“And that is all,” she sighed.
“Were you sick in Moscow?” Evdokia asked.
“Yes. To the bones,” Lazorska said, then fell silent.
“Did you see my grandchildren with Zosia in Moscow, maybe?” Marusia asked.
Lazorska shook her head. “I hardly saw anyone from here. The few I knew died or were sent to other places. It was chaos where I was.”
The women didn’t ask anything else. They didn’t want to pry into Lazorska’s guarded, mysterious life.
Lazorska again declared that she would stay in her own house. “I have enough firewood. And I have loads of dried corn husks which make an excellent heat. I have enough wood for two, maybe three winters, and you’re welcome to share.”
“Thank you,” Evdokia said. “Then I’ll be moving back into my own place too.” She looked directly at Marusia.
Marusia would not beg her to stay. She looked down at her hands in her lap and began a long monologue about her first days alone in the village, but Lazorska sat inert as though she hadn’t a heard a word. “I have to rest now,” she whispered.
“I’ll go with you,” Evdokia said. Marusia was surprised at how abandoned she felt when they left.
But on her evening walks to and from the bell ringing, Marusia was happy to see three chimneys smoking that mild winter. “Much better.” She smiled. “Almost like a real neighborhood.”
THE WOMEN DECIDED to celebrate their first Christmas Eve—January sixth—together at Evdokia’s home. It was the custom to serve twelve meatless dishes in honor of the apostles, but because they were living off food that was dwindling, the women decided that each individual item on their plates would have to do instead of twelve separate lavish courses. “And we’ll have to sing the carols to one another,” Evdokia joked when the women sat down at her table. Lazorska seemed sullen throughout the meal, and hardly touched the food or the flat sovietskoye champanskoye Evdokia had kept from three Christmases ago.
After the prayers were recited and the prosfora—bread dipped in honey—was passed around, they ate in a tense, meditative silence. Marusia studied the slow dripping of the beeswax candle that was placed on top of the kolach, the Christmas bread, but decided against removing the candle.
Lazorska picked at the tiny bones of her small portion of tinned herring. She startled the quiet by dropping her fork on her plate. “Where’s the extra place setting?” Her eyes were red and accusing.
Marusia and Evdokia stared stupidly at the frail angry woman in front of them.
“I’ll get it,” Evdokia stammered.
“No, stay where you are.” Lazorska got up from her chair and frowned as though the pain she felt was an annoyance. She touched her chest then stood straight. “Where?” She headed for the cupboard. “In here?” She took out several dishes and bowls and tiny saucers and haphazardly placed them on the table and on the empty chairs. Then she stooped and lined them up in a row on the floor.
“Dokhtor, please don’t bother,” said Evdokia.
“These are for all the dead, everywhere.” She carried the rest of the plates outside. Two brightly colored ceramic bowls rolled across the steps. A large wooden platter with hand-painted red poppies was hastily tossed and tumbled on top of a tree stump, and she pitched several small plates on the snowy ground.
“What’s the matter with her?” Evdokia demanded. She followed Lazorska outside.
“Come back, you’ll catch cold,” Marusia shouted after her. The front yard looked eerie and still in the winter twilight, which closed around the skeletal figure of Lazorska in a moon trance, stomping around in the snow. When she finished she stood for a while in the yard, looking up at the sky and breathing in the crisp air, her hands on her narrow, bony hips. “Look,” she said. “It’s so cold, the stars are shivering.” She laughed to herself, then calmly went back into the house, but stopped to mutter, “Or shivering like children from fear of the wolf….”
“I’m very sorry, I should’ve remembered,” Evdokia appealed to Lazorska. “My head is everywhere these days except on my shoulders….”
Lazorska sank into a chair near the big brown-tiled stove, where she took off her drenched kaptsi and tugged on her boots. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“No, no. What an idiot I am. I should have remembered. I mean, my husband died. I should’ve left a plate out for him.” She turned to Marusia and shrugged.
“I forgot one for my son, too,” Marusia whispered to herself. “I can’t believe he’s gone. I can’t.”
“I’ll be going now,” Lazorska said. Her face had taken back its stoic expression. “Thank you. I have to go now. Thank you.”
“Will you be all right?” Marusia asked. “Shall we walk you to your house?”
“I’m fine. I’ll see you good women tomorrow. Khrystos rozhdaietsia! Christ is born!” She left the door half open behind her, allowing a cold draft to waft inside. “Shut the door,” Evdokia shouted to her remaining guest. “Don’t let the ghosts in!”
Before Marusia completely closed it, the mangy stray cat rushed in. “Oh, so you followed me here,” Marusia said as she bent over the animal as though to stroke it, but it ran away from her and planted itself in the middle of the kitchen, its back arched. It sniffed at the empty plates Lazorska had left on the floor.
“Get that animal out of here,” Evdokia said. She hurried away from the cat, sat down at the table, and poured herself another glass of champagne. She nervously rubbed the blue and red embroidery woven into her finest linen tablecloth. “What a strange holy day this is! No empty plate—God forgive me Oleh, my husband! Lazorska going crazy here in front of us. No carolers and vertep actors to sing to us and bless us for a good year. No Mass. No family. Sumno! So depressing—so sumno.”
“We should at least bless the animals,” said Marusia. She took a bit of herring from her plate and gently swung it in front of the cat’s nose. “And since you’re the only animal we have left, I bless you and thank you for your company and hope that God keeps you well in memory of the Savior’s birth. And that we live for the next Christmas. Amen.”
The cat ignored the fish until Marusia placed it on the floor over its bloody front paws. It grabbed the food in its torn mouth and retreated into a corner, near the chair where Oleh last sat, and struck at the sheaf of holiday wheat that was placed there.
“Oh, get that thing out of my house,” Evdokia pleaded. “What a strange Christmas.” She wiped her eyes with the tassled edge of the tablecloth.
“Let’s finish our supper at least, and then we’ll have some more of that champagne,” Marusia urged. “I’ll get the cat out somehow. I’ll tempt him out the door with more fish.”
“No, not the herring. Give it that horrible squid. I never ate such awful stuff in my life. My old man would’ve said something dirty about the way it’s shaped,” Evdokia said.
“Yes, and all that jelly it’s packed in,” Marusia responded. She saw that Evdokia was about to cry. “Yes, your old Oleh sure would have said something about that. He was always ready with a dirty joke.”
“And what will you say, you scruffy one?” said Marusia, smiling at the cat. “This is the night when all the animals talk. Say something, and mind your manners.”
The cat licked at a sore on one of its paws, then stared intently into a dark corner for a second or two before resuming its ritual.
Evdokia half smiled. “It would say, ‘Thank you for a terrible Christmas. Life was better without the stupid humans when they made themselves the masters of the earth.’” Evdokia sighed. She downed the rest of her champagne, which brought a sudden brightness to her melancholy. “Hey, Marusia, look! Let’s shoot some kutia.” She scooped a large spoonful of the Christmas porridge made of wheat, poppyseeds and honey, and hurled the gluey dollop up at the ceiling. “Hah! It stuck! Means we’ll have good luck this year!”
Chapter 18
THE THREE OF them survived the long, stingy winter that was unrelentless in its cold sullenness an
d feeble sun. At last the new spring arrived, and with it two more women: the singer Yulia Pan’kovych and her cousin, a woman named Mychailyna Shkrabanova, who had lived in another village in the zone. They had been reunited by chance at an evacuee camp near Kyiv.
The new arrivals came in the evening. They heard the church bells ringing and found their way to Evdokia’s well-lit house. Lazorska and Evdokia were preparing their evening meal and welcomed them with samohon and soup.
“God grant you and keep you,” said Yulia. Her voice was low, and her eyes were inflamed. She had lost weight, which caused the hump on her back to appear larger, but otherwise she appeared well enough. Her cousin was shorter and skinny as a broomstick. She appeared to be far younger than the others—she wore oversize modern blue-framed glasses, and she kept her babushka on tight, so that not a strand of her bushy hair could escape.
Evdokia spotted Marusia coming down the road. “Come in, come in,” she yelled out the door. “We have more guests!”
Marusia was pleased to see Yulia and kissed her soft heart-shaped face. “Yulichka, you and your sweet nightingale voice returned!”
“Yes, the good Lord kept me through Stalin and Siberia and now this awful catastrophe,” Yulia said, returning Marusia’s damp kisses.
But Marusia halted and stepped away from her friend when she saw the other one. “You! So, out of all the good people that could have come back, God chose to spare you and lead you here to torment me.”
The other woman, Mychailyna, was startled. “I didn’t even think for a second that you’d be here. We didn’t think anybody would be here.”
“And why not me? I live here, not you.”
“So, you know each other,” Yulia broke in.
“This is the whore my husband ran off with.” Marusia aimed at the legs of her rival’s chair and spat on the floor.
“That’s not exactly how it happened,” Mychailyna whined. She had a nasal voice that was very loud, and each word was spoken with deliberate slowness. “I couldn’t help it if he chose to spend the war with me.”
“And the rest of his sinful life.”
“But how long ago was that?” cut in Lazorska. “Really that must’ve been a hundred years ago.”
“You didn’t have to kick him out of your house. He would’ve come back sometime…. He was always married to you,” Mychailyna retorted.
“He should have remembered that when he was sleeping with you!” Marusia’s anger moved her physically closer to where the birdlike woman sat. She leaned over her. “So why are you here now? Why come back to Starylis? Did you expect to move into my house?” She bent lower to look at her face and was close enough to Mychailyna to see her bow-shaped lips tremble. “Did you think I was finally dead and you could just dance in and pretend you’re the proper widow, you svoloch?”
Mychailyna coughed straight into Marusia’s face. Marusia gasped as though poisoned by the intruder’s breath.
“Get her some water,” said Yulia, who slapped her cousin’s slight back.
Marusia glared at Evdokia when she gave Mychailyna a cup of the precious Vichy water instead of the slimy brown stuff straight from the tap.
“She isn’t well, Marusia,” Yulia said. “And I asked her to come with me. I was too afraid to come back alone after my husband died.”
“May he rest in peace,” Evdokia said.
“We’re all sick,” grumbled Marusia. “But after forty some years, I still feel the same about this one.”
“Let it rest with the dead,” Lazorska said. “There are so few of us here we must get along. We could all die today.”
Marusia felt betrayed by Lazorska. “That one there ruined my life! And my son’s!” She turned to the little woman, who was still clearing her throat. “Are you sorry for what you did?” Marusia demanded.
Mychailyna looked up. Her eyes were magnified like an owl’s through the thick lenses of her glasses. She blinked twice, and her small doll’s mouth whispered, “No.”
“Then you go straight to hell.” Marusia slammed the door behind her and questioned God why she was always being tested in such cruel ways.
MARUSIA KEPT TO herself. She still rang the bells in the evenings but refused to participate in the communal dinners the women made together. She ignored Evdokia’s visits, refusing to answer the door or to talk with her whenever Evdokia let herself in. “Don’t be stupid, all men cheat,” Evdokia argued at Marusia’s back. “Even my Oleh. But who cared? Anyway, your man is dead. His sinning fasol’ka is earth now. Seeds for worms.”
Yulia also tried to talk to her alone. Marusia had always liked Yulia, but her pleas that she had no idea about her cousin’s past did nothing to soothe Marusia. “The less I see of her, the better we’ll all get along,” Marusia threatened. “Or I’ll be forced to choke the life out her chicken neck quicker than any poison from Chornobyl.”
Alone in her room, she rekindled her anger at her husband and cursed his name with the same venomous hurt she had felt when he first left her. In the past, so long ago, she was too young and naive to understand that he was unable to love her alone. There were always other women around—women he slept with when he worked at the kolhosp, women he found solace with whenever she had argued with him or demanded more attention than he wanted to give. His other women only expected a good time and found him desirable in ways she did not. But at least he never left their home, that is, not until he met that one.
That one, as Marusia called Mychailyna, that one was the worst of them all. She remembered too well how it happened. That one was younger and lived in the next village, where her father owned a bull. Antin, Marusia’s husband, wanted to mate their cow. He brought the cow over to that one’s bull, and “found himself another cow to mate,” Marusia said in bitterness the few times she told anyone her troubles. “The kham couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen at the time. He was already pushing thirty and should’ve known better. But no, he was milking her and giving her the stud service,” she cried out her shame.
Marusia didn’t believe in divorce—to her it was a Bolshevik invention. Marriage, as miserable as it was, was still a sacrament. The last time she saw him was the torturous hour when she begged him to stay home. By then he had deserted her to live with Mychailyna at her father’s house, still wearing his wedding ring. Throughout it all, she prayed that he would find his senses and return home to her and Yurko. After a year, she heard that the Red Army had found him and made him fight the Germans. The government returned his dead, shattered body to Marusia, who buried it in their family’s plot in the church cemetery, complete with his victory medals and uniform.
“Why do I have to grieve him all over again?” Marusia cried before her icon. “Why am I tortured with this life of mine, Lord? Better you had left me here alone or dead.”
Then she prayed that the sharpness in her heart would cease. “Oh, Lord, I’m so weak! I pick at the pain like a scab. I can’t help it, Lord, I hate her so much. Help me to forgive, Lord. Or at least, help me not to care so much anymore….”
LAZORSKA STOOD NEAR the doorway in the tiny vestibule of the church after Marusia finished ringing the bells.
“I haven’t been here since I came back,” said Lazorska. “Yulia thinks we should all come here on Sundays and sing the Mass. She will lead us.”
“I’m not sure I could pray in the same room with some people,” Marusia said.
“Really, you should be over it by now,” Lazorska said.
“She should apologize first.”
“Oh, now listen,” Lazorska said. “She was young. She was foolish. It’s the husband that you should blame.”
“I do,” Marusia retorted. “But she knew enough to make a choice between sinning and not.”
“Marusia, you know she’s dying.”
“Who isn’t around here.”
“No. She’s worse than ever. A lot of her hair has fallen out. She has a cancer.”
“We all will die from this life’s curse,” Marus
ia said.
“Marusia, don’t poison your own soul. She says she would like to see you.”
“What for?” Marusia clenched her fists. “What in the world for? What the devil does she want?”
“Maybe to ask your pardon,” Lazorska whispered.
“Too late! Too late! I gave her one last chance. She gave me her answer. You heard her!”
Lazorska shook her head. “Give it up,” she said in a weary, spent voice.
“My life is troubled,” Marusia said in a hard, even tone. “I have many crosses. I have no one left. She took my husband. My son is gone. Who knows about my grand children. I’ve seen too much death in this life. No, there’s nothing I can do for her. She should ask for God’s forgiveness, because I’m not able to give her any.”
The women walked outside together in silence. They were almost at Lazorska’s house when Marusia asked, “Are you taking care of her?”
“I gave her some potions I made up. It helps to quiet her down a bit. But she’s in great pain.”
“Why did she come here if she’s half-dead?”
“She took care of Yulia after the explosion. Yulia’s health improved, but Mychailyna grew sicker. They thought she would get better first here in Starylis, and then maybe she would go back on to her own village, but she’s worse off than Yulia ever suspected.”
“Why didn’t Yulia just take her back to her village?”
“This was closer.”
They stopped in front of Yulia’s house. “I’m going in to give her another remedy,” Lazorska said. “This will bring her gently to the other side. She’ll have one last good sleep.”
“I can’t come in. I can’t.”
Lazorska briefly touched Marusia’s shoulder and left her.
EVDOKIA CAME THE NEXT morning to tell Marusia that Mychailyna had died quietly that night without much pain and to ask Marusia if she wanted to attend the funeral. “We’ll all carry her and bury her somewhere in the churchyard. She’s such a little bundle, we should do it very easily.”
The Sky Unwashed Page 14
