The Sky Unwashed (24 page)

Authors: Irene Zabytko

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary

Out loud, Zosia continued:

I know that we never had a phone, but I tried calling the post office in Starylis to send you a message. The lines don’t work. So, I want you to please call this number as soon as you can. We are leaving Russia tomorrow but you can talk to my friends Stefan and Tatiana, and tell them where Yurko is and how you are. I will contact my friends when I get to Georgia. And then you can come live with us where it is warm and sunny and healthy!

Katia sends her love. She has headaches and is sick, but not as bad as Tarasyk. Poor boy, he cries to himself and doesn’t complain, but he doesn’t want to eat, and so all of our attention is on him right now
.

Pray for us so that we’ll be together again someday, safe and well. I hope that you are alive, and healthy! I am taking a chance sending this to Starylis, but I don’t know where else to send it
.

Call my friends at 095-032-45-89-21. We kiss you—yours always, Zosia

Mamo,
please try to find a phone and tell the operator the number—I know this is hard for you, but after all that we’ve been through, this really is nothing
.

The little girl nodded her approval and insisted on adding her own message:

Babusiu,
don’t worry! We will see you again! I kiss you every night in my dreams. Yours, Katia
.

Writing the letter wearied Zosia more than her ordeal with the journalist, more than arguing with doctors and finally bribing them. She tucked Katia in the divan next to Tarasyk, climbed in with them, and immediately fell asleep.

In her dream, she was back in Starylis. It must have been a birthday or some occasion, because there were several people in the kitchen. Yurko and Marusia were there, younger and laughing and talking with one another. Zosia brought in a cake she made, and she was laughing along with the others who were joking about how she had suddenly become such an expert baker. She was happy and tried to cut the cake, but she was doubled over with laughter. . . .

She woke up. Startled, Zosia watched the front door. No one knocked or rang the doorbell. A breeze wafted through the long gauze draperies, and diesel buses and taxis rumbled on the street. But that was all. No one came for her. The sky was gray, but it was daylight. In a few more hours, she and her children would be on their way. Zosia was giddy and hugged herself to keep from dancing on the makeshift bed and waking her innocent children who needed every minute of blissful sleep.

T
HE TRIP WAS
easy. Her friends’ car got them quickly to the airport without the usual stalled motor problems. Zosia and the children got out of the car very near the door to the airport terminal so as not to attract attention from the Red Army soldiers who were randomly detaining lingering travelers and demanding to know where they were going and why.

Once inside the terminal, Zosia was surprised by the almost kindly treatment the soldiers showed her and the children when they checked their passport. One soldier, a young man with acne, carried Tarasyk in his arms to the shuttle bus that would take them to the plane headed for Tbilisi.

At last, the plane roared higher and higher into the smoky clouds, and Zosia felt giddy again. She looked out of the tiny porthole window to catch a final glimpse of diminishing fir trees shrouded in mist. “See, children,” she said. “This is how God looks down on the world when He’s in heaven.” Zosia was surprised to hear herself utter such an odd thing. She knew that no one heard her in the noisy cabin, and she realized it was what Marusia would have said.

Their seats tilted further back as the plane pushed higher into the air. Zosia shut her eyes and felt the plane’s engines humming beneath her feet, rocking and vibrating her entire body, pulling them all through gravity—the sick earth’s last desperate grab for her soul and her
children’s souls. She relished her light-headedness and no longer feared anything, not even the radiation. She was a planet spinning out of its orbit, a comet soaring through space, a cloud dissolving into pure sweet air where no one, nothing could touch her.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

Great appreciation is due . . .

. . . for the thousand kindnesses of: Shannon Ravenel; Dana Stamey; Nancy Pate; Marta Kolomayets; Ksenia Kiebuzinski, Librarian, Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute; Alex Kuzma, Director of Development for the Children of Chornobyl Relief Fund; the Popowich family of Kyiv; the Pahuta family of Drohobych, Ukraine; Cousin Irina of Lviv; the
Prosvita
students in Ukraine; and the late Henry Sauerwein of the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation.

. . . the sanctuaries where various incarnations of this book were written: the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, the Dorset Colony, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony of the Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts.

. . . the blessed first readers, faith keepers, and kindred visionaries: Gwyn Hyman Rubio, Ruth Ginsberg-Place, Kathleen Riggs, Terry Bryant, Shelly and Lance Hedstrom, Michael, Mom, and all the Zabytko-Zaraska clan.

Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street, New York, New York 10014

A portion of Chapter II was previously published in altered form
in
Earth Tones: Creative Perspectives on Ecological Issues
,
edited by Belinda Subraman, Vergin Press, El Paso, Texas, 1994
as “Matushka’s Arrival.”

This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions
and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and
incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be
inferred.

The Library of Congress has cataloged a previous edition as follows:

Zabytko, Irene.
          The sky unwashed : a novel / by Irene Zabytko.
              p. cm.
         ISBN 978-1-56512-246-8 (hardcover)
         1. Chernobyl Nuclear Accident, Chornobyl, Ukraine, 1986—
      Fiction. 2. Aged women—Ukraine—Fiction. 3. Family—
      Ukraine—Fiction. I. Title.
      PS3576.A167 S58 2000
      813’.54–dc21                                                       99–053476

E-book ISBN 978-1-61620-243-9

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