Snow in May: Stories (19 page)

Soon Baba Olya brought me dinner—barley soup, hard-boiled eggs, and bread. Nothing new had happened at the Polyclinika, she reported. Thank God. She said everyone missed me and sent hellos. I wondered whether that included Dr. Pasha, whether he even knew that I was in the hospital.

“What are you having for dinner, Babushka?”

Baba Olya knew as well as I did that aside from her already rampant hypertension, her obesity could cause everything from diabetes to cancer.

“Chicken and rice, Sonechka,” she said. I didn’t believe her.

“Just without the skin, please.” It was painful to watch her eat, even as she reminded me that she and her sisters had a hungry childhood because of the war, and it was immoral not to eat well when food was available and one could afford to.

After I ate, we went to the lounge to watch the evening installment of
Felicidade
.

“Is it true that one of the nurses here burned alive? Her boyfriend started the fire because he’s a gangster?” I asked Baba Olya during a commercial break.

“Who told you this?”

Maybe the fire was a secret because the secret police were investigating the gangster ring. I didn’t want to give away Nurse Larissa. “I don’t remember. Is it true?”

The shadow from Baba Olya’s painted lashes made her dark blue eyes look violet. I’d always wished my eyes were like hers. “Yes. It’s such a pity. She was a beautiful girl.”

“Why do you say this, Baba? What’s the difference if she was beautiful or ugly? Are you saying she deserved it or didn’t deserve it?”

“I’m not saying either way, Sonya.” She held me tight against her warm side as though I were a fractured limb and she a splint. “No one deserves to die in a fire. But you, you should always be careful around people. Not everyone wishes you well for free. Most people are petty, unkind, jealous. Especially men. Choose well which men you trust. And better yet, don’t trust any.”

I hated when Baba Olya talked like that about men. Like they were carriers of some deadly virus. It made me feel bad for Papa and his papa, Deda Misha.

“By the way, how are you feeling?” Baba Olya said.

“Good.”

“Stomach?”

“Oh.” My stomach felt like a locked elevator with all of them inside—Natasha, Liza, Dr. Pasha, Nurse Larissa, and her dead friend—plummeting down through the earth. “Nauseous.” If I thought about them enough, I could probably make myself sick. For real this time.

Later, when Baba Olya tucked me into bed, I noticed Liza and Natasha glaring at her crisp white doctor’s coat. I felt safe in the proximity of her warm, powdered neck as she kissed me good night, proud to be her granddaughter, though so far I was nothing of interest myself. Not even to the doctors.

“Sweet dreams, girls,” Baba Olya said and turned off the lights.

About a half hour after she left, Natasha and Liza began whispering in the dark. One of them turned on the lights. I kept my eyes closed. Somebody yanked my hair.

“Get up, stinky.” Natasha was pulling me out of bed.

I scrambled out.

“Go stand by the wall,” Liza commanded from her bed and wrapped the blanket tighter around herself.

“What happened?” I said. The wall was icy cold.

Natasha marched to my nightstand and took out the Mr. Sketch box. She examined the markers for a while, sniffing them like a babushka at a fish market. The night snuck in through the windowpane cracks and poked me with its chilly fingers. Natasha settled on Pink-Melon, Magenta-Raspberry, Yellow-Lemon, and Dark-Green-Apple.

She drew feverishly, virulently, shifting my gown around for better reach. Red contusions appeared on my arms and chest, pink scars veined my legs. My thighs and shoulders were covered with lemon liver spots. Dark green flecks, resembling
zelyonka—
the green iodine used to treat chicken pox—dotted my whole body. On my forehead she drew a raspberry medical cross.

“That’s better.” Natasha looked me over with satisfaction. “At least now you don’t reek so much.” She opened the window, threw out the caps, and turned off the lights.

“And remember, it’ll hurt to lie down because of your rash and burns. So you better be standing there in the morning,” one of them added.

And I stood. My sinuses were stuffed, my skin goose-bumped. I was a little hungry, too. Part of me wanted to cry, yet another part realized that, in a way, I’d gotten what I’d asked for: I was finally a true patient. I now deserved to be in the Big Hospital.

How late was it? Baba Olya would be reading a book in bed, her white fluffy cat, Kelly, purring next to her. I missed my bed, set up in the glassed-in balcony among the cucumber and tomato pots. I liked so many things about Baba Olya’s apartment. The vanity dressing table in her bedroom with a multitude of little boxes in the drawers, each containing gold jewelry and treasures she’d collected on her travels. Also the medical instruments she used for everything. She raked the soil in the pots with curved dental picks, decorated cakes (which she shouldn’t have been eating) by pushing the cream through a syringe without a needle, opened letters with a scalpel, and plucked her eyebrows with a pair of surgical pincers. The first thing I always did when I arrived for the summer was to comb the apartment for new medical tools in whatever novel use they had found. This year, her bedroom curtains were held back with towel clamps. I suddenly missed all of it.

What time was it in Alaska? I’d heard that in the summer the sun never set there, and moose roamed the streets. I imagined Papa lying in bed on a daylight night, unable to fall asleep and thinking of me. I thought of Mama, too, alone in rainy Magadan and without hot water, playing piano in the empty arts college.

I was about to climb back under the covers when a sharp moan came from Liza’s bed. I held my breath. Another moan. Liza thrashed on her side and curled into a ball. I waited. Then Natasha moaned.

I tiptoed to Liza’s bed and bent to her: her breath smelled like spoiled peaches. Was she in pain or pretending? Then I saw a dark liquid spreading all over her sheets. I turned on the lights. The sheets were streaked with red and pink. Blood! I saw clumps of blood cells here and there, congregating in little pools.

“Are you okay?” I said. I tried to lift the sheet to look for a possible wound, but Liza was wrapped in a tight ball, her eyes shut, her knees clutched to her stomach. I could not move or unclasp her.

She cried out again, and I jumped back. Somewhere a door banged. Light footsteps tapped by our room. Maybe it was Nurse Larissa, or someone else who would know what to do.

I opened the door. A figure in white stood by the window at the end of the dark, empty hallway.

“Nurse Larissa,” I yelled.

Without turning around, the figure disappeared through the side door. I ran barefoot on the cold floor. Bed creaks and coughs emanated from other sickrooms. The TV in the empty nurses’ station reported the news in angry monotone.

Where were all the nurses, the doctors? The hospital seemed abandoned.

Another bang, this time from above. I darted through the side door and up the stairs to a deserted hallway with stacks of chairs lining the walls. No sign of Nurse Larissa. I ran back down. The door I’d come through moments ago was locked.

I hurried back up the stairs and farther down this particularly freezing hallway. There were no nurses’ stations here, and the windows in the doors were painted over with white. This was very odd. I’d imagined the hospital would be bustling with activity even at night. Especially at night. I opened one of the doors. In the dark room I thought I saw high metal shelves with large plastic bags. And inside those bags something white—bodies?

I banged the door and took off. I ripped through empty hallways, up and down stairs and around corners, afraid to look back, half believing that rotting bodies were chasing after me. I ran ran ran. I rubbed my burned finger and ran faster. I had to save Liza before it was too late.

I burst through yet another door and found myself in a brightly lit, noisy reception area. A doctor and a nurse stood talking in the hallway. Somewhere down a concealed hallway a baby was crying. On one of the chairs by the open window sat Dr. Pasha, dressed in jeans and a blue plaid shirt. No red bandana.

I knew I had no history of sleep-onset hallucinations, yet I had to be dreaming.

Dr. Pasha was hunched over, his head in his hands. First, I thought he might be sleeping; then he began to tap his foot. I came up to him and touched his curly hair. It was much coarser than I’d imagined.

“Sonya?” He looked at me with irritation, but he didn’t seem surprised to see me. I started to back away.

“Are those marker stains?” Amusement loosened his face.

“Pavel Dmitrievch, please come with me. A girl in my room is bleeding. At the other end of the hospital. There’s nobody there. No doctors, no nurses. We have to call someone. She’s having gastritis. Or ulcers.” I thought for a moment, then added, “Or gallbladder stones.”

“Cover yourself or you’ll catch a cold. A real cold.” He picked up his jacket from the next chair and threw it at me.

“We must run, please. There was blood on her sheets, lots and lots of blood!”

“That does sound serious, Sophia Anatolyevna.” Dr. Pasha grabbed my arm and twisted it back and forth to get a better look at the red marker contusions. “What are you doing here anyway?”

“Oh, well, I’m here for some diagnostic tests, for my stomach, but Liza—”

“I know that part.”

“What part?”

“Your grandma told us—your mushroom recipe was very original, I must say—but drawing the cross and the rash is overdoing it a bit, baby.”

So everybody knew … And everybody had played along. I could never go back to the Polyclinika now. I wiped my eyes with the backs of my hands.

“The things we do to get attention. The stupid things I did as a boy, still do.”

“Dr. Pasha, you don’t understand,” I said in a shaky voice. I wished for instant death or at least humiliation-induced coma. “You have to help me find someone for Liza. We don’t have time to lose. She’ll bleed to death!”

“I’m too busy to play your and your friends’ idiot games.”

“This is not a game!” I hollered and tried to pull him off the chair.

“Sonya, are you insane? Don’t scream here. This is a maternity ward. My son was just born.”

A son. Blood beat against my eardrums.

“Congratulations,” I said.

“Well, a big thank-you.”

What if he was right, I thought, and Liza was trying to fool me. Maybe it wasn’t blood but tomato juice—something I would have probably used for blood. No, a good doctor couldn’t think like that.

“Do you know about the get-up test?” Dr. Pasha said.

The what?

“I think so,” I lied.

“A pregnant woman sits down on the floor and, depending on which arm she instinctively uses first to help herself up, that’s how you know the gender of the baby,” he said with a dead-serious expression. “Right arm—girl, left arm—boy.”

“Really?” I hadn’t spent much time in the gynecology office. Almost anything was possible in medicine.

“Really. The test is ninety percent accurate, as long as the pregnant woman doesn’t eat any mushrooms beforehand.”

“I didn’t eat the mushrooms to—” I burst out sobbing. I let it all go. I fell on my knees in front of Dr. Pasha. “Pavel Dmitrievich, please help me find a doctor. Please. I am not lying, I am not pretending this time.”

He snapped me on my forehead cross and smelled his fingers. “
Raspberry—berry, you beckoned us
,” he sang out in a surprisingly squeaky voice. “Promise me you’ll never grow up, Sonya.”

I got up from my knees and yanked Dr. Pasha’s hand with all my might.

“What are you doing? I told you, I’m waiting for the baby.” He looked terrified. And terrifying, too. I knew that he wouldn’t help. I tried to free my hand, but now he wouldn’t let go.

“There’s your baby!” I pointed toward the double doors with my free hand. As he slackened his clammy grip, I ran out of the reception room. The darkness swallowed me back like a swamp.

Again I stumbled through empty hallways, up and down stairs, looking for somebody, anybody. I was so tired. The hospital was endless, sprouting and shedding new hallways and stairs. Maybe I was going psychotic. Maybe I had hallucinated them all—Natasha, Liza, and this Dr. Pasha. I wished I could talk to Alina; she knew all about hallucinations.

At last, I arrived in a hallway that wasn’t so dark. I looked into one of the rooms: six patients with dark faces snored sonorously. They were alive—that was a good sign. I lay down on a cold faux-leather bench in the hallway and pulled Dr. Pasha’s jacket over my head. I closed my eyes. It was all over now. My medical career was ruined. Liza was probably dead. Baba Olya had betrayed me. I wanted to be sick with something curable only in America, then Papa would have no choice but to take me with him right away, and everyone would be helpless and sorry. I lay there, in tears, not knowing which plague to wish upon myself. I scoured my body for pain—after all I had gone through today, it had to be somewhere … I couldn’t be the same. Something was pressing against my stomach, I think. I think I was already sleeping.

Kruchina

1998

Five nights before her scheduled return flight from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Magadan, Masha stood by the door of her granddaughter’s bedroom. She checked one more time to make sure no one was around and then she knocked.

“What?” Katya yelled in English. Masha knew that word well.

She came in and closed the door. The overheated room was half the size of Masha’s entire apartment in Magadan. Katya, heartbreakingly scrawny in her blue parachutelike nightgown, was lying on her bed in a jumble of thick math books, crumpled pieces of paper, and candy wrappers. She raised her head and looked at Masha through the curtain of her sparse brown bangs, annoyed.

“Katen’ka, I need your help,” Masha said. Katya stuck a yellow pencil into her mouth and chewed. “Please, sing one song with me at the green card party. For your mama.” Masha sat down on the side of the bed, and Katya’s trash and books slid toward her.