What if she hid the record book and then told her mother on Saturday that she’d left it at school, and then on Monday she could get sick and secure another day. And then on Tuesday, the day of the appointed meeting, she could tell VIP that her parents couldn’t come. Taking temporary comfort in that dubious reasoning, Alex listened to the sounds of the apartment, of drawers opening and closing and other activity in the kitchen as Katya got supper ready. Then she heard her parents come home. And then the doorbell rang and several voices were heard in the hallway. It must be company for supper.
So why did he say that she whistled, Alex thought pressing her head into upholstery of the sofa. Why did he do such a hateful thing? She remembered how last spring she had brought him a small box of Turkish delight, a rare treat delivered to their home as part of a special ration. Using the inside of his foot, Max was kicking a small stone by the schoolyard fence. Alex had gone over to him and silently handed him her present.
“Ah, Marsh Gas, it’s you and no other,” he said as he continued to kick at the stone, picking it up and dropping it again with his foot. “What’s this?” She had no idea why he called her that. Everyone at school had a nickname, but the one he came up with for her was easily the strangest.
Finally, he kicked the stone away and took a piece of candy from the box, licked the powered sugar off it, sniffed it, and put it back in the box. Then he took another piece, licked the sugar off it too, and stuck out his tongue all the way so she could see its red central groove.
“You think I’m some little winkie-dinkie? Take your junk away! Or even stick it up your ass, nutty Marsh Gas.”
Why did she like him so much? Why, even after that incident, did she try to help him with his school essays? “You’re terrific,” he said after receiving a 5 and the comment “excellent” on one of them. And then, to confirm his friendly feelings, he had pinched her painfully. But now it was clear to her that he must have hated her all along. She didn’t want to admit it to herself, but now she knew.
She shuddered under the coverlet and her palms started to sweat. She was worn-out with fear. Withdrawing into sleep, she dreamed of warm water washing all over her as she and her brother swam together, shoulder to shoulder, before getting out of the river to lie on the warm sand near their dacha. In her dream she loved her brother and admired him and happily felt his arm around her, protecting her.
He was telling her about something, about some easy trick she could use to solve all math problems, once and for all, a trick she’d always known but just didn’t realize that she knew. “It’s simple,” her brother said. “We need to find a seed.”
“A seed? What kind of seed?”
“A hemp seed like the one in ‘The Black Hen.’”
She was surprised and delighted that he knew her favourite fairytale from childhood. The Black Hen, who turned out to be the ruler of a kingdom of underground people, was saved by the little boy, Alyosha. The hen rewarded him with a magic seed that would free him from all homework. As long as he kept the seed in his pocket, he would know the answer to any question at school. But he betrayed the Black Hen’s secret and the seed lost its power.
5
The second class on Thursdays was physical education. Which in the winter meant 45 minutes of cross-country skiing around the schoolyard with barely enough time to change back into school uniforms, since between physical education and math, the next class, there was only a ten-minute break. When Alex stepped outside with her skis, she was blinded for a moment by the bright glare of white snow against the steel-grey sky. On seeing Max putting on his skis, the blood rushed to her cheeks. She needed to talk to him, to ask him why he had lied. But then she hesitated.
“Get away from me, Goofball!” he yelled, throwing a ski pole at her and harmlessly hitting the padded sleeve of her jacket.
“But why? Why did you say that? What have I ever done to you?”
“Don’t even talk to me, you fat pig!”
“I am not . . . I never did anything . . .”
“I hate your mug! Don’t you get it?” He pushed off with his poles, joining the other students on the crystalline white tracks.
After going around three times, Alex brushed off her skis, returned them to the shed, quickly changed, and ran to her math class. Her hair still uncombed and her cheeks red from the cold, she came to a stop in front of the open classroom door. Hadn’t VIP make it clear that she wasn’t to return to class until the meeting with her parents had taken place? A familiar sense of hopelessness overcame her and she started to feel sick.
“Are you coming in or not? There’s a lot of work to be done before tomorrow’s test. You had better come in.” VIP’s voice sounded almost friendly and Alex entered the room.
Ten minutes into the class VIP called Alex up to the blackboard. Standing in front of the rest of the class and watching her own trembling hand, Alex picked up a piece of chalk from the blackboard shelf. Then she felt a tickling sensation in her nose, an invariable precursor of tears. VIP stated the conditions of the problem. The class fell silent, waiting for Alex’s next gift of involuntary entertainment. She stared at her own blackboard scrawl, none of which, numbers or signs, was comprehensible to her.
“I can’t do it,” she whispered paralyzed with fear. “I don’t understand any of it. I can’t.”
“My goodness, what a milksop you are, Bolt!” VIP said emphatically. “Just a worthless, worn-out thing of no use to the world at all. Then she added: “An amoeba,” implying an even more radical lack of merit or substance. “A nonentity, a good-for-nothing cipher! The country needs qualified engineers. It needs nuclear physicists to develop peaceful atomic energy. It needs cosmonauts to conquer space. Maybe Bolt thinks that the Soviet people don’t need mathematics? Or maybe she thinks that she can somehow take from society without ever giving anything back?”
No, Alex said, she didn’t think that at all. She didn’t want to take away from other people. She didn’t know why she was the way she was, why she was unfit for math, the only thing in the world that mattered.
6
Alex wasn’t supposed to open the door to strangers when home alone. Listening to the assertive ringing of the bell and pressing her eye against the peephole in the door’s leather-padding, she saw a woman with a small child in her arms.
“Help a fire victim! Spare whatever you can! Don’t begrudge! Old clothing, shoes, in God’s name!”
“Fire victim” was a dark phrase that meant the destruction of a home. Such people were among the poorest of all. Somehow, fires never seemed to dispossess the rich. Since early childhood, Alex had always pictured fire victims with blackened faces and charred skin, but she had never seen any. And now only the front door separated her from two.
Through the peephole Alex could see only the child and the dirty calico headscarf covering the woman’s head and the lower part of her face.
A flat monotone came from the other side of the door: “Please help those in need!”
Alex opened it without unhitching the chain and saw a swarthy dark-haired woman in a crooked scarf, an oversize man’s jacket, and a gaudy Gypsy-style flared skirt. She was barefoot. The sight of bare feet in the middle of winter impressed Alex and she removed the chain and opened the door a little wider.
“I’ll see if I can find something warm for you,” she said.
The woman and the child immediately came inside. Alex hadn’t meant them to, but now it was too late. A rancid, alien smell invaded the hallway. The woman unwrapped the child’s dirty rags and set down on the floor what turned out to be a little girl of around four. The shiny black buttons of her serious, unblinking eyes stared up at Alex. The mother’s gaze, however, looked ceaselessly around, taking in every detail.
On the wall opposite her a mirror in a gilded frame with plump cherubs spoke of the comfortable, easy circumstances of the Bolts’ lives. An ottoman with carved legs stood
in a corner of the spacious hallway, the warm red velvet of its upholstery matching the pink wallpaper flecked with golden sparks. The pendant grape-shaped light bulbs of the hallway chandelier bathed the woman and child in a golden glow. The woman’s nostrils flared. Katya had been baking cinnamon buns that morning.
“She hasn’t had a crumb all day,” the woman said, pointing to the little girl. “I can see that you’re a good soul. Give the little one something to eat.”
“I’ll see what there is in the kitchen,” Alex uneasily replied, since she was afraid of leaving them alone in the hallway.
The woman apparently sensed that and pretended to take offence. “Scared? Then don’t get anything. We’re fire victims not beggars or thieves of some kind. Left with nothing at all, just the clothes on backs as you see us now.”
“I don’t have anything your size,” Alex mumbled, startled by the woman’s sudden change of tone.
“I’m sure your mama has something warm . . .”
“Yes, there’s her fur coat, but I can’t give that to you.”
“But why not, sweetheart? You’ll get it back, my pretty one, I swear on the life of this child. As soon as I drop her off at my sister’s, I’ll bring back everything you give me. You want to see how Gypsies live? Then come with me!” The woman pulled the little girl’s head toward her hip and both of them stared at Alex.
After making a quick mental measurement of the woman — she was exactly her mother’s height but half her size — Alex went to the armoire and ran her fingers through the things in it: a rain coat, a leather jacket for early spring, her mother’s mink coat, and some enormous jackets of her father’s. She hesitated for a moment and then removed the mink coat from its hanger. The woman tested its weight on her arm and then wrapped it around herself and twirled in front of the mirror. “It fits well, doesn’t it? Now how about some shoes I could wear?”
Exactly at what point did Alex completely yield to those forces now beyond her control? She got out several pairs of shoes from the armoire drawer. But they were all too small for the woman’s large feet. Then the woman pointed to Alex’s father’s fleece-lined snow boots and quickly slipped them on.
“God will send you a good husband for your kindness,” she said. And then she picked up her little girl and was out the door and on the stairs before Alex realized what had happened and ran after them.
The woman and girl went around the building into the courtyard and then across it and out through a narrow archway to another building and then through another courtyard. The woman loped with long strides in her new snow boots and loose-fitting mink coat. She paid no heed to the little girl, who was even so easily able to keep up with her. They were rapidly moving farther and farther from Alex’s familiar neighbourhood. As they were passing a row of metal storage sheds with construction materials scattered nearby, Alex tripped over a piece of wire hidden in the snow and fell hard on her face. She had by then no idea where she was, but oddly enough curiosity had replaced her initial fear. She felt vague excitement, even a kind of bold impatience.
The woman and the girl crossed over some old streetcar tracks and entered what looked like an abandoned barracks. Alex went over to it, and through a partly open dirty window on the ground floor she saw a room with dirty rags by the door and no furniture. When she followed the woman and girl inside, she smelled the same reek that the woman and the girl had brought into the apartment. The room itself turned out to be crowded with people. Swarthy children with curly black hair were running wild around women sitting on the floor and waving their arms as they argued with each other in an incomprehensible guttural tongue. Just as Alex was entering the room, a man suddenly blocked her path. He must have come in through another door that she hadn’t noticed in the semi-darkness. The “fire victim” angrily shouted at him and then they started fighting over the coat as the man tried to pull it off her while she tried to prevent it. In the end he slapped her hard.
“You better take the coat and run, girl! Run!” the woman shouted at Alex. The coat flew over the heads of the fighting man and woman in Alex’s direction but was caught in the air by the man’s outstretched hand. And then, before Alex could react, he grabbed her with his other hand and pulled her at a run out of the room. As they ran, he draped the coat over her. Strangely, she wasn’t afraid. Bundled up in the fur, she felt warm and cosy.
They finally stopped in front of a large section of conduit pipe left on the ground, its dark opening vivid against the white snow. Scraps of the insulation material covering its surface fluttered in the wind. The man bent over and entered the pipe, still keeping a tight grip on Alex. Once inside he placed a round piece of plywood in front of the entrance and then put her down. Total darkness enveloped them. A shiver ran down her back. She felt strangely detached and curious at the same time.
“We’ll make it warm for you,” the Gypsy said. The sound of his rough voice was appealing.
He lit a little oil stove. Its small flame relieved the darkness, casting triangles of flickering light on his sharp features and mass of matted curly hair.
Alex was mesmerized by his face, so close to hers, and by his smell, and by the rustling, whispering sound his feet made as he moved about. The other end of the pipe must he covered with last year’s frozen leaves, she thought. Every sound he made had its echoing twin as if glass was being broken. If she closed her eyes, it even seemed like the interior of a church. She was startled from her reverie when the Gypsy kicked some wooden object, a crate as it turned out, and then sat down on it with Alex in front of him.
“Scared? I won’t do you no bad if you be good.”
“But I’m not scared,” Alex pluckily replied, knowing in her heart that it was true. “Why did you slap the fire victim? They lost everything in a fire.”
“What fire victim? That was my wife!”
“Your wife? Is the little girl your daughter, then?”
The Gypsy burst into laughter followed by a sharp hacking cough.
“Oh, sure! Like I’m rich or something? She borrows the kids for begging. And you, little miss madam, you no meddle in Gypsy business, get it?” His eyes narrowed and gave off a menacing glint in the weak light. “Want something to drink?”
Alex shook her head, the defiance suddenly gone from her face. The Gypsy got to his feet and groped for a bottle. He drank what was left in it and tossed it into the darkness and leaves at the other end of the pipe. Then he passed his hand over the coat, feeling the soft fur. “Nice coat! Your mama’s? You must be rich, eh?”
“No, we’re not rich and I have to take the coat back,” Alex said firmly. But almost immediately she was overcome with fear.
“You want the coat back? Mama will get mad, eh?” He put his arms around her and squeezed her until she couldn’t breathe. “Here’s how it work. You get coat, I get what inside.”
Alex didn’t understand.
Then he quickly and expertly checked the coat’s pockets, turning her around as if she weighed nothing, a mere toy. He found some rubles and put them in the pocket of his shabby jacket. “These be mine. The coat you take.” And then he set her on his knee and gently rocked her while humming something. She knew he was dangerous and was afraid of him, yet at the same time she didn’t care.
The harsh edge of his voice, the wildness of his face, the probing of his hands excited her. And when his hand slipped inside the coat and then deeper under her sweater, she didn’t resist but continued to feel the same passive curiosity and indifference, reacting only as his hand moved toward her bra. She was afraid he would find the cotton wool stuffed in it for the technical translation teacher. But it was too late. The Gypsy’s hand was already painfully squeezing her breasts. She cried out, but he silenced her with his rough, chapped lips, covering her whole face, and took one of her nipples between his sandpaper fingers. She cried out again and for a time seemed to lose all sense of reality.
But the movement of his hands stretched her nerves like strings to their limit, so that every smell or sound or touch seemed to resonate within her entire body. But what completely brought her back to reality was the weak fragrance of Red Moscow, her mother’s favourite perfume, emanating from the coat. She kicked the coat away, trying to free herself from her mother’s abrupt intrusion.
Then she was lying in the man’s arms with nothing on but her woollen tights and her woollen camisole, its buttons undone. The Gypsy’s hands searched her body hungrily, now stroking the inside of her thighs. “You one fresh little bun, nice and soft!” For the first time her chubbiness was a source not of scorn but of pleasure to someone. Now she wanted him to know everything about her, wanted him to hurt her nipples, her lips, her thighs.
He raised himself up without releasing her, reached over to where she had kicked the coat, and wrapped it around her. And then he kept rocking and fondling her until she drifted off again. Her trance came to a sudden end when she felt a terrifyingly sharp pain between her now naked thighs. She shrieked, but he suppressed her shrieks with his biting kisses. She fought him and cried out again and again until finally he let go of her and the pain stopped. Then he groaned and forced her hand between her legs and back and forth over her belly and thighs, now covered with something wet and slippery. And then he roughly pushed her away. She began to sob, at once frightened and repulsed, thinking that the slippery fluid was her own blood. Or maybe his blood, which would mean that she’d done something terrible to him.
Then she heard his curse, then laugh and hacking cough and sobbed even harder from bewilderment, until he took her in his arms again and they both lay still for a while. From the world outside came a continuous, all-encompassing sound. The weather had changed, replacing the wet snow with the steady beat of rain against the metal of the pipe.
“Now you go home,” the Gypsy said.
“I don’t know the way,” Alex murmured, still in a daze.
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