by Ellen Litman
Ritka is an artist, a real honest-to-God artist. Teachers always ask her to do posters or decorate their wall displays. Why pay a professional when a student can do it for free? Ritka says it helps her practice. She’s got her eye on the Stroganoff Art Institute, and she’s constantly practicing. Everyone says she’s destined to get in.
It seems they’re all destined for something: Vlad for medical school, Nikita for the Institute of History and Archives. Sveta Vlasenko, who is a middling student, is mulling over a degree in education, and when the time comes, Jules, with her linguistic prowess, will join the Maurice Thorez Language Institute.
As for Kat, she continues to refine her acting. She has been working on imagination exercises, picturing a tree in Kratovo (a rowan tree or possibly a birch), the park behind the school, a fence with an intricate pattern. She has begun a notebook of observations—because an actor must notice the smallest details, the wing of a butterfly or a spiderweb or the little rolls of fat on the tops of Creampuff’s feet. She tries to keep the notebook private, which means that by the time she gets around to it, her memories have often grown stale. Sometimes she’s so tired that a whole day goes by and she forgets to “notice” anything, and then she worries whether she’s cut out to be an actress.
She pictures herself at eighteen, already a sensation, a star of the Sovremennik Theater or possibly the Lenkom, putting on makeup in her dressing room before a rosewood vanity, having a late supper with a lover at a small bistro down the street. She draws her fantasies from something she’s seen on TV, a film based on a book by Maugham. The truth is, she’s never met a single actress. She doesn’t know how they get discovered, what they do, where they live—or even what a bistro really is. But she’s sure their lives are dramatic and glamorous, and it’s sweet to imagine the satisfaction of fame: the admiring whisper of Sveta and Ritka; the gaggle, star-struck and full of hard regret. The poor, miserable gaggle, condemned to dumb menial labor, a life of drunkenness and ugly spats. No one will ever mistake Kat for one of them. As for Mironov, he’ll take to drink and go to seed by then. She’ll never have to chance upon the likes of him.
“WHY DO they call you Kat?” Mironov asks on Saturday.
They have gone through two weeks of clandestine study dates, devoting them mostly to geometry and algebra. The geometry test is on Monday, and while Mironov is still iffy on congruent triangles, Kat thinks he will probably pass.
Today they’re starting to tackle Russian grammar. Since everyone’s gone for the weekend anyway, they decide to use Anechka’s classroom. Kat goes up to the blackboard and copies sentences for them to diagram. “Not far from us, in a coastal ravine, a shallow river skittered rapidly over the rocky bed.”
It is the first time he has asked her anything, and she is feeling a tiny bit distrustful. “It’s just a name,” she says, “a name like any other.” “Apart from rivers, Meschersky region is rich in canals.”
“No, really,” he insists. She checks his face, but can’t spot any signs of ridicule or malice. They have worked hard these past two weeks. She gets why he used to hate her. It’s been seven years since she was forced to wear a brace and she is now used to being stared at. She’s learned how to repel frank, prying glances, how to answer with her own hateful look, how to set her jaw when faced with insults. Still, it took her years, while he, in first grade, was already a pro, his whole short life spent as a circus freak. And she—she called him a hunchback. She hopes he has forgiven her, or possibly forgotten the details. “Friendship is not a favor, it doesn’t require gratitude.”
So she tells him. She tells him about the old house in Kratovo, about her grandfather with his translations and his cane; his declining health; his desk set up on the veranda, where they have English lessons all summer; the trays of tea and bread and cherry jam.
“Fancy,” he says. “See, here I thought you and Jules were just stuck up or something. Making up screwy names.”
Screwy? she thinks. She’s an idiot for opening her mouth.
“So what’s my name? In English?”
“There isn’t one,” she says.
He seems disappointed, but then he tells her it’s okay. “I guess I’m not cut out to be, you know, English. Like Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson in The Hound of the Baskervilles. You seen it on TV?”
“I’ve seen it,” she says, unsure what to do with his sudden effusiveness. Is she now supposed to be his friend? Is she supposed to forget how vile he’s been to her? His clothes smell rank, and his face is still the same—bleached out, insolent, with freckles and thin scabby lips. She wishes she hadn’t told him anything. She wishes he’d go back to his bottled-up, barely mumbling self. That, at least, she knows how to deal with.
He is still talking about the movie: the moors, the butterflies, the hound with its phosphorus mark.
“Make it brief, Sklifosovsky,” she tells him. “I’d like to get home eventually. You see those sentences up on the blackboard? Go underline the subject and the predicate.”
It comes out harsher than she meant it, and he’s looking at her as if stung. After that, he shuts up. He diagrams each sentence, he watches her correct his errors—all of it in total silence, not a sigh from him, not a grunt. He won’t speak to her even when she asks him to explain a particular grammar rule, and for a long time after that it continues to ring in her ears, his silence.
THIS WEEKEND, Kat is struggling. She feels rotten about the Mironov fiasco and tells Misha they’re not getting along. He says, “Teaching is tough. I’m proud of you, Button.” But he doesn’t seem proud, just distracted, absorbed in the production of the play. He’s thinking of entering it in a regional contest. Anechka’s no help either. She still doesn’t believe Kat’s efforts are worthwhile or that she has it in her to succeed. “Make sure your own grades don’t slip,” she warns her.
Kat’s been thinking about a name for Mironov all Sunday, trying to find him an equivalent in English. Seryozha. Sergey. She’s even checked the dictionary. It seems imperative that she locate it, as if it’s a question that’s certain to come up on an exam.
It comes to her later that evening as she is flipping through their play. Mon Dieu. Au revoir. Ma chère. Their characters often speak French. Of course, she thinks, why should it be in English?
“Serge,” she says, when she and Mironov meet again. She’s genuinely happy about this name. It’s got a good and noble ring to it. “Give the boy a chance,” said Misha, and that’s what she is doing. She’s giving him a chance, and a new name.
“What’s that?” he says, suspiciously.
“You asked for it, your name. Except it’s French instead of English—”
He spits right there on the floor and cusses at her.
It’s been an agonizing day for both of them. They had their geometry test in the morning (more difficult than Kat expected), and after lunch he got called out in biology and failed. All day they haven’t spoken—they never speak in public anyway—and Kat can only hope that he’s managed the geometry test.
But maybe he hasn’t? He’s looking pissed, his lower lip is busted, and now, up close, she sees a cut below his left eye.
He calls her a psycho and tells her he’s done with her.
“You asked for it,” she says again, meaning not just the name but the cut and the bruises, the busted lip, the poor grades. He was supposed to study this weekend, not get in a brawl with some street rabble. “You’re totally worthless,” she says.
He’s looking at her the way he did before he hit her on the head, his hatred vast and irrepressible. Without thinking, she steps back.
“Scared?” he says. “You’re scared of the hunchback?” And now she knows he’s not forgotten anything.
He grabs for his bag and she flinches, because in that second she really believes he might hit her again.
Of course, it’s a mistake.
“You know,” he says, “I could kill you.”
“I know,” she says.
He slams th
e door so hard that a piece of stage set collapses in the corner of the drama room.
11
THE PLAY IS SLATED TO OPEN BEFORE THE WINTER holidays, and once December comes everything quickens. At first they rehearse twice a week, on Wednesdays after supper and Saturday afternoons, but after Misha enters them in the district contest, they add Tuesday and Thursday nights as well. The most surprising thing is Anechka. After months of gloom and moodiness, so bad that her students were starting to take note, she is suddenly crackling with energy. She’s become indispensable at rehearsals, choosing the music, choreographing the waltz, tirelessly coaching Sveta, who’s still having trouble with her part. Even Kat gets a tip or two about her performance: “Avoid unnecessary gestures, and stop wringing your hands. It makes you look like an amateur.”
Kat has no more time to do her acting exercises, what with the rehearsals and the tutoring, which on Saturdays has to be pushed back. It took some work to reinstate the tutoring. Misha spoke to Mironov in his office, a sensible man-to-man talk, about the realities of life and the value of good schooling. At least that’s how Kat imagines it. For all she knows, they might have talked about dialectics and the mystery of being. Their first conversation was fruitless. A day or so later they spoke again. By Saturday that week, they’d come to an agreement: Mironov would resume his tutoring, and as for literature and grammar, Misha would tutor him himself.
Mironov returned to the drama room. He and Kat exchanged no apologies. They simply set to work, immersing themselves in the subject at hand and steering clear of any superfluous discussion.
By now everyone knows about the tutoring, so they don’t need to hide it anymore. Margo, who had to know from the start, said nothing on the subject. The gaggle, as could be expected, embraced the news with zeal and great excitement, spinning atrocious tales about Kysya and Mironov and what they must be doing in the drama room, behind the closed door. “Kysya the slut,” they say whenever she enters the dorm, and Nina Petrenko pantomimes something ugly and lewd. Often they do these things in public, in the canteen or in the hallway at recess, and Kat finds that hardest to endure—anyone could happen by and get the wrong idea about her.
Lately, with Misha’s encouragement, Mironov has started sneaking into the assembly hall. Holed up in the back and nearly invisible, he watches rehearsals and then delivers his reports. He’s developed opinions, mostly shortsighted, and he’s especially invested in the character of Pushkin’s wife.
“Why is everyone so up in arms about her?” he asks, as if he’s somehow missed the part where Natalie caused Pushkin’s duel.
“She was selfish,” says Kat. “It’s obvious she never loved him. She married him because she had no dowry. Then she went around with d’Anthès, even though everyone warned her about him. She even flirted with the tsar himself.”
“So you’re saying she’s a whore?”
Kat wrinkles her nose at the jarring word. “It wasn’t really about her. She was convenient, you understand? The tsar, society, they went after Pushkin, and she . . . she kind of played into their hands.”
“It wasn’t her fault then!” Mironov says, triumphant.
It’s because of Sveta Vlasenko, Kat thinks, because she’s the one playing Natalie. At the mere sight of Sveta, all boys immediately lose their brains.
“You’re being willfully obtuse,” she says.
“And you’re full of shit,” Mironov counters.
She backs away from this sensitive subject, before the thin ice of their mutual politeness springs new, dangerous cracks.
But a week later, he returns to it again. He says he’s visited the library. “There are letters,” he says. “A whole book of them. Thick like three encyclopedias stacked up. There’s this letter in there that says that d’Anthès sort of trapped her. And the tsar—I checked about that. It says the whole story is a lie because she never went to no balls that year. She was, you know, big with child.”
“Pregnant?” Kat says. “You’ve told my dad about this discovery?”
“You tell him,” he says.
“Why should I? I don’t even think it’s correct.”
“It is.” Mironov sighs. “I checked. I don’t want to upset him, though, like his whole play is now wrong or something.”
They talk for a while about the play: how it’s basically a good play, even if it’s not completely accurate; how the final scenes are poignant, and even Natalie is kind of sympathetic at the end.
Mironov laments that they have no Pushkin. “You think I could play him?”
Kat bursts out laughing. She simply can’t contain herself. “No, no, wait,” she says, seeing his lips pale and tighten. “Don’t make a beastly face. I don’t mean you’d be bad. It’s just that you don’t look like him. You know what he was like, dark-eyed and swarthy.”
“Who do I look like then?” Mironov says.
She thinks for a moment. “Yesenin!” Another poet, from this century. Blue-eyed, light-haired, troubled. “‘I’m a rakish Moscow idler.’ Remember?”
He doesn’t.
She recites some other lines from memory. “You even have his first name,” she points out. “Sergey.”
“How did he die?” Mironov asks.
She tells him about Yesenin’s tumultuous life: his early successes and setbacks, several marriages (including one to Isadora Duncan, who also died in a horrible way), his drinking, and finally his suicide in 1925. He hung himself. In his room at the Angleterre Hotel—so stupidly, so hopelessly young.
“How young?”
“Barely thirty.”
Mironov nods. “Fits like a glove. I’ll be kicking the bucket round that time. A gypsy told me at Kazansky terminal last summer. They know their business, the gypsies. Said I’ll die from drink in a back alley. Or else get stabbed. Which do you think is a better way to go, Knopman?”
“Don’t be morbid,” she scolds him.
He chuckles. “Yeah, I know. It’s not as classy as the Angleterre Hotel.”
They go their separate ways, but Kat keeps wondering about what he said, about death and chance and how in their play the character of Natalie has just that sort of moment of foreboding. Except when it comes, it’s too late and the machinery of fate cannot be stopped, and all you can do afterward is question what set it in motion, which one of your past errors or bad choices is to blame.
“DO YOU believe in fate?” Kat asks.
She and Anechka are making waffles, using a clunky contraption to bake thin, round cakes which they roll with a fork into tube-shaped crispy structures. It doesn’t happen very often that Anechka elects to do this. There must be something in the air: the first nips of true wintry weather, the crunch of well-packed snow underfoot, the smell of pine needles and tangerine peel, the crinkling of chocolate wrappers. Soon it will be the holidays.
Anechka seems milder, gentler. They talk about fatalism and fortune-telling, which she admits might be a sham—even if it does feature in so much Russian literature. But Kat, she says, Kat has nothing to worry about. She’s a mirror image of Misha, and it’s common wisdom that girls who resemble their fathers turn out to be the happiest of all.
Anechka’s eyes are burning. This weekend she is churning with excitement, the sort of excitement that a short trip to the local haberdashery just isn’t enough to assuage. “Let’s go to Arbat,” she keeps saying. Arbat is a pedestrian street, strewn with buskers, break dancers, and artists. Peddlers sell amber necklaces and nesting dolls set up on trays. But it’s the artists Anechka is after. They sit on folding chairs, making cheap soft-pastel portraits for tourists. Fluid, fantastical pictures of starry-eyed women and men. Anechka’s got it in her head that she needs a portrait.
In December, though? Will the artists be there in the cold?
A movie then, Anechka says. Something lively and foreign, a musical comedy, an Indian love story. No, wait! Let’s go to that new cosmetics store and buy some cherry lip gloss from Poland.
In the end they stay home, eat t
heir waffles and two cups of egg-flip, curl up together on the green living room sofa. There’s a game show on TV, a bunch of city girls trying to milk a cow.
“I have a secret,” Anechka whispers. “Shall I tell you? Or can you work it out yourself?” She counts the months on her fingers: January, February, March . . .
Kat’s heart flips unpleasantly and her skin under the brace begins to itch.
“. . . July, August, September. A little present for your birthday, Kat.”
“You’re kidding,” she says.
“What would you like, a little brother or a little sister?”
“As long as it’s healthy,” Kat says—the only acceptable answer.
Anechka presses her lips together as if trying to keep back a smile. She hasn’t had the test yet, but she is sure of its outcome.
“You were sure before.”
“This time it’s different, baby.” Her body’s given her all sorts of signals, and she’s already thrown up a bunch of times. “Trust me,” she says. “I know what it feels like.”
“All right,” Kat says. “But why not see a doctor? Just to be certain it’s developing correctly.”
“And jinx it? No thanks!”
Their talk leaves a bad taste in Kat’s mouth, as if she has somehow been duped. She dropped her guard, allowed Anechka to lull her with her playfulness. She thought things were finally changing between them, that they were becoming equals, close pals, and Anechka was seeing in her something, maturity perhaps, as opposed to the usual source of aggravation. But she was mistaken once again. There’s only one reason for Anechka’s excitement and only upshot of her news: Kat is being replaced. Replaced for good.
For the next few days, she watches Anechka and Misha. They are caught in a constant leapfrog of activity: classes, rehearsals, assignments to grade. The day of the play is approaching. The playbill has already been posted by the canteen entrance—a beautiful playbill, done in a florid, old-time scrawl—and later Anechka and Misha go off to fetch costumes from a theater studio in the southwest corner of Moscow. Kat offers to come with them, but they go alone. The snow thawed a bit the other day, but then it got colder again, and now Kat watches as they both slip on icy patches. They’re laughing and Misha is especially protective, his arm wrapped tight around her mother’s waist. He knows, Kat thinks. He knows and he’s happy.