Disappearing Earth

NOVEMBER

There was a blister on Valentina Nikolaevna’s chest that never healed. Dark, it rested four centimeters below her clavicle, on the freckled plain of skin exposed by low collars. It had started as a spot, and then the spot swelled, popped, scabbed over, and continued to grow. Under the skin was hard with blood.

Valentina told herself the blister would fade in its own time. After every shower, she covered it with a small adhesive bandage. The blister didn’t hurt, but the look of the thing, a bodily purple when exposed, unsettled her. During the first week or two she wore the bandage, a few people asked what happened, but once a month had passed, nobody noticed it anymore. That fabric strip became her affectation—like wearing a silly hat or whistling. Her daughter ignored it. Not even her husband was bothered as they moved past each other on their paths through the house.

She believed the spot came from working outside. Maybe she’d pinched her skin leaning over a shovel. After Diana was born, Valentina had encouraged her husband to spend as much time as possible at their dacha all together; those two little girls’ abduction in August only emphasized the point she had been making to him for more than a decade. Family, she told him, over everything. A child raised in a close and loving family would grow up safe and healthy. Just look at the alternative—parents neglecting their duties, children wandering the city center, elementary school students vanishing. Now Valentina made sure that every weekend was reserved for the three of them. Her husband grumped over the forty-minute drive out to the countryside, and Diana, ever more teenage, got sullen, but Valentina would not have it any other way. She tended her garden there in satisfaction. Afterward, she always discovered some new scratch or bruise or scab. Wonderful as keeping a place outside Petropavlovsk was, the dacha held its risks, too: Valentina got to have her own space, her own chunk of hardened soil, along with all the wounds and inconveniences that gave. Only in late fall, when her vegetables were buried under snow, did Valentina look up from the sink in her office’s bathroom and really notice the humped bandage in the mirror. She counted on wet fingers. She had been putting that strip on daily since April, the better part of a year.

At forty-one, Valentina was far from old, but she was not unused to the peculiarities of the body. Her wrists were weaker these days. Her leg hair was lighter, thinner. If she ate sweets, her stomach cramped—the other women in the school office made a joke of offering her chocolates during their breaks for tea, and Valentina shook her head in wider swings every time. She and her husband, who had maintained a good distance from each other even as newlyweds, entirely fell off having sex a few years before, and she had seen her breasts deflate as if in answer.

Still, she had remained confident. Watchful of budgets at work and Diana’s school assignments at home. Valentina prided herself on taking care of her domains: the garden, the kitchen, the school office’s file cabinets. Certainly her own skin, she would have said. The reflection of this brown and purple circle made her fear all her competencies were about to disappear.

Adding up the months shook her. That Friday at lunch she finally went to the doctor. He leaned over her chest to study the mark: high as a knuckle, hard as a screw. The blister was small enough to fit under her bandage, but not as small as it once had been. “This is serious,” he said.

She raised her fingers to the top of her sternum. She had come to his office for a tidier answer than that. “How serious?”

“You’ll have to go to the hospital.” She hardly knew this doctor—she had seen him three years earlier, for a tetanus shot after she stepped on a hand rake. He had only just received his degree then. She chose this clinic because it was private and so offered a class of service, prompt, discreet, that she admired. On both that visit and this one, she hadn’t spent more than ten minutes in the waiting room. She hadn’t told anyone else that she was coming in today because she expected to make it back before the end of her lunch break.

“Why?” she said. “It’s just a blister—can’t you take care of it here?”

The doctor stepped away. He had given no sign of remembering her when he first entered the room. He turned toward her file. “We’re not equipped,” he said. “You’ve got to have it out as soon as possible. We’ll call the hospital and you’ll head over there straightaway.”

Valentina collected her things, followed him out to the front desk, and paid her bill. The girl at the desk took her cash and got on the phone. Valentina no longer had her bandage on. The blister, which for months had sat uncomplainingly over one rib, felt hot. She touched the skin around it but not the thing itself. It might have opened again but she was afraid to look down and check. Hanging up, the girl nodded at the doctor. The girl’s face was rude, slack, careless. “Fine,” the doctor said. “Go on, they’re expecting you.”

The walk across the parking lot left Valentina’s eyes sore from snow brightness. Wet flakes rushed toward her car. She let the engine warm and scrolled through her phone past her husband’s name. What comfort could he give her? He was no authority. Instead she called the school to say she would be out for the rest of the day.

“Is everything all right?” her colleague asked.

“It’s nothing,” Valentina said. Her voice was steady enough to convince even herself.

“Well, when you do get back, Lieutenant Ryakhovsky wants you to call him.”

Valentina straightened. “Did he come in again while I was gone?”

“No. He called.”

“Did he say anything about the Golosovskaya girls’ father?”

“No.”

Snow was piling up on Valentina’s windshield. She flicked the wiper switch. “Try harder to remember,” she said, as crisp as she could manage.

“I do remember,” her colleague said. “The whole thing was very memorable. He asked you to call and then he hung up.”

Valentina raised her hand toward her blister before gripping the steering wheel instead. This was exactly what she had feared—she allowed one disruption, a bandage removed, and her whole life crumbled after. She was missing important calls at work and allowing the younger women there to speak disrespectfully to her. She would have to discuss it with the principal when she returned.

“I suppose if there were any urgent matter the detective would ask for my cell number,” Valentina said. “So I’ll deal with it on Monday.”

Her colleague wished her a good weekend and hung up.

Valentina shifted into gear, rolled into the wet lines made by other people’s tires, and started to climb the hill that would bring her to the regional hospital. She would wrap this up then go back to her routine. Nothing to worry about, she told herself—just a chilly day, a task pending, a quick doctor’s visit.

But the last did worry. Valentina had never had surgery. Scares like that belonged to other people. Over the years, her peers had lost gallbladders and appendixes; Diana had drainage tubes put in both ears when she was tiny; even Valentina’s husband, dependable as he was, had to have his tonsils scooped out as an adult. Slices were made in all their bodies.

Now, after long luck, Valentina’s own death was catching up to her. That was crazy to think—but wasn’t it true? The clinic doctor said he couldn’t handle it.

It was cancer. Was it cancer? If it were cancer, wouldn’t he have said? It was cancer. Sometimes doctors didn’t let their patients know. If the illness was untreatable, they kept that bad news private and allowed people to die in slow ignorance. Valentina’s grandmother went like that, coughing up chunks of her own lungs. Valentina’s mother shut the door to the bedroom and said, “The flu.” The whole family knew and said nothing.

Cancer. But that was a different time, a different world. Back then Valentina wore red kerchiefs, and pledged allegiance to the party, and practiced handstands in their building’s courtyard, and came home to the hot mixed smells of boiling water and yeast. These days, they tell you. And there’s treatment—and tests. And it wasn’t cancer, because if it were, she would be sure about it. The blister throbbed. Signaling right, Valentina pulled into the hospital’s driveway, under the painted metal arch that announced the facility, and into a half-full lot.

The hospital was poured from concrete. As a child, Diana had cried in this waiting room until her pretty face swelled up. Valentina and her husband dressed the girl in a clean set of pajamas for her surgery. Should Valentina have brought spare clothes for herself? No, that was excessive; they needed a set for Diana because she had to enter a sterile operating room that day. But Valentina’s procedure would be brief. It did not compare. The mark on her chest was tiny.

The waiting room was saturated by the sweet, stale smell of liquor. Old men sat with their hands pressed to their bellies. A mother kept her arm around her daughter, whose leg was streaked with iodine and blood. Valentina moved past them to the desk of the admitting nurse. “Dr. Popkov called on my behalf,” Valentina said.

The nurse squinted at her computer monitor and looked up. A native woman. Valentina wanted to return to her doctor’s office, the good clean Russian service offered there. “Of course,” the nurse said. She tapped a few pages together on her desk. “Sign these, then come with me.” Valentina pulled her purse higher on her shoulder. Around them, the sick people groaned.

They took a corridor back, leaving the bleeding children, drunken men, and scuffed plastic chairs behind. The nurse led her up two flights of stairs. On the third floor, they emerged into a wide hall, tiled in green squares and lined by shut doors. The nurse opened one door, took Valentina past a row of red medical waste bins, and motioned her into a room. “Dr. Popkov—” Valentina started to say.

The nurse shook her head. Native as she was, she seemed responsible. Brows fading to gray, mouth unsmiling but not unkind. “Someone will be in to see you soon,” she said.

The door closed. Valentina put her hand in her purse and felt for her phone. But who could she call? What would she say? “I’m at the hospital and I don’t exactly know why,” she’d tell her husband, and he would go silent, or question her, or laugh. The idea that Valentina did not know. It was laughable. It put her to shame. So she shut her bag again. The room was small, windowless. There was no chair, so she hoisted herself up to sit on the exam table. Her slacks snagged on its cracked vinyl.

She reminded herself to sit up straight. Over minutes, though, her spine hunched, her belly folded. All these months she had told herself it was a common blood blister. She couldn’t trust her own judgment anymore. “Serious,” the doctor had said. Her hands were shaking. To stop them, she crossed her arms over her chest and listened. The room made a clean case around her. No sound from outside the door.

The next person who came in, she would ask to explain the diagnosis. If they didn’t know, she would say, “Call my doctor, please.” She opened her purse again to find the phone number. The purse held her clinic receipt, filled out in pen by the front desk girl; her wallet, suede, rubbed shiny at its corners; a pack of mints; a tube of mascara; folded attendance records. She had forgotten she brought those papers with her. She took them out and smoothed their creases over her thighs. Tardiness and truancy. The student names in their columns wavered.

Valentina focused on the door handle. It did not turn.

The ground outside the dacha would be frozen after today’s cold. Tonight at the apartment she would thaw pelmeni for her husband and Diana. Nothing too taxing. It would be dark by the time she got home; she might be tired, and a meal pulled from the freezer was the best she would be able to manage. That, a stiff drink, and a long sleep. In the morning she would call the detective at the police station for an update on his investigation. Then she and her husband and Diana would drive out of Petropavlovsk as a family.

For the first few weeks after the Golosovskaya girls’ kidnapping in August, her husband fancied himself the expert on abduction. He worked at the volcanological institute with the crime’s only witness. He came home with reports of black cars and no bodies as if neither of those things was communicated daily at the city’s markets. But once the police turned their attention away from the fat ghost created by a distracted dog walker, Valentina became a better source of information. Lieutenant Ryakhovsky hung around the elementary school office to speak with her long after he had finished his interviews with the girls’ teachers and classmates. Valentina would open the sisters’ student files before the detective and discuss suspects while he reviewed their papers. He’d come by that very Monday, when the snow started, to tell her they were stopping the civilian searches entirely.

“Because of the weather,” he said. “That, and the fact we haven’t found a thing.”

Valentina swiveled in her chair to face him. His broad shoulders were bowed over her desk as he flipped through Sophia Golosovskaya’s file. “Did you look at airplane or ship logs? The city is so crowded in the summer.”

“That’s true,” he said.

“A foreigner could have easily taken them.” Valentina’s parents had moved to Kamchatka in 1971 for her father’s officer assignment, so she grew up knowing the region at its best. Military funding used to stuff the stores with food. There were no vagrants, then, no salmon poachers, and no planes but Soviet military jets overhead. The peninsula was so tightly defended that even other Russians needed government permission to enter. But when the country changed, Kamchatka went down with it. A whole civilization lost. Valentina was sorry for her daughter, for all the children, who would grow up without the love of a motherland. “My husband thinks a Tajik or an Uzbek,” she said.

Lieutenant Ryakhovsky glanced up from the papers. He didn’t bother to talk to the other women in the administrative office; Valentina, as the office manager and the keeper of records, was the sole person he had to consult. “You heard the suspect description?” Valentina pursed her lips. He continued: “The witness didn’t say a Tajik.”

“That’s what I told my husband. But she didn’t describe a Russian, either,” Valentina said. “She didn’t describe anyone in particular. Just a man.”

He shrugged. “That’s all we’ve got. In any case, the girls probably aren’t with anyone, foreigner or not, anymore. We’ve been dragging the bay for bodies.” He flipped a page over. “My supervisors don’t believe they could’ve been taken off the peninsula.”

“People behave like Kamchatka is an island,” Valentina said. “I have my doubts. If it’s so secure, how do migrant workers keep showing up? Where do the drugs in our schools come from?”

“Are there drugs in our schools?” he asked.

“Most likely.”

His head was back down. “We haven’t seen any evidence of that.”

Valentina crossed her ankles around the column supporting her seat. Week after week, the detective visited, studied the same folders, sought out her ideas. She must have something to provide. She asked, “You got nothing from gas station surveillance cameras?” He didn’t respond. “How about people’s dash cams? No one driving that day happened to record a dark car?”

“We asked the public. We reviewed all the footage turned in. Nothing.”

“You interviewed the mother?”

“Many times.”

“No boyfriends? Nobody hanging around?” He shook his head. “It must have been a stranger, then.” Sophia’s last school picture looked up at them from the file. The girl’s pale eyebrows, skinny lips, sharp chin. Valentina could not remember the older sister outside news broadcasts, but she knew she had seen this one the year before in the school halls. Her narrow shoulders. Her high voice. Her colorful backpack thudding on her hips as she turned in to a classroom. Valentina could not bear to picture her in the hands of a sexual predator. “What about the girls’ father?” she asked.

“We interviewed him by phone. He lives in Moscow.”

Valentina gripped her fists in her lap. “But no interview in person?” she said. “How did he sound when you spoke to him?”

“As you would expect,” Ryakhovsky said. “Upset.”

Upset, the detective said. Distressed just as much as one might think he ought to be. Yet unwilling to come back to help search for his daughters. Valentina felt in her chest the welcome flush of certainty. She had always been able to know, to interrupt, when something was wrong. “Nikolai Danilovich, stop. This is it. The girls went with their father.”

Ryakhovsky looked at her. “No one reported seeing the father. There’s no record of him traveling in or out.”

“Don’t you know how easy it is to fake records or suppress reports? How much influence does this man have?” Ryakhovsky was listening now. She could tell from the narrowing of his eyes that he was interested in what she said. “Their mother works for the party,” Valentina said. “You’re aware of that, aren’t you? The children of someone with those connections don’t just fade away. But if their father is in touch with someone more powerful…”

“He’s an engineer,” Ryakhovsky said.

“An engineer living in Moscow,” she said. “So he’s rich. Everyone there is in someone else’s hand. And he’s from Kamchatka originally—he knows who to pay off here. He could’ve picked up the girls that afternoon, driven straight to a garage afterward, and arranged a boat off the peninsula. A private plane.”

The detective’s voice was low, focused. “Corruption.”

“Nothing else,” said Valentina. “After such a crime, a silence like this isn’t natural. You have witnesses out there who simply decided not to speak. Their mouths have been stopped up by cash.”

“Someone in this city knows something,” Ryakhovsky said. “That’s what I’ve been telling the major general all this time. And the father…”

“That’s precisely it,” Valentina said. “You’re right, somebody knows. Look at the father’s friends in Moscow, and start at the top, the ones with the power to pull a kidnapping like this off. That’s how you’ll discover the girls. They are right there in their father’s house.”

The detective’s eyes tight on her. Even thinking of that look now, Valentina was warmed. Her husband had only carried gossip about the case from his office; Valentina had actually influenced the investigation. That fact was enough to remind her: she ran a workplace and a household. She was powerful.

Dinner tonight, the dacha, the phone call with the detective to follow up. The sisters found and her colleagues awed. Picturing her future, Valentina saw her chest clear, blisterless.

She concentrated on that. The return to routine. Skin left without blemish. Only the tiniest scar, which would fade away by next summer. The documents grew damp in her hands, and the vinyl cushion bent to her weight. She practiced telling herself that everything was going to be fine.

At last the knock. The vision she had of a world set right was shuttered. “Yes,” Valentina called, as a doctor opened the door.

“Good afternoon,” the doctor said and turned to the empty counter, the locked cupboards. “Undress, please. Everything off.”

Valentina pinched the papers harder. Their edges were soft from her sweat. Then she stood up. She put the pages back in her purse and zipped it shut. Already half-naked without her bandage on, Valentina began taking off her clothes. She peeled off her boots and socks and put them in a corner with her purse, then folded her jacket and scarf and rested them on top. Then her sweater, her blouse, her slacks. Her back was to the silent doctor. The sooner she finished undressing, the sooner the exam would be over, the sooner she could go. She unsnapped her bra. The warmth from the lined cotton leached into her hands. Quickly, she took off her underwear, too, wrapped it with her bra into a neat little package, and set them on top of the pile.

She stepped back to sit up on the table. Her skin rubbed on it now.

As soon as Valentina was settled, the doctor turned around. She was dressed in white with a blue cap covering her hair. “No one’s with you?” she asked. Valentina shook her head. “And you didn’t bring clean clothes? A gown? That’s all right,” the doctor said. “It’s not so important.”

The doctor came close enough that they could smell each other: the doctor sharp with antiseptic wipes, cold circulated air, the waxed fruit flavor of lip balm tucked underneath, and Valentina slippery with nervousness. Valentina had skipped lunch. She was empty as a box bobbing in the sea. Bending, the doctor studied the blister; she touched it with her dry fingers. Then, carefully, she palpated Valentina’s neck, jaw, ears. She felt the span of Valentina’s chest and spent a long time pressing Valentina’s right armpit.

“What’s the matter?” Valentina said.

“We don’t know yet.”

Valentina studied the doctor’s face to see if that was a lie. “Dr. Popkov said it was serious.”

“Who?”

“My doctor. From the Medline clinic. He sent me here.”

The doctor straightened. Even hunched on the table, Valentina was a little taller. The doctor’s lips were pink and her cheeks were broad, giving her a sweet, apple-faced quality that belied the firmness in her fingertips. “He was right. We’re going to take it out,” she said. “Come with me.”

Valentina pushed herself off the table. She moved toward her clothes.

The doctor said, “No, we have to keep it sterile there. Leave your things in this room.”

But Valentina was exposed from her sagging neck to her frozen feet. Blister and breasts and ass and pubic hair. This was different from a bedroom or a bathhouse. Not even her husband had seen her like this—bare under fluorescent lights. Salt-covered. Filled with cancer—she could be filled with it. A naked patient in the regional hospital.

How many doors did she go through to get to this room? She could not remember. She wanted back the native nurse, who had looked at her humanely. The men waiting downstairs—had they also been shown into examining rooms? Were they sitting, round and jaundiced, just outside?

“I must have misheard you,” Valentina said. Her teeth were chattering.

“It has to stay sterile and you have no gown. It’s only a meter or two,” the doctor said. “Come on.” She was finished with Valentina’s body, ready to move on.

Valentina was not. “Shouldn’t I—”

The doctor was opening the door.

“I should bring my jacket,” Valentina said.

The doctor shook her head. “This is no time to be modest. You are going into the operating room.”

Naked, Valentina followed the doctor out into the short passageway with the red bins. If they walked straight, they would enter the hall, which had been empty before and now could hold—anything. Anyone. Instead they turned left, toward a double doorway. Valentina’s ID, her money, her keys, her clothing: all her things were in the room. She covered her chest with her arms but air poured across her hips and thighs. The doctor didn’t pay any attention.

Valentina held herself together as much as she could. Only two meters to cross. Under her feet, the passage’s floor was gritty. The number of dirty bodies that must have gone this way before. Was this how everyone else she knew had entered surgery—naked, frozen? At the limited mercy of authority. Even Valentina’s grandmother had died with more pride.

She gripped her own arms. Squeezed the muscle, stemmed the thought. Died. No. Yes, her grandmother had died, but Valentina was living, she had a job, a family, chores to finish, calls to make. She did everything right. Tragedy belonged to other people.

Yet she was going to the operating room. Her smallest toes were bent with age. Valentina’s mother had raised her to wear slippers indoors…to keep their house clean, to keep them safe. Her mother warned her that cold traveled up a woman’s feet to the rest of her body. That’s how girls go barren, her mother had said. Valentina had repeated the same warning to Diana, along with cautions against strangers and lessons on friendship. Family over everything, Valentina said. But cold feet might not matter anymore.

A meter ahead, the double doors. The doctor silent at her side. The passage leading them to surgery was lined by red buckets. They contained…what? Blood? Gauze? Cut-out growths? They likely contained body parts, discarded nightmares. Valentina cast her eyes down at the floor. An animal smell, like dirt, waste, death, was thick in her face and on her bare skin. She did not deserve this. She was not prepared. Seized by fear, she looked again at the row of closed bins and pictured entrails.

Her feet moved her. Somehow, she walked. Her private clinician and the solemn nurse and this doctor here had directed her this way, toward these twin doors, so she continued, repeating to herself that this was what she must do. The passageway was already ending. The doctor put her hands on the doors. “Valentina Nikolaevna,” she said, and Valentina looked up. A little kindness broke into the doctor’s round face. “Don’t worry. They’ll numb you.”

The doctor pushed the doors open. Valentina found a team of strangers waiting in gloves, gowns, and masks. Her life was left somewhere behind.

“Go ahead,” the doctor said.

Valentina was so cold. The smell from the passage had sunk into her tongue, so she tasted soil, tasted blood.

She thought, In an hour this will be over; she thought, Everything is going to be fine. It will. It has to be. No more blister. No more cancer, if it was cancer—it’ll be plucked out at the root. She told herself it would pass quickly. She thought, After this is done, I will never tell anyone about what has happened. No one at the office, and not the detective, not my husband, not my daughter. I will come back to the woman I was.