“We’ll see.”
“Nothing rattles you, does it, Baba Dunja?”
I don’t answer. Laura’s letter is burning against my skin. It’s giving me abrasions. Petrow looks at me intently.
“You sometimes talk about your daughter, but why never about your son?”
“He’s even farther away. In America.”
“America is big. Where exactly?”
“On the coast. It’s warm and oranges grow there.”
“Florida? Or California?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why doesn’t he ever write to you?”
“He sends me a card every Christmas. American Christmas. He doesn’t like women.”
Petrow takes half a second to digest this.
“And because of that you have disowned him?”
“I haven’t disowned anyone. But it’s good that he’s no longer here.”
“Do you miss him?” He looks at me searchingly.
I look down at the ground. The dirt on Petrow’s property is sandier than elsewhere. It absorbs a lot of water. Petrow’s voice is like a rustle in the wind. He talks about all the places he’s been. That he, too, lived in America, in New York and California. That he has traveled the world. That there are people who not only eat no meat but no milk and no eggs, and don’t buy leather shoes because of the animals. These are things that must come out of him again and again, things I already know. He talks like a broken radio receiver. But he is still here, and he bites off half of one of the cucumbers I brought over.
“So you can speak English, then, Petrow?”
“Of course I can speak English.”
Laura’s letter throbs beneath my sleeve.
“And you know other languages, too?”
“Others, too.”
It would be so easy to ask him. It’s not that I have anything against Petrow. I just don’t trust him or anyone else.
“What are you thinking?” he asks, reaching for a peach.
“I’m thinking that you are very different from me.”
“If at some point you are no longer here, Baba Dunja, Tschernowo will disappear.”
“I don’t believe that.”
He spits out the peach pit and follows its trajectory with his eyes.
“Do you think a new peach true will grow out of that?”
“No. Peaches are usually propagated with cuttings.”
“I mean, will this area forget one day what has been done to it? In a hundred or two hundred years? Will people live here and be happy and carefree? Like before?”
“What do you know about what it was like here before?”
It’s possible that he is a little offended. He is the only one here who talks like that, and I don’t think it’s right. It’s the type of thing written in the papers and has nothing to do with those of us here in Tschernowo.
“Thanks for the cucumbers and peaches,” he calls after me when I’ve taken my leave.
I realize that it takes me a few minutes longer than usual to make my way back along the main road. As I pass the garden with the grave I notice that someone has strewn rose petals on top of the newly filled spot.
The grief hits me without warning and, as always, at an inopportune time. The worries concentrate behind my forehead and I can no longer think straight. It’s moments like these that take me back to a life that I no longer have. A talk with Petrow is always a good trigger. He asks questions that go straight to the heart and that you have no answer for.
During the first year in Tschernowo I was asked many questions. The most difficult came from Irina. The most inane from the reporters. They followed me at every turn, wrapped up like astronauts in their radiation suits. Baba Dunja, they shouted agitatedly, what message are you trying to send? How will you survive in a place where there is no longer any life? Will you allow your family to visit you? What are your blood counts? Have you had your thyroid checked? Who will you allow to move into your village?
I don’t know if they ever understood that it isn’t my village. I tried to talk to them, showed them my house and garden, the other houses that were empty then. That, too, was a mistake, I should have turned away from the cameras and closed the door in their faces. But I was raised differently, and that outweighed decades of professional experience as a nurse’s assistant.
“You shouldn’t have told them that you love this land,” Petrow had informed me later. “They will construe it as a provocation, as a purposeful trivialization of the reactor disaster. They will hate you for it, for letting yourself be exploited.”
“Yes, should I have told them that in reality I don’t care whether I die a day sooner or a day later?”
“Maybe you should have,” Petrow said.
Laura’s letter burns furiously at my soul. It’s too much for me to deal with alone. I must find a way to read it.
The next morning I sit on the bench in front of my house with heavy feet and a heavy head. The cat skulks around me. It is steadily gaining weight, I watch as it catches spiders one after the next and giddily destroys their webs. One shouldn’t think that animals are any better than people. The cat jumps onto my shoulder and licks my ear with its rough tongue.
“I don’t like the way you look today,” says Marja. I didn’t hear her coming. She’s standing there with her big body, her broad feet in worn-out slippers, her unkempt golden hair. She’s wearing her greasy bathrobe and beneath that a negligee that’s faded to gray from being washed so many times.
“Why don’t you get dressed?” I ask sternly.
“I am dressed.”
“Other people live here, too. Men. You shouldn’t walk around like that.”
“Do you think Gavrilow could rape me? Move over.” She shoves me to the end of the bench with her massive rear end.
“Sidorow asked for my hand,” she says without looking at me.
“Congratulations.”
“I told him I needed to think about it.”
“Why string along a decent man?”
“It’s not the sort of thing to enter into lightly.”
I nod and straighten the kerchief on my head. The heat of her body ensures that sweat begins to trickle down my right side.
“I’ve been without a man for a while now,” Marja continues and then looks at me from the side, as if anticipating a reaction.
“You’re no less lonely when you have a man. And what’s worse, you have to take care of him.”
She whistles through her teeth like a schoolboy. “Would you be angry with me if I said yes?”
My ribs still hurt so badly that I can’t turn to her. “Why would I be angry with you? I’d be happy for you.”
“Ach, I don’t know.” She reaches for the seam of her washed-out nightgown and wipes her nose. “There are enough reasons to be angry with me.”
“Not at all. He is a very old man but noble of heart. You are a beautiful woman. You make a good pair.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see her blushing.
That night I dream that my cat gets married to the dead rooster Konstantin.
News travels fast in any village. In ours you need only think something and the neighbors already know. The first one to turn up at my door is Sidorow.
“Congratulations,” I say, cautiously, because something in me refuses to believe this development.
“Thank you.” He tries to kiss my hand but I take it away from him and tell him he should save his gallantry for his fiancée.
He begins a long speech, loses his train of thought, stops, confused, and then starts again from the beginning. I listen intensely. At some point I realize that he is worried about fulfilling his marital duties.
“You should have thought about that,” I say mercilessly. He blinks. He could almost make you feel bad, but old men who seek younger women should cons
ider in advance what they are getting themselves into.
“I wanted it to be you,” spills out of him, but I don’t want to talk about it, it seems rude to Marja.
He leaves, his back more hunched than usual. I bet his rabbit heart is galloping wildly.
Next, surprisingly, comes Mrs. Gavrilow. She sits down on my chair and says she has heard something. Her way of beating around the bush gets me worked up.
“You heard right,” I say. “We will soon celebrate a wedding here in Tschernowo.”
“But isn’t it somehow immoral?”
“The engaged parties are both of age.”
“The question of age is exactly what I wanted to get at.”
“The law doesn’t bar anyone from marrying after they reach a certain age.”
“But where will they live?”
“Why are you asking me, Lydia Iljinitschna? I’m not the mother-in-law. The engaged couple has plenty of square meters of space at their disposal.”
Suddenly Mrs. Gavrilow roars with laughter, and the tension in her face dissipates.
“Ach, it’s fine with me. At least she’ll be out of the way.
I look at her. Marja’s strange words about being raped by Gavrilow come back to me. Marja is not a woman who places any value in being handled delicately. And Mrs. Gavrilow is anything but stupid. Perhaps she can even speak German.
“God help him,” she says, with schadenfreude in her smile.
A little later Petrow comes by and, before he even enters the house, recites a love poem. And then another. By the third I’ve had enough.
“What do you want?”
“We’re going to celebrate a wedding, and if things keep going like this we will soon hear the patter of tiny feet.”
“Then the sky really would fall.”
“Isn’t it all wonderful, Baba Dunja?”
I answer with a look that makes him cringe. I’m not sure which of his moods bothers me more.
“Okay,” he says. “You don’t think it’s wonderful. You’re jealous.”
“Not me,” I say. “But some here in Tschernowo will be able to sleep better as a result.”
Petrow has to sit down as his strength is waning. The skin of his face is waxy and clings to his skull. It looks as if it might rip if Petrow were to smile too broadly.
“You need to eat something,” I say. “Otherwise you’ll lose your strength too quickly.”
“Apparently, there’s someone in India who subsists on sunrays.”
Petrow stands up. He takes a few steps and then falls onto my bed. I’m actually not thrilled that my bed is now communal property that anyone who happens to stop by feels free to sit on without asking. But if I shoo him off it he’ll fall flat on the floor. They’ve already removed quite a few of his organs; it’s a wonder that he’s still able to be such a bother.
“I’m sure I’ll cry at the wedding,” he calls from my bed as I leave my house. “I get more sentimental every day, have you noticed?”
What I would never trade for running water and a telephone in Tschernowo is the matter of time. Here there is no time. There are no deadlines and no appointments. In essence, our daily routine is a sort of game. We are reenacting what people normally do. Nobody expects anything of us. We don’t have to get up in the morning or go to bed at night. For all anyone cares, we could do it the other way around. We imitate daily life the same way children do with dolls, or when they’re playing store.
At times we forget that there is another world where the clocks move faster and everyone is plagued by horrible fear of the earth that feeds us. This fear is deeply rooted in the other people, and interactions with us bring it to the surface.
Seventeen and a half years ago I dialed Irina’s German phone number, which with the country code and area code was very long. She hadn’t been reachable by phone for a few months prior to that. She hadn’t written me anything either. I had a feeling that it meant something, but I didn’t know exactly what. I still lived in Malyschi then, regularly bought five-minute phone cards, stood in line at the international phone booth, waited to be connected, and listened to the outgoing message in German on her answering machine. I always hung up immediately in the firm belief that Irina would pick up the phone at some stage. If something truly awful had happened I would have heard about it already. She would have made sure of that.
And one day she did in fact pick up the phone and said, “Mother, it’s good that you called. I wanted to tell you something. You have a grandchild. She is eleven days old and healthy. Her name is Laura.”
And I asked: “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure, I named her.”
“I don’t mean the name.”
“You can never be sure. But I did count the fingers and toes.” She laughed.
A cry rang out in the background. It sounded like a kitten whose tail had gotten pinched.
“It’s a great joy,” I said. “Go to your daughter. I’ll call you another time.”
I didn’t call for a while. I knew what it was like when you first had a baby, you don’t have a lot of time to talk. I sent Irina a letter in which I remembered what she herself had been like as a baby, and I began to save money. Irina wrote back: Forgive me, Mother, for not telling you about the pregnancy beforehand. I wanted to wait for the birth.
She included a photo of a suckling baby with a giant pacifier in its mouth.
I knew exactly what she meant.
When Laura was three, Irina came for the first time to take sick children to Germany. She didn’t have Laura with her.
I didn’t ask her a single time when I could see my grandchild. I didn’t ask why she never brought Laura with her to see her old homeland. I know the answer. I wouldn’t want Irina to feel bad about it. She invited me several times to come to Germany, she suggested she could pick me up and take me back. It sounded so easy when she said it. But I don’t have any experience with travel. In my entire life I never made it beyond Malyschi.
I regret not taking Irina up on her invitation. When Laura was younger I didn’t have the heart to do it. I didn’t want to impose on Irina’s family. Now I’m too old. The walk to the bus station, the bus ride, and then another bus to the airport, the airplane, the drive to Irina’s, I couldn’t make it anymore.
And besides, I know that I give off radiation just like the ground and everything that comes out of it. Shortly after the reactor I, like many others, took part in studies—I went to the hospital in Malyschi, sat on a chair, told them my name and birthday while the meter next to me clattered and a nurse’s assistant recorded the readings in a notebook. A biologist explained to me later that the stuff was stuck in my bones and gave off radiation around me so that I was myself like a little reactor.
The strawberries and huckleberries in our woods give off radiation, too, as do the porcinis and the birch bolete mushrooms that we gather in autumn, and the meat of the rabbits and deer that Gavrilow sometimes shoots. No outsiders will touch any of it, the most they will do is take samples for their research, but it seems like such a shame to us to put it to that purpose.
Sometimes I think that I owe my long life to the good air and the freshly tapped birch sap I drink early each year. I go into the woods with pickling jars and take the time to find birch trees that seem strong and willing to give me a bit of their sap. I find it barbaric to injure a tree again and again or to take too much sap at one time the way some people do in areas that enjoy a much better reputation than ours. Birch sap sells for a lot, and nobody cares about the scarred, desiccated trees. Me on the other hand, I carefully bore through the bark and insert a tiny capillary tube, hold a jar beneath it, and secure it. The elixir trickles out drop by drop, and when I go back and pick up the jars days later, I tend to the wounded spot with the same care I used to show my patients.
I taught Irina and Alexej that, too: do
n’t destroy anything if it isn’t necessary. It’s difficult to repair things and something is always lost forever. The village children had a better feeling for it than the summer holiday children who came out from the city. More than once I saw Irina smack their hands when they impatiently plucked an unripe berry or heedlessly pulled a mushroom from the ground only to throw it back down.
I offer the valuable birch sap only to guests who are particularly important to me. I had become fond of the biologist and handed him a glass of the translucent liquid.
“Are you trying to kill me?” He shook his head, laughing.
I love this land, but sometimes I’m glad that my children aren’t here anymore.
I knock on Marja’s door, a gesture she purposefully neglects when she comes to my place because she mistakenly believes that I have nothing to hide.
She yells for me to come in. She is sitting on her bed and has her long, golden hair down, combing it like an overripe Rapunzel.
“So, bride,” I say, “are you getting excited?”
“I’ve never been a bride,” she moans.
“I thought you were married before?”
“Ach,” she says, waving her hand dismissively, “that doesn’t count. That was a hundred years ago. I don’t know what I should wear.”
“What are you two going to do with your houses?”
“What do you expect us to do? We’ll both keep our own.”
“You’re not going to sleep together?”
“A boil upon your tongue.”
“Why are you getting married then?” I sit down next to her. The mattress is very soft and sags precariously beneath our weight. Marja cries out and grabs me. We have never sat together on her bed, only on mine, which holds up better.
“Let go of me,” I sniff. “What has gotten into you, stupid woman, let go of me and help me stand up.”
“I’m trying,” she whines, but with every movement we are just pressed closer together by the buckling mattress.
When it cracks, I feel as if salvation is at hand. The bed collapses and Marja and I land among the covers on the floor. I crawl out of the mountain of covers, brace myself against the wall, and stand up.
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