“Bless you and may God watch over you,” Marusia said, blessing Zosia. They hugged before she remembered that she was wearing her gold medallion with the Blessed Virgin imprinted on both sides. “Take it, it’s pure gold. You can sell it if you have to. But it will protect you. Take this, too,” Marusia said, pulling out a small embroidered pillow from her shopping bag, which she’d taken from home on impulse. “Sell this to a foreigner… American or German. Someone rich. They have money.”
“Thank you. Take care of Yurko.”
“I will. Write to me here at the hospital or back in Starylis. I’ll be waiting for you.”
They hugged again, and cried, and Marusia watched them until she could no longer see their silhouettes outlined against the glow of the harsh purple lights.
AT THE HOSPITAL entrance, more evacuees waited in line. Marusia stood with them and didn’t return to her mattress in the basement until lunchtime the next day.
“Where were you?” Marta Fedenko demanded. “Where are your grandchildren?”
“A long story,” Marusia said. She had waited in line all night and registered as a new evacuee. She showed them her internal passport stating that she had come from the radiation zone, and they gave her a new blanket and pillow and six more rubles.
Marta Fedenko handed Marusia her big suitcase. “I kept a watch over your things.”
Marusia took it by the handle and swung it gently. “Oh, how light this feels. So empty, and light like air.”
PART II
The Sky Unwashed
Chapter 11
YURKO DIED ALMOST six months after the evacuation. All that time, Marusia had never given up her faith that Yurko would get better. That she would witness her son’s death from the fallout in an alien city where doctors would refuse to listen to her or quell her worries was inconceivable. But in his last days she sat near her son’s bed, alert, finally ready for a death watch. She prayed and hoped for a quick, merciful end. Though the doctors had promised to send him to a better hospital in Moscow, in fact they had simply let him waste away in his starched bed, his skin patched and crusty like dried brown leaves as his body neared death. He was forty-two years old, but when she looked at him for the last time through the oxygen tent, she saw the pinched-faced boy who used to catch toads and trout from the Prypiat’ River in a time before anyone could have imagined the evil pollutants Chornobyl would blast forth.
Marusia tried to touch her son’s hands through the plastic, alerting the nurses who hardly noticed his moans for water. They rushed to come and tell her to go away. Their voices behind their paper-thin surgical masks were harsh, and they laughed at her when she asked if he couldn’t return with her to be buried back home in Starylis. “Are you crazy, Baba?” they chortled. “We’ll have to burn this one.” They whisked his body away, and Marusia’s eyes stung from the antiseptic they poured over the floor where his bed had stood. No one spoke to comfort her. She heard only the lull of her own murmuring voice chanting prayers of mourning for his soul.
The bitter months had passed slowly for Marusia after Zosia and the children left for Moscow. Some of the other refugees were sent to sleep their last days on hospital beds. Others, like her friend Marta Fedenko, found relatives to take them in. The rest were sent to other refugee areas. Marusia stayed on until Yurko’s death. After that, she was able to get another fifteen rubles from the government—“nagrop, coffin money,” she heard the other refugees say when they got their paltry compensations. Hardly enough to live on, especially in a large city like Kyiv. She knew that sooner or later she would no longer be allowed to live at the hospital. She spent many wasted hours at various government offices futilely seeking permission to live in an apartment in Kyiv. The time came when she finally realized she had nowhere to go except home. When she could get hold of them, she eagerly read both the Russian and Ukrainian newspapers. Like all Ukrainians living in Soviet times, she had had to learn Russian, and from the papers she found that the fires at Chornobyl were over and that trains traveled there. She decided it must not be so bad anymore, not like the time when Zosia had tried to leave Kyiv. There was no question in Marusia’s mind that she should return home.
Thanks to Marta Fedenko’s relatives, who pulled a few bureaucratic strings in exchange for a percentage of her meager wages, she was, during her additional six months in Kyiv, able now and then to find work as a street sweeper. The job forced her to become familiar with the vast city, and soon she was resourceful enough to find and collect numerous empty vodka bottles to cash in for extra kopiiky. At the hospital, where she still claimed a mattress on the basement floor, she scavenged for discarded things that she could sell on the black market for real money in case she had to bribe the ticket agent at the train station to allow her to go to Chornobyl. She found many valuable items—half-bottles of aspirin, a man’s jacket made of chapped greasy brown leather, a transistor radio with dying batteries—and sold them to surly young men at the huge Sunday morning bazaars held on the Plaza of the October Revolution, not so far from the hospital.
Marusia believed Zosia might return to the hospital, and so she needed to leave a message for her. On the back of an expired ration coupon she wrote, “Zosen’ka, I have gone back to our home in Starylis. Yurko has gone to the Lord. They have taken his body to be burned. There was nothing for me to do. Come home to me with the children.”
She distrusted the nurses after the way they had treated her and her son. She had her eye on an old cleaning woman who had now and then offered sympathies during the long nights she had kept watch while Yurko’s condition worsened. When the time came, Marusia gave the cleaning woman two of her precious rubles to get her promise that she would deliver the message to Zosia, should she ever come. With the rest of her money, Marusia parceled out enough for a train fare, third-class, to Chornobyl.
The town of Chornobyl was barely one hundred thirty kilometers north of Kyiv. On the train, Marusia was one of only four people in her car. The others were men very like the sullen workers she used to see back in Starylis waiting for the bus that took them to their jobs at the plant. The men ignored her when she greeted them. And they hardly spoke among themselves, but sat there, passively hunched over their meager breakfasts of black bread, tomatoes, salo and a bottle of vodka they passed to one another. She was hungry, but meant to save her lunch of bread and tomatoes for later.
The train pulled into the Chornobyl station at six o’clock in the morning, and Marusia walked the five kilometers miles from the station to the silent town. In the distance, she could make out the blinking red lights atop the antennas and chimney stacks of the plant building.
At the town’s entrance, she stopped to look up at the huge, gaudy brick mural, with a metal relief of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant’s skyline set beneath a metal sun holding a hammer and sickle. The word Chornobyl was spelled in bold Cyrillic letters.
Just as she reached the town’s center, a garbled recording of the “Internationale” blasted from the loudspeakers perched on the lampposts. After the anthem, a woman’s sweet voice came on to announce the day’s bus schedules to the plant. She ended her announcements with a list of the workers who had been given job promotions. Then, several buses pulled up, and Marusia watched people emerge from the dingy gray apartment buildings. Marusia couldn’t tell if they were men or women because all of them wore the same dark blue jumpsuits, knee-high rubber boots and felt berets. They also wore protective surgical masks dangling around their necks as though there were no compelling reason to use them. The workers boarded the buses that would take them to the plant in time for the morning shift, and would, Marusia knew, transport them back home. A new load of blue uniforms would take their places during the night.
“Hey, you! Chauffeur!” she yelled at the startled bus driver. “Hey, I need a ride to Starylis!”
The driver shook his head. “Starylis? Are you crazy, Babo? Nobody goes there anymore. Go away!”
“I’ll pay,” Marusia persisted. She heaved
her heavy body up a step and barricaded the doors so that no one could pass her.
“You’re crazy. Get out! Hey, robitnyky!” the driver yelled to the workers waiting behind Marusia. “Come on, we’re late. Hop in. Not you, babo!” The workers pushed Marusia aside as they piled into the bus before the doors closed and it pulled away.
Marusia proceeded to walk the length of the town and past its borders, where she came upon another ugly brick mural that said, LEAVING CHORNOBYL—HAVE A GOOD TRIP! Marusia laughed bitterly. “Take your buses and go straight to the devil,” she yelled back at the town. She spat on the soil behind her.
She found the redbrick path that led home. It was pockmarked with loose gravel, and weeds grew between the bricks. Marusia hobbled and felt her thick ankles giving way. After a while, she had to stop and take off her boxy, black plastic shoes. She had bought them in Kyiv just before she left, and already they were falling apart; the heel was coming unglued from the sole, and the cardboard instep was in shreds. She took off her black woolen stockings, studied her feet, and saw that her left foot was particularly swollen and that the corns between two toes were inflamed.
“Do bisa,” she cursed, wondering if she should leave off her stockings, which were already snagged from the bramble bushes she passed. She spotted some moss and milkweed growing near the side of the road and stuffed some of the soft greenery into her shoes. That done, Marusia was able to walk the rest of the eight kilometers to Starylis, stopping only once to drink some water from a stream, which she spat out because it tasted like coins.
Toward midmorning the wind picked up a bit, and the sun hid behind the charcoal clouds. Some of the dirt from the ground swirled in the breeze and sprinkled into Marusia’s eyes and lips. Well, it’s my own earth, she thought. I’m almost home now. She liked the taste of the dirt on her tongue, the rich grains of soil she wanted to believe were the same as before the fires. She tried not to think that maybe her house was somehow blown up by that “damned radiatsia,” whatever that was supposed to be. Like everyone else who had homes in the Chornobyl zone, Marusia had been obliged in the past to attend seminars at the kolhosp, where she had worked before her official retirement, about atoms and nuclear fission and energy, but she never really understood what it was all about. In her mind, the Trinity made more sense than what was being done at Chornobyl. Anyway, it was well over a year after the accident, Marusia reasoned. Surely the poison had disappeared by now. Even earthquakes, forest fires and blizzards have their ends after they do their damage.
The brick road had ended a kilometer back, and Starylis was just around the river bend. Marusia walked on the muddy dirt road that split through the woods and led her to the main highway, straight into the village center. She was hoping that a familiar car could pass her by, maybe a neighbor or a policeman would give her a lift home and tell her about what had happened to everyone after she had gone.
But there were no cars and no people. Marusia didn’t hear any blue jays or woodpeckers. She listened in vain for a howling dog or a cow lowing to her calf. It was quiet.
In the village center, the post office was the first building on her way. The door was unlocked and squeaked open easily as she pushed it. On the dusty floor stood three huge overflowing sacks of mail. One of the sacks was untied, and Marusia reached in eagerly and grabbed a bundle of letters. They were postmarked a few days after the explosion. Nothing was sorted, nothing was delivered, no one had come to pick up or inquire about their letters and packages. She wondered if there was a letter to her; maybe Zosia had written about the children. But she was too disheartened to think of digging into the three lumpy canvas sacks. In the handful of letters she held, she recognized many of the names on the envelopes—neighbors and friends whom she had last seen so long ago. Where were they now, she wondered. She put back the letters from Odesa and Moscow and the birthday greetings written on the backs of colorful postcards with the usual bright reproductions of water colors of flowers in elaborate vases.
The abandoned post office made her feel uneasy. It’s like ghost fingers tickling my neck, she thought. She left hurriedly and headed toward the village store. The torn screen door hung on its jamb and rattled when she pulled it open. Inside, the shelves were empty except for a half-opened can of dried-up paté and an old potato with sprouted shoots that had turned a crispy brown. Marusia noticed that no flies buzzed around the paté or the potato. Before she left, she spotted two unopened cans of black tea, which she remembered had always been there on the third shelf and were probably as old as herself.
Across the street from the store, Marusia saw that the klub, the village social center, was boarded up. Someone had spray-painted a skull and crossbones on the side of the building. Marusia found herself remembering the wedding reception of Evdokia’s granddaughter, Hanna Koval, the little flirt who had had to get married. Yurko, poor unlucky Yurko, had danced with her more often than he should have. Then Zosia had caused such a scene about it! Everybody at the reception made jokes about Zosia’s jealous behavior. Yurko and Zosia were always fighting about something stupid, and now it was too late for them to make it up. Marusia’s stomach knotted. Zosia! Brave, mean-tempered, high-spirited girl! Where was she now? And the beautiful children?
She wiped her eyes and continued her way out of the village center and toward the familiar dirt road that led to her house. On the way, Marusia decided to stop at the home of her friends, the Metrenkos, who lived in the oldest and most traditional peasant-style izba house in Starylis. Ivan Ivanovich was the village clerk, and if he was home he would certainly have news about everyone. Marusia had always admired the gingerbread moldings that surrounded the windows and door of the old house. They were so classy, she thought. Ringing the bell, she called out, “Ivan Ivanovich, are you there?” and turned the brass knob. The door was unlocked. She gasped and coughed from the dust that drifted around her. The big old-fashioned brown-tiled stove was caked in soot, and piles of dishes and pots stood unwashed and crusty in the sink. The beds were unmade, and the linen was yellowed from the grime and sunlight. The closets were empty, and the beautiful carved oak kitchen table and chairs that Marusia had always coveted were gone. A patchy red and blue area rug remained on the floor, tufts of dog hair and dustballs almost hiding its floral pattern. An icon of the Madonna and Child still hung in a corner, except that the ruby and turquoise stones that were inlaid into the gilt frame were missing. Marusia picked up a hand-embroidered flaxen towel from off the floor. The towel was soiled with a footprint mark, and she tried to rub off the stain with her fingers. She draped it gently over the icon and made the sign of the cross before she left. The last thing she saw was a calendar with a picture of a young man singing, kissing into a microphone—it must have belonged to Marta, the Metrenkos’ teenage daughter. The calendar was turned to April 1986, and Marusia read a message scribbled in purple ink near the singer’s photo that said, “Back soon.”
Marusia’s house was a few yards down the road from the Metrenko home. She walked more slowly than she had before. On the way, she noticed that many of her neighbors had left their laundry out to dry—clothing stiff now like petrified corpses swinging from a hangman’s rope. She was terrified of seeing her home in ruins and felt her breath shorten with panic the closer she came to her house.
She looked anxiously for signs of life in all the houses she passed—a smoking chimney, the buzz of a saw cutting firewood for the winter, the motor of a threshing machine on the collective farm. But nothing.
Marusia took the path directly to her own gate. She sank to her knees on the ground, and she made the sign of the cross. She uttered a prayer of thanks to be back on the land where her mother and grandmother had lived. She was weak from hunger and from the long walk, and she worried over the unfamiliar aches she had felt festering in her body ever since she’d been forced to leave. Above all, she was sick from the cloud of loneliness that was choking her. She wailed and continued genuflecting. But her house was still standing, and even though
she knew that somehow God had cursed her land, she grabbed a handful of soil and kissed it and rubbed it over her hands and face. She stood up and stared hard at every broken shutter, every crack in the windows and steps, before deciding to go in.
Luckily, no one had bothered to board up her house. Marusia detached the house key from the string she wore around her neck, timidly unlocked and opened her own door, and peered in. It had not been vandalized. Only mildew assaulted her nostrils. She noticed a few piles of hardened mouse droppings on the kitchen table and on the pantry shelves. But everything else seemed to be there—her few meager chairs, the kitchen table, the beds and feather-down comforters, the kilims on the wall—all there just as she had left them. Her own icon of the Madonna and Child was still nailed on her bedroom wall. She found matches and lit the votive candle on the small shelf beneath the icon and whispered another prayer.
The next thing she did was to start a fire in her woodstove as a signal of her arrival in case anyone was around. In her kitchen, she found the hand ax that hung on a wall, judged its sharpness with a caress of her thumb, and then chopped some of the birch logs that were piled near the stove for kindling. She dropped it all on top of the old white ashes inside the stove, lit a small sheet of leftover birch bark, which she placed under the kindling, and watched the hot blue flames wrap around the wood chips before she threw on the larger logs. The wood was dry enough and the logs’ pungent odor was comforting because it erased the dank smell of the abandoned rooms.
Marusia then tested the faucets and was surprised when a thick stream of brown liquid rust emerged at first. Then clearer water flowed, but it was still tinged with rust and had a foul smell. She decided that from then on, she would boil the water before drinking it or cooking anything. Marusia went down into the root cellar and almost wept with gratitude when she found the hoarded jars of pickled tomatoes, beets and onions and the several other fruits and vegetables she had canned before—all untouched and waiting for her.
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