by J.M. Sidorova

Julia Sidorova has a Ph.D. in molecular genetics and works as a biomedical scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle, studying the many things that can go wrong with human cells. The rest of the time she writes fiction. Julia began writing and selling stories in Russian (her first language) in the late nineties. Since then, she has been switching to English. The author attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2009 and her English short fiction has appeared in Eclectica, an online publication. Her new story about adaptation in a hostile environment is her first professional sale in her adopted language.

Once upon a time long ago, Nina used to be an eight-year-old girl who lived with her mother and stepfather in a house that stood in the middle of the Red-City, the capital of the Hammer-and-Sickle Empire. The house—an old aristocratic edifice that had been sliced and spliced into a tenement—looked onto a small dusty park of poplars and lindens with a pond in the middle. There was a tablet by the pond that said it was The Pond of Pioneers (i.e., Communist boy- and girl-scouts) but everyone called it The Pond of Patriarchs (i.e., Church Fathers). That’s why Nina used to think that there were occasions when the word pioneer had to mean patriarch. Words were mysterious, after all. For example, why did they always say Hail to comrade Stalin? Did they think it was good for comrade Stalin to stand under a downpour of ice pellets?

Nina liked the pond of Pioneer-Patriarchs in winter when there was skating and in late spring when the air was ticklish with poplar cotton and honey-sweet with linden flowers, and the pond-water smelled of rain and not of rotting duckweed. She did not like the pond in summer because that’s when they brought chain gangs of German POWs to lay pipes along the street nearby, and Germans were confusing. On the one hand they were scary and bad. On the other hand they begged for food and when she threw them her fried egg-on-rye sandwich they fell on their knees to pick it up from the mud, and it was very, very sad.

German POWs or not, Nina could not spend as much time out by the pond as she wanted because she could not run and play with other kids. She would get short of breath and blue-lipped—she had a heart murmur, and kids did not like kids with murmurs and blue lips. Nina found it hard to understand why anyone’s blood would murmur when it sneaked through the heart the wrong way. Maybe there was something sinister about her blood, as if it was muttering under its breath like those villains on radio shows for children. Why else did Nina’s mother say that Nina’s heart was bad when she was upset with Nina?

Nina’s mother was a geography teacher. Nina’s mother said she hated teaching and she hated the children whose empty heads she had to fill with place-names that could and should have been figments of someone’s fickle imagination. Zanzibar. Saudi Arabia. Papua New Guinea. On the other hand, Nina’s mother also said she loved children and teaching—just the way she said it about Nina’s stepfather.

Nina’s stepfather was a part-time drunk and a night guard at a shoe factory. He said that Nina’s mother had ruined his life and that he had been spying in Persia before the Second World War. He had his drinking to show for the former, and the Persian dagger and rug for the latter. He wore a leather trench coat. He forbade Nina to call him Father. Once, Nina believed her mother when she said she hated stepfather worst of all in the world. Mother looked so sad. Nina took stepfather’s Persian dagger and sliced up his trench coat. But then Nina’s mother took her words back, while Nina could not take back the slits and cuts in the coat. Nina’s mother punished Nina with stepfather’s belt. This was more confusing than the German POWs.

The three of them lived in an eighty or so square foot room. Nina did not like to stay in that room when stepfather was around.

The room they lived in was one of the three rooms in an apartment. The apartment also had one greasy kitchen, one musky bathroom and one dark hallway—these were shared space. The second room was occupied by the Petrov family; he was a truck driver, she, a meat packer. Mrs. Petrov enjoyed an exalted status: she had access to an endless supply of sirloins and tenderloins she bartered for favors or sold for money. Meat cuts were not just currency, they were the language of emotion. Nina’s mother would buy tenderloins with her puny teacher’s salary and feed them to Nina’s stepfather whenever she feared he would return to his first wife. Mrs. Petrov on the other hand, would hurl raw sirloins and rib eyes at Mr. Petrov when he allegedly failed to pull his part of the weight that was their marriage. The Petrovs lived in a room bigger than Nina’s, but it was only appropriate, given the tenderloins. Mrs. Petrov had visionary dreams about moving to the room next to them, the biggest.

The biggest room was occupied by the single woman whom Nina’s mother called the Wicked Witch of the West. Nina did not quite understand why. The Witch was tall, had heavy hips and walked somewhat like a duck; she wore a brown dress and kept her fluffy salt-and-pepper hair pinned into a bun. She did not look like a witch. But maybe her being named the Witch was like hail to comrade Stalin, or like the pond of Pioneers that were Patriarchs.

Nina’s understanding of wickedness and witchery was shaped by children’s radio shows. On the radio they enacted The Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy and her friends freed the munchkins from the capitalist oppression of the Western Witch while the Wizard hid behind his veil of green envy and deception and invented lies and theories, like Leon Trotsky in exile.

Of Dorothy’s friends, Nina liked the Tinman best of all because he had an even worse congenital heart disease than Nina but he managed it. Nina wanted to be the Tinman. And she wanted to have retractable blades in her arms so she could walk in between her mother and stepfather when they had one of their fights. She wanted to stand there between them and slide her blades out and say, “Quiet now!” and this time they would listen. From a certain point of view, even the Wicked Witch of the West was not as bad as her mother and stepfather’s fighting.

But perhaps the Witch was indeed a witch because she attracted house flies. That’s what Mrs. Petrov said and demonstratively hung flypaper everywhere in the kitchen. On the other hand, she also said that the Witch birthed these flies out of her Jewish uncleanliness. On those occasions, Nina’s mother, being an educated woman and a teacher, accused Mrs. Petrov of illiteracy and said that nobody, even Jews, can birth the flies. Nina’s mother said instead that the Witch brought flies from her work.

Nina could not fathom what kind of work would involve birthing flies, or what was unclean about the Witch. The Witch often smelled of sourdough and something sweet and burned, as if at her work she stewed raisins. Raisins were a treat; Nina rarely got to eat them and she did not mind the smell, even burned. Whatever the Witch’s work was, it took long hours: the Witch was rarely home, even on weekends, rendering Mrs. Petrov’s expansionist dreams all the more vivid.

* * * *

That’s why, when, once upon a time, the Witch came home from her work very early, Nina was surprised. Nina was sitting in one of her legitimate hangouts outside their room—under their family’s table in the kitchen. (The kitchen was for cooking, not eating. There were no chairs and tables were places where one prepped food and kept pots and pans.) From her low vantage point, Nina’d been watching Petrov’s beef and potato soup boil—a towering monument of a pot on a high pedestal of a gas stove, burping luscious meaty steam and grayish-brown froth from under its lid.

The Witch filled up a tea kettle and put it on the stove. She started when she saw Nina. “What are you doing under the table?”

“Sitting,” Nina said.

“Oh,” the Witch said and left the kitchen.

In due time the kettle boiled but the Witch did not come for it. When the kitchen window steamed up, Nina decided to call upon the Witch. She went over to her door and knocked. The Witch opened. Nina said the kettle was boiling. “Kettle?” the Witch said. Then, “Oh, of course.” She walked past Nina, closing the door tightly behind her, and headed for the kitchen. She then quickly returned, empty-handed. Nina was still by the door. The Witch considered something and said, “Nina, can you do me a favor?”

“Okay,” Nina said.

The Witch said in barely more than a murmur, “Can you climb under the table in my room and look if there is anything out of the ordinary down there?”

Nina nodded.

“If you see something out of the ordinary,” the Witch continued, “don’t say anything, just write or draw it on a piece of paper for me, all right?”

Nina nodded.

The table in the Witch’s room was round and covered by a long heavy tablecloth with tassels that swept the floor. Nina crawled under it on all fours. She shifted to sit on her butt, cross-legged. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. She liked it under such a nice table, safe and covered from all sides.

But then she heard a faint buzzing sound. It seemed to come from the table top’s underside where it joined to the frame. Something black, small, and odd-shaped was there. A large fly? Nina reached with her fingers and ran into something bristly; just when she touched it, it buzzed louder, as if in admonition. Nina recoiled.

Once out, Nina returned to the door where the Witch waited for her, and scribbled on an offered scrap of paper, Something buzzes under the table. Having read this, the Witch gasped, then clamped her mouth shut with her palm. But the breath still forced its way out, in shoulder-shuddering bursts. Her shut eyes became like two wet crumpled napkins. The sight was so sad—but sadness was the source of all confusion and Nina did not want to be confused any more than she already was. So she left for the kitchen.

* * * *

The next day the Witch brought a radio, put it on the table, and left it on. It played music and babbled even when the Witch wasn’t in. But the Witch no longer went to work. Nina discovered it walking home from school: the Witch sat on a bench by the pond. The Witch’s thighs parted under a big book that rested in her lap. The Witch’s shoulders slumped. Wind was working to loosen the bun of her hairdo.

Nina sat down next to the Witch and picked at the blue paint that flaked off the bench. The Witch gave Nina a glance. Nina gave the Witch’s book a glance. She saw pictures of flies and X-shaped turd-like things. Nina pulled out her homework. She could now sit outside, she thought, thanks to the Witch she did not have to go home for another while. She sat, content.

* * * *

Nina came to sit on a bench with the Witch every day for about a week. Once the Witch asked, “Why don’t you ever play with other kids?”

“I have a bad heart,” Nina said, thinking about her murmuring, villainous blood.

“Is that right? I’m sorry to hear that,” said the Witch.

In a while, Nina asked, “Why don’t you go to work anymore?”

The Witch looked up from the book and said, “They shut down my laboratory.”

“They did not want you birthing flies?”

“What? Um, I guess so.”

“Why?”

The Witch straightened her back and gazed into the distance. She cringed when she recited, “Because at this historical moment true patriots must not waste their time studying defective fruit flies and instead should focus on generating superior varieties of corn and wheat to feed our country on its path towards communism.” She looked at Nina. “And because only capitalist scientists claim that there are limitations to the plasticity of living organisms in the hands of proletarian selectionists . . . Do you understand?”

Nina nodded, yes. It must have been somewhat like the pond’s name and the Hail to, she thought. “Is that why you are the Witch of the West?”

The Witch stared, then laughed. “If you say so.”

Nina said, “I like sitting with you.”

The next day the Witch had guests. Young men and women came over with many boxes and dragged them all into the Witch’s room. These youngsters were so different from the Tenderloin Petrovs and Nina’s family, even from the Witch herself. They were agitated and wild-eyed but not sad. They wore horn-rimmed glasses and unruly bangs, frayed pants and faded calico skirts; they told jokes and elbowed each other. They sprayed and sprinkled laughter all around as if they could not contain it, as if it was more compulsory than sneezing; they laughed even when Mrs. Petrov hissed at them from her door.

Nina liked that the Witch had such nice, laugh-filled friends.

They brought food and vodka. The young women boiled potatoes in the kitchen and pulled needle-thin bones out of pickled herrings. Then they all packed into the Witch’s room. Nina hovered in the hallway when the Witch came out of her room with a stack of dirty dishes. The Witch was hot-cheeked and fluffy-haired. Nina wanted so much to get in that room and take a closer look at those nice guests who made the Witch so hot and fluffy, and youthful-looking.

“Nina, go ahead, come in,” the Witch said. Inside, the young men and women sat around the table like happy pups, stacked up and crowding each other, two-a-chair, three-a-windowsill, five-a-couch. At least three conversations were going on, and every once in a while they’d nudge each other and wink and point at the table and press vertical fingers to their lips. Then there would be a brief lull, then another burst of conversation. Then they would sing songs about sitting around a campfire and longing for love. Nina wondered if they knew about the black buzzer that lurked right under the tabletop, next to their elbows and knees.

Somebody gave Nina a slice of unbelievable cake and a cup of incredible tea, somebody asked what her name was. Somebody else asked what she wanted to be when she grew up. “The Tinman,” Nina said, “In The Wizard of Oz.” They laughed. One of them, a skinny imp with a mop of dark hair, sprang up and mimed how Tinman would walk. Rigidly, yes, but precisely. Slowly, yes, but confidently. “You should become a geneticist,” he shouted, “It will be a so much more advanced science by then!”

Nina liked the young man. Perhaps being a geneticist meant being this young man’s girl?

As hours ran into the night, the young men and women spoke hotter and louder. Even hush-hush gestures and vertical fingers poised at lips, and even the Witch’s own pleading eyes and frowning brows could not stop them from shouting that Thomas Hunt Morgan’s genes were real units of heredity and not a capitalist-idealist invention, and that they may well be carried on chromosomes; that genes could change all right, mutations simply required the right dose of X-rays; but that scientific truths, on the other hand, were not meant to change with the party line. They fumed and boomed, until the Witch gave up all her frowning, eye-rolling and silent pleading, and only watched them with a soft blush of a smile, as if they were her beloved, pride-deserving children. Nina’s own mother never looked at Nina this way. In Nina’s opinion, all of it was beginning to be sad, and thus so very confusing.

Only when a bang on the door came did they stop shouting and glanced at each other like schoolchildren caught at mischief, but it was just Mrs. Petrov, furious about the racket. Then they all left and never appeared again quite in such force.

* * * *

Nina helped the Witch unpack the boxes the young men and women had brought. “It’s all of my research, we rescued it from the shut-down laboratory,” the Witch explained. The boxes contained myriads of glass vials, each marked in indigo scribbles, each filled halfway with dull-brown goop, and plugged with a cotton swab. Each had either little white eggs lying in the goop, or little white larvae crawling or cocooning on the walls, or little black flies busying about. Other boxes contained jars and cans, and others yet had a tabletop lamp, several magnifying glasses, a microscope, some needles, scalpels, spatulas. It was the goop that smelled of raisins and sourdough, but there were no raisins in it, only molasses, as the Witch explained.

The Witch’s flies turned out to be nothing like the house flies of Mrs. Petrov’s accusations. They were tiny and didn’t buzz, and the Witch said that out in the wild they ate only fruits and vegetables. “Would you like to help?” the Witch asked, and Nina said yes, because this was connected to so many desirable things, like that nice and popular young man who’d mimed the Tinman, and being a geneticist-girlfriend, and being looked upon as a beloved, pride-deserving child.

* * * *

Some of the young men and women kept coming over the next weeks. Alex was the name of the young man Nina liked. Alex and the others were the Witch’s students and they helped her in birthing flies.

Birthing flies was really simple and monotonous and even Alex became boring when he did it. When flies broke out of their pupas and started scurrying in their glass vial, Alex or the Witch put them to sleep. For this, they used ether, which came out of a glass jar. The smell was like a very cold draft in the air, it bore into Nina’s nose and chilled it. The Witch would put a drop of ether onto a cotton swab that corked the flies’ vial. She said one had to be careful: too much ether for too long—and the flies would never wake up. Then she’d empty a vial-full of sleeping flies onto a dinner plate and maneuver them with needles under a magnifying glass. Some flies only pretended to sleep and escaped. The Witch sorted the flies by their looks and separated females from males. It was very easy to tell them apart, Nina learned.

Sometimes the Witch put newborn flies into new vials with fresh goop. They would wake up some time later, startled by their new home. The Witch would say she wanted them to mate and lay new eggs. But other times the Witch just counted them and then drowned them in formalin—another glass jar, another smell. This one bit into Nina’s nose and made her eyes water. The Witch would hunch for hours at her table, her hands moving in a circle of light cast by the lamp. Trays of vials, and notebooks, and a microscope crowded the black box of a radio that murmured its endless stories: about record-breaking tonnage of wheat to be harvested this year by collective farms, or about martyrdom of the pioneer Paul Morozov—who must have been a Pioneer/Patriarch—during the war with the German fascists.

When they ran out of new vials with goop, Alex brought a Primus stove, a bucket, tin funnels, and they poured, and mixed, and boiled some of their own goop out of yellow flour-like, very stinky powders and molasses. The powders hung in the air. They made Nina’s throat itch, but Alex laughed at the powder on his face, and Nina laughed too.

* * * *

There were visitors. An old man came to see the Witch once; he looked sad and worried. The Witch said, “You promised,” and “I cannot maintain the colony in my room indefinitely. The neighbors will report me.”

The old man only shook his head.

“Three years of work went into it,” she insisted. “We are just now sorting through mutations, and it is a treasure trove. We can’t lose it!”

“I know what I had promised,” the old man said, “but my hands are tied. It’s worse than we thought. I am sorry.”

* * * *

One day the Witch appeared happy. She let Nina look in the microscope. “These flies have virtually no heart, look! And it is inherited as a single, recessive gene! We are making discoveries, Nina!”

The prickly black mess Nina saw in the ocular did not look at all like a heart. So Nina was not surprised to see that making discoveries did not change a single thing to the better. The room still reeked of ether and dried yeast. The radio still blared. The black buzzer was still under the table.

Flies escaped, flew around. In the kitchen, Mrs. Petrov hurled a T-bone steak into Mr. Petrov because he’d got no balls to forbid the Witch to turn a coveted piece of real estate—the room that would one day rightfully belong to the Petrov family—into a fly-infested muck-zoo. The steak missed Mr. Petrov. Sitting under the kitchen table, Nina watched the steak. The Witch was right: her little flies avoided meat, only the big, black Petrov flies feasted upon it. Did the black buzzer under the Witch’s table also eat meat? Nina watched when the Witch picked the meat up, washed it in the kitchen sink, and whisked it into her room. Perhaps the Witch was going to feed the buzzer? The Witch boiled the meat on her Primus stove. She said she had nothing else to eat. So they ate the meat, and the Witch wept as she chewed. That was how one fed the black buzzer under one’s table, Nina decided.

The next day a man and a woman visited. They brought leaf tea, chocolate, white bread, smoked sausage. “Give me a job. Please! Anywhere. Anything. I am penniless,” the Witch begged them. They told her to hold on just a little longer.

The Witch pleaded, “I have found a gene that makes a heart. There could be a similar gene in people. A little girl here, Nina, she has a heart defect. If we knew that a mutation in a gene caused it, one day we could repair the mutation. We could help kids like Nina! Don’t you understand?! It matters! We cannot afford to lose the colony!”

But the Witch’s visitors only shook their heads. The man said he agreed that there was plenty to learn from the fruit flies, but applying it to people was just too much of a fantasy, and if she went about saying how she’d cure heart disease with defective flies, she’d only give more ammunition to their opponents.

Then they left.

* * * *

Flies escaped. Flies crawled. Mr. Petrov made a habit of banging on the Witch’s door, then hiding in his room. Vials of moldy dead-goop were stacked in cartons along the walls. Mold was black and silvery-gray like the Witch’s hair. The Witch sneaked out in the middle of the night to clean old vials in the bathroom, until Mrs. Petrov caught her in the act and threatened to call the police.

Nina’s mother told Nina she was a bad, bad girl for associating with the Witch. Nina’s mother told the Witch to stay away from Nina. The Witch told Nina’s mother that she was damaging Nina by the ugly spectacle of her marriage; and why didn’t Nina’s mother do some child-rearing, buy her daughter some books to read, so the poor girl wouldn’t just grow like a weed under a kitchen table. And Nina’s mother shouted why wouldn’t the Witch birth a child of her own instead of flies only, and then raise it any way she wanted.

The rest Nina did not get to hear. She left the apartment, slowly, saving her breath, went down the stairs, and for the next hour she sat by the pond, quite certain that she could hear her blood hissing and murmuring like a bad, bad villain as it shunted the wrong way through her heart.

* * * *

Flies died. Whole vials of them gave in, and were swiftly engulfed by the grey-hair mold. The Witch no longer looked in her microscope, or wrote, or read her big book. She was away for long, odd hours, and returned glazed-eyed. Sometimes Nina would stay in the Witch’s room while she was away. She’d listen to the radio and leaf through the Witch’s books. The darkened room reeked of goop and mold, formalin and ether. Nina loved to have this whole room for herself. She wouldn’t have minded if the grey-hair mold crept out of the vials and covered the walls. Like a forest. It would’ve made the room even safer.

She made up fantasies and stories. She played with the vials. She wrote in notebooks. She was a geneticist and formalin and ether were her magic tools with which she ruled the flies. She’d trickle a drop of ether onto a cotton swab and put flies to sleep. Then she’d toss them out onto a plate. She’d move them around with the Witch’s needle, under the Witch’s magnifying glass. This is Dorothy, she is a Sleeping beauty, and this is the Tinman, he has virtually no heart. Still he came to rescue Dorothy so they could mate and lay eggs. Leon Trotzky-Wizard erected a wall of goop in his way, but Tinman cast him into formalin.

* * * *

Alex stuck around the longest. The last time he visited, he was very sad. “I am being expelled from the University,” he said to the Witch, “This means I lose my permit to live in the city. I’ll have to go back home, at least temporarily. They won’t leave me alone if I stay.”

He sat in a chair and the Witch came to stand in front of him.

“I understand,” she said and waved away a fly. Then she cleared a tangled thread of hair off his forehead. “You shouldn’t come here again.”

He grabbed hold of her hand and pressed it to his cheek, then his lips. She stroked his hair with her other hand; it trembled.

Alex picked up his bucket and his tin funnel on the way out. He glanced at Nina as he walked past; he stopped. He crowned Nina’s head with a tin funnel, steadied it slightly askew. “Here, little Tinman,” he said.

“Don’t leave,” Nina said.

He said, “I’m sorry.”

Nina understood she was a geneticist no longer.

“It’s just me and the flies from now on,” the Witch said to Nina when Alex left.

“And me,” said Nina.

“And you.”

This was worse than German POWs and worse than having to pretend that her mother’s hatred was actually love, worse than Nina’s own hissing and murmuring villain-blood, this was so much more sad and so hopelessly confusing—to pretend that there was a from now on when there was none.

“What is the black buzzer under your table?” Nina asked.

The Witch went over to the radio and turned it off. “It is a microphone,” she said in a loud voice, “So that NKVD can eavesdrop on me. Hear that, you. . . ?” She addressed the table now. “I am a scientist, not an enemy of the people!”

The flies stirred into the air and circled around her.

* * * *

Still with a tin funnel on her head, Nina watched the Witch as she packed her notebooks and a few vials of formalin-drowned flies into a small suitcase. “Are you leaving?”

“Of course not. I am trying to save a gene,” the Witch said. “A gene that makes a heart. Would you keep it for me, please?”

Nina nodded.

“I’ve put it in this suitcase. It’s yours now, don’t give it to anyone, no matter what happens. Can you hide it in your room?”

“Uh-huh. Can I show it to Alex?”

“When you grow up, and if you see him. If he asks for it. Deal?”

“Okay.” Nina shuffled her feet. Sadness grew in her like grey-haired mold. “What are you going to do?”

“I’d like to lie down. I need to get some sleep.”

“Like flies?”

“I guess so.”

“I’ll sit quietly.”

“Sure, only not here. Can you sit quietly in the kitchen?”

“I’ll sit by the door,” Nina said. “I won’t let anyone in.”

“Thank you but no,” the Witch said, “You have a good heart, Nina, remember that. You’ll be all right, you’ll grow up and get to do great things. Just don’t sit by the door, okay? Go someplace.”

Nina nodded yet did not move. “But . . . it’ll be a pretend sleep and then you’ll escape?”

The Witch stared, then smiled. “Yes. It’ll be just as you say.”

Nina left the room and started down the hallway but then doubled back. She sat down by the door, overhearing how the Witch locked it, how a glass jar clinked, a couch creaked. She sat until the radio’s babble was all she could hear. She did not get up when the front door bell rang and Mrs. Petrov shot out of her room to open it, as if she was urgently expecting someone. Nor when the hallway filled with people—men in NKVD uniforms, the apartment manager, both Petrovs, Nina’s mother and stepfather.

She did not get up when the men in uniform told her to step aside. She was the Tinman, with retractable blades in her arms and a good heart, because in her suitcase she had a gene that made it. She had to hold on just a few moments longer to make sure the Witch escaped, even if it meant spreading her arms wide and stepping in the way of the NKVD man’s banging fist.

“Don’t bother her!” she shouted.

When Nina’s stepfather grabbed her and dragged her away, and the NKVD men kicked the Witch’s door in, and the smell of ether slithered out of the room like a very cold and strong draft, and she could see what was left of the Witch, just a shell of a pupa lying on the couch—not all of what she felt was sadness. There was a bit of joy. And this was not too confusing.

She picked up her suitcase, her tin funnel, and went out of the front door, then down the stairs, and out of the house that stood by the park, by the pond of Patriarchs, in the middle of the Red-City, in the middle of the Hammer-and-Sickle-Empire.