FICTION

Summer Break

By Svetlana Satchkova     VOLUME 57 No. 2

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“What do you want to do?” Leeka asked. “If we don’t do something right now, I’ll just die, you know.”

They were sitting on a bench by a dried-up pond. Around them, there lay dusty streets with barren concrete buildings, yellowing vegetation, and almost no human beings in sight. Vera could feel her own brain melting. They needed to do something or the boredom would crush them until their eyes popped, and there would be nothing left of them.

It was the summer of 1988. They’d just turned thirteen: Vera ten days ago, Leeka a week earlier. They were the miserable people who never got to celebrate their birthdays. Who would they invite to their get-togethers? Everyone left Moscow for the summer. Some people went away to camps for the whole three months; others spent summer breaks with their grandparents in various rural municipalities; still others, the luckiest ones, lounged in summer homes just outside the city. Vera’s father was an engineer and her mother a doctor, which meant they worked for the state for a salary that barely allowed them to get by. Leeka’s parents also had neither a dacha nor the money to buy one, so the two of them were stuck in Moscow with absolutely nothing to do.

They’d already done endless rounds of their neighborhood in the hope of running into someone. Last week, they’d met two boys from another school. The boys had a cassette player, not a good one––a Soviet thing that kept chewing up the tape––but they did manage to listen to some Depeche Mode and split a bottle of beer among the four of them. The beer was tepid and gross, but Vera felt she’d become more mature over the course of several hours. There was also the sense of finally having lived, even if just a little.

Vera was wondering why the boys hadn’t proposed another meetup when Leeka suggested, “Let’s visit someone.”

There was only one someone who they knew was in town.

Their classmate Olya Troofanova was twice the size of a regular person, crosswise, and had a face covered with large glistening pimples, reason enough for her to become an object of countless practical jokes. During the school year, her clothes got stained with gooey disgusting stuff, her books torn, her pens broken, and, once, her jacket got drenched in a toilet. Everyone seemed to think that was funny, even the teachers. Vera and Leeka didn’t take part in the bullying, though they, too, couldn’t help laughing sometimes at the sight of Troofanova smiling stupidly while a blob of window putty was lodged in her hair.

“You mean Troof?” Vera said. “What will we even talk about?”

“Maybe there’ll be some cool stuff at her place.”

They’d heard that Troofanova’s dad worked in the city administration, which meant he supplemented his income through bribes.

“Like a videotape player?”

They’d both seen a videotape player once. A boy who used to be in their class had invited them to his place for his birthday. Around twenty kids came, and after eating some snacks, they all watched two movies on VHS. One was called The Evil Dead, and the other was about American teenagers who got killed one by one by a maniac.

Next time, the boy promised to show them a comedy that was supposed to make them die laughing, but that time never came because he emigrated to Israel. It made you want to cry, the way other people’s lives were progressing. Things happened to them! While Vera was watching that second movie, her mind skipped over the gore. Instead, she obsessed over the fact that regular American kids went to restaurants like it was no big deal and hung out in malls, that they had nice clothes and went to parties. Vera had never seen a mall and had never been to a restaurant or a party.

They walked to Troofanova’s building, identical to their own, and ascended two flights of stairs, inhaling the familiar smell of old dust mixed with piss. After they’d pushed the doorbell button, Troofanova opened the door and poked her pimply face out.

“Hey,” Leeka said. “Let’s go for a walk.”

Apparently, she’d decided not to invite herself in right away.

Troofanova studied their faces. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“My parents don’t let me.”

“Why the hell not?”

“It’s dangerous outside.”

“What’s dangerous?”

“There are drug addicts and prostitutes everywhere. They might infect me with AIDS.”

Vera and Leeka snorted. “Where did you hear this stuff?”

“Don’t you watch TV or read the papers?”

“No.”

“That’s why you have no idea.”

“We’re outside all the time,” Vera offered, “and we haven’t seen any drug addicts or prostitutes.”

Troofanova continued to stand there with a dull look on her face.

“You can let us in if you don’t want to go out,” Leeka suggested.

“I’m not allowed to have visitors.”

Outside, the heat descended on them again. Vera felt like she was one of the evil dead, her legs heavy and her mind empty and dazed. She dragged herself after Leeka, who had her face set in a determined expression and was clearly hoping against all odds to find something to do.

They happened upon a clothing store and ducked inside, but there was nothing to see except housecoats with lurid prints and rubber boots whose smell knocked you over if you came within a two-meter radius. Next, they tried their luck in the nearby park. The big metal swings they used to entertain themselves with were now broken, and the kiddie rides looked like they belonged in a scrapyard. They had no idea what to do with themselves for the rest of the day or the long summer that lay ahead. How could it be, Vera wondered, that she ached for summer all year and then when it actually arrived, it turned out she wanted to go back to school?

Leeka suddenly stopped, which made Vera trip over some tree roots. “What if we write her a letter?”

“Who?”

“Troofanova.”

Vera didn’t get it. Why would they write her a letter? They’d just seen her.

“We’ll pretend to be a boy,” Leeka explained.

“Huh?”

“You can be really dense sometimes, you know that?” Leeka said. Slowly, she announced, “We’ll pretend to be a boy who’s in love with her. Let’s go in the gazebo and plan it!”

She led Vera to the remains of the wooden structure where they often spent hours playing cards.



The next day, they rang Troofanova’s doorbell again.

“Hey, Troof,” Leeka said. “There’s this boy who likes you. He asked us to give you this.”

She held out a sealed envelope, but Troofanova didn’t take it. “What’s this?”

Leeka shrugged. “No idea. He just told us to give it to you.”

Troofanova eyed both of them and the envelope with distrust, probably weighing the possibility that they wanted to infect her with AIDS.

“What’s inside?”

“A note, I guess. I don’t know.”

“And who’s the boy?”

“He doesn’t want you to know who he is,” Leeka smiled sweetly.

“Why doesn’t he want me to know who he is?”

“Look, if you don’t wanna take it, don’t take it.” Leeka lowered her hand and made as if to leave.

“He just asked us to give this to you, but we don’t know anything else,” Vera added, starting to move after her.

“Fine,” Troofanova said and reached out for the letter.



The following morning, Vera and Leeka came to the courtyard in front of Troofanova’s building, plopped down on the edge of an empty sandbox, where she could see them from her window, and pretended to be absorbed in conversation. It dwindled shortly, and Vera sat biting her nails until Troofanova called out to them from her window, “Girls! Can you come up?”

She looked bashful when she opened the door and handed them an envelope. “Will you give this to him?”

As soon as they were out of view, they sprinted and ran all the way to the gazebo, where they tore open the envelope and, choking with excitement, started to read.

“Dear Max,” the letter said in neat circular handwriting. They’d chosen Max because it was Leeka’s favorite boy’s name. “Thank you for your wonderful letter! I liked it a lot. It was very interesting to find out about your life. It looks like we have a lot in common.”

Vera and Leeka had invented a boy who was moody and lonely. He thought that the girls in his class cared only about their looks while Troofanova was unique in that she was introspective and genuine. Over three whole pages, she tried to support this idea, confessing along the way that she was lonely, like him, and misunderstood.

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SVETLANA SATCHKOVA is a NYC-based writer and journalist. Raised in Moscow, she published three novels in her native Russian and writes in English as her second language. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College, where she was a Truman Capote fellow. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Newsweek, The Independent, Evergreen Review, The Rumpus, Catapult, and elsewhere. Svetlana is completing her first novel in English, a family drama with an explosive ending that seeks to evoke the upside-down, post-truth climate of Putin’s Russia.


VOLUME 57 No. 2