After the frost, the next few days were brighter and warmer, and a genuine thaw came with the new moon. Marusia felt a surge of cleanliness in the air after she returned from ringing the evening bells. She looked up at the diamond-lustered stars in the sky and almost felt hopeful again.
Evdokia had dinner ready—potatoes fried in sunflower oil with a cinnamon-like fragrance to it. “This is wonderful,” said Marusia. She felt her spirits restored. “What did you do?”
Evdokia eagerly watched Marusia eat. “So, you like it.” She smiled broadly. “Well, I put in some spices. Much better, eh?”
“Oh, did you go back to your house and find some?”
“Not exactly. I went further down the road to my neighbor’s. You remember Fedya the co-op owner? His wife had the most beautiful kitchen. She was a wonderful cook. And you know why—well, because she had all of these spices. Things I never heard of like
kuew-ree
. She has red and yellow
kuew-ree
.”
“How in the world do you know?”
“Oh, we often used to go to their home for
praz-nyky
, the holiday parties. And what a fancy cook. After the war, for a time, she worked in a hotel restaurant in the Crimea—that’s where she met Fedya when he was on vacation. What a cook she was! She met Frenchmen who visited the hotel and they gave her recipes.”
Marusia had heard various rumors about Fedya’s wife, but she didn’t say anything. “So where did you get the spices?” She put down her spoon. “You went in and took them!”
“Look, what good does it do to leave these things to rot? Marusia, I was thinking. Maybe you and I are here, but it may be that nobody else will return. Maybe everyone died off, all our generation—gone! None of the young ones will come back here. Why would they?”
Marusia pursed her lips and winced at hearing her own forbidden thoughts spoken aloud in Evdokia’s grating tone, shouted full into her face. She pushed the plate of potatoes away from her and crossed her arms.
“Look,” Marusia said, “You came. I came. Others will come. Wait until spring. It’s too hard to travel now.
Then what will happen? We live off everyone’s food and they come back and send us to Siberia as thieves. No! A sin. No!”
“But this is an emergency! You’ve heard of people starving in the snow, and yet it is an unwritten law of God that people in need can take from others in an emergency. Like the hunters lost in the woods who happen to find an abandoned house. They eat the food, use the wood for heat, live, write a thank-you note, and that’s it. Off they go. Be well.”
Marusia glared at her friend. “Cinnamon or
kuer-ski
or whatever you put in the potatoes is not going to save my life. A plain potato, even a cold one, is just fine by me.”
“Oh, all right,” Evdokia said. “But we do need powdered milk. We’re running low. We need medicines. You still have that grippe, and my eyes itch so much I want to shoot someone. And what are we going to do for water? Maybe what’s in that pump is poisoned. Maybe we should search for mineral water in bottles.”
Marusia stood up and stoked the coals in the stove in silence.
“Oh, be practical, Marusia! If I hadn’t come along, you would have had to do this soon enough. Any day now we may be on our deathbeds. It’s not a sin to take what we need to survive!”
Evdokia was right—Marusia had to yield on this. The water was bad—tinged with rust and certainly worse. Even boiling it didn’t help it much. Evdokia persuaded
Marusia that they could at least visit some of the houses tomorrow and “see what’s around in case of an emergency.” Marusia was silent. “That’s all I’m saying. So we know where to go in case we need something,” Evdokia urged.
“And Marusia,” Evdokia said after she won. “You had to admit—those were good potatoes!”
T
HE NEXT DAY
Evdokia eagerly led the way inside Fedya’s house. Marusia had been in it a few times before, but only because other villagers were collectively invited for a baptism or an anniversary feast. The kitchen was large and sunny, and the cupboards were filled with spice bottles with rubber stoppers, the sort found in a scientist’s laboratory. “Look.” Evdokia jubilantly held up a ring of dried mushrooms that were hung on a string. “There’s more.” She held up canned herring and powdered milk. “And the best prize of all—water from Vichy. See, I told you there’d be water!”
“Well, maybe we’ll take the water for emergencies,” Marusia said.
“And the mushrooms.”
“No, that’s not needed.” But Evdokia already wore the string around her neck.
“This is only the beginning,” said Evdokia. “They had so much! They were like rich Americans! Come here.” She grabbed Marusia’s hand and dragged her into a bedroom where an entire wall was covered with clothing
that hung from a long iron bar suspended from chains drilled into the high ceiling. The clothes were protected with a thick sheet of clear plastic which Evdokia lifted up. She eagerly grabbed the skirt of a pink chiffon ballgown. “Look at this wealth!” She took out a coat and blew on its collar. “Mink!”
“Did she get those things from the French chefs too?” Marusia said dryly.
Evdokia giggled like a naughty girl. “Oh, look at this.” She took out a low-cut red velvet evening gown with wide sleeves trimmed in black fur and a train. “Oh wouldn’t I look beautiful in this one?” She held it up to herself and admired her reflection in the mirror of a large vanity table that was crowded with exotic perfumes and vibrantly colored lipsticks. Evdokia smiled and showed her yellow cracked teeth beneath her puffy red eyes. “Well, once I was pretty. Now
starist’ ne radist’
, old age isn’t happiness, as they say.”
Marusia was uncomfortable. She thought it was like picking over the things left by a dead person. “I thought we were only going to search for necessary food.”
Evdokia ignored her. “I used to be quite a dancer when I was young. Oh, well, there’s no one to dance with here, anyway.” She sadly put the dress back on its hanger.
“Not with me, that’s for sure,” Marusia said. She left the bedroom. “I’m going back home,” she called out. She debated taking the mineral water with her but decided
not to. “We know where it is in case we really do need it.” She felt better about her decision. Marusia was out the door and halfway home before she turned around to hear Evdokia’s
koo-koos
behind her.
“Wait for me! Hey!
Koo-koo!
” She came up to her friend, holding two bottles of Vichy water. “You forgot these.” Marusia didn’t say anything until she noticed Evdokia’s shawl—a bright turquoise-and-white paisley-fringed one that was draped over her shabby brown woolen coat.
“I never saw that on you before.”
“Oh, I think it suits my age better than that red dress.”
Marusia faced Evdokia. “You can’t take people’s things! I don’t care how our government allows it or how poor we are in this world . . . it’s still a sin.”
“We are not in the real world anymore!” Evdokia shouted back. “This is an emergency . . . just like it was during the war. Worse. At least there were armies to fight for us, but here it’s only you and me. Two defenseless old women!”
“How is stealing that shawl going to help us?”
“I might have to barter it someday. Maybe your friend, the dogshooter, needs to be bribed. He might come back.”
Marusia spat on the ground in anger. She started to walk home alone.
“It’s an emergency because you keep your damn house so cold I could die from pneumonia. Not from the
radiation either!” Evdokia screamed. “Because of you, I’ll die!”
Marusia started to say that she should at least have the decency to steal something black for mourning, but forgot. Instead, her face beamed into a smile.
Evdokia caught up to her friend and stared at her. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked, breathless, turning around to see.
Coming from the woods was a woman holding a sack over her shoulder like
D’id Moroz
, Grandfather Winter. She was dressed in black, her face and hair covered by a severe black knit scarf that wound around her head into a turban above her horizontal, knitted black brows.
“
Slava Isusu Chrystu
,” Slavka Lazorska said, putting her sack down on the snow-dusted ground. “I could hear you screaming all the way in the village, so I took the shortcut through the woods to see if I could help stop the fistfight or maybe mend some wounds.”
The women embraced one another. “It’s good to hear all that yelling,” Lazorska teased. “I knew that I was definitely back in Starylis.”
Marusia’s smile was radiant. “Come to my house. I’ll make a welcome dinner.”
“Yes, and we’ll share with you some wonderful vodka that even you didn’t know about, Marusia,” Evdokia put in.
Marusia laughed. “Well, I’m glad you’re here now
Dokhtor
. Otherwise, Evdokia and I would have killed
one another and you would have returned and be all alone.”
She grabbed Lazorska’s sack, and the three women linked arms on their walk to Marusia’s.
L
AZORSKA WAS RELUCTANT
to move in with the two. Having spent so long in cramped rooms, she said she yearned to be back in her own home, where she could stay up all night if she chose to, which Marusia well understood to mean not be bothered by the others’ complaints and bickering.
She looked thinner, gaunt, and her braided hair had turned completely gray. Even the fine hairs above her lips had turned white, though her fierce eyebrows had remained as black as crow feathers. She didn’t say much about her experiences after the evacuation, but whatever she survived had aged her threefold. She moved more slowly and kept her mouth shut in a grimace of pain.
She did say that she had been sent to Moscow for a while, where she grew weak from living in the city. From there she had gone on to live with some distant
relatives in Kharkiv, and when she saw how hard their lives were, she found her way home as soon as she was able to gain her strength.
“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.”
T
HE 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.”