The Sky Unwashed (23 page)

Marusia dipped into the deep blue satin pouch that hung inside the suitcase. She was surprised when she found the white lace hair ribbon Katia wore. In that awful hospital basement in Kyiv, Katia had thrown it down after she caught Tarasyk putting it on his head.

And then, in her dizziness, she found Tarasyk’s blond curls—fine strands, gentle as clouds, she thought. She feverishly kissed the ribbon and the hair. Marusia wove the ribbon through a buttonhole of her dress and kept the curls inside one of her fists.

“Oy! Okh! Too much,” she groaned. She stood up and thought that she should water her garden, or at least hoe and weed the crops. No time to cry. So overgrown, she thought.
Han’ba!
Shameful! I’ll starve if I don’t save the garden.

The weeds ruled, crowding out the good crops faster than she had the strength to chop them back. She went out again into the garden and thought that the cow must need water, too, but . . . had the pitiful animal died a week ago, or was it grazing on the
kolhosp
land? She couldn’t remember.

Marusia sat down on the step outside. She shaded her eyes from the harsh glare and tried to make out the figure in the garden, near the empty cowshed. A golden figure—an angel—was sprinkling her garden with her watering can. The angel’s back was toward Marusia, but she saw its shoulder-length golden hair lift away from its head when a cool breeze picked up—little tufts of hair floating away like dandelion seeds. The hair swirled on the ground around Marusia’s feet. It glowed and shimmered on the earth, and she thought of the gold painted on icons.

“I have some, too,” she said, and released Tarasyk’s hair into the gentle cascade of soft wind that surrounded her head. It danced higher and higher until she had to shut her eyes because the sunlight dazzled and blinded her.

“Don’t leave me,” she murmured, then nodded her head as though in reply to something she heard, as though she understood everything that she had questioned all her life and felt satisfied in her wisdom. Now that all her prayers were answered, her knowledge complete, her last breath coupled with the still air.

Pure Sweet Air

A
NORMAL PERSON
would have been nervous or more cautious, but Zosia no longer considered herself
normal’na
. . . not anymore. Normalcy belonged to others like the woman sitting across from her, the British journalist who spoke Russian so well. There was only a slight accent to the woman’s vowels, and the way she pronounced the telltale soft
l
sounded like a spoiled child’s pouty voice. Zosia tried not to notice the accent and to concentrate on making her own voice sound soft and serious on the tape. Still, the woman and her assistants—the ones bustling around with the microphones and tape recorders—were all very kind and sympathetic to her, and Zosia noticed how often they glanced at her with respect for what she had to tell them.

Zosia appreciated the attention but was still somewhat taken aback by the British woman’s appearance. Such a different-looking person, her first up close
Westerner. But Zosia knew how much she herself had changed in the nearly three years since the explosion at the Chornobyl plant. She was certainly even dowdier and more disheveled compared with this Westerner. Zosia especially disliked the way her own coarse hair had grown out to reveal too many gray hairs between the dark roots. She’d had neither the time nor money to bother with her hair after their departure from that horrible hospital in Kyiv. How difficult it had been getting out of Ukraine! Mothers and children everywhere—rushing onto the trains, grabbing seats, piling on top of each other, camping out in the aisles where the rude conductors in their blue uniforms yelled at the passengers to get out of their way. Zosia hated the conductors for refusing to sell them tea and sugar wafers. Katia’s feelings were hurt by one conductress who ignored her request for a wafer that had fallen off a tray. No one would’ve gotten anything had Zosia not given in to a fit of frustration and anger. She raised a fuss by grabbing the smug conductress’s basket of treats and passing it around to all of the children in their car. “These children are ill!” Zosia shouted, crazed and defiant. “This is the least you can do to help, you
svynia
. Pig!” She threw a handful of kopeks at the conductress, who stumbled away from the frenzied, hungry children. After the ruckus, Zosia half expected to be thrown off the train, and at times during the interminable ride even welcomed the possibility. She and her children had had to sit
in the aisles near the lavatory—an awful place considering the toilet was nothing more than a hole in the floor and the door was never properly closed. There was an overwhelming stench, and rivulets of liquid streamed out of the toilet directly into Zosia’s space.

It had been an agonizingly long train ride with many, many stops and a six-hour delay because the tracks were broken. “Too many people on board, that’s why,” a woman near Zosia declared to no one in particular. “The train can’t carry us all.”

Finally, Moscow. Zosia and her children were almost crushed in the mad rush out of the narrow exits, and she had to push away several big women who were suffocating Tarasyk and Katia. “Keep away!” Zosia shouted at everyone. “Idiots!” She was ready to hit some-one. Luckily, she kept her head and her temper until they were off the train and on the platform.

As quickly as Tarasyk could walk, the three of them made their way quickly toward the station’s vast crowded lobby. Zosia carried the bags of food and clothes so Katia had to half pull a listless Tarasyk who more than once refused to walk and sat down in the middle of the floor. Finally Katia wouldn’t take Tarasyk’s hand anymore. “We can’t stop now,” Zosia said. “Katia, take Tarasyk over there to that wall. Near Lenin’s picture. Just a few more steps, darlings. Come on, before we get trampled.” Zosia herself nearly fainted and dropped her bags the moment they reached Lenin’s stern gaze. “I
can’t get sick,” she had told herself. To the children she said calmly, “Now, don’t move until I come back.”

Zosia had spent another two hours waiting in more long lines to use the phone. She had her cache of kopeks ready in hand in case she had to call more than one friend. She was right. Nobody was expecting her, of course. No one answered. Nearly everyone was at work or standing in a line somewhere else in the city to buy food for the evening’s meal. Or at a bar. Typical, Zosia had fumed.

S
HE RELATED MOST
of this to the British woman whose name was Roberta and who was doing a radio documentary about Chornobyl. Zosia spent most of the day at the woman’s borrowed apartment, describing the explosion, the evacuation, the putrid hospital. The foreigner’s kind hazel eyes spurred her on, but Zosia still did not trust her enough to fully confess everything. She didn’t admit what a coward she felt for deserting Yurko and Marusia like that. Nor did she mention her pregnancy. Inside, Zosia reprimanded herself throughout the interview.

“Where did you stay in Moscow, dear?” the foreigner asked her.

“Wherever I could. With friends. One after another. Then with friends of friends and their relatives,” Zosia said. “I tried to register for an apartment in Mos-cow, but that was impossible. I was put on a waiting list for new housing the government was building for us
Chernobyl workers near Kiev. But I missed an appointment with the housing officials. My son was sick.” Zosia bit her tongue so as not to reveal how ill she’d been by then. She had suffered a miscarriage and was so riddled with infections she was convinced that she would be forever sterile—a perfect punishment from God. What a sense of humor He has if He exists, she thought.

Zosia concentrated on the woman’s lilac silk scarf. So unusual. She could sell that on the black market in ten seconds and get real German marks or even American dollars for it. She had already sold the embroidered pillow Marusia had given her in Kyiv and the clothes she had gotten from humanitarian aid societies. The only item Zosia refused to sell was the gold necklace of the Virgin, the one Marusia had given her on that last night.

“Y
ES, MARUSIA
—
IS
it?” the journalist said. How very odd it felt to be called by her mother-in-law’s old fashioned name. “Marusia, please tell me, what exactly happened to your husband?” Zosia hadn’t given the Westerner her real identity. Before, back in the Brezhnev days, anyone could get arrested for even giving lost tourists directions to their hotel. Things had lightened up after Chornobyl, and Gorbachev was allowing a new openness—
glasnost
—after the world had criticized the Soviets for trying to hide the disaster. But Zosia did not trust this “openness” anymore than she did the lying, thieving bureaucrats who kept promising her they would locate her husband, or after slowly poisoning them, give
her compensation money and a new home for herself and her children. Why should she trust the same devils who insisted they were doing all they could for her sick son?

Poor Tarasyk. He was so tiny and weak that he could hardly stand up by himself. Even so, not once did he ever complain about the moves from one cramped apartment to another. But during the awful times when he was paralyzed with stomach pains and the pneumonia he endured all the previous winter, his red eyes would well up with tears, and he would look at Zosia as though asking her, “Why?” No more, Zosia vowed. She had to get him out of here. Katia, too. The little girl was also complaining of unusual aches and pains. She had to get her children away. Not even Moscow was safe for them.

T
HE JOURNALIST OFFERED
Zosia a foreign cigarette. Zosia shook her head. She studied the British woman’s well-polished fingernails and soft hands. And the wonderfully unusual haircut: a precision cut in the shape of a helmet that flattered the woman’s high forehead and long, thin face. When they first met, Zosia had known instantly that Roberta was foreign. Before Roberta had said a word, Zosia guessed she was from the West. The real leather shoes. The simple, well-tailored woolen skirt. The cotton blouse with fancy pearl buttons. The glasses: thin-rimmed, round ones. So different. Nothing like any of it even in the special stores for foreign tourists and high Party officials.

“Tea?” the foreigner asked, smiling at her. Even white teeth. No gold. “No? Now, you were about to tell me about your husband. . . .”

“To get my children out, I had to leave my husband at the hospital in Kiev,” Zosia told her. “After my arrival in Moscow, I contacted Kiev, but they told me that he was transferred to a Moscow hospital. Clinic Number Six. It’s a special hospital for the Chernobyl victims. He wasn’t there. Finally, they told me he died. They gave me some compensation money. And I’ve gotten a bit more while here, but now the money has been cut off. I can’t go back to Kiev either. They won’t give me permission anymore. They don’t want Chernobyl victims to come back and infect the rest of Kiev.”

The journalist bent forward in her chair. “And yourself? How are you doing these days?”

Zosia was disarmed by the woman’s concerned face. “I don’t know. I’m numb from worrying about everything. Worry will kill me in the end if the radiation doesn’t do it first.” She’d said too much. She hated to admit she was ill. Her throat itched, she coughed up blood, but she kept it to herself. She believed that if she did otherwise, they’d put her into another worthless hospital and send the children to an orphanage.

The Brit turned off the tape recorder. “Well, I think we have everything we need,” she told Zosia. “Thank you so much for your help. The world will know what happened. . . .”

“Yes, the money, please. I need the money
now
,” Zosia cut in. “You promised me one hundred rubles if I spoke to you. I took a great risk by doing this. So now, I have to be paid.”

The foreigner handed her a business card. “My chief will pay you. Ask for . . .”

“I don’t have time. Pay me now. Please!”

The Westerner fumbled in her soft leather briefcase and took out a wallet. “Sorry, I only have English pounds. . . .”

“
Kharasho
—fine. I know where to change them,” Zosia said, smiling openly at her for the first time and not caring that Roberta would see how many teeth were missing.

Z
OSIA’S ONLY CONCERN
the last evening she spent in Moscow was whether she would get her children out of Russia without being arrested for talking to the journalist. She had paid the doctor, the letter was in her purse along with her passport. Her hosts, good friends who had gladly allowed Zosia and the children to stay at their apartment during the past few weeks, were sound asleep in their own room. Tarasyk was also asleep on the divan in the living room. Zosia kissed the knit cap that covered his head, now nearly bald.

She was about to kiss Katia good night when the little girl sat up. “
Mamo
, I can’t sleep,” Katia said. “We are going away again without
Baba
.”

“But darling, we tried to call her in Kyiv lots of
times, and we’ve written letters to the hospital, and
Baba
doesn’t answer,” Zosia said.

“Write to our house,” Katia said. “Tell her we’re going away, but we’ll see her someday. So she won’t worry.”

“Write to the house in the village?” Zosia brightened up and kissed the child’s tangled hair. “Good idea! Maybe she’s there. You’re such a smart girl.” Together, she and Katia sat on the parquet floor while Zosia composed a letter which she read to the little girl, who listened as intently as though it were a story:

10 September 1989

Dear Mamuniu
,

I’m hoping that by some miracle you get this letter—our last before we leave Moscow. We’ve had a rough time, and Tarasyk is very sick, so we are going to a sanatorium in Georgia
.

Zosia read the next section to herself silently:

I contacted the hospital in Kyiv about Yurko. First, they told me he was transferred to Moscow. I searched everywhere and later was told that he’s not alive. But there’s no official record about his death. So, please tell me what really happened after we left you at the hospital and if he is still alive or not
.