Mannequin Girl

by Ellen Litman

  “Ah, what a life,” Serge says, back on the train. He hands his jar to Kat because, he says, why waste the good stuff? He doesn’t explain why he can’t take it home himself.

  “You know, you’ve got the best grandma.”

  “She’s not my grandmother,” Kat says.

  Back in the city, Jules catches the subway to Taganka, and once she leaves, Serge tags along with Kat. He says it is for her protection—the least he can do is make sure she’s safe—and she, of course, doesn’t point out that given his physical state, there’s little he could do to ward off an attacker.

  “So,” Kat begins, “what did you two discuss today?” She’s slightly irked by the quick bond that’s developed between Serge and Roshdal, and has an urge to mock their chats. “Julius Caesar, was it?” Gone are the times when she and Roshdal were that close.

  Maybe her teasing is excessive, but if so, Serge doesn’t take the bait. He shakes his head. “Your grandpa, he showed me this thing. Said not to tell you, but goddamn it!” The object in question was a flyer, a nasty piece of work. “There was a cross and also some slogans. ‘Get rid of Jews. Keep our nation pure.’ Only instead of ‘Jews’ it said, you know—”

  “Yids.”

  “He said these flyers, one day they just appeared. The one he showed me was pinned to their front door. You know what this means, Kat? Someone got over that fence of theirs. Your grandpa, he tries to act all calm, but really, I think he’s scared.”

  “It could be kids pulling a prank.”

  “I don’t think so, Kat. He said it’s been going on since last summer. Not the flyers, but you know, the talk. ‘Don’t rent your summer houses to Jews, or they might burn down.’ A house around the corner got destroyed. No one knows what started the fire. Then there was that old lady who was clubbed to death last fall, though I guess it was her family that did it.”

  She wants to dismiss it as gossip, empty talk that pensioners delight in while waiting outside the local store. But she knows about the clubbed-to-death old lady, and suddenly all she can think of is how easy it must be to breach a country fence or door, how exposed you are in Kratovo.

  “Your grandma’s been taking it really bad,” Serge goes on. “That’s why they got themselves that puppy.”

  “She’s not even Jewish,” Kat mutters.

  He looks at her like she’s being dumb. “Who cares what she is. Honestly, Kat, are you heartless or clueless? I mean, if you and I were . . . If somebody were threatening your life . . .”

  “Fine, maybe I’m heartless.” They stop before her building entrance. Her eyes are smarting from the insult, and in another second she will bolt. “I’m a heartless and horrible person. A monster!”

  He catches the sleeve of her jacket and won’t let her go. “Shut up, Kat. You’re not. You’re a decent person; it’s just sometimes you get so full of spite. I don’t know what happened between you and your grandma, but she—Valentina—she’s kind. Maybe you don’t realize it, but most folk aren’t. I mean, I should know, I’ve felt it on my hide. Not everyone’s this kind, not even real grandparents.”

  He stops, and for a while they stay quiet, her sleeve gripped in his fingers, so it’s almost like they’re holding hands.

  “You’re scared?” he says.

  “For them, not for myself. Here it’s not so scary.” She nods at the rows of lighted windows, the grid of her apartment block. Nine floors, four sections, 144 identical apartment doors. It makes her feel safe, this anonymity. “Now the atom bomb, that used to give me terrors. I’d look out the window and picture this horrific flash—”

  “The mushroom cloud,” Serge says, with relish. “Used to scare me shitless. Now I just think: Bring it on!”

  “They won’t, not anymore.”

  “I know. I’m just saying.”

  They stand like this a while longer, holding on to each other just outside the entryway. Inside, the elevator clangs, and Kat pulls back her hand. Reality asserts itself: it’s night, it’s Sunday. Anechka’s out at the opera. Misha is waiting upstairs and driving himself mad.

  “Are you coming up?” she asks.

  Serge looks hesitant. “It’s late.”

  “Please come,” she says. “Just for a short time.”

  EVERYONE LEAVES the school eventually, and Kat will have to leave as well, and though for years it was all she dreamed of, lately she’s been flinching from the thought of it. She’s not used to being out there. She doesn’t like to be alone, on buses, trains, or even on a short walk to the bread store. Her brace is gone, but she can’t shake the feeling that people are still staring.

  This year—her last year—she doesn’t mind the school at all. The schedule that used to feel so oppressive, the jumble of classes and medical procedures, now seems soothing, well controlled. The gaggle doesn’t bother her, and Jules is here with her. Jules, who eventually forgave her.

  At night, she and Jules walk up and down the campus alleys, bored senseless with the never-changing scenery, but also remarkably content. Kat frets about Nikita, about his health and whether she’ll see him again.

  “Just call him,” Jules says. She doesn’t understand Kat’s hesitancy.

  “For one thing, I don’t have his number—”

  “And for another thing?” Jules says.

  Kat shakes her head. “Forget it.”

  They round the corner, and Kat catches a glimpse of the familiar blue denim jacket, the stooping shoulders raised against the cold. It can’t be, she thinks. It’s not Wednesday. But yes, she sees, it is Nikita. He’s leaning against the entrance gates and smoking, studying a frozen patch of earth.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Beats me,” Kat says. “Waiting for Sveta maybe?”

  “Or else for you,” Jules says.

  “You really think—”

  “Go talk to him,” Jules says. “I’m heading inside anyway. I think I’ve lost all feeling in my fingers.”

  It’s not far, just a few dozen meters. Kat feels like she is soaring, though she tries to pace herself.

  “Hey,” she says, out of breath.

  “Hey, kiddo.”

  In her head, she goes through a score of awkward greetings, all of which amount to “Why are you here today?”

  He says, “Couldn’t think what to do with myself. You ever feel like that?” and she says yes, though in truth she almost never has this sort of freedom. Most of her days are scheduled down to the minute, decided by somebody else. And yet, she knows what it’s like to be restless in spirit.

  “You want to talk?” she says.

  He nods and turns against the wind to light a cigarette.

  She leads him to one of the distant recesses on campus, where no one will spot them in the descending dark. He’s finally seen her. He needs her.

  HE SITS hunched on the swing, his face blurred in the limp evening light. Every few minutes he bursts into a spasm of coughing.

  “I still want to write it,” he tells Kat, who’s standing before him and slightly to the side. “Even if no one stages it.” They are talking about a play he has in mind, a historical play, because he’s a historian at heart. “It’s the last thing I have in me. The only thing.”

  “And college?”

  “They’re done with me there. Can’t say I blame them.”

  “How did it happen? I mean, Railway Works? It’s not what you’d been planning.”

  “Ah, yes.” He laughs bitterly. “Of course. The idiot’s dream, the Institute of History and Archives. I almost did apply, you know. Brought in all the paperwork. There was this nice girl in the admissions office. She took one look at my passport, another at my stupid mug, and said, ‘It’s none of my business, but you seem like a sweet boy, so I might as well tell you. I’d hate to see a boy like you get burned. We have no quotas for the likes of you.’”

  “The likes of you?” Kat says, not understanding.

  “Maksakov is my mother’s name. My father’s last name is Gelgor.”


  “You’re Jewish?” she says. “Does Misha know?”

  Nikita shrugs. “He can’t keep track of everybody. Plus, I was so damned cocky, I didn’t want anybody’s advice.”

  He coughs again, the sound wet and painful, and she presses her fingers to his back, feeling the roughness of his jacket, the labored rattle of his breath. It’s the first time she’s touched him and it makes her light-headed.

  “What now?” she says.

  “The army, naturally.”

  “But you can’t, Nikita. Please! You won’t.”

  “Vlad trooped off like a good boy, and I’m no worse and no better.”

  “He had connections, though. Just ask Sveta. He got assigned to a good place.”

  “Nope, nothing here, no special connections. I bet for me it’s the infantry. Infantry all the way. ‘Forgive the foot soldiers,’” he croons the famous Okudzhava song, “‘for being so thoughtless, foolhardy, and rash.’” He grins and looks her in the eyes, and she is split in half with pain and hope, unable to hold on to him or to let the moment pass. “‘Don’t trust the foot soldiers . . .’”

  16

  “DON’T REPEAT MY MISTAKE,” SAYS NIKITA. “DON’T set your heart on something and then give it up. I see it in you, Kat, this bright artistic spark, this sensitivity. You must have got it from your parents.”

  He shows up randomly. They don’t make plans or dates, though he usually knows her schedule. They meet, as if by accident, in the secluded corner with the oak tree. Together they escape into the park. He comes when he’s feeling unsettled. He says most likely he’s already been expelled. He talks and she listens. Their talks are meandering, endless.

  He asks how come she is able to do this: go off into the park with him. “Won’t somebody miss you?”

  She shakes her head. “No one will.” These days Margo acts as though Kat doesn’t exist; she’s abdicated all responsibility.

  And Kat—she’s like a dog who’s broken free of the leash. She wears eyeliner every day, along with mascara and lipstick. She teases her hair and pulls it high into a messy ponytail. She dresses in skirts, in Jules’s fitted sweaters. Her coat is unzipped, her head uncovered, her scarf loose around her throat.

  “What about your Serge? Where is he?”

  “He isn’t mine,” she bristles.

  “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”

  Saint-Exupéry! She’d known and loved Le Petit Prince for years, but then Nikita told her to read his other works. Terre des Hommes. Vol de Nuit. The stories of pilots, strong, fearless, and doomed. Even more doomed than Nikita.

  Night after night they wander through this unkempt and vacant park, plunging knee-deep in the thawing snow, striking at the scraggly stalks of dead yellow grass. He walks fast. When he sees that she’s fallen behind, he stops and waits for her. Like now, for example: her foot’s gone through a patch of nasty ice. He helps her extricate herself, his steadying arm around her shoulders, her heart getting frantic, speeding up. It’s you, she thinks. You’ve tamed me.

  And Serge—what of him? He must have grown bored with their unfinished project, frustrated with their lack of dedication to the cause, the broken plans, the canceled meetings. Don’t they care about Misha at all?

  “He’s right,” Nikita says. “Every night I tell myself I’m going to write.” He doesn’t mean the Doctor Zhivago adaptation, but rather something of his own. Something honest and raw that will change everything. “And then, good grief, I don’t know what happens. My brain goes sluggish, the wheels, the cogs, it all goes to hell.”

  “You’re still ill,” Kat says. “You had bronchitis recently.”

  “Maybe that’s it.” Nikita leans against a tree.

  “What you need is a break.” Kat stands before him. Her hands graze the tops of his shoulders; his hands slip quietly inside the pockets of her coat.

  “A break,” he agrees, tugging her closer. “Just don’t get too excited, Kat. I’m a lost man, you know. Besides, things aren’t easy for folks like you and me.”

  “I know,” she says, her face upturned, as she rises on tiptoe.

  KAT IS unfocused, feverish, forgetting her assignments, daydreaming through the hours allotted for homework. She barely squeaks through a history quiz, and later in algebra she’s slapped with an “unsatisfactory.” She nods when Beatrisa tells her to collect herself. The big exams are coming up. Kat says she understands. But all she can think of is seeing Nikita again, the heartbeat she felt through his sweater, the hard tang of tobacco on his lips. She finds herself smiling in odd situations and randomly touching her face. This must be what love really is, this ceaseless, pulsing madness.

  Apart from Jules, no one knows, and frankly, it’s not difficult to keep her new entanglement a secret. Misha stays most nights at Zoya Moiseevna’s—because, he says, she’s getting worse—and Kat tries not to think about what is becoming of their family.

  Last Saturday they waited for Anechka all evening, waited until after twelve o’clock. Kat was reading, Misha grading, though neither could focus for long. Both listened for the clatter of the elevator, tensing every so often at the approaching noise. Anechka had gone to a play again. She was due back some hours ago.

  Shortly after twelve Misha put on his coat. He said he’d wait for Anechka at the bus stop. Kat asked to come along, but he said no, she must stay by the phone. “In case she calls.”

  Of course, she didn’t call. She came home in a taxi, while Misha kept on waiting—first at the bus stop, then outside the subway station—until the last train came and went. By the time he got home, Anechka was in bed. That night he slept on the floor of Kat’s bedroom.

  Jules is the first to suggest it: “She could be having an affair,” she blurts out, as if it were the most natural thing. And maybe for Anechka it is.

  Kat gapes at her. “You think?”

  “Anything’s possible, my child. People are nutty when it comes to love.”

  Kat isn’t completely naïve: she has considered it, though fleetingly, before cringing and banishing the thought.

  “I’m sure it’s to do with her lyceum. She’s so secretive about it.”

  “Just don’t try to fix it,” Jules warns, and Kat nods, not quite listening.

  Next Monday, instead of going to school, she takes the subway to the Revolution Square stop, where she pauses momentarily between the sculpture of a girl with a pneumatic rifle and another of a border-guard lad with a bronze dog. She had the lyceum’s address, but apart from that, she realized, she didn’t know very much. Not Anechka’s schedule, not even which grades she was teaching that year.

  The lyceum, a three-story mansion, stands in a quiet cul-de-sac. Many years ago, it must have been somebody’s home. You can picture a family—something out of a Tolstoy novel—young girls in pantaloons and longish dresses escaping to the garden outside. A handsome iron fence surrounds the property.

  Kat lurks outside the fence, some distance from the entrance. After a while, it gets unnerving (she might be too conspicuous), and she ducks into a doorway across the street. For the first half hour, the schoolyard stays empty. Then a young man—a teacher? a student?—comes out to have a smoke. He must be a teacher, she decides; a student wouldn’t smoke so openly. He is boyish, dark-haired, dressed in a knitted vest, white shirt, grey slacks. His face is narrow. He loiters on the school porch, glancing back at the front door repeatedly as if waiting for someone—a colleague, a lover, a friend. Kat pictures her mother emerging and joining him. They may exchange a glance, a cigarette. Will their involvement be obvious? Visible? The image in Kat’s mind is so vivid, she’s certain that it’s going to happen. But the man—who, on second thought, is too slight and tentative and no match for Misha—puts out his cigarette and goes back inside.

  Kat waits at least one more period, and then, when she is ready to give up, Anechka indeed appears. She perches on the steps without her coat, smoking and shivering, tugging the edge of her skirt over her bony knees.
When did she start dressing like this, in tight pencil skirts and frilly blouses and heels? She seems so dainty, so breakable, lost in a dreamy, wistful state, a bird that has escaped captivity. All she wants is a safe, neutral place, a place where she’s just Anechka. Not a mother or daughter or spouse or mental patient. She is still young. She’s hardly lived. That’s the reason, Kat thinks. That’s why she’s been so secretive. The lyceum is her refuge, hers alone, and if Kat cares for her, she must go away and find her own refuge.

  SHE MEETS Nikita at Mayakovsky Square, across from the famous statue of the poet. He pulls off her school bag and slings it over his own shoulder—two bags, his and hers, swinging along. “Where to?” he asks, taking her hand. She beams at him, carefree and gleeful. Their first stop is usually the record shop down the street. Apart from that, they’re unconcerned with the direction. They might continue down Garden Avenue, wend their way through the Boulevard Ring, linger around Pushkin Square, where they’ll splurge on a cup of hot chocolate. They’ve been spending the dregs of Nikita’s last stipend—on movie or museum tickets, meat pastries, ice cream treats in waffle cups.

  To be with him, Kat misses half her classes. Some days she skips classes altogether, returning to school in the evening, around homework time. She is changed, unrecognizable, buzzed on her own disobedience, and most of all, she is in love. Not that anyone shares her happiness. Even Jules, who is hardly a stickler for discipline, decides to give her a hard time. She says Kat is asking for trouble—everyone has noticed her absences, and if it weren’t for her father’s situation, the teachers would have spoken to the principal by now.