Disappearing Earth

DECEMBER

Ksyusha always knew about the dancers—growing up in Esso, she saw troupes perform at every minor holiday—but she was not interested in them for herself until her cousin came down from their village. Then Ksyusha’s desires began to shift. The cousin, Alisa, had enrolled in the same Petropavlovsk university where Ksyusha was now entering her fourth year. For safety in the city, their mothers decided that the cousins should live together. The two girls rented a one-bedroom apartment at the bottom of a city hill and moved their things in: Ksyusha’s neat from the tiny room she had kept in the dormitory, Alisa’s dust-covered after the twelve-hour bus ride south from home.

The state of their suitcases wasn’t their only difference. Alisa was only seventeen, with hair highlighted from black into orange-yellow above an adorable face. She had enrolled in school for philology, while Ksyusha studied accounting. During their first week of classes, Alisa met more people and learned more gossip than Ksyusha had over the last three years. And sometimes Alisa stayed out late. Once or twice, ignoring the missing-person posters that went up around the city that August, Alisa chose not to come home at night at all.

“I don’t like it,” Ruslan said.

He was still back home in Esso. This far into Ksyusha’s long-distance study, she and Ruslan had worked out a system. They talked on the phone every morning, every night, and he made the long drive down to visit at the end of every month. They kept that schedule for both their harmony and Ksyusha’s supervision; ever since she moved to Petropavlovsk, he had made sure to remind her how quickly a girl could get lost. His warnings got even louder after descriptions of the Golosovskaya sisters crept three hundred kilometers north to their village. Now Ruslan, in hearing of her cousin’s social life, had one more reason for concern.

“Alisa’s trustworthy. You know her,” Ksyusha said into her cell. She was home in her pajamas, gray sweatpants and a navy tank top, though the sun had not yet set outside the apartment windows. It was early September. The fall semester had barely begun and he was already finding faults.

“Alisa was always a little loose. Maybe she’s gone crazy in the city,” he said.

“She didn’t. She just has lots of friends.”

“Is she out right now?”

Ksyusha was silent.

“Where are you?” Ruslan asked.

“I’m home,” she said. “I told you.” The line was fuzzy with his breath. She went over to the microwave, set it for one second, and let it go off. “See?” she said over the beeping.

“All right,” he said, calmed. The microwave, the TV, or Ksyusha’s guitar—these were the domestic sounds that now gave him comfort. When Ksyusha was in the dormitory he had relied on the voice of her roommate. In the days before this school year started, when the apartment was brand-new, Ksyusha had tried to put her cousin on the phone for support, but Ruslan never believed what Alisa said. “Is anyone over?” he would ask. “Is anyone over? Is anyone over?” So Ksyusha mastered different alibis.

In the middle of September, Alisa decided to join the university dance troupe. She had already gone to one practice and liked it enough for both of them. This group was small, far from the professional ensembles that traveled the country showing off Kamchatka’s native folk dances to packed halls. It was more like a home troupe—it was just for fun. “We need this,” Alisa argued to Ksyusha. It would be a way, she said, to spend more time together, to honor their roots. “And a way to get you out of the apartment in the afternoons.”

“I can’t dance,” Ksyusha told her. They were in the kitchen waiting for their soup to finish simmering. The room smelled like hot cabbage, sorrel, salted butter, and chicken broth.

“Sure you can,” Alisa said. “Even if you can’t, it doesn’t matter. You’ll stand in the middle and look beautiful.” She lifted her palms to Ksyusha’s cheeks. “Look at you, Ksenyusha. You’ll be our star.”

Ksyusha withdrew. “Don’t make fun of me.” Ksyusha looked like their grandmother, pure ethnic Even, with bones broad, eyes hooded, brows faint, and nose turned up. Her face was too native, she knew, and hips too thick for stardom.

“I’m not.” When Ksyusha shook her head, Alisa shook hers back without stopping, then started drawing her hands in rhythm through the steaming air.

“I don’t know,” Ksyusha said. “I don’t want to.” Even so she had to smile.

“You don’t know or you don’t want to?” Alisa beckoned, her fingers slim as little fish.

“I’m not good at that sort of thing.”

“Neither am I!” This wasn’t true—Alisa had danced as a child in one of the village troupes and knew the old steps. Having said this once, though, Alisa would never take it back. She did not accommodate.

All Ksyusha could do was make a face in response. “Stop messing around,” she said, though she liked it, Alisa’s stubborn body and skinny, quick arms.

“This troupe’s all students. It’s nothing special. Come on, let’s see you give it a try.”

Ksyusha, lifting the ladle, nodded along to her cousin’s movements. Three years into university—classes each day on management or statistics, course work every afternoon, oral exams ending her semesters with the validation of top grades so she could maintain her scholarship, and her thrills relegated to summers in Esso, winter holidays in Esso, and the single weekend each month when Ruslan drove down—Ksyusha wouldn’t mind trying something new. Still, she said, “I’m not going to.”

“See you bob your head. You already are.”

This was how Alisa changed her: not with invitations to go out but with the joy she carried in. “Ruslan won’t let me,” Ksyusha said, as her last protest. But as soon as Alisa’s mouth twisted up, Ksyusha saw those words were a betrayal.

He was her first and only love. At night, Ksyusha passed into sleep by remembering his qualities. The scratch of his voice, the bunched cords of his muscles, the hair under his navel, the deepening creases of his eyelids. Seven years Ksyusha’s senior, Ruslan used to come over to play video games with her older brother, Chegga, and she would sit behind them to stare at Ruslan’s back. That sunburned neck above a baggy T-shirt. She used to dream about being old enough to kiss him, and now she was, and did, and it was everything she had hoped for.

The next Friday that Ruslan came, she wrapped herself around him on the futon. Alisa entered the apartment that night, unlaced her sneakers, and passed the couple on her way into the bedroom; she didn’t shut the door fully as she changed out of her street clothes. “Did Ksyusha tell you about the dancers?” she called.

Ruslan tipped his face down at Ksyusha. His mouth was already thinner, expecting bad news.

Alisa came back out in leggings. “We have a university ensemble,” she said over the noise from the TV they had been watching. “They’re looking for more girls. Wouldn’t she be perfect?”

“She doesn’t know how to dance,” Ruslan said.

“Oh, she could,” said Alisa. “You just show up, anyway. You don’t have to be any special talent for this one. They take whoever arrives.”

He scoffed at that. “I don’t remember any university ensemble,” he said—he had studied in the city for a couple years, before he and Ksyusha started dating, when he was still Chegga’s video-game friend and she was still a schoolgirl. Though Ruslan left before receiving his degree, he found himself a decent job with Esso’s public utility, where he ran waste pipes and rebuilt the rotting wooden bridges that crisscrossed their village’s rivers. Ksyusha’s parents liked him now even more than they had when he was young.

“The group’s been around a while, but it’s not for white kids,” said Alisa. “That’s probably why.”

“Alisa,” Ksyusha said.

“He doesn’t mind.”

“So it’s that kind of group,” he said. “Drums and skins.” He squeezed Ksyusha’s shoulders, then released her and stood. “You don’t think they’d take me?”

“Not unless you got a really good tan,” Alisa said.

He squatted and held out his arms. “Even if I show them what I can do? Hey!” Stomped forward in imitation of the dancers they grew up watching. With one fist, he mimed holding the straps of a frame drum, and he swung his other hand out wide to pound its face.

Alisa jumped toward him. Her hands lifted. She twisted in place, head sliding one way over shoulders sliding the other, and so on down the length of her body, hips swinging, knees together swaying, heels lifting, and feet pivoting in harmony. She whooped while Ruslan stomped around, singing loud in a nonsense version of the Even language, and Ksyusha laughed because they wanted her to laugh, although the way they moved gave her pause. The way they looked—Ruslan strong and wiry, the stubble copper on his jaw, and Alisa synchronized before him. Natural partners.

Ksyusha reached out to grab her cousin’s elbow. She stopped Alisa, without seeming to try. “Is that how the troupe does it?”

“Something like that,” Alisa said, plopping down on the futon beside her. “You’ll see for yourself.” Alisa lifted her gaze to Ruslan. “Unless she’s not allowed?”

He straightened. “What does that mean?”

“I thought maybe you wouldn’t let her.” Ksyusha stared at her cousin, but Alisa was refusing to turn from Ruslan.

“That’s not how this works,” he said. To Ksyusha, he asked, “Do you want to join this thing?”

She was struck, nervous, trying to measure the flush under his eyes. “I don’t know. I thought you might—I thought it might be a good way to stay connected. To keep myself thinking of home.”

“Do you need extra help thinking of home?” he said. “Fuck. Go on and do it, then. Who am I, your father? Have I ever told you how to spend your time?”

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon, the troupe met in a university music room. Ksyusha reported back to Ruslan after the first practice: “It was fine. Awkward.” Alisa had made everyone shake Ksyusha’s hand. Some of the group members were at the pedagogical university, like the two cousins, but a couple others studied at the technical university up the hill, and one boy was only in year ten of high school.

“How many guys in this group?” Ruslan asked.

Ksyusha didn’t know how accurately to answer. “Maybe it’s half and half,” she said. Everyone indigenous: Even, Koryak, Itelmen, or Chukchi. Black-haired, brown-eyed.

“Watch out for yourself,” Ruslan said. “They’d love to be company for my native queen.”

He was the only white person who could tease her that way. He grew up with her family, after all. Her first week in the city, when she was Alisa’s age, some other students had mocked her. “Where are you from?” one asked before class. “From Esso,” she started to say. “From the reindeer herds,” someone else said under her words. And then they laughed.

She sat in mortified silence for a moment before raising her fingers to her cheeks. Pressed them there, cold circles against flushed skin.

She, who won a gold medal for academic excellence at her high school graduation and earned a funded spot in the university’s accounting course, was laughed at. It was her voice. The bouncing intonation of her sentences—she sounded northern. And her skin, her hair, the angle and narrowness of her eyes. They recognized her immediately, these city kids. They spoke to her like she was part herd animal herself.

At home, everyone knew Ksyusha and her brother not as a future banker and a photographer but as herders’ children. Her family was one of too many sources in Esso for meat and pelts. Her grandparents and father lived in the tundra with their animals year-round, while her mother stayed with her and Chegga in Esso until classes ended. Then it was back out to the wilderness. Ksyusha had missed every school vacation when young, yanked with the rest of her family to work in the empty rangelands while the white kids in the village got to play soccer in the streets and duck under roofs when it rained. Esso in the summertime was beautiful—cottages were repainted in primary colors, gardens grew dense with vegetables, the rivers ran high, and the mountains that surrounded the village turned dark with foliage. Ksyusha did not get to appreciate the sight until she was seventeen years old. Instead, the demands of herding ruled her summers: kilometers on horseback, legs aching, back sore; mosquitoes crawling under her clothes and staining her skin with her own blood; hurried baths taken in freezing river water; Chegga’s teasing; her mother’s resentment; her grandmother’s reprimands; the men’s arguments over money they should’ve earned at last year’s slaughter and debts they planned to pay off at this one; the way Ksyusha’s mind itched for a book or a pop song or a television show, anything to break up the monotony of the landscape, grass and hills and shrubbery and antlers and horizon; the rich metallic taste of reindeer meat in her mouth for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for days, weeks, for months, until they got to go home again.

Dirty. Stupefying. That herding camp stink—smoke, meat, mildew—had somehow followed her all the way down here.

At least she had Ruslan. The rest didn’t matter. Ksyusha passed her days waiting for his texts, drifted away from other students when classes were dismissed, looked forward to two-hour-long phone calls, and fell into bed thinking of him. Her look, her sound, her smell—he was used to it. No one else would love her like he did.

The troupe’s director, Margarita Anatolyevna, was a short Koryak woman who kept her hair pulled back with a scarf. The dances she taught were traditional ones, and she instructed the group as if they all led traditional lives; after she passed out leather straps to the boys for the herders’ dance, where they squatted and kicked and spun the straps in the air, she yelled over the music to be heard. “Higher! How do you lasso deer like that?” In the tundra, Ksyusha’s father, uncles, and grandfather stepped into a whirling herd of thousands, snared running bulls, and wrestled the animals to the ground. But some of these dancing boys had never lassoed anything. They let the leather go slack in their hands. City people, Ksyusha’s father would say if he saw.

Yet not all of them were that way. There was Alisa, and a couple of girls from settlements near Esso. A graduate student named Chander from Palana, far north, beside the Sea of Okhotsk—Ksyusha’s brother had met his current girlfriend in the fishing camps up there. One boy studying at the technical university came all the way from Achavayam. His face was flat and frown permanent. He hardly spoke enough for Ksyusha to hear his accent.

Being with the troupe was both engaging and awful. It was fun, for the first time since Ksyusha moved to the city, to tell Ruslan about something beyond her classes, even if that something had to do with a high school kid and a bunch of fake lassos. At practices, she took the spot behind Alisa and concentrated on matching her cousin’s movements. Legs together. Toes planted. Heels raised. Knees bent. The music, recordings of drums and buzzing mouth harps, was just a little too loud, and Margarita Anatolyevna yipped along to keep the beat. In her jeans and knit sweater, Ksyusha, dancing, sank out of her thoughts. Into her body. Her breath, her muscles, the throb of her blood. Ahead of her, Alisa’s sunny hair swished in time.

But the group also made things more complicated by swallowing her once predictable days. Margarita Anatolyevna had a no-distraction policy, so Ksyusha was forced to keep her phone in her bag through every practice. For the first couple weeks, Ksyusha kept coming back to a screen clogged with messages. What are you doing now? Important. If you don’t answer me…

Hard to miss Ruslan’s texts, hard not to check in with him, hard to let him pass out of her mind when the percussion started through the speakers and then let him back in when the music switched off. Hard to master the movements—Margarita Anatolyevna showed the girls how to fall to their knees, bend backward, arch their spines until their ponytails brushed their calves. The boys worked on making their drums thud in unison, and Margarita Anatolyevna shouted at them to work harder. In the evenings, Ksyusha and Alisa shimmied across their bedroom.

And hard to try to make friends. Alisa seemed as ever to manage fine, but Ksyusha couldn’t remember trying before. Everyone else in the world Ksyusha cared about had known her since she was a little girl.

She liked them, though, the other dancers. Despite the gaps in their knowledge—the fact that some of them had never been near a wild animal and others had enrolled in university before seeing a public bus—the group members felt more familiar than the other people she’d met over these years in Petropavlovsk. Understandable in a way the white kids were not. And she liked Margarita Anatolyevna, who encouraged them to chirp like baby birds calling for food. Out of anyone else’s mouth, that description might have sounded ludicrous, but Margarita Anatolyevna said these things without seeming silly. The dances had old names, pagan ones, about gods and nature, so Margarita Anatolyevna taught them how to move in pagan ways. This one requires that you all look like fish, she said, so push your arms back. Wriggle. Open your throat, wide, wide, and drink seawater down.

For the partner dances, Ksyusha was paired with Chander, the one from Palana. Of all the boys, he seemed the best. He was smart, earning his doctorate by writing a dissertation on Paleosiberian language families, and he paid attention when the director gave instructions. He was tall, he moved well. That first practice when Alisa pushed Ksyusha’s hand into everyone else’s, a few of the kids had tried to flirt: “Does every woman in your family look so good?” one had said. But Chander only asked where she was from and said the group was glad to have her.

Alisa, meanwhile, was paired with the student from Achavayam. They were an unlikely match, with him tense, taciturn, and Alisa so talkative she was studying German and English to give herself multiple languages to converse in. Sometimes she slipped steps from childhood into routines they were learning, and he noticed, and they argued, Alisa spilling out three defenses for his every critique. Alisa said she couldn’t stand him, though Ksyusha believed that wasn’t true. It probably flattered Alisa to have someone pay such chaste yet close attention.

Still, Ksyusha wouldn’t have wanted to dance across from Alisa’s partner, with his narrow-eyed focus and his disapproving mouth. Instead, Chander showed her the way. In one dance, the girls stood and the boys knelt before them. They bent into each other, the girls stroking the air to draw their partners closer to their waists. Through the minutes the music played, Chander kept the same easy look he’d had on the first day they met. His face, from smooth forehead to straight eyebrows to high lifted chin, was undisturbed. Once they went through the routine a few times, he got up, the knees of his jeans whitened from dust, and said, “You’re getting a lot better, Ksyusha.” She was practically panting from the movements. But she agreed.

“Tell me about today,” Ruslan said.

Ksyusha was under her sheets in the dark. The phone balanced against her cheek and her hands rested on the little hill of her stomach. Her cousin’s bed across the room was empty. “It was crazy,” she said. “Margarita Anatolyevna yelled at Alisa, and I thought for a second Alisa might yell back. She had that look.” The city around Ksyusha was filled with what was sure to provoke him: those two little girls disappearing by the shoreline weeks earlier, photocopies of their class pictures tacked to the university bulletin boards, civilian search parties climbing the hills, and policemen watching Ksyusha on the street like she was the dark-skinned villain responsible. Ksyusha wanted Ruslan to think of her protected. She wanted the same with her parents, her brother, so she kept any calls with them mild. Better not to speak of what might worry them. Stories of school and dance were all she offered.

The afternoon break between classes ending and practice beginning lasted an hour and a half. Alisa and some of the other group members used this time to go to a café, where they shared a slice of cake or a pot of black tea, but Ksyusha couldn’t afford that. Anyway, part of her understanding with Ruslan was that they informed the other person wherever they went. Visiting a café with others would lead to too many questions. So she came to the practice room early instead, and sat outside it doing homework until Margarita Anatolyevna arrived to unlock the door.

One October Wednesday, Chander also came early. Ksyusha saw two legs in athletic pants over her textbook and looked up to find him standing there. “What are you reading?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said.

He sat down next to her, his long body folding. His bag was dropped between them. He reached over to take her book. “Not nothing,” he said, turning it in his hands. “Econometrics.” He gave the book back, took out a notebook of his own, and started to work.

Chander was the son of a fishing family. In his hometown, they went out in the winter for seal, the spring for pollock, the summer for flounder, the fall for crab. “Anatolyevna would call it traditional,” he said.

Ksyusha had never tasted crabmeat. Chander rested his head on the hallway’s tile wall. They were alone as always outside the locked practice room. “Next time I go back,” he said, “I’ll bring you some.”

She had never had a friend like him. So comfortable, so quickly—out of all the people Ksyusha grew up with and the classrooms full of student strangers, Chander became the exception.

During practices, he was polite to the other members. Margarita Anatolyevna liked him especially, and corrected him quietly when she would not hesitate to shout at anyone else. But he didn’t seem close to anyone in the troupe but Ksyusha. When Margarita Anatolyevna switched on the music for the herders’ dance, he glanced at Ksyusha and raised his leather strap, which he knew irritated Ksyusha, which he knew made her laugh. In moments like this, she thought, We’re friends. The idea came as a surprise and a comfort every time.

She looked forward to tasting crab. She asked Chander for more stories about Palana: if he wished he were still living there, if his family ever came to Petropavlovsk to visit, if he had ever met her brother’s girlfriend. No, no, and no, Chander said, though he softened those answers with tales from childhood. He described a place, four hundred kilometers north of Esso, with a population a fraction the size of Petropavlovsk’s but apartment blocks built just as tall. It was cased in ice in the winter and had a windy avenue leading straight to the sea. Pylylyn, he told her, was the town’s Koryak name. Meaning “with a waterfall.” His language came from farther back in the throat than the Even she had grown up hearing from her grandparents. When she tested its vowels out, he smiled.

He talked to her about Esso, too. The one land route south from Palana was a snow road passable only from January to March, yet Chander had been in Ksyusha’s village dozens of times, because the flights he took between Petropavlovsk and Palana were often grounded in bad weather at Esso’s tiny airport. Chander had spent days in her village waiting for storms to settle. When she showed him a picture her brother had taken of the house they grew up in, he took her phone in both hands, zoomed in with his thumbs, and peered at the screen. The hall was warm. They were sitting on their jackets.

“I’ve seen this house before,” he said. “Do you have a cat?”

Ksyusha squinted at him. “We used to.”

“A black and white one. I remember.”

She drew back. “No, you don’t,” she said to test him.

“I do.” Infallible. Was this how all doctoral students behaved? He tapped on the screen to bring the picture back to normal size. “A blue house with a black and white cat sitting on the fence.”

“And me inside.”

“And a Ksyusha inside.”

Letting him scroll through the rest of her phone’s camera roll, she explained each image. “My mother, in our kitchen, making dinner…She doesn’t like this picture. She doesn’t like, in general, to be photographed. She doesn’t consider herself pretty.” Chander shook his head in silent comment on the wrongness of that, and Ksyusha was grateful once more for how appropriate he was. The picture only showed her mother’s profile. Disagreeing out loud would have been too much. She flicked to the next image. “This is home, again, the same night, the meal she made.” Chander looked hard at the food, the furniture, before flicking to the next. “Ruslan,” she said.

In the picture, Ruslan was in a white undershirt, close to her camera, half-stern, half-smiling. She had straddled his lap to take it. She hoped Chander couldn’t tell. Heat rose to her cheeks as she attempted to look at the shot like it was new.

“He’s handsome,” Chander said.

Again, the right response. Her nervousness left her. “He is.” They went through her phone until Margarita Anatolyevna reached over their heads with the key to the practice room.

Chander, too, had dated a Russian. A white girl. In the city, while he was an undergraduate—they were together four years. “I loved her,” he said. Ksyusha was looking at the side of his face, the line of his jaw, his high cheeks, and his blunt nose. “She was willful, though, and we would fight—she finished university the year before me, with a degree in international relations, and she wanted to leave Kamchatka for work, but I—”

“Nymylan,” she said. Another Koryak word Chander taught her. It meant “settled”; he taught her “nomad,” too, when she first told him how her grandparents moved with the deer. (He had asked her for Even words in return, but while she understood her family’s language fine, all she could confidently pronounce was the vocabulary she’d been taught in elementary school. Asatkan, nyarikan: “girl,” “boy.” Alagda. “Thank you.”)

Chander turned his head toward her. His eyes were dark gloss. “Exactly,” he said. “I couldn’t do it.” His voice was as gentle as a finger down her spine. He turned back to face the tiles, which reflected spots from the overhead lights. “I was supposed to move into her apartment when I graduated, but she kept talking like that would only be the first of many moves. First Petropavlovsk, then Khabarovsk, then Korea or something, some new frontier. I told her I needed time to think. She said, Fine, take all the time in the world, we’re done, and I said, Fine, if that’s the way it is. I took my final exams and went back home to help my father. She and I didn’t talk for a month and a half. As the summer was ending, I started to call her, but her phone was never on. I thought she’d blocked my number.” His eyelashes were straight, short, dry. “Know where she was?”

“No.”

“Australia.”

“Australia!”

“Australia,” he said. “She went to be an au pair. Her friends told me, eventually. One called me…I’ll never forget that conversation. She’s still there. In the end of ends, I heard she got married.”

This girl was unimaginable. Ksyusha and Ruslan had not yet started dating when she applied to university, but if they had, she would’ve kept living in Esso and enrolled in distance learning instead. As it was, she thought of dropping out her whole first year. Her parents had insisted on her taking the scholarship, and she did want to get a diploma with honors, and Ruslan agreed to keep an eye on her—those were her only reasons to stay this far from home. Anyway, she was almost done. Only a year and a half until graduation.

“Australia,” Ksyusha said. “Do you miss her?”

“No,” he said. “I’m done with that.”

“What, with dating?”

“With those girls.” His calm look. A top lip with no bow, and stubble dotting black under the skin. “With Russians.”

Ksyusha had heard her people talk like that before. She pushed her head back hard against a tile. “You don’t mean it.”

“I do.”

“Well, you should be smarter.”

“Uh-huh. You haven’t noticed by now that you can’t trust them? They don’t care about us the same way they care about themselves.” Ksyusha waited for Chander to voice an exception: Ruslan. He did not. In her thoughts, Ruslan slipped from a man she should defend to a man who might abandon—Ruslan could leave her so much more easily than she could leave him. Chander was talking about something other than love now, though. “Something happens in the north,” he said, “and no one pays any attention. Then the same thing goes on down here and it’s news. When we had the fuel crisis in ’ninety-eight—remember? At home we had a solid year without power. People froze to death in Palana. But the ones in the city talk like it was just three or four months of cold, like the rest of the time didn’t matter because it only happened to us.”

Ksyusha hadn’t heard about this. During the fuel crisis, she was barely old enough to form memories.

“Or the two Russian girls who went missing over the summer,” Chander said. “The media report on it constantly. They show us the police officers and the girls’ mother until I know those faces better than I knew my own neighbors growing up. But what about that Even girl who disappeared three years ago? Who covered that? Who even thinks about her anymore?”

“The girl from Esso?” Ksyusha asked. “Lilia.”

He paused. “You knew her.”

“No,” Ksyusha said. “Not really. Her brother worked in our herd one summer, that’s all. How would you know her?”

“I didn’t.” Chander looked at Ksyusha with new care. “I heard about it when I flew through Esso that fall.”

Ksyusha had just started university when that girl went missing. Lilia Solodikova. Though Lilia graduated from the village’s high school only the year before Ksyusha, their paths at home had hardly crossed. Even Chegga, who had taken Lilia out on a few early dates, lost track of her in their teen years. Lilia got low grades. As small and sweet-looking as a child, she acted shy in public, but was rumored by classmates to be reckless with men. People said Lilia would let them touch her for money. The boys in Esso shouted after her as she passed. There were times that Ksyusha, up late on a school night, looked out her bedroom window and saw Lilia’s tiny body crossing into the shadows of the village’s athletic field.

Lilia and Ksyusha were nothing alike, yet for months after Lilia’s departure, Ksyusha heard warnings from her parents, her brother, and Ruslan. Don’t go out alone. Guard yourself. Avoid temptation. Don’t talk to strangers. Chegga swore Lilia had been murdered by some jealous admirer. It was then that Ruslan first decided Ksyusha and he should stay constantly in touch.

“What do you think really happened to her?” Chander asked.

“She ran away,” Ksyusha said.

“Is that true?” he said. “I heard that she didn’t leave a note. She just vanished.”

“She…” Ksyusha hesitated. “I was already living here in the dormitory when everyone in Esso started talking about it. I can’t say what happened exactly. But Lilia wasn’t so happy at home. Her brother, the one who worked that season for my grandparents, was crazy. Their older sister had already left because of it. Their father was dead, and their mother was…Lilia didn’t have much to keep her living there.” She smiled at him. “Maybe Lilia also became an au pair in Australia.”

He did not smile back. “Did she seem like the type of girl to run away?”

“Who’s the type of girl to do anything?” Ksyusha said. She shrugged. “I really didn’t know her, Chander. I don’t think we ever spoke.”

“I see,” he said. “I just think about her story when I see the city news.”

“No, I do, too.” Lilia, who was nothing more than a source of minor rumors when she and Ksyusha lived blocks away from each other, had changed the course of Ksyusha’s life in the three years she’d been gone. The constant check-ins now. The scheduled calls.

Ksyusha supposed she ought to be grateful. If that girl hadn’t left her life behind, would Ruslan have been so determined to hang on?

“The village police gave up on her instantly, didn’t they? Meanwhile, the city sends out search parties for the missing sisters all the time. People here talk about those girls even when they have nothing to say,” Chander said. “A white guy, a dark car, in the city center…that could be anyone.”

Chander was right. In the city, Lilia might as well have never existed. Reporters behaved as though the sisters from this summer invented the act of vanishing.

But that obliteration was almost certainly why Lilia left. Ksyusha wasn’t like Lilia, but she understood her. The belief that nothing better would come. The trap of family. The plan in secret for some desperately needed escape. Ksyusha used to feel that way, too, before Ruslan chose her.

Chander’s hands hung over his bent knees. His voice was low. “A white guy and a dark car. They’re everywhere,” he said. “You know what I mean.” She did. Chander wasn’t insulting Ruslan. He wasn’t even talking about his own ex-girlfriend. He was onto something else, deep common knowledge, an ache that was native.

Would Chander and Ruslan get along, if they met independent of her? They were only a year apart: Ruslan twenty-seven, Chander twenty-six. Ruslan was pricklier, fiercer, and Chander more studious, but if they’d gone to the same school or been called to a single army unit, they would have inevitably become friends. One white, one Koryak, each never doubting where he belonged.

Ksyusha skipped practice the last Friday of November, as she had the month before, to clean the apartment for Ruslan’s visit. Alisa was staying at a friend’s house for the weekend (“I don’t want to hear your gross noises together,” she’d said and laughed when Ksyusha squirmed). On her knees, Ksyusha scrubbed under the bathtub, while music blasted from her phone. The place smelled like synthetic oranges. She was aware of her kneecaps on the linoleum, the weight of her body warm with sweat, and all at once it hit her. She was happy. Really happy. Happier than she had ever been before.

All fall, small pleasures had come together. Now Ksyusha had everything: a boyfriend, a new home, good grades, a talent, and a friend.

Ksyusha’s conversations with Ruslan were different from those with Chander. More about the neighbors they knew, the memories they shared, the desire that continued to knot them together. And when Ruslan was stressed, behind schedule on a project or harangued by his supervisor, he used their phone calls to search for her missteps. Where have you been? Who were you with? Are you sure? She squeezed out the sponge. The orange smell was sharp in her nose. She didn’t mind his scrutiny, really, because she became better when he watched her, but how nice it was to spend three afternoons each week away, saying just what she thought to a person who would only sympathize.

How lucky to have them both. Ruslan in all his tempers, and Chander coming to her with no demands. After years of telling herself that Ruslan in Esso was enough—more than enough! she corrected herself—Ksyusha had discovered someone new in Petropavlovsk. Some people had nobody and nowhere; Ksyusha now had two.

By the time Ruslan arrived, it was nearly eleven. Before starting his drive he had worked in Esso all morning leveling dirt roads in preparation for asphalt. They had sex on the futon, his body electric, his duffel bag dropped on the floor and the air still sparkling from cleaning solutions. Ksyusha touched him with a fresh appreciation.

His voice afterward was rough in her ear. “Did you have a good day waiting for me?”

“I had a perfect day,” she said.

He studied her. “What’d you do?”

She slipped a hand over his side to pull him closer. The smooth lines of his ribs slid by her fingers. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.”

They were quiet. “Show me one of your dances,” he said finally, as he had the last time he came down, and she pressed her face against his chest and groaned but got up. The moonlight through the window lit her bare body. He rolled onto his side to get a better look.

Ksyusha chose a favorite routine. The paired one where Chander knelt. She leaned forward, beckoning. Shimmying. Her fingers pulled the air. She tipped toward Ruslan, then away, and stepped and spun and smiled. He watched her. For years, in bed with him, she had been shy, self-conscious, but she turned now in the white light without hesitation. Forward. Away again. Her body flowed into the next step, the next, as easily as a river following its course. She was dancing well. She knew it. She moved as if these steps didn’t want a partner—as if she were fine on her own.

In the hall on Monday, Ksyusha was glad to see Chander coming. His sneakers and jeans and cheap waffle-weave shirt: they all made her soften. “I thought I’d see you here,” he called.

“Where else would I be?” She had her book out to hold while she waited, but started to put the text away as he got close.

“Practice is canceled,” he said, and she stopped. “Margarita Anatolyevna told us on Friday. Alisa didn’t let you know?”

Ksyusha’s fingers were on her bag’s zipper. “No. I haven’t seen her.” The only communication she’d had with Alisa all weekend was when her cousin texted to ask how the visit was going, then sent kissy faces, winking faces, yellow dots of glee.

Canceled. She wouldn’t tell Ruslan, because that would suggest that practices could be canceled on any day. That they weren’t to be depended on. That she, by extension, was undependable. She dragged the zipper shut and drew her hands back to her lap.

“Is everything okay?” she asked.

“With Anatolyevna? Sure. She has a doctor’s appointment.” Chander sat down beside her.

Ksyusha tilted her head at him. “Why are you here, then?”

“To find you. How was your weekend?” he asked.

She told him about the visit. The movies watched, the news from home. Not the sex. Not the happiness. Still, maybe both showed.

“You must get upset when he leaves,” Chander said.

“I do.” She thought. “Not as much as I used to, though.”

At a point not too long ago, saying that would have seemed like a betrayal. But she and Chander understood what she meant—she used to fear going out of reach of the microwave timer. Now Ruslan was growing more comfortable, and she, too, was improving.

“Bring him to practice next time,” said Chander.

Ksyusha laughed. “I don’t think so.”

He leaned back, showing the easy curve of his throat. They sat in silence. The heater hissed down the hall.

“We missed you,” he said. “I missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” she said.

He looked right at her. “I need to ask you something.”

“All right,” she said. And dread rose in her. Dread and curiosity, the two mixed up like sand lifted in seawater.

“Why did you join this group?”

“Alisa wanted me to.”

“I know,” he said. “But Alisa wants you to do many things you don’t. She wants you to go to the café every day. You’ve never been. So why this?”

He was searching for some particular answer from her. His eyes moved in concentration from hers to her cheeks to her mouth. That sick mix swirled in her chest. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess…I don’t know.”

“You wanted something different.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Yes.”

“A change.” He reached over to her. “Me, too. Don’t be scared,” he said, as he took her hand from her lap.

He held her hand. That was all. Still, she felt her pulse thud through her back on the wall. Chander. Her friend. She didn’t want him to let go.

She had thought of him this weekend. Naked, fresh from the futon mattress, performing for Ruslan, she thought of Chander. She said she’d missed him. That wasn’t a lie.

He was her friend but something more. Wasn’t he? Coming to this hallway three times a week, she wished she could come five times instead. Their conversations, his seat beside her. She had wanted to find him here today.

They had already crossed some line together. He laced his fingers between hers. “Don’t be scared,” he said again, probably noticing the beat under her skin.

“I’m not,” she said. Not of him. He kissed her.

When she was little, staring at Ruslan across the coated tablecloth during a family meal, she alternated between pretending to be his girlfriend and reprimanding herself for playing pretend. Their neighbor—her brother’s friend—this sunburned boy. Something in that fantasy was mean, ludicrous. She felt it even then.

Then the summer after she graduated from high school, only a month or so before she moved away, Ruslan started talking to her like she was more than Chegga’s little sister. On any given night, he asked where she was going, showed up at the spot she named, told her classmates she’d hit curfew, and led her home. Chegga had moved away the year before for his mandatory army service, and Ksyusha’s parents had headed into the tundra for the season, towing along horses, sacks of flour, and handles of vodka to help them pass the time in the rangelands. That left Ruslan in charge. He took the responsibility seriously. They walked together over creaking bridges, past slatted wooden houses, and down dust-covered roads. The village black and abandoned. Ruslan finally kissed her under a streetlamp. He held her face as if she were beautiful.

That first month they were together, in the weeks before Lilia went away, Ksyusha kept wondering if this was pretend. It was too wonderful. Each time Ruslan came to the house, she opened the door to him in amazement. No matter where they met, she felt like she had on that perfect night, when they were alone on the streets they grew up on and their bodies were bathed in light.

And he wanted her even more after she left Esso. Checked in hourly, drove down regularly, and made sure she was avoiding risk in the city. Being his girlfriend still felt impossible. Ksyusha had tried for years to seem good enough to deserve his attention, but she really was not. She found little ways to slip out from scrutiny. She made excuses. She disobeyed.

After all this time, Ksyusha was showing her nature. It felt a base kind of good to know it: she was, in truth, the person she had promised Ruslan she wasn’t after Lilia left—the person he feared was there. She was treacherous.

“I missed you,” Chander said into her ear. His hair brushed soft against her cheek. His body, which she had been careful to move around for weeks, was close. “I kept picturing you with him on Friday.” He kissed her jaw, her collar, and she lifted her chin so he could go on. He pressed his face to her neck. She put one hand on the back of his head and held him there.

Nothing should seem to change. No one could know. Ksyusha and Chander kept their same arrangement, meeting in the hall for an hour and a half before each practice, except now they pushed against each other as they talked. They shared secrets. “I wish I’d met you then,” he said once, meaning when she was in high school. Before Ruslan, he really meant, but such a time had never existed.

Chander’s mouth was sweet. Ruslan’s was urgent, tasting of cigarettes. She knew Ruslan’s mouth in the mornings, or from drinking, or like a hot iron pressed on her after an argument—all those times, good and bad. She loved it. But Chander’s was sweet. Always. Soft. Lips full, teeth smooth, his tongue searching for and finding her, and then his breath coming in relief.

At times she doubted her affection for Chander, because it was so much slighter than her need for Ruslan. But she did love that puff of breath. One exhalation and she became powerful.

Was she happy? No and yes. Not in the same way she had been. She could hardly remember what had gone on inside the version of her that so diligently scrubbed the floor in November.

Instead she recalled other, older things. Coming home on the last day of school each year to find her father there. And being thrilled to see him, after his months out with their animals, but also knowing what his presence meant—that the next day he would take her and the rest of their family away from Esso to join the herd.

In early summer, the herders drove the deer closer to the village, so the animals could graze on mosses only thirty kilometers from home instead of three hundred. All the same, to reach them, Ksyusha’s family had to ride on horses for hours through plains and mountain passes. When she was little, her parents tied her to the saddle with a rope around her waist, and every time she nodded off on her mare’s wide back, her father yelled her name to startle her awake. The sun moved above them as they repeated that routine. At ten years old, she graduated to holding her own reins. The horses aged, their paces slowed, but the tundra kept the same shrill degree of emptiness.

Ksyusha dreaded those journeys. Her parents always ended them by fighting as they wandered the plains looking for signs of the herd. They would shout at each other about her father’s drinking, her grandparents’ health, their narrow wishes for her and her brother’s careers, the weak market for venison, the deer’s feeble calving and ragged pelts, the politicians who were killing the herding industry by refusing to subsidize it. During the rest of the summer her parents managed to keep their marriage together, as her father loaded the family’s bags on their animals to move camp each morning and her mother set aside the best cuts of meat for him each night, but the long days they took to start and end the season only got worse every year.

At last, the summer before university, she told them she could not go out to the tundra with them again. Too much required reading to get through before school started, she said. Maybe because she had never refused before, they actually agreed to leave her home, and she was grateful, and then she was amazed, because that summer was her last one spent unsupervised. It became the season of Ruslan.

But now, in Petropavlovsk three years later, she thought of what she had missed in the tundra that last season. She thought of what she had seen out there all the years before.

The blue-lit black of nights. The limitless dry yellow of days. For all that she loathed about those summers, setting up camp in the rain and pretending not to hear insults spoken in Even and growing sick from the smell of singed fur, they had become some of the most vivid times of her life. The repetition of them: her father’s arrival back in the village, their trip out together, the way when they finally got there that Chegga was folded into the men’s shift schedule to watch the animals and Ksyusha carried water as part of their grandmother’s kitchen crew, the ground the reindeer ate clean overnight, the early-morning packing of tents and bags that followed, and the daily moving of camp, on horseback, again, making their way along the thousand-kilometer loop of trails that took the herd a year to cover. The sameness of each day, each year, acted like the endless reopening of a cut, scarring those summers into her memory.

While the rest of the family slept in separate tents, Ksyusha’s grandmother kept two spots for Ksyusha and Chegga in the yurt where the women did the cooking. After the evening meal, their grandmother banked the fire, spread the horses’ blankets around its coals, and left the siblings to rest in the sudden quiet. The sun didn’t set until almost midnight but the yurt would already be dim with smoke inside. Ksyusha and her brother lay there smelling the day’s sweat with fresh crushed grass trapped underneath.

One time Ksyusha woke up in the middle of the night, not knowing why. The smoke hole at the top of the yurt was filled by the moon. A meter away, her brother, still a chubby schoolboy, was breathing.

The hearth’s coals popped. She rolled onto her side to look. The coals were black, but still somehow crackling; she watched without understanding. Crackles getting louder. Only after a minute did she grasp that the pops weren’t from the fire at all—the reindeer were passing outside the yurt. The men had taken the herd, for some reason, right through camp. The noise that woke her was the motion of eight thousand delicate hooves stepping just beyond the canvas wall.

Why return to these childish images? She had other things to think about these days. Course work, exams, the banking internship her brother’s girlfriend promised her next summer, the phone calls she owed the people who were waiting at home. Ruslan, if she could bear it—or if she couldn’t, then Chander, whose arms were around her. He pulled her close so her head rested on his shoulder. His lips brushed her hair.

Maybe it was because she was working hard at dance practices. Afterward came that same old soreness from the days once spent lugging wood, tending fires, building and taking down the yurt. Or maybe it was because she was around native people again; she hadn’t been with so many since she was still living in Esso. Or maybe it was the troupe’s herders’ dance. Chander did look foolish holding his lasso. A tool like that belonged to her father and grandfather.

She remembered her family, their animals, lessons, and chores. The empty, rolling earth. Maybe it was that her childhood, seen from this distance, seemed simple. And that as much as she now loved these men’s mouths on her, some part of her wished she could go back.

Ksyusha was idling around on her guitar, avoiding schoolwork, when Alisa came home. It was Thursday—no practice. Her cousin’s face was red from the cold outside. “Scoot over,” Alisa said, and Ksyusha made room on the futon. They sat with their knees touching.

Alisa’s leg was chilly. Winter was here. Snow had been falling for a week straight, and the city beyond their apartment windows was heaped in white. The muted television showed the Golosovskaya girls’ school portraits before their faces were replaced by a graph of the falling price of oil.

“Where do you suppose they are?” Alisa asked.

Ksyusha plucked a couple strings. “Who?”

“Those sisters. Do you think they’re alive? Somewhere?”

To her cousin, Ksyusha did not have to pretend away danger. “No.”

“Sometimes I imagine they could be in the next apartment over. You don’t think they’ll be found?”

“Not alive. I hope not.” The missing girls were not like Lilia, old enough to run away. “Whatever happened to them, I hope it ended quickly, and they didn’t have to suffer.”

The news changed again to a weather report: continued blizzards. Stuffed cabbage rolls were heating in the oven. The smells of pork and onion filled their apartment. “Everything with you normal?” Alisa asked.

“Yes,” Ksyusha said automatically. Once that answer came out, it didn’t sound like enough, so she said it again. “Yes.”

“Because you seem different.”

“I’m not.” Alisa laughed at the abruptness of that, and Ksyusha shifted her tingling fingertips. “How do I seem different?”

“You’re nervous. I thought maybe Ruslan did something wrong.”

Ksyusha glanced up from the neck of the guitar. “No.”

“Okay.”

“He wouldn’t.”

Alisa’s mouth twisted. “Great.” On cue, Ksyusha’s phone vibrated underneath them. Alisa dug the phone out, looked at the screen, and handed it over.

“Hi,” Ksyusha said. Her cousin stood up, off to their bedroom to change her clothes. “Nothing. I miss you.” Ksyusha strummed a G-major chord for Ruslan. “Hear that? I’m here. I’m good.”

In many ways, Ksyusha had improved as a girlfriend since joining the troupe. She was more patient, supportive, responsive. The worse she was in private, letting Chander trail his lips down her neck, the better she knew Ruslan to be. He had taken care of her all this time. So she texted him more, and asked for less, and when on the phone he got frustrated, she no longer tried to explain herself. She only soothed him until he settled down.

“I have wonderful news,” Margarita Anatolyevna said. Her silk scarf gleamed under the music room’s lights. “The university has agreed to send us to Vladivostok at the end of the month for the Eastern Winds ethnic festival. It’s an honor. Truly an honor. We’ll perform for more than a thousand people.” Her voice swung. She paused, and everyone applauded, a noise rapid and furious. “We haven’t gone for two years.” This last bit was half-drowned by their excitement. “Chander, can you tell everyone more?”

Ksyusha caught Chander looking at her before he stood. “This is great,” he said. “Right, they didn’t fund us last year. It’s for three or four days—”

“December twenty-third to twenty-sixth,” Margarita Anatolyevna broke in.

“And we dance, meet other ensembles, see a real city. Stay in a hotel.” Though he wasn’t speaking in Ksyusha’s direction, she knew he said that to her. “It’s fun.”

Alisa squealed, which set everyone off again. Even Margarita Anatolyevna was grinning. Ksyusha pressed her hands together to clap along with the rest of them, but she could not think of what to do next. Chander had told her that the troupe performed in public, but she’d pictured…visiting a local hospital ward, or taking the stage at an elementary school. Not missing classes to fly to Russia’s Pacific capital. And so soon…What would Ruslan say? He wasn’t planning to visit this month, as instead she would go to Esso to celebrate New Year’s at home, but…staying in a hotel, in a different region, with people he did not and should not trust?

Ksyusha excused herself and called Ruslan from the bathroom. “What is it?” he said when he picked up. Men and machinery were noisy behind him.

She told him about Eastern Winds.

“Vladivostok,” he said. “God.”

“I know. I know.”

“Just the name of the thing is ridiculous. ‘Eastern Winds.’ ”

“I know,” she said again, “but everyone else is excited. Alisa practically screamed when the director announced it.”

“Of course she did,” he said. “It’s incredible. A free trip to Vladivostok. I told you this dance thing was a good idea. How long do you have to be there?”

“Four days,” Ksyusha said. Even to her own ears, she sounded miserable. He clicked his tongue, and she understood that the more unwilling she seemed to take the trip, the more likely he would be to let her go.

That only made her feel worse. She had tried, since the first collision with Chander, to be better for Ruslan. But that effort—the tender questions, the caring noises, the more frequent promises that she loved him and home best—amounted to a strategy that paid off for her. Had she planned for this result all along?

“Drums and skins and Eastern Winds,” Ruslan said. “I wish I could see you all perform.”

She turned away from the bathroom’s line of mirrors. She wanted to cry. “I wish you could, too,” she said.

He didn’t have the money for a plane trip. Neither did anyone else in their families. So saying that didn’t matter—saying she wished for them to come together, though it would ruin them.

In the time before their next practice, Chander held her so tight she could not breathe. “Everyone else will go out at night,” he said. “They won’t expect you to come along. You’ll stay in your hotel room, and I’ll tell them I’m sick, or tired, or have to do research. Then I’ll come to you.”

“All right,” she said. It couldn’t stay kissing forever. Under her palms was his chest, the muscles tense in anticipation.

In their hall, they clung to each other, but once practice began they kept to opposite sides of the room. The knowledge of what was coming made her skittish. Margarita Anatolyevna announced an increase to five practices a week, and Ksyusha could not turn her head to look at him. She imagined he, and everyone else, knew what she pictured: his body above hers. The music started. Chander stepped forward and she flinched.

“When’s the next time you’ll see Ruslan?” Alisa asked. The two cousins lay in their separate beds. Ksyusha, who had been thinking of the university hallway, opened her eyes when Alisa spoke. Nothing but darkness above.

“New Year’s,” she said.

“Are you sad without him?”

“Sometimes.” The guilt rose in Ksyusha. She stared up.

“Maybe he can come visit before we go.”

“There’s no time,” Ksyusha said. She turned toward Alisa, who had her cell in her hand. The glow from the screen made Alisa look even younger, like a little girl at a campfire. “I’ll see him soon enough. Don’t worry.”

Alisa’s eyelids flickered. She was back to playing on her phone. A charm hooked to its top corner made a black line across her knuckles. “You’re the one who’s always worried.”

Ksyusha was sick of her cousin’s questions. Facing the ceiling again, she tried to return in her mind to the hall outside the practice room, but it wasn’t coming as vividly as she wanted. How Chander spoke to her today. The way he touched her.

What would their first night in the hotel be like? Under Chander’s patience was a growing force; he spent real effort unwrapping his hands from her as their time drew to an end each afternoon. If she agreed, he would peel her naked tomorrow and press her against the tiles. Ksyusha’s stomach flipped at the thought.

She had lost her virginity to Ruslan that first summer on her childhood bed. Afraid of making a mistake, she barely moved, and afterward he called her a cold fish, fastened her bra, and kissed her. Now she knew what to do for Ruslan, but Chander might expect something more, some great experience. Or he could be disappointed in her body. She looked better in her clothes than out of them. Soon he would find that out.

No. Chander, in his kindness, could never find her insufficient. She parted her lips in the darkness and imagined his face. Those brown-black eyes reflecting the hall lights. That quick breath, promising to adore her.

The troupe spent most practices in costume now. Over Ksyusha’s jeans, a leather dress hung heavy, with red squares embroidered from its bottom hem up to her knees. Strings of beads swung from medallions at her waistline. When she raised her arms, fur bunched at her neck. In less than two weeks they flew to the festival. After they got back, as soon as her last exam ended, she would take the bus north.

These were the days that would decide her. She would sleep with Chander, then see Ruslan. In doing these things she would learn: either one or the other. The cruel period of having both would end.

She wanted to be with Ruslan forever. But she did not know how that would go. For now, she played at being good enough on the phone that he didn’t notice anything, but when she stepped onto their home pavement, wouldn’t he spot betrayal right away? And even if he did not catch her— She loved Ruslan, she did, and always had, but was it right for her to stay with him after what she had done and what she was going to do?

Of all people, Ksyusha was honest with Chander, so she told him. “I don’t know what’ll happen after this trip,” she said. “Not the one to Vladivostok, the one to Esso.”

They were sitting cross-legged on the hall floor. He lifted her knuckles to his mouth.

“It’s possible—when I see him—everything will go back to the way it was.” Chander nodded. “I can’t stay in the ensemble after that,” Ksyusha said.

When Chander spoke, his words came out warm on her skin. “It’s possible it could go the other way, too.”

“I can’t say. I don’t know.”

She studied his face, his stippled cheeks and serious brows. He laughed, then, a short noise. “I can’t stand it,” he said. He tugged on her arm and she folded forward into his lap. “In the hotel, they make up the sheets all white and crisp,” he said. “The mattress is like a dream. Can you picture that? We’ll be dreaming.”

The next time Alisa came home while Ksyusha was on the phone, Alisa took off her winter hat, pointed to the cell, and whispered, “Ruslan?” Who else? Ksyusha nodded. “Tell him hi,” her cousin said, then spun to lock the apartment doors.

Ksyusha, watching the padded line of her cousin’s back, said, “Hi from Alisa.” They never had a say-hello-for-me relationship. Ruslan used to call the girl crazy.

“Okay. Remind me when you’re leaving for the festival,” Ruslan said. At least he was always the same.

“Eight days.” Not this Friday but the next. “And the week after that, I’ll see you.”

Ruslan sighed, the sound coming thick from his lungs. “Wish it was sooner.” Ksyusha shut her eyes. He didn’t know what he was encouraging—what he was urging them toward.

Margarita Anatolyevna clapped for quiet. “Get in your pairs.” Ksyusha stepped toward the center of the room; she knew, without looking up to confirm, Chander was near. Her mouth and cheeks had been kissed sensitive by him this afternoon, leaving her feeling like a tender extension of his body. Ksyusha pressed her lips together while she waited.

“My partner’s missing,” said the boy from Achavayam.

“Where’s Alisa?” Margarita Anatolyevna shouted. Chander was already next to Ksyusha. The boy from Achavayam crossed his arms.

“We didn’t see her before practice,” a girl said.

The director jabbed a couple buttons on the stereo, making the music start and stop. “This is unacceptable,” she said. “Do you understand the festival is in one week? Take responsibility for one another. Ksyusha!” Ksyusha jumped. “Where is she?”

Ksyusha’s cell phone was tucked in her bag, but suggesting she call would only irritate things. No distractions during practice, Margarita Anatolyevna would scream. Ksyusha said, “She must be on her way.”

Margarita Anatolyevna punched another stereo button. “Line up. Salmon dance.” The boys gathered in the middle of the room. Ksyusha fell into place with the other girls, all of them in their costumes, leaving a spot for Alisa until the director motioned for them to tighten up.

Ksyusha tented her fingers in front of her chest. The song started, and the boys began to dance, lifting their feet to wade through a river that was not there. They squinted at the dusty floor to look for fish. Flexing her toes, Ksyusha waited for the girls’ entrance. Her mind was with her cousin. Was Alisa sick? Had she missed today’s classes? Their mothers had been texting them all week with worries about money after Tuesday’s market collapse. Could they not make Alisa’s tuition? Had she been called back to Esso? She had still been at the apartment this morning when Ksyusha left.

The recorded drums crashed. Ksyusha raised her arms with the rest of the girls and stepped forward. The boys pressed shoulder to shoulder, making a circle, and the girls swam around them. They turned until they found their partners. The boy from Achavayam frowned into space.

Chander grabbed at the air over Ksyusha’s head, and she ducked. Bent at the waist, she spun into the next formation. She looked up. Margarita Anatolyevna faced away from the dancers. Relief: Alisa was at the door of the practice room, pulling a cap off her orange-streaked hair, gesturing in apology.

Behind Alisa, another person stood in the doorway. Alisa had brought a man.

She had brought Ruslan.

Ksyusha’s hands, which should have been flat as fins, clenched. He’s cheating, Ksyusha thought, wildly, because what were they doing together, but her cousin and her boyfriend were both smiling without guile. Alisa pointed at Ruslan, mouthed something to Ksyusha, and waved her palms in the air. These days of their echoing questions—how Ksyusha was doing, when she was leaving, when she expected to see him next—aligned.

Alisa had brought Ruslan to Ksyusha. They must have worked together to arrange this. Because Ksyusha had seemed to them nervous, Ruslan, who couldn’t watch her in Vladivostok, came to surprise her before she left.

Through the speakers, a synthesizer blared. Ksyusha pivoted with the line of girls to face away from the door. She tipped her head up. She kept the beat.

Inside her was white and smooth, a frozen landscape, solid bone.

So this was the last time she would have both. Though Ruslan and Alisa could not see her eyes from this angle, Ksyusha did not dare look Chander’s way. She had waited for the moment when her future would be decided. Only now when that moment was here did she know: the weeks she’d spent with both of them had been the best. The best. Ruslan calling in the mornings to wake her up, his texts popping into her phone throughout the day, and then an hour and a half of Chander…those days were over.

Women’s recorded voices rose high over the drumming. Underneath came the bass notes of men’s growls. The steps brought Ksyusha back to her partner. She looked. Afterward, she knew, she would have to be careful, but she couldn’t help this once—she glanced up at Chander and saw all his sweetness laid raw. His face was distorted with want.

Ksyusha stepped out of formation, away from him.

She turned toward the door so quickly her left knee twisted, and ran the few long meters that separated her from her boyfriend, the distance she needed to cross. Ruslan and Alisa might have allowed her an instant of shock after their arrival, but that instant was over. Ruslan could already suspect her. She had to get to him.

She pitched herself at Ruslan, her arms around his neck, and she only knew she was safe when she felt his body tighten under her, his hands grip her waist so the lines of beads there pinched, and his familiar mouth bear down.

He was saying something in her ear but the music was too loud to hear. She kissed him hard and pressed her cheek to his. He held her closer. She should have been thinking of her next alibi, but all she could bring up were memories: Chander in the afternoons, Ruslan on weekends, the pristine hotel bed she only ever heard described. The conversations she and Chander would never have again. The boys in this troupe practicing with their lassos. The first day of practice, shaking a dozen strangers’ hands. Ruslan in his car in traffic, making his way toward her, and him as a boy playing soccer on their street with her brother. The summer they fell into each other. Her parents—her brother—their constant concern for her—their village lives. The horses they rode. The trails followed. The nights Ksyusha spent in the tundra, when she was younger and braver and slept alone, when her world was clear, smelling of smoke and grasses, and thousands of reindeer passed her by.