Ken Kalfus - Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

That was last year. Yesterday she had passed Kolya playing in this same alleyway, a favorite place for the neighborhood boys, and when he saw her he had smiled, but not at her. A meteor had whistled by her right ear twenty seconds later. It landed on the ice ahead and skidded to an impact against a smaller stone, propelling it forward against some pebbles, propelling them in turn, a cascade of insults. She had walked on, hunched in her coat.

Today she expected the same rock to whistle by at exactly the same distance and velocity, and with the same melody. As she waited for it, she understood that the warmth that surrounded her had the character of an expectation, an intimate connection to something that was about to happen, born at the moment of the First Bulletin. Incomprehensible and unexplained, the bulletin had set off the ticking of a clock. The entire world heard it.

Even though the missile was never launched and she reached the door to the house unmolested, the sense of imminence never left her, it remained a warm, abiding presence through the rest of the day. She sought to capture and interrogate it, but after a hurried mental chase it eluded her around a rock and under a floorboard. The clock kept ticking.

Afternoon glided into evening, the haze imperceptibly passing into dusk and then night. Anzhelika sat on the bed in her family’s room, with her books open around a notebook in which, so close to the page her breath moistened it, she drew pencil sketches of gowned women. The sketches were minute, so as not to waste paper, but each had a label: “Nadia,” “Aleksandra Semyonovna,” “The Countess of Wallachia,” “Lyubov Orlova.” Distracted by the laden clouds gathering around her, she hardly thought of the drawings as she composed them. Anzhelika’s mother arrived from the dairy. Just before she entered the room, the girl turned the page of the notebook.

Her mother took some kolbasa and potatoes from the windowsill, prepared dinner in the kitchen, and brought it back to the room. Their table had once belonged to Anzhelika’s mother’s mother and still deserved a room a trifle larger. An inlaid stitched pattern of interlocking diamonds and rectangles ran the table’s perimeter. Anzhelika traced the clean end of her fork along the pattern, a road on which she was driving a red automobile, through open country at the edge of a high plateau.

After supper she went to the privy, an unpainted shed shrouded in fumes and resting on cinderblocks a few meters from the back of the house. There was some long-running dispute about the arrangements for cleaning it. Anzhelika hurriedly did her business in a half crouch over the hole, counting each shallow inhalation. Yet tonight she was not repelled by the odor; its extravagance nearly attracted her; there was something meaty and real about it. She wiped herself with some newspaper.

At that moment, a series of massive, earth-devouring steps came up the back path to the house. They belonged to Father. She waited until he passed and then—she thought it was important to do this tonight—she took one more half breath, trying to taste the essence of what appealed to her. She gagged on it.

Every evening when Father arrived home, after her supper, it was as if for the first time. Anzhelika had been in the privy then, four years before, a misty winter night like this one. The pounding of his boots had been immediately recognizable as a stranger’s, and was even more frightening than the privy, in whose hole, when she was nine, resided elves and bottom-grabbing demons. She had waited, shivering. Time passed and she wondered if the boots had either left through the front of the house or had never come at all. She returned to the house and stopped at the open door to the back room.

That evening her mother had been in tears. Never would Anzhelika consider the possibility that these had been tears of either relief or joy. A man had loomed in the shadows, the crevices and gnarls of his face starkly lit by the outside light. His eyes possessed a cold yellow illuminant of their own. A heavy bag, a grotesquely misshapen gray soldier’s satchel many times torn and patched, lay at her mother’s feet. Neither the man nor her mother turned in her direction.

Before that night, Anzhelika had shared the room with her mother and Aunt Lyuda. Afterwards, she slept in the kitchen. The other residents had bitterly objected to her usurpation of their common area. Threats were made. Father had replied with few words. He stood with his clenched, meaty hands on his hips, staring into the face of every opponent as if his glare could mark it. Now Anzhelika could not recall the final time she had seen Aunt Lyuda. She had simply left, a cousin had come for her. Those had been confused days and nights of agony. Sharp and sour odors had coagulated in the dark kitchen, taking fearful shapes. Anzhelika had imagined a great hand forming out of the murk.

No one ever spoke of Aunt Lyuda again. Anzhelika could hardly remember her. People were easily forgotten: like dreams their faces and the sounds of their voices were lost in the rush of daylight. Anzhelika herself would dissolve from memory no less quickly than Aunt Lyuda had.

Tonight her parents dined in silence, while Anzhelika sat among her schoolbooks on their bed. Father ate with enormous energy, tearing at his food. He was always hungry, never satiated. When he lay down his cutlery among the ruins of his meal, it was with a sour grimace, an expression of defeat. Anzhelika stared at the pages of notes that she had taken from the day’s lesson about the war. The words and fragments of phrases were only what had drifted into the range of her hearing: “national-patriotic forces,” “resolution,” “communiqué from the front,” “Voronezh,” “Hitlerite,” “by decision of the Central Committee.” She hadn’t been able to read the blackboard’s corresponding chalkmarks. The precise meanings of these words eluded her, except that she recognized them as the building blocks of a construction that, if it could ever be completed (it couldn’t be), would constitute an all-inclusive description of Comrade Stalin.

Uncle Fedya and Aunt Olya were having cutlets and soup. The aroma of their dinner entered the room as a rebuke. They ate better than Anzhelika’s family did. Her parents didn’t speak, they didn’t even look at each other as their nostril hairs twitched around the vapors emitted by Aunt Olya’s cutlets. Their anger intensified and their silence deepened. They too were listening to the somber, implacable unwinding of the gears inside the clock set off by the First Bulletin.

What made Father so frightful a figure to his family and to the other residents of the house was neither his great strength nor his angry aspect, but rather the four shrouded, silent years that had lapsed between the end of the war and his return from it. There had been no letters, and no one had notified her mother of his whereabouts nor of his imminent arrival. He never spoke about what he had done in the eight years of his absence. He hadn’t said whether he had been in prison or in a camp and if so, whose, or whether he had been free and simply reluctant to take up the reins of his previous life. Whatever the reason, when he returned it was as if he had come back from the land of the dead.

After Uncle Adik had prepared his dinner, Anzhelika swept the kitchen floor and made her pallet under the table used for cutting food. No one begrudged her the space anymore, the table was her own house, thatchedroofed and built from logs somewhere on the windscoured steppe, where she waited for Yevgeny Samoilov to come home. Sorrel soup simmered on the stove. She had used candle wax to stick onto the wall under the table small newspaper pictures of Samoilov and other actors, Vladimir Druzhnikov, Mikhail Kuznetsov, Lyubov Orlova, Deanna Durbin, and Tamara Makarova. Last summer Aunt Nina had taken her to the cinema to see Samoilov in The Boy from the Country.