Performance Anomalies by Victor Robert Lee Page A

 
    Cono looked up and searched for a familiar landmark. He smiled when he realized that he had gradually made his way toward Zelyony, the sprawling bazaar. It was in this neighborhood that Dimira had lived, in one of the squat rows of apartments on the fringe of the vast open market. It must be why he had thought of her. He walked in a zigzag path through streets lined with uneven concrete sidewalks and finally found the mottled amber-colored building that had been her home. He recognized it by a tree whose roots had cracked the bottom of the front wall.
    He walked up the stairwell to the second-floor door, pressed an ear against it, then knocked. No answer. He searched for signs of a change in the flaking paint, the three locks, the doorjamb marred by grooves of forced entry. They were all the same as before. Cono sat on the stairs above the landing and looked at his watch.
    He had met Dimira four years earlier, on his second stay in Almaty, before encountering Xiao Li outside the Arasan Baths, and before starting his job for Katerina and the Americans who used her. He’d given Dimira a “Hi” and a smile as they passed each other on Avenue Abay in the screeching sunlight. Only when they sat down for beers at a cottage pub did he notice the deformed, miniature ears that had been hidden beneath her long, black hair. They were like the ears of a wrestler or boxer who had been smacked or squeezed with too much force.
    Dimira was happy to meet a foreigner, and proudly told Cono she had a young daughter, beautiful, smart and perfect, but too dark to be accepted by the people of her country. She always referred to it that way—“ my country,” with the word my stressed and elongated. Dimira came from near Balkhash, in the flat rural middle of the country, and had fallen in love with an Ethiopian man who was studying there in the last days of Soviet-sponsored educational exchange. Dimira’s family threw her out when she became pregnant. The Ethiopian was threatened with death and fled. Dimira gave birth, alone, in a nearby small town. She and the baby rode the train to Almaty and lived on the floor of the railway station for months as the Soviet Union collapsed and chaos reigned.
    Somehow Dimira pulled herself out of this despair. She got a job teaching the Kazak language, newly required in all the country’s schools, and was brimming with happiness that summer when she and Cono met.
    They had kissed once, and nothing more.
       
    The door at the bottom of the stairwell creaked open and banged shut. Cono went up the next flight of stairs and looked down at the door of the apartment. A woman with wide hips and slender legs appeared. She had twisted a key in the third lock when Cono whispered her name, leaning over the railing, behind and above her. As she turned, she held out a canister of pepper spray and fired it.
    “You missed,” Cono said, still whispering.
    Dimira dropped the pepper spray and put her hand on her mouth. She dropped her purse, too, and leaped to hug Cono on the staircase.
    She took him into the apartment without speaking. When the door was shut and triple-locked, Dimira disappeared into the kitchen without meeting Cono’s gaze. “I’ll make some tea,” she called from the other room. A few moments later there was a crashing sound of falling plates and utensils.
    “Is that another Almaty earthquake?” Cono joked.
    “It’s okay. Just a minute.”
    Cono sat down on one of the carpets in the single room that was her living space. The apartment was largely as he remembered it. There were two small mattresses covered by hand-woven blankets, a chest of drawers, two lamps, and a rod suspended from the ceiling that was hung with clothes. The wall around the chest of drawers was a patchwork of photos of Asel, Dimira’s daughter, from her toddler days up to when she was gangly with beginning puberty. Cono got up to look at the pictures and saw only two photos that included Dimira, beaming, standing next