Snow in May: Stories (17 page)

“Stop, stop, stop,” Roman Ivanovich said and turned off the music. “The dismount—Sasha, make sure you hold her with both hands when she’s mid-hip, and then quickly switch the grip for the push-off. Otherwise you’ll drop her.”

“I’ve never dropped her,” Sasha said.

“I am a little afraid every time, Sasha,” Asik said. “To be honest.” She flicked her weight from one hip to the other.

“Watch my hands,” Roman Ivanovich said.

Sasha stepped aside.

Roman Ivanovich picked Asik up. She was heavier now than in the fall, when they’d blocked the choreography. And warmer, despite the chill of the studio. He wanted to coil her around his sore, tired neck. He rolled her down his side and pushed her from between his legs. She spun across the floor. One, two turns. It was so easy. Sasha could accomplish only one. They demonstrated the move several times.

“Your turn, Sasha,” Roman Ivanovich said. He was sweating. There was something he didn’t like about Sasha’s complacent smile.

At eleven, Sasha’s tall mustachioed father arrived. Both Roman Ivanovich and Sasha were exhausted. Asik remained on fire. She and Sasha ran through paso doble and jive. Sasha’s father applauded after each take, puffed out with pride. So this was the source of Sasha’s poise, Roman Ivanovich thought, his father. They adored each other.

“Anybody coming to get you?” Roman Ivanovich asked Asik after Sasha and his father had left.

“Nope. They’re busy. Busy, busy, busy,” Asik sang out.

He watched her small black figure slip into the changing room curtains. “I’ll walk you home, Asya. Hurry up.”

“If you want,” she yelled back.

He walked to the office to get the new golden sandals, then remembered that he had decided not to give them to her yet. No need to distract her from what is important. He would give them to her tomorrow, as a present for winning first place.

Away from the glow of the town’s center, the streets became emptier, angrier, underlined by violet ankle-snatching snow. The wind, with its erratic sense of rhythm, made it comically difficult to walk. Should he hold Asik’s tiny mittened hand? She prattled on about some intrigue at her school.

The world felt like a small, black box.

“Make sure you get a good night’s sleep,” he said when they reached Asik’s building.

“Roman Ivanovich, can you walk me up to my floor? You’re here already and it’s dark and I’m scared of the drunken bums that hang around on the stairs. Please?”

He came in. The hallway stank of piss and God knows what else. Weak light leaked from the upper flights, illuminating the nail-carved and chalked graffiti on the walls like cave paintings. They climbed the stairs, holding on to the rails. Asik kept on and on about school. Sometimes he’d catch a word: home ec, burnt, two, so unfair. He tried to reel his mind back, for he could not help looking down on this strange scene—his bearish body, sweaty and cold, dressed in a sheepskin and a synthetic woolen cap, clambering after a little girl.

Asik turned to him abruptly on the fourth floor. “Are you very tired, Roman Ivanovich?”

She had a few steps on him, her wan face level with his. He was no longer tired, though he wanted to be.

“Yes. You?”

She took off her gray rabbit hat, and a scent of wet bread rose from her scalp.

“Not really. Actually, night is my favorite time. They finally stop nagging me.”

“Isn’t your sister home?”

“Inka? She’s already in bed. She’s a lark.”

“I’m a lark, too.”

“Good night, Roman Ivanovich,” Asik said cheerfully. Neither of them moved. Then she threw her arms around the bulk of him. “You’re the only person in the world who’s on my side.”

She pulled away. Her child’s face was open. Tomorrow, she would pull back her hair, glue on the fake lashes, paint her lips red. She would put on the glittering dresses and go out into the floodlights. Her unbeautiful features already contained the drama of tomorrow’s competition, all the disappointments of her future and its small moments of bliss. Already in them lived the Asik of ten years from now, and thirty, and fifty—long after Roman Ivanovich had gone.

He grabbed her folded forearms and covered her mouth with his. Asik’s tongue fluttered like a butterfly under the net of his lips. He traced the uneven ridge of her small, cool teeth, flew up to the scratchy ribs of her palate, then swooped down and cajoled her tongue into submission.

Oh, his dancey girls! Their images flew before his eyes like a trick of cards: Anya with the dark curl tickling her ivory neck; the spattering of freckles on Oksana’s neck and chest; Lara’s chubby stockinged legs. Their cometlike flight over his gray planet had kept him alive.

Roman Ivanovich felt a gust of cold in his mouth and a dull tingling in his coated forearms. Asik was pinching him. Tears streamed down her blotchy cheeks. They should both be crying, mourning their innocence. Yet he was bellowingly happy. He couldn’t understand how up to now he had managed to carry this feeling inside, like water in a sieve. He kissed her again, holding on with his lips, his teeth, his claws. Ah, how she tasted, of salt and metal.

Summer Medicine

1993

All my life I’ve been healthy, too healthy to ever go to a real hospital, naturally. But this summer break, I had finally hit on a perfect plan and I carried it out masterfully. First, while undergoing my annual physical at Baba Olya’s Polyclinika in Syktyvkar, I told the gastroenterologist, Dr. Osip, that I had chronic epigastric pain. I had saved up raw mushrooms from a recent picking trip to the forest with Baba Olya and had been eating them every few days. I only had to throw up three times (with accompanying moans and shrieks) for Baba Olya to arrange an overnight diagnostic stay at the Big Hospital. She was in charge of me for the summer: I knew she’d take no chances with my health.

Compared to the two-storied wooden Polyclinika with lazy
polyclinikanese
cats warming themselves on the porch and lilac trees throwing sleepy shadows into the doctors’ offices, the Big Hospital seemed like a whole different city. It was gleaming white and as enormous as an ocean liner—with columns, marble steps, and two wings extending into the green waves of the park. Patients in faded pajamas shuffled along the flower-lined alleys, holding on to walking sticks or the elbows of their visitors. Ambulances buzzed by, their sirens wailing. Doctors hurried in and out of doors like white cranes. All the chambers of my heart were aflutter. Helping out at the Polyclinika no longer satisfied my thirst for a bloodcurdling, bone-protruding emergency, but here I was sure to finally observe real medicine.

As Baba Olya and I walked down the hallway, I looked out for my summer friend Alina, whom I still hadn’t seen this year. She had already been to the Big Hospital several times because of her migraines and didn’t like it. But it was different for her—she was just a patient, while I was going to be the chief doctor, like Baba Olya.

Instead of with Alina, Baba Olya set me up in a room with two older girls named Liza and Natasha. Liza was small like me, with a sparse ponytail and long blunt bangs. Natasha was a chubby redhead. Likely prediabetic, I noted. They sat on their beds and watched me unpack the purple Beauty and the Beast backpack Papa had sent me from Alaska. I’d also brought a pink American sweatshirt, a box of Mr. Sketch fruit-smelling markers, and two books:
Robinson Crusoe
in Russian and
The Little Mermaid
picture book in English, which I was studying back home at the English Lyceum.

“Your grandma’s so fat,” Natasha said when Baba Olya had left. “Where does she work? The cake factory?”

Liza nodded, the corner of her lip twisted up.

Oh, yes. It was a sad and medically troubling truth. Baba Olya was so overweight, she could no longer work as a dentist and now dedicated all her time to running the Polyclinika. That’s why, when the time had come for my annual dental exam two weeks ago, instead of going to her, I was escorted straight into the chair of the new dentist. Dr. Pasha. He was very young, too young to already be a doctor. Also, he looked like the American actor Kevin Costner.

I liked showing off my “textbook teeth” at the dental wing, which was the loudest and most exciting place in the whole Polyclinika. (I loved the bed chairs, with drills and vacuums attached to cords like tentacles with claws. I loved the orchestra of drilling and buzzing, and the endless supply of snow-white cotton rolls in the tall glass jars.) This time, however, the exam was dreadful. First, the office was stuffed with howling children in various states of dental distress. I couldn’t believe I’d been scheduled for the “Happy Teeth Day” again, as though I were still a child. I was already ten years old. And second, the young Dr. Pasha had found a cavity (on tooth number 29)—the first cavity in my life.

“She is chief doctor of Polyclinika Number Twenty-Five,” I said to my roommates, wishing Baba Olya had worn her doctor’s overcoat.

The girls giggled. “She doesn’t look like a doctor. Too fat,” Natasha said.

“Never heard of it,” Liza said.

“It’s by the Komsomolskaya bus station,” I said. “And you don’t have to
look
like a doctor.”

“
Foo
. It’s dumpy up there.”

“It is not dumpy. They have good doctors,” I said, then remembered with a shiver the way Dr. Pasha took off his special glasses, the ones with a miniature telescope attached to one lens (which I was dying to try on), and announced to the entire office: “What do you know, Sophia Anatolyevna! A dentist’s granddaughter and with a cavity.” And Baba Olya said, in her voice for men, “Here’s your chance to prove yourself, Pavel Dmitrievich. One cavity—one chance.”

“Then why are you here?” Liza said.

She had a point. While I was deciding on my answer, she pulled her knees up to her chest and started rocking side to side. “Do you throw up every month? Ooooh, I like that special time of the month when I go
bah
—”

Natasha jumped off her bed and ran at me with her mouth open. I covered my face with my hands. She returned to her bed, laughing.

“You throw up all the time?” I said. “I know how you feel.”

“It’s because she eats garbage.” Natasha stuck her finger down her throat.

“Shut up,” Liza yelled.

“Only stray dogs would eat the macaroni your mama cooks.”

“What macaroni?” I said. If these were the kinds of roommates poor Alina had to cope with, I could understand why she wasn’t the biggest fan of the Big Hospital. These girls would only aggravate her headache.

“Your fat grandma should ask Yeltsin,” Natasha said.

I tried to stay focused. As a doctor I’d have to deal with hysterical patients often.

“Is the pain sharp, dull, cramp-like, knife-like, twisting, or piercing? And where did you first feel the pain?” I asked as calmly as I could. I’d read the diagnostics chapter in Baba Olya’s old pathology textbook just the other week. “Oh, oh, and does vomiting alleviate the pain? Or, you know, vomiting … is just vomiting? Unpleasant.”

Natasha looked at me like I was the crazy one. “Axe-like and saw-like,” she said impassively. “Also knife-like.”

“Oh, knife-like?!” I cried out. “That means gastritis! Or it could mean an ulcer. Or gallbladder stones!”

I had almost asked her whether she had blood in her stool when I realized I probably sounded too excited for her real illness. Like Dr. Pasha announcing my cavity.

It was painful to think back to the dental appointment, but I couldn’t stop myself. I kept rewinding it in my head over and over. As Dr. Pasha had stuffed my mouth with cotton balls, I had tried to remember what I had for breakfast.
Chyort!
Oatmeal. I was about to clean my teeth with my finger when he stabbed my gum with a needle, a little unsympathetically.

“Lee-ghno-kaeen?” I had mumbled through the cotton balls. I knew of several types of dental anesthesia and wanted to know which one he planned to use.

Dr. Pasha chuckled. “Open wide!” It felt icky to have so much rubber in my mouth. Baba Olya said it was the new technique taught in medical schools, but the older doctors, including Baba Olya, couldn’t feel the teeth properly in rubber gloves. They needed live contact. Dr. Pasha dressed differently, too: instead of the white coat and cap, he wore green scrubs, a white T-shirt, and a red bandana.

“You know what’s unpleasant?” Natasha said. She eyed my backpack. “You. Where’d you get all those things anyway?”

“From my father. He lives in America,” I said and immediately regretted it. I was not allowed to tell anyone about America. Or that I was from Magadan. People could think we were rich and rob us.

“And he left you in some dumpy Polyclinika Number Twenty-six.”

“Twenty-five. When I finish—”

“Oh, sure—”

Our consultation was interrupted by Dr. Osip, who walked into the room with a young nurse.

“Hello, girls. Sonechka.” He brushed Liza and Natasha with a quick acknowledgment and concentrated his warm, grandfatherly smile on me. “This is Nurse Larissa. She’ll take care of you during your stay.”

The girls stared at Nurse Larissa. Nurse Larissa stared into space. Her features were exotic: wide-spaced, almost Asian eyes, a beaklike nose, a small mouth. A horseshoe pendant hung between her clavicles. When Dr. Osip left, she gave me a cotton gown.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said and ran out.

The gown was diaphanous, like dead skin peeling after a sunburn. How many truly sick children had worn it before me? I bunched up a piece of the fabric and pressed the knot to my chest, praying for the health of all the people on earth—especially Alina—and to become a good doctor. Then I yanked off my yellow sundress, folded it over the cracked sink, and changed into the gown.

Back in the room, Nurse Larissa lay on my bed, her pale legs dangling off the side, her face wedged into my pillow. I don’t know why, but seeing her like this made me paranoid that all the young medics in town were friends, including Nurse Larissa and Dr. Pasha. I imagined them laughing together about my snot attack during the dental exam, and about my spying on Dr. Pasha after. Yes, I had watched him, a little, but for a totally normal reason.