He sat there sucking on the cold pipe, a hungry child on his mother’s nipple. Marusia could hear the contentment of his smackings and see how his cheeks sank in a bit to draw out the last taste of the old tobacco when he sucked harder. She watched as he looked around his old home, felt its safety, and heaved one more sigh—a large one. When his wife returned to ask him if he wanted the stove lit, he wouldn’t move for her.
EVDOKIA STAYED THE night in Marusia’s house. They left the old man sitting in his chair. In the morning, they returned to where he waited. They decided not to practice the custom of washing the dead because water was too scarce, so they bundled him in a blanket and carried him in Marusia’s wheelbarrow to the cemetery behind the church. He was light enough, so it was easy to lower him into a shallow pit they dug in Evdokia’s family plot. Marusia made a cross out of three small branches tied with some chicken wire she found. They lit candles and sang the Vichnaia Pamiat’ for his soul before burying him.
“I wish we had some flowers,” Evdokia said. “We’ll plant some in the spring, and I’ll bring him a fresh bouquet. You’ll just have to wait, old man,” she said to the fresh mound of earth.
That evening at Marusia’s kitchen table, Evdokia shared a bottle of mead that Oleh had kept hidden under their bed. “I think it was that damn walk that did it to him. He was too old,” Evdokia said. “You’d think that he might have had a few more minutes with me to say good-bye. He should’ve called me, damn him.”
Evdokia poured another round. “He was always in a hurry to get somewhere.” She stared at the bottle still half full of the thick, syrupy alcohol. “That Oleh knew how to make a great wine, and he always held his bottles with more gentleness than he ever held me.
“And you know what else? He always loved his smokes more than me, too. It’s true, I never knew how to kiss that man as good as that old pipe of his.” She took his pipe from her pocket and kissed its base. “Now it’s mine. My rival. It’s the last thing he touched.”
Evdokia was silent for a moment, and so was Marusia. “I want to be buried with this,” she said, and began to cry.
Marusia stared at her glass and listened to her friend’s sadness throughout the bitter and cold night.
Chapter 16
EVDOKIA’S GRIEF KEPT her at Marusia’s house. She slept in Yurko and Zosia’s room and complained of chills at night because the stove was barely warm. “So, she hasn’t changed at all since I last saw her,” Marusia grumbled to herself. “Just the same—always saying what she thinks without thinking first.”
When she felt stronger, Evdokia went back to her house. Marusia went along with her, and together they closely assessed her pantry, root cellar and beehives. The yard was covered with tiny hillocks of dead bees, but the rich honey was ready to collect. It was decided that the two women would pool their food reserves, sharing their canned goods and preserves for the winter, or until they were able to contact an official who would send them supplies.
Evdokia was generous—she had an untouched pantry filled with cans of caviar from the Black Sea and sardines and herring from Israel, and a large tin of squid that she had never tried before in her life. “From Italy,” she boasted. Whenever her son-in-law traveled on official Soviet business, he always brought back exotic foodstuffs as a way to appease Evdokia, since she used to openly blame him for turning her daughter into a Bolshevik. They decided they would save the seafood for Christmas eve dinner and also drink a bottle of Evdokia’s sovietskoye champanskoye if the two of them made it to Christmas on January seventh.
Marusia believed that Evdokia had enough dry wood for one winter. “It might be wiser to stay together in one house and conserve the wood,” Marusia suggested. “At least this first winter together.”
Evdokia frowned. “I want to stay in my own house, even though I’m still afraid my dead husband might visit me in the night and bother me to bring him something to eat the way he used to, the fool.”
“But your house is so much bigger than mine and takes more heat.”
“So, I’ll close off some of my rooms,” Evdokia countered. Marusia knew why she did not want to live with her. It would be too cramped, and she had too small a kitchen. They would kill each other in such a closet of a kitchen! And she knew that most of all, Evdokia hated the cat who hung around Marusia’s garden and sat on a window ledge, where it watched them through the window.
“That cat is a devil,” she had said to Marusia. “It scares me.” Marusia didn’t want to shoo it away too often—she liked its presence, sometimes in preference to Evdokia’s blabbering ways. But the cat would at times sense that it wasn’t wanted and would hide from them for a few days until it forgave the old women’s rudeness and returned.
“I would feel better if you stayed with me,” Marusia said. She surveyed the uncut logs in Evdokia’s shed and dreaded having to help her slice the gnarly wood with Oleh’s rusty bow saw. “Stay through the worst of the season, then go back to your home in March or so.”
Evdokia reluctantly agreed, although Marusia could tell she believed it wouldn’t work. Her fears were proven true from the beginning. The women quarreled and insisted on their own ways, which they acted out almost deliberately at the inconvenience of the other. For Evdokia, Marusia’s house was “too damn cold.” She was used to blazing fires heating her house until she had to open a window to cool it down.
Marusia didn’t approve of the way her friend wasted water for cooking—you didn’t really have to rinse the dishes so much, she often grumbled in an undertone that always caught Evdokia’s ear. Worse was Evdokia’s constant chattering, a bona fide nunya, a blabbermouth, Marusia thought, who has to give her unwanted advice and opinions on every single little detail in the universe. And here she goes complaining about everyone… even Father Andrei who could be dead! Nunya! She wanted to shout out. Nunya, grab your tongue and tear it out!
Still, they shared their meals, preserved the last of the honey from Oleh’s dead bees, and took turns ringing the bells. Evdokia felt safer ringing in the mornings; she didn’t like to go near the church in the evenings so near to where her husband was buried. “He might come and scare me to death for a joke,” Evdokia said in earnest. “He’d do something like that, you know.”
“But the cemetery is holy earth,” Marusia said. She also didn’t care to ring the bells in the bleak evenings, now that the weather was cooler and the sun disappeared sooner into the swiftly darkening skies.
“Ah, but we never gave him a real funeral.” Evdokia’s eyes flashed with triumph. “So, his soul is still wandering. Anyway, even so, it takes forty days for the soul to go to heaven.”
Marusia had nothing to say to that and agreed to take the evening shift.
THE WOMEN MANAGED well enough despite their physical ailments. Evdokia experienced sore eyes and scratchy skin, and Marusia still coughed up phlegm, and her head throbbed from the cold. When the miseries of their bodies subsided, they were plagued by loneliness. Evdokia cried in the middle of sentences that had nothing to do with death, and Marusia would, in her turn, feel so lost she had to retreat to her own room and chew on the hemp gum to quiet her nerves.
The full moon in November brought a hard frost, and the women spent less time outdoors. Marusia still hoped that the dogcatcher would show up again, or some other people from the village or officials from Chornobyl. “Oh, to have fresh milk again,” she complained too often to Evdokia. She longed for her grandchildren. She missed their hugs and wet kisses laced with candy. She still hadn’t unpacked the suitcase she’d brought back with her. She couldn’t bear to find Tarasyk’s hair or the big white ribbon Katia used to wear. Loneliness ate at her soul, and Evdokia’s taciturn whines and howls of grief tested Marusia’s belief in deliverance. She secretly wished that the cat would come jump on her lap or caress her cheek once in a while.
After the frost, the next few days were brighter and warmer, and a genuine thaw came with the new moon. Marusia felt a surge of cleanliness in the air after she
returned from ringing the evening bells. She looked up at the diamond-lustered stars in the sky and almost felt hopeful again.
Evdokia had dinner ready—potatoes fried in sunflower oil with a cinnamon-like fragrance to it. “This is wonderful,” said Marusia. She felt her spirits restored. “What did you do?”
Evdokia eagerly watched Marusia eat. “So, you like it.” She smiled broadly. “Well, I put in some spices. Much better, eh?”
“Oh, did you go back to your house and find some?”
“Not exactly. I went further down the road to my neighbor’s. You remember Fedya the co-op owner? His wife had the most beautiful kitchen. She was a wonderful cook. And you know why—well, because she had all of these spices. Things I never heard of like kuew-ree. She has red and yellow kuew-ree.”
“How in the world do you know?”
“Oh, we often used to go to their home for praz-nyky, the holiday parties. And what a fancy cook. After the war, for a time, she worked in a hotel restaurant in the Crimea—that’s where she met Fedya when he was on vacation. What a cook she was! She met Frenchmen who visited the hotel and they gave her recipes.”
Marusia had heard various rumors about Fedya’s wife, but she didn’t say anything. “So where did you get the spices?” She put down her spoon. “You went in and took them!”
“Look, what good does it do to leave these things to rot? Marusia, I was thinking. Maybe you and I are here, but it may be that nobody else will return. Maybe everyone died off, all our generation—gone! None of the young ones will come back here. Why would they?”
Marusia pursed her lips and winced at hearing her own forbidden thoughts spoken aloud in Evdokia’s grating tone, shouted full into her face. She pushed the plate of potatoes away from her and crossed her arms.
“Look,” Marusia said, “You came. I came. Others will come. Wait until spring. It’s too hard to travel now. Then what will happen? We live off everyone’s food and they come back and send us to Siberia as thieves. No! A sin. No!”
“But this is an emergency! You’ve heard of people starving in the snow, and yet it is an unwritten law of God that people in need can take from others in an emergency. Like the hunters lost in the woods who happen to find an abandoned house. They eat the food, use the wood for heat, live, write a thank-you note, and that’s it. Off they go. Be well.”
Marusia glared at her friend. “Cinnamon or kuer-ski or whatever you put in the potatoes is not going to save my life. A plain potato, even a cold one, is just fine by me.”
“Oh, all right,” Evdokia said. “But we do need powdered milk. We’re running low. We need medicines. You still have that grippe, and my eyes itch so much I want to shoot someone. And what are we going to do for water? Maybe what’s in that pump is poisoned. Maybe we should search for mineral water in bottles.”
Marusia stood up and stoked the coals in the stove in silence.
“Oh, be practical, Marusia! If I hadn’t come along, you would have had to do this soon enough. Any day now we may be on our deathbeds. It’s not a sin to take what we need to survive!”
Evdokia was right—Marusia had to yield on this. The water was bad—tinged with rust and certainly worse. Even boiling it didn’t help it much. Evdokia persuaded Marusia that they could at least visit some of the houses tomorrow and “see what’s around in case of an emergency.” Marusia was silent. “That’s all I’m saying. So we know where to go in case we need something,” Evdokia urged.
“And Marusia,” Evdokia said after she won. “You had to admit—those were good potatoes!”
THE NEXT DAY Evdokia eagerly led the way inside Fedya’s house. Marusia had been in it a few times before, but only because other villagers were collectively invited for a baptism or an anniversary feast. The kitchen was large and sunny, and the cupboards were filled with spice bottles with rubber stoppers, the sort found in a scientist’s laboratory. “Look.” Evdokia jubilantly held up a ring of dried mushrooms that were hung on a string. “There’s more.” She held up canned herring and powdered milk. “And the best prize of all—water from Vichy. See, I told you there’d be water!”
“Well, maybe we’ll take the water for emergencies,” Marusia said.
“And the mushrooms.”
“No, that’s not needed.” But Evdokia already wore the string around her neck.
“This is only the beginning,” said Evdokia. “They had so much! They were like rich Americans! Come here.” She grabbed Marusia’s hand and dragged her into a bedroom where an entire wall was covered with clothing that hung from a long iron bar suspended from chains drilled into the high ceiling. The clothes were protected with a thick sheet of clear plastic which Evdokia lifted up. She eagerly grabbed the skirt of a pink chiffon ballgown. “Look at this wealth!” She took out a coat and blew on its collar. “Mink!”
“Did she get those things from the French chefs too?” Marusia said dryly.
Evdokia giggled like a naughty girl. “Oh, look at this.” She took out a low-cut red velvet evening gown with wide sleeves trimmed in black fur and a train. “Oh wouldn’t I look beautiful in this one?” She held it up to herself and admired her reflection in the mirror of a large vanity table that was crowded with exotic perfumes and vibrantly colored lipsticks. Evdokia smiled and showed her yellow cracked teeth beneath her puffy red eyes. “Well, once I was pretty. Now starist’ ne radist’, old age isn’t happiness, as they say.”
Marusia was uncomfortable. She thought it was like picking over the things left by a dead person. “I thought we were only going to search for necessary food.”
Evdokia ignored her. “I used to be quite a dancer when I was young. Oh, well, there’s no one to dance with here, anyway.” She sadly put the dress back on its hanger.
“Not with me, that’s for sure,” Marusia said. She left the bedroom. “I’m going back home,” she called out. She debated taking the mineral water with her but decided not to. “We know where it is in case we really do need it.” She felt better about her decision. Marusia was out the door and halfway home before she turned around to hear Evdokia’s koo-koos behind her.
“Wait for me! Hey! Koo-koo!” She came up to her friend, holding two bottles of Vichy water. “You forgot these.” Marusia didn’t say anything until she noticed Evdokia’s shawl—a bright turquoise-and-white paisley-fringed one that was draped over her shabby brown woolen coat.
“I never saw that on you before.”
“Oh, I think it suits my age better than that red dress.”
Marusia faced Evdokia. “You can’t take people’s things! I don’t care how our government allows it or how poor we are in this world… it’s still a sin.”
“We are not in the real world anymore!” Evdokia shouted back. “This is an emergency… just like it was during the war. Worse. At least there were armies to fight for us, but here it’s only you and me. Two defenseless old women!”
“How is stealing that shawl going to help us?”
“I might have to barter it someday. Maybe your friend, the dogshooter, needs to be bribed. He might come back.”
Marusia spat on the ground in anger. She started to walk home alone.
“It’s an emergency because you keep your damn house so cold I could die from pneumonia. Not from the radiation either!” Evdokia screamed. “Because of you, I’ll die!”
Marusia started to say that she should at least have the decency to steal something black for mourning, but forgot. Instead, her face beamed into a smile.
Evdokia caught up to her friend and stared at her. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked, breathless, turning around to see.
Coming from the woods was a woman holding a sack over her shoulder like D’id Moroz, Grandfather Winter. She was dressed in black, her face and hair covered by a severe black knit scarf that wound around her head into a turban above her horizontal, knitted black brows.
“Slava Isusu Chrystu,” Slavka Lazorska said, putting her sack down on the snow-dusted ground. “I could hear you s
creaming all the way in the village, so I took the shortcut through the woods to see if I could help stop the fistfight or maybe mend some wounds.”
The women embraced one another. “It’s good to hear all that yelling,” Lazorska teased. “I knew that I was definitely back in Starylis.”
Marusia’s smile was radiant. “Come to my house. I’ll make a welcome dinner.”
“Yes, and we’ll share with you some wonderful vodka that even you didn’t know about, Marusia,” Evdokia put in.
Marusia laughed. “Well, I’m glad you’re here now Dokhtor. Otherwise, Evdokia and I would have killed one another and you would have returned and be all alone.”
She grabbed Lazorska’s sack, and the three women linked arms on their walk to Marusia’s.
Chapter 17
LAZORSKA WAS RELUCTANT to move in with the two. Having spent so long in cramped rooms, she said she yearned to be back in her own home, where she could stay up all night if she chose to, which Marusia well understood to mean not be bothered by the others’ complaints and bickering.
She looked thinner, gaunt, and her braided hair had turned completely gray. Even the fine hairs above her lips had turned white, though her fierce eyebrows had remained as black as crow feathers. She didn’t say much about her experiences after the evacuation, but whatever she survived had aged her threefold. She moved more slowly and kept her mouth shut in a grimace of pain.
She did say that she had been sent to Moscow for a while, where she grew weak from living in the city. From there she had gone on to live with some distant relatives in Kharkiv, and when she saw how hard their lives were, she found her way home as soon as she was able to gain her strength.
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