The Sky Unwashed (12 page)

Zosia gazed at her mother-in-law with softness. “That’s the best idea. Naturally, that’s the only normal thing to do. Of course!”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Zosia went as usual to visit her husband. As always, she sat in a chair near his bed, watching him sleep. Sometimes she could help him eat some greasy soup or whatever she’d been able to take from her own dinners. Now she wasn’t sure whether to tell him anything of her plan to leave that night. There didn’t seem to be any reason to tell him anything.

She waited several minutes for the nurse to take away his bedpan. Yurko wheezed into a coughing fit, then finally settled back on his pillow, his mouth open, saliva dripping down his chin. Zosia had to pull her chair closer to see his face behind the plastic oxygen tent clouded by his coughs.

“You the wife?” the nurse asked Zosia. She was new. Zosia had never seen her before. She probably wasn’t even aware that Yurko was contaminated from the zone.

“Pneumonia. Looks pretty bad.” She clicked her tongue. “It might be worse. He’ll be going to the X-ray division. It might be a lot worse than we think.”

Zosia wanted to laugh. What a fool, she thought. The nurse kept clicking her tongue like the old women in Starylis did whenever they disapproved of something but were too guarded to give voice to their resentment. Zosia waited for her to go bother another patient.

“Yes, X-rays are what I need,” Yurko said. His voice was so thin it was almost like a child’s. He opened his eyes. “Smile, Zosen’ka. It’s a joke.”

Zosia saw how his face had shriveled and hung on his skull. She started to cry.

“Bad joke?” He half coughed and laughed at the same time. “Are you crying for me?”

“I’m so sorry, Yurochko. About everything. I wish our past was different.”

He waved his bony, chapped hand. “It doesn’t matter.”

Zosia couldn’t stop the flow of her tears because she was always hurting him, even at this moment when she believed he knew the emptiness of her feelings for him.

“The children miss you,” she said. “And Mama, too.”

He nodded. She always told him the same things.

“Yurko, listen. I’m taking the children to Moscow.” She tried to keep her voice low and calm. “Mama agrees this is the best thing. It’s bad in Kyiv for the children. They’ll get sick.”

He pointed a crusty finger at his chest.

“Well, maybe not like what you have. But it’s better if we leave Kyiv. Your mother will stay here with you. Then we’ll all come back home to Starylis.”

He pointed a finger at her. “You too?”

“Yes! I always come back.”

He didn’t answer her.

“Time’s up,” the silly nurse chirped to Zosia before passing to another bed.

“Not me,” Yurko whispered. “This time, I am leaving you.”

“Yes, you too,” Zosia said. “You’ll come back!”

His throat gurgled a laugh. Liar, it mocked her.

Z
OSIA WAS PLANNING
to take the children out of the hospital early in the morning, before dawn. She knew that the night nurse would be asleep and no one would notice them going. She acted as though nothing unusual was going to occur. She didn’t tell the children because she couldn’t risk their telling another child about their plan, especially Katia. Word would get out, and then what next? Prison?

Zosia decided not to eat her dinner but to hoard it all in her shopping bag. Marusia did the same. Zosia knew that the cold overbaked potatoes and sour kasha would save them from hunger on their long day ahead. She wanted to get to the train station before it opened and get her place in line.

Marusia held Tarasyk in her arms that night. She
couldn’t sleep, knowing that her grandchildren would be gone in a few hours. She gently stroked his head with the comb Zosia bought her, checking to see if more of his hair was falling out. She took the clumps from the comb’s teeth and hid them in her dress pocket.

Zosia also inspected the back of his head. It looked worse, with more bald patches and his scalp ringed with an ominous shade of crimson. “Children get this in crowded situations,” Marta Fedenko volunteered after she observed Zosia’s concerned face. Zosia ignored the old woman.

“Mama look how sick they are,” she said. “Tarasyk’s hair. Now Katia is scratching her legs so much she’s bleeding. This is awful!”

“Just like my sister-in-law,” Marta Fedenko said.

“Maybe we got it from your family,” Zosia snapped.

“
I
keep myself clean,” the old woman retorted, then proceeded to move her mattress further away from Zosia.

“Good riddance,” Zosia said. “Nosy old witch.”

Marusia was upset. She liked talking to Marta Fedenko, and now just because Zosia was feeling mean or bad about things, why did she always have to take it out on others? And how many times had Zosia deserted her and left her to deal with the whiny children? At least Marta Fedenko tried to help her. Marusia thought of ways she could be nice to her after Zosia and the children had left, but that would come very soon, and she felt her chest ache again with fear and loneliness.

That evening, two men, drunk on vodka, got into a fistfight. Several of their friends and their women got involved. The commotion made everyone more jittery and harder to calm down for sleep. But at three in the morning, when Zosia touched Marusia’s shoulder, she was amazed at how still and quiet the room was.

Marusia insisted on carrying Tarasyk. Zosia woke Katia and helped her stand up.

“We have to go, darling.”

“To see
Tato?
” she whimpered.

“
Ssh
, yes, later. But here, put on your sweater. It’ll be cold out.”

“Can we go home?” She smiled for the first time.

“Yes, dear. But to a better place. Be quiet and tiptoe over the sleeping people. Don’t wake them up.”

The four of them escaped the basement room and hurried into the corridor and up a back staircase to another corridor that brought them to an entranceway.

“Hey, you! Where are you all going?” It was the shrill voice of a cleaning woman.

They stopped. Zosia turned and waited for the woman to approach her. “Who wants to know?”

The woman was short, with a snub nose, and her green lizard eyes darted from Zosia’s face to Marusia’s. “I can report you,” she threatened. “No one is supposed to leave here without permission.”

“Listen, you see this woman?” Zosia nodded toward Marusia. “She had just suffered a loss. Her husband, Colonel Makrenko, just died. That’s right. Now
she must return to her
dacha
because there will be several important people coming around to pay their respects to her. We’ve been at the colonel’s bedside for three days now, and she must get her rest. They told us to go out through here, because of the Chernobyl people in our way.”

“How do you know about Chernobyl?”

“Who do you think ordered the evacuation in the first place? The colonel!”

Marusia was too afraid to say anything. How could Zosia think up such an incredible lie? And yet people did what she wanted. Even if they didn’t believe her, they seemed frightened and unsure enough not to take a chance in making her angry.

Zosia stared the cleaning woman down. “Anything else you need to know? Good. Now let the colonel’s wife grieve in peace!”

The little woman stepped aside to let them pass. She pressed her mop down on the floor, but Marusia saw that she stared angrily at Zosia’s back before swishing the mop’s slimy tentacles against the floor.

Outside, the air was crisp but stank of diesel from the buses pulling into the parking lot. “I think those are more evacuees,” Zosia said. “Wouldn’t surprise me!”

They went in the opposite direction of the buses, near the parking lot floodlights. “So, the Metro’s there. We can catch it. It’s a short walk, we’ll be fine,” Zosia said. She took Tarasyk from Marusia’s arms. “Wake up, darling. We’re going for a nice walk.”

“Good-bye, my beautiful ones,” Marusia said, and hugged Tarasyk, then Katia, who pulled back. “You’re not coming too,
Babo?
”

“No, sweetheart. I’ll see you later. Back home.” She kissed the little girl hard on both her cheeks, then she kissed Tarasyk the same way and made the sign of the cross over both of them.

“Bless you and may God watch over you,” Marusia said, blessing Zosia. They hugged before she remembered that she was wearing her gold medallion with the Blessed Virgin imprinted on both sides. “Take it, it’s pure gold. You can sell it if you have to. But it will protect you. Take this, too,” Marusia said, pulling out a small embroidered pillow from her shopping bag, which she’d taken from home on impulse. “Sell this to a foreigner . . . American or German. Someone rich. They have money.”

“Thank you. Take care of Yurko.”

“I will. Write to me here at the hospital or back in Starylis. I’ll be waiting for you.”

They hugged again, and cried, and Marusia watched them until she could no longer see their silhouettes outlined against the glow of the harsh purple lights.

A
T THE HOSPITAL
entrance, more evacuees waited in line. Marusia stood with them and didn’t return to her mattress in the basement until lunchtime the next day.

“Where were you?” Marta Fedenko demanded. “Where are your grandchildren?”

“A long story,” Marusia said. She had waited in line all night and registered as a new evacuee. She showed them her internal passport stating that she had come from the radiation zone, and they gave her a new blanket and pillow and six more rubles.

Marta Fedenko handed Marusia her big suitcase. “I kept a watch over your things.”

Marusia took it by the handle and swung it gently. “Oh, how light this feels. So empty, and light like air.”

The Sky Unwashed

Y
URKO DIED ALMOST
six months after the evacuation. All that time, Marusia had never given up her faith that Yurko would get better. That she would witness her son’s death from the fallout in an alien city where doctors would refuse to listen to her or quell her worries was inconceivable. But in his last days she sat near her son’s bed, alert, finally ready for a death watch. She prayed and hoped for a quick, merciful end. Though the doctors had promised to send him to a better hospital in Moscow, in fact they had simply let him waste away in his starched bed, his skin patched and crusty like dried brown leaves as his body neared death. He was forty-two years old, but when she looked at him for the last time through the oxygen tent, she saw the pinched-faced boy who used to catch toads and trout from the Prypiat’ River in a time before anyone could have imagined the evil pollutants Chornobyl would blast forth.

Marusia tried to touch her son’s hands through the plastic, alerting the nurses who hardly noticed his moans for water. They rushed to come and tell her to go away. Their voices behind their paper-thin surgical masks were harsh, and they laughed at her when she asked if he couldn’t return with her to be buried back home in Starylis. “Are you crazy,
Baba?
” they chortled. “We’ll have to burn this one.” They whisked his body away, and Marusia’s eyes stung from the antiseptic they poured over the floor where his bed had stood. No one spoke to comfort her. She heard only the lull of her own murmuring voice chanting prayers of mourning for his soul.

The bitter months had passed slowly for Marusia after Zosia and the children left for Moscow. Some of the other refugees were sent to sleep their last days on hospital beds. Others, like her friend Marta Fedenko, found relatives to take them in. The rest were sent to other refugee areas. Marusia stayed on until Yurko’s death. After that, she was able to get another fifteen rubles from the government—“
nagrop
, coffin money,” she heard the other refugees say when they got their paltry compensations. Hardly enough to live on, especially in a large city like Kyiv. She knew that sooner or later she would no longer be allowed to live at the hospital. She spent many wasted hours at various government offices futilely seeking permission to live in an apartment in Kyiv. The time came when she finally realized she had nowhere to go except home. When she could get hold
of them, she eagerly read both the Russian and Ukrainian newspapers. Like all Ukrainians living in Soviet times, she had had to learn Russian, and from the papers she found that the fires at Chornobyl were over and that trains traveled there. She decided it must not be so bad anymore, not like the time when Zosia had tried to leave Kyiv. There was no question in Marusia’s mind that she should return home.

Thanks to Marta Fedenko’s relatives, who pulled a few bureaucratic strings in exchange for a percentage of her meager wages, she was, during her additional six months in Kyiv, able now and then to find work as a street sweeper. The job forced her to become familiar with the vast city, and soon she was resourceful enough to find and collect numerous empty vodka bottles to cash in for extra
kopiiky
. At the hospital, where she still claimed a mattress on the basement floor, she scavenged for discarded things that she could sell on the black market for real money in case she had to bribe the ticket agent at the train station to allow her to go to Chornobyl. She found many valuable items—half-bottles of aspirin, a man’s jacket made of chapped greasy brown leather, a transistor radio with dying batteries—and sold them to surly young men at the huge Sunday morning bazaars held on the Plaza of the October Revolution, not so far from the hospital.

Marusia believed Zosia might return to the hospital, and so she needed to leave a message for her. On the
back of an expired ration coupon she wrote, “Zosen’ka, I have gone back to our home in Starylis. Yurko has gone to the Lord. They have taken his body to be burned. There was nothing for me to do. Come home to me with the children.”

She distrusted the nurses after the way they had treated her and her son. She had her eye on an old cleaning woman who had now and then offered sympathies during the long nights she had kept watch while Yurko’s condition worsened. When the time came, Marusia gave the cleaning woman two of her precious rubles to get her promise that she would deliver the message to Zosia, should she ever come. With the rest of her money, Marusia parceled out enough for a train fare, third-class, to Chornobyl.