Expulsion

by Marina Sonkina

  “What you mean?”

  “I don’t know where we are.”

  “Near bird market, stupid. You know bird market?”

  “No.”

  “Jesus!” he said, chuckling. “How you get here, then, you goose?”

  “I followed your . . . wife.”

  The man fussed for a moment with something on the floor, then he blew out the stove and led Alex outside. The rain was now mixed with hail. “I’ll show you how to get to market this time, and then you on your own.”

  She wanted to stay close to him, but he quickly moved away from her.

  It was still daylight when they entered the pipe, but now it was dark. Her parents must have declared an official search, Alex thought, beginning to panic. They must have called the police by now and started to check all the hospitals and morgues.

  They continued on their way, and then the Gypsy came to a stop.

  “See those tracks? Go left and when you come to construction, go left again. You come to pipe tomorrow?”

  She looked at his face partly hidden beneath the long bill of his cap.

  “I won’t be able to find it by myself.”

  He laughed. Then he touched her shoulder, turning her around. “You an idiot or what?” he said. “I meet you at market. You come after it get dark.”

  She nodded.

  The market stalls looked deserted, with discarded newspaper turning wet in the rain and the piles of shovelled snow now dark with dirt and excrement. On Sundays people bought and sold pets there: dogs, cats, hamsters, guinea pigs, and even a few birds. But the name still remained from the time when pigeon breeders had gathered there.

  “You bring money. No money, no go.”

  “What money?” Alex asked, not understanding.

  “Gypsy not work for nothing.”

  “How much should I bring?”

  “What have you got?”

  “Thirty kopeks for the movies, and some money for ice cream. About two rubles, I think. Is that enough?”

  “You kidding? With fat pigs like your parents? I need at least five.”

  “Five rubles? Where would I get that?”

  “How I know? That your business. No money, no fun,” he said and left her standing under a buzzing, blinking street lamp.

  She felt cold in the freezing rain and pulled the collar of the fur coat around her throat to protect it. Then she realized that if the coat got soaked, her mother would know that she had used it, so she took it off, rolled it up, and waddled off home, the rain and hail beating against her cardigan.

  7

  The courtyard of Alex’s building was deserted. To avoid bumping into any neighbours, she took the stairs up to the eighth floor instead of using the elevator. She quietly opened the door to the apartment with her key and slipped inside its brightly lit hallway. No one had missed her. Judging by the cheerful banter coming from the dining room, her parents had company. Without looking to see, she went to her room and took off her wet clothing, tucking it out of sight where Katya would be unlikely to find it. The sight of her own nakedness in the shower filled her with shame. She noticed a bruise on her thigh and hurried to dry herself and put on her robe back on. The cleanliness and soothing coolness of the bed sheets gave her some comfort, although the pleasant sensation lasted only a while. Her skin had begun to burn and she found it hard to breathe. “I did catch cold, after all!” she thought with sudden relief. If her mother or Katya should ask, she could say that she’d been sick in bed the whole time and for that reason couldn’t come out to greet their company.

  What had just happened to her overwhelmed all the other troubles that Alex was facing, or at least what had passed for troubles: her unfinished homework, the note from VIP summoning her parents for a conference — all dwarfed by comparison. The pipe had obliterated Alex’s past, but it had also brought new worries. What if it turned really cold and her mother decided to wear her coat? She needed to clean it somehow. Unsteady on her feet, she got up and looked out the window. It was still drizzling, which meant that it was above freezing. That would give her some time. The next morning, her mother felt her forehead, agreed that she was sick, and went off to one of her meetings.

  Alex waited until the apartment was quiet again with that special, late morning calm that followed the fuss and bustle of everyone getting ready for work. After listening to make sure that Katya had left on her regular visit to the market, Alex got out of bed and staggered over to her piggy bank. After losing count several times, she was finally able to make a fair estimate of how much she had — a total of almost nine rubles.

  The dry cleaner said it would only be three rubles and promised to have the coat ready in a week at the earliest. Alex panicked. The woman looked at her for a moment, and then said: “Come back in four days. That’s the best I can do.”

  Later that afternoon, when her mother returned home, Alex was already feeling much better, well enough, she said, to visit the school friend with whom she always studied for math tests.

  “I may have supper with her too,” she said casually.

  “But you were sick only a few hours ago,” Katya said.

  “The test’s tomorrow, an important one,” Alex said, averting her eyes.

  It was a miracle that she managed to find the bird market at all, and she was only able to do so after wandering in and out of courtyards and crossing the tracks several times. Finally in the dusk she made out the figure of the Gypsy leaning against an empty booth. He had been waiting for her and watched her eagerly as she came over to him.

  “So, you came back, missy! How much you bring?”

  “About six rubles,” Alex said. “It’s all I have.”

  He counted the money, put it in his pocket, and signalled for her to follow him. She looked around, hoping to memorize the route. He entered the pipe first without looking back to see if she was following. When she stumbled over some bricks by the entrance, he turned around, said: “Shh! Quiet!” and pulled her into his arms. Then he sat down with her on the crate again and began to rock her back and forth. Playing a game with herself, she pretended that she was a little child and was supposed to be passive and pleasantly powerless in his arms, the way she had felt the day before and the way, she sensed, that he wanted her to feel.

  He unbuttoned her top and pushed her bra down around her waist. “Tits are still too small, huh?” he said, kissing her nipples. She lay semiconscious in his arms.

  •

  To cover her tracks at home, Alex made up various stories: a classmate’s nonexistent birthday party, a school trip to the theatre, and, finally, her voice lessons, two of which she had already skipped, claiming to be sick. Her dog, Kerry, was becoming a nuisance. He seemed able to read her mind and would whimper and whine whenever she was about “to go to the pipe.”

  The fear of discovery was wearing her down. Financing her adventure demanded an ingenuity she lacked. Her tiny allowance wasn’t enough to satisfy the Gypsy. She borrowed money from Katya and, when that source dried up, she took ten rubles from her father’s wallet.

  She must have visited the pipe five times by then but still didn’t know the Gypsy any better than on the first day. He remained aloof and rarely spoke. But now she needed him and sometimes she would sulk like a small child to draw him out. He would scoff and laugh and rock her, but that was the nearest she could get to anything like tenderness from him. On the way back from the pipe, he would whistle. What followed the rocking prelude always filled her with horror, for nothing had prepared her for the ferocity of human lovemaking. Her own readiness to participate shocked her even more. She had eagerly flung herself into “that,” and now her body was taking its revenge. She felt weak, sickly, barely able to walk, yet full of an unrelenting desire for that stranger. Sometimes she managed to suppress her fear by imagining that she was just an observer, that she was located somewhere outside
her body, which was on temporary loan to her master.

  But her earlier sense of being an outsider had passed. Now she wanted the Gypsy and counted the days and hours until their next tryst. She was resentful that he had a wife and pretended he didn’t. And then she admitted it to herself and pretended that it was interesting and mysterious, like the picture in one of her father’s art books: a harem, languid women reclining around a fountain, getting massages from their black slaves as they waited, waited to serve one man. She imagined herself as one of them, lustful and carefree. But there was also the fear that she would soon run out of ways of getting money and he would forbid her to come to him. As if tempting that possibility, she suggested it.

  “What if I can’t come tomorrow?” she asked the Gypsy, stroking his black curls.

  “Oh, you’ll come. Where else would you go?”

  “But what if I can’t find any money next time?”

  “You’ll find it, all right.”

  She obeyed him and found it. She wanted to.

  Disaster finally struck from an unexpected quarter. Alex was sitting in her room over her homework and staring into the distance while thinking about the Gypsy, when she suddenly heard the sound of angry voices in the hallway.

  “But I didn’t take it anywhere, I swear!” Katya said.

  “Then how do you explain the cleaner’s identification tag on the collar?” Alex’s mother said.

  She was accusing Katya of removing the mink coat from the apartment, perhaps even wearing it herself, and then taking it to the cleaner’s, something that would certainly have been forbidden, since everybody knew that cleaners could replace real fur with fake.

  “I didn’t touch it, as God is my witness,” Katya swore.

  “You work in a respectable home. I can send you back to your village anytime, if that’s what you want.”

  Alex pushed back her chair and ran out to the hallway.

  “Leave her alone, Mama! She didn’t do anything. It was me! I took the coat to the cleaner’s.”

  Her mother stared at Alex for a long time.

  “But why? You didn’t wear it, did you?”

  “No, I lent it to the Gypsy.”

  “What do you mean, the Gypsy?”

  “Just that. The Gypsy wore it. They were fire victims. They lost everything in a fire. I had to help them, didn’t I?”

  For a moment, her mother was speechless. When she recovered, she brought her face close to her daughter’s and said flatly, barely letting the sound pass through her lips: “He was killed, but you’re alive? Why? Where’s the justice in that?”

  8

  Valentina Ivanovna Popova had taken up mathematics merely by chance. She had grown up in a family of construction workers in a little provincial town three hours from Moscow.

  Although strong and lean and an excellent track athlete who could beat any boy, none of them were attracted to Popova, for some reason preferring anaemic, empty-headed girls instead. She found relief during most of her adolescent years in collecting and classifying amphibians, intending to become a batrachologist, until an apparently minor event changed her life forever. As was the practice around the end of every September, the students of her school were taken by truck to a chronically understaffed collective farm to help bring in the harvest, this time by digging up potatoes from the hard, cold earth with a group of boys and girls from Moscow sent to work with them.

  The Soviet Dawn collective farm was an hour of dirt-road bumps and ruts from Popova’s school. With boisterous cries and whistling, 20 tenth graders climbed into the back of a rickety old truck, the boys taking their places on the side benches and the girls sitting on their knees. Every bump provoked excited screams. Popova was the only one sitting in the back with her legs hanging over the truck’s open tailgate. Unaffected by the general hilarity, she watched the dirt road running away in front of her and swore to herself that one day she would prevail over those inane hedonists and over the city children too. And especially over the girls the boys found attractive, and she would do so by excelling in an area where those ninnies would never poke their noses. And then and there she decided to become a mathematician.

  For a long time Popova’s efforts were unavailing and her marks remained middling at best. Even with her impeccable social background (her parents were both proletarians), it was still doubtful that she could get into the Moscow State University Department of Mathematics, the best in the country. But she tried anyway. Failing the entrance exams the first time, she took them again the next year and failed again. But that didn’t discourage her. The standards of the much less prestigious Pedagogical Institute weren’t so strict and she was ultimately accepted in its Department of Mathematics to train as a school teacher. But to her great disappointment, the overwhelming majority of students in the department were girls, with the small minority paying as little attention to her as before. But she persevered, despite her dislike of the subject, eventually becoming a leader of the Communist Youth Organization and serving in her final year as Secretary of the Institute’s affiliate. She was efficient, disciplined, and self-assured. Many of the other students were afraid of her, even though what she wanted was neither fear nor respect but affection. She began organizing nature outings and camping trips with bonfires under the starlit skies. She also led special trips to lakes and ponds to identify different species of frogs and water insects, and she strummed a guitar around those same bonfires, singing folk songs in her characteristic whinny.

  In five years Popova graduated from the Institute with a master’s degree and teaching certificate. By that time most of the girls in her year had got married, and several of them were even nursing their first children, while Popova remained a virgin. On the other hand, her Communist Youth activism assured her excellent job opportunities and she was sent to a boarding school for the mathematically gifted. The school was in a forest 100 kilometres closer to Moscow than her childhood home and thus meant a significant geographic promotion for her. And then, after a time, she was invited to teach in Moscow itself, which gave her a coveted residence permit and, because she was a teacher, a room in a communal apartment near Paveletsky Station without the usual wait.

  In her classes, Popova invariably favoured the boys over the girls, regarding the latter as silly, petty, and innately incapable of learning mathematics. She managed, as a rule, to win the boys over, forming something like a comradely bond with them. All the same, she remained hopeful of “personal happiness,” as it was called in the New Year’s greeting cards of the day. To expedite its arrival, she took up tennis, an uncommon game in the 1950s with courts reserved mainly for the elite. Since the majority of the players were men, she reasoned that the statistical chances of an auspicious encounter should be extremely high. And she wasn’t in that reasoning altogether mistaken. The men were happy to team up with her, considering her a good sport. Yet at the age of 35 she was still a virgin, and by 40 she had given up any hope of marriage.

  For Popova, Alex, the girl with a boy’s name, was an aberration and not to be tolerated. There was in her lazy passivity, in her unassailable perplexity, and above all in her clumsiness — in the way she tended to knock everything around her into disarray, something that offended Popova to the very core. Unfocused and disorganized, the girl seemed to be sleepwalking through life as if she had all the time in the world, whereas no one does. To live without any purpose was inexcusable to Popova. Mathematics was a vast subject, so vast that it could never be mastered in a single lifetime. Popova herself had achieved what she had by dint of sheer hard work, sacrificing everything for the sake of her science, whereas that girl was looking for an easy way and would even lie if it suited her purposes. And there was her last name too. Bolt? Was that Jewish or German? And her father, the principal had intimated, was a big fish of some kind. Oh, those people are so sure they’ll prevail! Only not this time. And certainly not over her! If the parents wouldn
’t teach their children to accept responsibility, then the school would have to take appropriate measures on its own. And so with quiet resolve, the way she made all her decisions, Popova assured Alex’s expulsion from School No. 1. By failing her in mathematics.

  9

  When Alex’s father appeared in her office one afternoon, Popova politely asked him why it had taken him so long. Her summons had been sent almost two weeks before. When he heard that, Professor Bolt’s his eyebrows rose: he had never seen any note, he said, but had come on his own initiative because he and his wife were concerned about their daughter’s lack of progress.

  “Her marks are surprisingly low, given the enormous amount of time she spends on your assignments,” he said to Popova, while quickly looking her over and casting down his eyes . “Three hours a day, on average, and sometimes more. My wife and I have been wondering about the reasons for her lack of success. Well . . . it goes without saying that your view of the matter is crucial.”

  There was a pause. “Comrade Bolt, let me ask you something. In your line of work, are you judged by the results or by the amount of time you put into them?”

  “Well, the answer to that is clear enough,” Bolt said, acknowledging Popova’s point. “But let me stress that we really do need to consider any child’s development in its totality. And from that point of view, my daughter’s other subjects have been suffering. Because of her heavy math assignments, she has had no time for anything else. She’s been taking voice lessons after school, as you may know, and she seems to have some talent.”

  “Voice lessons? Now that surprises me!” Popova replied with a grave expression. “Don’t you think it would be better for your daughter to avoid extraneous activities and focus on what’s important? With the problems she’s having with math? Focus on what will ensure her continuing presence in School No. 1?”

  “Yes, of course, of course, I do,” Professor Bolt rushed to assure his interrogator. “But perhaps I didn’t express myself clearly enough. Our daughter has a special talent for singing. It would be devastating to her if we took away such an important part of her life. But if you think the danger of her failing your class is a real one, then we’ll certainly . . . well, we’ll have to take that into account.”