Mother Country

by Irina Reyn

  “I feel the dark forces working on her behalf.”

  She turned around to face him. “Why does it have to be a husband? Isn’t a boyfriend enough? Or maybe instead of either, she could just concentrate on her studies?”

  Pyotor didn’t have time to take offense. Tanya, an upstairs neighbor, a widow who had not succeeded in seducing Pyotor away from his grief, drew him away by the elbow for introductions, and Nadia was left alone to marshal her shawl more tightly about her shoulders. Despite the warm day, she shuddered.

  It was the summer solstice, the night of vampires and witches and rusalkas, murderous spirits whose existence once terrified her as a child. Her mother would murmur to her at night about women who dragged people below the water’s surface, witches who took the guise of normal people but damned you with the evil eye. Domovoi, the ghosts of dead people who lived in your house and demanded particular food, order, and respect or they would create domestic havoc. There were barn demons, water demons, flying women who kidnapped you to distant places, carrying you away on their backs. They might be invisible during the day, her mother said, but they were waiting for the setting sun when you were left alone and vulnerable. Didn’t she ever read Gogol’s “Viy”? If you survived the night, you would often be safe from their magic, so the trick was to make it until the morning, when the evil would be dispelled.

  Five years ago, as she turned forty, an age that knew better than to distinguish between good and evil, she started to believe that those unclean forces must have kept many people company as they were making sense of the kind of country they lived in. They kept the storytelling going, providing one vital link to the motherland. And to look around now one would assume that even if they slumbered under communism, these spirits were being summoned back to life. Who knows? Maybe now they had legitimate reasons to haunt and kill, reasons living beings could not possibly understand.

  * * *

  Larissa first mentioned the prospect of Sergei a week ago. They were out in the field gathering the raw materials for the wreath. The field was not abundant, probably already plucked of the best flowers, the local girls having covered the terrain just before they got there. It was their little ritual, the gathering of the daisies and fern, then plaiting them together on an old towel. That this would be the last time until they reenacted the tradition in New York filled Nadia with a sweet ache in her abdomen. It was hard to believe that the two of them would be making wreaths in America in a matter of weeks.

  Across the square, the remaining plant was spewing fresh black smoke into the air. The sight of chemical fumes over exquisite fields of flowers was a familiar contrast in their lives but Larissa was particularly occupied that afternoon, her freckled nose pointed at the sun. It was Sergei she would miss when they left, she announced. Almost as much as Galya and the rest of her old girlfriends who were always running in and out of the house in their socks and pleated skirts, dragging her out by her arm to some party or picnic.

  “Sergei? Who’s that?”

  “I wasn’t going to tell you. What’s the point? We’re leaving anyway.”

  “That’s true.” She had not been particularly receptive of boy talk, redirecting her daughter to her studies, to more important aspects of the future. “There will be so many boys in America. It’s better not to waste your time.”

  “But he is nice, you’d like him. He seems tough on the outside but he really has the biggest heart.”

  Larissa returned to the stalks of dandelions, plying their tubes into knots. It only recently emerged that she was a talented embroiderer. All Ukrainian girls mastered embroidery, of course, but Larissa’s work was much more elaborate and sophisticated. In the evenings, she spent hours painstakingly weaving scenes of country life onto canvas. The thread was a very specific Czech variety she ordered from catalogs. Sometimes eyes of peasants or cows would be punctuated by glass beads, sometimes gold metallic thread would emphasize the sun.

  Now Nadia could read the torment swishing around her daughter’s mind and she wished her own wisdom could be implanted inside her, enough to dull the pain at such a small thing. She turned instead to their upcoming Kiev trip, the medical tests, the embassy forms. When they returned to Rubizhne they would be free to leave. Wasn’t that remarkable?

  “Excited?”

  “Scared,” Larissa admitted. “Should have taken English instead of German.”

  “Who knew our number would ever come up? Eleven years? Forget it, after five years, I gave up hope. Why make you switch languages for something that will never happen?”

  Behind Larissa, the chemical plant with its steel grid and yawning exhaust pipes continued propelling its vapor into the clouds. It’s funny; all this time and she never stopped to think of the implications of what was being made inside, the industrial explosives, the insides of bullets.

  “He’s the best in languages. Far smarter than me. He speaks perfect Italian,” Larissa said.

  “Sergei?” Nadia smiled. How easily youth fell in love. She was passing her daughter the next daisy in the arrangement. “Italian is a beautiful language.”

  “He knows everything about our politics, medieval history.”

  “Is that what he’s studying?”

  “He’s going for his specialist’s degree but he hasn’t ruled out a master’s yet. Their class is working on this ten-volume project, ‘Memory Book of Ukraine. Lugansk Region.’ After volume two was published, he was asked to join the project and he was only a first-year. His research is called ‘Relations of the East and the West of Ukraine: Search for Historical Compromise.’ To have your own chapter is very rare.”

  “That sounds very impressive,” Nadia said. Not to discount Larissa’s enthusiasm, but if only women could be as proud of their own accomplishments as they were about their men’s. “I hope he hasn’t asked you for your hand in marriage just yet. Do you want me to have a chat with him like I did with that Artem?”

  Larissa turned a deep raspberry color.

  “Mama, I was thirteen. That was a little different. It’s not like I’m a child anymore.” The wreath in her hands was starting to take shape. Daisies, connoting peace and tenderness, were well represented. A few dandelions were interspersed. They represented innocence. Cornflowers meant modesty. But where were the field bells, the heathers, the flowers that were about strength, success, independence? Those were the ones Nadia always gravitated to. Instead, her daughter wove in a red poppy for a burst of color, a classic Ukrainian symbol of sorrow.

  “You are a child because you are always my child.”

  “Anyway, I don’t think he likes me that way. We’re friends.”

  “That’s good.” Nadia did not mean to sound relieved. “I mean there will be so many boys, right?”

  Larissa began working on the ribbons, attaching the brown one, the one of soil, of Ukraine, of nativity, to the center of the wreath. “But they don’t like me. Everyone always thinks of me as the sick one.”

  “It’s just diabetes, Larissa. Do you know how many people in the world have it?”

  The ribbons were emerging from her daughter’s purse at once, yellow for sun, green for youth and beauty, orange for bread, red for truth, purple for wisdom. She sped up the braiding as if she wanted the conversation to end as soon as possible.

  “It’s hard to feel deprived. I want treats like everyone else. I feel like my whole life is about depriving myself.”

  “You get a treat every now and then.”

  “But I want to not think about what I can’t have, you know? Tea with sugar, a cookie. Every day I have to stop myself from wanting.”

  “It’s just a daily shot, there’s no reason to make it out to be more dramatic than it is. You’re not missing much with the baked goods. This is no Paris, you know.”

  “I haven’t had much luck with boys.”

  “In America, treats will be cheap and plentiful. In America, Olga says you can’t tell the sugar-free cookies from regular cookies.”

  “It’s n
ot just the cookies.”

  Hiding her irritation was proving difficult. Why was her daughter so incessantly negative? Why was she acting like she didn’t want to go? “Fine. Let’s just not be dramatic, all right?”

  Larissa was silent. The chemical plant was puffing with more energy this morning, which was always suspicious. The last time it was this active was after the Orange Revolution when it felt like the country was either finally righting itself from a dangerous fall or some calamity would punish them for insisting on elections that did not tamper with their ballots. Nadia was getting out before the collapse and Larissa would just have to appreciate the decision later.

  She noticed her daughter had taken out a blue ribbon and was inserting it with a blade of grass. “What are you doing? That’s for orphans.”

  “I know. It’s for my father, whoever he is. There’s no ribbon for a parent whose identity I don’t know.”

  So that was her daughter’s calm revenge, that was how she punished her mother. “Your father? What father? This is your gratitude for everything I’ve done for you?”

  Nadia rose, flower parts cascading from her lap. From this vantage point, she could see only the top of a head, the center part, a braid. Plaiting ribbons for a cowardly man, a weak man who disappeared as soon as the factory closed. Who never had the courage to say the words—I’m your father. Your daughter is my daughter—even just between them. Every day she bled for her daughter but instead of appreciation, the girl continued to harp on this one insignificant detail.

  She chose her words carefully, with ornate spite. “When you get a boyfriend, then talk to me about fathers. Until then, I suggest you try being a little more grateful to the parent who actually raised you.”

  Before Larissa could lift her stubborn little head in her direction, Nadia stomped away. She was going to halt after a few paces, wait for the teary apology she was sure to receive—her daughter always regretted her outburst right after it tumbled from her mouth. But she found herself continuing to walk to the tram stop, and glimpsing the headlights of a tram, she simply climbed on. She thought she could hear Larissa running behind her, her sandals clopping against the soft soil of the field, calling out, “Mama, stop.” But she didn’t turn around. Even as the tram pulled away on its track and Nadia kept her eyes directly forward, she couldn’t believe that she was capable of abandoning her daughter so deliberately, with this much unyielding force.

  But it was within her, and she was.

  * * *

  When she was ten or eleven, her daughter liked to play a game of hypotheticals. She would begin with calling forth horrific scenarios and her mother would have to tell her what she would do in those situations. The two of them trapped in a burning building with the exit closed off? Nadia would lower her down an open window with connected bed sheets. They awaken to a man in camouflage pointing a gun at Larissa’s face? Nadia would trip him, bind him, knock the gun out of his hand. She and Larissa would run out of the apartment together, hollering for help.

  They both enjoyed the game. It gave Nadia pleasure to work through numerous varieties of the same self-sacrificing impulse, where she would beg the intruder, “Spare her. Kill me.” Or push Larissa out of harm’s way, only to sink into quicksand herself or direct her to “Run, run!” while burning inside the building.

  It was a test that escalated, where the stakes grew. Where her mother had to prove herself as protector, one willing to pay the highest cost.

  “What if my heart was failing and I needed an emergency transplant?” her daughter would ask at the very end.

  But Nadia always produced the right comforting answer. “I would tell the doctors, ‘Cut me open right away. Give my baby the heart.’”

  * * *

  The knock on the door came almost immediately after she returned from the field. Making love with your neighbor was inconvenient when you were in need of privacy. Pyotor knew the sound of her approach and departure, the specific tap her shoes made, the timbre of her key scraping in the lock next door to his. He could probably hear her breath between walls, her fights with her mother, her choice of nighttime television programs. She imagined him alone in the apartment, gluing together one of his tiny building replicas, his ear trained to the sounds she made on the other side of the wall.

  “You in there?”

  “Not now, Pet’ka.”

  His voice was floating out of the keyhole. “Your mother is out, no? Your daughter?”

  She was agitated, butterflies flapping in her chest. “This is not a good time anyway. I’m waiting for Larissa to come home.” Men. Men were so insignificant, why did they have to play such outsized roles in their lives?

  “But you’re leaving tomorrow. Just five minutes. I can finish in five minutes.”

  She should tell him she was emigrating and be done with it. Who could tolerate this blubbering? But she remembered his wife, the cheesecakes she used to bring over on holidays, how she would watch Larissa after school when she was running late from work. The way he found this wife dead on a normal weekday evening, swinging from the light fixture.

  “I said not now!”

  “What is the matter, Nadyen’ka? Why is it so hard to get a minute with you?”

  She kept the door closed and conducted the exchange through wood. “It’s not hard to get a minute with me. This is not a good time, can you understand that? To have two people want to come together at the exact same time does not happen in every single instance.”

  “But can it happen a little more often?” was the reply.

  “Don’t you understand? There are extenuating circumstances right now. I need to be alone.”

  “Excuse me, Pyotor Ihorovich,” she heard. It was Larissa, and the door swung open, and they were plunged in each other’s arms, fused cheek to cheek, crying their apologies. The identity of her father didn’t matter, Larissa said between breaths, and Nadia assured her daughter that she knew how her daughter suffered with diabetes and how hard it must be and she would find her the best sugar-free treats so she wouldn’t even notice the difference.

  And Pyotor was watching the whole open-door exchange with a bewildered expression, too hapless to leave them alone to it.

  “I’ll come over later,” she said, shooing him away. She would give him his five minutes, she thought, feeling generous now toward a man who would soon be consigned to her past.

  * * *

  Pyotor was famous in the building for his postretirement hobby, a painstaking miniature replica of their entire city using matchsticks, cardboard, gravel, wood, and shreds of wallpaper he peeled off all their walls. No one understood what drove him to do it, what was the point of the exercise. Couldn’t he visit the originals outdoors any time he wanted? The chemical factory with its Lenin monument at the entrance, the city museum that took over the kindergarten building, the Afghan war memorial, the Eternal Flame before the mass grave of Soviet soldiers who fought in World War II, the large, concrete Labor Square. All those landmarks were available to anyone in the mood for a stroll.

  “Someday the city will be gone,” he explained to Nadia when they were preparing for sex later that evening, folding their clothes on the chair, her hose rolled up into a fist, shoes tucked under the bed. “And my creation will live on.”

  “Why on earth do you think this will survive if the city’s destroyed?”

  “I will put it somewhere safe. Store it in a bunker.”

  She turned away from him to unsnap her bra. Forties were no joke; she gained weight if she even conjured a plate of nice, crispy khrustiki in her mind. The flesh around her middle seemed to have materialized overnight. She slipped under his duvet cover.

  “I had no idea you possessed such an apocalyptic temperament.”

  “Who doesn’t have one these days? You’d be a fool not to.”

  “Eh, we’re always in apocalypse and we always survive.”

  He ran his hands over her breasts, which was always the initial step of a highly orchestrated process. It
took her a few months to feel comfortable with his coal miner’s hands, whose history was impossible to cleanse. She murmured her encouragement to move on to the next step.

  The replica of the city stood right by the bed, an eerie reproduction complete with the mosaic on the Ukrtelekom building with its tiny sun surrounded by flapping birds. Say what you will, but his hobby and her daughter’s embroidery gave them a common interest that smoothed the way to good relations. They would often ask to see each other’s work, taking it seriously where others discounted them.

  He was kneading her belly, moving in the direction of her pubic hair. For the first time, she noticed that other residential buildings were included in the panorama but not theirs.

  “Where’s our pile of bricks?” she wondered.

  “I will add it when we marry,” Pyotor said. It was time for phase two: lightly tickling the walls of her vagina, she would not allow any fingers inside her. “Larissa will marry and you will move in here and the configuration of the entire building will change. Then I will build it.”

  The tears so recently near the surface threatened to return. She could not afford to think about Pyotor, to weigh Pyotor in a decision she made eleven years ago. She would miss him, the simple limits of his need. She could see their alternate life as a married couple stretching before her, and it looked just fine, time marked by meals and short outings and quiet evenings with tea and cookies by candlelight.

  “Maybe I should hold on to a few of your houses,” she said, “in case something happens in the apartment. A fire or flood.”

  “For safekeeping, yes?” He replaced his finger with the sharp push of him.

  She sighed. “For memory.”

  Pyotor wordlessly finished and she exhaled a satisfied hum that was more empathetic than related to any internal state of gratification.

  “Thank you,” he said, kissing her shoulder.

  “Don’t thank me, for God’s sake. It’s nothing.”

  “Enjoy Kiev. Hope you and Larisska have a nice vacation.”