The Sky Unwashed

by Irene Zabytko

  “Four of us,” Marusia answered. She was annoyed at Evdokia’s unusual muteness.

  “What makes you think that you are above the law of the people’s government and you can live anywhere you want?”

  Marusia wanted to be as convincing as Zosia would have been. She needed to choose her words carefully, in Russian—otherwise it would be so easy for this Khrushchev impostor to dismiss them, or worse, send them to a jail as spies or for that catchall anti-Soviet crime of hooliganism.

  “But tovarishch,” Marusia said carefully, reaching into her bag for her internal passport with the heavily embossed hammer and sickle emblem on the red cover. “You’ll see that my passport says that I am and always have been a resident of Starylis. Even in Kiev, I tried to find a place after my son died in a hospital, but they never gave me a home. He worked for the plant here. He was an engineer, and a Young Pioneer and a Party member, too. I myself worked nearly all of my life on the collective farm, and my husband served and died in the Great Patriotic War….” What else could she say? Marusia thought wildly. So far, the magister sat there glaring at her. The smirking man in the trench coat yawned. She swallowed and continued.

  “We are old women who have never been anywhere except on the land the government let us use to live on. For which we are grateful. We only ask that you in Soviet brotherhood and friendship continue to protect us and let us live our last few years in good citizenship for our Soyuez by giving us a cow—at least.” There, that sounded patriotic enough, Marusia thought. She nudged Evdokia to echo her words, but Marusia saw that the nunya merely nodded her head and smiled like a fool at the two men.

  “Well, this is highly unusual,” the magister said. He wiped his perspiring face with the thin paper napkin that was placed under his tea glass and gazed at his cohort. “What the devil am I supposed to do with these babysi?” he whispered to the other man.

  The trench coat leaned down toward the magister’s shiny bald pate and whispered, “Listen, this could be great publicity for us. It would prove that people can come back. And,” he said in a lower tone, “they’re old anyway. Hell, they’ll be gone soon enough. If we tell Pravda about how we’re taking care of the people and leak it to the West, we’ll look better for it. Give them a damn cow. What the hell!”

  “And our pensions, please,” Marusia said.

  “And our other requests, please,” Evdokia finally spoke out.

  “Well,” said the fat man, pulling on one of his thick eyebrows. “The cow is, of course, something you should have. We’ll get you one soon. As for the rest, I’ll take it up with my committee.”

  “Thank you, good sir,” said Evdokia, clasping her hands and shaking them in front of her in a gesture of thanks. She turned and headed for the door.

  Marusia didn’t want to have come so far and not have anything to show for it. She didn’t trust the fat stupid man nor his laughing partner. She gingerly sat down on the edge of the white chair. “We need a cow, now. We haven’t had milk or cheese or butter for over a year.” She tilted her chair forward toward the magister.

  His wide face stared blankly at Marusia.

  “Oh, give them a damn cow,” the trench coat said. “Come on, Sasha. What do you care?”

  “Oksana,” the magister bellowed. A middle-aged woman with big worried eyes behind huge pink-rimmed glasses hurried in. “Does Pripyat have any cows to spare? A milking one.”

  MARUSIA AND EVDOKIA returned to the village in a pickup truck arranged by the plant. In the back, a skinny but live cow was tethered for them. On the way from the outskirts of Prypiat’ where they found the cow, the driver teased the women that its calf was born with two heads. “I can’t believe such a thing,” Evdokia said with scorn.

  “Have it your way,” he chuckled. The three of them pushed the cow into Marusia’s small shed, where her old cow once lived.

  That night the women drank warm fresh milk, which was sweet enough for their hunger. No one mentioned how wan the cow looked or how mangy its fur. No one laughed at the slight blue tinge of its hooves, or at the way it mooed, like a broken siren.

  Chapter 21

  ON THE SECOND anniversary of the explosion, the women wore black armbands they tore from old pieces of cloth. They took turns ringing the bells for a total of thirty-one times in memory of the official count of the dead. But when they were finished, they seemed unable to stop. They knew the catastrophe had stolen more souls than that, and so the ringing continued far past thirty-one.

  In the evening, the women gathered together and Yulia sang the panakhyda inside the church. They lit candles and made a solemn procession around the church and into the graveyard, where they finished their prayers.

  Their Easter celebration earlier in the month had been barely more joyous. Marusia made a paska from the flour Yulia donated and from the precious powdered egg mixture Evdokia had found in one of her neighbors’ homes.

  Evdokia, for her part, gave Marusia a cup and a half full of dried raisins and generous handfuls of candy sprinkles she had used in the past to adorn her own Easter bread. They shared a simple loaf, which turned out lumpy and tasted of too much flour in the dough because Marusia refused to use the bottled water that would have made the bread lighter.

  Marusia grated her fresh horseradish root into a batch of her best new beets, which were a faded red color when she boiled and peeled away their leathery black skins. Disappointing, but it had to do for the holy day.

  This Easter, they wouldn’t have a ham, but Lazorska was able to churn butter from the cow’s cream, and Yulia shaped the butter into a lamb, an odd custom she’d learned from a Polish prisoner in the camps.

  Yulia also found a nest full of blue robin’s eggs in the graveyard, and she wanted to collect them and decorate them as pysanky—traditional elaborately decorated eggs—because, as she reminded the others, “You know the saying—pysanky hold all the evil between the lines we draw on the eggshells, and that way the world will continue.” The eggs smelled odd, as though the unhatched birds were already stillborn. She pierced a hole in one of the eggs with a sewing needle and tried to blow out the yolk. A gray, putrid fluid flowed out. “Maybe next year we’ll have some proper chicken eggs,” she reasoned. She threw the egg out into the field with great force, and afterward she could not lift her arm without a stab of pain.

  Together the women attended church for the Easter service and blessed their paltry baskets with holy water before going to Evdokia’s house for the holiday breakfast. Their meal was morose. The women were wearied by their lives, and they had little compensation for their futures. They ate their disappointing food quietly, drank their fifty-gram shots of aged home-brewed horilka, and recalled the Resurrection in their toasts. No one had the heart to liken their situation to a rebirth, no one dared say that the four of them sitting together in somber anxiety was a miracle. “More like the Last Supper than an Easter breakfast,” Evdokia grumbled. She was the only one who ate the powdered chocolate cake that tasted bitter and crumbled into pieces on their meager table.

  THE SPRING TURNED into another humid summer, and the women tended their gardens. Lazorska was busy trying to revitalize her medicinal shrubs, but many of the plants and herbs were too withered to grow or had altogether disappeared from the garden. “This earth is too sick for my healing plants,” she joked.

  At summer’s end, they decided to chop down some birch trees for the coming winter. They wanted to stack the wood so that it would dry in time for the frosts. Yulia winced at the work. She had spent her youth doing this work in exile in Siberia and could feel her strength diminishing. Her limp was worse, and her arm was stiff with pain. Still, she refused to ask the others for help and wanted to cut her own wood. Trying to pull down an old rotted tree by using leather straps she tied to her chest and waist, she collapsed and couldn’t move. She managed to heave herself up and drag her twisted body to her kitchen. There, she crumpled and lay on the floor until Evdokia and Marusia found her the next day.

  Yuli
a was dying—it showed in her thin face, which folded into pain whenever she coughed up gobbets of warm, dark blood. She lingered for three days before she asked Lazorska to take her away.

  Early that morning, Marusia woke up to find a worn Lazorska sitting on her doorstep. “We had to let another go,” she said, concentrating on the sun that was mating with the morning clouds.

  Evdokia was the most sorrowful over Yulia. “I hoped I’d go first so that she could sing for me.”

  The funeral was still and quiet, because no one had the heart to sing without Yulia’s voice.

  WHEN EVDOKIA’S TURN came, she would not go without a fight. Evdokia had caught pneumonia harvesting her squash and potatoes in the early fall. The squash vines were especially hearty and blooming when she fell over in her patch and could not stop gasping. Marusia happened to have seen her bent over her garden on her way from ringing the church bells. “Koo-koo! Hey, did you find a man you are going to reject and give a squash to?” Marusia called out to her friend. It was a folk custom for a woman to give a suitor a squash if she rejected his love. When Evdokia didn’t answer, Marusia ran to her and half carried her friend into the house.

  Evdokia’s condition grew worse, but she survived and with great will lingered most of the difficult winter. Marusia had moved in, and she and Lazorska tended her.

  Gradually, Evdokia grew less interested in her own life and slept without the aid of the dried hops Marusia brewed for her in teas. She had turned a jaundiced yellow and lost weight. With her high fevers, she often hallucinated. Other times she was lucid. In the middle of a great frost that winter, Evdokia complained in a clear voice that her skin was about to explode and begged to be taken away. Marusia ran down the road to call for Lazorska, who followed her and brought with her the sack of forbidden medicines.

  Marusia watched as Lazorska caressed Evdokia’s head and spoke quiet, soothing words to calm her fears. “It will be fine,” she whispered.

  “I’m so afraid,” Evdokia gasped out. Her face glistened with sweat. Marusia blessed her with holy water. Lazorska gave her a root herb mixed with spearmint and valerian to chew on, then a drink that smelled of sweet almonds. Evdokia slept hard, her breathing dropping to shallow wisps.

  Lazorska and Marusia were with her when Evdokia quietly sighed her last breath. The three held each other’s hands until Evdokia’s grew cold. Before the women left, Marusia placed Oleh’s pipe on Evdokia’s still chest.

  The winter dragged on for the last two women, who made sure to see each other at least once a day, although they had little to say. Marusia liked to visit the new graves alone so she could think about her two dead friends—not the way they were in the last miserable months of old age and torment, but when they were all young together. Yulia had been a tall, dark girl with a loud booming voice that drowned out the choir at church. She was an athlete, too—always running away from the boys who tried to catch her around the waist. Her long, wavy hair had a way of coming undone in the wind. And Evdokia—Marusia’s best school friend. They had liked the same boys, shared their silly girlish secrets and squabbles together, and were inseparable until Marusia married. Evdokia never liked Antin. “And you were right about him, you bossy one,” Marusia said, smiling through her sadness. “I should’ve listened to you, my friend. I wish I could hear you now.”

  Marusia kept busy canning what she could, including Evdokia’s squash, which she boiled and strained but, out of grief, simply couldn’t bring herself to eat.

  Chapter 22

  ANOTHER SPRING CAME, bringing the welcome trickle of water from the icicles that had formed beneath the roof eaves and were melting away in the warming sun. Yellow crocuses and snowdrops grew strong and hearty in the snow. Thin shrills of young birds were heard on the budding trees, and Marusia brushed a new caterpillar off a dead oak.

  More people came back. Some returned because they had read a story in Pravda about villagers returning to the zone. When their patience was worn through by the deaths of families and the sorrow of lost homes, many of the older former Starylis villagers returned home. Almost all of them were welcomed by Marusia’s bell ringing when they arrived. By the end of May, the village had grown to a community of fifteen people.

  Marusia was only too happy to have them come and take over the duties of the co-op and the post office. She was relieved to return the foodstuffs to their rightful owners and to hand out the rest of the old mail to the survivors. From them she heard their stories and learned about what had happened to the others she once knew and who would never be seen on earth again. Unfortunately, no one had any news about Zosia or the children.

  At last, the mail was coming through to Starylis again. With the others, Marusia visited the post office once a week when the mail truck stopped by. She was always disappointed. She never received any word from Zosia. Someday she would, she hoped. The government had mailed her some of her pension, but she felt too weak and weary to attempt another trip to the magister for the rest of her lost money. “Maybe somebody else could handle such matters,” she told herself. “I can’t fight anymore.”

  The church doors reopened, another priest came, and the entire Mass was sung every Sunday morning. But Marusia kept her custom of ringing the bells more in memory of the dead and because it eased her soul. All of the newcomers replanted their gardens, and a few of the stronger ones cultivated and harvested some sections of the kolhosp. They were intent on selling their new crops into the cities, just as before.

  Still, each survivor suffered from ailments that were blamed on the radiation. Lazorska did all she could when she could be found. As time passed, she kept more and more to herself and grew thinner and quieter, and gradually, fewer people sought her skills.

  Only one death occurred that summer among the returnees, and it was one that was not related to the poison. Ivan Avramenko tried to repair old Paraskevia Volodymyrivna’s ruined roof because he thought he would live there instead of in his own much smaller house. He fell off a ladder that wobbled away from the side of the building and broke his neck. After that, Paraskevia Volodymyrivna’s house was considered cursed and was left to rot.

  In late summer, Marusia noticed that the mosquitoes nipped her again, and that normal butterflies were feasting hungrily on sunflower heads. Blueberries grew in robust abandon alongside the dirt roads, and all the returnees except for Marusia had a proliferation of cabbage heads blossoming in their gardens. Her cow did well enough, but it was obvious that one cow—and a motley one at that—could not feed the entire village, and some of the new arrivals petitioned for more cows. The hay field was threshed, and the clover grew back on the green land. Three more cows were soon grazing in the fields. Another miracle was evident when a few storks returned to nest on the roofs of some of the reoccupied homes.

  On the morning of the feast day of the Transfiguration, the cat that had kept Marusia company for so long was found dead on her front step. She hadn’t seen it for a long time, but she recognized its crooked body. “So you did want me to bury you after all,” she murmured. “That’s why you’re here.” She took an old shawl, wrapped the cat in it, and buried it near her yard. She felt lonely for the forlorn animal, although she remembered how sullen and unfriendly it had become before it abandoned her completely.

  The cat’s little funeral made her melancholy. Marusia’s thoughts floated to Lazorska, whom she hadn’t seen for over two weeks. She decided to visit her after she’d rung the bells.

  But when she knocked on Lazorska’s door, there was no answer. Marusia let herself in and found a dark room that was crowded with old potted plants on the shelves and tables all dying from lack of water and care. Dried herb posies veiled in cobwebs hung upside down on the low ceiling beams.

  Lazorska sat at her table near two long windows that overlooked her once beautiful, abundant garden, now unkempt and grown over.

  Marusia tapped the healer gently on the shoulder and was relieved to see her look up, but was surprised by how gaunt and cavernous he
r face had become. “I’m glad you’re here,” Lazorska said in a high-pitched voice that wasn’t her own. “My time is coming. I don’t know how much longer I can stand this….” She pushed herself closer to Marusia. “God should’ve taken me already.”

  She smiled a crooked grin, exposing gaps where her fine white teeth had once been. Her jaw was extended, and her skin was a thin sheath over her protruding cheekbones. “Samohon?” she said, nodding slightly to a bottle with clear liquid on a shelf. Marusia took it down, poured two small ceramic cups full, and placed one in Lazorska’s clawlike hand. She drank it, spilling most of it down her mouth and throat before dropping the cup. Marusia picked it up, filled it again, and raised it to her friend’s gray lips.

  “You, too,” Lazorska whispered. Marusia raised her cup in silence to her friend, then drank it up.

  “There are some gladioli bulbs I saved for you. And hollyhocks,” Lazorska said. She wiped her mouth. “There—on the table, next to the other things.”

  Marusia found the bulbs. “These?” she asked, her eyes on the brown bottle she had watched Lazorska pour from for Yulia and Evdokia. She understood what her friend wanted from her.

  “Thank you. I’ll plant them so that we can have flowers in the church.”

  “Plant them soon,” Lazorska whispered. “Plant them so you can see them soon.” Her eyes were glazed with tears. “Marusia, I’ve been afraid for my death. What if it was a sin?” She grabbed Marusia’s hand and hooked herself to her. “What if what I did all those years was a sin? What happens to my mortal sinful soul if I do it myself and I roast in hell next to all the ones I killed? That’s why I can’t do it to myself. What is next for me?” Lazorska’s thin, humped shoulders shook. She released Marusia’s hand and dropped her head on the table.