Marusia could not remember a spring when she and her family had not attended many weddings. She decided that out of the several that would take place in the village over the coming weekend, she would attend the wedding of the granddaughter of Evdokia Zenoviivna. Evdokia had promised that the ceremony would be traditional and Christian, held in the village church and performed by the priest, and not the usual unholy service where the bride and groom simply signed a register at the ZAKS, the magistrate’s office.
Evdokia had expressly asked Marusia to bake her famous wedding bread—a korovai—for the reception, a party that Evdokia declared would be special because her son-in-law, “that stupid Bolshevik,” had been able to rent the klub, the village social center, for the occasion. The klub was also the village headquarters for the komsomol meetings, and everyone knew that because Evdokia’s granddaughter and bride-to-be, Hanna Koval, was past komsomol president, and because her father had paid off the klub’s director, theirs was the only wedding party given permission to use the building that weekend. Since Evdokia had insisted Hanna get married in the church, Hanna balanced public opinion by having the rest of her ceremony—“the best part,” as she put it—at the most obvious Communist building in the village.
Marusia spent all day Thursday preparing the dough for the huge korovai before carrying it to the communal outdoor oven a short walk down the dirt road from her home. She liked using the old-style oven better than her own stove that heated either too quickly or not at all. She sat down on one of the wooden benches and thought what a warm day it was, warmer than the past few weeks.
“Slava Isusu Khrystu,” said the reedy voice of Slavka Lazorska, who was making her way up the little hill to where Marusia sat. Slavka Lazorska held a jar of clear liquid.
“Slava na viky,” answered Marusia. “God give you peace and health.”
“And you,” said Slavka Lazorska. The tall, lean woman sat down beside Marusia. “I smell your famous work of art. Whose wedding is it for this time?”
“Hanna’s.”
Slavka Lazorska snorted. “Oh, her. That one. She has to get married you know.”
“Yes, I know.” Marusia shook her head. “Well, these young ones with their, you know, modern socialism and…” She bent toward her friend and whispered, “sex.”
“At least we had the decency to blame our bad behavior on the war,” said Slavka Lazorska. The old women laughed.
“Now, no one bothers to excuse themselves,” said Marusia. “They just sew material enough for two white wedding dresses and there it is, for anyone to see.”
“So true. The little whores.” Slavka Lazorska laughed. “I’m going to attend that other one’s wedding—you know, Ania Podilenko. The one with the fake red hair. Somehow she’s related to me, I don’t know how. Probably from some bastard’s side of the family I’m not even sure of. Everyone’s related to me all of sudden when they want a present.”
“What are you getting her?”
Lazorska untied her green and black paisley babushka and wiped her face with it. Her lank iron-gray braids were coiled tightly like chain mail and wrapped around her head several times. “Well, she—that other one, Ania—is not like that rabbit, Hanna. Ania has a hard time getting a baby. So I made up an herbal potion to help her along. She’s no young chicken, either. Way past thirty, and this her fourth marriage.”
Marusia was impressed. Slavka Lazorska was the village healer, as all the women in her family had been. She boasted that she was never sick a day in her life, not even during the war when people dropped in the streets like acorns after a windstorm. Her garden was the largest patch of privately owned land in Starylis. In it, she grew all of the herbs and plants she used in her treatments. And she worked with the cups—large glass jars heated over a flame which she strategically applied to soothe the arthritis in a sore leg or loosen the phlegm in an inflamed chest. Lazorska was famous for her poultices and mustard plasters and was particularly revered for knowing the right cures for women’s ailments, especially when a woman lost her female pleasure juices or the “gripping powers” in a womb that should cushion and hold a child inside.
Marusia was a little afraid of Lazorska and only called on her when prayers and conventional medicine failed.
She had first met Slavka Lazorska during the horrible typhus epidemic right after the war. The Red Cross had not gotten medical supplies through to Starylis. Marusia’s mother was near death before she begged her daughter to fetch the “dokhtor,” the title given to Slavka Lazorska’s own mother. Marusia couldn’t find her, but brought back the daughter, whose hair was coal black then, as were her arched eyebrows that met in the center of her high forehead, her skin taut and smooth as an olive. When Marusia first saw her, she felt sure she was a witch or a Gypsy and distrusted her exotic darkness. Even so, Slavka Lazorska cooled Marusia’s old mother with a healing poultice mixed in snow that quenched her fever and resurrected her.
The second time Marusia called on Lazorska was when she was far along into her sad marriage and begged for an herb to conceive a child. “It might keep him at home,” Marusia had confessed to Lazorska in shame. From it, Yurko her son was born, and Marusia always remembered that she owed the healer two more major, unrepayable debts—one for her son’s birth, the other that Lazorska never betrayed Marusia’s secret.
“Is that the gift?” Marusia asked shyly, pointing to the jar.
“This? Oh, no! This is just some vintage leftover samohon Fed’ko at the co-op wanted me to sample. Here, have a taste.” She unscrewed the top of the jar and held the pure grain vodka out to Marusia.
“Na zdorovia,” Marusia said. She took a long swig. “Ahh. Thank you. Very good. Luxe. First class.”
“Yes, it’s about the best I’ve had all season. But he better not try to sell me any. You know, I gave that devil’s son my own recipe. And then he has the nerve to tell me it’s from an ancient family formula that was handed down from his great great great Kozak grand-father who slept with the tzarina’s horse or some such cow shit.”
The women laughed. Slavka Lazorska took her turn and wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her woolen cardigan before handing the jar back to Marusia. The healer smiled openly at her, exposing the gold in her teeth and brightening her sallow, triangular face.
Marusia’s head felt light, and the sun’s rays were warm and comforting on her face. She remembered a lullaby her mother had taught her a long time ago. Lazorska’s voice was off key and lower than Marusia’s, but she hummed along as she tried to pick up the melody. Marusia’s eyes misted, and she blew her nose into a handkerchief she had tucked in her dress pocket.
“Sometimes, I miss my mother so much,” she confessed, thinking that she would sing the song to her grandchildren later that night.
“She was a good woman,” Slavka Lazorska said. “Bless her soul.”
Marusia sighed and, measuring the sun’s shadow on the grass beneath their feet, reckoned that she had had the bread in for about the right amount of time. She peeked into the clay oven and took the loaf out carefully with a long, flat wooden shovel.
“Oh, what beautiful bread,” whispered Slavka Lazorska, as if the loaf might cave in if her voice were too loud.
Marusia placed the walnut-brown loaf on the picnic table. She was pleased. It was a magnificent korovai, a huge round braided bread decorated with several birds also made of dough, kissing one another. Later, when it cooled, she would place some sprigs of periwinkle and flowers among the birds.
“Yes, it turned out very well.”
“I hope that silly little potato appreciates it,” Lazorska said. She took her turn with the vodka.
“I don’t care,” Marusia said, gladly taking the offered jar. “As long as it’s noticed as much as the bride’s dress.” She spotted a brown skylark flying in circles with a twig in its mouth. On a nearby branch, its mate stood chirping at him. The women watched.
“Look, she’s telling him what to do,” Slavka Lazorska pointed. The male flew
back to his mate on the branch, who abruptly took the twig from out of his beak and flew alone to another tree. He followed her to a half-built nest well concealed in the cradle of the higher branches and humbly watched her entwine his meager donation within the delicate bowl of twigs and straw.
Slavka Lazorska laughed. “You see how it is! The females always have to do the work of the males! Even the male birds can’t do anything by themselves, because they don’t know how.”
“That’s the blessed truth!”
Then they sat in idle silence, breathing in the air and the scent of the fresh bread, listening to the low rumbles of a threshing machine in the distance.
Marusia made a small sign of the cross over the bread. “Well, anyway, thank God we’ve made it through another winter.” She shooed away tiny flies lingering over her bread and covered it with a towel. “I wish I could offer you some of this bread.”
“You make one for me for my wedding,” teased Lazorska, who had buried five or so husbands and outlived several more lovers than she cared to admit she remembered.
Chapter 3
“I CAN’T HELP it if I have to work later tonight!” Yurko had raised his voice at Zosia. It was Friday morning. Marusia was still in her bed, in the room she shared with Tarasyk and Katia. Only a thin curtain separated it from Zosia and Yurko’s part of the house. The little boy, Tarasyk, was still asleep, his thumb poised on his lower lip. Marusia kissed his curls and brought the goose-down coverlet closer to his chin. Katia was already up and in the kitchen playing with the cat and dog before she was sent off to school.
“You always have to work. You knew about the reception two weeks ago,” Zosia shouted.
“How the hell can I remember something as stupid as somebody’s wedding two weeks ago.”
“Yes, that’s how you are. But six months ago you made a date with your friends to go fishing, and you remember it like your own birthday.”
“What the hell are you talking about? I didn’t have any date to go fishing. The weather just turned to spring a few damn days ago….”
“Right. So like a thief in a palace, off you’ll go next weekend with your drunken, rotten friends on a boat… that you’ll do. But when I want to go somewhere, where there’s a wedding and dancing, and people, you have to work….”
“All right, I’ll go to the damn wedding. I’ll go to the stupid reception. But I have to leave by nine-thirty for the night shift. You can stay all night and dance with every goddamn fool and his brother’til your big feet swell like rockets, and you can do whatever the devil else you want to do. I don’t give a good goddamn….”
“Oy, yoy, yoy,” Marusia grumbled out loud so that they would hear her. They can’t go a day without fighting about something stupid, she thought.
Marusia didn’t like to overhear their arguments, but the house was small, only three and a half rooms, built in a circle with the kitchen in the center. Zosia and Yurko’s room was so close to hers that it was hard to ignore the sounds of suppressed rage and anger or of the sporadic lovemaking that in their earlier years together used to always follow their battles. Zosia was usually the more emotional and dramatic of the two, sometimes—when she felt especially wounded or when he ignored her—adding to the venom of her voice by throwing things at Yurko. Yurko was more controlled perhaps only because he was so much older than she. Marusia had been relieved when her son finally married at the elderly age of thirty-five, although, when she first laid eyes on the young Zosia, surly and demanding even then, with her thick makeup and wild yellow hair, she thought to herself, What a prostytutka.
Zosia and Yurko met working together at the electronics section of the nuclear power plant. Yurko was Zosia’s supervisor, and they had become lovers on the long lonely nights when they should have been preoccupied with the instruments on the generators that connected to the turbines of the nuclear reactors. They married when Zosia was pregnant with Katia.
Marusia crawled out of the bed and stiffly put on her sweater over her flannel nightgown. “Good, they stopped,” she said to herself. She knelt on the cold hardwood floor and said her morning prayers, praying especially for Zosia to mend her mean ways and be more myla—quieter and kinder—to Yurko.
Katia skipped into the room. “I fed Myrrko.” Katia giggled. “I gave him all your beautiful bread.”
“Oh you naughty one,” Marusia said, pinning the little honey-haired girl against her and kissing her head. “Would you like some breakfast yourself?”
“Yes.” Katia began to brush Marusia’s unplaited, wavy gray hair. “Babo? I didn’t really give Myrrko your bread. Just a mouse.”
“Much better, but I was saving that mouse for your dinner, dorohen’ka,” Marusia said. They both giggled loud enough to awake Tarasyk, who was rubbing his eyes.
“Wake up darling, the birds are singing, the sun is shining,” Marusia sang to Tarasyk, who smiled. It was the same song she always sang for the children in the mornings.
IN THE KITCHEN, Marusia was surprised to find Zosia ironing a dress shirt for Yurko. “So, good morning,” Marusia said. Yurko sat at the veneered wooden table in his T-shirt and his best navy blue striped trousers, drinking his black tea from a tall glass and eating leftover potatoes and sour cream. His rounded shoulders were stooped from worry, and his face was more haggard-looking from the new growth of heavy beard sprinkling his chin.
“So, sonechko, you and Zosia are going to the wedding?” she asked, trying to sound casual.
“Well, Mama, it’s hard to keep anything from you,” Yurko said, slumping further into his chair.
“A regular Cheka agent,” Zosia said, and suppressed a short laugh.
Marusia pursed her lips and ignored them. She turned her attention to preparing kasha for the children. Katia was helping her brother wash at the sink. Bosyi the dog was at his usual place, beneath the table at Yurko’s slippered feet, his tail thumping happily whenever he felt Yurko’s leg twitch. Except to the children, Marusia did not speak again until Zosia noticed the korovai in the larder when she went to fetch some powdered cornstarch which she used to stiffen Yurko’s shirt collar and cuffs. “Oh! Mamo,” she yelled. “It’s beautiful! The best one you ever made! Yurko, come in and take a look.”
Yurko got up and went grudgingly into the larder. “Beautiful, Mamo!” he echoed.
“It looks just like a soft cloud,” said Katia.
IN APRIL OF that particular year, the days were unseasonably warm and mild. The dirt roads leading around the village were muddy because the ground had thawed too quickly from the recent hard frosts.
The morning of Hanna’s wedding was especially tranquil except for a few billowing clouds that had at first threatened rain, but released only a quick, clean shower before the sun reappeared in all its warm brilliance. Marusia made her way to Evdokia’s home, where a large group of villagers was waiting outside in the garden for Hanna and her groom to arrive. These older villagers and some of Hanna’s friends had gathered to see the blahoslovennia, the traditional blessings given by the elders in the bride’s family on her wedding day. Evdokia Zenoviivna and her husband, Oleh the beekeeper, sat stoically on wooden slat chairs in front of their tidy white-washed house. They wore traditional Ukrainian folk costumes: Evdokia in her long red skirt, embroidered sash and blouse; her husband in his own embroidered shirt and long red sash that wound several times around his narrow waist, and which also held up a pair of satin blue sharavary, the balloon-wide pants that had fit him more snugly in his younger days.
“We’re taking bets to see if Hanna and the drunk she’s marrying will show up,” Marusia overheard the man in front of her say.
“Oh, she’ll come all right,” said the stout woman next to him. “The grandparents promised Hanna her ruby necklaces and a wad of money Evdokia got from selling her cow. That’ll help her get through the next winter, for sure, and now with a new little soul on the way…”
The crowd hushed one another and nodded their heads in the direction of a short woma
n, dressed in a long white wedding dress and veil, slowly making her way on the muddy road toward the crowd. The hem of her dress was dotted with wet mud, and her long veil dragged over the ground. She held a fading bouquet of pansies and tulips and hesitated each time her spiked heels caught in the mud. “Do bisa!” she cursed loudly when she nearly slipped and fell. She regained her balance and continued.
“Pick up the train of your dress,” a woman in lavender lace shouted. “Or it will get dirty!”
“It’s too late for that, Mama!” shouted the bride.
“Where’s the groom?” someone snickered.
A robust young man, blond with watery blue eyes, and in workclothes from the Chornobyl plant, put down his lunch pail and ran toward the bride. He picked her up and carried her the rest of the way to the grandparents.
The crowd applauded. “Well done, Maksym,” shouted the bride’s father dressed in a blue pin-striped suit with a pink boutonniere.
“Maksym, you should marry her yourself,” someone in the crowd shouted.
“And make my wife mad? No thank you!” Maksym said. The crowd laughed at the blushing man. Everyone knew what a bad-tempered woman he was married to.
“Good people, this is a solemn occasion,” shouted the bride’s mother. “Hanna go ahead.” She gently pushed her daughter toward a tiny fringed rug beneath the grandparents’ feet. Hanna knelt before them and grabbed their withered hands into her own. “Bless me Babo and Didy. I am about to leave my home and become a bride.”
Some of the younger people were snickering. Hanna immediately recognized them as her friends from her job at the plant. “Hey Hanna, where’s the groom? Maybe he went to the wrong wedding,” yelled out a brassy-haired young woman with the same shade of lipstick as Hanna’s.
The Sky Unwashed Page 2