The Sky Unwashed (9 page)

Marusia’s sharp eyes found an area on the far side of the packed room, near the entrance leading into a corridor. She and Katia quickly rushed to claim their patch of wall and carpet. She made Katia sit on the floor, then waved for Zosia, Tarasyk and Yurko to join her.

Marusia smiled shyly at the group near her spot, a young couple hushing and rocking their colicky twins. Both of the babies were crying at once. “Nice voices,” Marusia said over the babies’ howls. “They’ll be great
singers someday.” It was her way of being apologetic to her neighbors, since she had taken away some of their space and privacy, such as it was. She clicked her tongue happily at the infants, who ignored her and cried louder.

The mother nodded. She was dark, like a Georgian, and yet looked Slavic because of her blue eyes and heart-shaped face. Zosia and Tarasyk plopped down near Marusia. Yurko set the suitcase down as though it might break and then sat on it. He looked at the young mother of the twins, whose skin was the same abnormal tan color as his own, and he quickly dropped his eyes away from her.

“My babies are tired,” the young woman said. She had a slight lisp.

Yurko ignored her. He didn’t want to look at her again. He knew everything about her and her suffering because he felt it deep in his own blood and skin. He wanted to hold his own children close to him for a little bit and hug them near his heart so that he could feel their innocent sweet breath on his polluted face. He sat and watched his son, who was in a bad temper and fought with his mother as she changed his wet pants, and then he turned to look at his daughter, sitting on the plump, safe lap of his own mother, and he felt a wave of remorse for his wasted life.

Yurko’s head sank lower on his chest. He blinked back his tears. To steady himself, he lit a cigarette and tried to concentrate on the smoke circling before his smarting eyes.

An obese nurse in a white duster and a paper-thin coned cap stood in the center of the room and clapped her hands. “
Uh-vah-ha! Uh-vah-ha!
Pay attention,
tovaryshi!
Everyone will be taken care of. You will be fed and given a place to sleep tonight. Everybody will be processed according to their number.”

“What number?” Marusia anxiously whispered to Zosia. “Did we get a number?”

“Don’t worry, we will,” Zosia said confidently.

The nurse waddled to a wooden desk at the far end of the room. She gruffly shook the shoulder of a man with a thick growth of beard who had fallen asleep on top of her desk. He awoke in surprise and jumped to his feet when he saw the nurse looming over him. She heaved herself into her seat behind the desk, took out a thick notebook, a pen and a full bottle of ink from a drawer, and spread them all on the desk with great deliberation. The room quieted down. She looked up and bellowed, “Number one . . .”

Katia had to go to the bathroom. Zosia foraged around the room until she found an empty specimen bottle beneath an examination table. “Come on darling,” she coaxed, “just squat and do it into the bottle.”

“I don’t want to,” Katia said, and started to cry.

Tarasyk fell asleep with his thumb in his mouth on the floor next to his father, who ventured a slight caress over the boy’s golden hair. Zosia gently took the blanket that covered him. “Here, a little modesty,” she said,
holding up the blanket. “You go behind it and pee into the bottle. No one will see you.”

“I’ll help you, dear,” Marusia offered.

“No, I’ll do it,” Katia said. She went behind the blanket.

“Hurry up, my arms are getting tired,” Zosia said. Katia shyly handed her mother the bottle. “Don’t show anybody!”

“Thank you, darling. I’ll just put this out here.” She placed the bottle on a cart loaded with various suspicious-looking jars out in the corridor. “Let some doctor analyze it.”

Marusia studied her daughter-in-law. Zosia had vomited a bit on the bus, but she seemed better. She certainly looked healthier than Yurko, whose hands shook each time he brought a cigarette to his lips.

Zosia stood up again. “I have to get us “official,’” she said, and in her thick red shoes she sidestepped the hordes of people that barricaded her path to the nurse’s desk.

“Hey,
medsestro
,” she called out to the nurse.

“Are you number five? Let’s see your number card.”

“No,
we’re
number five,” shouted a tiny woman with a check coat holding an overstuffed shopping bag. “Me and my family here are all number five. See!” She thrust her card in front of the nurse’s face and glared at Zosia.

“Fine,” said the nurse. She wrote something down in her notebook and handed the woman another card. “Go out to the corridor and down the stairs to the basement. Number six!”

“Excuse me,” Zosia said to the nurse. “We were never given a number. Someone either stole our number or your incompetent staff didn’t think we needed one.”

“Then you can’t be here. Go back outside and get in line for a number. Six! Number six!”

“You don’t seem to understand.” Zosia’s voice was louder but very self-assured. “My husband was directly contaminated from the fires at Chornobyl. He was exposed to radiation. They made us come in here immediately because he needs emergency medical care. His condition is worse than anyone’s here.”

The nurse looked bored and annoyed at Zosia’s high-handed speech. “Everybody has a number. You go out like you were supposed to and get one.”

“But he was there when the fires started at the plant. He helped put the fires out. . . .”

“Number six!” the nurse shouted, wedging her hefty backside firmly against her chair.

Zosia wished she had something valuable to give the woman. She eyed and measured the nurse’s feet beneath the desk, then took off one of her high-heeled shoes and held it up for the nurse to see. “Here. These must be worth something.”

The nurse looked for a minute, then glanced back down at her notebook. She was waiting.

Zosia continued. “Look, you probably have a beautiful daughter who would love to wear these. Or for yourself. Why not! Or sell these on the black market for a real wage.”

The nurse’s pig eyes were greedy. “Put them under the desk,” she mumbled.

“Not until my husband is given medical treatment first.”

The nurse sighed heavily, then yawned without covering her mouth, exposing a wealth of gold and silver teeth.

“Wait. Here’s one shoe.” Zosia placed it beneath the desk. “You get the other one after he’s taken care of.”

The nurse admired a shrewd operator. “Good. I believe I called your number. Number six?” she said looking directly at Zosia.

Zosia smiled. She waved over her family while the nurse argued with a young couple who claimed they were the true holders of number six. “Impostors,” the nurse spat out. “Who do you think you are—playing a game with me? Go outside and get another number card. You can’t jump ahead of everybody. I can have you arrested for that!”

The couple, in their early twenties and young enough to have never experienced the authority of a bigcity bureaucracy, were dumbfounded when the nurse took their card away. They left the room without any protest.

Marusia had kept a close watch on the scene and
understood when Zosia motioned her to come up to the desk. The old woman helped Yurko stand up and steadied him. His arm rested heavily around her shoulders.

“Children, stay here and guard our things.” She grasped him around his waist and lead him slowly across the room.

Zosia quickly took off her other shoe and held it tightly in the crook of her arm. She rushed to meet them and caught her husband just as his knees buckled. “I’m fine,” he rasped.

“We’re almost there, a few more steps, dear,” Zosia said, eyeing the fat nurse who sat calmly watching them struggle.

Yurko’s body was very hot, and his cotton shirt was soaked through. “This takes too much time,” the nurse yelled. “Natalka!” she called to another nurse who leaned idly against a wall, talking to a man dressed in a filthy white duster.

“Natalka! Come here and bring that lazy idiot with you!” Natalka scowled back at the nurse. She and her companion were finishing a shared foreign cigarette.

“Take this man to ward four. Internal medicine.”

“Come on
bratiku
,” the man in white said. He gruffly grabbed hold of Yurko, but Marusia would not loosen her grip around his waist.

“What are you waiting for?” said the nurse at the desk. “Get the wheelchair.”

Natalka indolently shuffled to a wheelchair. In it sat
an old man who hobbled out of the seat. “Now sit him down here,” Natalka commanded Marusia. She was irritated that she had to take charge of Yurko and was surly to the old woman, who seemed to be afraid of her.

“He’ll go straight to the ward, and you can go to the basement where you’ll be taken care of,” the nurse at the desk cut in.

“What about the rest of my family?” Zosia demanded. Her head itched from perspiration and her stomach cramped. “I have two little children, and my old mother-in-law here. What about them?”

The huge nurse smugly stared at Zosia. “They’ll just have to go outside and get their own number.” Then with a grunt she dismissed Zosia and Yurko and proceeded to call out more numbers.

Zosia refused to be put off. “Find a place for all of us or you’ll never get this other shoe,” she said.

The nurse mumbled, “Either you give me that shoe or your husband can rot on the floor.”

Zosia’s eyebrow twitched. She glanced at Yurko, who sat uninvolved. She thought hard for a minute.

“
Mamo
, take this shoe. Stay here with the children until I come back. I’m going with Yurko to make sure he’s all right.”

“You’re not allowed,” Natalka sneered. Immediately Zosia knew that Yurko might well end up in a corridor all night, forgotten and neglected. She knew far too well the taciturn laziness of workers like this Natalka who resented fulfilling any given duty. It was like that in
every single job she ever had, even at Chornobyl. She knew that Yurko could die while this slovenly bitch flirted with her worthless boyfriend who had no intention of working if he could get away with avoiding it. And absolutely no one would be held responsible.

“I’m going! If you try to stop me, I’ll push your ugly face so far into your fat
dupa
that you’ll beg me to find a gun and shoot you,” Zosia exploded. “Mama, I’m going with Yurko.”

Marusia cried quietly to herself, nodded, and took a last mournful look at her son, who slumped in the wheelchair, his head hanging down. Then she retreated back to the children.

“Let’s go,” Zosia said to Natalka. She walked behind the wheelchair and Natalka’s billowy rump, which swayed rhythmically like two large bells clanging together. Zosia didn’t mind following in her nylonstockinged feet. She almost enjoyed the soothing coolness of the linoleum floor on her tired soles. It took her mind off her nausea. A devil of a time to be pregnant, Zosia thought to herself.

Later, Zosia returned alone. Marusia and the children were sitting close together. Many more people had jammed into the room, all straining to hear their numbers called above the din. Still others were able to sleep despite the wretched stink of cigarettes and bodies reeking of fear and illness.

Marusia’s tired face broke into relief when she saw Zosia. “How is he?” She asked worriedly. The children
were asleep with their heads resting on rolled up sweaters.

“He’s very ill,” she said, not sure how much to tell Marusia. “When they saw him in the ward, they put him in a bed with an oxygen tent. There are a few others in his room who were infected by radiation. Like him.”

Marusia nodded and understood. She was afraid to ask if he would live. “At least he’ll have a bed to himself tonight, thank God.” It was too soon to ask when he would be able to return home. Of course, Marusia thought, we can’t leave until he does, but when? She decided that she would stay behind with Yurko no matter what, even if Zosia and the children returned to Starylis in a couple of days.

The same large nurse was still at her desk calling out the numbers that would lead the people on to the next phase of their wait. Zosia walked over to her and shoved the other shoe quickly beneath the desk.

The nurse acted as though nothing unusual was happening. “Take your family out to the corridor and down the stairs to the basement. All of you will be taken care of there.” Then she stamped another official card for Zosia to take with her and looked away.

“Let’s go,
Mamo
, before she changes her mind,” Zosia said, gathering their belongings and grabbing the clumsy suitcase.

Before leaving the emergency room, Zosia couldn’t help glancing back one more time at her beautiful lost red shoes—always the cause of trouble. Shoes that were
given to her by a man who forced her a long time ago to become his lover. Otherwise, Yurko would have lost his high position at the plant. She demanded those shoes in payment and wore them with the pride of a war hero who displays his medals. Just as well that Yurko got some more use out of those damn things, Zosia thought.

She couldn’t see the shoes because the nurse had already hidden the treasures beneath her own great toes, and Zosia was briefly reminded of a picture from a forbidden prayer book someone in her family had smuggled in from the West. It was a holy picture of the Virgin standing on top of a globe, with a crushed snake beneath her bare feet.

“I am going mad,” she muttered to herself.

T
HE ROOM IN
the basement to which Marusia and her family were banished proved to be little better than the emergency room. But at least they were given two thin mattresses to share, along with stained, lumpy pillows and frayed blankets. They were also given two meals a day, sometimes three, though the food was paltry, mostly cold, hard potatoes with dry cucumber and tomato slices and a dollop of thick, pasty gray kasha. Meat was never part of the menu. Milk was given in tin cups for the children and weak black tea for the adults. Marusia’s food from home was long gone.

A week had passed, and no authority figure had said anything about returning home.

Marusia tried to keep her emotions hidden because she was aware that Katia and Tarasyk became upset and sullen whenever she began to cry. Katia especially kept
asking when they were going to go back to their home. She missed her dolls and the animals, especially her cat.