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.
It was early evening before they were through with the mail. Lazorska was not in sight. Yulia stood up and stretched. “I’m going over to help Lazorska.”
Evdokia walked with her, but Marusia lingered in the post office. She wanted to be alone for a few minutes. She had to open the letter. The envelope was made of faint pink linen paper. She liked the way it felt, elegant and rich. The handwriting looked practiced and large, almost like Katia’s but less childish. She had to open the letter. The letter was written on typical graph paper stationery. Here, the ink strokes were larger and angrier. In Russian it said:
Stay away from my husband or I will have to tell the authorities. I will also tell your husband. Forget about trying to make him to marry you. He’s only using you, and will never leave me. He said that to me himself. For your own good, and his and mine, leave him. He has a wife and his own children. Leave him alone
.
She couldn’t make out the scribbled signature. It looked like Liena, or Genya, maybe Nina. Who is that? she wondered.
She thought about it and then was glad she didn’t know. She was relieved that Yurko didn’t know about this. Or did he? She thought about Zosia and Yurko and their lives together. Why couldn’t they have been happy? He was like me, she thought, unlucky in the people he loved.
She tore up the letter and hid the pieces in her dress pocket. It was too stupid—all of that, so unnecessary. Life passes too quickly for such nonsense. Marusia was surprised to suddenly feel a bolt of remorse for Zosia. Zosia was unlucky, too, and Marusia felt tremendous grief for all of the lost chances she might have taken to try for an understanding, an alliance of respect with her strong-willed daughter-in-law. And it was too late for that as well.
She would burn the pieces in her stove later. Now she hurried to see what damage was left to be cleared from Paraskevia Volodymyrivna’s house before it was time to ring the bells.
M
ARUSIA AND EVDOKIA
planned to leave early in the morning for their walk to Chornobyl, but even before daylight they were awakened by shouts of obscenities and a rumbling motor shattering the still night.
“Oh, no—not another explosion.” Marusia sat up and searched in the dark for her slippers. She lit a candle and hurried to her window. The sky was a soft dark blue. There were several hours before the first tentacles of morning light. She couldn’t see anything unusual, so she put on a shawl, grabbed her crowbar from the woodstove, and went outside. The air was cool and smelled of springtime. She didn’t see any stars through the hazy clouds, but could make out the outer scythelike rim of the half-moon poking through. She followed the noise down the path to the church.
“Marusia, is that you?” hissed Evdokia from her
open window. “Hey!” she yelled, tapping the pane a few times, but Marusia didn’t hear her over the din. “Wait for me!” She ran and caught Marusia passing her gate. Marusia hardly recognized her friend, who had her gray hair plaited into two braids that bounced over her plump breasts. “What is that noise?” Evdokia asked, breathless.
“I don’t know. A tractor?” They stopped at Lazorska’s yard, where she stood rigid in the middle of the road, her arms crossed. She was dressed in her usual black dress and scarf.
“
Woch!
Lazorska, it’s you,” Evdokia gasped. “I thought you were a night spirit. Some kind of mean
Lisovi
ghost come to take me away. Yoy!”
Yulia had also been awakened and came out to join the other women. She carried an ax. “Good idea,” Evdokia whispered. She searched the misty ground for a thick stick for herself in case they had to defend themselves. The women walked down past the churchyard and onto the path that led to the
kolhosp
. In the thin slice of moonlight, they could see the outlines of two people and half a car.
“Be careful,” Lazorska cautioned. “We don’t know what they’re doing or who they are.”
Marusia blew out her candle. The two figures seemed unaware of the women who crept along behind the bushes and beneath the canopies of shadowy trees in the dark. When they were close enough to hear one of them, a young man, swear loudly, they realized he was working beneath the hood of a car. He lifted up his face
in clear view to the group. A large case of tools, a pickax and two shovels were on the ground.
“Hold it, Oles!” he yelled to his friend who was in the car revving the engine. “Who are you?” the young boy demanded of the stunned women. “Are you
gorsoviet
agents? Listen, we weren’t doing anything.”
Evdokia spoke up. “Hey, is that you, Mykola Hnatsenko?” His friend stumbled out of the car. They both stared stupidly at the women. “Don’t you know me, you little fool? I’m Hanna’s grandmother.” Evdokia turned to the other women. “You should all know this crazy child. Let me introduce you to Mykola. ‘Mykola-
shkoda
’ we called him because he wasted his life. One of Hanna’s old boyfriends from the plant. What are you doing here? I thought you left to live in Chornobyl a few years back.”
The young man smiled, showing a mouthful of steel teeth. He had deep pockmarks on his hairless young cheeks, and his blond hair fell over his dull green eyes. “Oh, sure. Evdokia Zenoviivna. How are you?”
“Never mind that. What are you doing here in the middle of the night?”
His friend Oles, a taller boy with darker hair, cut in. “We could ask you that. What are
you
doing here? This is a dead zone. No one is supposed to be here.”
“Well, how about that, because as you can see, we’re here in the flesh and blood shivering in our nighties. We live here,” retorted Evdokia.
“We came back from the evacuation,” Marusia put in.
“So, there’s people here now?” asked Mykola.
“Just us,” Evdokia said.
“Just the four of you?” Oles laughed. He poked Mykola in the ribs with his elbow. “So, you’re not really supposed to be here? Great! Just old ladies! That’s great! Nothing to worry about, Kolya.”
“Wait one minute,” Marusia said. She didn’t like their disrespectful tone, especially from that puppy Oles. “We came back. This is our home. I don’t know either of you boys. You’re not here to live with us, are you? It doesn’t look like you’re moving in anywhere. So, what are you doing here in the middle of God’s immortal night?”
“Look,” Oles said, “why don’t you go back to sleep and forget you saw us. We’ll be out of here soon and you lovely beauties can all live here happily ever after.” The boys laughed.
In low voices, the women murmured among themselves. Then Marusia stepped closer to the car. “How do you know that we’re not supposed to be here? We
babysi
are everywhere, in every government office, on every hotel floor, on every street corner cleaning, working night and day. We are the eyes and ears of the government. Now suppose I tell my boss, whose name you would know quicker than your own fathers’, about what you bad little boys are doing here in the middle of a dead zone.” Marusia walked around the car and tapped the hood with her crowbar. “Whose car is this?”
“Yes, whose car?” Evdokia played along. She had
never liked Mykola anyway. “I don’t remember you ever making enough money to have a car. They kept giving you the lousiest jobs and firing you because you were no good. No wonder my Hanna married someone else—a top Communist official. So, let’s see some proof that it belongs to you and not to the people!”
Lazorska feebly kicked the back tires that were half mired in the dirt. A mound of earth was piled next to the automobile. “I see what’s going on here,” she declared. “After everyone left, you buried someone else’s car. Now you’re stealing it.”
“Oh boys, that’s thirty years in Perm for you,” said Yulia. “Believe me, I know. Next stop . . . Siberia.”
“That’s an official deputy’s car for sure,” said Evdokia.
“Then it’s fifty years, and after that ten more just to prove that you can’t get away with it,” Yulia said.
The boys looked nervous. Oles lit a cigarette and Mykola scratched his face. “So,” Marusia said, “does this monster work?”
“We got it out as far as it would go,” Mykola said in a respectful tone. “But it still needs work. We’ve got to dig it out some more.”
“I’m sure you can do that, you’re such strong boys,” said Marusia with more confidence. “Then you will take us to the
gorsoviet
in Chornobyl. We have an important document to deliver—something to the
magister
.”
“Look,
babo
, I’m not taking you anywhere,” Oles shouted. “This is my car. Prove that it isn’t. I don’t care
if you call the authorities on me, but I’m getting out of this area. I’m not going to Chornobyl.”
Marusia thought of Zosia and what she would have said if she were here. She wasn’t going to back down. She planted herself directly in front of the boys. “Listen you little ball of snot. I didn’t put up with all the catastrophes in my life—the war and then the explosion—for me in my old age to be yelled at by a piece of duck shit like you. You
will
take me to Chornobyl when you get this car working again! I don’t care if it takes six months. I will sit myself down like this—” She poked a hole in the ground with the crowbar. “—right on this same grass I myself drove a tractor over. And I will watch you day and night until I hear that car roar. I have to get a cow for us. Then you’ll bring me back here to the village. After
that
, you can run off in this junk heap and take the devil for a joyride for all I care.” She thought a second as to how the cow would fit in this car, but she let that pass for now because her mind was set on getting her way.
“Good for you, Marusia,” cheered Evdokia. Lazorska turned her head to the side and let out a cackle. Yulia raised her ax above her head and waved it in the air.
Mykola glanced at his friend. “Oh, take her, what the hell.”
“And besides,” coaxed Evdokia, “there’s six of us all together. We could help you push the car out of the pit.”
“All right,” said Oles. “Let’s just get on with it.”
It was another two hours before Oles could get the
dead engine alive and sputtering into a reliable, steady hum. The women helped push, rock, and heave it out of the dirt. Before the boys could run off, Yulia, still clutching her ax, sat down in the backseat of the car with Lazorska, while Marusia and Evdokia returned to their homes to change their clothes and collect some food for the road.
“Do you have the
ukase?
” Lazorska asked as she and Yulia relinquished their seats.
“Yes, right here.” Marusia patted her chest.
“If you please, ladies, let’s go,” Oles said, holding the passenger-side door open. Marusia and Evdokia climbed into the back and held the ends of their babushkas over their noses to keep from sneezing. Luckily, the boys or whoever buried the car had thought to shut the windows before it was completely filled with dirt.