Kseniya Melnik was born in Magadan, a port town in the far northeast of Russia, and immigrated to Alaska in 1998 at the age of 15. A graduate of the creative writing programme at New York University, she was recently selected as one of Granta’s New Voices. Within a day of her story appearing on the magazine’s website, she had been contacted by agents and editors from all over the world.
“In the Queue” is from a collection in progress. Set between 1950s and the present, in Russia and the US, the stories feature characters connected to Magadan, a former transit base for prisoners sent to Stalin’s labour camps. Its inhabitants were a curious mixture of ex-prisoners and cultured new arrivals from the cities. This story takes place in 1975, during a period of rapid development in the region, which is rich in gold and natural resources. Books, fruit, vegetables and good clothes, however, were still scarce.
Tanya rang the doorbell of Auntie Roza’s fifth floor kommunalka. The dear face with green seashell eyes soon appeared, and they hugged. Tanya couldn’t wait to tell her aunt about the bizarre encounter she’d had with a foreigner on her flight from Leningrad. She followed her through the long, darkened hallway, bumping into boxes, metal-edged trunks, piles of chopped firewood, a bicycle, and a baby stroller. Halfway down the passage, they almost collided with Sergeich, who was carrying a bowl of eggs and a packet of sausages to the kitchen.
“Good day, Roza Vasilievna. Ah, I see Tanechka is back,” Sergeich said, pressing his barrel-shaped body against the wall.
Tanya was on the third leg of her long journey. She’d travelled from Magadan, her hometown in the far east, to Leningrad for a five-day conference on the portrayal of socialist reality through painting and sculpture. She planned to spend her stopover day in Moscow shopping. Winter coat for baby Pavlik. Borya needed a backpack and notebooks for the start of first grade. Fruits and vegetables. She loved cabbage for its excellent transportability. Tomatoes, if she could find a sturdy box. Apples, oranges. And something exotic and a little magical to jolt her sons’ routine, even if for a moment, out of its bread-and-potatoes orbit.
In Auntie Roza’s little room Tanya realised that while she’d been in Leningrad, her aunt had undergone a makeover. She’d tweezed her eyebrows down to threads and dyed her greying hair the colour of peeled carrot.
“Look at you, Auntie. Ten years younger. For the May Day party at work?”
“Just trying to keep up with you. Hungry?”
“I’d rather take a shower. I hate the aeroplane smell.”
“Why shower when you’ll be running around Moscow all day? Besides, Ivanova has the bathroom for the next two hours.”
“When’s your turn?”
“In the evening, Tanya, in the evening. Weekends are busy, everyone’s home. You rest now while I warm up the borsch and cutlets.” Auntie Roza opened her fridge and pulled out two pots.
“I’ll help. I have a funny story to tell you.”
In the dark hallway they ran into a tall, heavy-set woman with a column of sooty hair piled on top of her head. Letting her pass, Tanya tripped over the bicycle, and it crashed down with a squeal.
“I’m sorry,” Tanya said.
“To the devil!” the woman hissed, gesticulating with the pot of pea soup in front of her heaving bust. “That bike was new. If it’s broken, you’ll be standing in line for a new one yourself, Roza Vasilievna.”
“Broken!” Auntie Roza came instantly to a boil. “You should see your sons ride it down the stairs. Broken, you say.”
“That’s none of your business. You better tell your niece here that she turned on our light bulb when she splashed in the washroom for a whole hour last week, and we now have to pay for that hour of electricity,” she said, not looking at Tanya. “Do I look like a millionaire to you?”
“What a place,” Tanya whispered when Pea Soup had disappeared into her room at the end of the hallway.
The communal kitchen featured four ovens, four tables, several standing and hanging cupboards, most of them with little locks on their doors, and a sea of kitchenware occupying every available surface and wall. The entire space was compartmentalised by bedsheets, towels and various other laundry articles hanging to dry from a network of ropes. An invisible radio babbled the news. Sergeich’s silhouette moved behind the sheets like an actor in a shadow theatre.
“There was an Italian—” Tanya said.
“Lower your voice, Tanechka.” Auntie Roza turned on the gas on her oven and struck a match.
“The Italian football team was on my plane,” she whispered. “Buffered by empty rows in the front and back. I’ve never even seen real foreigners before. There was something so glossy about them, something you just don’t see in our everyday people. All smiling with lime-white teeth, for no reason. Then, halfway through the flight, one of them came up and handed me a note. ‘Rendezvous,’ he said. And ‘bellissima.’ The whole plane turned to look at me like I was a chicken who suddenly grew a peacock tail and learned to fly.”
“What was in the note?”
“Luciano Moretti, Hotel Rossia, 8. He kissed my hand. Twice.”
“Was he handsome?”
“I was so shocked I hardly remember. What’s the difference? I’m not running to the foreigners’ hotel like some KGB-trained prostitute. There seemed to be something sincere in his eyes, but it doesn’t make any sense. He is a international sportsman and I have melted mascara and roots.”
“I’d go,” Auntie Rosa said, pressing her ringed hand to her chest, which was pink and laced with delicate spiderwebs of wrinkles. “When will you have a chance to meet such an exotic man again?”
“And how will I look Anton in the eye?” He was a good husband: non-smoker, employed; he’d never raised a hand at her. Yet, he didn’t look at her like she was a newly discovered Michelangelo. He told her that she was getting a bit plump and to bring him his coffee and a piece of cheese, for which she stood in line for an hour.
“Anton will be there on that couch for all eternity.”
The bedsheets moved.
“Spying on us, Sergeich?” Auntie Roza said.
Sergeich came out from behind his cover and asked for some salt. Balding, with a stained undershirt stretched over a paunch, he seemed to have stepped out of the dictionary entry for “kommunalka neighbour, male.”
“If it were me, I’d be careful with the foreigners.” Sergeich squinted in Tanya’s direction. “There’s a reason why the State wants to keep us regular citizens away. It’s for our protection. I’ve never met any real foreigners myself, but I’ve heard stories.”
“What stories?” Tanya asked.
“Well, I heard from a friend of a friend who knows someone who’s friends with one of the Party kids. They all travel to the west like it’s Crimea. So, that particular comrade lived in America for a year, and he said that they have special schools there, for, err, interrelations.” Sergeich made a sour face and looked at Auntie Roza. “They teach the intimate technique and some kind of philosophy of love there, as if it could be taught.” He hit his chest above the heart. “It’s expensive. They don’t have free education there, so not everyone can attend. Not that it’s normal for people to want to attend such a school. But those who do, they have to bring a partner. They don’t have to be married, and—can you imagine?—it doesn’t even have to be a woman for a man—”
Pea Soup barged into the kitchen, tore through the bedsheets and yelled out of the window: “Kolya! Grisha! Lunch is ready!”
“They learn to reach—it’s impolite to say—for a whole hour and sometimes more,” Sergeich rattled on as soon as Pea Soup left. “And during the—it—they see God. Pure debauchery. But this is in America, I don’t know about Italy.”
“Are those not the yogis in India?” Tanya said.
“An orgasm for an hour? That would finish Comrade Brezhnev right off. Lethal stroke.” Auntie Roza laughed, a throaty trill. Sergeich’s face was completely purple now. “Italians don’t need any special schools. They have love in their blood.”
“The State doesn’t encourage unauthorised intermingling with foreigners,” Sergeich insisted.
“But what could happen?” Tanya said.
He stared at her with incredulity. She imagined the feel of Luciano’s shapely olive arms. Her skin prickled.
“You get arrested, that’s what,” Sergeich said.
“Thank you for the advice, Mikhal Sergeich.” Auntie Roza gave him the smile he’d been waiting for.
They picked up their pans with food and went to eat in their rooms.
“Don’t listen to him, Tanechka. Listen to me,” Auntie Roza said over the perfect nostalgic borsch.
***
The giant Children’s World department store stood across the square from Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters, known colloquially as Adults’ World. The first floor, with its marble columns, a sparkling double-decker carousel, and endless rows of toys still gave Tanya the same chills as when she came here as a child. She wondered whether stores in Italy looked like the inside of a cathedral, with frescoes on walls and ceiling painted like the Sistine Chapel.
She joined the queue at the base of the stairs and tapped the woman in front of her on the shoulder.
“What are we standing for?” Tanya asked.
“Finnish overalls, dear.”
Tanya’s heart jumped. “God help us. What number?”
The woman showed Tanya her palm with 238 written on it in pen. Tanya pulled out a pen and wrote on her own palm: 239.
“And where are you from?” the woman asked Tanya in a soft friendly voice.
Too nice for a Muscovite. Most of the people loading up on the wearable and edible goods in the centre of Moscow were from the provinces. Camels on a long journey east or north, bears storing up for a hungry winter.
“From Magadan.”
“Ah, yes. My father sat in the camp for eight years near there.” The woman’s cheekbones were beautifully pronounced, convex like the bowls of soup spoons.
Tanya nodded and held the obligatory mournful pause at the mention of her infamous hometown. “And you?”
“Odessa.”
“We’ve been there. We try to take our boys somewhere warm every summer, usually to my husband’s mother in Krasnodar. My elder one had pneumonia when he was a baby, and every winter he’s sure to pick up some bug. The overalls would be for the younger one. He loves to play in the snow.”
“Amen. I’m buying them for my relatives in Arkhangelsk. They hardly ever make it out to Moscow. We in Odessa right now have a disastrous shortage of children’s potties. And I have a one-year-old. Yet the stores are overstocked with radios. Thank heavens we found a potty here. We bought five for our friends and neighbours.”
Tanya shook her head in sympathy. One summer she’d been on a hunt for soap, and instead encountered rows and rows of skis for sale. They introduced themselves. The woman from Odessa was named Zina.
While they chatted about children and tricks for procuring this or that defitsit item, the line crawled up the stairs. Tanya made friends with a man behind her—Denis from Sverdlovsk—and asked him to hold her place. In the shoe department on the third floor, she was lucky to happen upon some winter boots. She got two pairs, two sizes too big for the boys to grow into. For now she’d sew a little pouch of wool inside the toe so the boots wouldn’t slip off.
With a nod of co-operation from Denis, Tanya dashed to the fourth floor to stand in two queues for a pencil box, a stack of notebooks and a yellow backpack with a print of cars on the flap. New acquaintances held Tanya’s place in the toy queue on the ground level, while she held places for Zina and Denis in the overalls. The store was unbearably stuffy. In the thick of the queues it reeked of sweat and cologne. At the last moment she ran downstairs and prised out a microscope for Borya and a box of toy soldiers for Pavlik.
In another two hours the overalls queue finally scaled the third floor. Tanya could already see the big brown boxes. Suddenly there were screams at the front and a wave of people threw her back. She immediately grasped the full horror of the situation: they’d run out. In the end, she bought a girl’s pink rabbit coat from a shrivelled babushka who peddled odds and ends of children’s wear right on the steps of the department store. Luckily Pavlik was too young to be teased.
At the Central Department Store Tanya secured a lacy Polish bra, and a box of Bulgarian toothpaste. Stockings, three Czechoslovakian shirts for Anton, and the last Hungarian silk dress without trying it on. A tube of lipstick was passed to her over the heads of others in exchange for money.
***
Hours later Auntie Roza opened the door and took some of the bags off Tanya’s numb hands. This time one naked light bulb in a row of five burned furiously in the hallway.
“Get lucky?” Auntie Roza asked.
“Oh, yes. Now the shower.”
“Not the best time, Tanechka. Everyone needs hot water in the kitchen. Dinnertime, you know. We only have one heater.”
“But Auntie Roza, you said it was your turn in the evening.”
“Yes, yes, it is.”
“You let them bully you?”
“What can I do? They’ve lived here longer than me. You could try tying a dishrag around the kitchen tap—that’s our sign for hot water needed in the bathroom—but I doubt it’ll work.”
“Oh, Auntie.”
The kitchen was in mid-battle. The laundry had been taken down from the ropes. All three female heads of households and Sergeich, the lonesome penguin, were embroiled in cooking. There was cutting, shredding, frying, boiling, meat-grinding and dough-rolling. The oil hissed, the pans banged, the radio screamed over the noise like a frantic mother yowling for her child in a crowd of strangers. Sergeich winked at Tanya awkwardly. She tied the dishrag around the faucet and escaped to the bathroom. As she showered, the water went hot and cold every few minutes, then shut off completely.
“For your rendezvous?” Auntie Roza said back in the room, holding up the Hungarian dress. Tanya realised that it was beautiful: the colour of a lily pad with contours of large-petalled flowers embroidered in white thread at the shoulders and side seams. The neckline plunged frighteningly deep.
“I’m dog-tired.” Tanya tried to keep her voice calm. “I have to get up early to get the produce.”
“Why not try to make yourself a little happier?”
“I’m not sure this would,” Tanya began. On one hand, she didn’t want to disturb the precarious balance of her life. On the other hand, she had discovered a beautiful dress, a defitsit to everyone else and wearable to her. “I’ll just try it on. If it’s too big, I’ll leave it for you.”
Tanya slipped on the dress and looked at herself in the wall mirror. A baby began screaming behind the thin wall.
“Just look at you,” Auntie Roza exclaimed, but Tanya had already grabbed her make-up bag and was out of the room.
Down the hallway, she switched on what she hoped was the right light bulb, and sneaked into the bathroom. She sat down on the toilet, her make-up bag in her lap. The chipped tile floor was filthy; the blue walls were covered with anti-roach stick designs
Squinting into a tiny hand mirror, Tanya put on some blue eye shadow and mascara. The new lipstick turned out to be a clownish shade of orange, so she wrapped the tip of a match in a piece of cotton ball, which she always kept handy, and scraped out some leftover coral paste from her old lipstick tube. She put her hair up in a bun.
She could hardly recognise herself. The exhaustion in her eyes lit up her features with a kind of wistful nobility. The girlish essence of her, tipsy off this sudden metamorphosis, separated and floated above her tired body. She had to show Luciano, who had grown up surrounded by ancient beauty, who had seen the world, that he’d been right about her.
“Just go,” Auntie Roza said when Tanya returned to the room. She spritzed her with “Red Moscow” and made the sign of the cross. It was seven o’clock.
As Tanya skipped down the five flights of stairs, even her heels seemed to click more brightly. Her hunger had evaporated along with her shame and fatigue. Her skin breathed in the evening cool that had descended upon panting Moscow. She was about to dive into the mouth of the metro entrance, when she saw that the fruit stand by the station sold bananas.
In his seven years of life Borya had eaten bananas only three times, and Pavlik had never tasted them. The line curved around the block.
She lingered, then took a few steps towards the metro. That made her feel like a criminal. An old man in the line looked at her cleavage with interest, which was quickly replaced by reproach. She felt as though her sinful plans were stamped on her forehead.
Tanya took her place at the end of the line. Perhaps there would still be enough time. Perhaps Luciano would wait.
Thirty minutes passed. Little particles of her new skin, the ones blessed with Auntie Roza’s “Red Moscow,” fluttered across the big, indifferent city towards Hotel Rossia, to Luciano, his vertiginous gaze. She understood the relative insignificance of bananas to the bright future she hoped for her sons. But their future would begin when she returned home, and she had the power to make it a little sweeter.
Gradually the kite of her soul retracted back into her body. She felt tired and overdressed. Stupid.
When it was finally her turn, Tanya saw that the sales clerk took bananas from two different boxes. One contained taut yellow bunches; the bananas from the other box were covered with brown spots.
“Excuse me, are you selling rotten bananas?” Tanya cried out.
“And what else am I supposed do with them, grazhdanka? I have product to move. If you don’t want them, I have plenty of other customers who will take them and be grateful.”
Tanya bought the allotted three bunches per person; one was in the early stages of rot. It was seven fifty. It’d take her forty minutes at the very least to get to Hotel Rossia by metro. She could try catching a taxi.
Twenty minutes later she still hadn’t seen a single free cab. Clutching bananas to her chest, she wandered through a poplar-lined street and sat down on a bench, under a light pollen fall. Her head spun.
She remembered sitting as a girl on the bank of the Volga River once. She’d just finished a volunteering shift at the kolkhoz with her Young Pioneers brigade. Soon it would be completely dark, and the Pioneers would build bonfires and sing songs about loyalty, valour and honour. Then the dark happy sleep. Tanya’s hands hurt from pulling carrots all day. She knelt and dipped them into the river. The water was so cold a shudder shot up her arms and jolted her heart. In vain she tried to scrub the black soil from under her nails. She lifted up her eyes just in time to see the last ray spark a little fire on the golden cupola of a small church on the opposite bank. Then she looked back at the hands in the river. For a moment it seemed they were about to run away with the shining, trembling water. She’d almost let them, laughing.
“In the Queue” is from a collection in progress. Set between 1950s and the present, in Russia and the US, the stories feature characters connected to Magadan, a former transit base for prisoners sent to Stalin’s labour camps. Its inhabitants were a curious mixture of ex-prisoners and cultured new arrivals from the cities. This story takes place in 1975, during a period of rapid development in the region, which is rich in gold and natural resources. Books, fruit, vegetables and good clothes, however, were still scarce.
Tanya rang the doorbell of Auntie Roza’s fifth floor kommunalka. The dear face with green seashell eyes soon appeared, and they hugged. Tanya couldn’t wait to tell her aunt about the bizarre encounter she’d had with a foreigner on her flight from Leningrad. She followed her through the long, darkened hallway, bumping into boxes, metal-edged trunks, piles of chopped firewood, a bicycle, and a baby stroller. Halfway down the passage, they almost collided with Sergeich, who was carrying a bowl of eggs and a packet of sausages to the kitchen.
“Good day, Roza Vasilievna. Ah, I see Tanechka is back,” Sergeich said, pressing his barrel-shaped body against the wall.
Tanya was on the third leg of her long journey. She’d travelled from Magadan, her hometown in the far east, to Leningrad for a five-day conference on the portrayal of socialist reality through painting and sculpture. She planned to spend her stopover day in Moscow shopping. Winter coat for baby Pavlik. Borya needed a backpack and notebooks for the start of first grade. Fruits and vegetables. She loved cabbage for its excellent transportability. Tomatoes, if she could find a sturdy box. Apples, oranges. And something exotic and a little magical to jolt her sons’ routine, even if for a moment, out of its bread-and-potatoes orbit.
In Auntie Roza’s little room Tanya realised that while she’d been in Leningrad, her aunt had undergone a makeover. She’d tweezed her eyebrows down to threads and dyed her greying hair the colour of peeled carrot.
“Look at you, Auntie. Ten years younger. For the May Day party at work?”
“Just trying to keep up with you. Hungry?”
“I’d rather take a shower. I hate the aeroplane smell.”
“Why shower when you’ll be running around Moscow all day? Besides, Ivanova has the bathroom for the next two hours.”
“When’s your turn?”
“In the evening, Tanya, in the evening. Weekends are busy, everyone’s home. You rest now while I warm up the borsch and cutlets.” Auntie Roza opened her fridge and pulled out two pots.
“I’ll help. I have a funny story to tell you.”
In the dark hallway they ran into a tall, heavy-set woman with a column of sooty hair piled on top of her head. Letting her pass, Tanya tripped over the bicycle, and it crashed down with a squeal.
“I’m sorry,” Tanya said.
“To the devil!” the woman hissed, gesticulating with the pot of pea soup in front of her heaving bust. “That bike was new. If it’s broken, you’ll be standing in line for a new one yourself, Roza Vasilievna.”
“Broken!” Auntie Roza came instantly to a boil. “You should see your sons ride it down the stairs. Broken, you say.”
“That’s none of your business. You better tell your niece here that she turned on our light bulb when she splashed in the washroom for a whole hour last week, and we now have to pay for that hour of electricity,” she said, not looking at Tanya. “Do I look like a millionaire to you?”
“What a place,” Tanya whispered when Pea Soup had disappeared into her room at the end of the hallway.
The communal kitchen featured four ovens, four tables, several standing and hanging cupboards, most of them with little locks on their doors, and a sea of kitchenware occupying every available surface and wall. The entire space was compartmentalised by bedsheets, towels and various other laundry articles hanging to dry from a network of ropes. An invisible radio babbled the news. Sergeich’s silhouette moved behind the sheets like an actor in a shadow theatre.
“There was an Italian—” Tanya said.
“Lower your voice, Tanechka.” Auntie Roza turned on the gas on her oven and struck a match.
“The Italian football team was on my plane,” she whispered. “Buffered by empty rows in the front and back. I’ve never even seen real foreigners before. There was something so glossy about them, something you just don’t see in our everyday people. All smiling with lime-white teeth, for no reason. Then, halfway through the flight, one of them came up and handed me a note. ‘Rendezvous,’ he said. And ‘bellissima.’ The whole plane turned to look at me like I was a chicken who suddenly grew a peacock tail and learned to fly.”
“What was in the note?”
“Luciano Moretti, Hotel Rossia, 8. He kissed my hand. Twice.”
“Was he handsome?”
“I was so shocked I hardly remember. What’s the difference? I’m not running to the foreigners’ hotel like some KGB-trained prostitute. There seemed to be something sincere in his eyes, but it doesn’t make any sense. He is a international sportsman and I have melted mascara and roots.”
“I’d go,” Auntie Rosa said, pressing her ringed hand to her chest, which was pink and laced with delicate spiderwebs of wrinkles. “When will you have a chance to meet such an exotic man again?”
“And how will I look Anton in the eye?” He was a good husband: non-smoker, employed; he’d never raised a hand at her. Yet, he didn’t look at her like she was a newly discovered Michelangelo. He told her that she was getting a bit plump and to bring him his coffee and a piece of cheese, for which she stood in line for an hour.
“Anton will be there on that couch for all eternity.”
The bedsheets moved.
“Spying on us, Sergeich?” Auntie Roza said.
Sergeich came out from behind his cover and asked for some salt. Balding, with a stained undershirt stretched over a paunch, he seemed to have stepped out of the dictionary entry for “kommunalka neighbour, male.”
“If it were me, I’d be careful with the foreigners.” Sergeich squinted in Tanya’s direction. “There’s a reason why the State wants to keep us regular citizens away. It’s for our protection. I’ve never met any real foreigners myself, but I’ve heard stories.”
“What stories?” Tanya asked.
“Well, I heard from a friend of a friend who knows someone who’s friends with one of the Party kids. They all travel to the west like it’s Crimea. So, that particular comrade lived in America for a year, and he said that they have special schools there, for, err, interrelations.” Sergeich made a sour face and looked at Auntie Roza. “They teach the intimate technique and some kind of philosophy of love there, as if it could be taught.” He hit his chest above the heart. “It’s expensive. They don’t have free education there, so not everyone can attend. Not that it’s normal for people to want to attend such a school. But those who do, they have to bring a partner. They don’t have to be married, and—can you imagine?—it doesn’t even have to be a woman for a man—”
Pea Soup barged into the kitchen, tore through the bedsheets and yelled out of the window: “Kolya! Grisha! Lunch is ready!”
“They learn to reach—it’s impolite to say—for a whole hour and sometimes more,” Sergeich rattled on as soon as Pea Soup left. “And during the—it—they see God. Pure debauchery. But this is in America, I don’t know about Italy.”
“Are those not the yogis in India?” Tanya said.
“An orgasm for an hour? That would finish Comrade Brezhnev right off. Lethal stroke.” Auntie Roza laughed, a throaty trill. Sergeich’s face was completely purple now. “Italians don’t need any special schools. They have love in their blood.”
“The State doesn’t encourage unauthorised intermingling with foreigners,” Sergeich insisted.
“But what could happen?” Tanya said.
He stared at her with incredulity. She imagined the feel of Luciano’s shapely olive arms. Her skin prickled.
“You get arrested, that’s what,” Sergeich said.
“Thank you for the advice, Mikhal Sergeich.” Auntie Roza gave him the smile he’d been waiting for.
They picked up their pans with food and went to eat in their rooms.
“Don’t listen to him, Tanechka. Listen to me,” Auntie Roza said over the perfect nostalgic borsch.
***
The giant Children’s World department store stood across the square from Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters, known colloquially as Adults’ World. The first floor, with its marble columns, a sparkling double-decker carousel, and endless rows of toys still gave Tanya the same chills as when she came here as a child. She wondered whether stores in Italy looked like the inside of a cathedral, with frescoes on walls and ceiling painted like the Sistine Chapel.
She joined the queue at the base of the stairs and tapped the woman in front of her on the shoulder.
“What are we standing for?” Tanya asked.
“Finnish overalls, dear.”
Tanya’s heart jumped. “God help us. What number?”
The woman showed Tanya her palm with 238 written on it in pen. Tanya pulled out a pen and wrote on her own palm: 239.
“And where are you from?” the woman asked Tanya in a soft friendly voice.
Too nice for a Muscovite. Most of the people loading up on the wearable and edible goods in the centre of Moscow were from the provinces. Camels on a long journey east or north, bears storing up for a hungry winter.
“From Magadan.”
“Ah, yes. My father sat in the camp for eight years near there.” The woman’s cheekbones were beautifully pronounced, convex like the bowls of soup spoons.
Tanya nodded and held the obligatory mournful pause at the mention of her infamous hometown. “And you?”
“Odessa.”
“We’ve been there. We try to take our boys somewhere warm every summer, usually to my husband’s mother in Krasnodar. My elder one had pneumonia when he was a baby, and every winter he’s sure to pick up some bug. The overalls would be for the younger one. He loves to play in the snow.”
“Amen. I’m buying them for my relatives in Arkhangelsk. They hardly ever make it out to Moscow. We in Odessa right now have a disastrous shortage of children’s potties. And I have a one-year-old. Yet the stores are overstocked with radios. Thank heavens we found a potty here. We bought five for our friends and neighbours.”
Tanya shook her head in sympathy. One summer she’d been on a hunt for soap, and instead encountered rows and rows of skis for sale. They introduced themselves. The woman from Odessa was named Zina.
While they chatted about children and tricks for procuring this or that defitsit item, the line crawled up the stairs. Tanya made friends with a man behind her—Denis from Sverdlovsk—and asked him to hold her place. In the shoe department on the third floor, she was lucky to happen upon some winter boots. She got two pairs, two sizes too big for the boys to grow into. For now she’d sew a little pouch of wool inside the toe so the boots wouldn’t slip off.
With a nod of co-operation from Denis, Tanya dashed to the fourth floor to stand in two queues for a pencil box, a stack of notebooks and a yellow backpack with a print of cars on the flap. New acquaintances held Tanya’s place in the toy queue on the ground level, while she held places for Zina and Denis in the overalls. The store was unbearably stuffy. In the thick of the queues it reeked of sweat and cologne. At the last moment she ran downstairs and prised out a microscope for Borya and a box of toy soldiers for Pavlik.
In another two hours the overalls queue finally scaled the third floor. Tanya could already see the big brown boxes. Suddenly there were screams at the front and a wave of people threw her back. She immediately grasped the full horror of the situation: they’d run out. In the end, she bought a girl’s pink rabbit coat from a shrivelled babushka who peddled odds and ends of children’s wear right on the steps of the department store. Luckily Pavlik was too young to be teased.
At the Central Department Store Tanya secured a lacy Polish bra, and a box of Bulgarian toothpaste. Stockings, three Czechoslovakian shirts for Anton, and the last Hungarian silk dress without trying it on. A tube of lipstick was passed to her over the heads of others in exchange for money.
***
Hours later Auntie Roza opened the door and took some of the bags off Tanya’s numb hands. This time one naked light bulb in a row of five burned furiously in the hallway.
“Get lucky?” Auntie Roza asked.
“Oh, yes. Now the shower.”
“Not the best time, Tanechka. Everyone needs hot water in the kitchen. Dinnertime, you know. We only have one heater.”
“But Auntie Roza, you said it was your turn in the evening.”
“Yes, yes, it is.”
“You let them bully you?”
“What can I do? They’ve lived here longer than me. You could try tying a dishrag around the kitchen tap—that’s our sign for hot water needed in the bathroom—but I doubt it’ll work.”
“Oh, Auntie.”
The kitchen was in mid-battle. The laundry had been taken down from the ropes. All three female heads of households and Sergeich, the lonesome penguin, were embroiled in cooking. There was cutting, shredding, frying, boiling, meat-grinding and dough-rolling. The oil hissed, the pans banged, the radio screamed over the noise like a frantic mother yowling for her child in a crowd of strangers. Sergeich winked at Tanya awkwardly. She tied the dishrag around the faucet and escaped to the bathroom. As she showered, the water went hot and cold every few minutes, then shut off completely.
“For your rendezvous?” Auntie Roza said back in the room, holding up the Hungarian dress. Tanya realised that it was beautiful: the colour of a lily pad with contours of large-petalled flowers embroidered in white thread at the shoulders and side seams. The neckline plunged frighteningly deep.
“I’m dog-tired.” Tanya tried to keep her voice calm. “I have to get up early to get the produce.”
“Why not try to make yourself a little happier?”
“I’m not sure this would,” Tanya began. On one hand, she didn’t want to disturb the precarious balance of her life. On the other hand, she had discovered a beautiful dress, a defitsit to everyone else and wearable to her. “I’ll just try it on. If it’s too big, I’ll leave it for you.”
Tanya slipped on the dress and looked at herself in the wall mirror. A baby began screaming behind the thin wall.
“Just look at you,” Auntie Roza exclaimed, but Tanya had already grabbed her make-up bag and was out of the room.
Down the hallway, she switched on what she hoped was the right light bulb, and sneaked into the bathroom. She sat down on the toilet, her make-up bag in her lap. The chipped tile floor was filthy; the blue walls were covered with anti-roach stick designs
Squinting into a tiny hand mirror, Tanya put on some blue eye shadow and mascara. The new lipstick turned out to be a clownish shade of orange, so she wrapped the tip of a match in a piece of cotton ball, which she always kept handy, and scraped out some leftover coral paste from her old lipstick tube. She put her hair up in a bun.
She could hardly recognise herself. The exhaustion in her eyes lit up her features with a kind of wistful nobility. The girlish essence of her, tipsy off this sudden metamorphosis, separated and floated above her tired body. She had to show Luciano, who had grown up surrounded by ancient beauty, who had seen the world, that he’d been right about her.
“Just go,” Auntie Roza said when Tanya returned to the room. She spritzed her with “Red Moscow” and made the sign of the cross. It was seven o’clock.
As Tanya skipped down the five flights of stairs, even her heels seemed to click more brightly. Her hunger had evaporated along with her shame and fatigue. Her skin breathed in the evening cool that had descended upon panting Moscow. She was about to dive into the mouth of the metro entrance, when she saw that the fruit stand by the station sold bananas.
In his seven years of life Borya had eaten bananas only three times, and Pavlik had never tasted them. The line curved around the block.
She lingered, then took a few steps towards the metro. That made her feel like a criminal. An old man in the line looked at her cleavage with interest, which was quickly replaced by reproach. She felt as though her sinful plans were stamped on her forehead.
Tanya took her place at the end of the line. Perhaps there would still be enough time. Perhaps Luciano would wait.
Thirty minutes passed. Little particles of her new skin, the ones blessed with Auntie Roza’s “Red Moscow,” fluttered across the big, indifferent city towards Hotel Rossia, to Luciano, his vertiginous gaze. She understood the relative insignificance of bananas to the bright future she hoped for her sons. But their future would begin when she returned home, and she had the power to make it a little sweeter.
Gradually the kite of her soul retracted back into her body. She felt tired and overdressed. Stupid.
When it was finally her turn, Tanya saw that the sales clerk took bananas from two different boxes. One contained taut yellow bunches; the bananas from the other box were covered with brown spots.
“Excuse me, are you selling rotten bananas?” Tanya cried out.
“And what else am I supposed do with them, grazhdanka? I have product to move. If you don’t want them, I have plenty of other customers who will take them and be grateful.”
Tanya bought the allotted three bunches per person; one was in the early stages of rot. It was seven fifty. It’d take her forty minutes at the very least to get to Hotel Rossia by metro. She could try catching a taxi.
Twenty minutes later she still hadn’t seen a single free cab. Clutching bananas to her chest, she wandered through a poplar-lined street and sat down on a bench, under a light pollen fall. Her head spun.
She remembered sitting as a girl on the bank of the Volga River once. She’d just finished a volunteering shift at the kolkhoz with her Young Pioneers brigade. Soon it would be completely dark, and the Pioneers would build bonfires and sing songs about loyalty, valour and honour. Then the dark happy sleep. Tanya’s hands hurt from pulling carrots all day. She knelt and dipped them into the river. The water was so cold a shudder shot up her arms and jolted her heart. In vain she tried to scrub the black soil from under her nails. She lifted up her eyes just in time to see the last ray spark a little fire on the golden cupola of a small church on the opposite bank. Then she looked back at the hands in the river. For a moment it seemed they were about to run away with the shining, trembling water. She’d almost let them, laughing.
