Mannequin Girl

by Ellen Litman

  Kat cried when she was told. She refused to believe it, pleaded with her parents to not send her away. It was all wrong, this school, she told them. Couldn’t they see how wrong it was for her? She was supposed to be at their school, the three of them finally together, putting on plays, winning awards, sitting next to one another at lunchtime.

  She has been hoping for a miracle, a pardon. There was some talk of it at first, some alternatives offered and bandied about: she could do half-days at her parents’ school, physical therapy at home. They’d find a policlinic with a swimming pool. But in the final weeks of August it all came to naught; a space at the special school had been secured, and Anechka and Misha spent the last days of summer hassling with alterations and returns.

  Now they eye Kat with caution, as if she were a ticking bomb, or as if she’d gotten sick on purpose. And that is the worst part: she did, in fact, fake her little sickness the morning before. She’d stayed awake all night, thinking of the special school, of what a travesty her first day of school—not to mention her birthday—would become. By morning, stricken with grief and insomnia, she already looked green around the eyes. All it took was a couple of hard coughs and the shove of a toothbrush deep against her tongue. Voilà! Afterward, as she was resting on the sofa with a glass of cold water, she wasn’t sure if the vomiting had been entirely an act.

  The truth is, she hates deformities. She’s always been weirdly sensitive to trauma. A pair of crutches, an empty sleeve, a prosthesis (crude, wooden or metal, ending in a sickeningly narrow peg)—a glimpse of any of these guarantees her a night of fitful vomiting, a week of nightmares. There are certain streets she avoids, certain shops she won’t go near. Anechka tries to shame her. Her fears, she says, are plebeian, banal. The legless man by the grocery, who sits on a low dolly cart, was probably injured in the war. Same with the drunk who has a leather bulb for a hand. These men are heroes!

  Heroes or not, it doesn’t matter anymore. There won’t be any heroes here. Just children. Deformed, freakish children.

  THE SCHOOL grounds, it turns out, lie outside the park. You have to climb through a hole in a low concrete fence with pieces of iron sticking out. You wonder what sort of desperate force it took to break through these concrete planks, what insane yearning to escape could have been driving the people who did it, and then you have to ask how bad it must be inside.

  The sight of the campus is dispiriting. The low-slung boxes of the buildings, unadorned, identically drab. The medical block. The dorms. The school block. Perhaps it’s the drizzle that makes the campus so featureless. They dither in between these buildings—which one is block seven?—their feet sinking into the soggy gravel paths. “Use your imagination,” says Misha. He points to the flowerbeds, which must be bright with pansies in the summer, but now are dark squares of mud.

  Kat tries. There are walkways connecting the blocks, seemingly suspended in the air, and there’s the swimming pool—not quite like an aquarium, no, but it does have one wall that’s a giant green panel of glass, and it’s not unthinkable that on a good day it might look as if it housed exquisite sea life. Still, no matter how hard she tries, all she sees is how bleak the campus is, sealed off, and, above all, hospital-like.

  THE DOOR to the principal’s office, upholstered in leather and studded with impressive metal bolts, is guarded by a secretary. She is a youngish woman, thin and sallow, with a drippy, malnourished sort of face. You take one look at her and imagine all her troubles: a slogger husband, sickly kids, limited salary, early pain in the joints, the long wait at the laundry, the sales clerk at the milk store who called her an imbecile, the shoes that pinch her toes. Add to that the total chaos of the special kiddies the day before, reams of new paperwork, and the last thing she needs today is these stragglers, this pair of milksops.

  “Our girl was indisposed,” says Kat’s mother.

  “She was what?”

  “Ill. Ailing. Unwell. Laid up.” Anechka abhors all manner of crudeness. Also, she has a great vocabulary.

  “And now she’s suddenly healthy?” The secretary narrows her eyes. She flips through a sheaf of papers to verify Kat’s name. “You must take her to block five.”

  “And where is that?” says Kat’s father, advancing, making it clear he isn’t impressed with the way she is doing her job. Misha, for all his gentleness, can be a daunting presence—tall, curly-haired like the poet A. S. Pushkin, and decked out in a suit and tie. He looks like someone who can make a few phone calls and get this woman fired, though of course in reality he’s just a teacher and has neither an office nor a phone.

  Faced with such a surprising burst of power, the secretary yields. “Fine, I’ll take you,” she says unhappily, because frankly it’s not part of her job.

  They follow her: up and down the stairs, through a series of French doors, in and out of hallways—an unsettling sequence of turns, a whiff of something meaty from the canteen, a dip into a tunnel of bedrooms, the vomity linoleum of long, connecting corridors. There have been no deformities so far. They’ve seen no one at all. Still, whenever they pass a wall display with pictures, Kat lowers her eyes.

  They are moving along the cold yellow walkway when at last they hear voices in the distance. Kids’ voices. Two girls, singing. The melody leaps wildly inside the hollow walkway. It’s a popular song from two summers ago: “Kings can do anything. Kings can do anything except marry for love.”

  The girls look tiny. There’s something odd in their appearance, something unyielding and stiff, and it takes Kat a moment to take in the contraptions they are in. Their heads are held up by white plastic collars; thin metal slats run alongside their necks; and beyond that, she can see the shape of something cumbersome, like armor, gripping them under their blue uniform jackets and pants. When they turn, it is with their whole bodies.

  The secretary asks, what’s with the ruckus? “Why are you here? What’s going on?” The girls try to explain: they’ve misplaced their school diaries, and now they must find them, because . . . because . . .

  “Go back to your class.”

  “But the diaries?”

  “Out! Now!”

  The girls seem untroubled by this harshness. They do a comical about-face and scurry off in the direction they came from.

  “How can you speak to them like that?” says Anechka. “Is it not enough that they’re physically damaged? You have to maim them on the inside?”

  “We treat these children,” says the secretary. “We educate them. You don’t like our methods, you can take back your girl’s paperwork. We have a waiting list full of very grateful people.”

  “Grateful for what?”

  But the secretary won’t engage in the fine nuances of Anechka’s argument. “You want out?”

  Kat’s heart nearly stops. It is her chance, her miracle, her pardon. Anechka is a hothead when it comes to the injustices of school life. She takes up the flimsiest of causes, writes letters, makes phone calls, or, as Alexander Roshdal says, blows things out of proportion. Last year, when a few boys in Lithuania got expelled for not informing on their teacher, she and Misha joined a protest, which nearly cost them their jobs. Poor judgment, Roshdal calls it, and though Kat disagrees, right now this so-called poor judgment is a gift. All it will take is one word: Yes! Yes, we want out.

  “No,” says Misha. “We don’t.”

  The four of them pause, and in the momentary quiet there’s a faint giggle from the far end of the walkway, then a few tentative notes. The girls, emboldened by the distance they have covered, start again with their ludicrous song. “Kings can do anything. Kings can do anything.”

  “We maim them here, don’t we?”

  ON THE INSIDE, the school is a spidery organism. You follow the web of its walkways, and you barely notice as one building ends, another one begins. Soon you don’t notice at all. Borders become blurry, indistinct. There are several dorm floors, two classroom blocks, two separate canteens.

  Block five is where the lower grades at
tend their daily classes, where they keep their belongings, where after evening walks they return to do their homework. It has an ordinary school layout: rows of doors, parquet floors in the hallways, all the usual displays on the walls: Milestones of Our History. Nothing’s Forgotten; No One’s Forgotten. At the end of the hallway on the second floor is a faculty lounge with an adjoining bathroom.

  “I’d like to meet the teacher,” says Anechka.

  “You can do it on Saturday, when you pick up your girl.”

  “I’d like to do it now,” insists Anechka.

  “Have I been unclear?” says the secretary. “Have I been speaking to a wall? No outside people during regular school hours.”

  “Let’s go,” Misha begs under his breath, taking Anechka gently by the elbow. They are already desperately late.

  “I’ll write a letter of complaint,” says Anechka.

  “Knock yourself out,” the secretary says. She moves to the side, her arms folded, her foot tapping ostentatiously. She stands there and waits.

  Before they leave, Anechka gives Kat some two-kopek coins in a cellophane baggie. “You call us if anything happens. You hear me? Anything! If anyone dares to touch you—”

  “They won’t,” Misha jumps in to say, and his words are like a soft splash of water against Anechka’s mounting excitement.

  “She’ll be fine,” he says, and Kat agrees: “Of course!” She’ll be fine, she’ll be great, she has been born and bred for greatness; she knows they are expecting nothing less. And now they are leaving, so at last it’s done, it’s finished. There’s no more hope for her, no time for the last lucky break. Her lovable, fumbling Misha. Her Anechka, the queen. Her pals. Her accomplices. How glad, how eager they are to leave. Every step fills their bodies with confidence. Their tired shoulders straighten. Their proud backs expand. She’s never noticed until now what beautiful backs they have. They have their work ahead of them, the work they love and are good at. And she? Trained under their command, she turned out imperfect. Deficient.

  The secretary shifts, becomes apparent again, like a transfer picture on a kitchen tile, or rather, like a water stain. It is only then, minutes away from the life so alien she can’t begin to comprehend it, that Kat remembers that, sheltered as she’s been, she’s never learned to use a pay phone. And if that’s the case, what else has she failed to prepare for?

  AN UGLY troll lives in your spinal column, coiling itself among the nerve endings, scaling the rickety knobs of your vertebrae. When you get well, he will come out and we’ll catch him. Catch who? The troll, of course! Who else? Keep him under glass, in a cage, in the museum of scoliotic trolls and other medical curiosities. Bet you didn’t know there was such a museum.

  Kat thinks this is incredible. Her first lesson is a fairy tale. Has she fallen into a rabbit hole or drunk from a forbidden bottle? Hands, feet—no, she is still the same. It is her new teacher, Olga Ivanovna Fromkina, who seems to belong elsewhere—small, androgynous, with muted blue eyes and short hair. She has a slender body, an elongated face. An elf. A Thumbelina. Dressed in a denim skirt and white turtleneck, she flits across the classroom in her stocking feet, her shoes shoved into the corner by the rubbish bin, abandoned like an afterthought.

  Kat is an afterthought herself.

  “Oh yes, the new girl.”

  She is only a day late. Aren’t they all new, this being first grade? All of her classmates look the same in their blue trousers and jackets, a plastic emblem on their sleeves—an open book, a flame. Their hair is shorn, just like Kat’s, for some implausible reason that has to do with swimming.

  The classroom has no desks. Instead there are rows of cots, each with a matching triangular prop and Plexiglas writing tray. They study while sprawled on their bellies, because their bones, the story goes, are too frail to withstand a full day at a desk. Which also explains the uniforms. Can you imagine lying down in a dress? Awkward, not to mention unseemly.

  “Children, this is Katya Knopman.”

  “Kat,” she corrects, and sees a quick exchange of glances in the back row. A smirk elsewhere, as if to say, What a poser!

  A cot in the center of the second row has been reserved for her. Ugly, cream-colored, its ink-spotted vinyl smelling like stale noodles on a plate. Kat stalls a little at the sight of it, then lowers herself gingerly. She’s not completely flat, she’s leaning on her elbows—anything but to touch the filthy vinyl.

  But that’s wrong—can’t she see?—and Thumbelina is quick to point it out. “Darling, put your elbows down. Rest your chin on the prop.”

  “It’s dirty,” Kat says.

  “Is it? Well, do you have a handkerchief?”

  She does, a clean one in the breast pocket of her jacket. It’s small, but it will have to do for now.

  “You must be patient, doves,” says Thumbelina, and Kat understands that others have also been unsettled by the cots. “Soon we’ll have brand-new cot wrapping. Warm and soft. We’ll do money collection at our next parent assembly.”

  Parent assembly. How wrong, how utterly out of place are these two words. They belong to her parents. They are a part of their vocabulary, along with pedagogic councils, methodology tutorials, Marxist–Leninist studies. Something mentioned at breakfast, a scheduling nuisance remembered with a groan. She used to loathe the sound of these words. They took her parents away from her, carried their work late into evening hours. But now . . . Sadness has stung her. She sees her parents as they were this morning, lofty, lovely, Anechka fiddling with the camera, Misha in his one spiffy suit which he has worn just for her.

  Kat drops her face down and in the process discovers that the prop she is lying on is hollow and that inside is a bit of eraser and a broken pencil stub.

  No one is immune to sadness. The classroom gets quiet, and the two littlest girls in the front row start crying. A girl to Kat’s left makes a snorting sound, and for a moment Kat thinks she’s also in distress. Her cot is pushed against Kat’s cot. The girl is dark-haired and bulky, with sour dairy breath. The primer in front of her is wrapped in green paper and already splattered with something. The scribble of her name, Sonya Bronfman, is like a squished bug on the cover.

  Kat’s about to speak to her, but Sonya Bronfman looks away and quickly pops a candy in her mouth.

  “Cow,” someone whispers, and Kat whips around to see a boy on the cot to the right of her. He is watching her with interest. “Not you,” he says. “Your neighbor. She’s been eating those Little Cow candies since she got here.”

  The boy is green-eyed and attractive. He has the haughty manner of a movie spy. There’s an aisle between their cots, but it is narrow. His name is Igor Zotov. “At your service,” he says. Were they both standing, he’d probably click his heels and bow, and ridiculous as it seems, she might even curtsy in response; but as they are horizontal for now, they simply shake hands across the aisle.

  So taken is she with this strange boy that she forgets she’s supposed to stay down. The moment she props herself up on her cot, Thumbelina says, “Is something wrong?”

  Stupid Thumbelina. She is in the middle of her nonsense troll story, trying to soothe the two weeping girls up front. As a teacher, she has zero personality, none of Anechka’s brilliance or Misha’s charm. But maybe you don’t need those qualities, as long as you don’t plan to teach past the third grade. If you never aspire to be anything of worth, maybe all you need to be is kind and docile.

  AT RECESS, Kat finds herself surrounded, encircled by a small posse of girls. The most insistent of them, the two little weepers from the front row, are practically leaping in her face. Are you foreign? they want to know. Are you from another country?

  “You’ve got a weird name,” says the girl Kat remembers as Kira Mikadze. She read from the primer at the end of class, read briskly, offhandedly, the way Kat herself would have read if she’d been asked.

  The name, Kat begins to explain, is indeed short for Katya. She is about to tell them about her translator grandfather,
but Kira Mikadze interrupts: “I mean, your last name.”

  “Knopman. Knopka. Button,” someone promptly recites in the back.

  “A doorbell,” offers someone else.

  “It’s weird,” says Kira Mikadze. “I’d rather die than have a name like that.” She flips back her stringy blonde hair and saunters away. It’s like she fancies herself something incredible, whereas in reality she is thick as a sausage, speaks with a burr, and has a weird name herself. What sort of last name is Mikadze?

  As if on cue, the other girls disperse as well. Kat is left with the weepers. They alone still find her fascinating. The wispy, sharp-nosed redhead is Nina Petrenko. Her blonde, cherubic counterpart is Vika Litvinova.

  “We won’t let them tease you,” says Nina.

  “The boys,” Vika explains.

  But the boys don’t seem to be a problem. There are so few of them anyway—they must be less susceptible to scoliosis—and she’s already made friends with one of them. She looks for Igor Zotov, but by now the hallway has become one swirling, sweaty mass: girls strolling in pairs, boys racing along the perimeter and sliding on the sleek parquet.

  Their class is 1A, and Kat is glad, because A implies excellence, whereas B or C can’t help but be hopelessly mediocre. In the canteen, 1A sits closest to the entrance, which also pleases Kat. The whole canteen is in a state of chaos: there’s pushing, and rushing, and banging of trays. She is overwhelmed and impressed.

  She’s sitting next to Igor Zotov. They bonded in math, which they are equally good at. In penmanship, they shared a laugh over Kat’s atrocious chicken scratch. Igor’s own cursive is impeccable. His mother, he said, is an industrial artist. He has inherited from her his steady hand.

  “Are you homesick yet?” he asks Kat.

  She shakes her head, though it’s a lie. Not homesick, she thinks, but apprehensive.

  Igor tells her he’s not homesick either. It’s just that this whole place is stupid. He’s already phoned home, and he’s absolutely sure he’ll be out of here by the end of the week. His father has access to a government policlinic.