by Ellen Litman
Here’s Inna Smirnova (code name: Snake)—a psychopath. Here’s Vika Litvinova (Cherub), one of the former weepers, famous for her compulsive lies and thieving, including that time in first grade when she convinced the whole class that her mother was dying of cancer. Lida Kravchenko (Shrew)—given to furious outbursts. And not to be forgotten: Kira Mikadze (Little Hog), their fat, despotic, self-appointed leader. Nina Petrenko, the second of the weepers, is doing a vile imitation of Anechka, jerking her shoulders, shaking her nonexistent hips. “Look! Kysya’s mother!” It looks nothing like Anechka, and Nina Petrenko is vile. Slippery, freckled, she’s learned to make her smallness obscene. She sucks in her cheeks, streaks naked through the dorms. She peels herself open for everyone to see.
“Ignore it,” Jules mutters.
“That’s what I get for my birthday?”
“Just wait,” Jules says. “Maybe Mironov will get expelled.”
Mironov has been gone most of the day, ever since his stupid escapade at assembly. “Wouldn’t that be a great birthday present?” Kat says.
Regrettably, he reappears in time for evening snack. In the canteen he bumps Kat with his shoulder. On purpose, she is sure. “Pig,” she mutters, though quietly and mostly to herself.
She tries not to see him, pretends he is not even there. But he exists nonetheless, perpetually mediocre, flickering in and out on the periphery of her vision. His cot is in the back of the classroom. On evening walks, he joins the boys from other classes. Climbing trees, running with sticks, whatever inane activity they seem to be fond of that week.
“Slim pickings,” Jules sighs, as they spy the boys escaping through the broken fence into the park. There are movies at the House of Culture, at the opposite end of the park, and other classes go all the time. But 7A isn’t allowed to go. Margo is like a bloodhound, scouring the campus every night, waiting for them to get in trouble.
“Let’s try it,” Jules says. “In honor of your birthday.”
Kat says, “Don’t even start.” It’s not worth the risk. Besides, there are movies at school every other Friday.
“Amphibian Man?” says Jules. “The bloody Elusive Avengers they show every quarter? Honestly, Kat, you’re such a mug sometimes.”
But she is not. She’s simply being cautious. The old guard is watching them all. Any stumble on her part will get her parents in hot water. It’s hard to be a rebel when you have others to protect. So she tries to be perfect. She never wears makeup, breaks curfew, or busts her brace on purpose. She’s the one person in the school who’s always got her brace on, even when she’s in a play, even when there’s a disco, when other girls put on miniskirts and stow their braces in closets.
She’s gotten used to the discomfort of the brace: the blisters, the bruises, the withered spots of skin on her hip bones. She’s used to nonplussed glances, pity from the neighbors, the local boys with their catcalls. No boy will ever find her pretty.
“All in its time,” Misha usually tells her. “Someone will love you for who you are inside.” As if Kat’s outward beauty were now out of the question.
Those careful, tenuous promises: someday, sometime. What she wants isn’t abstract or tenuous. The boy she likes is real, and he is three grades older.
Kat has a foolish heart. In first grade she loved Igor Zotov, and the next year, after Igor Zotov was discharged, she loved her second cousin from Leningrad. That’s how it went, a new infatuation every year, until last year, in sixth grade, she met Nikita. Her love had been always unrequited, but until now it wasn’t real love. Now it hurts, and that’s how she knows it is real.
The first time she saw him was at last year’s play rehearsal; it was the second rehearsal of the season. Kat had missed the first rehearsal—she had been home with chicken pox—and she was slightly late for this one. She entered the assembly hall and stopped. There was this person on the stage, this boy she’d never seen before, standing atop a shaky coffee table. He was playing a villain, apparently. Misha had told him to do this, to leap up on the table, to use the coffee table as a prop, and who could have predicted the effect would be so dramatic? He smiled, breaking out of character, and his face, somewhat crude, a little sheepish, came inexplicably alive. Imperfect it was—imperfect and strikingly familiar.
To him, she must be nearly invisible. He hardly knows she exists, and if he thinks of her at all, it’s simply as Misha and Anechka’s daughter. Sometimes she imagines writing him a letter, a confession, Eugene Onegin style: “I write to you, what more is there to offer . . .”
Jules says, “How about we call him over? Tell him it’s your birthday. I could go fetch him if you want. We can play spin the bottle.”
Kat tells her to stop it. “Don’t be so—”
“Yes, dear?”
“Trivial.”
“Ah,” says Jules. “Trivial. All right.”
Jules is hopelessly unsentimental, unlikely to swoon over a person, verse, or movie star. “You know me, darling,” she likes to repeat. “I’m an inveterate cynic.” But Kat knows that Jules cares. She got her a chocolate bar called Inspiration for her birthday, a tube of pink lipstick, and a card. She helps her to apply the lipstick, even though she knows Kat’s going to wipe it off before they go inside.
“Child,” Jules says, “you’ve got to loosen up. They’re your parents, I get it. But sooner or later you’ll have to disappoint them.”
“I disappoint them all the time.”
“So what’s the problem?” Jules asks, and Kat can’t explain it, or maybe doesn’t want to. Jules is nothing like the kids Kat’s parents tend to like—not romantic in spirit, not upfront with her emotions. She mostly reads what gets assigned in class, and even her cherished Jane Eyre she prefers in its televised version.
“Tell you what,” Jules says. “Let’s go to the oxygen café.” It’s a new type of therapy they have, a small basement place by the library that serves frothy drinks made of air.
Kat nods. It’s not much, but it’s safe.
SVETA VLASENKO finds Kat in the canteen at suppertime. “We have a surprise for you, Kitten. Come to the drama room, okay?”
“You can’t go,” Jules whispers, and points with her eyes to Margo. It’s the first day of school, which means that tonight Margo is primed to deliver her start-of-the-year harangue: where not to be, what not to do. “She’ll never let you go, even if you beg her.”
“Who’s going to beg?” Kat says.
Jules stares at her, flabbergasted. “You won’t come with me to the movies, but this Vlasenko character crooks her little finger and suddenly you’re not afraid?”
“It’s not the same,” Kat says, because the truth is a lot more complicated. She belongs with the drama kids, with Anechka and Misha’s favorites. They speak the same language; they share passions and ideals—all of which have to do with being noble and a little hapless, and somehow helping humankind. None of them is rich like Jules or has careerist parents.
After supper, Kat runs off to the drama room. It’s far enough away, behind the boys’ dorms, that no one will stumble across them by accident. Inside, there’s an old piano in need of tuning, a scattering of mismatched chairs, old props and set decorations stacked randomly against the walls. In the center, a pair of plain canteen tables.
“The birthday girl,” says Sveta, when Kat enters. On one of the tables there’s tea and a cake. Bought with Anechka’s money, Sveta whispers in Kat’s ear. Anechka has arranged it all. A small group of drama club regulars has gathered: Sveta’s best friend, Ritka Mavrina. Sveta’s boyfriend, Vlad. And here is Nikita, too, with his broad, freckled face (some might say pitted), his slouched shoulders and coppery hair that always falls into his eyes. He nods at Kat shyly, then moves to the side, sits with his back against a wall while strumming his guitar.
Sveta, the graceful hostess, passes around napkins, cuts the cake into thin slivers so everybody gets a taste. They talk of doing a new play, which hasn’t been announced yet, and ask Kat if she knows what
it’s going to be this year. She says Misha has sworn her to secrecy, and they tease her and then attempt to guess.
After a while, though, their attention drifts. They talk of other things, to which Kat was never invited: a trip to Peredelkino, where famous writers live; the party Ritka had that summer. No one thought to include her, because she is three years younger and not their equal yet. But all of this is going to change. She is about to surprise them. In the meantime, it’s her birthday. She is happy. She is fourteen but wise beyond her age, and Nikita is playing the happy birthday tune for her: “How sad that a birthday comes only once a year.”
8
WHEN ANECHKA AND MISHA WERE HIRED TWO years ago (a full-time load each, plus half-time extra for the drama club), no one at the school expected real theater. Their duties weren’t that extensive: to arrange pageants for all the major holidays, to prep the gym for the quarterly discos, to act as DJs, and to make the discos more educational in nature.
They started modestly. For Teachers’ Day, they did a potpourri of short poems and comedy sketches, and most of the teachers were pleased. They said it was refreshing, and the kids got to do something creative, which in the past hadn’t always been the case.
For Revolution Day, Anechka and Misha staged a few scenes from Ten Days That Shook the World, and though the younger faculty members enjoyed it, the old guard expressed concern. “This ain’t the Taganka Theater,” Creampuff announced, and the others from her group concurred. They hadn’t asked for this buffoonery. They wanted what they’d always had: the carrying of the banner, declamation of poetry, heartfelt singing of patriotic songs to the sound of an accordion. They wanted their boys and girls dressed up as proper Pioneers.
Kat’s parents dialed down their efforts. For March 8, they went back to pop song parodies: a humorous ode to the school nurses, a moving tribute to the canteen’s female personnel. And for the Victory Day pageant, they even dug up an accordion. Still there were rumblings among the old guard: it was the fortieth anniversary of the victory over Germany, they had expected something grander.
The week after, a playbill went up by the canteen entrance. The play would be a modern fairy tale. Anechka and Misha had been planning it in secret for most of the year. There were stage sets and costumes on loan from an actual theater. There was real theater makeup. On opening night, girls appeared on stage with rouged cheeks and upswept hair, touchingly delicate with their exposed, skinny elbows and long lace gloves. Sveta Vlasenko played a princess, Vlad Borisov a swineherd. With not enough boys to go around, some girls had to take male parts. They wore frock coats and pantaloons, and some sported penciled-in mustaches.
Kat didn’t get a part that year, not even as an extra; her parents said she was too young. She’d sat through every minute of every rehearsal and knew each scene by heart. On opening night, she watched from the front row as Professor Fabri came up to embrace Sveta Vlasenko. He held a large bouquet of flowers, and there were tears in his eyes. “Our beautiful mannequin girl,” he called her, and Kat knew he meant it, because even then Sveta Vlasenko was beautiful and had only a nominal degree of scoliosis.
Later, the old guard questioned whether the play had been necessary and whether such spectacle promoted unhealthy competition and early fondness for makeup, though what they really objected to were the not-so-subtle messages: the villain dressed to look like Stalin, the masses marching with red flags. But the school administration liked the play, and Professor Fabri commented on the positive effects of the dramatic arts on the students’ attitude to treatments.
Next year, everyone wanted to be in a play. The girls from the top grades swarmed over Anechka and Misha, but they remained selective. Sveta Vlasenko played a princess again; Vlad Borisov, an absentminded scientist. They had a thing between them now, a real-life romance. Nikita, new to school that year, was in the play as well. Kat played a villager, a wordless part. Her costume was a poncho and a wide-brimmed hat, and she wasn’t allowed to take off her brace, because Anechka said the brace wasn’t affecting her performance. Even without the brace she wasn’t much to look at, clumsy and awkward, her hair sticking out of her ponytail in short, unruly tufts.
Still, it was the best spring of her life. They rehearsed every Wednesday at night and on Saturdays in the afternoon, and once again she memorized each part, on the off chance that an actor might fall ill and she’d be asked to step in as an alternate. When they weren’t rehearsing, she watched Nikita strum his guitar or play cards with Sveta Vlasenko and Vlad. She spoke to him twice: once to ask whether learning guitar had been hard, and another time to tell him Misha needed his help in the drama room. He and Misha bonded instantly, Nikita often staying to talk to Misha after class, so after a while Kat knew just when to visit Misha’s classroom.
It wasn’t just Nikita. She felt close to everyone. They would huddle together at the end of each performance, giddy from applause, a little stunned. It seemed unthinkable for them to ever be apart. They’d stay for hours in the assembly hall and sing their favorite guitar songs, about the rose blooming in a brown beer bottle, about the last midnight trolley, about the beloved courtyards of old Arbat, despite the fact that none of them had ever lived near Arbat. They’d all grown up in the unsightly new developments in remote corners of Moscow.
Before the school year ended, they’d given three performances. Afterward, some of the students got discharged. Sveta Vlasenko went to a tourist resort. Kat got dispatched to Kratovo, as always. To sleep and to laze in the sun, to swim in the nearby lake whenever the weather allowed, to wait for her burr of a body to soften and blossom so that she also one day might be worthy of love.
Summer that year was overcast and lonesome. She paced in the woodsy back of the property, reciting the play to herself. She knew it was pointless—the year was over, the play was over, she’d never be asked to step in as an alternate—but the play was a part of her now, vital like an internal organ.
It was then, while reciting the play, that she decided acting was her calling. She had a lot of time to ponder it, and she figured it had to be true. She’d once asked Misha how he knew that teaching was what he had to do, and he said that time disappeared whenever you were doing what you were meant to. Time certainly disappeared for Kat that summer as she gulped down Chekhov, Ibsen, and Shakespeare, memorizing pages’ worth of monologues. She was Nora, or Nina, or Cordelia. She could probably be Hamlet. She’d found a paper-wrapped book in Misha’s classroom, the fictional diary of a young man enrolled in acting school, and after she read it three times in a row, she started practicing its theories and exercises.
Looking back at the drama club contingent, she could easily see who her parents took under their wing. It was either great talent or great need. There were the girls who’d lost their families to accidents and who sometimes had no place to live. There was the girl from 9B who couldn’t go home to Ukraine. There were others shipped in from far-flung towns—because schools like this didn’t exist anywhere else—who knew not a soul in the capital and spent their weekends in strangers’ apartments.
Mostly, though, it was talent: a professional dancer who used to perform all over the country, a trained ballerina or violin player, even a twelve-year-old prodigy who could compose her own songs. Ritka Mavrina was an artist. Sveta Vlasenko looked good on stage, though in Kat’s opinion she wasn’t a great actress. She always played the same old character and seemed to have no range. Kat could imagine outshining her, leaving the audience shaken, her parents proud and impressed. Proving once and for all that she was one of them.
ONE WEDNESDAY after nap time, three weeks into the autumn term, Jules helps Kat get ready for the first rehearsal. She lends her a pink sweater and puts her hair in a tight French braid—so tight that Kat’s scalp itches and she’s feeling the beginning of a tension headache. Some blush? Some lipstick? Some eye shadow? Kat says, “No, thanks.” Makeup looks tacky on young girls, in Anechka’s opinion—that is, unless they are on stage.
Kat doesn’t b
other asking Jules to come with her to rehearsal. She’s tried in the past and she knows the answer. “Don’t like amateur dramatics,” Jules usually says. No one from 7A is in the drama club, apart from Kat. In theory, one doesn’t need an invitation; it’s a school institution, open to every student. In practice, though, the workings of the drama club are secretive. You must be in the loop to know about their upcoming auditions and new plays, and you are only in the loop if Anechka and Misha want you there. Jules must know she isn’t wanted, not for her talents anyway. As Kat’s best friend, sure. But anyone can tell it’s not the same.
Kat goes to the bathroom to check her reflection. The brace is like a military jacket; it makes her look square and squat. Her face, pinched by the brace, looms large and unattractive, and her pulled-back hair only accentuates her ugliness.
“Nonsense,” says Jules. Kat looks exotic, Georgian maybe? There must be someone Georgian in the play. Didn’t Pushkin write about some such lady? “A jug held high, the Georgian lass her way was slowly making . . .”
“That’s Lermontov,” Kat says. She’s strangely irked by this mistake, and even more so by the suggestion that she looks Georgian. She knows she is darker than most other girls, dark in a Jewish way, and whenever they celebrate Friendship of the People Day, she always has to dress up like someone from the Caucasus.
Kira Mikadze (Little Hog) overhears “Georgian” and thinks they’re making fun of her. She claims her father was from Cyprus (God rest his soul), not that they understand the difference, the ignorant cows. The gaggle pretends to believe her, because no one’s willing to provoke her. She’s thick-set, muscular; she can easily squeeze you into a corner. There are bruises on her legs, her sides, her arms. The gaggle never asks about those. There is no need; they’ve seen Little Hog’s mom.
Inevitably Little Hog will run to complain to Margo. Knopman, she’ll say, was making fun of Georgian people. Not that Little Hog herself has anything to do with Georgians, but for her it’s a matter of principle, you understand? She is hurt on behalf of the homeland.