Mannequin Girl

by Ellen Litman

  Trouble. Kat sighs. But they have so little time! No one knows when Nikita might get drafted. Besides, what’s a couple of missed classes in the grand scheme of their unfurling lives? There are more important things than trigonometry and algebra.

  “Namely?” says Jules.

  “Namely, love.”

  Jules says, “What’s gotten into you?”

  Serge doesn’t get it either. “Where were you?” he asks whenever Kat returns after a string of absences.

  She winks at him and tells him it’s a secret.

  The secret can be the Moscow River embankment. On a cold day, it can be the Lenin Library or the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. It can be Arbat Street or Gorky Avenue, a park in Ostankino, a cemetery at the New Maidens’ Monastery—the resting place of tsars and luminaries, where she and Nikita discover by accident the grave of the famous physicist Landau. “A Jewish physicist,” explains Nikita. “He even won a Nobel Prize.”

  He keeps bringing up Jewish scientists, celebrities. The old actress Faina Ranevskaya, the historian Natan Eidelman, the bard Alexander Galich, the writer–dissident Yuli Daniel. It wasn’t easy for them, to be sure. Some, like Galich, were forced to leave the country; others, like the poet Mandelstam, perished in Stalin’s times. And yet, despite their ethnic handicap, or possibly because of it, they made their mark. Nikita says he didn’t use to care, didn’t make a distinction between his Jewish and non-Jewish friends. But now, since the fiasco at the institute, he feels that only a Jewish friend can understand what he’s been through. “Like you, Kat,” he says. “We’re cut from the same bolt of cloth, me and you.”

  And he is right: they fit together so neatly, her head in the crook of his shoulder, his arm wrapped tight around her waist. They make out at the movies, in random doorways, on countless boulevard benches. They are typical homeless Moscow lovers, with no place to go and no future.

  WHETHER OR NOT Kat’s teachers are concerned, they don’t speak to Misha about her. Maybe they think it would be fruitless (can he really discipline his daughter when he’s barely getting by himself?), or maybe it’s a measure of how low he’s fallen. His colleagues avoid him as though his misfortunes might spread and infect them like a disease.

  Whatever the reason, Kat is powerless to help him. When she does see her parents together—on weekends—it’s like they’re strangers already. They keep to their separate corners, take care of their private tasks, make individual servings of kasha or hot dogs. Or bread and butter sandwiches, if everything else fails. Though they do continue to combine their laundry.

  When the Roshdals ask Kat how things are going at home, she isn’t sure what to say. Roshdal says, “Tell your mother to call me,” and Valentina looks away. Why do they bother to ask, Kat thinks, if they already know?

  She and Jules have stopped going skiing. Whatever snow is left now lies in dirty, shriveled piles. After their English lesson, they stay inside by the woodstove. Reading or studying or dozing, or drinking cups of tea, while Serge plays dominoes with Alexander Roshdal.

  One Sunday the Roshdals have a visitor, a friend of Valentina’s who has barely escaped the violence in Sumgait. She is a tall, majestic-looking woman, with an aquiline nose and great mane of silvery hair. A guest of honor, she sits in Roshdal’s rocking chair, her face impassive, perfectly composed. Her name is Gayanoush. All day she tells them stories.

  They know little about this regional conflict; the TV has barely mentioned the recent unrest. And as for the city of Sumgait, they’d be hard-pressed to find it on the map. She tells them about the violence: the Azeri rallies in Lenin Square, the calls to kill Armenians, the drinks and narcotics served freely to the mobs.

  The mobs combed through apartment buildings, looking for windows with no lights. They seemed to know where to go; they’d come prepared. “All these years we’ve lived side by side. Azeri, Russians, Armenians . . . And now if it weren’t for the family next door, we wouldn’t be alive. A good Azeri family. But how did they know what was coming?”

  Of the slaughter itself, she says little. There were knives. There were axes. There was blood in the courtyards. They waited, but no help came. Three days later, when it ended, she packed up just a few belongings and left her home behind. She’s now staying in Moscow with her eldest daughter. But it’s her son that is the problem, a hothead and only nineteen. He ran off when they were on their way to the airport, ran off to join the rebels in Nagorno-Karabakh. There has been no news from him since.

  She starts weeping softly and Valentina holds her.

  She says, “You’re so lucky, Valechka. Lucky you didn’t have kids.”

  Valentina puts a blanket over Gayanoush’s shoulders—“Hush, my darling. Come have a bit of rest. It’s not over yet, you must preserve your strength”—and leads her off toward the bedroom.

  An hour later, the woman has regained her composure. She says she is sorry, she hasn’t had much sleep. At dinner, she and Valentina delve into lighter topics. They are both World War II veterans, former comrades in arms. They reminisce about their front-line past (“Valechka was always so popular!”), hum songs from their favorite Sevastopol Waltz, recall old bits of gossip. “Remember Shurik? What a joker! Two children, three grandchildren, lost his wife. Guess who sent me a card for my birthday?” They try to sidestep any perilous topics, anything that might suggest the recent tragedy and take them back.

  But Kat can’t stop thinking about the Sumgait pogrom, and on the subway ride home she keeps bringing it up—how for days the media was silent and the paramedics and police didn’t respond. The whole thing, it seems, was planned. The mobs had lists of Armenians; their phones had been shut down in advance. She now doubts the safety of apartment living.

  “But Sumgait’s so much smaller than Moscow,” Serge reasons. “And the tensions there are, you know, more acute.”

  “I wonder if our neighbors would hide us. They seem like nice people, but really, we hardly know them. We usually just nod and say hello.”

  Serge says, “It won’t happen.”

  “And what if it does?”

  Her voice falters and she looks away, embarrassed. He touches her hand, which is trembling. She didn’t realize it was.

  “I’ll hide you,” he tells her.

  WHEN KAT comes home that evening, no one is there. Misha is probably at Zoya Moiseevna’s and if so, he’s likely to stay overnight. Zoya Moiseevna has grown grubby, shaggy-haired. She’s like a child now, irrational, contrary, refusing to eat or be fed. She sits at the table, her mouth clamped tight. “Just try a spoonful,” Misha begs her. She shakes her head. Or even worse, she takes it—only to spit it in his face. Alone, she raids the kitchen cabinets, eats sugar or hard candy.

  Kat hardly ever visits anymore. Not because of the horrible rank smell that permeates the whole apartment, but because being with Misha drives her mad. She can’t understand or excuse his inaction. He won’t take his mother to the doctor, and he won’t speak to Anechka, and his job situation is a mess. The drama club is doing nothing; stacks of untouched compositions gather dust on his desk; he’s failed to submit lesson plans, assign important chapters, give dictations.

  Kat dials Zoya Moiseevna’s apartment and when Misha picks up, she doesn’t ask if he is coming back.

  “Do you know where Mom is?” she says.

  “Probably working.”

  “Have you checked your watch lately? It’s a quarter past eleven.”

  “I’m sure she’ll turn up eventually.”

  “When did you see her last?” Kat says, and he says, “I don’t know.”

  She stays up all night waiting, checking the phone every hour to make sure it’s got a dial tone. She leaves the lights on everywhere, even in the toilet and the bathroom. She waits even after it’s clear that Anechka has stopped coming home.

  In the morning, Kat goes back to the lyceum. Since it’s Monday, she knows that Anechka will be at work. She watches for her, as before, from the doorway across the street. She’ll ask
her, point blank, whether she’s given up on them, whether she’s having an affair, whether this means that she and Misha will divorce. She’ll ask her if she’s heard about the flyers in Kratovo and the unrest in Sumgait. She’ll tell her everything about Misha’s problems, how some teachers look away when he approaches and then disparage him behind his back, how the old guard says he’s fizzled out and defaulted on his duties. And it’s not just the teachers. Kat herself has heard two students from 9C complaining. “He looks unwashed, like he’s on a drunken binge,” said one of them, a blonde, bespectacled girl. “I thought Jews didn’t drink?” the other one said in response.

  The scorn in the girl’s voice was unmistakable, the implication couldn’t be clearer: Jews were unclean. Jews were vermin. They degraded Russian people, turned Russian children into alcoholics, spread drug addiction, AIDS, and rock and roll. Kat’s heard it all—from TV, from the gaggle, and even from some of the teachers. There are those who, like Creampuff or Margo, delight in bringing these tidbits to school—pamphlets, hearsay, articles from Young Guard and Our Contemporary. Any public figure they found objectionable had, according to them, a secret Jewish last name. Margo even ventured that the Jews had sat out World War II. Her mother, she claimed, had seen it with her own eyes, perfectly healthy young men hiding out in Uglich, evacuated. It was Russians, she said, who won the war.

  Kat found it easy to deal with people like Margo. You knew where you stood with them, you knew who they were. It was the others, the circumspect ones, that were tricky. The ones who kept quiet or talked of “our Russian nation,” of going back to their faith and their roots. What did they mean by that exactly? What did they think of Kat and Misha? You had to rely on your instincts, your powers of observation, pay heed to the slightest inflection, the smallest of smirks. You never trusted anyone completely.

  Was it like that for Anechka at her elite lyceum? Kat thought probably not. Why else would she leave Kat and Misha behind so decisively, so eagerly?

  Kat waits all day. Soon after two o’clock, the school begins to empty out. A dirty orange Lada pulls up outside the fence. It’s not an eye-catching or fancy car; it blends in so well with the scenery that Kat almost misses it at first. The man at the wheel is reading a newspaper. Someone’s parent perhaps? He seems impatient. Anechka said the students here were handpicked and many had important parents. The man is dressed in a leather jacket; he’s bald and has a bullish boxer’s build. He seems like the type, though his car is too grimy for him to be anyone special.

  This is when Anechka appears, in her long coat and high boots and that atrocious raspberry beret. She squints around for a second, and then, before Kat can react, she practically flies across the schoolyard. The man leans over to unlock the car door and she slips in, matter-of-factly, like she’s done it a million times. They kiss in a quick, practiced way. They kiss! Her mother and the bald guy in the Lada car.

  The man guns the engine and they are gone in a small cloud of exhaust, gone before Kat can scream or memorize the license plate. The license plate! She’ll laugh about it later, though at the time it seems like the only thing to do. What was she going to do with it? Rush to the local police station? Report an abduction? Explain that her mother couldn’t mean it, couldn’t kiss a bald stranger unless she’d been bewitched? Brainwashed? How dumb she will feel, how gullible, when she recalls standing there in the street trying to make out the dirty orange car, as if finding it could salvage anything.

  17

  ON A WET AND CHILLY SATURDAY, KAT MEETS Nikita at their usual place. Her shoulder bag holds a few books, some clothes, and a toothbrush. She hands it to him and says, “I need a place to stay.”

  Nikita says, “What happened?”

  She says she and her parents had a disagreement, though she won’t divulge any details. She’s too ashamed and furious to tell him what she saw on Monday: her mother in flagrante, the orange Lada car.

  “One disagreement?”

  Kat says one is enough. “If you can’t put me up, I’ll go somewhere else.” She can go to Jules, or stay in Kratovo, or sleep at a train station with the best of vagabonds. What she can’t do is go home. She’s got no home anymore. After everything Anechka has put them through, now this final betrayal. And what is Kat supposed to do? Play along? Be a dutiful daughter? Pretend she saw nothing?

  Nikita takes her to a drab three-story building not far from the Barricades station. “It’s not where I really live,” he says, as he unlocks the door on the top floor. “My brother rents a room here, but right now he’s not using it.”

  The place has an awkward arrangement: a poorly lit hallway, a string of strange adjoining rooms, a kitchen with nothing but a stove and sink.

  “Does anybody live here?”

  Nikita says, “Some students. It used to be a dorm, I think.”

  His brother’s room is stuck haphazardly behind the kitchen. Inside lies an old, stained mattress. No tables or chairs or lamps or potted plants. No books. Not even a small radio.

  Nikita smiles apologetically. “It’s dreadful.”

  Kat slowly takes off her scarf and coat. “It’s dry,” she tells him, “and it’s warm.” She cautiously sits down on the mattress.

  She knows, in general outline, what happens between men and women. She’s looked at the sex manuals in Jules’s home: the hand-drawn pictures of bearded, naked males and sluggish, wide-hipped female bodies. They seemed crude, those drawings, purposefully unflattering, as if meant to discourage you from having sex. Sex, they seemed to say, was for married, unattractive couples.

  Nikita moves around anxiously. “Are you thirsty?” he asks. “Are you comfortable? Do you want something to eat?” He peeks into the kitchen, which, by the looks of it, hasn’t seen food in weeks.

  Kat tells him she’s okay. “Come sit with me.” She pats the mattress.

  After some hesitation, he joins her. It’s not very cozy or restful—they might as well sit on the floor. She stretches out on her back. He settles down next to her. They lie side by side, gazing up at the ceiling, unsure how to be, how to act.

  “Imagine if your parents saw us.”

  “Don’t think of them,” Kat says, and pulls herself up on one elbow.

  They lose track of time for a while, their bodies jammed against each other, their lips becoming rubbery and sore. They do manage to keep most of their clothes on, though he’s shed his sweater and her blouse is now unbuttoned. The room grows dim and they barely notice; only later do they find out that the light in the room doesn’t work. She loves how easily she can entrance him: a knee pushed just so, a certain tilt or shift in pressure, and his whole body goes crazy in response. He has to excuse himself a couple times—to get a sip of water, to use the bathroom.

  “Are you tired?” he asks when he returns. She kisses his throat, says no. She leans into him, simply to test once more this new and thrilling power. Nice girls don’t do this. Nice girls stay home—but she is not a nice girl. She’s a wicked, wretched creature, no better than the trashy girls at school who get drunk with the local boys and then strip naked in the bushes.

  “Wait, Kat. We mustn’t.” He sits up abruptly. “It would be like taking advantage of you. What if tomorrow I’m gone? I’m a transient person right now. You’ve read what the army is like in our country, with all the violence and hazing. I might not come back in one piece.”

  “Can they send you to Afghanistan?”

  “They can do anything.”

  She tucks her face into his shoulder, crestfallen, ashamed of her eagerness, while he absentmindedly strokes her hair. She’s just like her mother, a wild, selfish woman.

  That night they sleep next to each other in their clothes, except Kat finds that she can’t sleep. She’s been like this all week, nodding off around midnight only to wake up an hour later, churning with heartache and frustration, thinking of confronting Anechka, plotting what she might say. The words spin themselves in endless arguments.

  In the morning, she and Nikita
have a makeshift breakfast of tea and bread with dried-up jam, and later in the afternoon they go out to look for groceries.

  “I don’t mind you staying,” says Nikita, as they walk back with their bags. “But aren’t you too young to run away from home?”

  “Home?” she says. “What’s that?” Then she tells him of Anechka’s bald suitor and Misha’s refusal to see that anything is wrong.

  “Good grief,” says Nikita. “Are you sure?” Not that he doubts her story, but Anechka and Misha—how can they be with anybody else? They are these perfect, ethereal beings, the stuff of poetry and legend. Orpheus and Eurydice. Marie and Pierre Curie. If their love is untenable, what hope is there for anybody else? Poor old Misha, he says. Poor Kat.

  At the end of the block, he pauses by a pay phone. “Call him, Kat. He’s going to worry.”

  “I bet he hasn’t even noticed that I’m gone.”

  She tries to tell him that her parents aren’t perfect, that for all their talk of sacrifice and honor, they can be weak and self-absorbed. Nikita remains unconvinced. “I still feel you should call them.”

  Outside the apartment they stop. There’s music blaring through the door and they glance at each other, unsure whether they should enter, except that they have no other place to go. Inside there’s a party—twenty people or more—judging by the music on the stereo, the steady din inside the rooms, the twang of a guitar, the dull clink of bottles.

  Before Kat and Nikita can escape into his room, they’re intercepted by the host, a tall, emaciated-looking boy with weird hair, shaved in the back, long and bleached in the front. He’s got an earring in each ear, one in his nose. His smile is so intense it actually might bespeak insanity.

  “Nikita, my friend, good to see you! How’s your brother doing? He’s such a character, your bro. And who is this lovely young lady? You must join us, you wonderful people. We’ve got some drinks and grub.”