The Sky Unwashed (3 page)

“You make one for me for my wedding,” teased Lazorska, who had buried five or so husbands and outlived several more lovers than she cared to admit she remembered.

“I
CAN’T HELP
it if I have to work later tonight!” Yurko had raised his voice at Zosia. It was Friday morning. Marusia was still in her bed, in the room she shared with Tarasyk and Katia. Only a thin curtain separated it from Zosia and Yurko’s part of the house. The little boy, Tarasyk, was still asleep, his thumb poised on his lower lip. Marusia kissed his curls and brought the goose-down coverlet closer to his chin. Katia was already up and in the kitchen playing with the cat and dog before she was sent off to school.

“You always have to work. You knew about the reception two weeks ago,” Zosia shouted.

“How the hell can I remember something as stupid as somebody’s wedding two weeks ago.”

“Yes, that’s how you are. But six months ago you made a date with your friends to go fishing, and you remember it like your own birthday.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I didn’t have any date to go fishing. The weather just turned to spring a few damn days ago. . . .”

“Right. So like a thief in a palace, off you’ll go next weekend with your drunken, rotten friends on a boat . . . that you’ll do. But when I want to go somewhere, where there’s a wedding and dancing, and people, you have to work. . . .”

“All right, I’ll go to the damn wedding. I’ll go to the stupid reception. But I have to leave by nine-thirty for the night shift. You can stay all night and dance with every goddamn fool and his brother’til your big feet swell like rockets, and you can do whatever the devil else you want to do. I don’t give a good goddamn. . . .”

“
Oy, yoy, yoy
,” Marusia grumbled out loud so that they would hear her. They can’t go a day without fighting about something stupid, she thought.

Marusia didn’t like to overhear their arguments, but the house was small, only three and a half rooms, built in a circle with the kitchen in the center. Zosia and Yurko’s room was so close to hers that it was hard to ignore the sounds of suppressed rage and anger or of the sporadic lovemaking that in their earlier years together used to always follow their battles. Zosia was usually the more emotional and dramatic of the two, sometimes—when she felt especially wounded or when he ignored her—adding to the venom of her voice by throwing things at Yurko. Yurko was more controlled perhaps only because he was so much older than she. Marusia
had been relieved when her son finally married at the elderly age of thirty-five, although, when she first laid eyes on the young Zosia, surly and demanding even then, with her thick makeup and wild yellow hair, she thought to herself, What a
prostytutka
.

Zosia and Yurko met working together at the electronics section of the nuclear power plant. Yurko was Zosia’s supervisor, and they had become lovers on the long lonely nights when they should have been preoccupied with the instruments on the generators that connected to the turbines of the nuclear reactors. They married when Zosia was pregnant with Katia.

Marusia crawled out of the bed and stiffly put on her sweater over her flannel nightgown. “Good, they stopped,” she said to herself. She knelt on the cold hardwood floor and said her morning prayers, praying especially for Zosia to mend her mean ways and be more
myla
—quieter and kinder—to Yurko.

Katia skipped into the room. “I fed Myrrko.” Katia giggled. “I gave him all your beautiful bread.”

“Oh you naughty one,” Marusia said, pinning the little honey-haired girl against her and kissing her head. “Would you like some breakfast yourself?”

“Yes.” Katia began to brush Marusia’s unplaited, wavy gray hair. “
Babo?
I didn’t really give Myrrko your bread. Just a mouse.”

“Much better, but I was saving that mouse for your dinner,
dorohen’ka
,” Marusia said. They both giggled loud enough to awake Tarasyk, who was rubbing his eyes.

“Wake up darling, the birds are singing, the sun is shining,” Marusia sang to Tarasyk, who smiled. It was the same song she always sang for the children in the mornings.

I
N THE KITCHEN
, Marusia was surprised to find Zosia ironing a dress shirt for Yurko. “So, good morning,” Marusia said. Yurko sat at the veneered wooden table in his T-shirt and his best navy blue striped trousers, drinking his black tea from a tall glass and eating leftover potatoes and sour cream. His rounded shoulders were stooped from worry, and his face was more haggard-looking from the new growth of heavy beard sprinkling his chin.

“So,
sonechko
, you and Zosia are going to the wedding?” she asked, trying to sound casual.

“Well, Mama, it’s hard to keep anything from you,” Yurko said, slumping further into his chair.

“A regular
Cheka
agent,” Zosia said, and suppressed a short laugh.

Marusia pursed her lips and ignored them. She turned her attention to preparing kasha for the children. Katia was helping her brother wash at the sink. Bosyi the dog was at his usual place, beneath the table at Yurko’s slippered feet, his tail thumping happily whenever he felt Yurko’s leg twitch. Except to the children, Marusia did not speak again until Zosia noticed the
korovai
in the larder when she went to fetch some powdered cornstarch which she used to stiffen Yurko’s shirt collar and
cuffs. “Oh!
Mamo
,” she yelled. “It’s beautiful! The best one you ever made! Yurko, come in and take a look.”

Yurko got up and went grudgingly into the larder. “Beautiful,
Mamo!
” he echoed.

“It looks just like a soft cloud,” said Katia.

I
N APRIL OF
that particular year, the days were unseasonably warm and mild. The dirt roads leading around the village were muddy because the ground had thawed too quickly from the recent hard frosts.

The morning of Hanna’s wedding was especially tranquil except for a few billowing clouds that had at first threatened rain, but released only a quick, clean shower before the sun reappeared in all its warm brilliance. Marusia made her way to Evdokia’s home, where a large group of villagers was waiting outside in the garden for Hanna and her groom to arrive. These older villagers and some of Hanna’s friends had gathered to see the
blahoslovennia
, the traditional blessings given by the elders in the bride’s family on her wedding day. Evdokia Zenoviivna and her husband, Oleh the beekeeper, sat stoically on wooden slat chairs in front of their tidy white-washed house. They wore traditional Ukrainian folk costumes: Evdokia in her long red skirt, embroidered sash and blouse; her husband in his own embroidered shirt and long red sash that wound several times around his narrow waist, and which also held up a pair of satin blue
sharavary
, the balloon-wide pants that had fit him more snugly in his younger days.

“We’re taking bets to see if Hanna and the drunk she’s marrying will show up,” Marusia overheard the man in front of her say.

“Oh, she’ll come all right,” said the stout woman next to him. “The grandparents promised Hanna her ruby necklaces and a wad of money Evdokia got from selling her cow. That’ll help her get through the next winter, for sure, and now with a new little soul on the way . . .”

The crowd hushed one another and nodded their heads in the direction of a short woman, dressed in a long white wedding dress and veil, slowly making her way on the muddy road toward the crowd. The hem of her dress was dotted with wet mud, and her long veil dragged over the ground. She held a fading bouquet of pansies and tulips and hesitated each time her spiked heels caught in the mud. “
Do bisa!
” she cursed loudly when she nearly slipped and fell. She regained her balance and continued.

“Pick up the train of your dress,” a woman in lavender lace shouted. “Or it will get dirty!”

“It’s too late for that, Mama!” shouted the bride.

“Where’s the groom?” someone snickered.

A robust young man, blond with watery blue eyes, and in workclothes from the Chornobyl plant, put down his lunch pail and ran toward the bride. He picked her up and carried her the rest of the way to the grandparents.

The crowd applauded. “Well done, Maksym,”
shouted the bride’s father dressed in a blue pin-striped suit with a pink boutonniere.

“Maksym, you should marry her yourself,” someone in the crowd shouted.

“And make my wife mad? No thank you!” Maksym said. The crowd laughed at the blushing man. Everyone knew what a bad-tempered woman he was married to.

“Good people, this is a solemn occasion,” shouted the bride’s mother. “Hanna go ahead.” She gently pushed her daughter toward a tiny fringed rug beneath the grandparents’ feet. Hanna knelt before them and grabbed their withered hands into her own. “Bless me
Babo
and
Didy
. I am about to leave my home and become a bride.”

Some of the younger people were snickering. Hanna immediately recognized them as her friends from her job at the plant. “Hey Hanna, where’s the groom? Maybe he went to the wrong wedding,” yelled out a brassy-haired young woman with the same shade of lipstick as Hanna’s.

Hanna stood up and turned around, shaking her bouquet at them. “You all just shut up or don’t bother coming to the party later on!”

“Hanna, you shut up,” her mother said. “Don’t disrespect your grandparents.
Tatu
, wake up.” She gently nudged her old father’s shoulder.

“Oleh, wake up and speak to her,” said Evdokia.

The old man looked up. His mustache was long and white, with dabs of beeswax turning up the corners, and he pulled on it as he spoke. “Well, nice to see everyone.
Let’s go to the church now. Come on. It won’t kill you.” He stood up and would have left, but his daughter grabbed him and firmly pressed his shoulders, leveling him back into his chair.

“Sit down, crazy fool,” Evdokia whispered. “We can’t go anywhere without the groom.” She sighed. “Get up Hanna, no use waiting for your husband like that. You’ll be on your knees long enough, you’ll see, either praying over or cleaning up after that . . . that bad one.” She shook her head. “You’ll see.”

“Hanna! Hanna!” A young man standing in a cart pulled by a white horse shouted in the distance. His light brown hair was darkened by hair cream, and he was dressed in a suit and a wide crimson tie that could have flagged any bull in a field. It was Ihor, Hanna’s groom. He waved his hand, and a long, scandalous purple and green Italian silk scarf tied to his wrist flapped in the breeze. The three other men in the cart with him had similar scarves tied to their wrists rather than the traditional embroidered ones. One man quickly passed a bottle to the others, and each took a hefty swig before they came nearer to the old people’s house. “Please, good people of God,” the groom mumbled with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his full mouth. “Please, good people of God . . . please come to the wedding.”

“Yes, come to the wedding,” chortled his friends in the cart, waving to the crowd.

The white horse was old and having difficulty because the men kept taking turns at the reins. The crowd
quickly separated when the squeaky wooden cart approached. Several men in the crowd had to hold the horse and calm it because it did not want to stop.

“Look out! Even the horse is drunk,” a man shouted, and everyone laughed.

“Hanna, beloved, I came. See, I didn’t forget,” said Ihor.

Hanna placed her hand on her hip. “Fine, fine. I guess I should count myself very lucky. But as you probably don’t know, it is our tradition to have the reception
after
the wedding.”

“And the honeymoon after the wedding too,” one of Hanna’s girlfriends shouted. The crowd laughed. Hanna turned and stared into the group until she recognized the traitor. “You shut up, Masha. Just because you can’t hold on to a man . . .”

Evdokia’s short, stocky body appeared at her granddaughter’s side. The old woman’s apple cheeks were ruddier than usual, and her pug nose twitched like a rabbit’s. “Stop it. You can’t fight now, not in that dress or in your condition. Get on with the ceremony. You there, Ihor. Help her into the cart!”

Ihor hopped out unsteadily. He grabbed Evdokia’s hand and kissed it. “Bless me,
Babo
. . . .”

Evdokia wrung her hand away from his grasp. “Stop that, you idiot! Get Hanna in the cart. The priest is waiting.”

“You couldn’t wait until later to get drunk?” Hanna hissed at Ihor as he and his friends strained to lift her in.

“Look, I might have changed my mind. . . .”

“You do, and I’ll see that you never drink another thing in your life again because you’ll be dead!”

“Oh my little Hanna, so heavy,” Ihor said, dragging her up.

“Thanks to you!”

The men in the cart laughed and handed her the bottle.

“Go to hell,” she whispered to them. Then she smiled at Ihor and pulled some hay from his hair. “What’s this? Where did you sleep last night?”

“Your grandmother made me sleep in the barn—with the stinky pigs. They wanted to keep you pure. Of course, as a gentleman, I had to oblige. . . .”

She laughed and gently brushed the hay off his mustache. “
Koo-koo
,” she said in a small, high voice.

“
Koo-koo-ri-koo
,” he replied in his loud rooster voice. They both giggled and bumped their foreheads together. The men in the cart guffawed and whistled with their fingers, and the crowd applauded.

Ihor tried to kiss her, but she turned her head. “Not now, wait a little bit longer.” She turned to her audience and shouted, “Please come to the wedding good people of God.”

The crowd cheered and walked behind the wedding party on the path that led directly to the wooden church at the other end of the village.

T
HE TINNY CHURCH
bells rang. Inside the ancient—some said it was built in the seventeenth century—wooden building, the priest patiently waited for the
observers to find a place to stand on the floor, since there were no pews. Ihor’s friends made a path through the crowd to the altar. Hanna and Ihor shyly approached the priest standing before the iconostasis. Father Andrei was a young man whose hobnailed work boots, polished for the service, peeked out from beneath his gold brocade vestments. When he wasn’t conducting services, he was a janitor at the Chornobyl plant. He lived with his mother, Paraskevia Volodymyrivna, who never missed a service her son was ministering, even this one, although she had carried a grudge against Evdokia and her family for over a decade. It had something to do with a sick chicken, but no one remembered the details.