The View from the Necropolis

Erica X Eisen
| Fiction

 
* * *
 
The officials have come because there is to be a new director of the Chersonesus Museum. This new director is a priest. Several days after the visit from the Russian bureaucrats, he arrives, in the beard and black robes of a monastic; he has made no aesthetic concessions, it seems, to his present role. The priest says little as a group of my colleagues and I escort his retinue around the premises; what questions he asks are largely confined to the cathedral at the top of the hill, an imitation Byzantine structure built in the nineteenth century on the presumed spot of Saint Vladimir’s baptism. It is a preoccupation that I take gamely at first, but as the day wears on my optimism becomes difficult to sustain. After one of the archaeologists has finished explaining her excavation of the settlement’s water systems, the priest pauses for several long seconds before turning to a lanky medievalist and asking him about the consecration of the church’s high altar. Beside me, the archaeologist’s shoulders sink; I touch her wrist in solidarity.

When we reach the edge of Chersonesus, where stone ruins yield to cliff face, the priest clears his throat and with little pleasantry or prelude announces that starting next week the site is to be closed for a brief period until we can make “the necessary adjustments to our narrative.” He speaks in the manner of one accustomed to hearing his words ring out in a vaulted chamber against the pious silence of a gathered crowd. It is the manner of one unused to taking questions. The gold cross he wears glints harshly in the strong noontime sun; I cannot take in his speech without lowering my eyes.

The priest makes me very conscious of being a woman: when he looks at me, I feel an inarticulate sense of shame.

 
* * *
 
Alla has a long scar that starts as a pit in the middle of her left cheek and snakes its way downward. On the first day of each school year, she stands at the front of the class and tells her students the story of her accident. After that, the scar is neutralized as a point of mockery. She has taken it from them, and so they cannot hurt her with it.

I am at her flat, halfheartedly scanning the news on my computer at the kitchen table after dinner. The local journalists are not reporting on the change in leadership at the museum; this is itself a kind of verdict, for those who can understand its mute language.

“I saw the battleships again today,” I say. The Russian fleet that now has the exclusive right to the port of Sevastopol can be seen from the slopes of Chersonesus; on clear afternoons, I watch them coasting toward the naval docks. They used to unnerve me, these great gray ships with their prows jutting out haughtily like a pugilist’s jaw, yet now, as I mention them to Alla, I might as well be relating a half-amusing story about a colleague, or what I had for lunch.

Alla narrates her day as she washes the dishes, her back to me. “One of the girls in my class fell during recess and needed me to take her to the nurse. And do you know what she did instead of thanking me? She looked right at me and said she was going to tell the nurse that I’d pushed her. Me!” Without looking up I can picture her expression: the wide, bright eyes of a figure in a Byzantine mosaic. “And then she just burst out laughing, like it was the funniest thing in the world. Can you imagine? Nine years old, and acting like that.” Many of Alla’s stories are like this, centered around acts of petty cruelty on the part of small children. Even after so many years she has not become inured to them. I think back to my own school days, dominated by castle-shouldered Soviet instructresses: it would never have occurred to me to cross them. But then I picture Alla at the front of the classroom, so small and so fragile-looking. Alla with her scar and her sparrowish frame. She must seem to them very easy to break.

At the end of her story, Alla shakes her head in disbelief, laughing a little, but I can see that this incident with the girl has cut deeper than she allows. When she is upset, Alla has the habit of running one finger down the puckered line on her cheek. I asked her once if her scar hurt her; after several moments’ reflection she replied, “Not in the ways that are obvious.”

Erica X Eisen‘s works have appeared or are forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Little Star, Pleiades, The Atticus Review, Lumen, The Harvard Advocate, and the Nivalis 2015 anthology.

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Geographies: Cold Storage by Keith Althaus (Off the Grid Press, 2016); Spill by Kelle Groom (Anhinga Press, 2017)