The Sky Unwashed (7 page)

“Stay,” she said to the dog, who started to whimper and lick her foot. “You can stay.” She briefly touched its head and gently eased herself into the bed next to her husband. She covered both of them with his thin flannel blanket and lifted his head near her shoulder. Her spine tingled a bit each time she felt his shallow breath puff gently on her neck.

Z
OSIA WAS FLYING
sky high, deep into the black clouds. Her lightweight body was hurled over a granite wall, but she landed upright on her feet, like a cat. The
chort
stood tall, towering over her. He wore a black robe with a hood like the medieval Western monks she once saw on a television program. The
chort
asked her in a baritone’s voice, “If you are to be saved, then what good is the world?”

And Zosia was six years old again. Her hair was in ringlets, and she wore a big white bow pinned to her head exactly like the one her own daughter wore now. She started to cry and pointed to the wall behind her, at the inscriptions from the beatitudes etched in the stone, written in an alphabet she had never seen before, although she was able to read each sentence out loud:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. . . .”

The demon disappeared into a black smoke, and Zosia heard the church bells; not the shallow clanging ones from the village church in Starylis, but the big, resonant bells she remembered from the golden domed church she attended when she was the child of political exiles in Siberia; from the time when she memorized her catechism as though it were her life’s calling.

Zosia awoke and remembered her dream. Her arms were still wrapped around her sleeping husband, and they were both wet with sweat. She strained her ears. She heard bells after all, but the sound came from the cowbells Marusia had hung outside their front door because they didn’t have a real doorbell.

She put on a robe and stumbled her way to the front door. A little girl in blond braids wearing the bright red scarf and crisp white blouse of the Communist Young Pioneers greeted her. “
Dobryi den’
. Here, take this.” She held up a waxed paper envelope.

“What is it?” Zosia asked.

“Iodine pills. Because of a fire at the Chornobyl plant. Give one to each member of your family once a day.” The little girl turned to go.

“Wait a minute,” Zosia said.

“I have to go now,” the little girl said impatiently. “Take the pills and you’ll feel better.”

Zosia watched her skip down the road. She felt weak and sat down outside on the blue-gray slate of the front steps. Her red eyes were heavy with sleep and grit, and she lay her head on her knees, too dizzy to make a move.

M
ARUSIA FOUND HER
keeled over on the steps. “Zosen’ka, wake up!”

Zosia sat upright. Her head ached, and the hand tightly clutching the envelope the girl had given her was numb. “I’m fine.”

She saw that Katia was staring at her. Tarasyk began to cry. “Come here, darlings.” She brought the children to her chest and hugged them hard, but only the little boy held on to her. Katia wriggled out of her mother’s grasp and ran into the house. “Go with your sister,” Zosia whispered and dully watched the little boy turn away from her.

“
Bida!
” Marusia cried. “Calamity! We’re not supposed to go out of the house today. We have to shut all the windows. I saw the
militsiia
with guns in the village. I was in town getting the children and a
militsioner
yelled into that big megaphone they carry and said we all have to stay in our homes today.” Then she remembered, “You’re not working? Are you all right?”

Zosia stood up too quickly and had to hold on to Marusia’s arm. “I’m a little groggy,” she said. “I’ve had a nap. Yurko is still asleep.”

“Thank God for that. He was so tired, poor boy. What do you have in your hand?”

“Oh, I got these a while ago,” Zosia said. She handed Marusia the iodine tablets. “Give one to the children and take one yourself. Iodine tablets. For protection. Give one to Yurko if he’s awake. Go on, I’ll just sit here a few minutes. Then I’ll come in.”

“Hurry up. The air is so bad. . . .” Marusia looked at Zosia with great concern before briefly touching the top of her head.

Zosia waited until Marusia was out of sight before she allowed herself to succumb to her nausea. I’m going to die, she thought calmly. She was kneeling on the grass, hugging her waist and concentrating on a bee that was hovering in mad semicircles near her head.

She closed her eyes, and her ears were full of the harsh sounds of birds squawking in the linden trees above her. Then she heard Myrrko the cat purr and felt it nuzzle her cheek. “My friend,” she said, hugging it close to her. The cat’s coarse tongue licked her hand. It pressed its claws into Zosia’s sleeves and did not leap out of her arms when she struggled several times to stand before finally regaining her balance. Once in the kitchen, the cat jumped to the floor, paused as though sniffing the air, and quickly darted out. “Looks like kitty isn’t hungry. That’s new,” Marusia said. She was heating a castiron pot of barley soup on the woodstove.

A
FINE RAIN
fell that evening, and Yurko slept hard. Zosia was disturbed in the night by the painful lowing of their cow. Marusia spent the night in the shed,
where the cow was expected to birth her calf. “She cries with big round tears in her eyes,” Marusia reported to Zosia, who came out to see what the trouble was. “But she doesn’t want to give life.”

Z
OSIA WAS MAKING
a cup of instant chicory coffee early the next morning when she heard the cowbells ring again at her front door. This time a man in a blue uniform carrying a shotgun stood in the doorway. He was from the
militsiia
. “
Tovaryshko
, you know about the fire at the plant?”

Zosia pulled the collar of her robe closer to her chin. “Not much.” She heard her mother-in-law come into the hallway behind her.

“Nothing to worry about, nothing at all. But for your safety we will be evacuating the residents here. Be ready by five o’clock this afternoon. You’ll only be gone for a day or so. Three days at the most.”

Marusia peered behind Zosia’s shoulder. “Where are we going? I have a cow who is going to give birth any day now. She might have trouble. She did the last time.”

“Don’t worry,
Babo
. Just keep it away from the grass.”

“What does he mean?” Marusia asked Zosia.

“Radiation?” Zosia asked. She wanted someone official to say the word to her face.

“Just a touch. Couldn’t be helped. That’s normal when there’s a fire at the plant. Ask any engineer. It’ll pass. Did you get any potassium iodine tablets?”

Zosia perked up at the question. “No,” she lied. There were always shortages of such things, and she wanted to get all the medicine she could. Maybe she could sell the tablets in an emergency. Maybe Yurko would need more than his one tablet per day.

The
militsiia
took out the familiar crumpled waxed paper envelope from a pouch strung on his belt. “Here,
tovaryshko
. One a day.”

“My husband is ill. We’ll probably need more.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll take care of it. Just grab a few things to take with you, stuff you would take for a weekend holiday, then come to the village center and we’ll put you on a bus. There are buses going to the hospital, too. You’ll be back before you’ve had time to unpack.”

Y
URKO WAS WEAK
and tired, but he moved around the house. He had lost his appetite and ate only a little of the soup Marusia made for him. Zosia was cuddling Tarasyk, who seemed to have an earache. He was crying and fidgety. Katia played silently with her doll in the corner of the kitchen. She refused to change out of her black school uniform with the white lace apron and huge hair bow. Marusia wanted to stay in the shed with the cow, but saw that it was up to her to pack for the family. She managed to fit everyone’s overnight clothing into one heavyweight suitcase, the only one she had kept since she was last evacuated during the war.

She had hidden the large, boxy case behind the oak-veneer closet where they stored their clothes. Inside
the suitcase, folded with mothballs and a small sachet of lavender, lay some of Marusia’s old hand-embroidered blouses made of crepe and linen from when she was a girl. She also kept her wedding costume, now yellowed, and her dead husband’s one good dress shirt, which somebody once told her was made of silk. It too was a yellowed white, but it was still as intoxicating to her as when she first saw him in it at their wedding. She held the shirt to her face, and her thoughts drifted to the very painful day he left her for another woman. “After all these years, Antin, I still don’t know why. It still grieves my heart. Even in your death, I ask you, why
that
one? Why did you choose that little whore?” She sobbed into the shirt.

“Foolish
baba
,” she muttered to herself. “I don’t have time to think about foolishness.” She found another box to put her old treasures in and slipped it behind the closet. The suitcase was still useful; its handle was firm, and the spring lock worked well enough. She liked the blue satin interior, though it seemed too grand for the threadbare cotton underwear and thin flannel night-clothes she was packing. She didn’t know what to pack for Zosia, who was so particular about her things.

Next, Marusia stuffed her canvas shopping bag with heavy glass jars filled with the vegetables she had put up the previous season. For the road, she added two long
kovbasa
sticks, a slab of salt pork, a few tomatoes and cucumbers and a loaf of dark rye bread she had baked earlier in the week. She also pushed in a flask of
vodka in case Yurko was still sick and some other little snacks for the children to chew on when they were difficult.

When she was satisfied, she swept the floors, made the beds, and washed the dishes. She put away the stray food, except the scraps she kept out for the dog and cat, who were following her around the house, pacing around her feet until it irritated her. They seemed nervous, and she kept accidentally stepping on their tails.

She went out to the stable to bless her cow. “We’ll be back, darling. You’ll just have to give birth alone.” She hugged its coarse head and cried on the little place between its ears. The cow mooed with pain. It tossed its head and danced around the old woman. “Don’t be mad at me. I’m sorry. I don’t want to go. But I’ll be back in a day or two. Do your best. I’ll ask the
militsiia
to take care of you.”

Marusia wiped her tears and returned to the house, where she found Yurko sitting in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and listening to the radio. “Are you feeling better,
sonechko?
” Marusia asked.

His eyes were distant. He seemed distracted by her question. “
Mamo
, it’s good that we’re leaving.” His voice was weak and higher pitched than usual. He turned up the volume of the radio. A static-filled voice was jabbering in Russian about evacuation schedules. Nothing specific was said about the fires or why it was necessary to leave.

Zosia came in. Her face looked paper-white, but
strangely pretty. Marusia pursed her lips when she saw that Zosia wore her amber bracelet and the offensive, whorish high platform shoes she was so proud of, but this was not a time to mention the presents Zosia took from her men friends.

“Come on, darling heart,” Zosia called to Tarasyk. The boy ran to his mother and greedily took her hand. He was holding on to a stuffed bunny that had only one eye and half of an ear.

Zosia listened to the broadcast for a minute. “Turn it off. They won’t say anything we don’t already know. Let’s get going.”

Marusia was the last to leave the house. She turned off the electric lights and looked around the rooms one more time. At the last minute she almost took her personal icon of the Madonna and Child, but she decided to leave it because it was nailed too tightly into the plaster. For over fifty years, it had hung next to the woodcut portrait of the national poet, Shevchenko. There was no time to pull it off. After all, they’d be back soon enough. “We’re waiting, Marusia,” Zosia called out from the front yard. Marusia locked the door.

Zosia held each of her children’s hands. Marusia started to take the suitcase, but Yurko held it fast by the handle. “I’ll take it. You can carry the bag of food,” he said. Marusia let him take it from her without protest, but she was worried that he might fall faint on the road to the village. Yurko walked ahead of them, straight and hardly wavering. She wondered if his knees were buckling.
He did not greet the neighbors who happened to be walking with them at the same time, leaving Marusia to talk to them and cover up Yurko’s rude silence.

She was grateful when they made it into the village center, where several empty buses waited, their doors closed. Everyone who lived in Starylis was standing in unruly lines for their seats.
Militsiia
men and women with shotguns slung on their shoulders stood between the villagers, abruptly answering questions and strutting importantly on the sidewalks.

“
Dobri liudy!
Good people of Starylis,” a burly
militsiia
man shouted into a bullhorn. “This evacuation is for your protection. Don’t worry, you’ll be compensated by our government.”

Marusia and her family found themselves in a long line. Yurko put down the suitcase and sat on it. Zosia and the children spread a blanket they had brought with them and sat on it, huddled together. Soon, though, Marusia stood, hoping to seek out some sympathetic official to take care of her beloved cow.

In line, some men were passing a vodka bottle. “Decontaminate yourselves,
tovaryshi
,” they laughed, handing one another a bottle. “Nothing purer. Not even mother’s milk.”

“This will kill anything! Especially this batch.”

“It’ll be over in a few days, maybe a week, so drink up now, you’ll be back for a fresh bottle,” they joked, and the men winked at the younger girls, who flashed quick smiles back at them.