“Zaraza! Chort! Let him go. Let him go. He didn’t do anything to you! Let him go! Zaraza!” I was screaming like a mad woman. I grabbed at the buckets of water that had just been filled. I started throwing them at the Comrade. The first one missed its target and hissed all over the wood stove creating a cloud of steam that made the Children scream louder. It took three bucketsful to get him to stop. When the schoolmaster let go of Gregory, the boy collapsed onto the floor beside Nikolaiovna.
“I’m out of this den of maggots until you two get it under control. Some doctor. You can’t even cure a simple cough. I’m reporting it to the Thousander. I’m not taking my life into my hands for the sake of a handful of degenerate brats.”
“A single tear of one of these brats is worth more than one hundred of you,” Ivanovna shouted from her position by her fallen colleague. “May their God strike you dead or make you blind! You’ve ruined both of my best workers, you filthy scum. Now take that stinking ass of yours and get out of my sight.”
“You’ll regret this,” he bellowed. “Just wait till I get a hold of the Thousander. Your next job will take you out into Siberia, if you’re lucky.”
Comrade Professor packed up his books, his chalk and slate, his posters and his broken metre stick. Dripping wet as he was, he walked off into the winter wind. I never saw him again.
“Larysa,” Ivanovna said. “Put the Child down— never mind that she’s crying. Get more water. We’re going to need it.”
I bent over Gregory. The shirt was completely burned and stuck onto his skin. Where the shirt had ripped off, his back was like an over cooked piece of meat. I could see exposed bones on the places that Comrade Professor had pushed against the side of the stove. He lay unconscious on the floor as still as death.
“What are we going to do with him?”
“First I need something for bandaging Nikolaiovna. I have to stop her bleeding. Bring me a clean sheet — if you can find one — Hurry! Larysa— the water!”
“But what about Gregory?”
“He’ll have to wait. He can’t feel anything when he’s unconscious. We’ll have to regroup somehow. Give me a moment to catch my breath.”
The rest of that day was a blur. I was pulled from all sides. If it wasn’t a crying, coughing Child, it was Ivanovna with another order — “cut the sheet — hold her head— bring some water.” Nikolaiovna’s injuries were messy because of the bleeding.
“You have nothing serious to worry about once the swelling goes away. You’ll have some nasty bruises and plenty of pain, that’s for sure,” Ivanovna said.
“Men!” Nikolaiovna said through clenched and loosened teeth. “You can’t get away from their fists no matter how far you run away.”
“Did you run away from a man?” I asked.
“My dear, you’re too young to hear about all of that. Remember, you can’t trust them so don’t get too close. Even when you don’t want them they’re all over you.” Her eyes took on a vacant look. I could see that she was going inside, somewhere far away where I was not welcomed. I didn’t want to go there with her anyway. I just wanted to lie down and go to sleep.
“Larysa, Philipovna,” Ivanovna said. “Get a blanket and help me take Gregory to the sick room.”
Gregory was coming back into consciousness. He groaned with pain. I remember thinking that his groan was the only sound I ever heard him make. His arms and legs flailed involuntarily while his face was a contorted mask of suffering. We couldn’t roll him onto the blanket on his back because of the injuries. We couldn’t pull him across the floor on his belly either because we would hurt his face. It took all three of us a long time to manoeuvre poor Gregory across the floor from beside the stove and onto a bench in the sick room.
Larysa’s awkward movements and reluctance to help also slowed us down. The other Children were so frightened that they tried to get as far away from us as they could. They huddled into groups which piled themselves under blankets on the sleeping benches or in the corners of the big room. Nikolaiovna fell asleep. It was eerily quiet.
“We have to cut away his clothes,” Ivanovna said. “Hold down his arms so that he doesn’t bump my hands. I will have to take some of the flesh ... I have no choice ... the poor boy.” She sharpened her knife.
What? I thought to myself. Is she really crying? And she was. As she cut away the burned clothes and the occasional patch of skin where the two had melded together, Ivanovna’s forearm would swipe across her eyes to keep her tears from falling onto Gregory’s back.
“Hold him still!” she said as Larisa’s grip relaxed from holding on for so long. Larysa was retching and crying, too.
The smell of the burnt wool and linen that comprised Gregory’s ragged clothes mixed with the smell of his seared flesh was making me sick. I fought with the gory sight of his back, his flailing limbs and the gagging reflex. My arms vibrated with the effort.
“Philipovna!” Ivanovna said. “Don’t you dare faint! I need your hands ... don’t you dare.”
The world started spinning, but I willed my arms to stiffen like frozen logs and hung on.
“I’m almost done. For the love of God, don’t faint. I need you.”
Thankfully, Gregory succumbed to the shock and pain and lapsed back into oblivion. I don’t remember clearly seeing Ivanovna finish her ministrations. For the next while, I sat on the floor slumped over in exhaustion.
“Come Philipovna,” I heard Ivanovna say. “I know you’re tired, but I have only you and Larysa to help now. Try to keep going. It’ll be a day or two before Nikolaiovna can do things again.”
I was confused by the change in Ivanovna’s voice. She wasn’t tossing out commands or yelling. She was actually speaking to me, speaking like a normal person. Her face had softened somehow. Larysa was sent to start cooking the evening porridge.
“Get some of the stronger ones to help you. Philipovna has to stay here with me,” Ivanovna said. “We still have the other sick ones to care for.”
Larysa sulkily obeyed.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.” Ivanovna stood over Gregory wringing her hands. “There’s no morphine ... I have no more carbolic soap ... and they never send enough antiseptics or anything else I need either. I’d like to know what your precious Auntie would do in this situation. He’ll probably die of infection.”
“Do you really want to know?” “I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t.”
“There is one thing she would do,” I said. There were really two things that she would do, but I knew that Ivanovna wouldn’t want to know about the praying. She gestured for me to go on.
“When someone gets a bad burn like this, Auntie gets someone to urinate into a pot and, using a clean cloth, she washes the burn with urine.”
“But urine is your waste.”
“Yes. But Auntie says that it’s perfectly clean especially if you let the first little bit go before you collect the rest into your pot. The men used to do that when they were wounded at war and it saved many of their lives.”
“All right then. Get a pot.”
I did her bidding.
“Now lift up your skirt and go,” she said.
“I can’t,” I said. “I peed after you fixed Gregory. I always have to do that when I’m upset.”
The doctor picked up her skirt; peed a little on the floor and then emptied her bladder into the pot.
“Do what you saw your Auntie do,” she said. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“It stings when you first put it on,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. He’s unconscious. He’s going to die if we don’t do something.”
“When it dries and the skin starts to heal, it gets crusty.” “We’ll see,” she said.
I could see that she was sceptical. I dipped a ripped piece of a sheet into the Comrade’s urine and washed Gregory’s back. My stomach heaved each time I touched him.
“This may take care of the infection,” Ivanovna said, “but it won’t take ca
re of the pain. He’ll hurt himself more by throwing his arms and legs around in those spasms. And when the skin crusts as you say it will, it will pull and crack. He’ll be in so much pain. I wish I had some morphine.”
“Would this help?” I reached into my clothing with my hand that still smelled like the Comrade’s urine. I tugged at the bundle of tea that was still tied into my under shirt, the last precious thing that I had from Auntie. I didn’t want to give it to Ivanovna, but Gregory’s back looked so terrible that I wanted to do something, anything that could help.
“What’s this?”
“It’s poppy tea. My Auntie grows it in our garden every year. She gives it to us when our tummies hurt and we can’t sleep.” I fought back the tears and the memories.
“It’s not morphine,” Ivanovna said, “but it will certainly help. The poor boy could use anything that will put him to sleep. Make it exactly the way your Auntie did.”
I went out into the big room. As Larysa stirred the porridge, I made Gregory’s tea. The Children were getting ready for supper. Nikolaiovna was sitting up. She was not able to do anything, but she was already giving the girls instructions. So the house slowly came back to a sense of order.
Farewell
ICONTINUED TO do Ivanovna’s bidding. She resumed her command voice and brusque manner, but she was also more patient than she had been before Comrade Professor’s departure. Her problems were compounded by the fact that her medicine was running out. She was reducing the doses and giving it only to the Children who looked strong enough to survive. I would watch her eyebrow rise in frustration as she pondered over a Child, examining him or checking her. I could see that it was difficult for Ivanovna to play the part of God as she decided who would live and who wouldn’t. She often asked for my opinion when she was thinking out loud about what to do next. I held my tongue until I was pressed for an answer.
Why is she asking me? I’m not an adult and I’m not as wise as Auntie, I would think.
The rest of the house was adrift. The loss of the schoolmaster meant that there was nothing to do in the long day that dragged out before the Children each morning. Larysa took on Nikolaiovna’s jobs. Meanwhile, Nikolaiovna sat on a bench and directed the goings-on. The cold in the house did not encourage healing. She became stiff from the bruising.
“I feel like an old baba,” she said. “I can’t move my right arm. Are you sure it’s not broken?”
Nikolaiovna’s face was very black and swollen. At first the distortions frightened the little Children so that only the bravest ones would come close to her. After a few days we made sport of watching how it shrank back into place and how the bruises faded from black, to blue, purple and then green and yellow. The good-natured Nikolaiovna indulged our antics. She planned a little celebration for the morning when her face would return.
“It always does, you know,” she said with a painful grimace. “I’ll do a dance for you when I’m back to myself again.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that to them,” Ivanovna said. “It’s a serious matter.”
“I know it’s a serious matter. But if I cry, they’ll be afraid of every man they meet. Would that be better? Maybe they should be afraid. So far, the men that have crossed my path were men I should have stayed away from. Ask Gregory. He would tell you if he could. Why do you think he doesn’t speak? His father loved his horse better than he loved Gregory.”
”You mean you’re his Mama?” I said, blurting it out.
“No, my poor unfortunate sister was. That horrid man of hers drove her into the ground.”
I could see tears standing in her beautiful brown eyes. So that’s why Gregory stayed in this awful place. Other boys of his age would be out proving themselves rather than hanging on to a woman, even if they worked for someone else or survived on their own in the woods like Mitya did, unless they were like my cousins and their father had a place for them to labour.
There was not much time for small talk or my personal reflections. Gregory’s back crusted. Ivanovna was hopeful because it looked like Gregory was improving. But as the skin dried, it shrank and cracked. It bled the way she had feared it would. In the end, the infection set in. I felt sick at the sight of the blackened scabs and the weeping, yellowish mess that came oozing out from the fissures on Gregory’s back. There was no penicillin or any of the drugs we are used to today. They hadn’t been discovered yet. Even if they had been, Father Stalin wouldn’t have thrown them away on some poor orphans in an obscure home in the wasteland of the Ukrainian countryside.
“There’s too much flesh missing,” Ivanovna said. “There’s not enough to grow back over those bones.”
“He’ll be a monster,” Nikolaiovna said through her tears. “No one will ever want a man who can’t speak, never mind someone who looks like he will. He used to be so beautiful before the hunger. It might be better if he were dead. It’s a good thing his poor mother didn’t live to see this. What will he ever do if something happens to me?”
It was dreadful to watch the poor boy suffer. I prayed for him to die. I begged Mama to tell God to take him to Heaven so that I would not have to look into those pain-filled eyes. But the days dragged on and Gregory languished. The nights were a little better for him as I managed the bundle of Auntie’s tea carefully. I was so grateful when, under its influence, his eyelids got heavy and slowly shut as he retreated into sleep. Fortunately, he wasn’t coughing yet.
The croup didn’t let up its assault either. It was hard to sleep at night with the noise of the coughing. We were always on watch because we never knew when one of the little ones would choke on the phlegm. Ivanovna let me sleep first and then woke me when she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer. I did the same for her.
The sound of that cough gave me nightmares. It reminded me of the nights Xenkovna and Auntie would spell each other off when the twins were sick. But every now and then we wrapped another unfortunate in a piece of sheet or blanket and Ivanovna laid him or her out by the back wall to be taken away. I was glad when Nikolaiovna could take back her regular duties and the sullen Larysa could help in the sick room again.
“What are we going to do when there’s not enough space for all of them in here?” Larysa asked.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” the Comrade said.
I knew we’d never have to worry. Larysa was oblivious to the fact that Children kept on dying. The one thin wall that divided the two rooms also created a barrier between those in the sick room and the rest of the house. It never ceased to amaze me at how separate those two worlds seemed to be.
Nikolaiovna got tired of the restlessness that set in when there was no school to keep the healthier Children occupied.
“They need something to do,” she said. “I’d send them out for a good game of Big Bear’s Den if there was enough clothing to dress them properly. They could use a breath of fresh air.”
“It’s just as well,” Ivanovna said. “Our neighbours don’t want to see sick orphans wandering through their healthy town. The other Children wouldn’t play with them anyway.”
“I don’t have a husk of corn to make a doll out of or yarn and rags to make any clothes for it either. There’s no book to read or slate to write on. No wonder they pick at each other. The ones who have given up sit staring off into Heaven. They’ll die of boredom before they starve.”
“I’m not a Baba Yaga that can pull things out of thin air,” Ivanovna said. “I’m already expected to do that with the sick room. You’ll have to figure this one out by yourself.”
Nikolaiovna made a game of bringing in the wood. She drew lots for those who could help with the chores and organized the girls into groups that swept the floor, folded up blankets or washed the few dishes we had.
“I’d like to see a good game of Baba Kutsya,” she said another time. “But there’s not enough room for all of them to run away from being tagged.”
“Try a game of shepherd then,” Larysa said. “Half of them have to be
the sleepy sheep so only the thieves get to actually move around. And Lazy Hrits is just lying about anyway.”
“I wish I would have thought of that one,” the Comrade said.
So they pushed the long table to one side of the room with the benches under it and played a game of Shepherd. The part of Lazy Hrits was easy to find a Child for. The more energetic Children were enthusiastic so she could get the first group of thieves to steal the sleeping sheep, but after that the game fell apart because the rest of the Children were either too lethargic or too sick. Others complained that they were too cold.
“You’ll feel better if you move around,” Nikolaiovna said.
Finally, she decided to play at spelling words and reciting times table games with those who could pay attention. It’s not that they didn’t want to play games; the plain truth was that the Children were so hungry that they were lethargic and stupid. If three or more would not respond, the game was very short, but if they cooperated, she rewarded the whole group with a story.
It wasn’t long before all of the able Children were involved and trying to please Nikolaiovna, not only in the word play and the times tables, but also in any chore she needed them to do. I found myself pushing through my work too. I would sit in the back of the group cradling Malenka and listening. I even caught a glimpse of the stern Ivanovna lending an ear when she had a break in her duties.
Nikolaiovna was a walking bookful of stories. Though she was Russian, she knew many Ukrainian fairy tales. There were strange ones like the three sons who were expected to look after their parents’ grave. The two older ones didn’t do their duty and pushed it onto the youngest son. The youngest was a faithful son. He brought the bread offering to the grave as was the custom in the old days. In return, he was allowed to visit his dead parents in the other world and talked with them through the burning of three candles. When he re-emerged, it was three hundred years later as the burning of each candle represented the passing of a century.
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