“It’s an hour’s drive away. I’ll be back in the evening. I can take some bread and sausage for breakfast if you’re sleeping.”
“Aren’t you going to help me with the baby?”
She was looking out of the window.
“You’ve got your mother there. You can manage between you. I might not have to work at the weekends.”
She was silent, and he felt angry that she didn’t understand. He didn’t want to live in that small, dark house with her mother who hated him. He had to save their money. He had to make enough money for something bigger, something better. For their life full of happiness and sunshine.
He glanced over at her. He could see the side of her cheek, turned away from him, as she stared. A thin streak of water was glistening on it.
The baby started to cry.
T
When Lyuda came down the garden path, closing the gate behind her, the rain was pouring down.
She pushed open the door of the house. She had come from a check-up at the hospital, an hour on the village bus each way over bumpy roads, and now the rain was soaking through everything. The baby was hidden inside her coat, for warmth. She closed the door behind her and stood, the rain dripping from her hair and clothes onto the kitchen floor.
“Mama?” she called out. “Mama, the soup’s not on. It’s almost six.”
She nudged off her wet boots and left them on the mat, going through to the bedroom. The soup should have been cooking by now.
Her mother was lying on the bed, her body unnaturally still, her face deep in a headscarf.
“Mama?”
Lyuda stood in the doorway looking at the figure on the bed.
“Mama?”
Suddenly, she felt it. She knew that if she reached out and touched her mother’s hand, that it would be cold. Her coat was dripping rainwater and the warm baby was wriggling in her arms.
“Mama?”
Lyuda called out one last time, but she knew that it wouldn’t help. She balanced the baby over one side of her body and reached out to touch her mother’s wrist. It was cold. She leaned forward and pushed back the dark headscarf, and her mother’s eyes were open, and empty. Her fingers brushed against her mother’s cheek and it was cold.
“Oh my god.”
She stared at her mother’s face, unable to move, willing it not to be true. A blankness came over her, as if her body was refusing to choose a reaction to what she was seeing. As if it knew that the longer she didn’t move, the longer it could hold off the pain that was waiting to flow into her.
The baby wriggled and made a small sound. At last, Lyuda shifted, and looked down at its face; tiny eyelids folded over sleeping eyes, the mouth moving in little smiles. The sight of its face released something in her mind, and the first wave of fear went through her. Her father was gone. Her mother was gone. There was nobody to help her.
She thought of all the work her mother had done. She thought about the work that needed to be done. The soup to make for dinner. The pile of clothes to be washed. The constant buckets of water from the well. The cutlets for Volodiya’s supper. The shopping from the market.
“I can’t do it,” she whispered. “Mama, I can’t do it without you.”
Then there would be the funeral to arrange. And Volodiya spending more and more time at the building site, sometimes not coming back for days. And every night the baby crying and waking her from her short sleep, and then having to get up again, and then again to make breakfast for Volodiya, when her head was banging and she felt like crying. She couldn’t even imagine how she looked to him anymore.
She sat down on the edge of the bed, the baby in her arms, and she began to rock her body back and forth. Tears ran down her face the more she rocked, and she held the sleeping baby tight against her. She looked at her mother through the falling water and felt the panic rising in her body.
“Mama,” she whispered. “What am I going to do?”
T
“My poor Lyudichka. My poor Lyudichka. I’m so sorry.”
Volodiya held her as she cried, struggling to block out the noise of the baby, which was crying in the other room. Lyuda was shaking, her face bloated from all the tears, and she rocked herself in his arms. He tried to think about her, even though he had come home from a long day of work, hungry, and there was nothing to eat, no soup, no cutlets, no potato, no vegetables.
“What am I going to do?” she was saying. “What am I going to do?”
He held her close as she cried, and felt her body against his, thicker and heavier since the baby, and her clothes stained with milk and splashes of cooking. The shapeless housedresses she now wore, and the slippers. The look of exhaustion, always there. She didn’t smile much any more. He couldn’t remember when she had last put on a lovely dress. He couldn’t remember the last time they had made love.
“It’s going to be alright,” he said. “It’s going to be alright.”
15
“Lyuda. The soup isn’t hot enough.”
The winter had come. Outside the window, the white flakes were pounding on the glass in a gale, piling up a bank of snow that he would have to clear to get to work in the morning.
“Lyuda?”
She was sitting opposite him. Her eyes met his. The look on her face was pure hatred. The baby was on her lap and her golden-brown eyes were full of such anger and disgust that he felt something inside him twist. She had been at home all day, in the warm house, just watching the baby. Her dress was dirty. The supper was terrible. The bread was stale. He pulled the lid off the vodka, half-filled a glass, set the bottle down. He knocked it back. He waited.
“Lyuda? The soup is cold!”
She stood up, and carried the baby through to the bedroom behind the kitchen. When she came back, she went to the stove and struck a match to light the hob. Every movement of her body was an expression of her hatred for him. Every movement of her body filled him with anger. The feeling twisted again. It reached out to his hands, wrapped in tight fists on his knees. He pushed it back.
Lyuda came round to his side of the table and picked up his bowl of soup. She took it to the stove and poured it into the saucepan. She stirred it with a tin spoon, scraping the metal round and round. The baby began to cry in a high rasping whine.
The noises seared into his head, each separate sound creating a layer of anger and rising panic. These were the noises of his childhood. The screaming babies, the scraping of metal on pans, the growling aggression of a male voice. Even the howl of the snow outside the window. These were the noises that he had escaped from, and now they were all around him.
It was worse when Lyuda started to complain, accusing him of something new every day, of something wrong, of everything that had been promised. How he wasn’t supporting her, how alone she felt, how she cried when he didn’t come home for two or three days. And then, at night, after all the accusations, she would lie close to him and expect comfort, and she would cry. But by that time it was all he could do not to get up and leave the bed, and he would turn his back to her, trying to block out her sobbing and ragged, jerking breaths. It was a relief when the baby needed feeding and she would get up at last.
He squeezed his fists tighter.
The soup was ready and he watched her pour it into his bowl – a drop splashing onto her dress – and carry it to the table. The baby was crying louder now, but she wasn’t doing anything about it.
“Lyuda. The baby is crying.”
He poured another glass of vodka and knocked it back. She fetched the baby and sat down opposite him.
“Shhhhh,” she said. “Sssshhhhhhh.”
He turned to his soup. Steaming red borsch with lumps of meat and potato and beetroot. He took a spoonful and a piece of rye bread and chewed it heavily, blocking out her voice and the baby’s cries and the snow pounding against the window and the wind whistling through the cracks. The baby started to scream. She should take it to the other room. She should be able to control it.
&nb
sp; “Lyuda...”
He felt the rage coming up in him again, and he glanced over to her. He met her eyes and there it was again. The disgust. The hatred. Everything he had ever done wrong. Everything she wanted to tell him. He squeezed his fists.
Something had to change.
He got up, leaving his soup, and lifted his winter coat from the hook next to the door. He pulled on his boots and took his thick gloves, and a fur hat to cover his ears.
When he opened the door, the snow smashed into his face in a blast of wind, freezing his skin. He slammed the door behind him. He picked up the shovel that was leaning semi-frozen against the wall and began to dig the snow from the kitchen step, clearing away the soft fall before it settled into solid layers. He finished the step and then moved down the garden path, pushing the snow to each side to make an avenue towards the garden gate. The wind was flying around him and his cheeks turned a bright red with the cold.
He reached up to the icicles above the window and broke them with the shovel. He couldn’t reach the ones on the roof. He worked the path all the way to the gate and then opened the gate and cleared the slope to the village street. Soon, the trucks would arrive to salt the roads. He had sacks of salt stored in the old chicken shed in case the trucks couldn’t get through, or the garden turned to ice.
He thought about his job, about the construction work that was slowing for the winter, about the contract he had been offered in another region, on the other side of the country. It would be more money, it would bring him closer to everything he wanted. And Lyuda. All her stupid mistakes. Ruining the happiness they could have had. It wasn’t so difficult. He worked all day at the construction site, it wasn’t so much to come home to a hot dinner and a baby that wasn’t crying. She wasn’t out in the fields all day, working on the farm with four children and a savage husband to look forward to every night. He knew what it meant to have a hard life.
And now he was feeling this urge, every time she looked at him in that way. He remembered the way his father had dealt with his frustration, and he sensed how easy it would be for his body to follow the movements it knew so well. He had been pushing it down, but he felt it inside him, waiting, and at some point, if something didn’t change, it was going to come out.
He had never wanted her to get pregnant. He had never wanted his dreams to twist into such distortions of happiness. He had never wanted anything but an easy, carefree life for her. The rage came up in him again, and he felt it overtaking him. He raised the shovel high and brought it down on the garden gate as hard as he could. The gate smashed, breaking from its hinges and swinging away from the path; the latch, the metal broken. Then, after the rage, he felt a rush of something else. An awful sadness, as if something inside him had broken. His strength, his will, the love that he had felt for her, the dream that he believed he could build for them both, his determination to struggle against the life he had always known, the life that was ready to pull him back at any moment. He felt a choking sensation surging up inside him. He didn’t let it out. He coughed and pushed it back. He looked at the gate and at the shovel in his hands.
There was no big house. There was no beautiful wife. There was no peace and sweetness. There was no money. There was him and his anger and the vodka and his fists.
His promises watched him, waiting for him to make a decision. Waiting for him to accept the noise, the unhappiness, the pain, the anger, the drink, the struggle, the violence. Waiting for him to say yes to all the misery and affirm the one betrayal that would lead to all the others. The choice that would break every dream, every belief, everything he had always worked for.
“No,” he said aloud. “No. This will never be my life. Never.”
He walked forward in the snow, his fists clenched into huge mallets. The snow was hurling against his skin and the wind was blasting his body, and in his heart and in his head, he made what he knew was the most terrible decision of his life.
T
“What about me?” screamed Lyuda, when he said the words to her, and the baby started to cry. “What am I supposed to do? What about my life? What about the baby?”
He stood near the door, his face hardened. He looked at the woman in front of him and he tried not to see the girl she had been.
“Goodbye, Lyuda,” he said.
He picked up his bag. He opened the door. The wind blew.
Lyuda howled.
He walked out of the door.
Lyuda put her hands up to her head. The baby was crying.
“What am I going to do?” she whispered.
Volodiya walked out into the snow and pulled his fur hat down over his head, and the ear flaps over his ears, where he could still hear Lyuda’s screams. He slung his bag up over his shoulder and went through the smashed gate, hitching it back up onto the broken latch behind him. He didn’t see the last glimpse of Lyuda, pulling open the kitchen window and hurling the ring out into the swirling snow behind him, her tears already turning to a quick ice.
He climbed the slope and walked in the falling snow to the bus stop. The bus arrived, its windows grey and condensed with the heat of passengers, and he climbed on. There were no seats and it was packed with villagers and bags, heavy coats steaming and hats and the smell of sweat and smoke and vodka. And the bus moved off, carrying him, his life, his bag, and his memories of a place where he would be left a shadow, held forever alive by the energy of a single, desperate howl.
The snow fell, and the tracks of his steps disappeared into the whiteness.
Lyuda, quietly crying, was feeding their baby.
16
The darkness is crushing me. I open my eyes and feel it pushing down into every cell of my body. Dark, down, everywhere. My lungs feel too heavy to breathe, my heart too laden to beat, my body too weighted to move at all. Part of it must be exhaustion. I barely sleep with the baby sucking and crying. When she sleeps for a few hours I have to cook something so I have strength to feed her.
It seems there is no end to this winter. For days now it has snowed and snowed and snowed. The few hours of light show only falling snowflakes through the windows and the glint of icicles hanging from the eaves, before darkening again. In the garden, everything is white except for the trunks of the trees and a few twigs that have shaken off the snow. There are still birds. I cannot understand how they can live in this cold. Where do they go? Where do they sleep? How are they not frozen? Where do they find food?
The questions pass through my head without any desire to know the answers. Questions, questions, questions. How did I get into this situation? How is it possible that I am here? How is it possible that I am a mother and that my mother is gone and that I am on my own? How is it possible that I look like this, filthy in a filthy dress? My hair is filthy. My body is covered in dried milk. My face looks like it is a hundred years old. How long have I looked like this? A month? A week? What does it matter? Nothing matters. I am in this house surrounded by snow and darkness and silence. I am in this house on my own, and it doesn’t make any difference what age I am, if I am eighteen or nineteen, or if I look hideous, or if I am alive or dead. If there is nobody to matter to, then nothing matters. Nothing at all.
Angela is sleeping. I must heat some water soon to bathe her. I must go out to the well and pull more water. People are passing in and out of the house like ghosts. Some of them bring food. Some of them pump water and bring me buckets. I wonder what would happen if they stopped coming. If one day they didn’t come. I wonder. They look at me and say some words to me and it seems as if I have stopped understanding the meaning of words. It is like a dark dream, but I am in this dream alone.
I think about going outside the house. Just stepping out and lying in the snow. I would take off my dress so that I was naked. I would lie there, under the lilac tree, and the movement of my body would make some of the snow heaped up on the twigs drop down onto me. It would land on my skin and it would feel so cold. And it might settle on my hair or my face. How delicious it would be just t
o lie there, naked, and to know, beyond any possible doubt, that everything was going to be alright.
It wouldn’t take long. Just a few minutes of cold, and then a few more minutes and I wouldn’t feel any cold. I would feel deliciously warm, and I would know that I was starting to leave. And I would have a smile on my face as if I was sitting in front of a warm fire with my grandfather and he was telling me a story and we were drinking sweet black tea with slices of lemon. Except he wouldn’t be drinking tea. He would have a glass of vodka and I would have a cup of the hot, sugary tea, and he once told me about how when it is very cold and you don’t have enough clothing, then you feel very warm, and that is when you know you are going to die. He had been in the army. He had seen men die like that. Warm and smiling, with their blood frozen. And Grandfather would be with me, he would be with me through all of it. Just me, this untouched snow, my naked body stretched out, and Grandfather there waiting for me, saying, “It is nearly done, you are nearly there, little Lyuda, little Granddaughter, little swallow.”
Mother’s dead face in the coffin. Father’s face, dead, and Grandfather. I would go where they have all gone. And the baby? I don’t know. I don’t care. There is nobody to take her. There is nobody to take me. She must go somewhere. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
The darkness closes in on me until I can’t move anything. I can’t move my thoughts. They pass through my head one after the other and they grow heavier and heavier. All I want is to stop them. To stop the thoughts. To stop anything coming into my head. Going out of my head. To stop everything. All thought. All movement. All everything. If the blackness wants to take me, then let it take me entirely. I cannot remain in this unbearable state. If it wants me, then let me go to it, let me disappear. But I cannot live like this. I must do something. I must run out into the snow and disappear into it. I must find some medicine, which will end everything. I cannot stand it anymore. I cannot.
T
Angela cries.
Lyuda gets up.
The Woman Behind The Waterfall Page 9