Baba Dunja's Last Love

by Alina Bronsky

  The little girl with red pigtails who didn’t die so nicely, I’d have liked to give her something, but I wasn’t permitted. The entire family badgered me and the doctor, demanding things that were out of our hands, fighting among themselves over trivialities.

  Those are my dead, the ones that followed me to Tschnernowo, and there are dozens of others that were already here, along with their cats and dogs and goats. The village has a history that is intertwined with my history, like two strands of hair in the same braid. We’ve come part of the way together. I always greet the dead with a slight nod of the head, my lips barely move.

  A man and a little girl are walking down the main road, I’ve never seen either one of them before. He’s carrying a backpack, and she’s pulling a small suitcase. Her feet are in red Sunday shoes. I greet them the same way I do the rest of the dead, but then I realize they aren’t dead.

  I stop and so do they. We look at each other. We never have visitors here, unless you count the film crews and photographers and biologists. And the nurse from the city who pops up every couple of years and wants to measure our blood pressure and take blood samples.

  Her most recent visit was seven months ago, she was no longer wearing a radiation suit, just a lab coat, and too much rouge on her powdered, unnaturally white face. She parked her old Lada on the main road and tugged her equipment around behind her. Petrow closed the door in her face, Sidorow acted as if he couldn’t see or hear her, Lenotschka smiled at her kindly and asked her not to touch her. Only the Gavrilows and Marja monopolize the poor woman’s time and don’t let her go until she has palpated their livers and tested their vision. When she knocked on my door, totally spent, I let her in and offered her a cup of tea. The harried look on her face and her bad perm reminded me too much of myself forty years ago.

  People who come here normally stay until they are carried to a little plot by the former village school. The girl is probably terminally ill.

  Even if I live to a hundred I will never learn to take something like that lightly. I look at the girl so intently that she nearly starts to cry. Then I introduce myself by name and ask what I can do for them.

  The man doesn’t want to say his name. He’s different from all the others I’ve seen in these parts. He is a city person, but not from Malyschi. He’s from the capital city. Everything about him, his shoes and his smooth face and his way of speaking, everything cries out that he doesn’t belong here. I’m not the sort of person who quickly develops sympathy and he’s making it particularly difficult for me to feel any towards him. The girl is named Aglaia. So it’s true what Marja told me, that they name little girls like ancient women in the capital these days.

  “Aglaia, right, so it’s Glascha then,” I say. The girl smiles and her hand moves from her father’s to mine. She doesn’t otherwise seem particularly trusting. Maybe I remind her of someone. She looks healthy, rosy cheeks, dark hair, only her eyes are sad, and her smile is crooked.

  I lead little Glascha to a house that I want to show them. I nearly took it myself but it’s too big for me. But the two of them need two rooms, it’s not good when a girl and her father have to share a room. The eyes of the others follow us as we walk down to the end of the main road.

  The house that I have in mind is painted blue. Glascha’s eyes begin to light up and my heart softens. I force myself to let go of her hand. But she clings to me.

  “Does it have running water?”

  I don’t look at her father as I answer. “Nobody here has running water. The well is at the end of the street. Some yards have their own, but not this one. We have electricity. There’s a stove that you can heat and cook with. I don’t know how long . . . ”

  I look at the girl and don’t want to say it. It’s not as easy in Tschernowo in winter as it is in summer. But will there still be two of them by then?

  “I don’t know, either,” says the man.

  He enters the gate. The girl lets go of my hand and follows him. She runs through the garden and I’m reminded of the fact that Irina and Alexej used to play here, too. An old woman, Baba Motja, lived in this house back then, and she let the village children munch her raspberries. She had not only red ones but also a yellow kind that Irina sometimes brought me, closed carefully in her fist so as not to squash the delicate berries. Yellow and larger than ordinary raspberries, they shone in the palm of her hand. But they didn’t taste particularly sweet.

  Glascha’s father goes into the house and tries to open the window from inside. He has to tug and jiggle it, but then his face appears in the window, looking suddenly content. He disappears. There’s a bustling sound and then something falls to the floor, and his upper body appears in the window again, as if he’s framed in an old picture.

  “Okay,” says the man. “There’s nothing better?”

  If at my age I still spent time wondering about people I’d never manage to get around to so much as brushing my teeth.

  “No,” I say. “This is the best place as far as size, furnishings, and condition are concerned.”

  He seems surprised that I’m able to produce such long sentences.

  “Okay,” he says again. “Does it belong to anyone?”

  “No,” I say again. “You can live in it.”

  “And what if someone comes and demands I pay the rent retroactively?”

  I don’t begrudge him his suspicions. When it comes to the reactor, you can’t trust anyone. There was a scandal just recently in our region. The residents of irradiated villages who moved to other places were promised compensation for their homes, and they claimed them at values the cabins wouldn’t have had even if they’d been on Red Square. Bureaucrats dutifully approved them in exchange for a portion of the inflated compensation. At least that’s how Marja told it. I was happy that on paper my house still belonged to me. Not to mention that my conscience is clear, which is something that becomes more and more important with age.

  “Nobody just drops by. How did you get here anyway?”

  “Somebody drove us. But not all the way to the village. The driver was scared.”

  I nod. The girl has found some raspberries in the garden and pops them in her mouth.

  The man watches her from the window. “Are the berries irradiated, too?”

  “Do you not know where you are?”

  “Yes, yes,” he says. “Do I ever. You don’t like stupid questions, do you, Baba Dunja?”

  I should go home but something keeps me there. I have to really force myself to leave.

  “One last question,” he calls after me. “Where can you buy something to eat around here?”

  I turn around. I think starvation is a relatively gentle way to go, but it’s not in my power to decide how death comes to other people.

  The man is waiting for an answer. He is not accustomed to waiting. His oily face twitches impatiently.

  “Malyschi. Vegetable garden. Stockpiles. Neighbors.”

  Then I finally go home.

  My work taught me that people always and inevitably do what they want to do. They ask for advice, but don’t actually have any use for the opinions of others. From every sentence they strain off only what they want to hear. They ignore the rest. I’ve learned not to offer advice unless someone explicitly asks for it. I’ve also learned not to ask questions.

  I wait until the evening hours to water my cucumbers and tomatoes. Bees buzz around the yellow zucchini blossoms. I watch them, spellbound. For a long time after the reactor I didn’t see any bees around here. Various creatures dealt with it differently. The bees just disappeared. I pollinated my tomatoes by hand with a little paintbrush. Perhaps the fact that bees are now crawling around in the calix of these flowers is just the good news Petrow asked for. If I were younger I would shout the news. I decide to write Irina about it. And Laura.

  Later I make a cup of tea from fresh raspberry leaves. When I turn away
from the kettle I see Jegor sitting there. I feel bad that I can’t offer him a tea. It’s always nicer to drink tea with someone else. It is perhaps the one thing that with age becomes better to do with company than alone. One time I poured a cup for him out of politeness, but I realized I wasn’t doing him any favor by doing that.

  Jegor looks at me with his dark eyes. I’m getting self-conscious. I’ve aged since his death and he could be my son at this point. He doesn’t need to undress me with his eyes like that.

  After a moment I can’t take it any longer. “What are you staring at?”

  He leans back. “I love to look at you.”

  “Do you know any languages other than Russian?”

  “Surzhyk.”

  “That’s not a language. It’s a dialect. Didn’t you learn anything in school?”

  “We didn’t have any foreign languages in school,” he says unperturbed, looking through me. Surely he sees Laura’s letter in my sleeve. I’m grateful that he doesn’t say anything.

  “Have you seen the newcomers?”

  He raises an eyebrow. “The guy is an asshole,” he says.

  I don’t contradict him. Even though I don’t believe there are good and bad people. I wouldn’t know which group I myself would belong to, for instance. When I was young I put so much effort into being a good person that I was dangerous to others. I was very strict with my children so they’d be decent, hardworking citizens. Now I’m sorry I didn’t indulge them more. But indulging children was looked down on in our day. People used to say that the only thing you got from indulging your children was coddled good-for-nothings, and I wanted to spare them that. I was particularly strict with Alexej, even though it broke my heart.

  “The girl is going to die,” says Jegor.

  I look up from my teacup. Of course she will. We are all going to die. Some sooner, some later, and a child who moves here certainly won’t be around long. Children are frail and delicate. It’s the tough, old lumps like Marja and I who hang on forever. No microwaves are going to wear us down.

  “He’ll kill her with his own hands.” Jegor looks out the window knowingly.

  “What can he do about her being sick?” Even in death I won’t let him get away with it when he acts as though he is the smarter of us two.

  “He is doing something about it because he brought her here.”

  And then I begin to understand what he is getting at because I was thinking the same thing the whole time. “You mean she’s not sick?”

  In the past he would have spat on the floor. Now he just shrugs his shoulders. “Not yet. But that could change fast.”

  “But why would a father do something like that?”

  “Fathers.” Now he spits on the floor after all. “You know everything about fathers. What kind of father was I?”

  For the sake of civility, I remain silent. Most women I know would have been better off raising their children on their own rather than constantly stumbling over the boots of their drunken husbands.

  But I don’t think it’s right. Deep in my heart I feel that humans belong in pairs. At least if they have responsibilities. A family is for two. I missed Jegor even while he was alive, no matter what I always claimed. Now he’s here and it’s too late.

  “You know something,” I say.

  “His wife left him. He wants to teach her a lesson,” says Jegor.

  I always forget how old I am. I’m constantly surprised by my creaking joints, by how difficult it is to get out of bed each morning, by the unfamiliar puckered face in the scratched mirror. But now, as I cross the main road, actually running, it feels effortless again. It probably couldn’t feel more effortless unless I were dead. I yank open the gate, hurry through the garden, and beat my fist against the blue-painted planks of the side of the house.

  The man is soon standing in the doorway in jeans and sneakers. A T-shirt with foreign writing on it is stretched across his shoulders.

  “What do you want?” He shrinks back from me. I put my foot into the doorway before he can close the door.

  “You’ve brought a healthy child here?”

  He tries to shove my foot in the hiking sandal out of the doorway with his sneaker. We grunt like a couple of mating wild boars.

  “Have you completely lost your mind?” That’s me.

  “You should concern yourself with your own sanity.”

  “Your wife left you, but why drag the little girl into it?”

  “Nonsense.” He kicks my foot and I stumble backwards, nearly falling over. Jegor is standing behind me but he can’t do anything to hold me up.

  “You have to leave here right away!” I haven’t shouted like this in ages. “She’s healthy!”

  “Who among us is really healthy?”

  He steps out of the house and comes right up to me. I plead with him, saying how sweet his daughter is, that he should go somewhere else with her, that he can jump in front of a train for all I care but that he needs to take the child home, away from here. His face contorts into a grimace. He shoves me, I stagger and grab his T-shirt to steady myself. He swats at my arm. The cloth rips with a dry sound, or maybe it’s actually something inside me as his fists land on my ribs. It hurts, but I have no fear of pain. My only fear is of helplessness. But even that can’t keep me from saying things that are important to me.

  “What do you know anyway?” he grunts as he jabs roughly at my shoulder. Now I really do fall over. I’m lying on the ground, above us the Big Dipper illuminated in the cloudless sky. He kicks me in the side with all his weight, his face looks distorted. His fingers close around my throat. I hear myself wheezing. How quiet two people can be when one is in the process of killing the other.

  Jegor stands behind him, crying.

  What happens next I don’t understand at first. A dry snap out of nowhere. The man, who never introduced himself by name, stands up straight and lurches. For a second he stands there in a contorted, unnatural position. Then he falls to the ground right next to me.

  Against my will I suddenly start to moan. When a strong man just falls over like that it’s always a fright. My first imperative is to stand up. I roll onto my left side and then onto my stomach. Next I get to my knees and brace myself with my hands. I crawl over to the fallen man.

  “Sir, what is with you, sir?”

  His face is lying in a pool of blood. There’s a hatchet stuck in his skull. I look over at Jegor, who is holding his hands up as if to say: You can see for yourself that I’m unarmed. I kneel there groaning with pain and my gaze wanders slowly through the dark, against which a figure slowly starts to form.

  “Petrow,” I say. “You swine.”

  There’s a maniacal grin on his face. His eyes look into the distance. I wonder if perhaps he is sleepwalking. Then he shakes himself and tries to help me to my feet, which just causes me more pain.

  “Why were you fighting with him, Baba Dunja?”

  “I didn’t want to have him here.”

  “Was he misbehaving? Didn’t show you respect?”

  “You can see for yourself.” I stand up and let him kneel down and let him brush the dirt off the hem of my skirt.

  “I’m terribly sorry to muck up such a lovely evening, but I’m afraid I’ve killed him.”

  I’ve seen too many wounds in my life to contradict him.

  “The question is an easy one,” says Petrow. “What shall we do with him?”

  “At this point,” I say, holding my ribs, the stabbing pain screaming with every breath I take, “the question doesn’t concern him.”

  The girl sits in bed and blinks in the dark. Our dirty faces must have given her a terrible scare. But she’s brave. She doesn’t cry, she stares at me, now barely blinking. I probably remind her of someone.

  “You’re going to come with me now, Glascha,” I say, trying not to betray my distress. “Y
our papa’s just conked out.”

  She doesn’t ask about him. It’s a good sign. Actually a bad sign, but for us at the moment a good one. She crawls out of bed, a proper little girl in a polka-dotted nightgown. Her little suitcase is lying open on the floor, and on her pillow there’s a stuffed animal with a long tail.

  “Early tomorrow morning it’s back home,” I say. Actually tonight would be better, but I can’t work magic.

  I take the girl by the hand. She doesn’t notice as she walks past the body of her father, lying like an oblong mound of dirt in the dark. For tonight I’ll take her to my place.

  Petrow carries her little suitcase and talks to me the whole time. He’s making me crazy, because at the same time I feel as if I can see the radiation pressing through the pores in the skin of this child. It allows me to forget my own injuries.

  “Aluminum foil,” I say loudly. “If anything can help us now, it is aluminum foil.”

  “Who here has aluminum foil?”

  “I do. I have foil.”

  I do in fact have some, thanks to Irina. She has sent me all sorts of things for the kitchen, practical, German things that we never had in the past. Parchment paper to bake bread on without getting the baking sheet greasy. Silicone forms for baking small cakes, which in the past I had to use rinsed-out jam jars for. And good, strong aluminum foil reinforced in a honeycomb pattern.

  “Glascha,” I say. “You are going to be surprised.”

  The girl must have an old soul. She isn’t surprised by much. I ask her if she knows what is unusual about our village. She shakes her head. Maybe it’s better that way. I’ve seen people get burns because they imagine they have touched something glowing. If I tell the girl about the radiation she won’t survive even a month.

  “It’s like a game,” I say. “You’re going to think it’s silly, but in exchange you’ll stay healthy and grow up to have five kids with a nice man.”

  She laughs, apparently she finds the image funny. I unpack the aluminum foil, Petrow helps me. In her suitcase Glascha has a pair of tights and a long-sleeved shirt, she has to put those on so that the armor doesn’t scratch her tender skin. Then she stretches out her arms and legs and we wrap the silver foil around them. Glascha giggles. I’m thankful for her agreeable nature, that she doesn’t cry and she doesn’t balk. Even the iodine tablets from my home pharmacy she gulps down without grumbling. If she’s always so obedient you almost have to fear for her.