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“Okey-dokey!” Zinochka yelled, not actually listening to her mother’s instructions.
She was in a hurry to close the door and throw the latch, but her mother had, like always, gotten stuck giving final directions over the threshold. Do laundry, iron, clean, boil, sweep. What a phenomenal number of things she thought of every time she left for work. Usually, Zinochka patiently heard her out, but she had chosen this particular day to be unforgivably slow, while Zinochka’s latest idea demanded action, being unexpected and, Zina suspected, almost criminal.
That morning, Zinochka had dreamed of being on the riverbank. That summer, she had, for the first time, gone to summer camp not as an ordinary girl but as a counselor’s assistant, overflowing with a sense of responsibility. She had spent all summer strictly raising her prickly eyebrows, to the point of leaving a small white vertical crease on the bridge of her nose, a crease Zinochka was very proud of.
But she did not see herself with the campers for whose sake she had to raise her eyebrows, but with the adults: the counselors, teachers, and other people in charge. They were tanning on the beach, and Zinochka was splashing around in the shallows. Then she got yelled at, and Zinochka headed towards the shore, because she had not yet unlearned obedience to her elders.
Coming onto the shore, she felt a look: intent, appraising, masculine. Embarrassed, Zinochka pressed her hands tightly to her wet breast, and attempted to fall onto the sand as quickly as possible. In her sweet half-doze, she imagined that there, on the beach, she had not been wearing a bathing suit.
Her heart missed a single beat, but Zinochka did not even open her eyes, because the alarm she felt was not frightening. It was some other kind of fear, a kind that she wanted to take a look at. So she hurried her mother out the door, afraid not of the fear, but of the decision to peek into it. A decision that fought with shame within her, and Zinochka wasn’t quite sure yet which would come out on top.
Having thrown the latch on the front door, Zinochka rushed back into the room and to the window, meticulously drawing the curtains. In a feverish hurry, she ripped her clothes off, throwing them every which way: dressing gown, shirt, bra, panties… She only just took hold of them, pulled away the elastic, and immediately let go. The elastic snapped against her tan stomach, and Zinochka came to her senses. She stood there for a moment, waiting for her heart to stop pounding, and then diffidently headed for her mother’s large mirror. She approached it as she would an abyss, feeling every step and not daring to look. Only when she had reached the mirror did she look up.
Reflected in the mirrored cold was a short tanned girl, eyes round with criminal curiosity, gleaming like cherries. She was bronze all over, and only the disproportionately large breasts and the strap traces were implausibly white, as if not belonging to this body. Zinochka was, for the first time, deliberately examining herself as if from the outside, admiring and at the same time fearing that which, it seemed to her, had matured already. But the only thing to have matured was the breasts. The hips were still refusing to fill out, and Zinochka testily smacked them with her hands. The hips could be borne, though: they had widened a smidgen over the summer, and the waistline had formed. The legs, though, the legs were seriously upsetting: they formed some kind of cone-like shape, thinning excessively around the ankles. The calves, too, were still flat, and the knees had not yet become rounded and stuck out like a fifth grader’s. All of it looked simply terrible, and Zinochka anxiously suspected that nature would not help her here. And anyway, all the lucky girls had been born in the previous century when they could wear long dresses.
Zinochka carefully lifted her breasts, as if weighing them: yes, these were adult, full of future expectations. So that was what she would be like: rounded, taut, supple. It would be good, of course, to grow a little bit more, even a tiny bit; Zina went up on tiptoe, estimating what she would be like when she grew, and was generally satisfied with the result. “Just you wait, we’ll see how you’ll look at me soon!” she thought smugly and did a little dance in front of the mirror, humming the popular song “The Wearied Sun”.
And then the sound of a doorbell burst in. It burst in so unexpectedly that Zinochka dashed to the door just as she had been when she was looking in the mirror. Then she darted back, hurriedly and awkwardly pulled on her scattered clothes, and returned to the hallway, buttoning her dressing gown as she went.
“Who’s there?”
“Iskra?” Zina unlatched the door. “I would have opened up right away if I’d known it was you. I thought…”
“Completely left. You know he only has a mom. And you have to pay for school now, so he left.”
“That’s awful!” Zina sighed dolefully and fell silent.
She was intimidated by Iskorka, even though she was almost a year older. She loved her dearly, obeyed her in moderation, and was intimidated by the forceful way Iskra dealt with problems; with her own, with Zina’s, with anyone’s who she believed was in need of it.
Iskra’s mother still wore a worn leather jacket, boots, and a wide belt that left burning red stripes after its blows. Iskra never told anyone about the stripes, because the shame was more painful. And, too, because she was the only one who knew: her abrasive, harsh, unyielding mother was a deeply unhappy and lonely woman. Iskra pitied her very much and loved her very much.
She had made the fearful discovery that her mom was unhappy and lonely three years ago. She made it by accident, waking up in the middle of the night and hearing dull moaning sobs. The room was dark, and only a strip of light was barely visible beyond the wardrobe that blocked off Iskra’s bed from the rest of the room. Iskra slipped out from under the covers and looked out carefully. And froze. Her mother, bent double and clutching her head in her hands, swayed before the table lit by a newspaper-covered lamp.
“Mama, what’s wrong? What’s the matter, Mama?” Iskra flew over to her mother as her mother slowly got up to meet her with dead eyes. Then she went white, started shaking, and, for the first time ever, whipped off her soldier’s belt.
Iskra would never forget the way her mom had been at that moment. Her dad, on the other hand, she did not remember at all; he had given her her unusual name and disappeared when she had been a small child. And her mother had burnt all his photographs in the stove with her usual ruthlessness.
“He turned out to be a weak man, Iskra. And he had been a commissar once!”
The word “commissar” meant everything to her mom. The concept was her symbol of faith, her symbol of honor, the symbol of her youth. Weakness was the antithesis of this everlastingly youthful, furious word, and Iskra despised weakness more than betrayal.
For Iskra, her mom was not just an example and not even a model. She was the ideal that Iskra aspired to achieve. With just one exception: Iskra hoped to be happier.
In school, the two friends were well-liked. But if Zinochka was simply liked and easily forgiven, Iskra was not only liked but obeyed. Obeyed by all, but forgiven nothing. Iskra always remembered this and was a little proud of it, even though it was not always easy to be the class conscience.
Iskorka, thought Zinochka, would never caper in front of the mirror mostly naked. The thought made her blush, making her afraid that Iskra would notice her sudden flushing, which made her blush ever more uncontrollably. This internal struggle so occupied her that she could no longer listen to her friend, she could only blush.
“Me?” Zinochka put on an attitude of extreme surprise. “I haven’t done anything, why would you think that?”
“Well, I don’t know when I turn red. I just turn red and that’s it. I’m just sanguinous, I guess.”
“You’re ridiculous,” Iskra said irritably. “Just go ahead and admit whatever it is. You’ll feel better.”