Mannequin Girl

by Ellen Litman

  Instead, they talk about Misha, who, Sveta says, had better snap out of his funk. The old guard is quietly stirring the pot. The bosses are unhappy. There were some outbursts at the last union meeting, which Misha neglected to attend. Creampuff reminded everyone that Misha was getting paid extra. “For what, I ask you. For the dormant drama club?” Margo made it known she’d always found him “unsavory”: “All that supposed devotion to the children. Not worth a broken dime.”

  “He’s sinking and he doesn’t realize it, Kitten.”

  Kat says, “I tried to speak to him.” But how do you speak to a person who’s heartsick and overworked, who still runs twice a week to check up on his mother in Kuzminki? He’s got to understand how tenuous his position is. The drama club has already lost its room. It’s now the home of the school’s Wartime Glory museum.

  “We have to do something to rescue him,” says Sveta. She’ll try to round up some folks, trusted old-timers from the previous years. Alex, Nikita, Ritka. “He doesn’t need to know what we’re planning.” She flips through her calendar, each day delineated, dressed up in multicolored ink. “We’ll meet at our normal time, next Wednesday.”

  SERGE VOWS to be at the meeting, and though he was never one of the drama club regulars, Kat has to admit that his presence might help. He’s been a good influence on Misha.

  He says, “Your dad should come as well.”

  “We have to think it through first,” Kat explains. “We don’t want to overwhelm him.”

  “We do!” Serge disagrees. “Stagger him! Overwhelm him! Give him clamoring crowds and stuff. He’s got to see that it’s not some mundane obligation he must fulfill for a check mark. He needs a kick in the pants, some inspiration.”

  “How come you’ve said nothing to him all this time?”

  Serge says it’s because he’s an imbecile, a dumbass.

  But when they gather in Sveta’s room next Wednesday, they’re both relieved that Misha wasn’t told. There are no crowds, clamoring or otherwise. Just Kat, Serge, and Sveta. Sveta says she tried to get their old gang, but they’re all so preposterously busy with college.

  “So,” says Serge, “what do we do instead?”

  “Maybe we talk to him?” says Sveta. “Tell him the school’s not the same without the drama club. I work with the kids, I can see it in their faces, the lack of beauty and artistic outlets.”

  Serge rolls his eyes. “Pathetic.”

  “You got a better idea?” she snaps.

  “I say we start without him,” says Serge. “Get a script, cast the actors—”

  Sveta laughs before he’s even finished. “You want to run the drama club yourself?”

  “Misha will step in when he’s ready, when he hears about our play.”

  “A play?” Kat says, suddenly wary. She can’t do it again, can’t take a repeat of last year. The last time she stepped on stage was at the dress rehearsal, the night Anechka collapsed, but even before that, she’d realized that her theater dreams were a delusion.

  Sveta says a play would be too challenging. “It’s best to start with something modest. An evening of music and poetry, maybe?”

  “Modest my ass,” Serge says under his breath.

  “To hell with this false modesty,” a voice booms in the back, and they all jump a little and Kat’s heart does a leap. In the door stands Nikita, looking exactly as he did last winter, exactly as she pictured him week after week, in his dark denim jacket with its matted sheepskin collar. She had tried to convince herself she didn’t like him anymore, that her crush on him was childish, unreal. For a while she even believed it, or at least she had more crucial concerns: Anechka almost killed herself that spring and despite Misha’s claims to the contrary, Kat knew it was at least in part her fault. She was too guilt-stricken, too ashamed to think about him; but halfway through the summer things started to get back to normal and her memories of him returned.

  “You said you couldn’t make it.” Sveta gets up and walks toward Nikita. She tries to appear displeased, even though her eyes fill with happiness and her whole face turns a lovely shade of pink.

  And Kat’s own face feels like it’s stretching in a dopey grin. How easily her heart and mind deceive her. Her cheeks burn and she’s glad that she put on some makeup, that she’s wearing a decent sweater, and that two weeks ago she let Jules cut her bangs.

  Nikita shakes Serge’s hand, then takes a seat between Kat and the still pouting Sveta. “Cheer up, ladies and gentlemen. Of course, we’ll do a play.” He says the old guard has become completely brazen, while everybody panders to their whims. “The times have changed,” he says, sounding a bit like Misha. “We’ve got to hit them where it hurts, show them what we’re made of.”

  They kick around and debate some titles, mostly the latest perestroika prose they could adapt: Life and Fate. Children of the Arbat. The New Appointment. White Robes. Nikita says he’d like to write something original.

  “But can you handle it,” asks Sveta, “with your institute business?”

  Nikita laughs. “I’m a man of many gifts.”

  They make a plan to meet again next Wednesday.

  Kat follows Nikita out, and he is halfway down the stairs when she speaks. “What’s going on with your institute?”

  He pauses, turns, a little startled. He’s looking at her, and his eyes twinkle with amusement, which makes her want to disappear on the spot. “You’ve grown up, Kitten. You’re different.”

  For a moment they study each other, his laughter giving way to something serious and soft, and she’s struck, once again, by how familiar he looks, a long-lost relative or soulmate, and she is sure he must feel it too.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to mock you.”

  “No harm done,” she responds.

  As for the institute, he tells her it’s nothing. A minor inconvenience. A knot in an otherwise smooth line.

  “That’s good, I suppose.”

  “I’ll see you in a week, Kat. Same place, same time.” Before he leaves, he smiles at her.

  15

  “GET UP, GET UP, GET UP!” THAT’S HOW THE mornings start—with the music teacher bellowing in her overworked contralto, the sound of her heavy-booted footsteps, and then the abrupt burst of light. Kat stiffens as the voice draws near. “Get up, get up, get up. I’m leaving the floor in ten minutes precisely.” That’s what she does, the music teacher, to make some extra money: shows up before the crack of dawn to wake their floor, to herd them outside for morning exercises.

  “Smolkina, do you need an extra invitation?”

  There! She’s made it, and now she won’t leave them alone.

  “I’m on duty,” mutters Jules, burrowing deep under the blanket. But the rest of the girls groan and stir. Grudgingly, with effort, they draw themselves up. It’s not as easy as it used to be, now that so many of them are weighted down with casts and metal. They are slow, so slow it must be maddening, pulling on their clothes, nursing their aching bones, making their shuffling way toward the bathrooms. Pain has made them dull, subdued their anger. No one gets in Kat’s face anymore.

  Kat’s also on dorm duty this morning, so she doesn’t need to hurry. Once everybody else is gone, she and Jules rise, get washed and dressed. Only then do they set about cleaning—tidy all the beds, go over the windowsills with a wet cloth. Slowly, leisurely, they drag their brooms over the pale squares of linoleum. Jules sings: “Don’t Take Your Leave of Me, My Darling,” and later, “The Reeds Were Whispering, the Trees Were Drooping.” She’s good at old romantic songs, her voice sonorous, spirited, with a strong undercurrent of hurt, and Kat, not for the first time, wonders why she won’t train for a music career.

  Jules says it’s a stupid idea. “To be a music teacher like that cow we’ve got?”

  Kat asks why not consider the stage, and Jules quickly says, “Not talented enough.” Besides, she’s got her heart set on diplomacy and international relations. She even has a high school picked, one with the special
ized English curriculum. Though she claims her language skills have dwindled lately and she is worried she won’t pass the entrance interview.

  “Can your grandfather tutor me?” she asks. “My folks, of course, will pay him.”

  “He won’t take your money,” Kat tells her, but the more she thinks about it, the more she likes this plan. She’s not that keen on facing Valentina, but she’s missed her grandfather. She didn’t see him much last summer, opting to stay in the city instead, pretending she was needed there. In fact, she was nothing but a hindrance, asking superfluous questions and getting in everyone’s way as her parents attempted in vain to piece their lives together. It was then, at the end of that long, confusing summer, that she found herself without a destination or a goal.

  Unlike her, Jules has gotten more tenacious. She’s already mapped out her future, and the English school is merely a stop along the way.

  She says, “Why don’t you try it too?”

  “Me and diplomats’ children? Get real, Jules.”

  “Then what about your mom’s lyceum?”

  “And study under Anechka’s surveillance? I think I’ve had enough of that,” Kat says—though in truth it’s Anechka who would probably discourage the arrangement. She takes her students to museums and theaters and never invites Kat along. Nor does she bring them home like she used to. She says it’s because of the distance. Her new students, without exception, are bright, ambitious boys and girls. They have no time to fritter away on subway trains.

  Privately Kat believes the reason must be her and Misha. Damaged, dispirited, they won’t make the right impression, won’t cast an aura of success. Whatever fiction of their life Anechka is trying to create, they won’t fit her descriptions. And so, like half-mad ancient relatives, they must be kept hidden away.

  Kat doesn’t like to think about the future. She figures she’ll just go to a local school next year, and who knows where after that. Most likely engineering. The Institute of Auto Industry, of Steel and its Alloys, of Oil and Gas. If she’s lucky, by the third year of college she’ll be married. It doesn’t really matter where she goes or what stupid career she attempts. Whatever she does, she is unlikely to impress her parents.

  Her parents welcome the idea of English lessons, though, and the Roshdals are also overjoyed. English is good. English is practical, the lingua franca of the world, useful even if you choose to study engineering. It is assumed that Kat will learn alongside Jules. Alexander Roshdal starts comparing curriculums, stockpiling tutoring materials, planning weekly sessions for the girls. And Kat plays along, acts as though she is also intent on bettering her English.

  THEY GATHER on Sunday while it’s still dark, meet under the blue Zodiac clock at Kazansky Terminal. Jules and Kat arrive separately, both in thick woolen sweaters, light jackets, ski boots, and woolen tights. Serge is already waiting. He’s stomping in place and smoking fitfully, trying to fend off the cold. “A drink right now would be good,” he says, and seeing Kat’s eyebrows jerk, he quickly adds, “A hot one.”

  As always, it was Misha who suggested they take Serge along. Better than letting him languish in his lawless neighborhood or with his drunkard parent. At least, he said, in Kratovo there’s fresh forest air and good food.

  The trains are mostly empty at this early hour on Sunday. Kat, Serge, and Jules clamber aboard, settle on the hard wooden benches. Their carriage is unheated, and they squirm in the cold and huddle closer together. They doze, or stare dimly out of the window. Stations flash by. The train rattles along. Serge is reading Doctor Zhivago.

  They’ve had two more meetings with Sveta, and Kat went to the first of the two, the one where Serge revealed his harebrained idea to stage Doctor Zhivago. Nikita turned up late that Wednesday. He stumbled in at half past eight, weatherbeaten, unwell, looking as though he’d been roaming the streets for hours. “The dean’s office again?” Sveta asked him.

  “They tell me I can try again on Monday—but only if I finish my three remaining labs. I said, who’s going to give me all that lab time?”

  They know his story by now, how he flunked his first winter exams—though “flunk” is not the word. He simply didn’t take them. Something had happened to him in the summer. Instead of the Institute of History and Archives, he took his papers to the Institute of Railway Works, and in his happy-go-lucky fashion got in with hardly any studying. Then, halfway through the term, he stopped showing up to labs and lectures, missed so many assessments that by the time winter exams rolled up, he wasn’t permitted to take them.

  At the meeting they discussed Doctor Zhivago. Nikita seemed uncertain, disenchanted, but Sveta embraced the idea. She said she loved that book. It was about the Civil War and the Revolution, but most of all it was about passion, and Sveta, predictably, expected to play one of the two romantic leads. She actually said to Nikita as much—“You’ll be Zhivago, and I’ll be your Lara!”—as if he and Vlad were interchangeable.

  The whole meeting was a fiasco. They only had about half an hour, not enough time to move forward or make any specific plans. Nikita didn’t speak to Kat, and she had no time to seek him out. Though what could she possibly say to him? To take better care of himself? He coughed a lot that night. His cough was something terrible.

  This week Nikita has bronchitis, and Kat isn’t sure he’ll ever return. Sveta and Serge met without him on Wednesday. Kat couldn’t bring herself to go. Without Nikita there, their whole plan seemed preposterous and wrong.

  Serge, of course, is still fully committed. He is sifting through Doctor Zhivago, taking notes, talking incessantly about saving Misha’s job, about bolstering his confidence.

  Kat says, “He’s not a child, Serge.”

  “Grown people need help too once in a while.” He shivers, and Kat thinks he really should get a better coat.

  Jules, as usual, stays out of these discussions. It’s her general principle—to not get involved. Good intentions, she reminds them enigmatically, have a way of turning out wrong. She stares out the window and breathes on her knuckles. “What’s wrong with this train? Why is it so goddamn cold?”

  By the time they arrive at the dacha in Kratovo, they are frozen to the point of numbness. But tea is already set out for them on the glassed-in, weatherproof veranda, the radiators ticking rhythmically, expelling puffs of hissing steam. Kat’s grandfather reclines in his favorite rocker, an afghan thrown over his knees. Out on the storm porch rest Kat’s and Jules’s skis, which he has rubbed with special wax this morning. “The snow’s too sticky,” he warns them and flinches a little, because the dampness in the air wrenches his hip and bad leg.

  Valentina brings pastries and bread on a tray, small saucers of jam—cherry and raspberry. She fusses endlessly, pours their tea, pushes choice slices of cake toward each of them. She can’t get over how cold they look, how thin. She rubs Jules’s shoulders, gets Serge a dry pair of socks. She heaps on them this strange maternal tenderness, and only with Kat is she painfully formal.

  Kat herself doesn’t quite know where she stands with Valentina. Since last year, there has been little in the way of contact, just a dutiful phone call now and then, when Anechka can force herself to make one, and when she does she only speaks to Roshdal. A few obligatory questions about Roshdal’s health, strained promises that everyone is well, that life is uneventful, normal, that she is not about to try to kill herself again. She never asks about Valentina, never concedes her existence or utters her name. She’s too busy to talk anyway, she really must go, but here’s Kat instead, the family’s proxy, who can spit up more pleasantries and even visit on weekends.

  A high-pitched yelp escapes from somewhere in the back, and Valentina goes to fetch the puppy, the chocolate miniature poodle named Bublic. Kat thinks the Roshdals have both gone a little loopy over the puppy: they spoil him rotten, feed him the most expensive tidbits, let him chew on the chair legs and even pee on Roshdal’s leather couch. They call him their joy and their love.

  And Kat has to admit t
hat Valentina does look joyful. In the last year, she’s softened, grown thicker in the waist and shoulders, lost some of her nervous, girlish verve. You wouldn’t expect it, but it suits her. She comes back cradling the impatient Bublic and says she’ll take him for a walk.

  “Don’t be too long,” says Alexander Roshdal. “And button up your coat—the weather’s foul.”

  She kisses the top of his head.

  “She’s like a child,” he complains, once she is gone. “Completely heedless. Not even a pair of mittens or a hat.”

  After tea, they start their lesson. First come vocabulary drills. Then Jules and Kat take turns reading aloud from Jane Eyre, translating every paragraph and noting the unknown words, which Roshdal won’t let them look up until later. They do some grammar exercises and practice sample dialogues. They finish off with a series of Moscow News articles. They’re given three minutes per article, to scan it and grasp the central point, and then they have to summarize it. No help, no dictionary. Three minutes are so piteously short. But Roshdal says the exercise is useful—it makes their minds more nimble, their language acquisition more intuitive.

  Serge takes no part in this schooling. He wanders off in the direction of Alexander Roshdal’s study, and after a while returns with a book. Beckett, or Ibsen, or Brecht. A thick tome of Shakespeare’s plays. These days he mostly goes for drama, the same books Kat herself used to devour. They probably still have her pencil marks. Now she eyes them with embarrassment.

  Well then, no use sitting around. When the lesson is over, she and Jules go off to ski—there’s a wooded area not far from Roshdals’ dacha—while Serge and Alexander Roshdal stay in and drink more tea. It’s only their second time in Kratovo and Kat is amazed by how well these two get on. Perhaps it’s their physical ailments. They often ache on the same days, their bodies vulnerable to the whims of weather.

  At two o’clock they all sit down to dinner—pea soup, some meat concoction in clay pots—and then, dazed by the warmth, they slip into a drowsy reverie. Roshdal expounds on the failings of perestroika prose. Kat wants to interject—she liked those novels—but her head has gotten fuzzy and slow. She leans back in her chair, eyes half-closed. Roshdal and Serge are talking about Brodsky’s Nobel Prize. Jules shows Valentina a sewing pattern in the latest Burda Moden. The next thing Kat knows, it’s evening, it’s somehow gotten dark. She stretches and catches Jules’s eye: It’s time to go. Before they do, Valentina presses on them small jars of fruit and jam.