Marusia peered behind Zosia’s shoulder. “Where are we going? I have a cow who is going to give birth any day now. She might have trouble. She did the last time.”
“Don’t worry, Babo. Just keep it away from the grass.”
“What does he mean?” Marusia asked Zosia.
“Radiation?” Zosia asked. She wanted someone official to say the word to her face.
“Just a touch. Couldn’t be helped. That’s normal when there’s a fire at the plant. Ask any engineer. It’ll pass. Did you get any potassium iodine tablets?”
Zosia perked up at the question. “No,” she lied. There were always shortages of such things, and she wanted to get all the medicine she could. Maybe she could sell the tablets in an emergency. Maybe Yurko would need more than his one tablet per day.
The militsiia took out the familiar crumpled waxed paper envelope from a pouch strung on his belt. “Here, tovaryshko. One a day.”
“My husband is ill. We’ll probably need more.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll take care of it. Just grab a few things to take with you, stuff you would take for a weekend holiday, then come to the village center and we’ll put you on a bus. There are buses going to the hospital, too. You’ll be back before you’ve had time to unpack.”
YURKO WAS WEAK and tired, but he moved around the house. He had lost his appetite and ate only a little of the soup Marusia made for him. Zosia was cuddling Tarasyk, who seemed to have an earache. He was crying and fidgety. Katia played silently with her doll in the corner of the kitchen. She refused to change out of her black school uniform with the white lace apron and huge hair bow. Marusia wanted to stay in the shed with the cow, but saw that it was up to her to pack for the family. She managed to fit everyone’s overnight clothing into one heavyweight suitcase, the only one she had kept since she was last evacuated during the war.
She had hidden the large, boxy case behind the oak-veneer closet where they stored their clothes. Inside the suitcase, folded with mothballs and a small sachet of lavender, lay some of Marusia’s old hand-embroidered blouses made of crepe and linen from when she was a girl. She also kept her wedding costume, now yellowed, and her dead husband’s one good dress shirt, which somebody once told her was made of silk. It too was a yellowed white, but it was still as intoxicating to her as when she first saw him in it at their wedding. She held the shirt to her face, and her thoughts drifted to the very painful day he left her for another woman. “After all these years, Antin, I still don’t know why. It still grieves my heart. Even in your death, I ask you, why that one? Why did you choose that little whore?” She sobbed into the shirt.
“Foolish baba,” she muttered to herself. “I don’t have time to think about foolishness.” She found another box to put her old treasures in and slipped it behind the closet. The suitcase was still useful; its handle was firm, and the spring lock worked well enough. She liked the blue satin interior, though it seemed too grand for the threadbare cotton underwear and thin flannel night-clothes she was packing. She didn’t know what to pack for Zosia, who was so particular about her things.
Next, Marusia stuffed her canvas shopping bag with heavy glass jars filled with the vegetables she had put up the previous season. For the road, she added two long kovbasa sticks, a slab of salt pork, a few tomatoes and cucumbers and a loaf of dark rye bread she had baked earlier in the week. She also pushed in a flask of vodka in case Yurko was still sick and some other little snacks for the children to chew on when they were difficult.
When she was satisfied, she swept the floors, made the beds, and washed the dishes. She put away the stray food, except the scraps she kept out for the dog and cat, who were following her around the house, pacing around her feet until it irritated her. They seemed nervous, and she kept accidentally stepping on their tails.
She went out to the stable to bless her cow. “We’ll be back, darling. You’ll just have to give birth alone.” She hugged its coarse head and cried on the little place between its ears. The cow mooed with pain. It tossed its head and danced around the old woman. “Don’t be mad at me. I’m sorry. I don’t want to go. But I’ll be back in a day or two. Do your best. I’ll ask the militsiia to take care of you.”
Marusia wiped her tears and returned to the house, where she found Yurko sitting in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and listening to the radio. “Are you feeling better, sonechko?” Marusia asked.
His eyes were distant. He seemed distracted by her question. “Mamo, it’s good that we’re leaving.” His voice was weak and higher pitched than usual. He turned up the volume of the radio. A static-filled voice was jabbering in Russian about evacuation schedules. Nothing specific was said about the fires or why it was necessary to leave.
Zosia came in. Her face looked paper-white, but strangely pretty. Marusia pursed her lips when she saw that Zosia wore her amber bracelet and the offensive, whorish high platform shoes she was so proud of, but this was not a time to mention the presents Zosia took from her men friends.
“Come on, darling heart,” Zosia called to Tarasyk. The boy ran to his mother and greedily took her hand. He was holding on to a stuffed bunny that had only one eye and half of an ear.
Zosia listened to the broadcast for a minute. “Turn it off. They won’t say anything we don’t already know. Let’s get going.”
Marusia was the last to leave the house. She turned off the electric lights and looked around the rooms one more time. At the last minute she almost took her personal icon of the Madonna and Child, but she decided to leave it because it was nailed too tightly into the plaster. For over fifty years, it had hung next to the woodcut portrait of the national poet, Shevchenko. There was no time to pull it off. After all, they’d be back soon enough. “We’re waiting, Marusia,” Zosia called out from the front yard. Marusia locked the door.
Zosia held each of her children’s hands. Marusia started to take the suitcase, but Yurko held it fast by the handle. “I’ll take it. You can carry the bag of food,” he said. Marusia let him take it from her without protest, but she was worried that he might fall faint on the road to the village. Yurko walked ahead of them, straight and hardly wavering. She wondered if his knees were buckling. He did not greet the neighbors who happened to be walking with them at the same time, leaving Marusia to talk to them and cover up Yurko’s rude silence.
She was grateful when they made it into the village center, where several empty buses waited, their doors closed. Everyone who lived in Starylis was standing in unruly lines for their seats. Militsiia men and women with shotguns slung on their shoulders stood between the villagers, abruptly answering questions and strutting importantly on the sidewalks.
“Dobri liudy! Good people of Starylis,” a burly militsiia man shouted into a bullhorn. “This evacuation is for your protection. Don’t worry, you’ll be compensated by our government.”
Marusia and her family found themselves in a long line. Yurko put down the suitcase and sat on it. Zosia and the children spread a blanket they had brought with them and sat on it, huddled together. Soon, though, Marusia stood, hoping to seek out some sympathetic official to take care of her beloved cow.
In line, some men were passing a vodka bottle. “Decontaminate yourselves, tovaryshi,” they laughed, handing one another a bottle. “Nothing purer. Not even mother’s milk.”
“This will kill anything! Especially this batch.”
“It’ll be over in a few days, maybe a week, so drink up now, you’ll be back for a fresh bottle,” they joked, and the men winked at the younger girls, who flashed quick smiles back at them.
“Well, with so many alcoholics on the job, no wonder there was a fire,” a woman was heard to say, which brought out a round of laughter.
“That’s right, darling. A bottle of vodka, a hot man, mix them together and poof….” said an old man without front teeth.
“Where are we going, Babo?” Katia asked. She was rocking a naked baby doll in her arms. Its blue eyes stared coldly up at the sky.
>
“We’re going for a nice trip to the city.” She’d heard on the radio broadcast that they were going to Kyiv, maybe Moscow. Marusia was afraid. She had never been to the big city and dreaded the idea of having to walk the big streets where cars could run you down at a hundred kilometers an hour. How would her son manage that? She glanced at Yurko, who sat with his head bent down. He was ignoring Tarasyk, who tried to sit on his lap. Zosia peered into his face. “You need a doctor.” She stood up. “Mamo, I’m going to find out if any of these buses go to the hospital.” Before Marusia could object, Zosia hurried away from them, and Tarasyk started to cry. “Come here, soloden’kyi. Tato is too tired right now. Mama will be back soon. Come to Baba.” Tarasyk shook his head no, until Marusia coaxed him with some chewy apple slices she had dried the previous winter. “That’s my baby,” she whispered to the child, who settled down, sucking on the fruit held in his even white baby teeth.
People in line were joking and talking until their attention was drawn to two militsioner dragging Paraskevia Volodymyrivna.
“Make way, good people,” one of the militsiia shouted. As they approached the village center, Paraskevia wrung herself free from her escorts and sat down in the middle of the street.
Two men in front of Marusia guffawed when they saw the scene. “Oh, oh!” one of them said, pointing to a goat who jumped away from a group of militsiia.
“Her and her goats! They had a hell of a time getting her out of her cellar with those animals,” an old woman declared.
The crowd laughed and watched three more uniformed men try to corral the goat after it butted one of them in the rear. A woman militsiiantka threw rocks at it, which steered the animal back on the dirt road toward its home.
“Look, they’re hurting the goat,” Katia cried out. “Why are they doing that?”
“Now behave yourself, babo!” one of the militsioner yelled at Paraskevia. He and another man helped her roughly to her feet. She spat in his face.
Marusia darted her way through the crowds close enough to yell out to the old woman. “Paraskevia,” she said. “Please wait with me and my family. They won’t hurt you.”
Paraskevia did not recognize her friend and shouted wildly, “I’d rather die here. This is my home. My home, you bandits! I have to wait for my son to come back.” The old woman started to cry. “He is the priest. No one else is here for him to come home to. Just me.”
Marusia heard someone honking a horn. A driver was in one of the buses, waiting for his instructions.
“All right, get her in first,” a militsioner shouted. Two men forcibly lifted the old woman and carried her into the bus.
“No! No! I want to go home,” she protested.
Marusia turned away when she saw Paraskevia’s tattered slip hanging out in full view as they hoisted her into the bus.
“Hey, don’t be so rough on the babtsia,” shouted a blond-haired man in a torn T-shirt. His arms were stained with tattoos.
“You don’t know what a mean old lady she is,” the militsioner with the bullhorn answered. He wiped his perspiring face with his wide black tie. “It took four of us to get her out of her cellar, and she had six goats with her.”
“What a hero!” the tattooed man shouted. “Is that who we have protecting us? Even the old ladies are tougher than our dear little policemen.” Everybody laughed.
“All right, your attention now,” the militsioner brusquely shouted into his bullhorn. “Keep the lines moving. There is room for everyone on these buses.” As he spoke, more drivers in black leather caps strolled leisurely to their buses, sat down in their seats, and waited for their passengers.
Zosia returned and led her family to another area of the town square where they stood with other groups of villagers. Suddenly, the pace of the lines picked up and moved faster than Marusia was used to, and she panicked when it was her turn.
“Wait a minute.” Marusia turned from the bus doors.
“Mamo, come on,” Zosia said, helping her children to climb in while Yurko struggled with the large suitcase.
“I’ll be right there.” She forfeited her place in line and went up to the officer with the bullhorn. “Excuse me, please… I have a cow….”
“Don’t worry about your stupid animals. I’m so sick of these damn old ladies and their animals….”
“But my cow was supposed to calve. She might have a problem….”
“You’ll be compensated. We have to save people first.” He dismissed her with a shove toward the bus. Marusia’s heart sank, and she had half a notion to sneak back to her house and wait for her family to return in a few days. But then she thought of how they forced Paraskevia.
Marusia searched for her bus. They all looked the same until she saw Zosia standing on the steps and blocking others from entering.
“Woo-uh,” Marusia shouted, shoving her way back into the right line. “Wooh! Wait for me!” Zosia was arguing with a man who tried to pull her off the steps. “I’m here,” Marusia said, relieved.
“Come on, Mamo!” She pushed the surly man to the side and helped the old woman on. “Good thing you came. Otherwise I’d have to kick him where it hurts, the bastard.”
“I’d like to see you try, you whore,” he said.
“Why bother, there’s nothing there to kick,” Zosia retorted.
“Oh yeah! I’ll show you what I got!” He started to unzip his pants.
“Hey you, not here,” cried a militsioner. “You can’t piss in the middle of a street. Against the law!”
“Arrest me then! To the Gulag! Davai! Come on.”
“Drunk, too,” he called to another militsioner. They argued and shouted at one another while the others in line shoved in.
The bus was packed with more than three times as many passengers as seats. Old people crouched in the aisles. Marusia and Zosia sat on top of their bundles with the children on their laps near the front of the bus. Yurko stood over them, holding on to one of the hanging straps, his eyes closed, struggling just to stay upright.
The minute his own space was invaded by bobbing heads and elbows jamming into his back, the driver slammed the doors. He didn’t care that he might have cut off a part of a family, perhaps separating a parent from a child. Once he saw that his own legs might be cramped by too many bundles, he was ready to roll. Doors shut, he zoomed the bus out of town.
Yurko appeared as lifeless as a corpse on a gallows as he swayed with each jerking motion of the vehicle.
“Sit down, bratiku,” said a tired voice. A bald man with an eyepatch tapped Yurko on the shoulder. “You, please sit down.” He stood up and gave Yurko his seat.
“Thank you,” Yurko said, embarrassed. He felt that he should offer his seat to Zosia or his mother, but he felt weak and truly wanted to sit down. “I’ve been ill,” he confided, ashamed of himself.
“Really?” said the bald man, waiting for more. He tried to open the window behind Yurko, but all the windows were stuck shut.
“From the plant. It’s bad….” Yurko suddenly turned his head toward the window. Outside, a pack of dogs was following the bus. The dogs howled after their masters.
“Look at that, they want to leave, too,” said the bald man.
“It’s Bosyi, my dog,” Yurko mumbled. He wasn’t exactly sure if Bosyi was in the pack, but he liked to think he saw him one last time. He had hardly patted his head before he left, although Bosyi whined and nudged him and licked his face almost as if he was desperate. “Good-bye, my friend,” Yurko said to himself.
“Damn, stupid animals,” the bus driver shouted, stepping on the gas. He was an ugly man in his twenties with a bad complexion who wore his black leather cap jauntily perched on the side of his head. He lit a cigarette and turned on a portable radio that was hooked up to the dashboard. Russian rock music blared over the hacking coughs and whimpering children.
The dogs followed the bus, yelping and whining, but gave up once the vehicle picked up speed on the smoother, paved highway. Yurko sank back in
to the torn leather seat.
Marusia looked over to her son but could not see him behind the crowded travelers standing over her. She glanced out the window and caught a passing glimpse of a small group of young men burying their cars and television sets deep in the ground on the town’s outskirts.
“We should have done that,” a woman behind Marusia said.
“What for? We’ll be back in a couple of days,” said someone else, probably her husband.
The bus took a back road, shifting into second gear to pull up a steep hill. It almost turned over when the driver swerved into the opposite lane to pass the slower buses in front of him. He beeped his horn and swore out loud.
“Sorry, darling,” someone said. Yurko’s eyes snapped open. His upper lip was bristling with sweat. He unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt, hoping to breathe easier in the stench of the diesel fumes.
The bus slowed down in front of the kolhosp. Three tractors were mowing the fields for hay. Mounds of grain were piled by the side of the road, and strong women in bright head kerchiefs were emptying the sacks and handing the depleted bags to a man with a pickup truck.
“What are they doing?” someone wanted to know. “Why are they wasting food like that?”
“They need the sacks for sand. To put out the fire,” said the driver to no one in particular. He stopped the bus near one of the women on the roadside. She was younger than the others and wore a pair of faded jeans that stuck tight to her ample thighs and backside.
The bus driver opened the doors. “Hey, beautiful,” he shouted in Russian to the girl. “Forget that work and come with me to Kiev. I’ll buy you a mink coat.”
She laughed and took off her kerchief, stroking back her straw-blond hair. “Thanks, but we’re going on another bus after we finish here,” she said. Then she giggled and sauntered closer to the bus door, where she posed with one foot on the bottom step.
“Good, then meet me at the relay station tonight in Kiev. I stashed away a bottle of the best sovietskoye champanskoye and I got a nice bottle of perfume for you… from Paris.”
The Sky Unwashed Page 6