Ken Kalfus - Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies

The cloth had belonged to a favorite, long-outgrown and long-outworn dress. As she returned through the early morning chill to the house, Anzhelika tried to smooth out the suspicious bulge in the lap of her uniform. It resisted elimination. Uncle Fedya, still unshaven, passed her in the hallway and halted. He pushed his eyeglasses up the long bridge of his nose, contemplating what was different about her. His breath that morning ascended from somewhere unspeakably deep within his body.

She turned, threw her coat over her shoulders, and rushed from the house before she would have to speak with him or anyone else.

Outside, past the front gate, she was alone again. She stood for a moment with a single foot in the street, as if caught between one place and another entirely different. Then she ventured onto the blackened ice and the fossilized imprint of a truck tire. The neighbors were already picking their way across the road that led to the dairy. They passed before her like shadows, weightless and speechless. The town’s small homes and buildings were composed of the same wan, chipped concrete as the sky.

Anzhelika arrived well before the first bell and opened her coat, checking for stains on her uniform. She entered the classroom and carefully took her place, intent on maintaining the position of the cloth between her legs, which was bunched not quite flush against her. She shifted and it squirmed slightly, like a small animal. The regard of the other girls, her enemies, as they came into the room was neither casual nor blind, but direct and knowing. Blood again: Anzhelika heard it coursing through her cheeks and ears.

The torrent deafened her. She was unaware of Aleksandra Semyonovna’s entrance until her benchmate Masha swung open her desk and rose with the class. Anzhelika stood abruptly and the cloth slipped a little. It was horrible, the blood had wadded it.

The teacher carried a pointer and immediately began poking it at a large map of the world. With long auburn hair, a bright complexion, and slim, long legs, she was the prettiest woman Anzhelika had ever known. She liked Anzhelika. Once, when the girl had volunteered the correct answer to a difficult geography question—she almost never spoke in class, unless directly called upon—Aleksandra Semyonovna had stepped behind her bench and squeezed her by the shoulders. The answer was Paris. According to Masha, Aleksandra Semyonovna had been jilted by a cavalry officer from Ufa, a lieutenant with a clipped blond moustache. Anzhelika had once thought of growing her hair long like her teacher’s, but her mother objected. She said it would get dirty and tangled.

The memory of her teacher’s caress suggested to Anzhelika that she could be an ally, but the form and even the purpose of the alliance eluded her. Gazing ahead as the lesson began, Anzhelika recalled the steppe and the house she shared with Samoilov. Aleksandra Semyonovna also lived on the steppe, in another house across the way, still pining for her cavalry officer. Anzhelika and Aleksandra would borrow eggs and cheese from each other, and sometimes each other’s dresses, and comb each other’s hair, and in summer they’d sit on the porch waiting for their lovers to ride up on horseback.

But Boris Sergeyevich arrived instead, at the door to the classroom, his youthful, unlined face bleached, his expression grim. Aleksandra Semyonovna fell silent and the class, which had been listening attentively, found a level of stillness that approached the absolute. The principal beckoned the teacher. She took a lingering look at her students before she stumbled from the room.

The children were alone. An excited murmur rose from the seats and benches, like the humming of an engine. Its heat fell upon Anzhelika’s back and the exhaust singed the hairs on her neck. The girls behind her snickered. She stared into her desk, focusing on a single scratch in the wood dashed across the grain, an imperfection less than a millimeter wide, and forced all her being into it. Drifting down the crevice, she bumped against its ragged walls and settled onto a ledge. Rapidly moving water rushed below her and foamed crimson against the rocks.

She luxuriated there in the heat fed by the springs below. Her feet dangled over the ledge. The light descending from above the desk was softened by its fall, and sound could not reach her at all. She dozed, making up for the previous night’s sleeplessness, until a shiver, Masha’s, was telegraphed through the bench.

Aleksandra Semyonovna had returned to the classroom, soaked in tears. The humming ceased abruptly. The teacher’s face appeared to have been broken in two, skewing the bones of her nose and jaw. Her pale blue eyes, framed in fear, rested for a moment on Anzhelika. She looked as if she were about to speak, but surrendered instead to a fresh, disfiguring storm of tears. The students were paralyzed by the spectacle.

Something emerged from her trembling lips that Anzhelika could not hear. A wind swept through the room, cold and fetid, carrying the gasps and moans of the children and then the children themselves. As notebooks and papers gusted against the windows and walls, Anzhelika and her classmates were lifted from their benches and borne to the general purpose room.

The boys in their year were crying as they poured into the hall alongside Anzhelika’s class, as were many of the older children. Boris Sergeyevich stood before them, tears streaming from his eyes. Anzhelika had never before seen a man cry, hardly knew it was possible. Something warm tickled the inside of her thighs. Please stop please, she prayed against the flow of his tears and her blood.

The day passed without any sense of movement. A few teachers attempted to make speeches, but most of what they said made no sense, as if the speeches were about why the sun had risen in the west, bearded, or why a cow drove the trolleybus on the left side of the street, rather than the right. Most of that day the children were not spoken to, they remained in their places, sniffling. Elsewhere grown men and women took their own lives. Others mutilated themselves to show penance. Candles were lit in churches and prayers were said in mosques and synagogues. In the Far East, political prisoners wept. Two days later, panic would seize a grieving crowd in Moscow’s Trubnaya Square and more than five hundred people would either be trampled to death or suffocated.

The schoolchildren didn’t stir in their seats, but they never expected to be dismissed. They bathed in the liquids of eternal purgatory. No bells ended the schoolday. At some undefined, unclocked moment, several children rose and filed out. Others followed, Anzhelika with them. Aleksandra Semyonovna was no longer present, but other teachers were at the door, embracing their favorite, most affected students. Outside the school, adults waited in the yard, and they too were embracing each other, talking in low tones. Not a single one was without a cigarette. As Anzhelika passed them, every chafing stride announced that the insides of her thighs were wet.

Little Kolya was with his friends again. This time the boys didn’t have a stick, but they were standing around the same oily puddle between the two houses. Anzhelika went by and they turned with her. Their faces were as dead as walls, but their little bird eyes stayed alert and predatory.

She didn’t enter the house but went right to the privy and closed the door. Reaching over her head, she fastened the hook into the bolt, forcing it deep into the eye. She opened her coat. In the gray light admitted over the top of the door, she could not determine whether the uniform was stained. She removed her coat and hung it on a nail. After hitching up her dress and dropping her underwear, she pulled on the rag. She shuddered as it slithered out of her. Thoroughly soaked, it dropped into the privy hole without returning a sound. Anzhelika tried to make out the lower portion of her body, but couldn’t. She let go of the hem of her uniform and stood there, her underpants around her ankles.