Vaclav & Lena

by Haley Tanner

  After three hours, when the paramedics arrived, Lena answered the door and pointed them to the bathroom. Then she went to Radoslava’s bedroom and took the envelope out of the top drawer of her bedside table. This envelope contained Radoslava’s will. Radoslava had told Lena, over and over again, “Give it to them when I finally pass on, when my suffering is over.” Lena thought that these people might be the “them,” might be the people who come and find you dead. She thought that perhaps she was not meant to find Radoslava, because these men knew what to do, they talked very much, and they had equipment.

  When Lena handed the envelope to one of the men, he was talking on the phone, and he said into the phone, “Hold on.”

  “What is your name, hon?” He said this in English, so Lena stared at him, and then at the floor, because she did not understand. The man went back to his phone.

  “She’s not talking. I want to say around five, maybe four. She’s little. No. Alone in the apartment. Okay. We’ll stay here until then? Okay.” And then he hung up the phone and smiled at Lena.

  “Someone’s gonna be here real soon to talk to you, hon,” he said, smiling. Then he went back into the crowded bathroom with the other two men, and Lena sat down in front of the television.

  Lena could hear the noises of the men in the bathroom. She wondered how they would take Radoslava Dvorakovskaya out of the tub, not because she was large, and dead, and wet, but because she was naked. Lena could not imagine anyone touching another person who was naked.

  For a long time the men talked, and Lena could hear their voices coming out of the bathroom. There were three men, and sometimes one would come out and get something from a big red bag that they had left in the hallway. After a little while, the three men came out of the bathroom, and the man who had talked to Lena before talked to her again.

  “We’ll be right back, okay? So don’t worry. Right back.” He said this slowly, and then the three men walked out of the apartment and closed the door behind them. Lena wondered what he had said. She could see when the door was open that there were a lot of people in the hallway, and that these people were watching the paramedics, and that they looked very excited. No one came inside the apartment, and no one knocked.

  Lena went back to the bathroom to see what they had done. Radoslava Dvorakovskaya was still in the bathtub, exactly the same, but she looked different. Her skin was the wrong color, and some little things had changed. The men had closed her eyes, so she was not looking up at the ceiling anymore. Also, her lips seemed to be going away, and more of her teeth were showing. Lena looked down at Radoslava and still could not think of how the men would get her out. She heard a knocking on the door and then the door opening, and a man’s voice saying, “Paramedics,” and Lena ran out of the bathroom, because she did not want the men to know that she had been in there. She felt that she was not supposed to want to look at her babushka dead and naked and wet, and with her eyes closed and her teeth showing.

  The men did not see her coming out of the bathroom—they did not see where she had come from because they were struggling to bring a metal bed into the apartment. They brought the bed into the living room, they pushed it, and it rolled along on wheels, making deep marks in the carpet jungle.

  On the top of the bed was a board with red cushions on it, and they took that off the bed and took just the board into the bathroom.

  Even from the living room, even with the television on, Lena could hear the sounds of Radoslava’s wet skin moving against the bathtub. She could hear the men and their grunting noises, and their breathing. She could hear the wooden board banging on the tile bathroom floor, and then banging against the bathtub, and then a squeak, which must have been Radoslava’s skin moving a little bit harder against the bathtub. Lena had made this sound herself, with her body in the bathtub, when she moved herself against the bottom, so she knew what this squeak was.

  The sounds coming from the bathroom were wet sounds and hard sounds. Lena wanted to see. This day was different, Lena could feel it, and the rules of other days did not apply. Her babushka could not see her. Lena could look at her naked in the tub and she would not know, and Lena wanted to see what the men were doing, and what the noises were.

  Lena walked very slowly with her tiny feet in socks against the linoleum floor in the hallway, and she did not let the floor make any sounds. The bathroom door was open, and Lena looked just a little bit to see if the men were looking, if the men could see her. They all had their backs to the door.

  Lena leaned farther, looked more, and then stepped into the doorway. Still, they did not see her. She could watch.

  The men had turned Radoslava Dvorakovskaya on her side, so that now she lay on her side facing the men. Two of the men held her up that way: One of the men held her shoulders, and one of the men held her legs right below her bottom.

  Lying on her side like this, she looked worse and scarier to Lena. Her belly lay in front of her like it was not attached enough, and there were lines all over it, and her belly button was an ugly dark thing. Her breasts were the same, covered in lines.

  The third man, the one who had talked to Lena, then put the board behind Radoslava, and the two men then leaned her back against the board. Lena saw that now they could pick up the board to get Radoslava out of the tub instead of picking up her squishy body. They used some black straps to attach her to the board, and then one of the men said, “One, two, three.”

  As they picked up the board, Lena could see that it was difficult to keep it straight, because the men’s arms were shaking a lot and they had to lean over the bathtub and squat down a little bit. All the men were very strong.

  When they had Radoslava on the board and they were carrying it, they moved toward the door, and one of the two men who had not talked to Lena saw Lena now, standing in the doorway, and he was not expecting to see Lena there, and he sucked in his breath.

  “Holy Christ!” he said.

  “Shit,” said the man who had talked to Lena. “Honey, you shouldn’t be here. Why don’t you go watch some TV?” The man’s voice was nice; he was not angry. Lena did not understand the suggestion to go watch television, did not understand that the man wanted her to go away from where they were doing this difficult work. She did not think that she should walk away, especially since this man was talking to her, and so nicely.

  Lena moved aside so that the men could get her babushka out of the bathroom, and she followed them into the living room, where they moved Radoslava onto the bed with wheels, and they covered her with a white sheet, her whole body, even her head and her face. This looked very nice to Lena. The talking man held open the front door for the other two men, and they wheeled Radoslava out into the hallway and past all the people who had been waiting just for this moment—to be so close to Radoslava Dvorakovskaya, who dropped dead in her bathtub, and to see, on the stretcher, a real dead person.

  The talking man stayed behind with Lena, and closed the door, and looked at Lena and sighed as though he was very tired.

  “I’m going to wait with you until the social worker can get here, and it might be a while. Do you need anything?” His voice was still so nice, and he seemed not to be frustrated with Lena for not answering.

  “You’ve had a tough day, huh. Do you need a snack? Do you need a drink?” Lena wished she could understand, because she liked this man and hoped he would continue talking.

  “Well, I’m going to have a glass of water, and I’ll get you one too. We might as well get comfortable, right?” Lena watched the man walk over to the kitchen, and she watched him reach up with his strong arms to open the cabinets, one after the other, looking for something. He found two water glasses, and he filled them at the sink, and he handed one to Lena, and then he sat on the couch. Lena took her glass and sat on the couch as well. The man picked up the remote control, and he turned on the television.

  “I love this show,” he said. It was Sesame Street. “Watch it with my kids all the time.” He smiled, and he looked at the
television. Lena loved Sesame Street, and she could see that this man loved it too, because he showed her with his smile.

  Lena sat next to this man and thought, Maybe he is here to take care of me. He had come into the house when Radoslava Dvorakovskaya went away. He had walked right in and looked for water glasses as if the cabinets were his own cabinets in his own house. He is acting like he lives here, she thought. Maybe he lives here now.

  Lena felt very excited to sit on the couch with the nice man with the nice voice who laughed at Sesame Street. Bert and Ernie introduced a cartoon that showed a boy and a girl and a plant. The plant looked very sad. Lena liked this cartoon because she understood it. There were English words in it, but she still understood what was happening.

  First the boy called the girl over and pointed to his plant, which was sad. You could tell that it was sad because its big, green leaves drooped to the floor. Then the girl looked at the plant, and she said something, and the boy came back with an alarm clock. And the alarm clock made an alarm-clock noise. And then they said some things to each other, and then the boy went away and came back with a dog. The dog slobbered and barked at the plant. Then the boy and girl said some more things to each other, and the boy ran off, and he came back with a watering can, and he watered the plant, and the plant got happy, and its leaves sprung up and the music told you that the plant was happy and that the boy and the girl were happy.

  The man liked this cartoon too, and they both laughed together at the end, Lena and the nice man.

  The nice man received several phone calls on a phone he kept in his pocket, and each time he sounded a little bit sad to Lena, but when he hung up the phone he smiled and spoke to Lena in a tender voice.

  The man even made them a plate of cookies, with cookies that were in the pantry. He poured a glass of milk for himself, and a glass of milk for Lena, and he showed Lena how to dunk her cookie in the milk and then eat it. Lena had never put a cookie in a glass of milk before, and she thought it was the most wonderful thing, and that the nice man must know so many of these wonderful things. She felt warm, and nice, and she fell asleep.

  KNOCK KNOCK BYE BYE

  …

  Lena did not wake up because there was a knock at the door, she woke up because the nice man got up from the couch.

  The nice man stood up from the couch and walked to the door, and opened it, and Lena opened her eyes and wanted him to come back. She liked sleeping while the man sat next to her, awake. She liked this nap in the warm evening, curled on the couch with the television on, even when the man switched it to the news. When he switched the TV to the news it woke her, just a little bit, but she pretended to still be asleep so that their time together would never end.

  The woman at the door spoke to the man for a few minutes, and then she came in and she sat down next to Lena on the couch. The nice man stood above them.

  “Do you speak English?” The woman’s voice was as nice as the man’s. Lena did not understand, so she did not answer.

  “Do you speak Russian?” the woman asked, in Russian. Lena understood. “Da.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Yelena,” she said, giving her full name, as she always did with adults.

  “Yelena, my name is Anna, and I’m going to ask you some questions, but there are no wrong answers.” The nice man was putting on his coat.

  “Do you live here?” she asked. Lena did not understand why she asked this question. Where else would she live? Lena did not like that the man had his coat on. She watched him carefully, worrying. She wanted Anna to stop talking so that the man would stay.

  “Where do you sleep?” Anna asked.

  “Here,” said Lena, and she pointed to the couch. Anna nodded and then looked up at the nice man.

  “Mark, thank you so much. I can take it from here.” Mark smiled and nodded, and then he leaned down and talked to Lena.

  “You’re gonna be okay, kiddo. Okay?” He patted her on the head, and then he turned and walked to the door, and opened it, and left. Lena wondered when he was going to come back. She hoped it was soon.

  Anna asked Lena a couple other questions, and then helped Lena pack her clothes into a bag, and then they held hands and walked out the door and into the empty hallway, to the elevator, and they took the elevator down to the garage, where her car was parked, and then she took Lena away from that place and brought her to a new place.

  Lena didn’t want to leave, because she wasn’t sure that the nice man would be able to find her, and she began to worry that he would come back to watch Sesame Street and she wouldn’t be there.

  GOOD MORNING, SUNSHINE

  …

  Lena fell asleep in Anna’s car, and when she woke up, they were parked in front of a big house. Anna brought her inside, where it was dark and quiet, because it was the middle of the night, and put Lena to bed in her very own room, and Lena fell asleep right away.

  Lena woke up early to the sounds of the house, busy morning sounds, sleepy children sounds, excited children sounds. There were children running up and down the hallway; there were children yelling. She had never been around so many other children before. In the room next to hers, someone was playing a radio and singing along to it, and then there was someone singing along to the singing along.

  Lena had to pee, but she did not want to leave her room, and she could not imagine what, but she was sure that she was doing something dumb, that there was something she should have known to do or not do, and she was sure that the other kids would make fun of her, and she did not want to talk to them or see them.

  Lena waited until the noises all went downstairs before she left her room, slowly, quietly, and ran to the bathroom to pee. The bathroom was closer to the staircase, and smells were coming up the stairs from the kitchen. The smell was familiar to Lena—it was toast—and Lena was hungry, but she was not brave enough to go downstairs.

  She went back into her room and sat on the bed that she had slept in, the one with the blue flowers, and waited, quietly. She became afraid that when someone came in, they would wonder why she was waiting quietly, or they would know that she was too shy to come and talk to everyone and have everyone see her, and Lena did not want that, because she was ashamed of being shy, and she was ashamed of not understanding what everyone was saying and of not being able to talk.

  Lena lay down again on the bed, and she pretended to be asleep. She heard footsteps in the hall and made sure that her eyes were closed and that she was very, very still.

  The footsteps stopped outside her door, and the door creaked open.

  “Here’s some toast in case you’re hungry.” Lena heard words but did not understand, and kept her eyes closed, thinking that maybe the person would think that they did not wake Lena up because Lena was so tired she was sleeping like a princess in a fairy tale, and this person would go away.

  “Anna told me to bring you this toast in case you were hungry, so you should wake up and eat it,” the person said, louder. Lena was starting to hate the person.

  The footsteps and the smell of the toast—it had butter on it!—entered the room and came closer and closer to Lena.

  The plate of toast was set down on the wood floor, and it made a nice clunking sound, and then the hand of the person shook Lena by the shoulder. Now Lena could not pretend to be asleep anymore. Lena rolled over and looked at the person. The person was a girl, older than Lena, and much taller than Lena. She was black, and she had braids in her hair and clips at the ends of those braids. The clips were shaped like butterflies, all different colors.

  “You wasn’t really asleep,” she said. “You don’t talk?” Lena was embarrassed that she did not understand, and she wished the girl would stop talking to her.

  “¿Habla español?” she said. Lena said nothing.

  “Okay, fine, you don’t talk. Whatever. Eat the toast or not. You gonna come downstairs ever? Your lady is here.” Lena said nothing; she did not understand. This girl seemed not as happy as Anna or the
nice man to talk to her without getting any answers, and this girl certainly was not as nice.

  The girl left, and Lena ate the toast. Lena decided that the plate from the toast was a good reason to go downstairs. She couldn’t just keep the dirty plate in her room, and she knew that it was more polite, that it was the right thing to do, to return the plate and to bring it to the sink and to wash it. This she knew how to do.

  Lena walked out of the room and into the long hallway. Some of the kids were back in their rooms, and all the doors were open. All the rooms had one or two beds. Some of the rooms had a lot of stuff in them, stuffed animals and posters, and some had nothing, like Lena’s room.

  Inside the rooms, some of the kids were folding their clothes, or reading, or talking to one another, or playing a game.

  Some of the kids were just lying on their beds, facing the wall, like Lena had been.

  As Lena walked down the long staircase, she heard Anna’s voice. She was talking to another lady, and they were using the same serious voices that they had been using the day before, when Anna dropped Lena off. Lena followed their voices.

  They were sitting at the kitchen table, and Anna was talking on her cellphone. There were papers in front of them, and Anna was writing a lot of things down on her piece of paper.

  Anna saw Lena walk into the kitchen. She popped up out of her seat.

  “Hey! Good morning!” She took the plate out of Lena’s hands and put it on a pile of dishes by the sink. Two kids were standing at the sink, washing dishes together, and they were talking and bumping each other with their butts, making each other splash water or soap on themselves. They were laughing. They weren’t laughing at each other, they were laughing at the fun they were making together.

  Anna took Lena into a room off of the living room.

  “This is the art room, craft room, general playroom,” she said in Russian. “You can do anything you like in here.” Lena looked around the room. There were shelves on every wall with toys and books, and there were tables in the room that had boxes of crayons on them, and big, huge pieces of white paper. There were clear plastic tubs everywhere with toys in them. There were kids Lena’s age on the floor, playing with cars on a rug that had streets and houses drawn right into it.