The Sky Unwashed

by Irene Zabytko

  “I can’t go.” But later that day, Marusia walked alone into the churchyard and heard Yulia singing the panakhyda chants for the dead.

  Yulia, Lazorska and Evdokia were about to break ground in a far corner of the graveyard. Marusia called out to them, “Why are you burying her there?”

  “No room. Too many dead family members in my plot,” said Yulia. “It’s as close as I can get to my section.”

  Marusia thought hard a moment. It was time to make amends with the dead, since she couldn’t when her rival was alive. “No. Stop it. Bury her there. Near my husband.” She pointed to another spot.

  “Are you sure?” Yulia asked.

  “Yes, she can have Yurko’s spot. I’ll be buried on the other side of them, further away, closer to my mother.” She tried to swallow down some of her pain. She stood near the women and pointed a finger at them. “Remember, just bury me with something of Yurko’s—his hat or his watch.” Her voice cracked and her chest swelled. She turned away to lead them to her family’s section.

  The women took turns digging the grave, except for Marusia, who stood apart like an outsider. The earth was still partially frozen and inert from the long winter, but gradually the ground yielded and divided against their shovels. Once the grave was dug, Marusia took hold of a foot, and together the four women gently lowered the body of Yulia’s cousin, Marusia’s enemy, into the hole as she was, without a casket. She wore the same clothes she had on the day of her return to the village. Her head was wrapped in the same floral scarf, and her hands were clenched around an old prayer book of Yulia’s. Her face looked less pinched, and her opaque eyelids were closed behind her large glasses.

  The four women each threw in a handful of dirt. Marusia was especially careful not to cover the corpse’s face when it was her turn. The dirt landed over Mychailyna’s heart.

  They finished the burial and marked her grave with a cross Evdokia had made the night before out of wood and a garland of herbs from Lazorska’s garden.

  Yulia grabbed Marusia’s hand on the way to her house. “Thank you. You are a blessed woman.”

  “These things don’t matter anymore,” Marusia said. She turned away from Yulia, carrying the stone that still remained deep within her heart.

  Chapter 19

  IN THE EARLY days of April, the women realized how warm the air had become and how soft and dark the earth. “We should plant,” Evdokia said one evening during a meal shared at her table. “Not only should we plant, but we need a cow. We need fresh milk,” she continued in her quick-paced cadence. “I haven’t had any milk since I came here. A goat would suit me fine. I had a dream last night about a goat.”

  “Even the evacuee camp had some milk now and then for the children and the old people,” said Yulia. She declined the hard brown bread Marusia offered. “I lost two more teeth last night.”

  “I still think,” Evdokia said, “that we should go from house to house, see what is left, and take what we need. We have so little among us.”

  “You can have whatever I have,” said Yulia. “Lord knows, my canned vegetables look cursed and bad. I saw these evil bubbles floating around them. I didn’t seal them tightly enough I suppose.”

  “That happens sometimes,” Marusia said kindly. “Many times I canned the best of my harvests, but I forgot to seal the lids, or wash the bottles really well. The bad air pushes itself in and poof—all the good food rots.”

  Evdokia nodded.

  “Well, you’re welcome to have whatever I have left,” Yulia said, her cheeks flushed. “I have some powdered milk and a sack of flour—as far as I can tell, it’s still usable, although I saw a few dead worms. We can sift them out. Oh, and I found an unopened can of powdered chocolate. We can make a cake out of it, for Easter.”

  “Has anyone been to the village?” Lazorska asked.

  No one answered.

  “Our situation is not normal at all,” Lazorska said. “I think it’s right that we go into people’s houses and take what we need.”

  Evdokia beamed. “Exactly! Just as I’ve been saying.”

  “Then we should only take the things we really need,” Marusia said, staring at Evdokia’s stolen shawl, which was torn and dirty. “Only things for an absolute emergency.”

  “We should keep a list of all the things we take so that when the people come back, we can find a way to barter with them or replace the food we took,” Lazorska said.

  “Yes, that I’ll agree to,” Marusia said.

  “I’ll keep the records,” Evdokia volunteered. She pulled a notebook of graph paper out from under the short leg of a rickety table. “I’ll write down whose home we visited, and what we took and how much of it.”

  “Fine,” Lazorska said. “We need to see what the village has as well.”

  “Nothing in the co-op, that’s for sure,” Marusia said.

  “But what about the post office?” Yulia asked. “I keep hoping for a letter from my son. Where would it go?”

  “There’s a lot of mail still in bags since the explosion,” Marusia told them.

  “That should be sorted out,” Lazorska said. “It still belongs to people. Even if they’re dead, we should sort all the mail. Later, someone might want it.”

  “What about the mail that we should be getting now?” Marusia asked. She was thinking that Zosia may have been trying to reach her all this time.

  “The government must have our mail. In Moscow,” said Lazorska.

  “We should file a petition to get it,” said Yulia.

  “Maybe it’s stuck somewhere in Chornobyl or Kyiv,” said Evdokia. “The mail is always forgotten and ends up on top of someone’s desk—somewhere it shouldn’t have gone to.”

  “Well, then,” said Marusia, “we have to file something official I suppose. We must go to the nearest gorsoviet officials and let them know we’re here. Lord knows, no one will come to us and help us.” She thought of the dogcatcher and silently cursed him.

  “Then let’s tell them we want a cow,” said Evdokia.

  “Yes, my cow was about to calve when we had to leave,” Marusia said heatedly. “I’m certain this poison killed her. The government should compensate me. After all, there are four of us now. When it was just me here, there wasn’t anything I could do. But with four of us… now that’s the size of an average family. That counts.”

  The others agreed.

  “What should we do about money?” asked Evdokia. “No one is paying our pensions.”

  “Another declaration,” said Marusia. The women laughed. “Yes, we must write to them and demand our money. It’s ours.”

  “Let’s write this document,” Evdokia said, and tore a page from the notebook. “Wait, let me get one of my son-in-law’s fancy pens.” She searched in her daughter’s old room and returned with a fountain pen and ink bottle. “So, who wants to write it?”

  “Yulia, you have the most education, you know Russian best. You do it,” said Marusia.

  “But we all know Russian,” Yulia said. “We all had to learn it.”

  “Yulia, you have to do it,” Evdokia insisted. “It’s too easy for us to make a mistake by writing one tiny Ukrainian word and spoiling the whole document.”

  “Yes, don’t write anything in Ukrainian or they’ll arrest us as bourgeoise nationalists,” said Lazorska. “Worse, they’ll throw it away.”

  “I can’t write it alone,” Yulia protested.

  “We’ll all dictate it,” Lazorska said.

  “Who should I address it to?” Yulia asked, scratching the pen nib on the paper to see if it would ink.

  “Address it to Gorbachev,” said Evdokia.

  “And another to the commissar of Chornobyl,” said Lazorska. “If he’s still alive.”

  “Somebody’s there. The trains run there, don’t they?” Marusia said.

  “Well, write to both of them,” said Lazorska. “And also to the commissar of Ukraine. This will be our Village of Starylis Ukase.”

  The women spent the
morning drinking tea and drafting the letter. They wrote:

  6 April 1988

  To the Supreme President Michail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the Supreme Commissar of the Ukrainian SSR, and the Magister of Kiev Oblast:

  We send you greetings and our wishes for your good health.

  We, the undersigned, are victims of the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl of 26 April 1986. Since that time, we have had to leave our homes in Starylis, give up our farm animals, endure sickness and hardships where we were evacuated to so far from our loved ones, and are now separated from them because many have died or have been sent to other places where we lost them.

  Good Commissars, please hear our demands as we are four old and defenseless women who have always worked hard for our State. We are law-abiding citizens who are now living back in our deserted village of Starylis, and are nearly destitute. We request the following:

  1. A cow. We need fresh milk. If possible, a goat and chicken or pig would also gratify us.

  2. Our mail. We have not received any mail since 1986. Please send all past mail to us in Starylis—even letters for our dead or missing relatives and neighbors.

  3. Our pensions. We have not received any pension money since the evacuation nor any other compensation for our having had to leave our homes and families for over a year.

  4. Transportation. We need a bus or a car to take us to a nearby place where we can buy supplies or to another village where we can trade.

  “Anything else?” asked Lazorska.

  “I miss hearing music on the radio and television,” said Yulia. “And the news. What is going on in the world?”

  “Let’s put in a demand for electricity and clean water,” said Evdokia. So they added:

  5. Electricity and water. We have a little water from our wells but it is not healthy and we have no electricity at all.

  “And put in a statement about medical supplies,” Lazorska offered.

  “But you take care of us,” Marusia said.

  “My treatments can’t stop this poison. We need more attention.”

  “What good is their medicine?” Marusia argued. “I’ve seen my son dying in a hospital, and nothing they had could save him. None of those tubes and wires they hooked into him like he was a lamp. Nothing helped. I would trust you sooner than have them touch me.”

  The others echoed Marusia’s words.

  “I can’t save you either,” Lazorska said. “I can’t fight this.”

  “But you can help us to die,” said Yulia. “You helped my cousin, God rest her soul.” She glanced quickly at Marusia, who bowed her head and said nothing.

  After a silence, Marusia asked, “How did Lazorska help… her?”

  “I can only help people to die quietly.”

  “That’s a blessing,” said Evdokia. “My old man did that on his own. But I also saw so much suffering… especially the children.”

  “It’s not really a sin—is it—to have help, if we have to die from this radiation poison,” said Marusia. “My son suffered so much. It was a sin to keep him suffering….”

  “I was trained by my grandmother to make the sickness less painful whenever I could,” said Lazorska. “The priests tried to get me arrested during the war for what I did. In fact, the truth be told, I was arrested by the Bolsheviki for murder. I always suspected that the priests turned on me.”

  “What happened?” Marusia asked.

  “Everyone was denouncing everyone else then. You remember. That’s how it was. You couldn’t trust anyone. Then the war came and I got out, because they needed nurses. I still did what I thought was right. But only if the people I was helping wanted me to. I never did it on my own.”

  The women said nothing to Lazorska’s confession. “Bad times, then,” Yulia said, breaking the tense stillness.

  “Not better now,” Evdokia said. “You know, I think that when my time comes, I want to go quickly. If I’m made to suffer more than the Lord intended because man meddled in God’s ways, then it’s wrong for me to die in such unnatural agony—more than God Himself intended. Do you understand what I am saying? Am I a sinful woman to think this?”

  “We were poisoned and not of our own doing,” said Yulia. “Should we die so horribly because of man?”

  “You’re right,” Marusia said. “We have tried to keep God’s ways, but we have been forced not to. They tried to shut our churches and make us into Bolshies. They built that plant, they took away our children. They killed my son!” She rocked back and forth in her chair.

  “I want to go peacefully,” said Yulia. “But if I can’t on my own, then will you help me, Lazorska?”

  “I promise,” she said.

  “And me as well,” said Evdokia.

  “And me,” Marusia said firmly.

  “I promise, but you must help me when it’s my time,” Lazorska said.

  The women nodded their heads.

  “Then we don’t need to say anything about medical help in our ukase,” Evdokia declared.

  Satisfied, the women signed the petition. They drew lots with the hay straws Evdokia kept on hand to light her woodstove. “The one who picks the short straw will have to walk to the Chornobyl plant and hand over our document,” Marusia said. She stared at Lazorska and Yulia, whose faces were pinched in pain, then she broke the shortest one in secret and purposely held it away from those two. Evdokia also pulled a long straw.

  “Well, it’s up to me then,” Marusia said.

  “Do you want to go?” asked Lazorska. “We can draw again.”

  “I’ll go with you,” offered Evdokia.

  “It fell to me, so I’ll go,” Marusia said. “After all, I was the first one to come back. And yes, bless you Evdokia. I’d like your company. Let’s go tomorrow. Early.”

  They all agreed, and also decided that they wanted to examine all of the abandoned homes in case they’d forgotten something and needed to write in a last-minute addendum.

  AND SO THE four women went together to each empty house. Many were locked, and those were passed over for the time when they had nothing left. “Then we can break in without feeling guilty,” said Yulia.

  Throughout, the women were solemn. Each house was at its own level of decay and neglect. People had left food rotting on the table, and piles of laundry hardened into lumps in the filthy washtubs, caked with the grimy residue of cheap soap. But all the villagers had stored and left behind a fine cache of food sheltered inside pantries or hidden in cellars. The women collected the bottled water and milk and other staples and put them in Marusia’s wheelbarrow and in Yulia’s grandchild’s old brown wagon. They also took canned fish and various preserved vegetables and jams, and every item was dutifully recorded by Evdokia.

  On the way to the co-op, they passed the home of old Paraskevia Volodymyrivna, the priest’s mother who had kept goats.

  “We didn’t look in here,” said Lazorska.

  The house was the most rundown and forbidding in the village. The shutters were unhinged and the thatched roof was in shreds.

  Lazorska stepped in and the others followed. They were greeted by a horrible stench. In the middle of the living room floor lay the remains of two goats, their amber reptilian eyes glazed. The rug was smeared with old blood, and the fur was strewn about like clumps of dust.

  “That looks like dog feces,” Lazorska said. “The goats must have been attacked by wild dogs.”

  “I have to go out for a minute,” Yulia said. The others left with her. She held on to the fence. “I needed air.”

  “You go on ahead and sort the food out,” Lazorska called out from the doorway. “I’ll clean up as best as I can, get some of the stink out. Then I’ll see what she had.”

  “Why bother?” said Evdokia. “She won’t come back. She probably didn’t have much anyway.”

  “She was my friend. She loved those goats.”

  The women halfheartedly offered to help, but Lazorska insisted she could do it alone. “I don’t mind. But go ahead and get the
store organized. I’ll meet you later.”

  They were glad to escape Paraskevia’s sad home and to have time for organizing the store, which took up most of the day. The women found that the villagers’ supplies would easily fill up all the co-op shelves in full view. Evdokia left the notebook on the countertop. “If we need anything, all we have to do is sign it out and this way we won’t have to bother one another all the time,” Evdokia said. It was her idea for everyone to use the honor system.

  Lazorska had not shown up by the time they were finished, so Marusia suggested that they go to the post office and sort out the mail.

  “I haven’t been here since my first time back,” she said. They decided that since Yulia would be leading church services, and Lazorska was of course the healer, and Evdokia in charge of the co-op, then Marusia should be the postmistress. “Remember, you’re still in the Soviet Union and have to work, work, work,” Evdokia teased, but became quiet when no one laughed along with her.

  The women were more somber in the post office than in the store. Lenin’s faded portrait looked down on them as they hauled the sacks to the center of the dusty floor and poured out bundles of mail at a time. There was nothing postmarked after April 1986. Between the three of them, they sorted the mail according to families and bundled it with the string and remnants of rope they found buried in drawers that hid stamps and an abacus with black wooden beads. Then they shoved all the mail that fit into pigeonholes and piled the rest on the countertop.

  “Look, here’s a letter for you,” Yulia said to Evdokia. It was addressed to Hanna in care of her grandmother.

  Evdokia stared at it. It was a postcard with a picture of a deep blue ocean. Square white granite hotels were prominent in the background. On the other side was a greeting wishing the newlyweds good luck. “That’s from my husband’s nephew’s family in Odesa. They couldn’t send a real wedding present, oh, no. I’m surprised they bothered to write at all.”

  Marusia found an envelope addressed to Zosia. “Well, here’s one for my family.” She felt odd. It couldn’t be from Zosia’s mother because the return address wasn’t from Siberia. Her stomach tightened. She searched for a more recent letter from Zosia, but none had come for her.