“See you bob your head. You already are.”
This was how Alisa changed her: not with invitations to go out but with the joy she carried in. “Ruslan won’t let me,” Ksyusha said, as her last protest. But as soon as Alisa’s mouth twisted up, Ksyusha saw those words were a betrayal.
He was her first and only love. At night, Ksyusha passed into sleep by remembering his qualities. The scratch of his voice, the bunched cords of his muscles, the hair under his navel, the deepening creases of his eyelids. Seven years Ksyusha’s senior, Ruslan used to come over to play video games with her older brother, Chegga, and she would sit behind them to stare at Ruslan’s back. That sunburned neck above a baggy T-shirt. She used to dream about being old enough to kiss him, and now she was, and did, and it was everything she had hoped for.
The next Friday that Ruslan came, she wrapped herself around him on the futon. Alisa entered the apartment that night, unlaced her sneakers, and passed the couple on her way into the bedroom; she didn’t shut the door fully as she changed out of her street clothes. “Did Ksyusha tell you about the dancers?” she called.
Ruslan tipped his face down at Ksyusha. His mouth was already thinner, expecting bad news.
Alisa came back out in leggings. “We have a university ensemble,” she said over the noise from the TV they had been watching. “They’re looking for more girls. Wouldn’t she be perfect?”
“She doesn’t know how to dance,” Ruslan said.
“Oh, she could,” said Alisa. “You just show up, anyway. You don’t have to be any special talent for this one. They take whoever arrives.”
He scoffed at that. “I don’t remember any university ensemble,” he said—he had studied in the city for a couple years, before he and Ksyusha started dating, when he was still Chegga’s video-game friend and she was still a schoolgirl. Though Ruslan left before receiving his degree, he found himself a decent job with Esso’s public utility, where he ran waste pipes and rebuilt the rotting wooden bridges that crisscrossed their village’s rivers. Ksyusha’s parents liked him now even more than they had when he was young.
“The group’s been around a while, but it’s not for white kids,” said Alisa. “That’s probably why.”
“Alisa,” Ksyusha said.
“He doesn’t mind.”
“So it’s that kind of group,” he said. “Drums and skins.” He squeezed Ksyusha’s shoulders, then released her and stood. “You don’t think they’d take me?”
“Not unless you got a really good tan,” Alisa said.
He squatted and held out his arms. “Even if I show them what I can do? Hey!” Stomped forward in imitation of the dancers they grew up watching. With one fist, he mimed holding the straps of a frame drum, and he swung his other hand out wide to pound its face.
Alisa jumped toward him. Her hands lifted. She twisted in place, head sliding one way over shoulders sliding the other, and so on down the length of her body, hips swinging, knees together swaying, heels lifting, and feet pivoting in harmony. She whooped while Ruslan stomped around, singing loud in a nonsense version of the Even language, and Ksyusha laughed because they wanted her to laugh, although the way they moved gave her pause. The way they looked—Ruslan strong and wiry, the stubble copper on his jaw, and Alisa synchronized before him. Natural partners.
Ksyusha reached out to grab her cousin’s elbow. She stopped Alisa, without seeming to try. “Is that how the troupe does it?”
“Something like that,” Alisa said, plopping down on the futon beside her. “You’ll see for yourself.” Alisa lifted her gaze to Ruslan. “Unless she’s not allowed?”
He straightened. “What does that mean?”
“I thought maybe you wouldn’t let her.” Ksyusha stared at her cousin, but Alisa was refusing to turn from Ruslan.
“That’s not how this works,” he said. To Ksyusha, he asked, “Do you want to join this thing?”
She was struck, nervous, trying to measure the flush under his eyes. “I don’t know. I thought you might—I thought it might be a good way to stay connected. To keep myself thinking of home.”
“Do you need extra help thinking of home?” he said. “Fuck. Go on and do it, then. Who am I, your father? Have I ever told you how to spend your time?”
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon, the troupe met in a university music room. Ksyusha reported back to Ruslan after the first practice: “It was fine. Awkward.” Alisa had made everyone shake Ksyusha’s hand. Some of the group members were at the pedagogical university, like the two cousins, but a couple others studied at the technical university up the hill, and one boy was only in year ten of high school.
“How many guys in this group?” Ruslan asked.
Ksyusha didn’t know how accurately to answer. “Maybe it’s half and half,” she said. Everyone indigenous: Even, Koryak, Itelmen, or Chukchi. Black-haired, brown-eyed.
“Watch out for yourself,” Ruslan said. “They’d love to be company for my native queen.”
He was the only white person who could tease her that way. He grew up with her family, after all. Her first week in the city, when she was Alisa’s age, some other students had mocked her. “Where are you from?” one asked before class. “From Esso,” she started to say. “From the reindeer herds,” someone else said under her words. And then they laughed.
She sat in mortified silence for a moment before raising her fingers to her cheeks. Pressed them there, cold circles against flushed skin.
She, who won a gold medal for academic excellence at her high school graduation and earned a funded spot in the university’s accounting course, was laughed at. It was her voice. The bouncing intonation of her sentences—she sounded northern. And her skin, her hair, the angle and narrowness of her eyes. They recognized her immediately, these city kids. They spoke to her like she was part herd animal herself.
At home, everyone knew Ksyusha and her brother not as a future banker and a photographer but as herders’ children. Her family was one of too many sources in Esso for meat and pelts. Her grandparents and father lived in the tundra with their animals year-round, while her mother stayed with her and Chegga in Esso until classes ended. Then it was back out to the wilderness. Ksyusha had missed every school vacation when young, yanked with the rest of her family to work in the empty rangelands while the white kids in the village got to play soccer in the streets and duck under roofs when it rained. Esso in the summertime was beautiful—cottages were repainted in primary colors, gardens grew dense with vegetables, the rivers ran high, and the mountains that surrounded the village turned dark with foliage. Ksyusha did not get to appreciate the sight until she was seventeen years old. Instead, the demands of herding ruled her summers: kilometers on horseback, legs aching, back sore; mosquitoes crawling under her clothes and staining her skin with her own blood; hurried baths taken in freezing river water; Chegga’s teasing; her mother’s resentment; her grandmother’s reprimands; the men’s arguments over money they should’ve earned at last year’s slaughter and debts they planned to pay off at this one; the way Ksyusha’s mind itched for a book or a pop song or a television show, anything to break up the monotony of the landscape, grass and hills and shrubbery and antlers and horizon; the rich metallic taste of reindeer meat in her mouth for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for days, weeks, for months, until they got to go home again.