Tarasyk pouted more and was constantly wetting his pants. They hadn’t, of course, brought enough clothing with them, and Tarasyk had developed a rash on his thighs. Marusia was grateful that he hardly complained, and that he slept a great deal, sometimes falling asleep in the middle of eating his dinner. He had to be coaxed into eating anything and usually sat morosely, clutching his worn-out stuffed rabbit to his chest, shaking his head in a fierce “no” to any comforting words Marusia or his mother uttered.
Marusia wasn’t allowed to visit Yurko. Only one visitor was permitted each patient, and that right belonged to Zosia. When she felt abandoned by her daughter-in-law, and worn-out by the children’s bad tempers, she consoled herself by searching the room for people she had known back in Starylis. She was sorry that Zosia had insisted they separate themselves from their own people and wait in a line for evacuees from some other, contaminated village. Perhaps her neighbors were in another part of the hospital or somewhere else altogether. Even so, Marusia reasoned, it was lucky in a way that they were in a hospital—Yurko would be properly looked after, and she was near enough to know how he was.
The windows were painted orange and locked securely shut. The basement stank of perspiration, baby diapers and foul odors from the hordes of unwashed and unhealthy people. By the fifth day, tempers flared and
fights erupted because people were tired and frustrated and no one had bothered to examine them or soothe their ailments. The evacuees had expected to be packing up and boarding the buses back to their lives, and they became even more downcast as the successive days turned into successive evenings and they knew that they weren’t going to leave, at least not that day. Perhaps tomorrow, they repeated to themselves every night.
“That’s my dress! Give it back, you
svoloch!
” a woman screamed out. Marusia turned around and saw a short, black-haired woman ripping the front of a red and white polka-dot dress off another woman. The woman in the torn dress was taller and much heavier, and after a moment in which astonishment registered on her jowly face, she hit the smaller woman square on her jaw.
“Thatta girl, Liena. Give it to her good,” shouted a thin man with a gray mustache.
“Mind your own business! That’s my sister she’s hitting,” another dark-haired woman shouted at the man. She rushed up to the fallen victim. “Get a doctor! Is this supposed to be a hospital? Get some help.”
The big woman stood over them, her arm raised over her head. Then she looked down and started to whine over her torn dress. “Look at what that whore did to me!”
Some of the men and young boys started to whistle and clap. The woman in the polka dots looked around and pressed the flap of the ripped piece over her exposed slip. She looked to her husband, who was suddenly
embarrassed and turned his back on everyone. Another onlooker, a young woman, picked up her blanket and gently wrapped it around the woman’s shoulders.
The dark-haired woman was on the floor, sitting up with her hand over her swollen face. She wailed at her sister, and the two of them crept off to another part of the room where several people searched in their belongings for pieces of
salo
that would help alleviate her bruises.
“How crazy we’ve become,” said a skinny old woman with a bright paisley babushka. She dragged her thin mattress toward Marusia and Tarasyk, who had slept through the outburst. A trail of its down feathers fluttered out of a hole. “I don’t want to wake him,” she said in a hushed voice, but made a great noise when she plopped down the mattress. “Oh, how sweet your grandchildren are. I miss mine so much. Come here, darling,” she said to Katia. “Here.” She gave the little girl a sugar cube still in its wrapper.
“Katia, say thank you,” Marusia coaxed. The little girl’s lower lip puffed out, and she looked down at the sticky square in her hand.
“Never mind,
malen’ka
,” the skinny woman said. She reached out to Katia, saw that she was crying, and wiped her eyes with her thumbs. “She must be tired. It’s so cramped for the children.”
Marusia nodded. The women talked together for a bit in guarded tones, but gradually their stories of how
they came to this place flowed out more freely. The woman said she was an evacuee from Prypiat’ and was separated from her sons. She was a widow like Marusia and had three sons—all engineers—working at the plant. “I’m not sure where they are,” she sighed. “I worry about them, and I miss my own grandchildren. But my brother and his wife are here.” She pointed to a chunky man wearing a blue suit with Lenin medals covering its wide lapels. A dour brunette was seated next to him on their mattress. The sister-in-law was scratching her legs. “I want to get away from them,” she whispered. “That Stefa’s got some rash on her and my brother got it, and who knows how dangerous it is, so I want to keep away from them.”
Marusia thought that was wise, although she knew how easy it would be to become infected by anyone in this place . . . people were packed too close together. How could you avoid someone coughing on your neck or breathing on your food? She overheard people around her complaining about their stinging eyes, and sore throats, and headaches. Older people, men mostly, coughed their phlegm onto the floor, which was yet to be washed. Cigarette smoke hung heavily in the air, and they all had to leave their waste in buckets that sat full and stinking for hours in the corridor before someone thought to collect them.
Marusia herself was feeling ill. She breathed heavily, broke into sweats often, and had coughing spells that went on for several minutes at a time, causing her to lose
her breath whenever she had to get up from the mattress. One of her coughing spells came on while she was talking to her new friend, whose name was Marta Fedenko. “Oh, that sounds bad,” said Marta. She took out a thermos from her plastic shopping bag. “Try this. Onion and honey in red wine. It might help.”
Marusia took a cupful and drank it down. “Thank you.” Her chest felt warm, and she liked the sweet silky taste of the clover honey on her tongue. “Are you a healer?” Marusia suddenly thought of Slavka Lazorska and once again felt a stab of homesickness.
“Oh, no,” Marta Fedenko laughed. “I’m a
pensionerka
. But before that I used to be a seamstress.”
“My son was stationed at Prypiat’ when the fires started,” Marusia said. Then she started to cry, because she was tired and ill and felt so alone. “My son is contaminated with radiation. He’s in this hospital. I haven’t seen him since the night we first came here.”
“God grant that he will live,” Marta Fedenko said, and kept silent, looking down politely so that Marusia could weep a bit.
After a while Marusia said, “I wish we could all go home and I could take him back with me and nurse him.”
Katia listened closely to the old women’s talk, then pouted and went back to playing with her doll. She pretended to feed it the sugar cube, but stopped when she saw that another little girl, with black braids, was watching her. She hid the cube in her dress pocket and
ignored the girl. “Look,” whispered the other girl. She held up a small chocolate duck that was half wrapped in torn colorful foil. “I got this.” She pulled off its head and gave it to Katia. The head had melted and then hardened and reformed into an egg-shaped blob. Katia bit into the milk chocolate and smiled, and Marusia remembered that it was Easter Day.
T
HE EVENING MEAL
was dispensed by two nurses who monitored a long table in the corridor. The evacuees were made to stand with their chipped plates and wait in long lines for stingy scoops of warmed-over food. Later, after the people had eaten hurriedly, rushed by the nurses who wanted the plates and utensils returned, a pall descended over the evacuees. In a far corner of the dank room, some of the men gathered and played cards. One man lulled his children with a mandolin and a soft voice. Women tidied up their small territories, ingeniously draping long scarves and skirts over the bare hanging lightbulbs to shield the light from their children’s eyes as they tried to sleep. During the course of the night, old men rose and stumbled over the cramped bodies to relieve themselves in the pails; men and women lowered their voices and argued about what would happen next.
The room was still, and Marusia fell into a deep sleep. Since her arrival in Kyiv, she had dreamed often about the cow she left behind in her village. That night, the cow didn’t appear. Instead, she saw herself walking
in a fog toward the abandoned cowshed, where several mice were eating the hay. Marusia awoke with the certain knowledge that her beloved cow had died.
She sat up, wiped her eyes, coughed, and then looked around to see if she had disturbed anyone. Zosia was asleep on the other mattress with Katia cradled in her arms. Tarasyk was gone. She inched over to where Marta Fedenko lay across her thin mat, her scarf pulled low over her eyes to keep out the light. She was snoring, as were several other people surrounding the small space where Marusia and her family slept.
Marusia struggled to get up. She did not want to wake anyone. Her babushka had slipped off to her shoulders, and she felt the sting of electricity crackling over her thin, messy hair when she pulled the paisley woolen scarf back on her head. She stepped over the sleeping bodies and looked around the room in the dim light.
“Did you see a little boy with blond curly hair?” Marusia frantically whispered to a man propped up against a wall, smoking a cigarette.
He grunted an obscenity and turned away from her.
A woman’s voice loudly ordered Marusia to shut up because she wanted to sleep. But another voice, also a woman’s, coming from the same direction said kindly, “I saw some children go out into the corridor.”
Marusia blindly thanked the second voice and hurried down the badly lit corridor. There was only one direction to go, and Marusia glanced into each of the tiny
windows set in the doors to unknown rooms. She saw beds, and patients, and a group of doctors playing cards, but not Tarasyk.
She followed the L-shaped passage and heard high-pitched voices. A dog yelping. Marusia sighed out a loud “thank God” when she saw three children huddled around a small dog. She grabbed Tarasyk’s hand.
“We saw the doggie, so we followed him,” said the little dark-haired girl whom Marusia recognized as Katia’s new friend.
The dog was mottled brown and black. Its fur was clotted with burrs, and its pink tongue hung limp from its mouth. It looked at the old woman with calm brown eyes and wagged its stub of a tail.
“Where did this dog come from?” Marusia asked.
“We saw him in the hall. He must be hungry. Then we chased him down here,” said another girl.
“Tarasyk, why did you leave us?” Marusia scolded. Her grandson snatched his hand away, but she grabbed hold of it again.
“Let’s go back, children,” Marusia said. “Don’t leave like that again. You’ll worry your parents.”
“What about the doggie?” the dark-haired girl asked.
“He’ll go back where he came from,” she said. “He has a home, too. He’ll find his family. Now, let’s go back and find your parents. Come on.”
The children followed the old woman. They had little trouble finding their way back to their mattresses.
In her own area, Marusia tripped over Zosia’s outstretched legs on the floor. She laid Tarasyk down on their mattress and let him snuggle into the crook of her arm. She peered into Zosia’s face: Her mouth was wide open, her face relaxed. Good thing I’m still looking out for the children, she thought.
Somebody grumbled. Marusia propped herself on her elbow in time to see the dog being chased out of the room by an old man. “What a horrible place,” she muttered. She settled herself and tried to catch some sleep before it was time to wake up and wait in line for another awful breakfast.
Tarasyk tossed his head and pushed himself away from Marusia. He rolled over on one side so that his back was pressed against her. I wish he wouldn’t nap so much during the day, Marusia thought. Now he won’t sleep. She reached out to stroke his head to soothe him. He didn’t turn to her, and when she bent over to look at him, she noticed how tight his eyes were shut. She touched his hair again, and her fingers held a sprig of his blond curls. She looked closer and inspected his head to see if there were any lice or worms from that dog. She saw none, only small patches of reddish bald spots on the back of his head.
We have to leave here, Marusia vowed, or at least find a room with a real sink.
Z
OSIA WAS RESTLESS
. Her bottle of perfume was almost empty. It was important to her that she splash just a drop on her temples and wrists; it helped her to survive the basement’s stench.
Her temper was quick and harsh in the cold, overcrowded room with its sickening pea green walls. Thick water pipes hung so low from the ceiling that she bumped her arms whenever she stretched. It was too easy to get into arguments, especially with the children and her mother-in-law.
Whenever she felt closed in, she would steal away to take a look at Yurko, even though his deteriorating condition depressed her. She spent most days wandering around the hospital corridors.
Within a day after relinquishing her shoes, Zosia was able to trade her lipstick for another pair—flat black vinyl slip-ons with cheap rubber soles she wouldn’t
be caught dead in at work. She got them from a man whose wife was laid up in a ward like Yurko’s. He thought the lipstick would cheer his wife up. The shoes were a bit large for her feet, and the soles were tearing apart at the toes, but she didn’t mind as long as she was able to walk away from the misery of the basement room for a few hours every day.
It was well over a week after they’d been evacuated before the refugees were given ration coupons and six rubles per adult in compensation money. Zosia was determined to take her money and leave the hospital, at least for a day. Maybe she could find some drinking friends of one of her lovers. Someone like that might take her in, and then later, if she could talk someone into it or bribe somebody, they might let her family move in until they could all return to Starylis. She might even finagle a new bottle of perfume.