“I’m afraid so. Oh, and wear this.” He hands Zenon a mask.
Zenon holds the mask as if he doesn’t understand what it is. “I feel helpless.”
“I know,” the doctor says.
Zenon sits by Halya all evening and long into the night, the curtains open to the light from the streetlamps. It paints exaggerated shapes on the walls, on the bed. In the shadows he feels older, weaker. He came out of prison starved and sickly. The thought of her helped keep him going then; what will happen if he loses her?
He strokes her hair, her cheek. Keeps trying to get her to drink water. He has to dribble it into her mouth a few drops at a time.
“It’s all right, darling. It’s all right.” He has to say it, but knows it isn’t so.
He keeps applying the wet cloths. Simple things are hard to do. He can’t think for the fear in him. Tries to control it by talking to her.
“Halya, darling, please be well. You can’t know how much I need you.” He wonders if she can possibly hear him, from some place deep inside her fever. “I love the way you look at me, with that tough little smile. When you’re going to say something sarcastic about the government. I love the colour of your eyes. Your hair. You’ve made me so happy.”
He takes her hand and feels fresh terror at its heat. She’s delirious, moaning or whimpering with pain.
He would pray, but he isn’t a believer. Rationality has ruled his life. He wonders what he can do to help her, to make her fight the disease. Wonders how to be rational when everything is suddenly irrational.
His parents are dead. Halya and Nestor are the people he cares for.
“Halya, liubov, please listen. You are my darling, my wife, my truest friend. You saved me when I came back from prison. I don’t know how I could have survived without you.” He needs her to know these things.
Needs her to know she has to come back.
She doesn’t answer, but he begins to think she seems calmer, quieter. When this goes on for an hour or so, he allows himself to lie down beside her, takes her hand and absorbs its heat into his own. And falls into sleep.
CHAPTER 44
Pampushkas
Sunshine streams in the window. Halya doesn’t want to wake up but there’s a noise and it’s been getting louder. Not a constant noise. It comes and goes, but there’s never time to fall back to sleep in between. No choice but to swim up into the light. She realizes her fever’s gone down. She turns to look at Zenon, lying beside her – sweat-soaked, eyes shut. The noise is his breathing, it makes a hoarse rattle each time he breathes out.
“Zenon!” His eyes open but he seems not to see her. She’s never felt such terror. She knows it’s him, but already he’s gone somewhere far away from her. She remembers that he was looking after her. She thinks she remembers a doctor.
Now he’s much sicker than she was.
“Cold...so cold,” he murmurs. But his skin burns. He coughs a sudden spate of hard, wet coughs and his chest shakes with their force. She rummages in a drawer for a handkerchief. When she holds it to his mouth, bright blood stains the cloth.
Halya has no strength, but she has to do something. Although she doesn’t want to move, she forces herself to dress, her hands shaking on the buttons of her blouse. She makes herself go out the door and down the steep stairs, light-headed and clinging to the rail.
At the nearby grocery store, they let her use the telephone to call Nestor. After that she makes it home, gasping for breath and struggles up the steep stairs. Her legs feel as if the bones have gone soft. As if they’ve been taken out and boiled a while, then put back again.
Zenon’s hoarse breathing, his unknowing face, are just the same. She tries to see the face with eyes open, his wide, generous mouth smiling at her, but sees only this mask. She begins the business of wringing out wet cloths and applying them to Zenon’s forehead. There’s no sign he knows she’s doing it.
Halya feels desperately tired, but she can’t sleep, can’t let her guard down. She has to bring Zenon back from the place he’s gone to. In the back of her mind she hears his voice, talking to her when she was lost in fever, calling her back.
She takes his hand in hers and talks to him about his kindness, his patience, his bright mind, his warm spirit. She praises his hands, his eyes, his smile. She bends over and kisses his cheeks, his forehead, and finally his lips. Wonders, will he remember any of it when he’s better?
Nestor arrives and finds Zenon still unconscious, except when he wakes for a moment and complains of cold or has another bout of coughing. Then he asks in an injured tone why no one is helping him get warm. Nestor fills the kettle and boils water for tea, makes Halya drink some. He’s called the doctor and been told not to expect him for several hours because of the sudden flood of influenza cases in the city.
Halya continues to bathe Zenon’s face, or trickle water into his mouth, but he never seems to get any cooler. He has a fit of coughing so fierce it raises him from the bed and he spews blood all over the bedcover. She changes the cover. Between these spells the dreadful breathing goes on and on. Once it seems to stop altogether and then there’s a small catch in his throat and he breathes again. His lips are turning pale blue. She tries not to see it.
She hadn’t known the disease could strike so swiftly and so hard. Where, where is the doctor?
Around suppertime Nestor makes sandwiches and tries to get Halya to eat, but she won’t. She puts towels around Zenon’s head and shoulders, and when they get too bloody she rinses them and wrings them out.
Zenon’s skin is now stained blue. His tongue, when she tries to give him water, is brown. Nestor, who’s been reading about influenza, says this is caused by lack of oxygen.
It’s so unbelievable that Halya thinks she must be going crazy. Do something! she wants to scream. Help him! But what can Nestor do?
She doesn’t know how she’s hanging on, and yet if she weren’t suffering too, maybe it would be even worse. Since she’s so ill herself, she simply does what she has to.
Her own fever doesn’t prevent her from thinking what might happen. But it blurs everything, makes it both real and unreal.
It’s dark, after eleven at night, when the doctor finally arrives and examines Zenon.
His ragged breathing grows weaker. More time passes between gasps.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Houghton says at midnight, “your husband’s dead.” He closes Zenon’s eyes, writes the death certificate, tells Nestor what arrangements need to be made.
After he leaves, Nestor begs Halya to come home with him; his wife will look after her. She shakes her head.
She understands that even if the doctor had come earlier, it wouldn’t have made a difference. The childhood tuberculosis that left one of Zenon’s legs shorter than the other also weakened his chest, and the time in jail made it worse. She tries not to think that he died because his family was poor. Or because of his political ideas. But she does think these things.
She’s too shocked and hurt to go with Nestor. Too angry. She lost Taras and now she’s lost Zenon. She’s not going anywhere until she can somehow understand that.
Nestor fills a boiler with cold water and Halya throws in the bloody towels and bedcover. She washes Zenon all over with wrung-out cloths and wraps him in a clean blanket. Pulls away the bloody top sheet and scrubs at spatters on the bottom one. She won’t let Nestor help with any of it in case he becomes infected.
Around two in the morning he has to go home, but promises to come back around noon the next day. Halya stays awake a long time. She touches Zenon’s face, his hands, thinking he might not be dead. She knows that must be wrong, but he still seems too warm for death. She strokes his chest and shoulders, his belly and thighs, his genitals. Listens to his chest. Hears nothing.
He grows slowly cold but she finally falls asleep in a chair before that’s done. She wakes at dawn, chilled, and knows he is dead and somehow she is not.
Later two men in dark clothes and white masks, undertaker’s me
n, remove Zenon’s stiff body. Halya sits in a chair, watching. Their manner of handling him, brisk and impersonal, would tell her everything if she didn’t know already.
Nothing in life seems to last.
As the undertakers’ men leave, Nestor and Paraska arrive with a basket, make tea and set out food. Paraska keeps up a stream of words that helps fill the emptiness in the room, but they flow right past Halya. Paraska has brought clean sheets and changes the bed while Nestor distracts Halya, making her eat and helping her plan for prayers at Zenon’s grave. Funerals are temporarily banned because of the influenza outbreak. Nestor doesn’t say that he has purchased the burial plot. Halya hasn’t even thought about that. She’s still too young to know about all the things that cost money and how much it takes.
After many cups of strong tea they leave, satisfied by her promise to lie down. But she stays in her chair, not even bothering to lock the door behind them.
That night the priest comes to speak with her. Afterwards she remembers none of it. She lies down on the bed, eyes fixed on the ceiling.
At some point she sleeps. She wakens in the same position but with sunlight coming in. She gets up and makes tea, stirs in milk and a lot of sugar. She tastes the sugar with interest; thinks: I like sweet things. She hunts around for the pampushkas Paraska left. Each has a flick of icing on top that melts on her tongue. She approves of the sensation. Keeps going till all the little buns are gone.
A couple of weeks pass. Prayers have been said. Nestor paid for everything, because for Halya, undertakers’ men are simply people who appear when someone dies. It has nothing to do with her. She doesn’t go to work, but Nestor checks on her, brings more baking. Halya promises him she’s all right and will return to work in a few days. She keeps drinking tea and eating buttered toast or pampushkas. They take away the hollow feeling for a short while.
She realizes she should write to her father and Natalka. She finds paper and pen and begins. It’s as if a stranger writes, describing something that happened to an acquaintance. When she’s done she forces herself to go out and mail it, and on the way back she picks up some milk, and bread and butter and honey. She catches sight of herself in the store window and thinks, “She looks thin.”
As she hangs up her coat, she sees Zenon’s shirts and trousers in the closet and now she can weep. When it’s dark she realizes she’s hungry and makes slice after slice of toast slathered with butter and honey. She eats them between gulps of milky tea, sobbing all the while. Some time after midnight, she falls asleep. In the morning she starts again with toast and milk and sobbing. By bedtime she’s exhausted and her tears have stopped.
The next morning she starts tidying the room. She thinks about Nestor and about the paper, wonders how he’s managing. Somehow this makes him appear with more baking. She drinks tea with him. Nestor flips the November issue of The People’s Voice onto the table and she grabs it and starts reading, consuming it the way she’s been consuming toast.
Halya says she’ll be back at work the following Monday. Nestor acts pleased. He doesn’t think this is the moment to tell her the government has shut down the paper.
“Tell Paraska it’s enough pampushkas,” Halya says with the hint of a smile. “Tell her they saved my life.”
“I’m glad to hear your life is saved.” Nestor looks at her very seriously. The young woman who climbed up those stairs three and a half years ago is now dear to him, almost a daughter. And he could have kept the paper going with her writing and his own.
“I’m too young to want to die,” she says. “ I think I knew that even when I was sick.”
“Would you like me to write to your father?” It’s clear he’d do it in an instant.
“No, I’ve done that,” she says. “But thank you for offering.”
“Do you want to go home for a visit before you come back to work?”
“Better not. I might get stuck there. Anyway, my father doesn’t want me.”
“I’m sorry,” Nestor says. “He should be proud to have a daughter like you.” She smiles again. “Look, why don’t you lie down for a while and I’ll sit with you.”
She surprises herself by agreeing. Wonders fleetingly what she’d be like if Nestor had been her father. He fluffs up her pillow and she settles herself on the bed.
Halya hasn’t noticed a second parcel Nestor brought with him and left near the door. When he sees she’s asleep, he opens the cardboard box and lifts out a typewriter, the one she used at work. And a large stack of paper. He leaves them on the kitchen table.
After a few more minutes of watching Halya’s strong, regular breathing, Nestor goes quietly out the door.
She’ll be all right, he thinks. Pampushkas.
CHAPTER 45
The sun shone warm but did not burn
Taras continues to visit Tymko each afternoon. He’s been here almost two weeks and wonders if he should go to the railroad and ask for a job. It’s not costing him anything to stay with Myro, but if it goes on much longer he wants to pay his share of the food; and although he had enough saved up for the journey, he hasn’t earned a lot in the year since he went back to Spring Creek.
One day early in November he takes fresh oranges and cuts one in sections for Tymko.
“Oh, that’s good isn’t it?” Tymko crushes one in his mouth. “Makes you want to believe in God.”
Tymko talks less although he seems pleased to have Taras there. They haven’t actually said it aloud, but both Taras and Myro think Tymko is weaker than when Taras came.
After school Myro bounds up the stairs with a bag of pecan-studded cinnamon buns. And four plain cotton masks. His school has just closed because of the flu epidemic.
Mrs. Plaskett brings tea and accepts, but doesn’t put on, her mask. At Tymko’s direction, Taras adds whiskey after she leaves. They find it good. Since the camp they never take food and drink for granted. Or whiskey. It’s as if every privation is written in a thick book and any pleasure now is a measure of restitution.
After a while the landlady brings Tymko’s supper and more tea. Taras and Myro watch him eat his pork chop and peas like anxious parents.
Today Tymko does need help going to the bathroom. Myro goes with him, and while they’re out of the room, Taras slumps in his chair and wipes away tears.
When they come back, Tymko settles back into his chair. “It’s true what I’ve heard. You can feel pain in a part of your body that isn’t there any more. Worse than that, it’s an itchy pain. Not a goddamn thing I can do about it, boys.”
“More tea?” Myro asks.
“In a while,” Tymko says. “Dyakuyiu. Right now I’m thirsty for something else. I want to hear more about Shevchenko and that black man, Aldridge. I keep seeing them together. Not a word of each other’s language and yet something is understood.”
“Very well.”
“I want to know how it was. Where they met. What they talked about.”
“They had, at best, only a few days together. But they shared something. A kind of understanding that happens in an instant and lives on in the mind afterwards.”
“That’s right. That’s what I need to hear. Show me the scene.”
“Douzhe dobre. Apparently they visited Kalnikov’s house. The one I told you about, where Taras attended an evening party.”
“Ah. The count with the pretty young daughter.”
“Exactly. But this is quite a few years later, and the pretty daughter is married. She and her child, a four-year-old girl, have come for a visit.”
“Damned aristocrats,” Tymko says. “Still, this family sounds better than most. And they did help our poet.”
“They did. Although this was before Taras got in so much trouble and the tsar sent him into exile. After that, people didn’t help as much. They were afraid. And not without reason.”
“Tell the story, Myro.”
“Dobre.” Myro sits up a little straighter. “You’ll forgive me if I make some of it up.”
“Mak
e up all you like. I’m used to that now. I just want a story. Truer than life.”
“The time is 1848 in St. Petersburg. Taras and his new friend Ira Aldridge have been invited to the Kalnikovs because the old man is curious about this great American actor. And because Tatiana speaks English, learned in childhood from a governess, and can translate for them. I see it all so clearly.”
“Tse dobre,” Tymko says softly.
“Well, then...” Myro takes a deep breath. “You won’t mind if I just tell it as if I’m there? As if I can see into the poet’s heart?”
“I not only won’t mind,” Tymko says firmly, “I insist upon it.”
Myro begins.
Tatiana Alexandrovna would once have been the perfect model for an angel, thinks our poet Taras Shevchenko. Or the mother of Jesus before she became with child. Now, ten years after he first saw her, she is, although still youthful looking, more guarded, more divided by conflicting loyalties and cares. A married woman paying a visit to her family.
Her small daughter, Yekaterina, runs in and out of the room. She stops at intervals to gaze at a man with a thick moustache and tightly curled hair, whose skin must look to her like melted chocolate. She runs off again to think about it by herself until curiosity draws her back. This last time she runs to her mother and buries her face in her mother’s skirt.
Tatiana kisses the top of her head and sends the small figure in a bright purple dress whirling back to the long corridor beyond the room. Without being aware of it, she sighs.
Yet at this moment Tatiana seems almost to have returned to her fifteen-year-old self. Her simple dress is deep blue, lovely next to her rosy-peach skin and dark eyes. Her brown hair is braided and wound around her head, giving her the look of an artless country girl. Of course she cannot really be artless. At times Taras sees tears in old Kalnikov’s eyes when he watches his daughter, but he smiles now as if she’s still his child, safe in his house.
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