Zaya parks in front of 1933 Ivansk.

  She beholds the sight, trying to make sense of it. Konstantyn’s tenth-floor suite—she recognizes the red-and-white-checkered curtains—is the last left hanging intact between two pillars of rubble. She can see cornflower-blue sky through a gap in the center. The edifice seems, understandably, abandoned.

  Still, Zaya calls his name.

  A piece of debris flakes off Konstantyn’s apartment, hurtles to the ground, and smashes into a fine dust.

  Zaya doesn’t know if it is hope, or the devastating absence of it, that makes her take a step toward the building.

  Another step, tentative, as if she is approaching a sleeping bear.

  Once inside, though, she bounds up the dusty staircase. An unsettling draft blows through the many cracks in the walls. A pair of roaches the size of her hand skitter down a dark corridor—no, surely just rats?—but still she climbs.

  When she reaches Suite 76—its steel outer door freckled with rust—she lifts the heavy knocker and raps. After a moment she hears the click of the inner door’s dead bolt. A familiar sound—yet under the circumstances, miraculous. She hears the inner door squeal open—its red faux-leather upholstery surfaces in her mind—then the ticking of more locks, like clockwork, followed by the gravelly melody of the chain sliding along its track, and dropping. At last the steel door swings open.

  For a moment Konstantyn stands there, blinking, a dripping wooden spoon in hand.

  He doesn’t look at her with fear, as the clients did, but regards her with simple recognition. She feels herself shrinking, suddenly powerless, but also—with relief—less monstrous.

  “Just in time for lunch,” Konstantyn announces. His eyes flit over her billowy white dress but, mercifully, he doesn’t ask questions. He steps aside to let her in, as if she’s just returned from a stroll, as if he’d been expecting her.

  The smell of the apartment greets her, unchanged. Old books, laurel leaves. A pot of soup bubbles on the stove, infusing the air with a sharp sweetness, like the underbelly of a rotting log. Zaya can’t recall the last time she ate.

  “Mushroom soup,” he exclaims, as though nothing could make him happier. He gestures to a chair at the kitchen table.

  The fact that the apartment hangs above an abyss becomes a distant worry.

  The soup is salty but delicious, globs of oil shimmering over fungal caps and gills. She remembers not to scoop her spoon too deep, where the peppercorns hide. As she devours two bowlfuls with three slices of rye bread, uncertain if she’ll be invited to stay for another meal, Konstantyn chatters away. The other tenants having evacuated, he’s never lived in such quiet, he tells her. He thought he’d enjoy it, but at night he can hear his own pulse, like the drum of an approaching army. A few tenants moved to their dachas, others moved in with relatives many towns over. His ex-wife, whom he hopes Zaya might one day meet, left for Poland with her new family—he pauses at this last word, a seemingly difficult verdict.

  “What happened to the saint?” Zaya asks. She wants to keep him talking as she reaches for more bread.

  Observing how Konstantyn’s face darkens, she senses that his chatter has been an effort to avoid the subject.

  “I’m so sorry. The saint is gone,” he says at last. “But at least it wasn’t crushed under the rub
ble.” A few days before the tomb caved in, Konstantyn discovered that the guard had sold the saint. When he demanded the saint’s return, the guard told him it would be impossible, the saint could be anywhere. “Actually, everywhere,” Konstantyn corrects himself. “It had been split into many pieces.”

  Zaya smiles at this thought, imagines the saint scattered all over the Earth, ever present. Satiated at last, she slips her half-eaten piece of bread into a pocket for later. “Why didn’t you leave like the others?” she asks. “Go to your dacha?”

  “I’ve been busy.” His face erupts in a grin. “Home renovation. I’ve squeezed in a second room,” he says. “Yours.”

  Konstantyn nods at a cherrywood door off the corridor. Zaya doesn’t remember it being there before. He springs to his feet, beckons her over, opens it. They stand at the threshold.

  In the years to come, Zaya will reminisce about this room. It’s truly beautiful, everything she hadn’t dared dream of as a child, and it will stretch larger and larger in her mind, hold more windows. She’ll remember the telescope, the easel. The bronze gilded wallpaper and the painted sun shining from the ceiling, its rays twirling ribbons. The books, spines uncracked, take up an entire wall of shelves. Most of all she’ll remember Konstantyn, beaming at her. “Welcome home.”

  She won’t know, won’t want to know, which of these remembered details are real.

  She gets only a glimpse of her new room before its glossy hardwood floor gives out.

  The furniture folds into the center of the room and vanishes, like a pop-up card closing.

  One of the walls falls away, pulling a chunk of ceiling along with it. Zaya watches books flutter ten stories down, like a dole of doves.

  For a second she thinks she could stay here until the entire apartment succumbs, but her body instinctively snaps into action. She grabs Konstantyn’s hand and pulls him back through the corridor. Light floods in as the walls and the rest of the ceiling crumble behind them. They race down the staircase two steps at a time, terrified of tripping, more terrified of slowing down. At last they’re outside, across the road.

  Konstantyn doubles over, panting. A deafening crack, and the two halves of the building tumble into each other like lovers reunited, then collapse. A great plume of dust envelops them.

  With each passing year Zaya thinks, Perhaps just one more year? The place isn’t so bad, after all. The Church has restored the cupolas, sealed the scratches in the frescoes and repainted them. Zaya keeps the sanitarka room, and Konstantyn sleeps in the sun-warmed attic. It was his idea to lease the monastery to the Church, after he and Zaya ate through the sea cabbage and squeezed flat the last tube of liver paste.

  After 1933 Ivansk collapsed, Zaya had returned to the monastery with Konstantyn riding in the van’s passenger seat. They found the place deserted, the orphans and clients gone. The orphans must have pulled the screaming clients out of the hole—not just a hole to the orphans, but a grave yawning open. The only things left behind were the papers attesting to Zaya’s ownership of the property, thrown onto her bed. Zaya had imagined Almaza casting a last wary gaze over the lush grounds, their beauty having revealed a shameful secret.

  Now Zaya wanders the meadows, watching the bustling monks as they hike up their robes to pull weeds. They try to fill in all the pits, but the property is large, and it isn’t unusual to stumble upon yet another unfilled hole. They’ve torn down that old fence, and soon will build an even taller, sturdier one. For security. The forest is full of beasts, the monks say. We’ve got to keep them out.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My deepest gratitude to those who helped bring this book into the world: Amelia (Molly) Atlas, agent extraordinaire and short-story advocate. Everyone at Doubleday, especially Lee Boudreaux for her unifying vision for this book, as well as Alessandro Gottardo (aka Shout) and Emily Mahon for the cover. At Knopf Canada, Lynn Henry for her wisdom and willingness to dive into the weeds of the sentences with me, and Rick Meier, who played a key role when the book was on submission. Heartfelt thanks to Sarah Savitt and Donna Coonan at Virago Books.

  I owe a debt of gratitude to the Michener Center for Writers for giving me the time, resources, and mentorship to write this book. Special thanks to Elizabeth McCracken, Deb Olin Unferth, Jim Magnuson, Steven Dietz, Edward Carey, Bret Anthony Johnston, Michael Adams, Ben Fountain, Marla Akin, Debbie Dewees, Billy Fatzinger, and Holly Doyel. Thank you, Lara Prescott, Olga Vilkotskaya, Jessica Topacio Long, Nouri Zarrugh, Veronica Martin—invaluable classmates and friends. Thanks as well to Zoey Leigh Peterson and Julie Wernersbach, and to benefactors from the underworld: James A. Michener and E. L. Keene.

  The writing community of Vancouver, especially Renée Sarojini Saklikar, whose mentorship came at a crucial time, and Isaac Yuen, for his friendship and exquisite prose. The Writers’ Trust of Canada and RBC Bank, for the generous support. Adam Day at the Baltic Writing Residency, where the “Lucky Toss” story unlocked itself at last.

  The editors and journals who first published these stories: C. Michael Curtis at The Atlantic, Claire Boyle at McSweeney’s, Rosalind Porter at Granta.

  Huge appreciation to my parents, Jane and Alex, for their unwavering support. This book began with a lunchtime conversation about our old building in Ukraine (also missing from municipal records). I’ve gone back to that building many times to make sure it still stands. But maybe it was never really there?

  Much gratitude to my grandfather Georgiy Reva, a well of historical and literary knowledge.

  To Little Jerry, for standing guard.

  To Michael, for everything. To Michael’s parents, for their curiosity, openness, and kindness.

  And thank you, forever, to my sister Anna Pidgorna, first reader and confidante, who gave me the courage to write. This book is for you.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Maria Reva was born in Ukraine and grew up in Canada. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere, and has won a National Magazine Award. She also works as an opera librettist.

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