Baba Dunja's Last Love

by Alina Bronsky

  Grandchildren always used to leave the cities during their summer breaks and stay out in the country with their grandparents. The school holidays were long, three hot summer months, and the parents in the cities didn’t have such long vacations. It was the same in our village, from June until August city kids ran around and in no time at all they had sunburned faces, bleached hair, and dirt-crusted feet. They went together into the woods to pick berries, and they swam in the river. Noisy as a flock of birds they went up and down the main road, stealing apples and wrestling in the muck.

  When they got too wild, we sent them out into the fields to collect potato bugs, which threatened our crops. They would pick them off the plants by the bucket-load and then burn them. I can still hear the sound of all the shells popping in the fire. We really miss the little thieves now—the world’s never seen a plague of potato bugs like the one we’ve had since the reactor.

  Everyone in Tschernowo knew that I was a nurse’s assistant. I was always called when children had broken something or had abdominal pain that wouldn’t stop. Once a boy had eaten too many unripe plums. The fibers caused a blockage in his gut. He was pale and writhing around on the floor, and I told them to get him to the hospital immediately, and the boy was saved by an emergency operation. There was one with appendicitis and another who turned out to be allergic to a bee sting.

  I liked the children, with their fidgety feet, scratched-up arms, and high-pitched voices. If there’s anything I miss these days it’s them. Those of us who live in Tschernowo these days don’t have any grandchildren. Or if we do we never see them. Except maybe in a photo. My walls are covered with pictures of Laura. Irina sends me new ones in almost every letter.

  It probably wouldn’t take Laura long to become a carefree summer holiday child. If everything were like before. Though it’s hard for me to imagine it. In her baby pictures she had a serious little face, and I wondered what sort of thoughts lived in her head to project such darkness from her eyes. She never wore bows or barrettes in her hair. Even as a baby she didn’t smile.

  In the most recent photos she has long legs and hair that’s almost white. She still looks very serious. She’s never written to me. Her father is German. Irina promised me a wedding photo—one of the few promises she hasn’t kept. She always sends greetings from him. I collect all the letters from Germany in a box in my dresser.

  I never ask Irina whether Laura is healthy. I never ask about Irina’s own health, either. If there’s one thing I’m afraid of, it’s the answer to that question. So I just pray for them, even though I don’t believe there’s anyone who listens to my prayers.

  Irina always asks about my health. When we see each other—every two years—the first thing she always asks about is my blood counts. As if I have any idea. She asks about my blood pressure and whether I’ve had a breast cancer scan.

  “My dear girl,” I say, “look at me. Do you see how old I am? And I made it this far without vitamins or operations or checkups. If something bad manages to worm its way into me now, I will leave it be. I don’t want anybody touching me or sticking needles in me, and that much I have earned.”

  Irina shakes her head. She knows that I’m right but she can’t escape her surgeon’s mind-set. At her age I thought the same way. And the way I was at her age, I would have picked a huge fight with the me of today.

  When I look at our village, I don’t feel as if it’s nothing but a collection of living corpses running around. Some people won’t last long, it’s true, but the reactor alone isn’t to blame for that. There’s not many of us, you can count us all on two hands. Five or seven years ago there were more of us, when all at one time a dozen people followed my example and moved back to Tschernowo. We’ve buried a few of them in the meantime. Others are like the spiders, resilient even if their webs are a bit erratic.

  Marja for instance is a little crazy with her goat and her rooster, which is simmering so nicely in my pot. Unlike me, Marja knows her blood pressure exactly because she takes it three times a day. If it’s too high she gulps down a pill. If it’s too low she gulps down a different pill. That way she always has something to do. But she’s bored anyway.

  She has a medicine cabinet that could kill the entire village. She restocks it regularly in Malyschi. She takes antibiotics for a cold or diarrhea. I tell her she shouldn’t take them, that they actually do more damage than good, but she doesn’t listen. I’m too healthy, she says, I wouldn’t understand. And it’s true, I can’t remember the last time I had a cold.

  The aroma of the chicken broth fills my whole house and wafts out the window. I pull the rooster out of the pot and lay it on a plate to cool. The cat brays and I raise a cautionary finger at her. I fish out the vegetables, too, they’ve already lent the broth their flavor and now they’re just limp. I wrap them in an old newspaper and take the bundle out to the compost pile. There are pumpkins growing on my compost pile, in the fall I’ll harvest them and pass them out to people in the village, otherwise I’ll have to eat gruel with pumpkin all winter.

  I pour the broth through a sieve into a second pot. A thousand fatty golden eyes peer up at me from the new pot. I read in a newspaper that you should skim off the fat. But I disagree. If you want to live, you have to eat fat. You have to eat sugar once in a while, too, and first and foremost lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. In summer I eat cucumber and tomato salad almost every day. And herbs by the bunch, they grow thick and green in my garden—dill, chives, parsley, basil, rosemary.

  The meat isn’t too hot anymore, I can touch it with my fingers. I carefully remove it from the bones and put it in a bowl. I used to cut it up into small pieces for my children and make sure I divided it evenly between them. Even though Alexej was just eighteen months younger than Irina, he was a skinny little fellow, and I was sometimes tempted to save the best bits for him.

  We ate a lot of chicken soup because there were a lot of chickens in Tschernowo. I made borscht and schi and solyanka from the broth. It was never boring. I can picture Irina cutting meat into small bites for Laura when she was younger. If Laura was here, I would tell her what her mother was like as a child. But Laura is far away and stares out at me from the wall with sad gray eyes.

  The day goes by quickly when you have things to do. I tidy up the house. I wash a few pairs of underpants and hang them on the line in the garden. The sun dries and bleaches them, and it takes just two hours before I can fold them and put them away.

  I scrub the dirtied stockpot with sand, rinse it with well water, and leave it, too, to dry in the sun. I have to take a break at some point, and I sit down on the bench in front of the house with a newspaper. I get the papers from Marja. She found them in her house when she moved in. The single woman who used to live there had read a lot of papers, including the good women’s papers: Factory Woman and Woman Farmer, every issue. Bundles of them, each bound with twine, were stacked under the bed and in the toolshed. Marja gave them all to me. I read them whenever I have time during the day and also before I fall asleep at night.

  In the issue of Woman Farmer I open are recipes using sorrel, a sewing pattern, a short love story set on a collective farm, and a disquisition on the theme Why women shouldn’t wear pants in their free time. It’s from February 1986.

  I pour half of the soup into a smaller pot and look around for a top that will fit it. Holding it by the handles, I carry it over to Marja’s. I have to suddenly blink as I pass the fence because Konstantin’s ghost is sitting there swaying in the wind. I nod at him and he answers by flapping his wings wildly.

  Cats are crowded in front of Marja’s house, and no wonder: it smells like valerian inside. Marja is a large woman, particularly in width. She’s sitting in armchair and her body arches over the backrest. Her gaze is fixed on the TV, which is equipped with two antennas. The screen is black.

  “What’s on today?” I ask and put the pot on the kitchen table.

  “No
thing but shit,” says Marja. “Same as always.”

  That’s why I never turn on my television. I dust it off once in a while and the cat likes to sleep on top of it, on a doily. On my last visit to Malyschi I saw in a shopwindow that there are now TVs you can hang on the wall like a painting. Marja’s by contrast is like a potbellied chest, and it takes up half the room.

  “What did you bring?” She doesn’t turn toward me because it’s difficult when you’re wedged into a chair the way she is.

  “The soup,” I say. “Your share.”

  She immediately starts to cry and the goat, which is lying in Marja’s bed, adds a baleful “meeeeeh.”

  When I get out a bowl, I can’t help but notice that Marja has really let things get out of hand lately.

  Her dishes are covered with a fatty film, which tells me she’s scrimping on soap. The sink is stopped up and moldy. And this woman says I should clear out the spiderwebs in my place. There’s a pile of colorful pills on the table.

  “Marja,” I say sternly, “tell me, what’s going on?”

  She waves my question off with one hand and with the other rummages around between her breasts. From between various layers of unwashed clothing, she pulls out a photo and hands it to me.

  I push my glasses up to my forehead and hold the picture closer to my face. It’s a black-and-white photo of a couple: a girl in a white wedding dress with a long train, and a fellow with broad shoulders and a low forehead in a black suit. The girl is heartbreakingly beautiful: big eyes beneath thick lashes and a mouth that promises sweet kisses. She looks fragile in the slightly too big dress that’s not been fitted quite right. And although the contrast couldn’t be more stark, I recognize immediately that the girl is Marja.

  “That’s your Alexander?” I ask.

  And Marja cries more and says that she got married fifty-one years ago today.

  I should have realized that Marja isn’t just lazy and messy. She’s lazy and messy because she’s suffering from depression. Back when I was a nurse’s assistant nobody had depression and when people killed themselves you called them insane, unless it was out of love. Later on I read in a newspaper that there was such a thing as depression, and I asked Irina about it on her last visit.

  She looked at me as if she didn’t want to answer at first. She wanted to know why I was asking, like it was some kind of state secret.

  I told her I just wanted to know if there was anything to it. And Irina said in Germany it’s very widespread, practically like a stomach bug.

  And when I look at Marja, I think maybe it sloshed across the border at some stage. Perhaps if she’d moved back to Tschernowo earlier, she could have avoided it—if there’s one thing that can’t harm us here, it was the epidemics that sweep through the rest of the world.

  Marja has told me a lot about her Alexander. Most importantly, that he beat the living daylights out of her and at some point while in a drunken stupor got run over by a tractor. She took care of him for a while after that, and he continued to curse her and to throw his cane—and whatever other heavy objects he could grab—at her from bed. A few days before the reactor he threw a radio at her and managed to hit her. The radio was totally destroyed, which made Marja so upset that she left with the liquidators and a sack of clothes without ever turning around to look at Alexander. He was discovered only after he was dead, and now she’s reproaching herself and painting a rosy picture of her past.

  I’m of only one mind about that sort of thing: when two adults live together but have no children, they can just as well live apart. That’s not a marriage, that’s just a lark.

  But I keep my opinion to myself.

  I thoroughly wash two of Marja’s bowls and dry them with a dish towel that turns out to be a piece of curtain. Marja mutters to herself that I’m wasting her water and that she’s too weak to go to the well. I click my tongue, she needs to pipe down.

  She wrenches herself out of the armchair and comes to the table. Her body is massive and the rickety dining chair groans beneath her backside. It’s a mystery how someone can get so fat in a village where you have to either grow all your food or drag it all laboriously home from town.

  I shove a bowl of chicken soup over to her.

  As she takes the spoon in her hand, dunks it in the golden broth, and guides it to her lips, I suddenly see it: Marja as a young bride with a fear of the future flickering in her eyes. Her former beauty hasn’t completely disappeared, it’s still here in the room like a ghost. How much easier I’ve had it my entire life: never being beautiful means never being afraid of losing your beauty. Only my feet drove men wild, and now I can’t even cut my toenails. Lately Marja has helped me do it.

  The goat jumps out of Marja’s bed and comes over to us at the table. It puts its head on Marja’s lap and peers over at me. I take a mouthful of soup, which is clear and salty like tears.

  And I think to myself that Marja should never have come here. It’s not the radiation. It’s the peace and quiet that is so bad for her. Marja belongs in the city, where she can quarrel with the baker every morning. Since nobody here has any desire to fight with her, she’s lost her sense of self and just sits around stewing, and she’s wilting as a result.

  There are about thirty houses lining our main road. Not even half of them are inhabited. Everyone knows everyone else, everyone knows where the others are from, and I suspect everyone could tell you what time of day his or her neighbors go to the bathroom and how often they turn over in their sleep. Which doesn’t mean that everyone here spends time together. People who move back to Tschernowo have no desire for companionship.

  Money is also a factor. There are places available in Malyschi, but the gray five-story buildings from the Khrushchev era have leaky pipes and thin, moldy walls. Instead of gardens there are courtyards with a rusty swing, the remains of an old slide, and a row of never-emptied garbage barrels. Anyone who wants to plant tomatoes needs a dacha outside of town, to which an overly crowded bus goes once a day. I would have to have rented, and my pension would have only been enough to cover living with strangers as a lodger. And the room would have been tiny.

  Though we do have people in Tschernowo for whom money is not an issue, as far as I can tell. The Gavrilows, for instance, are educated people, I can tell from the tips of their noses. And also by the fact that they are accustomed to living in comfort. They could win prizes for their garden. They have a raised bed with cucumbers, a greenhouse, and a contraption that they grill meats on during the warm months, just like on television. And they have roses, a never-ending supply of roses in every color, which grow in bushes that entwine the fence. Mr. Gavrilow often stands in front of those roses in a suit, and as soon as he catches sight of a withered blossom he cuts it off. Mrs. Gavrilow dabs the leaves with a soapy cloth to ward off aphids. When you walk past their property it smells like honey and perfume. But they never speak to anyone, so if I urgently needed salt I’d go somewhere else.

  I could go to Lenotschka, who from the back looks like a girl and from the front like a doll. A doll like the ones Irina had, but aged for decades. Lenotschka mostly sits in her house, knits an endlessly long scarf, and smiles when someone addresses her. Doesn’t answer, though. She has a lot of chickens, and they seem to multiply at her place like flies. I could go to Lenotschka if I needed something, she always shares if she has it.

  I would go to Petrow, too, except that he has no salt in his home. He is cancer-ridden from head to foot. After his operation they wanted to keep him in the hospital to die. He fled like he was in prison, jumped out the window in his surgical gown, his IV pulled along behind him. He moved into the house of his ex-wife’s grandparents in Tschernowo and didn’t have much more in mind than to die quickly and peacefully. But that was a while ago now. He’s been here for a year, to date the last one to arrive. Petrow doesn’t grow anything in his garden because he says he doesn’t want to feed the cancer an
ymore. He considers salt and sugar unhealthy, so he doesn’t have either in his home.

  I put in a spoon, carry the bowl of chicken soup across the street, the German hiking sandals raise dust. I call loudly at Petrow’s gate, and when he doesn’t answer I walk in. He is still alive, and he emerges from the hedges zipping up his fly. A hatchet with a rusty blade is stuck in his belt. Beneath his left arm he squeezes a yellowed little book that he probably found in some empty house. The first few months he annoyed the whole of Tschernowo knocking on doors and asking for reading material—he had arrived with nothing but a bag with underwear and a notebook in it.

  “Greetings, Baba Dunja,” he says. “I’m not much when it comes to gardening, and these blackberries are wearing me out.” He shows me his scratched arms and I shake my head apologetically.

  “What’s new in Woman Farmer?” he asks.

  His skin is so translucent that I wonder if perhaps he has become a ghost after all.

  “You need to eat something,” I say. “Otherwise you won’t have any strength.”

  He sniffs the bowl.

  “Your fat friend’s old rooster?”

  He sure shoots his mouth off for someone so translucent.

  “That’s why it’s finally quiet,” he says, sniffing the soup again.

  “Eat.”

  “That stuff will kill you. Salt, fat, animal protein.”

  I’m a peaceful person, but I’m slowly developing an urge to dump the soup down his front.

  He seats himself on the bench in front of the house and polishes my spoon with his shirt.

  “I like you, Baba Dunja,” he says. The spoon shakes in his hand. He probably hasn’t eaten in days.

  “Come over whenever you are hungry,” I say. “I always cook fresh.”

  “I may be an asshole but I’m no freeloader.”

  “You can thank me by repairing my shutters.”