She pushes past a young man in a short-sleeved nylon shirt and sits down, leaning her head against the scratched glass of the window. The hot plastic of the seat sticks to her bare legs, and as the bus jolts along, the arms of the young man push into hers, his damp hairs rubbing against her skin.
Lyuda stares out of the window, her body turned away from the man, and she watches the villages passing by, the winding roads leading back to her village, to the house on the hill. Back to him.
She thinks about her visit to the hospital, and the doctors. Her first appointment had been some weeks ago, but today was her final check-up. It was always painful lying on that high, flat bed, legs suspended in cold metal stirrups. The white rubber gloves, the soreness. She sat and waited. Sat on the hard bed until he came back into the room in his white coat holding some files and not looking at her, just looking at the papers as if it were nothing to do with him, what he was about to tell her, as if those sheets of paper alone were responsible for everything.
There had been no sheets of paper in the other clinic, seven years before, when Mother had taken her to have the abortion. No papers; just money exchanged and her child gone, the future of her body decided. No white coats and no papers. Just cold eyes and women and blood and her child gone.
Out of the bus window, Lyuda watches the village they are driving through. It looks similar to her village. White houses with bright blue windows and long gardens full of vegetables, fruit trees and flowers. Black soil. Fat white geese pecking and goats tied to fences. Narrow, winding roads between the villages, up-and-down hills, miles of fields and forests in the distance stretching out towards the Carpathian Mountains and the borders of countries where Volodiya has been and where she once wanted to go. Romania, Moldova, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary.
And now she can’t have children. He read it from the piece of paper without looking up at her. The tests all confirmed the same thing. Her blood. The examination. The papers. His words.
She feels her head aching and she breathes in the stale air of the bus. The small window above them is open but only hot air is blowing through it. The young man next to her gets up and moves down the aisle towards the front, his shirt stuck to his back with sweat. Lyuda wipes her arm where his hairs have been rubbing against her and she shudders. Horrible, she thinks. How can he dress like that? Cheap, horrible clothes. She leans her head against the window and watches him step down from the bus – sweaty shirt and plastic sunglasses, a blue-and-red checked carrier bag in his hand – and set off down the road. She feels strangely angry at him, at his ordinary life. He can probably have as many children as he wants, she thinks. He’ll probably marry some stupid village girl who wears ugly housedresses and they’ll have a family and he’ll have everything he ever wanted. And I have everything I ever wanted, and I’ve ruined it all. She watches the young man as the bus moves away, wiping his forehead with his arm, and then she closes her eyes, trying to ignore the surges of anger and the images of the doctors in her head.
By the time the bus reaches her village, it is almost empty. She steps down onto the road, feeling the driver’s eyes following her from behind, and she leans against the wall of the bus stop. Her insides are aching after the hospital and she feels nauseous from the heavy smells and the heat of the bus. She crouches down, suddenly sweating violently, and manages to pull her hair behind her neck before she vomits onto the concrete.
She stays there, panting, crouched above the circle of vomit. She wonders if anyone is watching. She took the bus today, instead of their car, so that Volodiya wouldn’t know where she had gone. And now, if someone sees her like this at the bus stop, he’ll hear about it. She’ll have to make something up.
The sweating has passed. She stands up slowly and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. She thinks she can make it home. She sets off down the street, finally glancing around to see if someone is watching from behind a garden fence or from one of the windows. She doesn’t see anyone.
She reaches the garden gate and stumbles down the little slope from the road and pushes it open. Volodiya will be home in a few hours to drive her up to the new house. She looks down into the garden but doesn’t see Maria there. Sveta must have called her home, she thinks. Inside the kitchen, she slips off her sandals and stands barefoot on the cool paving stones. She feels momentarily confused. She isn’t sure what she is meant to be doing now. The sunlight is streaming in through the white-painted window and she turns away so that it isn’t shining into her eyes. She wonders if she is going to cry or not. She still feels nauseous and unsteady. The kitchen seems quiet as she stands there; the window is open but she can’t hear any birds singing.
She turns around and starts to open and close the doors of the cupboards. The shelves are filled with jars of food, boxes of grains, cups, plates, glasses. She opens the liquor cupboard and stops. She pulls out the bottle of cognac and two bottles of red Crimean champagne and a bottle of vodka and puts them on the sideboard. She breaks the seal on the vodka and takes a narrow shot glass and pours the clear liquid to the very top. She picks it up and knocks it straight back with her eyes closed. Then she opens them and pours another. She closes her eyes and holds up the glass until it is touching her lips. She thinks about Volodiya, she pictures his eyes narrowing and hardening the way they do when he doesn’t get what he wants. She feels his hands on her stomach. She pours the vodka down her throat.
She feels hot inside now and a little numbed. She likes the feeling. She looks around the sunlit kitchen. The image of Maria comes into her head and she has an idea. I’ll make her a cake, she thinks. I’ll surprise her when she comes to play tomorrow.
But she doesn’t move.
Instead, she takes the bottle and the shot glass and goes into the bedroom. She draws the curtains so that no light is coming into the room and she pulls her tight dress up over her head and drops it onto the chair so that she is naked apart from a red silk thong. She slips on her silk robe, pours the shot glass full of vodka and sits down on the bed, her knees pulled up under her chin, pushing against her flat stomach. Her insides are still sore from the hospital, and she remembers how much she had hurt all those years ago, when Mama had taken her to the clinic on the bus and then back home while she was still bleeding, and she had been crying on the bus, and Mama had stroked her hair, and that had been summertime, too.
And now I will have no daughter, she thinks, and she remembers Maria in the garden and she thinks of herself as a little girl helping her mother to make a cake in the kitchen, stirring the mixture in the bowl with the wooden spoon, and she takes a sip of the vodka and she says out loud, “I will have no daughter,” and she pauses, hearing how the words sound in the dark room, through the vodka, and through the pain of her body.
She opens her robe and looks down at her stomach and she lays her hand flat onto it.
Everything finishes here, she thinks. Everything Mother taught me. The river.
She puts the glass to her lips and knocks back the vodka, and then she lays her other hand on her stomach and she feels Volodiya’s hands as they held her to him this morning, and every morning. Desiring her, desiring a life with her, his strong hands covering the place where his child once was.
She breathes in vodka and darkness and broken glass.
“I have stopped the river,” she whispers.
21
Lyuda reaches up into the lilac tree and snaps off six branches for her mother’s grave.
It is a short walk to the cemetery, along the main street and then up the dusty hill, passing houses and families that Lyuda has known all of her life. Children and parents, grandparents dead and replaced by grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She walks, holding the sweet-scented lilac in a jar of water and she thinks about her mother, her face, her voice, what she might be telling her now, after everything that has happened.
The grass grows high and wild in the cemetery, with poppies scattered between the placements. Her mother’s grave is marked with a smooth, bl
ack stone, an image of Zoryana’s smiling face carved into the surface. It is an image from a photograph, taken just after she was married. Beside it is an identical stone with her father’s face and name. She glances around the graveyard, a garden of smooth black stones and smiling faces.
Lyuda sets down the jar of lilac in front of the grave and arranges the stems. Then she lowers herself onto the grass next to her mother and looks out over the cemetery and the hills in the distance. She can see one or two figures far off among the array of stones, but apart from this, she is alone. She narrows her eyes against the fading sun and she can see the hill where their new house is being built, the massive structure in cream and red brick outlined against the sky. She can see tiny figures of workmen moving around it and a car parked next to it. Volodiya will be there now, she thinks. He’ll be checking the works. He always goes in the afternoons. She tries to make out the features of the people moving around the house, but it is too far away.
She feels a surge of love, thinking about Volodiya. How wonderful he was when Mother had died and it was the two of them in the house together. How hard he had worked to become one of the biggest building contractors in the region, and now he was building them a house on top of the hill, just as he had promised all those years ago. He has given me everything I ever wanted, she thinks. And now I can’t give him what he wants.
An image of Maria comes to her, holding one leg out behind her in an arabesque. It was just yesterday morning, in the garden. That seems so long ago now. How could it possibly have been just yesterday? Her heart gives a strange ache when she thinks of Maria. She remembers when she was a baby and Sveta would drop her off at the house while Volodiya was working. She would look after her while Sveta was teaching at the school. She would carry her through the flowers in the garden and talk to her and hold her, show her the world moving around her and then she would sing the folk songs she knew from her babulya.
Lyuda picks one of the lilac stems out of the jar and holds it to her face. I still have her, she thinks, her head filling with the sweet scent. Maybe I can’t have a daughter, but I still have Marychka.
A wind blows through the cemetery and Lyuda thinks back to the room at the hospital clinic, and the abortion. The blood, the pain, how she had cried, how she hadn’t wanted to do it, how Mother had talked her into it, persuaded her that her life would be ruined if she didn’t. She smells again the stench of disinfectant from that bare room and sees the eyes of the nurses. No white coats. No papers. Just the emptiness when they were done and she was left bleeding and her baby gone.
“And now what?” she whispers to her mother, shaking her head. “I have everything. And I have nothing.”
From the willowbank, Grandmother stretches her river across the long reality and she touches Lyuda. “It is all the same,” she whispers, but to Lyuda her words sound like the movement of the wind through the long grass and through the poppies.
Lyuda puts the sprig of lilac back into the jar and stands up. She walks through the cemetery to the dusty path and starts off towards the village. Across the hills, the long shadow of the new house stretches down over the slope in the fading sun.
T
The gate to the house is painted blue, with white tips on the pointed ends of the wooden planks, and when she pushes it open, she sees the familiar garden full of yellow sunflowers, their golden-green, pollenous faces turned westwards towards the setting sun. Lyuda goes down the path through the blaze of yellow to her friend’s door. She hopes that Maria is there, but she can’t see her. I wonder why she doesn’t prefer to play in her own garden, she thinks. Sveta’s is prettier than ours and we don’t have any sunflowers at all. She knocks on the door and pushes it open. “Sve-tich-ka,” she calls. “It’s Lyuda. Are you there?”
“Yes, hold on!” Sveta calls out. Lyuda steps into the blue-painted hallway and takes off her shoes. She looks around for slippers and sees a pair of Sveta’s and puts them on. She peers into the living room. Brown-and-red carpets hang from each of the three walls, and another covers the red floorboards. There is a neatly made bed under each of the windows and in the middle of the room is a table where Maria is sitting, drawing a picture with coloured pencils. Her black hair is loose down her back and she is wearing a white embroidered blouse and a red skirt. Lyuda’s heart jumps when she sees her.
“Marychka,” she says, and the girl looks up and smiles, her dark eyes full of sweetness. Lyuda suddenly wants desperately to take the little girl in her arms and to hold her. She feels tears coming up in her eyes as they hadn’t today at the clinic, and as they hadn’t at her mother’s grave, and she gives a half-gasp and pulls herself back and out of the room. Sveta comes into the entrance hall from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dirty apron. She looks tired, her face is sweating and wisps of hair are hanging out of her plait.
“Lyudichka,” she says, and she leans forward to kiss her on the cheek.
Lyuda struggles to clear the distress from her face and she swallows.
“Sveta, I’m sorry to just come round. I really needed someone to talk to.”
“Don’t be silly, dorohenka. I told you to come.”
Sveta wipes her hands on her apron again and then glances down at herself. “Look at me, I look terrible!” She starts to laugh and turns around. “Untie me,” she says, and as Lyuda unties the apron, she waves at Maria.
“Marusya, go and colour outside. Or go into the back and look after your brother. He’s making such a mess in there.”
“Yes Mama,” says Maria, and she gets up from the table and gathers her colouring pencils and leaves the room. Sveta pulls the apron over her head and holds out her hands to Lyuda. “Come on, sit down. Tell me everything. No, wait. I’m going to make some tea. I’ve got cake. You’ll tell me everything in a minute!”
She goes back into the kitchen, rubbing the sweat from her face with the apron, and Lyuda goes around the table and sits down in the chair where Maria had been sitting. The girl’s drawing is still lying on the table and she picks it up. It is a picture of a lilac tree and a bird with a sun shining on them. Without thinking, she folds the drawing in half, and then in half again, and slips it into her pocket.
Sveta comes back, tucking wisps of hair behind her ears.
“Maria will bring the tea in. Now, tell me everything.”
She draws up a chair and sits opposite Lyuda, and the two women look at each other. Sveta holds out her hands across the table and Lyuda takes them, and she says, “I can’t have children. After the abortion, I can’t have children.”
Her hands go limp in Sveta’s and Sveta squeezes them.
“Oh, my god! Oh, my poor Lyudichka.”
The kitchen door opens and Maria comes in carrying two cups of tea on saucers. There is a thin slice of lemon in each cup. “Here, Mama,” she says, putting them on the table. “I put sugar in them already.” Lyuda watches her. “Thank you Marychka,” she says, and the girl smiles, and Lyuda follows her with her eyes as she goes out of the room.
Sveta lets go of her hands and picks up her cup.
“I can’t believe it,” she says in a low voice, when Maria has gone. “How could that happen? There weren’t any complications. I remember the whole thing.”
Lyuda shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she says. “I haven’t even cried. I can’t tell Volodiya. We’re meant to move into the house in a few weeks. And then what? Then what’s going to happen?”
“Oh, my dorohenka,” says Sveta, “My poor girl. How could this have happened? What did the doctor say?”
“I hardly remember. He came in with all these papers and started reading them to me. He said there was no chance of children.”
“And you haven’t cried once?”
“I went to Mama’s grave. I took her some lilacs.”
“She loved those flowers.”
“I know she loved them. But I didn’t cry. I can’t even tell you how much Volodiya wants a child.”
“You never told him about the abort
ion?”
“Of course not. He would have been happy to have a child even back then.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“I suppose not.”
Lyuda picks up her cup and she sees that her hands are trembling. She pictures Maria in the kitchen, spooning sugar into the cup and then stirring it, cutting the lemon into thin slices. Again, she wants to hold her, to embrace her; she wants to smell her and feel the child’s warmth and sweetness against her body. She would smell of lilacs. She would smell of sunshine. Of the soil. Of sunflowers. She would smell of the river.
Lyuda shakes her head. “It’s like some kind of awful ending. I don’t even know how I should react.”
“You don’t have to react.” Sveta takes a sip of the tea and holds her cup and saucer up near her mouth, looking at Lyuda. “Nothing’s really changed. You’ve still got everything you ever wanted. Look at you! When’s that house going to be ready?”
“The house is enormous! It’s a house he built for children, not for me.”
Sveta laughs. “Lyudichka, don’t be so silly! He built it for himself. He just wanted to have the biggest house. So don’t make up some nonsense about it being for you or the children. Now what do they say about Ukrainian men?”
The two women speak together, laughing. “For every two Ukrainians, there are three tsars.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Lyuda puts down her cup as the door opens and Maria comes in with slices of cake on small plates. She has white paper napkins tucked under her arm. She puts them both on the table and Sveta passes one to Lyuda.
The Woman Behind The Waterfall Page 12