Ken Kalfus - Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

But another picture luminesced within the constellation of actors arrayed on the wall, a red-tinted charcoal sketch that she had won at school as an award for good penmanship: Comrade Stalin in his marshal’s uniform. He gazed directly ahead, a few strands of gray in the dense growth of his moustache, a kind smile hidden beneath it. His eyebrows were slightly arched, an expression of punishing sternness that lay in contradiction to the warmth around his eyes.

Anzhelika went to the privy one last time that evening, carrying under her nightdress her notebook and the small sewing scissor she had stolen from her mother months before. The glow of a distant lamp seeped through the nearly parallel cracks in the privy door, illuminating a hieroglyphic that for years had refused exegesis.

She took great care, her hands sure, as she cut the page of drawings from the notebook and pulled away from the stitching the sheet that had been attached on the other side of it. Then she cut the pages into pieces, balled them up, placed them into the privy’s hole—her hand detached itself, weightless over the pit—and let them drop. Never before had this subterfuge, this paper wastage, been so thrilling; never before had she felt so shamed by it.

As she returned to the house, the heat of her body cut a luminous swathe through the night. Under the table, she examined each of the photographs, looking for evidence of wear, or for signs that either Druzhnikov or Kuznetsov had become tiresome. They hadn’t; she was newly charmed by the small rebellious sneer in the turn of Kuznetsov’s mouth. Now the feeling that had accompanied her the entire day intensified. She recognized it as warmth, as expectation, as the creepy stink of the privy, and now as something else as well, a familiar, beckoning, taunting, and sickening itch. She kissed the picture of Samoilov, felt the starch of the paper on her lips. Then she lay on her back, the underside of the table eclipsed in shadow but as visible as the unlit side of the crescent moon after dusk, the photograph above her, her right hand beginning the long rustling arc through her bedclothes.

But Comrade Stalin watched too. He drew her eyes to his. It was said that if you were in the same room with him, or even with him and tens of thousands of others in the cobblestoned vastness of Red Square, you could not resist looking into his eyes, he had that power over men and women. Scientists couldn’t explain it, the only man who could have explained it would have been Stalin himself. It was also said that those eyes could see the future.

Anzhelika’s teachers had deeply immersed her in the history of the Revolution— the roar of marching crowds, a blur of red flags, a storm of dates—but the word revolution, whispered at night in her solitude, made an entirely different impression upon her. An incandescent globe had somehow been lowered from the sky. It hovered above Russia. It revolved. She gazed directly into the ball, a solid sphere of goodness, her face warming to its radiance. The miracle was augmented by mystery: Stalin had either summoned the sphere or had stepped from it, Lenin at his side.

Stalin was as handsome as any actor, men all over the world brushed back their hair and let their mustaches grow out like his. Anzhelika dreamed of marrying him. There had been girls worthy of Stalin: the young partisan spy tortured and hung by the Nazis, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya; the Krasnodon Young Guard who had organized acts of sabotage against the Germans, Ulya Gromova; the little orphan in the song who had sent him her teddy bear. Fate had refused Anzhelika the possibility of similar acts of heroism, she was just some drab little girl living in a drab little town. Her eyes stung at the thought.

Yet at the same time, and this was the miserable secret rattling around the chambers of her heart, she was afraid of him. The fear had sprouted from something evil inside her, and she was not sure exactly what it was, but it was there and Stalin could name it. One line was never erased from Aleksandra Semyonovna’s blackboard: Although you do not know him, he knows you and is thinking of you.

Stalin knew the evil was something worse than wasting notebook paper. The real evil was something deeper, indelible and pervasive, something that lay in the under water provinces of her body. Anzhelika knew the itch was wrong, or rather, that the pleasure she derived from touching it was wrong. The itch (it wasn’t exactly an itch: it was a kind of incipience, something on the verge, a craving to be touched, a pulsing infection) would be all right if she left it alone. To silence it one night she had bit her hand. In class the next day she gazed at the mark, proof, if not of her goodness, then at least of her desire to be good.

Tonight she mumbled the bedtime words repeated by millions— Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for a happy childhood— and passed unevenly into sleep, her lips parching, her eyes fluttering open to the pictures on the wall. She woke to arrest her hand in its drifting fall. Don’t touch it, it’ll stop. But it spread through her body like water pouring into an empty vessel. Although no dreams lit the dark, her sleeping mind entered into a dialogue with the itch, which whispered entreaties and made demands, asked seemingly innocent questions and gave malicious answers. And then at last, hours deep into the night, she touched it and it was as if the liquid had turned to ice, and then as if the ice had caught fire.

She woke again, wet between her legs. Urgently she searched the bedclothes and closed her eyes in gratitude when she discovered that they weren’t damp, that she hadn’t peed. Her relief was so profound that she almost returned to sleep and would have if not for the thought that she might still wet the pallet and face terrible consequences. The warmth seized Anzhelika in an embrace under the blankets, insisting against the cold, middle-ofthe-night journey to the privy. A different entity now, more distinct but still enigmatic, the warmth suggested that there was no pressure on her bladder and no need to urinate. But Anzhelika climbed from beneath the table anyway.

The night was as cold as promised, the wetness clammy, almost reptilian, against her skin. The privy’s stink carried no attraction now. Her urine flowed in hardly a dribble, but when she wiped she sensed that she wasn’t coming clean. She returned to the house, removed her coat, shoes, and galoshes, closed the door to the kitchen, and turned on the electric light.

A little brown fish swam across the white front of her nightdress. Anzhelika nearly swooned as she made the identification: blood.

She extinguished the light at once. The realization that the stain was blood cut through the fog of her childhood. She would need to dispose of the nightdress in the privy (but it was too big, the scissor wouldn’t cut the cloth) or bury it in the rubbish tip at the end of the yard (physically possible, but her mother would miss the dress immediately).

Anzhelika returned to the pallet and lay awake, nauseated, wondering how long it would take for the wound to heal. It was freshly wet when she touched it. From the pallet, she could make out only a black oblong of sky in the window over the wash basin, most of the sky occulted by a wall alongside the next house. She watched the sky for hours, imagining stars and comets and the ticking of a clock, until the moment she perceived the first thin gray spill of daylight.

She crawled from beneath the table and washed at the basin. When her mother and the other women arrived to prepare breakfast, no one noticed that Anzhelika had already rolled her pallet and dressed. With her father in the privy and her mother in the kitchen, Anzhelika hid the stained nightdress under the linen in their dresser, putting off a decision about it until nightfall. Then she stole a large scrap of yellow cloth from her mother’s sewing kit. When it was her turn to use the privy again, she stuffed the cloth into her underwear to stanch the flow.