The Sky Unwashed (21 page)

M
ARUSIA AND EVDOKIA
were jostled during the short, bumpy ride, but held on to the short leather straps over the windows. The car slowed down near the plant’s gates. Oles stared at the rearview mirror. “Look, we have to let you off here. We can’t wait around.”

“Honest, we’re in deep trouble as it is,” pleaded Mykola.

“Shut up,” Oles said.

“I’m sorry, ladies,” Mykola said. “But someone’s looking for me. We’ve got to go. Otherwise, they’ll make me clean up the radiation. . . .” Mykola turned to
look at the old women. “Honest, I’m sorry. But please let us go. We kept our end. We just can’t wait for you or take you back.”

“That’s all right, son,” Marusia said. “Thank you and good luck.”

“Say hello to your mother for me,” said Evdokia to Mykola. She ignored the other one.

Once the women had gotten out of the car, it spun crazily around and sped out of sight.

“Well, at least we only have to walk one way,” said Evdokia. “We can lead the cow, if we get one. I’ve done that a million times in my life.”

The women stood in front of the high fence that surrounded the Chornobyl plant. They weren’t sure where to go, or even how to get inside.

They approached the main gate, where a Red Army guard stopped them.

“Halt!” he yelled. “This is restricted territory. You are not allowed to go further!” He stormed toward them with his rifle cocked and aimed.

“Please,
tovaryshi
,” Marusia said. “We come on business. We’re from Starylis.”

“You can’t be from there,” the guard said. He was young, with pimples on his broad babyface. “There are no residents in the zone areas, except for authorized personnel.”

“We’re from Starylis,” Marusia repeated, trying to sound calm. “There are two more women in our village besides us. We came to speak to the
magister
.”

“We want a cow,” Evdokia blurted out. “Please.”

“Are you spies?” he asked.

Evdokia giggled nervously. “Who wants to know?” she said.

“
Ssh
.” Marusia was frightened. He might be crazy enough to shoot them where they breathed. He made them lift up their arms in the air, and with one hand searched them, causing dust to puff out from their threadbare clothing each time he patted them.

“Look, son, we’re evacuees,” Marusia said after he was through. “Our sons and daughters worked here before the explosion. Now some of us old ones have come back. We’re here to tell someone official and to get a cow.”

“What the hell is going on here, Officer Rostov?” said a thick, dark voice. A man dressed in a suit and tan trench coat stepped out of a new-model Soviet-built black Volga and strode up to them. “Why are you attacking these women? Did you have another fight with your mother-in-law and are declaring war against all the
babysi
now?”

“Sir.” The guard saluted the man in the trench coat, then resumed pointing the rifle at the women. “They said they’re from the zone, sir. But no one’s there. They could be spies.”

“Oh, put that idiotic thing away,” said the man. His voice was coated with whiskey. “Damn
Svejk
. Ever read
Good Soldier Svejk?
No? Great book. This idiot is the adopted son. Now what is this all about? Please, ladies, put your arms down.”

“We came here to see the
magister
,” Marusia said.

The man laughed. “Damn if that isn’t precious! Damn!”

“Show him the
ukase
,” Evdokia nudged. Marusia modestly took the document from inside the front of her dress and handed it to the man in the trench coat.

He laughed harder. “Damn! And to Gorbachev, too. You old women are amazing. And this fool wanted to shoot you. Come with me! This is too good to miss!”

The women were humbled more by the man’s exuberance than by the guard’s rifle. And they were awed by the plant itself—a busy place with people in white and brown jumpsuits milling around, many saluting the man who walked briskly and a little ahead of the women.

Marusia and Evdokia glanced nervously out of the sides of their eyes at the red and white towers that loomed atop massive concrete buildings. Behind those stood a decrepit structure that looked as though a fire had gutted it. It was crowned with a black carapace. “A church painted black?” Marusia whispered to Evdokia, who shrugged. Marusia quickly crossed herself in tiny circular movements so as not to be noticed.

They were taken to a building farther away from the gate, and into an office where several pretty women were typing mysterious messages at large, bulbous computer terminals.

Then they were led into another office where a fat little man—Marusia thought he might be the ghost of Nikita Khrushchev—sat behind a small desk without
anything on it except an ink stand and a magazine opened to pages with bright pictures of skiers on mountaintops. He was about to sip a steaming glass of tea when the man in the trench coat ushered the women in.

“Ladies, this is the
magister
. Tell him everything you told me.”

The women were asked to sit down.

“Please,
tovarishch
,” Marusia said. “If you don’t mind we’ll stand. We’re dirty from our journey.” She didn’t want to smudge the clean white plastic chairs.

The man in the trench coat gave the fat man the
ukase
. “Read this! It’s wonderful!”

The
magister
shook his head. “Unbelievable.” Marusia could see he wasn’t as amused by it as the other man. “But why did you women come back? Who gave you permission?”

“We read in the newspaper that only thirty-one people died from the accident, and that now things were back to normal, and so we wanted to come home to die. We lost our families and we have no money. So, we want our homes. . . .” Marusia’s voice trembled and faltered.

“And a cow,” Evdokia said.

“Well, we have to inspect this more closely,” the
magister
said, flustered. He cleared his throat. “Well, go on back now . . . wherever you are living. Where was it?”

“In Starylis,
tovarishch
,” Marusia said.

“Well, that’s not really allowed,” he said. His forehead suddenly burst with oily droplets of sweat. “Really,
not allowed. I’ll have to take that up with the committee as well.”

“Excuse me please, but where are we supposed to live, then?” Marusia said. “We have nowhere to go.”

The
magister
thumped his thick hairy fist on his desk. “You can be arrested for inhabiting a forbidden zone,” he shouted.

“Sasha, Sashen’ko,” the trench coat cut in. “They have a point. Where would they go? Unless you and your lovely Masha put them up in your apartment. Now, that’s a good idea! What do you say? A couple of beauties here and the devil knows who else is lurking around under their beds in their village. They can cook for you, bake bread, comb your hair. . ..”

“Not a funny joke, Dmitri Pavlovych,” the
magister
hissed at his crony.

“Well, then I’ll take them home with me. My place needs a good scrubbing since my wife left me. Do you ladies know how to make a good cheesecake? I haven’t had that in a long time. Maybe I need a cow, too, Sasha. . . .”

“Enough!” the
magister
said. “You women—how many did you say are in the village there?” He was staring at Evdokia, who was openly smiling at him.

“Four of us,” Marusia answered. She was annoyed at Evdokia’s unusual muteness.

“What makes you think that you are above the law of the people’s government and you can live anywhere you want?”

Marusia wanted to be as convincing as Zosia would have been. She needed to choose her words carefully, in Russian—otherwise it would be so easy for this Khrushchev impostor to dismiss them, or worse, send them to a jail as spies or for that catchall anti-Soviet crime of hooliganism.

“But
tovarishch
,” Marusia said carefully, reaching into her bag for her internal passport with the heavily embossed hammer and sickle emblem on the red cover. “You’ll see that my passport says that I am and always have been a resident of Starylis. Even in Kiev, I tried to find a place after my son died in a hospital, but they never gave me a home. He worked for the plant here. He was an engineer, and a Young Pioneer and a Party member, too. I myself worked nearly all of my life on the collective farm, and my husband served and died in the Great Patriotic War. . . .” What else could she say? Marusia thought wildly. So far, the
magister
sat there glaring at her. The smirking man in the trench coat yawned. She swallowed and continued.

“We are old women who have never been anywhere except on the land the government let us use to live on. For which we are grateful. We only ask that you in Soviet brotherhood and friendship continue to protect us and let us live our last few years in good citizenship for our
Soyuez
by giving us a cow—at least.” There, that sounded patriotic enough, Marusia thought. She nudged Evdokia to echo her words, but Marusia saw
that the
nunya
merely nodded her head and smiled like a fool at the two men.

“Well, this is highly unusual,” the
magister
said. He wiped his perspiring face with the thin paper napkin that was placed under his tea glass and gazed at his cohort. “What the devil am I supposed to do with these
babysi?
” he whispered to the other man.

The trench coat leaned down toward the
magister
’s shiny bald pate and whispered, “Listen, this could be great publicity for us. It would prove that people can come back. And,” he said in a lower tone, “they’re old anyway. Hell, they’ll be gone soon enough. If we tell
Pravda
about how we’re taking care of the people and leak it to the West, we’ll look better for it. Give them a damn cow. What the hell!”

“And our pensions, please,” Marusia said.

“And our other requests, please,” Evdokia finally spoke out.

“Well,” said the fat man, pulling on one of his thick eyebrows. “The cow is, of course, something you should have. We’ll get you one soon. As for the rest, I’ll take it up with my committee.”

“Thank you, good sir,” said Evdokia, clasping her hands and shaking them in front of her in a gesture of thanks. She turned and headed for the door.

Marusia didn’t want to have come so far and not have anything to show for it. She didn’t trust the fat stupid man nor his laughing partner. She gingerly sat down
on the edge of the white chair. “We need a cow, now. We haven’t had milk or cheese or butter for over a year.” She tilted her chair forward toward the
magister
.

His wide face stared blankly at Marusia.

“Oh, give them a damn cow,” the trench coat said. “Come on, Sasha. What do you care?”

“Oksana,” the
magister
bellowed. A middle-aged woman with big worried eyes behind huge pink-rimmed glasses hurried in. “Does Pripyat have any cows to spare? A milking one.”

M
ARUSIA AND
E
VDOKIA
returned to the village in a pickup truck arranged by the plant. In the back, a skinny but live cow was tethered for them. On the way from the outskirts of Prypiat’ where they found the cow, the driver teased the women that its calf was born with two heads. “I can’t believe such a thing,” Evdokia said with scorn.

“Have it your way,” he chuckled. The three of them pushed the cow into Marusia’s small shed, where her old cow once lived.

That night the women drank warm fresh milk, which was sweet enough for their hunger. No one mentioned how wan the cow looked or how mangy its fur. No one laughed at the slight blue tinge of its hooves, or at the way it mooed, like a broken siren.

O
N THE SECOND
anniversary of the explosion, the women wore black armbands they tore from old pieces of cloth. They took turns ringing the bells for a total of thirty-one times in memory of the official count of the dead. But when they were finished, they seemed unable to stop. They knew the catastrophe had stolen more souls than that, and so the ringing continued far past thirty-one.

In the evening, the women gathered together and Yulia sang the
panakhyda
inside the church. They lit candles and made a solemn procession around the church and into the graveyard, where they finished their prayers.

Their Easter celebration earlier in the month had been barely more joyous. Marusia made a
paska
from the flour Yulia donated and from the precious powdered egg
mixture Evdokia had found in one of her neighbors’ homes.

Evdokia, for her part, gave Marusia a cup and a half full of dried raisins and generous handfuls of candy sprinkles she had used in the past to adorn her own Easter bread. They shared a simple loaf, which turned out lumpy and tasted of too much flour in the dough because Marusia refused to use the bottled water that would have made the bread lighter.

Marusia grated her fresh horseradish root into a batch of her best new beets, which were a faded red color when she boiled and peeled away their leathery black skins. Disappointing, but it had to do for the holy day.

This Easter, they wouldn’t have a ham, but Lazorska was able to churn butter from the cow’s cream, and Yulia shaped the butter into a lamb, an odd custom she’d learned from a Polish prisoner in the camps.

Yulia also found a nest full of blue robin’s eggs in the graveyard, and she wanted to collect them and decorate them as
pysanky
—traditional elaborately decorated eggs—because, as she reminded the others, “You know the saying—
pysanky
hold all the evil between the lines we draw on the eggshells, and that way the world will continue.” The eggs smelled odd, as though the unhatched birds were already stillborn. She pierced a hole in one of the eggs with a sewing needle and tried to blow out the yolk. A gray, putrid fluid flowed out. “Maybe next year we’ll have some proper chicken eggs,” she reasoned.
She threw the egg out into the field with great force, and afterward she could not lift her arm without a stab of pain.

Together the women attended church for the Easter service and blessed their paltry baskets with holy water before going to Evdokia’s house for the holiday breakfast. Their meal was morose. The women were wearied by their lives, and they had little compensation for their futures. They ate their disappointing food quietly, drank their fifty-gram shots of aged home-brewed
horilka
, and recalled the Resurrection in their toasts. No one had the heart to liken their situation to a rebirth, no one dared say that the four of them sitting together in somber anxiety was a miracle. “More like the Last Supper than an Easter breakfast,” Evdokia grumbled. She was the only one who ate the powdered chocolate cake that tasted bitter and crumbled into pieces on their meager table.