3

By 1992, Dmitriy Fyodorovich had been laid off from the Rubin factory. Despite rumors that the workers would have a chance to buy it out for themselves, it had been privatized and was doing worse with each passing day. To add insult to his injury, Yelena Viktorovna was still employed. And because Alyssa Vitalyevna led a vibrant social life elsewhere, it was mostly Dmitriy Fyodorovich and Mitya stuck together at home.

Dmitriy Fyodorovich’s late older brother had left behind a perfectly manly, well-developed male heir, Vovka, and Dmitriy Fyodorovich wanted to accomplish the same. But he understood swiftly that Mitya was not growing up to be the son he had wished to have. Mitya did not like playing with the three toy guns that his father had bought for him. Once, Dmitriy Fyodorovich gave his son a toy tank. It was an accurate, scale model of the tank that he had operated in the Afghan War. Dmitriy Fyodorovich found it a week later, behind the fridge, covered in dust, next to a rotting chicken drumstick. Behind the fridge was where Dmitriy Fyodorovich kept his extra money so that Yelena Viktorovna wouldn’t find it. That was also the place where Mitya deposited unwanted food and toys.

Mitya did not like helping Papa with his chores or participating in his pastimes. Once given a hammer, he immediately hurt his pinkie and cried for a whole hour without Mama to comfort him, getting on Papa’s nerves. Once, Dmitriy Fyodorovich poured some beer into a glass for him, and Mitya broke down in tears after tasting the bitter liquid. Another time Papa took him to a soccer match, the army’s sports team, CSKA, against the visiting Shakhter from Donetsk. Mitya feasted on the sunflower seed shells and cigarette butts that the large scary men spat out, and then started vomiting halfway through the second halftime. Because Dmitriy Fyodorovich had to hold his son over the squat toilet as he threw up, they missed Papa’s team’s two defining goals. CSKA was leading, and he wasn’t there to see it. When father and son returned from the restrooms, there were twenty minutes of the game left. In these twenty minutes, CSKA was defeated three to four, and it was quite clear that it was all Mitya’s fault.

After that, whenever Dmitriy Fyodorovich asked his son to join him in yet another endeavor, Mitya made a sad face, and Papa proclaimed that he was a devchonka, a girl.

If Mama, Babushka, or anyone else was around, he would add: “My son is an idiot, an invalid, a sissy.”

But there were some advantages to the situation. The fact that his mother-in-law had made his son mentally incapacitated presented Dmitriy Fyodorovich with constant power over her. Alyssa Vitalyevna liked complaining of how arrogant and ridiculous her son-in-law was, how unworthy of her higher-class, educated daughter. But whenever she started, he reminded her of the time she almost killed his only child. The pangs of guilt forced Alyssa Vitalyevna to her room.

Now that father and son were stuck together, Mitya’s deviance, ripening, swelling, was too hard to ignore. When Dmitriy Fyodorovich walked in on Mitya drawing pictures on the kitchen table, he saw little animals in dresses frolicking on the pages of his drawing pad. The drawings were meticulous, but so unmanly. When passersby in the park on the weekend asked Mitya who he wanted to become when he grew up, Dmitriy Fyodorovich heard his son respond, “Alla Pugacheva.” She was the country’s biggest pop star and, unforgivably, a woman, all curls and kaftans.

And Mitya cried too much. He cried when he fell and scraped a knee. He cried when he didn’t want to eat soup. He cried when he saw war films. He cried when he saw fairy tale movies. He cried when he saw cartoons.

“Devchonka!” Papa growled again when he saw Mitya—before he even had a chance to find out what unmanly activity his son was engrossed with at a given time. The word devchonka was everything to Mitya. It sounded like a magical spell, like something that was not to be said out loud. And once his father, that giant with his booming voice, pronounced the truth, there was no way to back away from it.

“Devchonka,” Mitya whispered whenever he put on makeup.

The older Mitya got, the more Devchonka became a part of his life. He quickly learned that his dressing up was not a universally admired thing. So he mostly became Devchonka when he stayed at home alone, and then made sure to remove every trace of her from his body, using soap and vodka.

Seasons changed, the country changed. A little before his eighth birthday, in 1993, Mitya heard gunshots outside and a woman in the opposite building spent the whole night swearing at Yeltsin from her window. Alyssa Vitalyevna and Dmitriy Fyodorovich fought about him again. The next day, they showed the white house where the parliament sat on TV and it was blackened on the top, but Mitya did not understand why. It was as though the building’s mascara got smudged.

A month before Mitya was eight, he started school. He was older than all the other children in first grade. The school was public but was considered better than most: they boasted in-depth foreign-language classes. Mitya was eligible based on address, but the trick was to get into the best class with the best teacher. Bribes were out of the question; the family’s income had been severely depleted since the collapse of the USSR since the new government undertook various financial measures. But Dr. Khristofor Khristoforovich Kherentzis’s little niece was going to that school, so he asked her parents to talk to the principal about admitting Mitya to a good class.

As his own grandchildren were already teenagers, no one could deny him the right to get a good education for the smallest ersatz grandson that he had. Besides, from the few times that Alyssa Vitalyevna had taken Mitya with her to Khristofor Khristoforovich’s relatives’ Greek parties, everyone knew the timid little boy. He was pale and scrawny, unlike their beautiful sun-kissed children with dimples in their elbows. But there was something angelic about Mitya’s blond curls, and the sad way he looked at everyone.

The Greek community and, in particular, its women did not enjoy the fact that the non-Greek Alyssa Vitalyevna was threatening Khristofor Khristoforovich’s blissful widowhood. But they did feel pangs of affection for the outsider child. The Greek women talked behind Alyssa Vitalyevna’s back and they fed Mitya more and more khachapuri smothered in cheese as if to atone for their intolerance.

Although his acceptance to the school’s leading class was made through the systems of nepotism, Mitya was still a charity case. Most of the time, Mitya’s classmates pretended he did not exist. Their homeroom teacher, Tatiana Ivanovna, did the same. Mitya’s parents did not give her fancy gifts for her birthday; they were not friends with the principal; they didn’t come to any of the parent-teacher meetings. Tatiana Ivanovna barely mentioned his name during roll call. She never failed to call out the Nariyan twins, who came before him on the alphabetical list, and Orlanova, after him. The Nariyan twins came from a flower trade family and gave great discounts. Orlanova’s aunt was a teacher in the attached middle school.

The only person at school who never failed to notice Mitya was the decrepit custodian, Semenovna, who took to washing the floors on the ground floor at the same moment classes were over, but that was mostly because Mitya had a habit of loitering in the way of her broom.

Mitya was absent from the class photos for the first three years of school: it was as if he never existed at all. He missed the first time by accident and, as Tatiana Ivanovna was distributing the school photographs to those who had paid for them, peeked at the glossy portraits that his classmates received. Everyone was so beautiful: girls in expensive, puffy dresses or crisp blouses, boys in miniature suits and bow ties. In the following years, he purposely avoided the days when the photographer came. Mitya stood in front of the mirror in his boy clothes, a white turtleneck a few sizes too big and the itchy gray sweater with an X-pattern. He saw that he was ugly, poor, and not worthy of the class photo.

His memories of everything that happened during classes were dim too. He was too shy to read aloud or answer the teacher’s questions in class and got bad grades. He had no friends. But the life that he had back at home was boundless. Mitya was left to his own devices once Papa left to look for a new job, Mama went to the factory, and Babushka went to the hospital. Dr. Khristofor Khristoforovich Kherentzis helped her get a position as a receptionist, after he assisted in firing one of the original receptionists for being mean to Alyssa Vitalyevna. Money was tighter than ever, and Alyssa Vitalyevna reveled in the fact of her increased participation in the family’s income. She never failed to flaunt the fact in front of her unemployed son-in-law.

Once Mitya realized that the female garments found at home were not glamorous enough for his aspirations, he opted to create new outfits from scratch. At first, he glued things together using the skills from home economics class in school. Later, Mitya took advantage of Mama’s sewing kit and sewing machine. He made utterly unwearable garments, spoiled most of the material and torn clothes he had stolen from the home economics classroom or found by the dumpster. But little by little, Mitya got better.

Because Mama and Babushka sometimes worked changing hours, they got to see him dressed as a woman a few times. Mama was not happy, but she didn’t say much. She asked Mitya to be more careful with some of her lipsticks because he was leaving teeth marks on them. She didn’t care what he did as long as he kept busy. As the Russian saying goes: “Whatever the child may do lest they hang themselves.” Sometimes, while sitting at work, Yelena Viktorovna wondered whether, maybe, Mitya had hanged himself in her absence. She wanted to call home, but a calmness of not knowing overtook her, and she put the phone back down and smiled into the distance.

Babushka was more sympathetic. She had been struggling with the fact that her grandson was becoming homely with age: gone was the tender toddler she had known before the needle accident. Though it was too early for puberty to harden the boy’s looks, he had somehow managed to become unappealing: like a skinny mouse bathed in soup. When she saw him in makeup and girl clothes that he must have made himself, she saw a pretty girl. The pastiness of a sickly winter child disappeared; his cheeks were now rosy, his lips plump and red, and his eyes well defined and wicked. Alyssa Vitalyevna had always had a weakness for the bohemian, and now she saw that her daughter’s little offspring had the inclinations of an artist. Was it possible he could become an actor? Or a singer? Most importantly, he wouldn’t follow in his father’s proletarian footsteps.

She did not want to be too encouraging. After all, it was probably a phase, and it would pass once Mitya found a more fitting outlet for his talents. She made a mental note to ask Cleopatra about that woman who gave singing lessons to someone else’s grandson. Alyssa Vitalyevna told Mitya to be careful not to appear like that in front of his father and gave him a book of Pushkin’s poetry, her answer to everything.

The Rubin factory closed. Yelena Viktorovna did not stay unemployed for long. She asked the new factory owner if he needed a housekeeper, then ironed some shirts in front of his wife, and was hired. The hardest part was telling this to Alyssa Vitalyevna, who felt so humiliated by her daughter’s downshifting, it would be a year before she could discuss it with her.

And then, finally, after two years of looking for a job, Dmitriy Fyodorovich found one, too. Or rather, Alyssa Vitalyevna found it for him, when he finally consented to her bribery schemes, which were even more effective in the new Russia than in the old country. The family had to skimp to afford them but a few bottles of champagne and imported whiskey later, Dmitriy Fyodorovich was again gainfully employed, through a kindness from a cosmonaut’s ex-wife’s nephew, who had recently opened an upscale supermarket and was looking for day guards.

The job kept Dmitriy Fyodorovich from seeing Devchonka. But it was bound to happen one day. Mitya was nine, and it was a September afternoon in 1995. The supermarket was shut down before closing time because of a power outage. Imported French chickens, German cakes and pizzas, and Norwegian fish fillets were thawing in the freezers, so the manager made the employees buy everything perishable at half price. Dmitriy Fyodorovich came home with bags full of fancy food and found his son dressed as Ariel the mermaid from the foreign cartoon.

Mitya was wearing Babushka’s red cardigan on his head, instead of a wig. He had on Mama’s blue slacks, secured with a ribbon at the end to resemble a fishtail. On his chest was a bra of Yelena Viktorovna’s that Mitya had enhanced with candy wrappers in different shades of blue—sky-blue Mishkas, navy Belochkas, snowflake-covered Snezhoks. He had also attached some red-and-white Rakovie Sheyki because they had crawfish on them. A mermaid needed sea creatures as her friends. But most importantly, Mitya’s face was painted to the fullest, with bright red lips and green-and-blue eyelids.

When he saw Mitya, Dmitriy Fyodorovich did not drop his bags in surprise, cinematically. It wasn’t a surprise at all: more like the worst that he could fathom coming to life. So instead, he held on to the bags and came at his son. He started hitting Mitya, the handles of the bags still wrapped around his wrists. It seemed, for the moment, that beating the femininity out of his son was possible. One more punch, and the needle that had crippled Mitya, and now also made him a deviant, would become detached and fall out on the floor between them.

Mitya could feel two frozen-solid chicken carcasses and a couple of cardboard boxes attack him from the sides as Papa beat him on the head.

“Suka, you want to be a devchonka? You paint your face like a blyad? You want to shame me? You’re a pidoras?” Dmitriy Fyodorovich bombarded Mitya with questions for which his small son didn’t have answers.

It was the first time Papa had beaten him. It was also the first time Mitya had ever heard the words blyad and pidoras. He had no idea what they meant but suspected that it was something wrong. Mitya had never seen his father this angry before: he had never been a pleasant man, but mostly his temper was reserved. He had never beaten Yelena Viktorovna and steered clear of Alyssa Vitalyevna.

The beating hurt. It felt simultaneously like scalding-hot water and a heavy winter frost, like falling off the swing at the playground and running out of breath on a chilly day in autumn. Mitya held his breath and listened to the metal tinkling inside his head—was it the needle?—as each of his father’s fists landed on the boy’s head. It seemed like Mitya was becoming deaf and could only feel everything around him through the pain in his skull. Mitya wondered if he would hear the slight fall of the needle on the floor when it finally got detached.

“Petukh pozorniy,” Papa spat at him when both of the bags had torn and spilled their insides out. Dmitriy Fyodorovich had let off steam, but not anger. It was still simmering inside him, and the punches brought no relief. He stopped and pointed at the mess on the floor: “Now clean this up.”

Mitya picked up the fancy frozen food and felt a hot numbness where Papa had been hitting him. There was no needle to be found anywhere around him. It had protected him: maybe the pain was there, but the beating had stopped, and he had survived.

As he put everything in the freezer, Mitya wondered if what Papa had called him—“petukh pozorniy,” a shameful rooster—had anything to do with the frozen chickens. When Papa left, Mitya took the chickens, still frozen but a little thawed out on the outside so that his fingers left indentations in the top layer beneath the plastic. He kissed the dead birds’ carcasses one by one and left traces of lipstick on their white striped packaging.

Yelena Viktorovna was upset that Dmitriy Fyodorovich had let his fists fly free but did not intervene. It was not her fault and not her place. She was the best mother that she could be, but her son was not turning out as her husband had hoped, or as she had hoped—although she wasn’t sure what it was they had hoped for.

A month or so after Dmitriy Fyodorovich’s attack, Yelena Viktorovna took Mitya to the market, and he liked it. It smelled like blood and fermented cabbage, his two favorite things in the world, and the ceiling was so high above him, Mitya felt like he had lost the ground beneath his feet when he stared upward for too long. He felt small and insignificant.

Mitya saw many dead animals at the market. There were chickens, and bigger chickens, and the largest chickens of all. “Look, Mama, these chickens are huge,” he said, pointing at them. Mama giggled. “They are cows, silly.” There were also skinned rabbits with furry feet, which, Yelena Viktorovna explained, vendors kept to show the buyers that the smaller corpses were in fact rabbits, not cats. There were chebureki, juicy, deep-fried bubbly pies filled with meat. They smelled great, and Mitya wanted to try them, but Mama refused: they could be made from dogs. She didn’t have any reason to think that they were. But that was the same excuse Alyssa Vitalyevna had given when Yelena Viktorovna was a child and needed to be lured away from street meat.

And then Mitya saw a pig’s head. It was pink, with touches of red where the air had dried it out, and where the blood vessels appeared through the translucent skin. Its hairs were sparse, thin and white like an ancient man’s, and on its lips was a smirk. The eyes were half-closed as if the pig were napping, eyelashes long and white, some crusty goo around them: dried tears, or gunk that one has to pick out from the corners of one’s eyes in the morning. The pig’s head looked like it belonged to a human, only a deformed, strange human, who had been given the porcine features as punishment by a witch.

Mitya stopped in front of the pig’s head and stared at it. His mother did not notice at first, and proceeded to the cheese stalls to the right. They couldn’t afford the expensive handmade cheese and had to stick to the factory Rossiyskiy from the grocery store.

When she noticed that Mitya had lagged, Yelena Viktorovna came back and waited for him patiently. She hoped he wouldn’t get attached to something and ask her to buy it. They’d gotten soup bones, but the rest of the meat would have to come from the store: the market fare was way too expensive. She watched the butcher, dark-haired, perhaps Georgian or Armenian—Muslims wouldn’t be handling pork, would they?—chop up a rib cage, wipe his hands with dry rags, and accept money from an older woman in a fur coat. Yelena Viktorovna squirmed. Animals, no sense of hygiene at all.

They stayed by the pig’s head for a few minutes. It took Mitya a while to muster up the courage to feel the head with his hand. The skin felt human, too, only thicker. Mitya became braver and touched the bumpy snout and the droopy, torn ears. He did it with such ravishment, mouth agape, eyes as big as five-ruble coins.

“I want to take it home,” Mitya said to his mother.

Just what she feared. Yelena Viktorovna shook her head, took hold of his hand, and pulled on it: “Poydem.”

Mitya resisted.

“I want it,” he repeated. It was rare for him to be this assertive, but the beckoning of the pig’s head was too strong to deny.

The butcher, who had finished his transaction, turned to them. Yelena Viktorovna was prepared to be coldly polite, or maybe even rude if the man persisted. Georgians could be talkative, persuasive, that was why there were so many of them at the marketplace. She firmly held Mitya’s hand, as if ready for a standoff.

Instead, the man smiled widely.

“I see that the boy likes the pig’s head,” he said, with a heavy accent. “I’ll give it to you free of charge!”

As he wrapped the head, he laughed heartily and loudly relayed the story to his friends from the neighboring stalls.

Yelena Viktorovna thanked him, dryly, not ready to trust the unexpected kindness, aware that any minute she could be asked to give something in return.

All the way home, on the trolleybus, Mitya kept touching the yellowish flesh of the pig and comparing it to the rough surface of the parchment wrapped around it. The feeling it gave him was powerful, yet not erotic, akin to what he felt when he admired himself in the mirror in makeup and women’s clothes—a loving admiration for texture. But also, for death.

He played with it at home, keeping it in the fridge. Each time Alyssa Vitalyevna discovered it there, she let out a scream. When the head had wilted enough to render it a dangerous toy for Mitya, Yelena Viktorovna made kholodets from it for a whole week. Dmitriy Fyodorovich ate it with horseradish, Alyssa Vitalyevna with mustard, and Mitya with a sullen fascination. He was, after all, mourning a beloved friend.