Ken Kalfus - Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

A kind of noise surrounded her now, a ringing sheath that insulated her and deadened her senses to the privy’s odors and the stickiness. She heard music, from “The Fall of Berlin”:

The song was punctuated by footsteps, recognizable by their echoing tread. They stopped and the door to the privy creaked and heaved. The little hook tugged on the screw and even in the gloom she could see the screw give. The plank to which the screw was fastened yawned away from the doorframe.

Too frightened to move, she didn’t lift her underpants. The door hook was pulled hard to the horizontal, spanning a chasm of daylight, before it fell back into place. After a moment of silence, a fist thumped twice against the door. The privy’s timbers rattled like the bones of a skeleton. She made a choked, wordless sound, signaling herself. Father left.

She would need another piece of cloth. This morning she had seen in her mother’s sewing basket a second scrap alongside the yellow cloth, a piece of her old nightdress. Why hadn’t she taken both of them? She wished she could travel back in time and steal the second piece of cloth, or better yet… further back, to prevent everything that had happened. Using what was left of the newspapers (there would be complaints), she wiped herself. Tossed off its cinderblocks, the privy was spinning now, she was sure her father would return any minute. Why was he home so early? What time was it anyway? Was her mother home? If she could get past him, she could steal what was left of the old nightdress.

She quickly pulled up her underwear and, forgetting her coat, hurried from the privy. Father wasn’t waiting on the steps. She went around to the front of the house. She stepped through the door, removed her galoshes, and shuffled through the hallway, unaware of the swelling music. Her progress carried her to the door of the front room. Uncle Fedya and Aunt Olya’s big glass doors, usually shut and curtained, had been swung open. Anzhelika stopped. Surprise carried her hands to her face.

All the adults who lived in the house were there, sitting around a circle in the failing light, listening to Uncle Fedya’s radio. They had never done that before, they disliked each other too much. Still wearing her dark blue smock from the dairy, her mother cradled her head in her hands as if it were a cabbage. In the dusk, her person seemed no more substantial than an image in an old photograph, and that is how Anzhelika would remember her. Uncle Fedya sat alongside her mother, and on the other side were arrayed Aunt Olya, Aunt Vera, Uncle Adik, and then Father, occupying the place closest to the door.

In sacred devotion to their grief, they were all perfectly still, except Father, who was clenching and unclenching his fists. The tendons rose in his arms and neck. The choir continued, Forever he is true to that vow, which he gave Lenin. Only gradually did the adults’ eyes register the child’s presence, at first with indifference. And then a few eyes widened and held their gaze. Father turned in his chair. He was red in the face, which was greasy with sweat. His eyes were raw. He too had been crying.

It was only then that Anzhelika realized that her fingertips had been wet and that now her cheeks were wet as well. She glanced to the right. Across the room, the full-length mirror of the 1879 wardrobe neatly framed her. She was betrayed in it, what was left of the day coalescing around her like a spotlight. The blood was all over, streaked brown across her face, up and down her legs, and across her bare left arm. The uniform was stained too, finally, in her lap and in a big swipe across her chest. There were even dried bits of blood caught in her hair. Her body lifted from the floor, buoyed away on a rush of sorrow. New tears flooded her face: she could taste the blood with them. She gasped for breath. The adults didn’t move.

“It was me,” she sobbed. “It’s my fault!”

Father’s blow, when it came, was like a bolt of divine lightning.

Israel’s prayers were answered.

A young woman stood in the shadows, hugging herself as if she were cold, though body heat and the fire of political dispute had steamed the flat’s windows. Against the imagined chill she wore a shapeless brown cardigan that ended high above the waist of a long, incongruously flouncy blue dress. She was tall and almost swaybacked, with slender, bony limbs. Clearly a city girl, probably a student, possibly a Party worker. A casual glance might not have discovered her prettiness in the angular thrust of her jaw or in the firm, unsmiling set of her mouth, but he appraised her with the care of a jeweler. What summoned his attention was the penumbra of loneliness that extended from her person and merged into the room’s dim places. In its indeterminate contours, he perceived the precise impress of his own need.

He had stepped from the kitchen only to stretch his legs (and to register his disgust with the course of the conversation). The flat’s former dining room had been turned, or requisitioned, into the living space for a family of five. This evening it had been requisitioned yet again. Its fine parquet, shadowed by Chinese lanterns, now served as a dance floor. A gramophone recording unwound a length of insistently jazzy music, not quite current. In the center of the room a young red-haired student was trying to show her partner and another couple a new dance step, but she was unsure of it herself. Now she laughed at her own ineptitude.

“Back left foot, Israel? Side right foot and then the glide?”

He smiled distractedly, his gaze on the woman in the corner. She was staring into the room as if watching an entirely different scene, something unpleasant. Israel now noticed the menorah behind her, the shammes candle askew and a single light burning beneath it. The menorah was the only religious artifact in the room, even though Hanukkah was the Cultural Traditions Committee’s ostensible reason for the party.

“Yes, but you must lift your arms. The gentleman steps, and then follows. No, no, up. Back left, side right, chassé, up. Here, let me show you.”

In three quick strides he had reached the woman in the brown cardigan. “Please,” he said, offering his arms. “I would like to demonstrate the Paterson Hop.”

She shrank back from him, startled. She kept her arms around her chest.

“Ir ret Yiddish?” He asked if she spoke Yiddish. She shook her head.

“Please,” he said in Russian. “I would be most honored.”

“I don’t know how to dance.”

“You will, within three minutes.”

The two couples on the dance floor giggled. The needle was brought to the perimeter of the disk. He lightly held the woman and fixed his eyes on her face, but she looked away. As the song began, Israel ascertained that the woman had lied: the ability to dance was not easily concealed. She took some shuffling, flailing steps, exactly the steps that a good dancer thought were the trade of the clumsy. He was pleased with this lie; his smile burst upon his face like a sun shower. She tossed boyish hips in time with the composition’s complicated rhythm, unable to resist it. But she didn’t know the Paterson Hop. He said, “It’s a one-two, one-two, and then glide, with your arms, so”—he gently guided her—“so that the lady can pass under, and then, like this, that’s the hop part. My name is Shtern. Israel Davidovich. Are you involved with Komzet?”

“No, my friend Rachel Labanova invited me.”

“Lydia,” he said to the red-haired girl. “Try it with Maxim. One step back, two steps forward. It’s a dance for Nepmen. Now, glide. Almost. Again.” Turning to his own partner, he added: “You have some potential as a dancer, but you’ll need to practice. At least four times a day. Is Rachel Labanova involved with Komzet?”