Petropolis

Couldn't resist it. Anya Ulinich's writing is hilarious and she has a really great site for Petropolis worth checking out.


A CORRUGATED FENCE RAN THE ENTIRE LENGTH OF A STREET WITH NO NAME, until it crossed another street with no name. At the end of the fence, there were six evenly spaced brick apartment buildings and a grocery. Just under the buildings' cornices, meter-high letters spelled: glory to the, soviet army, brush teeth, after eatin, welcome to, asbestos 2, and model town! The letters, red and peeling, were painted along the seams in the brickwork, which forced the authors of the slogans to be less concerned with their meaning than with the finite number of bricks in each facade.

In the fall of 1992, Lubov Alexandrovna Goldberg decided to find an extracurricular activity for her fourteen–year–old daughter.

"Children of the intelligentsia don't just come home in the afternoon and engage in idiocy," declared Mrs. Goldberg.

She would've loved it if Sasha played the piano, but the Goldbergs didn't have a piano, and there wasn't even space for a hypothetical piano in the two crowded rooms where Sasha and her mother lived.

Mrs. Goldberg's second choice was the violin. She liked to imagine the three–quarter view of Sasha in black and white, minus the frizzy bangs. This is Sasha practicing her violin. As you can see, there is a place for the arts in the increasing austerity of our lives, she wrote in her imaginary letter to Mr. Goldberg, whose address she didn't know. But after the money was spent and the violin purchased, three consecutive violin instructors declared Sasha profoundly tone deaf and musically uneducable.

"A bear stepped on her ear," Mrs. Goldberg complained to the neighbors, and Sasha thought about the weight of the bear and whether in stepping on her ear the animal would also destroy her head, cracking it like a walnut.

"Sit up, Sasha," said Mrs. Goldberg, "and chew with your mouth closed."

Then came auditions for ballet and figure–skating classes, which even Mrs. Goldberg knew were a long shot for Sasha. On the way home from the last skating audition, where the instructor delicately described her daughter as overweight and uncoordinated, Lubov Alexandrovna walked two steps ahead of Sasha in a tense and loaded silence. Trudging through the snow behind her mother, Sasha contemplated the street lamps. She tried to determine the direction of the wind by the trajectories of snowflakes in the circles of light, but the snow seemed to be flying every which way. Sasha was staring straight up when her foot hit the curb and she landed flat on her face in a snowbank. This was more than Mrs. Goldberg could take.

"I told you to stop taking such wide steps. You want to see what you look like walking? Here!" Mrs. Goldberg swung her arms wildly and took a giant step. "See? This is why you fall all the time! You trip over your own feet!"

Sasha got up and dusted herself off. Her right coat sleeve was packed with snow all the way up to her elbow, and the anticipation of it melting made her shiver.

"I have some advice for you!" shrieked Mrs. Goldberg. "Watch your step! You should see yourself in the mirror, the way you move!"

Sasha woke up and stared at the water stain on the ceiling. For a while, her eyes were empty. She allowed the horror of life to seep into them gradually, replacing the traces of forgotten dreams. It was the first day of winter recess. The Fruit Day.

Mrs. Goldberg had a new diet for Sasha: each week, six days of regular food, one day of fruit only. Fruit meant a shriveled Moroccan orange from the bottom of the fridge and a mother's promise of more, since oranges were the only fruit found, if one was lucky, in midwinter Siberia. Mrs. Goldberg was already at work or orange–hunting somewhere, her bed neat as a furniture display.

Sasha got up and went to the kitchen. Feeling faintly revolutionary, she boiled water in a calcified communal teapot and pulled a chair up to the cupboard. In the corner of the top shelf was her mother's can of Indian instant coffee. Sasha put four spoons of coffee granules and four spoons of sugar in her cup and added water. The next stop was the fridge. Her mother had hidden all the food that belonged to the Goldbergs, but the other tenants still had theirs.

Sasha found half a bologna butt wrapped in brown paper, an egg, a brick of black bread, and half a can of sweetened condensed milk. She ate a bologna omelet and washed it down with burning coffee. For dessert she had the bread with condensed milk. Some of the milk seeped through the pores in the bread and made a mess. "Fruit!" cursed Sasha, licking the drips off her fingers. When her hands were clean, she made another cup of coffee and returned to the fridge.

Sasha Goldberg was determined to enjoy her vacation. Winter recess would be over in six days, and her fellow inmates would be waiting for her by the gates of the Asbestos 2 Secondary School Number 13, ready to knock her bag out of her hands and send her flying backward down the iced–over staircase. Hello, Ugly! Wanna die now or later? She would pluck her books and her indoor shoes out of the deep snow like birthday candles out of frosting and hurry to class.