by Ellen Litman
“You’re inhuman,” Misha says to this invisible, silent, possibly dead grandmother. “I never want to speak to you again.”
And this is what Kat sees as they are leaving: An overturned chair. A kitchen table resting on its side. On the floor, a river of tea, shards of red polka-dot cups and saucers.
Her grandmother, though, seems unharmed. She stands upright and unrepentant, staring out the window, her shoulders raised, her back straight as a plank. “Get out,” she says, not bothering to face them.
IT IS UNTHINKABLE. Kat can hardly believe it, though she’s seen it with her own eyes: Misha—her dear gentle Misha, who under normal circumstances won’t even raise his voice, who only has to look a bit perplexed in order to subdue the most unruly of his students—her Misha, her idol, her dad, has just destroyed his mother’s kitchen.
“What did she mean—” she begins.
But he shrinks from her question, and later he says nothing as they ride the subway home. He has this darting, lost expression. She rests her cheek against his sleeve. Cripples, she thinks. That word again. Her grandmother called her a cripple, but why did Misha have to get so angry? Maybe because it’s true. Except she’s not a cripple—is she? She’s got her limbs; she doesn’t hobble when she walks. Unless something has marked her already. She thinks of all the times in recent weeks she has stood before the mirror. Some days she sees nothing; her body looks perfectly symmetrical, or maybe she’s convinced herself it is. Other days it’s there from the start, the damage lurid, unmistakable. Her parents told her that no one could see it, not when she has her clothes on, but now she knows: she’s faulty and the world can sense it.
A few blocks before they reach their building, Misha clears his throat. “Can you do me a favor?”
“What is it?” she says, though she’s already guessed it, both the question and her eventual response. She won’t mention the incident to Anechka, not under any circumstances.
4
PROFESSOR FABRI HAS DRY, ELDERLY HANDS. HE taps Kat’s shoulder blades, tugs at the band of her panties. He tells her to bend. She is standing barefoot in front of him, on a soft, silvery carpet, in a room slick and modern, full of big geometrical paintings and polished Italian furniture. Is it really Italian? She doesn’t know. What she knows is that Professor Fabri lives in Italy and also in Moscow sometimes. He is a famous specialist, he travels constantly. The school is his pride and his special project. He founded it, but he’s only around for a few weeks at a time.
Dressed in a smart three-piece suit, he doesn’t look like other doctors. His hands smell delicious, like good foreign soap. He wraps them around her waist. She’s a ceramic pot, a sculpture he is molding. “A perfect little figure,” he says. “Our mannequin girl.” She knows who mannequin girls are. They are in her grandmother’s Working Woman magazines, modeling flouncy dresses and berets. “Bend,” he tells her, and she does, so pliant, so obedient. “Bend and touch the floor. Keep your knees straight.” She tries, but she can’t. She is sorry to disappoint him. “Just as well,” he says. “Just as well. Limited range of motion, but the curvatures are small. I see no significant problems.” And then he says, “Let’s take a look at her X-rays.”
It started last week. The first nurse showed up on Wednesday. Short and thick, with great bluffs of shoulders, she called the names of a few kids and made them leave with her. You could tell they didn’t want to. Don’t worry, Thumbelina told them. It’s only Professor Fabri. He’s in town. He’s doing consultations.
The nurses have been coming ever since. They vary in age and appearance, and Kat has a distaste for all of them, their sharp medical smell, their stiff and officious demeanor. They take a few kids away with them, and those they pick now leave unafraid. The consultations aren’t painful, and nobody minds a short trip to the medical block. Nobody except Kat, that is. She’s been dreading this new consultation that’s supposed to confirm just how bad her scoliosis is and recommend a course of treatment. She still sometimes thinks it’s a mistake, this sickness. She feels fine. She can’t be sick.
The last few weeks were almost blissful as she focused on mastering her penmanship, collecting dry leaves for a herbarium, learning about the nature of the rain, snow, and wind. Regular schoolgirl activities, typical of first grade. Until the nurses came, she could almost forget why she was here. She could pretend that medical gymnastics was no different from gym. She could simply not look at the hunchback Seryozha Mironov, ignore the braced and stumbling figures of the older kids.
Now, at the consultation, a small group of doctors crowd around her X-rays. There’s the head of orthopedics, Doctor Razumovskaya, pretty with pinned-up orange curls; and there’s the cruddy-looking Doctor Bobrova, who is 1A’s attending doctor.
Professor Fabri takes a pencil and traces a long letter S. Lumbar fifteen, he says. Thoracic twenty. Now ladies, be so kind to direct your attention to the widening of the gaps between Ms. Knopman’s vertebras. What does it tell us, Dr. Razumovskaya? Yes, that’s correct: the disease will develop aggressively. Bracing is imperative; surgery, not out of the question for this patient. We’d like to avoid it, naturally. For now we’ll call it a wait-and-see phase. A pity, such a pretty little figure. She’ll be our mannequin girl yet. Don’t you agree, Dr. Bobrova? Dr. Razumovskaya?
THE FIRST floor of the medical block looks deserted and smells, inexplicably, like a shoe repair shop. On the walls are dour portraits in oil, medical drawings. Children in strange contraptions. A crooked sapling tied to a pole.
She isn’t sure how it happened: for a moment she was almost perfect, but then the good doctor changed his mind, spoke of numbers and vertebras and called her something else. Not a mannequin girl, but a “patient.” She’s probably supposed to call her parents. She’s supposed to get back to her class. But the nurse who brought her here must have left, and Kat, too nauseated to think straight, keeps trying random passages. Another corridor, another door, its handle wrapped in gauze. She steps across the threshold, and everything becomes bright and distorted. She’s in a large room filled with body parts. Throat molds, pelvic enclosures, shelves of plaster torsos.
A man in a black smock approaches her. “You’ve come for a fitting?” he asks. His left thumb is missing, his middle finger’s cut in half. With the remaining fingers he’s holding an odd metal device.
“What’s wrong? Have you swallowed your tongue?”
He follows her eyes, fixed on that horrible, misshapen hand of his. He thinks she’s looking at the clumsy apparatus, which he’s holding by its horizontal plank. So he gives it a shake, this thing, this brace, and asks Kat if she likes it. “Clunk, clunk,” he says at the metallic sound, and laughs—as if it’s a funny joke to make the brace jerk like a puppet. “You like it? I’ll make you one, girlie. You are a girlie, aren’t you? Hard to tell with these damn haircuts.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, backing out, her legs like cotton wool. “It’s just a mistake. I’m sorry.”
IN HER dreams there’s water. A smooth expanse of glittering azure. It’s surprisingly firm, firm like a bed, and can easily hold her small body. It’s warm, and the lights at the swimming pool are always on.
The real swimming lessons are in the afternoon. No one bothers to turn the lights on, and because of this the water looks not welcoming but turbid. They do exercises at first, breathing and dribbling, but after that Kat can’t let go of the low tiled wall or the metal handrails. “Trust the water,” the trainer tells her. Next to her, the weepers are flopping on their bellies, gliding a couple of meters to the nearest rope, stretching out in a “starfish,” gathering themselves into a “cork.” They are fearless, the weepers. A few lanes over, some older girls are doing laps, so fluid and fast, just like Kat in her dreams, their graceful arms cleaving the water.
Back in the changing room, the weepers leapfrog from bench to bench, celebrate their terrific weightlessness. Kat watches the older girls get dressed. They must be in ninth or tenth grade. They have womanly breast
s, shapely hips. They goose one another and sing, apply their mascara and lotions, shuffle back and forth in their towels and underthings. Their braces rest atop the dressing cabinets.
Kat can’t recall how she escaped the brace shop, how she made it back to class. Someone must have found her and led her back to Thumbelina. She got ill that evening, running a fever and throwing up. The night nurse had to take her to the infirmary, and in the morning Anechka came in a cab to pick her up.
“I don’t want a brace,” Kat said, when they got home.
“You want to be an invalid instead?” Anechka gave her some water and aspirin. Then she gave her the usual spiel about perseverance and heroism. Life’s not a holiday, she told her, with trumpery and prizes and cream puffs. Then she went to the toilet, because she had to throw up.
Kat knows all about life. She also knows that she’s got company. Most of her classmates are about to be braced; only a few remain unscathed (Alina Nesterenko, Igor Zotov). Some have already gone to their brace moldings, and their reports set Kat on edge. Nina Petrenko says you are “immured.” Mironov insists there are knives and hooks. He says that the molding people hang you by your throat. One wrong move and you’re strangled or your throat’s cut. He stares at Kat as he says it. Sometimes he laughs. He can’t wait for her to get accidentally murdered.
She’s learned by now what the braces look like. She eyes them each time after swimming, studies the lattice of their metal planks and clamps. Each brace is like the carcass of a prehistoric animal. There is a wide band of plastic to catch one’s hips and bottom; a swath of corset; an awful circular head-holder. She watches the older girls put their braces on. Step by step, they tighten the laces and belts, lock up their chests, anchor their heads. They allow these monstrous things to swallow their bodies, and when at last they rise they’re not the same. Brittle and halting and strange. All of the liveliness is gone from them.
KAT’S MOLDING is scheduled for first thing Friday morning, and announced three days in advance. Anechka takes the morning off. She arrives, as directed, with a fresh towel and an old swimming cap that she won’t be sorry to have spoiled. She is not happy about this whole setup, keeps talking about her 8B, how they might flunk their regional exams next month.
Kat is undressing in a narrow shower room. It has a boarded-up window, a brown cot, a bathtub. In the next room, she has glimpsed two giantesses in heavy-duty aprons. She’s taking her time: folding and refolding her uniform, fiddling with her hair, pushing the ends under the swimming cap.
Anechka’s face is queasy as she watches her. After a while she drops her head, covers her eyes. “I can’t stand the smell in here, baby. Gypsum, or whatever. You mind if I wait outside?”
“But Mom,” Kat begins, then grits her teeth and says it’s fine. She’s ready to cry with disappointment. She is frightened, so frightened. And the smell, the sickly gypsum smell, it turns her stomach too.
The giantesses have crude but kindly faces, and when Kat at last appears, swathed in a white sheet like some Greek goddess and naked underneath, they don’t scold her for tardiness, but smile at her gently and slowly. Soft-hearted rogues, they tell her not to be afraid.
A tall wooden construction resembling a gallows stands in the center of the room. They help her to this scaffolding. They strap her in. Hard wooden planks rest firm against her buttocks; a rubber harness is looped around her chin. The screws are tightened to the maximum, the harness cranked up so high she can’t even glance at her feet. You must be absolutely still to get a perfect mold.
The women slather her in Vaseline. They start with her hips and pelvic area, wrapping her in warm, moist bandages. They wait until the bandages congeal. Now it’s a shell, tough and sticky. They wait some more, then label it and cut it in the back with a pair of blunt, crooked scissors, the blades rasping with effort, the cold metal tickling Kat’s skin.
Next they do her upper torso, a process that follows the same precise steps.
Then it’s her head and neck: the wet swish of bandages against her swimming cap, thickening layer upon layer. They cover her chin, her lips, stopping just short of her nostrils. The world grows mute, indistinct. She can’t gesture or speak. The giantesses retreat to the back of the room, and she can’t even call for them. How long has it been? Don’t panic, she tells herself, don’t panic. With her head jacked up high, she can’t see if the rest of her exists. She is disembodied.
IN THE dressing room, she weeps under the hot shower. Anechka soaps her back, scrubs the white residue between her shoulder blades. “Was it bad?”
Kat doesn’t answer, because isn’t it obvious? Anechka should’ve been there. Maybe it wasn’t the gypsum smell that made her mother queasy. Maybe it was Kat herself, the image of her naked on the scaffolding, her crooked body swathed in bandages.
“No throwing up tonight,” Anechka says. Kat nods in a dumb, noncommittal way.
Anechka says, “It’s a deal. If you don’t anymore, I won’t either.”
The very next instant, she has to clamp her hand over her mouth and dart into the smelly toilet cubicle next door.
It occurs to Kat that something’s wrong with Anechka. Horribly wrong. She might even have cancer, like Vika Litvinova’s mother. Mothers get sick all the time, Kat knows that now. They languish in hospitals, perish during messed-up surgeries, come back to haunt their daughters, like in the scary bedtime stories Nina Petrenko tells the girls. And some, like Igor Zotov’s real mother, leave and never return.
“Stop whimpering,” says Anechka. She is back, wiping her mouth and looking rather peeved. “So you had your molding done. It’s hardly the end of the world.”
She doesn’t understand that Kat’s now sobbing for her.
Mothers get sick. Mothers die. Mothers abandon you.
5
WEEKS GO BY, AND KAT CAN’T TELL IF ANECHKA is getting better. Since the molding appointment, she hasn’t seen her throw up again. But that in itself doesn’t prove anything. There could be other symptoms. Anechka takes long naps on Sundays, and when she isn’t napping, she seems sad. She and Misha have tense conversations behind the closed kitchen door, and Kat feels excluded from their secrets. And it’s not just the secrets. She’s unsure of their schedules, can’t place some of the names they mention, those of their new students and colleagues that Kat isn’t likely to meet. She’s a transient presence at home: a visitor, a stranger.
It is now the end of October. “A somber time, the eyes’ enchantment,” wrote the poet A. S. Pushkin, but what did he really know of autumn? He never had to live in a school-sanatorium, get up at the crack of dawn, do calisthenics in the school’s frosted courtyard. The light in the morning is meager, and in the afternoon it rains. When it rains in the evening, their walk gets canceled.
“It’s just as well,” says Rosa, hearding 1A into the classroom. They have a lot of work to do. They are preparing to become Octobrists. Once received into the Octobrist organization, they’ll wear red-star pins. They won’t be mere children anymore, but vital participants in their country’s great ventures. It is an honor, Rosa tells them. It comes with duties, tasks. The first of which is to prepare for the initiation ceremony, with a montage of patriotic poems, songs, and chants.
Rosa has already selected the poems, written them out on long paper strips:
A star burns on a soldier’s hat.
A star speaks of our work and sweat.
And on the flags of our land
Our Soviet stars shine lights ahead.
It is a poor, incompetent poem: A star, a star, a star.
“Is there a problem, Knopman?”
Kat says no. “It’s just . . . It’s so short.” She’s only got one poem, while some kids got two or three each.
“You can have one of mine,” says Igor Zotov.
Rosa bristles. “What do you think you’re doing? Swapping gum wrappers? Is that how you’re going to act when your country entrusts you with a special task? Are you going to haggle with your country?”
The class says no—empathically, in unison. No, no, no! A fiery assurance from every one of them.
“Russian people don’t haggle,” says Rosa.
Kat isn’t so sure. She’s gone to the market in Kratovo, she’s seen Valentina haggle, and her mother, and the old women with callused, dirt-encrusted fingers who plunk radishes on duck-shaped metal scales. The only one who never haggles is Misha. He has a delicate constitution, an overdeveloped sense of fairness. Faced with inflated prices, he simply walks away.
After the poems and songs come elections. Soon they’ll be more than just a class. They’ll be an Octobrist detachment. Rosa explains how each detachment needs its leaders, those the class respects the most. A detachment commander and a class elder.
“What’s the difference?” asks Sonya Bronfman, and Kat tenses instinctively. She hates being Bronfman’s cot partner. She has nothing in common with this dormouse Sonya, but their proximity makes Kat complicit in every stupid thing her partner says.
“It shouldn’t concern you, Bronfman,” says Inna Smirnova, a spindly, mean-spirited girl. “You’re not eligible.”
The elder, Rosa says, is responsible for practical matters. Cleanliness, attendance, the schedule of housekeeping tasks. The commander’s job is more ideological in nature.
They select Tanya Kushina to be their elder. The vote is unanimous, except for Bronfman who abstains. Tanya Kushina is neat and even-tempered, with short, curly hair tucked behind her ears and small, clean hands. She has the best handwriting: substantial, blocky, each letter at a perfect slant. You don’t expect such a diminutive person to have such forceful handwriting.
Next comes commander. Alina Nesterenko nominates Kira Mikadze, and Kira nominates Alina, which is a courtesy and a big mistake. The majority votes for Alina. It’s not that surprising. Alina is prettier than Kira—prettier, in fact, than all of them. She is like a princess, with her long, willowy body and hair.