“And nobody is watering my tomatoes in Tschernowo,” I think out loud.
“Forget the tomatoes, Mother. In Germany we will lease a garden plot for you.”
“What is there for me in Germany? I don’t know anyone there except you.”
“But everyone knows you,” says Irina, holding up a photocopy of a magazine.
Seeing the photo frightens me. I wasn’t even photographed much as a young girl, and with good reason. The fact that I’m on the cover of a German magazine with my headscarf, my wrinkles, and my still fairly good teeth is proof that the outside world has gone crazy.
I look at more photos. Photos of Tschernowo in black and white. I remember the photographer who spoke a language we didn’t understand. He had a high-strung interpreter with him and took pictures of everything, Marja and her goat, Lenotschka and her apple trees, Sidorow and his telephone.
These are the photos that came out of that.
Even Konstantin is captured here. And I am standing in front of my house with the cats skulking at my feet.
There is a lot of writing. The photos are old, but the magazine is new. She copied the pages out of the latest issue. Irina reads the piece to me, a bit haltingly since she has to translate it as she goes.
“Baba Dunja is one of those women you envy because they can smile like children. She has a small, wrinkled face and narrow, dark-brown eyes. She is tiny and as round as a ball—she’s not even five feet tall. An iconic figure. An invention of the international press. A modern myth.”
I look at my hands. On the back of one, the faded O between the liver spots, which really does look a little like an eye. I didn’t want to live when Oleg took up with another girl, and now I can’t even picture his face anymore.
“I’m not an invention. I actually exist, right, Irina?”
And once again Irina starts to cry like a small child.
I would like peace to return. I would like to go back to work. Right now I’m still too weak on my feet, but I’ll get there. I would like to dress myself like a human being. I would like Irina to go home. And I would like to find out what is distressing her so much. She doesn’t want to tell me. She wants to talk about what is in the papers, what the world thinks of me, but what do I care about the world?
“Did Laura read my letters?”
“Laura?” Something in her face scares me.
“Yes. Laura. Did the letters arrive?”
“We haven’t received any letters from you in ages, Mother.”
“But I wrote to her.”
“Maybe you didn’t put on the right postage.”
“But I explained everything in them.”
She shrugs her shoulders. She doesn’t need my explanation. Nobody needs explanations. People need peace and perhaps a little money.
“How is Laura?” I ask.
“Laura?” she repeats again. And the way she says it sends a shiver down my spine. Because I realize I am about to learn something terrible.
“Laura is ill?” My lips go numb with anxiety.
Irina shakes her head. And then I think I should have known. Should have figured it out long ago, because all the signs point to it. “There is no Laura, right? You made her up. You are unable to have children. Or you don’t want to. Like Lenotschka.”
Irina looks at me. Her eyes are open wide and very blue. If she didn’t have such a severe face she would be beautiful. But I didn’t bring her up to be a beautiful woman. I tried to get her through it. That at least I managed.
And in my head is just one thought: What is the point of it all if Laura doesn’t exist?
“Of course she exists,” says Irina. “But she is very different than you think.”
The Laura I know is blonde and has sad eyes. Her face is so pretty it almost hurts. She doesn’t wear hair clips and never smiles. She is a marvel because she’s perfect. That’s the way my Laura is in the photos.
The Laura Irina speaks about has shaved her head. She has stolen money from her parents, had alcohol poisoning at age thirteen, has been thrown out of two schools, and doesn’t understand much Russian, which I don’t hold against her.
“She hates me,” says Irina and looks right through me with her rubbed-red eyes.
Irina has never spoken with me like this. She has never mentioned any problems. And now one like this, all at once. She needs to be hugged but we’re not accustomed to that.
“I’ve done everything wrong, Mother.”
“No,” I say. “I have done everything wrong. It breaks my heart that you have so many problems, and then I add to them with my murder. I just hope your husband doesn’t think badly about our family.”
“No idea what he thinks. We’ve been divorced for seven years.”
She says this casually, and I nod just as casually. What can you do. Children are more important. Our child is in trouble. And given that revelation, everything else pales by comparison—the conviction, my stroke, and the pillowcases in the prison.
“I can’t even give you the money I’ve been saving for Laura. It’s in a tea caddy in Tschernowo. Maybe someone can go get it.”
“I couldn’t give it to her anyway. I don’t know where she is.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What is there to understand? Laura ran away. She has been missing for months. She doesn’t check in with me. I have no idea where she is.”
And for that reason I say something that I am sure will help Irina. “Laura wrote me a letter.”
Once again I can’t say whether what I’m doing is right or wrong. I ask Irina to give me my plastic bag, which someone has placed next to the bed. I unpack: a bar of soap in a soapbox, a sponge, a half-empty tube of hand cream, and another of toothpaste. The red lipstick that Marja lent me for my time in prison. And the small, folded-up piece of paper that I open and smooth out.
“All I could understand was the,” I say. “I wasn’t able to find anyone who could translate it for me.”
Irina rips the letter from my hands a little too hastily. My betrayal of Laura’s trust pains my soul. But Irina needs this now. She bends over the sheet of paper, her lips move silently.
“What does it say? Can you read it?”
She doesn’t answer, her eyes jump around the page, and her chin begins to tremble.
“Tell me, Irina.”
She lifts her head and looks at me. “It says exactly what I told you. What a screwed-up life she’s led. How awful her family is.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t mean it.”
“Oh, yes, she does. It says she hates us all. Just not you.”
“And where is she now?”
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t say.”
I know that Irina lied. There was more in the letter than she told me. She left quickly and said that she would come back as soon as possible. I told her not to worry about me. I will be just fine. She needs to tend to her child. I don’t want to believe all the stories she told about Laura. Laura is a good girl.
“You are still young and can even marry again if you would just learn to smile and to buy yourself some nice clothes,” I told her as she was leaving.
“From whom would I have learned how to do that?”
“I eventually learned it, too. And I was over seventy by then. I really only learned to smile after I moved back to Tschernowo.”
She cringed.
I took back the letter and this time hid it in a shoe. Irina didn’t like it, but I stood firm. She was allowed to read the letter but it belongs to me. And now I know it is written in English. Good girl, she probably thought her grandmother could speak a foreign language. Or that it would be easier for me to find someone to translate English than German.
I have my spot at the sewing machine back. As long as I have work to do, I can breathe easily. Our country needs pillowcases.
My fingers feel as if they no longer belong to me. I pay no attention. Since the stroke I’ve sewn six hundred and fourteen pillowcases. That’s not so many, younger women work twice or even three times as fast as I do. But six hundred and fourteen people no longer have to sleep on bare pillows thanks to me.
At noon, as always, we have a break, we get ourselves thin fruit tea from the canister, most of the women go out into the yard for a smoke, I stand up and do some vein exercises and watch the sparrows as they flit between all the feet in rubber shoes looking for invisible crumbs. I think of the bullfinches of Tschernowo and wonder if I’ll ever come face-to-face with a crane again. In between I repeat the English words I’ve learned in the last few days. Bag. Eat. Teacher. Girl.
I’m not finished with pillowcase number six hundred and fifteen when a commotion erupts outside. I don’t look up; I’ll learn soon enough what it’s about. When they come inside I’m startled because they make a beeline for me. This can’t be good, I think, when so many come to get me. It is women in uniform and men in civilian clothes and vice versa, their faces blur together, and I feel very old.
One of them steps forward, stoops down to me, and says loudly that our president has pardoned me.
Our president is a good man. He looks a little like Jegor in his good years. Except that Jegor was a dishrag and our president is a man of iron will. With a man like him I would have had more respect for my marriage. He wouldn’t have shown any fear of Tschernowo, he wouldn’t have let himself be forced to abandon his village, he would have laughed at the offer of compensation and at the pointless vision tests and the vitamins that you received for free as a reactor victim.
Because our constitution is celebrating an anniversary, the president has pardoned a lot of criminals. I’m one of them. My crime is more serious than many others, but my age must have swayed him. Maybe he read about me in the paper and thought, Baba Dunja from Tschernowo should not die in prison. He has a soft heart, like all great men.
I’m just sorry about the pillowcase I’ve started. I make every one like it’s my last, and this one isn’t finished, and it bothers me. I’m urged to hurry along because I’m now free. I’m not prepared for this. I don’t know what to do. Pack up your things, they say. So I pack.
I don’t have much, the clothes belong to the prison, I lay them out tidily. Someone keeps looking into the cell. I hiss at him, hasn’t he ever seen an old woman fold three pairs of underpants. I make the bed and fluff the pillow. My things I place in the pillowcase, which I then tie closed.
I’m not surprised to see Arkadij. He probably wants to make sure everything is done properly and that nobody swaps my blood thinning medication for toilet cleaning fluid, as happened recently.
Arkadij urges me to hurry. So that I can leave in peace, the press has been told that I won’t be released for another three days. But soon the first of them will arrive, as rumors travel fast. He braces me, I have to make an effort to keep up with him step for step. We cross the yard, I want to go to the workshop one last time to say my goodbyes. Arkadij holds me back as if his only concern is to get out of here as quickly as possible. The young woman who sits next to me runs up and shoves a rolled-up piece of paper into my hand.
“English vocabulary,” she whispers. I run my hand across her delicate cheek and wish her many more healthy children. Then I turn toward the workshop. Women in gray prison clothes are standing at the window. And then they applaud.
Arkadij Sergejewitsch drives a dirty little car. He has brought me a new, slightly too long winter jacket and gloves because I had to hand in my warm clothes to the prison. I feel bad that criminals like me keep him from making decent money. He didn’t get a single ruble from me for his work. I’ll have to give him some money from Laura’s tea caddy.
“As soon as I get home I’m going to send you money.”
“Better just to hurry, Baba Dunja,” he says and holds open the car door for me. And so in my old age I take a ride in a private car.
Arkadij says we can get everything I need at the airport.
“Get what? At what airport?”
“You are flying to your daughter’s in Germany. It is all arranged.”
“I am not flying anywhere,” I say. “I am going home.”
Arkadij understands immediately.
The little television on his dashboard that tells him where to go doesn’t recognize Tschernowo.
“My garden is surely overgrown,” I say. “Maybe you can drop me at the bus station.”
“Your daughter would kill me,” says Arkadij.
He stops briefly in Malyschi to buy a chocolate bar and a bottle of water. Never before has a strange man spent money on food for me.
“You are a good boy,” I say, sticking the things in my pocket.
He just looks at me. It’s the same later during the drive. It would be a shame if I were to die in a car crash now, of all times, and just because he didn’t keep his eyes on the road.
I ask him about his life and work. We’d never had the chance to talk about anything but the axe in the head. He answers cautiously, as if every word were a step in a minefield. Then he says he’s going to become a father in two months.
“Congratulations from the bottom of my heart!” I say. “The child is surely healthy? These days you can see right inside.”
“My wife isn’t here,” he says. “I sent her to England.”
I nod. Then I tell him about the flowers in my garden as he drives along a country road. The landscape stretches out cheerfully white before me. The winters keep getting milder. When I was little we had more snow. Nature needs the snow in order to rest.
In Arkadij’s car, you sit much lower to the ground than in a bus and you hear the pebbles stirred up by the tires. The drive goes by quickly. He stops in front of the abandoned candy factory, next to the green shelter of the bus stop, which is dusted with snow. This is where I always recuperated after my long marches. On the path through the fields you can see the prints of rabbit paws.
“I’m sorry, Baba Dunja,” says Arkadij, avoiding my gaze.
“Don’t let it trouble you,” I say. “I’m very grateful to you.”
“I just don’t know what to say.”
“Then don’t say anything.”
I have to struggle to get out. He opens the door for me and waits patiently. He hands me the pillowcase with my things in it.
“You still know the way?”
“You bet I do.” I brush a few snowflakes from his sleeve. “Thank you for your dedication.”
Then he is gone. I throw the half-full pillowcase over my shoulder and head on my way.
I walk not one hour or two. I walk more than three hours. It’s as if the way has lengthened, as if Tschernowo has receded during the time I wasn’t there. Something is singing inside me even though I am having trouble breathing. I limp since the stroke, and everything hurts when I walk as a result. I keep stopping to catch my breath. I wonder whether I should just leave the pillowcase behind.
On the other hand: Who would leave their underwear in a field except in an emergency?
I sing “The Apple and Pear Trees Are Blooming” to regain my strength.
Fortunately it’s not summer. The heat would kill me.
Soon spring will come to Tschernowo. Fresh grass will sprout, the trees will subtly start to green. I will go into the woods and tap birch sap. Not because I want to live to be a hundred but because it is a crime to reject the gifts of nature. The birds will twi
tter in the blossoming apple trees. The biologist told me why the birds are louder here than elsewhere. After the reactor, more males survived than females. This imbalance persists to this day. And it is the desperate males who belt out their songs in search of good females.
I wonder whether I will still run across Petrow. Probably not. I wouldn’t bet that Sidorow is still around, either. Maybe they will greet me as ghosts. My cat is surely still there. And Mrs. Gavrilow’s chickens. The house will certainly need to be made inhabitable again. Jegor will be there. He will always be there.
I catch my breath again. My leg hurts, but I must keep going. The houses of Tschernowo rise on the horizon like a set of loose, crooked teeth.
Hopefully nobody is there, I think. If nobody is there, then I will live alone with all the ghosts and animals. And wait to see who all comes along.
I think of Laura. I will always think of Laura. I think about how nice it would have been if we had overtaken the bus on the drive here, and inside the bus had been a blonde girl. A short-haired, tattooed blonde girl for all I care. She would have hopped out and I would have taken her by the hand and taken her home. That is what has always been missing for this girl. She never had a home because I never taught her mother how to feel comfortable in life. I learned it too late myself.
I will study English and read Laura’s letter. I will stay alive until I can read her letter.
I take the chocolate bar out of the pillowcase to strengthen myself.
The main road is covered in fresh snow. Smoke rises from the Gavrilows’ chimney. And Marja’s goat is nibbling on the bark of my apple tree.
“Pssst,” I call. “Get away from there, you stupid animal!”
Baba Dunja's Last Love Page 11