You Know When the Men Are Gone Read Online Free PDF Page A

They worked silently, biting their lips, and thought about Natalya.
    When Meg returned to her apartment that night, she saw a man silhouetted in front of Natalya’s door for a moment, the bright light of the hallway flashing across his sturdy frame. The thickness of his neck frightened Meg, and when she was inside she took down a biography of Chagall, and listened.
    She should have tried harder to teach Natalya to cook, she thought. She should have tried.
    There were no sounds of strife from next door, just the opening and closing of bureau drawers. At dawn, just before Meg fell asleep, she heard a woman’s murmur, thick with tears or laughter, and then, for the first time, the bed creaked on its springs twice as if two bodies slid beneath the sheets, but no noises of lovemaking followed. The next morning Meg woke to absolute peace: Boris must have overslept.

    The night before their husbands’ arrival, Natalya knocked on Meg’s door.
    “Please watch children,” she said, one long-fingered hand on each child’s head. Their matching green eyes peered up.
    Meg had been cleaning her apartment and she glanced into her living room, at the pile of unfolded laundry waiting on her couch and the vacuum sitting in the middle of the living room, half of the carpet neatly lined from its sucking groove. It was eight o’clock and Meg was about to say that she couldn’t possibly babysit tonight of all nights, she had so much to do before Jeremy returned. But she hesitated, noticing that Natalya wasn’t wearing a short skirt and heels, rather a white T-shirt, dark jeans, and flats under her long Klimt coat. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her face was scrubbed clean and pink. For the first time Meg noticed the acne scars on her cheeks and suddenly she understood they had all been wrong. Natalya had been too tall and thin in high school, with bad skin and ill-fitting clothes; other students made fun of her. Natalya had no idea how beautiful she was, which was why she wore that long jacket and rarely left the house without her too-bright lipstick and too-long earrings.
    “Of course I will,” Meg answered. Natalya nodded, as if it had never occurred to her that Meg would say no, and turned back to her apartment. Meg got her keys, closed her door, and followed. “They must sleep at nine. Boris already been outside. That is all, yes?”
    Meg stepped into the apartment. She was immediately disappointed. No red velvet hung from the walls and no vodka bottles lined the windowsill and shelves; nor did she see sinister posters of Tito or Milosevic. It looked like any of the wives’ apartments: light wood table and chairs, fat paperback novels on the bookshelves, a soldier’s military awards on the wall, a few primary-colored children’s toys scattered on the floor. There was no hint that Natalya was anything but American except for a stack of fashion magazines on the coffee table with Cyrillic writing on the covers, as if she had wiped every shred of her past life away, everything but this one last comfort of elusive beauty.
    Natalya got down on her knees and spoke Serbian to her children.
    “They will be good,” she said when she stood. She turned to Meg. It was hard to take her stare, as if all of the makeup and jewelry in the past had been a filter and now Meg was looking directly at the sun.
    “Thank you,” Natalya said, her accent making the words sound impossibly grave.
    “When will you be home?” Meg asked. The troops were arriving at the First Cavalry parade ground the following day at ten and she wanted to be rested and ready.
    “Soon.” Natalya kissed each child on the mouth, patted Boris’s square head, picked up her small beaded purse, and walked out, leaving her noisy keys behind.

    Her children were every bit as good as she had promised they would be, playing quietly with a set of wooden blocks, then going to bed as soon as Meg led them to their room.
    Of course Meg crept all around the apartment,