She gripped her own arms. Squeezed the muscle, stemmed the thought. Died. No. Yes, her grandmother had died, but Valentina was living, she had a job, a family, chores to finish, calls to make. She did everything right. Tragedy belonged to other people.
Yet she was going to the operating room. Her smallest toes were bent with age. Valentina’s mother had raised her to wear slippers indoors…to keep their house clean, to keep them safe. Her mother warned her that cold traveled up a woman’s feet to the rest of her body. That’s how girls go barren, her mother had said. Valentina had repeated the same warning to Diana, along with cautions against strangers and lessons on friendship. Family over everything, Valentina said. But cold feet might not matter anymore.
A meter ahead, the double doors. The doctor silent at her side. The passage leading them to surgery was lined by red buckets. They contained…what? Blood? Gauze? Cut-out growths? They likely contained body parts, discarded nightmares. Valentina cast her eyes down at the floor. An animal smell, like dirt, waste, death, was thick in her face and on her bare skin. She did not deserve this. She was not prepared. Seized by fear, she looked again at the row of closed bins and pictured entrails.
Her feet moved her. Somehow, she walked. Her private clinician and the solemn nurse and this doctor here had directed her this way, toward these twin doors, so she continued, repeating to herself that this was what she must do. The passageway was already ending. The doctor put her hands on the doors. “Valentina Nikolaevna,” she said, and Valentina looked up. A little kindness broke into the doctor’s round face. “Don’t worry. They’ll numb you.”
The doctor pushed the doors open. Valentina found a team of strangers waiting in gloves, gowns, and masks. Her life was left somewhere behind.
“Go ahead,” the doctor said.
Valentina was so cold. The smell from the passage had sunk into her tongue, so she tasted soil, tasted blood.
She thought, In an hour this will be over; she thought, Everything is going to be fine. It will. It has to be. No more blister. No more cancer, if it was cancer—it’ll be plucked out at the root. She told herself it would pass quickly. She thought, After this is done, I will never tell anyone about what has happened. No one at the office, and not the detective, not my husband, not my daughter. I will come back to the woman I was.
DECEMBER
Ksyusha always knew about the dancers—growing up in Esso, she saw troupes perform at every minor holiday—but she was not interested in them for herself until her cousin came down from their village. Then Ksyusha’s desires began to shift. The cousin, Alisa, had enrolled in the same Petropavlovsk university where Ksyusha was now entering her fourth year. For safety in the city, their mothers decided that the cousins should live together. The two girls rented a one-bedroom apartment at the bottom of a city hill and moved their things in: Ksyusha’s neat from the tiny room she had kept in the dormitory, Alisa’s dust-covered after the twelve-hour bus ride south from home.
The state of their suitcases wasn’t their only difference. Alisa was only seventeen, with hair highlighted from black into orange-yellow above an adorable face. She had enrolled in school for philology, while Ksyusha studied accounting. During their first week of classes, Alisa met more people and learned more gossip than Ksyusha had over the last three years. And sometimes Alisa stayed out late. Once or twice, ignoring the missing-person posters that went up around the city that August, Alisa chose not to come home at night at all.
“I don’t like it,” Ruslan said.
He was still back home in Esso. This far into Ksyusha’s long-distance study, she and Ruslan had worked out a system. They talked on the phone every morning, every night, and he made the long drive down to visit at the end of every month. They kept that schedule for both their harmony and Ksyusha’s supervision; ever since she moved to Petropavlovsk, he had made sure to remind her how quickly a girl could get lost. His warnings got even louder after descriptions of the Golosovskaya sisters crept three hundred kilometers north to their village. Now Ruslan, in hearing of her cousin’s social life, had one more reason for concern.
“Alisa’s trustworthy. You know her,” Ksyusha said into her cell. She was home in her pajamas, gray sweatpants and a navy tank top, though the sun had not yet set outside the apartment windows. It was early September. The fall semester had barely begun and he was already finding faults.
“Alisa was always a little loose. Maybe she’s gone crazy in the city,” he said.
“She didn’t. She just has lots of friends.”
“Is she out right now?”
Ksyusha was silent.
“Where are you?” Ruslan asked.
“I’m home,” she said. “I told you.” The line was fuzzy with his breath. She went over to the microwave, set it for one second, and let it go off. “See?” she said over the beeping.
“All right,” he said, calmed. The microwave, the TV, or Ksyusha’s guitar—these were the domestic sounds that now gave him comfort. When Ksyusha was in the dormitory he had relied on the voice of her roommate. In the days before this school year started, when the apartment was brand-new, Ksyusha had tried to put her cousin on the phone for support, but Ruslan never believed what Alisa said. “Is anyone over?” he would ask. “Is anyone over? Is anyone over?” So Ksyusha mastered different alibis.
In the middle of September, Alisa decided to join the university dance troupe. She had already gone to one practice and liked it enough for both of them. This group was small, far from the professional ensembles that traveled the country showing off Kamchatka’s native folk dances to packed halls. It was more like a home troupe—it was just for fun. “We need this,” Alisa argued to Ksyusha. It would be a way, she said, to spend more time together, to honor their roots. “And a way to get you out of the apartment in the afternoons.”
“I can’t dance,” Ksyusha told her. They were in the kitchen waiting for their soup to finish simmering. The room smelled like hot cabbage, sorrel, salted butter, and chicken broth.
“Sure you can,” Alisa said. “Even if you can’t, it doesn’t matter. You’ll stand in the middle and look beautiful.” She lifted her palms to Ksyusha’s cheeks. “Look at you, Ksenyusha. You’ll be our star.”
Ksyusha withdrew. “Don’t make fun of me.” Ksyusha looked like their grandmother, pure ethnic Even, with bones broad, eyes hooded, brows faint, and nose turned up. Her face was too native, she knew, and hips too thick for stardom.
“I’m not.” When Ksyusha shook her head, Alisa shook hers back without stopping, then started drawing her hands in rhythm through the steaming air.
“I don’t know,” Ksyusha said. “I don’t want to.” Even so she had to smile.
“You don’t know or you don’t want to?” Alisa beckoned, her fingers slim as little fish.
“I’m not good at that sort of thing.”
“Neither am I!” This wasn’t true—Alisa had danced as a child in one of the village troupes and knew the old steps. Having said this once, though, Alisa would never take it back. She did not accommodate.
All Ksyusha could do was make a face in response. “Stop messing around,” she said, though she liked it, Alisa’s stubborn body and skinny, quick arms.
“This troupe’s all students. It’s nothing special. Come on, let’s see you give it a try.”
Ksyusha, lifting the ladle, nodded along to her cousin’s movements. Three years into university—classes each day on management or statistics, course work every afternoon, oral exams ending her semesters with the validation of top grades so she could maintain her scholarship, and her thrills relegated to summers in Esso, winter holidays in Esso, and the single weekend each month when Ruslan drove down—Ksyusha wouldn’t mind trying something new. Still, she said, “I’m not going to.”