PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2017

by Kelly Link

  “That is not what we saw,” she said softly. “Our hawk was gold.”

  Leroy moved his jaw slightly left, slightly right, not enjoying her resistance.

  “Sorry, Dinara. There’s no such thing.”

  She put on her glasses again and leaned close into the screen to look. Then she straightened.

  “Hmm,” she said, a noncommittal noise to satisfy his pride. She began packing up her laptop.

  Each morning, Dinara parked her car (a car—what a luxury it had once seemed, now what a necessity it had become) and stared up at the pine trees that ringed the asphalt lot, watched as they stood rigid in the still air or swayed with the wind.

  Each evening, her walk from the doors of the building to her distant corner of the parking lot was consolation for the hours in stale air reeking with male sweat and anxiety. That night, like every night, in the space between the hiss of the automated exit and the gentle slam of her car door, she prayed for one more day, one more week, one more year, until her children finished university and could support themselves, until she did not carry the burden of their three souls upon her back.

  In the twilight, she saw the glint of feathers, heard the rustle of a disturbed branch. She looked up and saw a round unblinking eye watching her. She stood still, feeling her fingertips grow cold in the night air. It was gold, she thought triumphantly, not at all like the picture Leroy had shown her. Not that she would tell him—she would let him be satisfied in his ignorance.

  The hawk tilted its head once, as if to concede to Dinara a lack of danger. Its head ducked down and she heard the rip of tendon and muscle. It must have found a squirrel. As the hawk pulled at its meal, the branch trembled. Dinara thought she could just see the clustered branches of a nest.

  She would not tell the men she had seen the hawk’s secret place.

  ______________

  Katherine Magyarody is a postdoctoral fellow at Texas A&M University. She completed her PhD in English at the University of Toronto in 2016. In her fiction she explores the personal, familial, and cultural histories that we remember, and the secrets that keep us awake at night. She is working on a collection of short stories and two novel manuscripts.

  Editors' Note

  “Galina” is a beautiful story told by a skilled and talented writer. We were captivated by Angela Ajayi’s descriptions of a fictional exclusion zone near the site of a nuclear accident in Ukraine, and carried away by the sureness of her voice and the richness of her characters. What made the story stand out from the many others we read was Ajayi’s penetrating depiction of a mother-daughter relationship marked by history and time. In the author’s hands, a simple reunion in a kitchen and a view outside to a cherry tree become menacing and urgent. Galina has fled Nigeria and her marriage only to find her motherland poisoned and changed forever.

  We read about 1,500 unsolicited short stories each year, always with an eye for work by new writers. It is not often that we find writing of the quality in this story. We are not surprised that she was chosen for an award, and we are very happy with the confirmation of our faith in this story and in Angela’s talent and hard work.

  Vern Miller, publisher

  Rachel Swearingen, guest fiction editor

  Fifth Wednesday Journal

  Galina

  Angela Ajayi

  “You were like a bird,” Galina’s mother said to her. “The kind that came during the summer when the trees were filled with fruit. Then you flew south, after a coolness had settled in the morning air, to a land so distant that I couldn’t even imagine it.”

  Galina laughed at the comparison, apt as it was and described so poetically, as they drank tea in her mother’s kitchen. She looked out the window by the old wooden fence and her eyes fell on a cherry tree dotted with forbidden fruit.

  It had been a month since Galina had returned from Nigeria for good. On her first visit, guards holding rifles at the checkpoint two miles away had warned her that her mother’s village, Zhovtnevoe, was in an exclusion zone, that the radiation levels were still high even eight years after the blast at nearby Tarkov Nuclear Power Plant.

  “Try to get your mother out. Don’t drink the water or eat the vegetables and fruit,” they had said as they stamped the date on her pass.

  But Galina hadn’t dwelled on their words. She wanted to live for the moment, shabby as it was. She laughed again, and her voice sounded cheery and high-pitched like a child’s.

  “Let me see,” she asked her mother in the kitchen. “And how else am I like a bird?”

  “I know—your face!” The words escaped through chapped lips, leaping out of a mouth framed by wrinkles with specks of dirt in them.

  Galina knew her mother hadn’t meant it as a cruel gibe. Over the years, she had begun to look birdlike. Her eyes, always large, appeared larger now, and her nose was longer, pointier at its tip. Lately her lips had thinned and were barely visible.

  “Pity,” her mother said again. “You were such a beauty. I couldn’t keep the boys away. I wanted to lock you in the house and keep you there forever. Then you left.”

  “But, Ma—” Galina protested. Her tea had gotten cold, and she pushed the cup away. It left a brown stain on the white tablecloth.

  “You went away, and each time you came back during the summer you looked a little different.”

  “I got older,” Galina said, but she knew this was not the whole truth and that her decade in Nigeria had changed her irreversibly. These days she laughed easily at the most inopportune times; she cried just as easily. And when she tried lovemaking again, after meeting Olexa at Perchok School in nearby Drabov where she now lived and taught geometry, she grew so anxious that she stopped returning his calls.

  “You’re broken, Galochka. I don’t know what ended your marriage, but you’ve lost your way,” her mother said, as she poured herself more tea and sipped it without adding more milk or sugar.

  Galina wondered when her mother had become this forthright, this blunt with her delivery. She averted her eyes from the stain and looked out the window again toward the cherry tree a few feet away. She could swear the leaves looked bigger than when she was a young girl, their fresh dark green color glistening under the sunlight. A barn swallow swooped down on one of the branches and rested there, bejeweled by its bluish-red feathers.

  “I’m not broken,“ Galina said. But her voice wavered, revealing the true weight of her insecurities. She had come undone in a way that couldn’t be measured. She might have begun to lose her mind in Nigeria after learning of her husband Umaru’s secret—plunged into a darkness that only her motherland could retrieve her from. And that was why she’d bought herself a one-way ticket with the money she had saved from decorating wedding cakes. She had told Umaru that their marriage was over and flew away that day.

  The swallow on the tree lowered its short neck and pecked at a cherry, digging into the red flesh and exposing the brown pit. Melancholy hung in the air. Galina cleared her throat. The sound she emitted was not the usual hoarse-sounding one—it was as if she had just whistled a happy tune. Her mother, whose hearing never failed, turned her head and leaned closer. A whiff of raw garlic hit Galina’s nose.

  “It’s not my life I’m worried about now,” Galina said. “We need to get you out of here. The longer you stay, the more likely you’ll die from cancer. Just look at the leaves on that cherry tree. Look how big they are. Next year, they will double in size.”

  “Nonsense,” her mother said. “Even with the radiation, things won’t change that quickly. Besides, I’m almost seventy-five—I’ll die of old age soon.”

  Galina shook her head. The years had not been kind to either one of them. Her mother had grown more isolated, more certain of her impending demise. Her only other visitor was a brother, Ivan, who lived in another village outside the exclusion zone. These days, guilt, dull but insistent, had crept into Galina’s heart
, and she wondered if both their lives would have worked out better if she’d stayed closer to her mother.

  “I dug up some more potatoes this morning. I’ll make us some borscht for lunch,” her mother said.

  “We really shouldn’t eat the vegetables,” Galina said, but her mother shushed her.

  “A woman has to eat. I won’t starve to death like my grandparents almost did. I’ve eaten hundreds of those potatoes and I’m still here.” She stood up and reached for her walking stick. Her hands had become unusually large, and her fingers looked bulbous at the tips, but she gripped the walking stick with such ease. The old woman was stubborn, even in the face of a life lived semilegally in isolation.

  “I’m going to the cellar to get the potatoes and beets,” her mother said.

  “Let me help you,” Galina said.

  But her mother raised a hand in the air and shook it as she walked away. This movement startled the swallow outside the window on the cherry tree, and it darted up toward the blue sky, leaving the fruit half eaten.

  The first day Galina had visited her mother, she had killed a swallow with her car. It had happened a mile from the checkpoint. She had driven through Shramkovka, past the general store where she used to buy fresh bread and chunks of sweet halvah. The store stood empty, its windows clouded over with dust. She had come upon Baba Dasha’s house, a stone’s throw from the store, abandoned. Then Galina had driven out of the small town and onto the tarred highway. Alongside her, the fields that were once filled with wheat, usually bent by the wind, were overgrown with weeds. As she neared her mother’s village, she had been relieved to see that the forest of fir trees that lined part of the road looked unchanged. She maneuvered the car onto the muddy road that led to her mother’s house, and it struck her that the road appeared less ugly with fewer tire marks.

  The Shurkas’ house was barely hanging on—its windows dust-filled, its thatched roof caving in, the windows still lined with a few possessions that were left behind in the hasty evacuation. Outside the house, a sandpit, in which Galina had played as a child, was strewn with plastic toys. She remembered her childhood, when the summer days had been bright and long and filled with playing or fishing by the pond behind their house. She would climb trees or run through cornfields, emerging flushed and winded. It had been a joyful time until the summer she was thirteen, when her father died of a heart attack on a train.

  Her mother had howled into the night, beating the floor with her fists. “My Vityok, not my Vityok!”

  And yet with each new day, Galina and her mother had fed the chickens, fetched the warm eggs from the coop, and tied the cow out to pasture at the break of dawn. Then fall had come with its wetness, its decaying leaves. Then winter with its snow, falling on her father’s grave underneath a cherry tree in a cemetery overgrown with weeds and cobwebs. The years had passed by, and when Galina was old enough, she had moved to Kiev, where she met Umaru, a Nigerian student studying international politics at the university. It hadn’t been long before they married and moved to Nigeria, into an old colonial house and into a life of leisure, of expats, of cultural coagulation that would result only in heartbreak.

  In the car, the thought of her past, which was still a fresh wound, caused Galina’s heart to beat faster. She gripped the steering wheel tighter and accelerated into the path of a swallow. The bird catapulted upward and landed on the road in front of her.

  “Shit.” Galina stopped the car. As she opened the door, she thought this moment to be an ominous sign. She couldn’t tell if the bird was merely stunned or dead. It was lying on its side; its wings were unusually large, and the soft brownish feathers beneath its head were dotted with four white spots. It was dead. Galina cupped the bird in her hand and placed it in the tall grass by the side of the road.

  “I killed a swallow.” That was the first thing she said when she got to her mother’s house.

  “But you are here, my dearest daughter! That is all that matters to me.” Her mother threw open her arms and kissed her tightly. “Besides, we can drink some of that bad omen away,“ she continued, winking in the direction of a small shed.

  “You’ve been making vodka?” Galina asked.

  “How else do you expect me to make a little money, or return a favor? Uncle Ivan came by yesterday to help me harvest some wheat. He took home a jar of my vodka. Let’s go inside,” her mother said, and she led the way, walking slowly toward the kitchen by an orchard of pear and apple trees overburdened with ripening fruit.

  After the lunch of borscht her mother prepared, Galina returned to Drabov, where she had rented a small, barely furnished one-bedroom apartment. As soon as she unlocked the door, she ran the bath—and then she flung off her clothes, shoving them into a plastic bag. Later in the evening, she would do what she always did when she returned from her visits to her mother: she would soak the clothes in hot water overnight and then wash them by hand. She was walking around her apartment in just her underwear when the phone rang.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  She immediately knew who the shouting voice was. It was Umaru, calling from Nigeria. She pictured his face, always open and

  inviting, and the way he often furrowed his brow when he spoke, his tall body, attractive and lean, and then she fought the impulse to hang up.

  “Yes?” Her English sounded foreign to her ears.

  “Galina, Galina—can you hear me?”

  “What do you want? How did you find me?”

  “I’m calling to say I’m—”

  She gave in to the impulse and hung up.

  By the time she reached the bathroom and opened the door, the phone rang again. Galina stepped into the narrow room and shut the door behind her, leaning against the door, her back in knots, her arms heavy and hands in fists. She caught her reflection in the small mirror above the dripping sink, and she felt a whoosh of air leave her thin lips. The face that stared back at her was as pale as the moon, and because her pupils were dilated in her large eyes, she thought again about how she resembled a bird. She unclenched her fists and touched her chin, where sunspots had emerged, reminding her of those sunny days in Nigeria when she had changed into her bikini, thrown a towel on the grass outside their house, and taken in the hot rays of the equatorial sun. One such day she had felt a nudge on her right shoulder, and found a Nigerian neighbor standing over her.

  “Madam, madam, are you okay?” he had said.

  She had removed her sunglasses and laughed out loud. “Yes, of course. I’m just sunbathing.”

  He had nodded and walked away quickly as if embarrassed.

  In the bathroom Galina laughed to herself—a contrived laugh, at once girlish and manic. If she was losing her mind, this might be one of the symptoms. But she was unlikely to do the research required to know what happens to a person when her internal world suffers a sudden obliteration or collapse. No, there was no need for any research; she was here to begin anew.

  The phone rang again.

  Galina undressed fully and slipped into the bath, sinking into its warmth, deeper and deeper until more than half her head was submerged and she couldn’t hear the ringing of the phone. Until all was silent like in a dream.

  One week later, Galina drove back to the exclusion zone to visit her mother. She was leaving a trail of voicemail messages from Olexa behind her. The first one, in his calm, deep, unaffected voice: “Where are you?” The second one: “Are you around?” And the third and fourth one, again: “Where are you?”

  Her mind had begun to repress everything and anything that reminded her of the past, especially those moments that occurred in sequence. One. Two. Three. Four. The number of times she had miscarried her babies. The number of times she had failed to give Umaru a son—or a daughter. The number of times Umaru’s mother had arrived from her village near Kano only to say, “Ah-ah, not yet? Not even one? How come?” What was the word her Nigerian doctor had used
to describe her condition? Yes, barren. She was a barren woman.

  In her car, Galina followed a winding tarred road through a land so fertile it was hard to believe. Nature had taken over, giving rise to a dense tangle of trees and vegetation in areas where people had once lived, and allowing for a surge in the population of animals. The last time she traveled this road, she had spotted a wild boar moving swiftly by the edge of the forest. She had once imagined that in Nigeria she would be living alongside jungles filled with lions and cobras. It occurred to her that she had never seen a lion in the wild in all the years she lived in northern Nigeria, where the land, flat and dry, stretched far into a horizon dotted with shrubs, the occasional tree, and rocks. Nor had she ever seen a cobra. The only snake she ever saw was a puff adder, which Umaru had found and killed in their garage.

  She slowed down at the checkpoint and smiled warmly at the guards. Reaching into her handbag, she pulled out two packets of cigarettes.

  “Here.” She offered them to one of the guards.

  “Well, thank you,” he said.

  The other one cleared his throat. “We’ve been informed that an old woman died a few hours ago in one of the villages. We won’t know who until she’s been identified, but we are following orders and telling folks who are coming through now.”

  The image of the dead swallow filled Galina’s mind. “My mother?”

  “We don’t know, you hear?”

  She nodded, her head bobbing as if detached, and she drove off, raising radioactive dust in her wake.

  Galina came upon field after field after passing Shramkovka, each one a reminder of how much distance she had to cover to get to her mother’s house. Visions came. More birds. Not swallows but vultures this time, with dusty light-brown feathers and balding heads that were too small for their bodies. In the fields behind their house in Nigeria, the vultures had landed often, hovering excitedly over some poor dead thing.