Good Citizens Need Not Fear: Stories

When Zaya slides her leg between the rods of the fence, she doesn’t expect the rest of her body to follow—but it squeezes right through. She picks up the saint, and runs for the pines.

LETTER OF APOLOGY

Don’t think.

If you think, don’t speak.

If you think and speak, don’t write.

If you think, speak, and write, don’t sign.

If you think, speak, write, and sign, don’t be surprised.

—

News of Konstantyn Illych Boyko’s transgression came to us by way of an anonymous note deposited in a suggestion box at the Kirovka Cultural Club. According to the note, after giving a poetry reading, Konstantyn Illych disseminated a political joke as he loosened his tie backstage. Following Directive No. 97 to Eliminate Dissemination of Untruths Among Party Cadres and the KGB, my superior could not repeat the joke, but assured me it was grave enough to warrant our attention.

One can only argue with an intellectual like Konstantyn Illych if one speaks to him on his level. I was among the few in the Kirovka branch of the agency with a higher education; the task of reeducating Konstantyn Illych thus fell to me.

Since Konstantyn Illych was a celebrated poet in Ukraine and the matter a sensitive one, I was to approach him in private rather than at his workplace, in case the joke had to be repeated. Public rebuke would only be used if a civil one-on-one failed. According to Konstantyn Illych’s personal file (aged forty-five, employed by the Cultural Club), the poet spent his Sundays alone or with his wife at their dacha in Uhly, a miserable swampland 30 kilometers south of town.

Judgment of the quality of the swampland is my own and was not indicated in the file.

The following Sunday I drove to Uhly, or as close as I could get to Uhly; after the spring snowmelt, the dachas were submerged by a meter of turbid water and people were moving between and around the dachas in rowboats.

I had not secured a rowboat for the task as the need for one was not mentioned in Konstantyn Illych’s file, nor in the orders I was given.

I parked at the flood line, where five rowboats were moored: two green, two blue, one white, none black. Usually, our mode of transportation was black. I leaned on the warm hood of my car (black) and plucked clean a cattail as I deliberated what to do next. I decided on the innocuous white; I did not want to frighten Konstantyn Illych, and cause him to flee, by appearing in a black rowboat.

The dachas were poorly numbered and I had to ask for directions, which was not ideal. One man I spoke to was half-deaf and, after nodding through my question, launched into an account of his cystectomy; another elderly man, who clearly understood Russian, rudely responded in Ukrainian; one woman, after inquiring what in hell I was doing in her brother’s rowboat, tried to set her Rottweiler on me (fortunately, the beast feared water). I was about to head back to the car when an aluminum kayak slid out of the reeds beside me, carrying two knobby-kneed girls. They told me to turn right at the electric transformer and row to the third house after the one crushed by a poplar.

A few minutes later I floated across the fence of a small dacha, toward a shack sagging on stilts. On the windowsill stood a rusted trophy of a fencer in fighting stance, and from its rapier hung a rag and sponge. When no response came from an oared knock on the door, I rowed to the back of the shack. There sat Konstantyn Illych and, presumably, his wife, Milena Markivna, both of them cross-legged atop a wooden table, playing cards. The tabletop rose just above water level, giving the impression that the couple was stranded on a raft at sea. The poet’s arms and shoulders were small, like a boy’s, but his head was disproportionately large, blockish. I found it difficult to imagine the head strapped into a fencing mask, but that is beside the point.

“Konstantyn Illych?” I called out.

The poet kept his eyes on the fan of cards in his hands. “Who’s asking?”

I rowed closer. The wood of my boat tapped the wood of the table. “My name is Mikhail Ivanovich. Pleased to meet you.”

Konstantyn Illych did not return my politesse, did not even take the toothpick out of his mouth to say, “You here for electric? We paid up last week.”

His wife placed a four of spades on the table. Her thick dark hair hung over her face.

I told Konstantyn Illych who I was and that the agency had received reports of how he had publicly disseminated wrongful evaluations of the leaders of the Communist Party and Soviet society at large, and that I was here to have a conversation with him. Konstantyn Illych set his cards facedown on the table and said in a level tone, “All right, let’s have a conversation.”