Baba Dunja's Last Love (2 page)

When the reactor happened, I counted myself among those who got off lightly. My children were safe, my husband wasn't going to live much longer anyway, and my flesh was already toughened with age. In essence I had nothing to lose. And anyway, I was prepared to die. My work had taught me always to keep that possibility in mind so as never to be caught by surprise.

I marvel every single day at the fact that I'm still here. And every second day I ask myself whether I might be one of the many dead who wander around unwilling to acknowledge that their name is already inscribed on a gravestone somewhere. They need to be told, but who is that brazen? I'm happy that nobody has anything left to say to me. I've seen everything and have no more fears. Death can come, just let it come gracefully, please.

The water in the pot is bubbling. I turn down the heat, grab a ladle from a hook, and begin to scoop off the thick gray foam that's pushing up the sides of the pot. If the water were to keep boiling so hard, the foam would break up into tiny bits and get mixed into the broth. On the ladle the foam looks dreary and unappetizing, like a collapsed gray cloud. I let it drip into the cat's bowl. Cats are even less sensitive than we are. This cat is the daughter of the one that was in my house when I came back. She was really the lady of the house and I was just her guest.

The nearby villages are all abandoned. The buildings are still there, but the walls are flimsy and collapsing, and the nettles grow as high as the eaves. There aren't even rats because rats need garbage, fresh, greasy garbage. Rats need people.

I could have taken my pick of houses in Tschernowo when I came back. I chose my old one. The door was open, the gas tank was only half empty, the well was just a few minutes' walk away, and the garden was still recognizable. I cleared the nettles and cut back the blackberries, for weeks I didn't do anything else. I knew: I need this garden. I can't manage the walk to the bus stop and the long ride into Malyschi very often. But I need to eat three times a day.

Ever since, I've planted a third of the garden. That's enough. If I had a large family I would use the entire garden. I benefit from the fact that I took such good care of it before the reactor. The greenhouse is a jewel, handcrafted by Jegor, and I harvest tomatoes and cucumbers a week before everyone else in the village, just as I did before the reactor. There are gooseberries in green and red and currants in red, white, and black, old bushes that I carefully prune each fall so they produce new shoots. I have two apple trees and a raspberry patch. It's a fertile area here.

The soup is simmering on the lowest flame. I'll let it cook for two or even better three hours, so the old flesh softens and falls from the bone. It's the same with people: it's hard to choke down old flesh.

The smell of the chicken soup makes the cat twitchy. She slinks around my feet, meowing, and rubs herself against my calves in their thick wool stockings. I know I'm getting older because I'm always cold. Even in summer I don't leave the house without wool socks.

The cat is pregnant, I'll give her the skin and gristle of the rooster later. Sometimes she hunts beetles and spiders. We have a lot of spiders in Tschernowo. The amount of bugs has increased since the reactor. A year ago a biologist came and photographed all the spiderwebs in my house. I leave them be, even when Marja calls me a slovenly housewife.

The good thing about being old is that you don't need to ask anyone's permission anymore—you don't need to ask whether you can live in your old house, or whether it's okay to leave the spiderwebs be. The spiders were here before me, too. The biologist took pictures of them with a camera that looked like a weapon. He set up spotlights and lit up every corner of my house. I didn't have any objection, no reason he shouldn't go ahead and do his job. He just had to turn down the sound on his device because the beeps sent chills down my spine.

The biologist explained to me why we have so many bugs. It's because there are far fewer birds in the area since the reactor. So the beetles and spiders can multiply unhindered. He was unable to tell me, however, why there are so many cats. Cats probably have something that protects them against bad things.

 

A second cat slips into the doorway. The cat that lives with me immediately arches her back. She's a beast and doesn't let anyone across the threshold.

“Come on, be nice,” I say, but she isn't nice. She makes hissing noises and her hair stands on end. She has only half a tail, someone clipped off the rest. I always had cats and chickens and, earlier, a dog, it's a part of village life that I like. Another reason I came back. The animals here aren't sick in their heads the way they are in the city, even if they are irradiated and crippled. The noise and constriction of the city makes cats and dogs crazy.

Irina flew all the way from Germany just to try to keep me from moving back to Tschernowo. She tried all means, even crying. My Irina, who never cried, not even as a little girl. It wasn't that I forbade her to cry; on the contrary, it would have been healthy to cry sometimes. But she was like a boy, climbing trees and fences and sometimes falling off, even getting smacked, and still she never cried. She ended up studying medicine and now she's a surgeon with the German military. That's my girl. And then, of all times, she thought she needed to cry because I wanted to move back home.

“I have never told you what you have to do,” I explained to her. “And I don't want you to tell me what I have to do.”

“But, Mother, who in their right mind could possibly want to go back to the death zone?”

“You're saying words that you don't understand, my girl. I've already gone to look, the buildings are all still standing, and weeds are growing in the garden.”

“Mother, you know what radioactivity is. Everything is irradiated.”

“I'm old, nothing can irradiate me anymore, and even if it does it's not the end of the world.”

She dabbed her eyes dry in a way that made it clear she was a surgeon.

“I won't come visit you there.”

“I know,” I said, “but you don't come very often anyway.”

“Is that a reproach?”

“No. I think it's good. Why should anyone hover around their parents?”

She had looked at me suspiciously, like she used to many years before, when she was still little. She didn't believe me. But I meant it just as I said it. There's nothing for her here, and I don't try to make her feel guilty about that, either.

“We can meet every couple of years in Malyschi,” I said. “Or whenever you come. As long as I live.”

I knew she didn't have a lot of vacation days. And when she took them she didn't need to spend them here. And back then flights were still really expensive, far more expensive than they are now.

There was one thing we didn't talk about. When something is particularly important, you don't talk about it. Irina has a daughter, and I have a granddaughter, who goes by the very pretty name of Laura. No girls are named Laura around here, only my granddaughter who I have never seen. When I went back to the village, Laura had just turned one. When I went back home, I knew I would never see her.

Grandchildren always used to leave the cities during their summer breaks and stay out in the country with their grandparents. The school holidays were long, three hot summer months, and the parents in the cities didn't have such long vacations. It was the same in our village, from June until August city kids ran around and in no time at all they had sunburned faces, bleached hair, and dirt-crusted feet. They went together into the woods to pick berries, and they swam in the river. Noisy as a flock of birds they went up and down the main road, stealing apples and wrestling in the muck.

When they got too wild, we sent them out into the fields to collect potato bugs, which threatened our crops. They would pick them off the plants by the bucket-load and then burn them. I can still hear the sound of all the shells popping in the fire. We really miss the little thieves now—the world's never seen a plague of potato bugs like the one we've had since the reactor.

Everyone in Tschernowo knew that I was a nurse's assistant. I was always called when children had broken something or had abdominal pain that wouldn't stop. Once a boy had eaten too many unripe plums. The fibers caused a blockage in his gut. He was pale and writhing around on the floor, and I told them to get him to the hospital immediately, and the boy was saved by an emergency operation. There was one with appendicitis and another who turned out to be allergic to a bee sting.

I liked the children, with their fidgety feet, scratched-up arms, and high-pitched voices. If there's anything I miss these days it's them. Those of us who live in Tschernowo these days don't have any grandchildren. Or if we do we never see them. Except maybe in a photo. My walls are covered with pictures of Laura. Irina sends me new ones in almost every letter.

It probably wouldn't take Laura long to become a carefree summer holiday child. If everything were like before. Though it's hard for me to imagine it. In her baby pictures she had a serious little face, and I wondered what sort of thoughts lived in her head to project such darkness from her eyes. She never wore bows or barrettes in her hair. Even as a baby she didn't smile.

In the most recent photos she has long legs and hair that's almost white. She still looks very serious. She's never written to me. Her father is German. Irina promised me a wedding photo—one of the few promises she hasn't kept. She always sends greetings from him. I collect all the letters from Germany in a box in my dresser.

I never ask Irina whether Laura is healthy. I never ask about Irina's own health, either. If there's one thing I'm afraid of, it's the answer to that question. So I just pray for them, even though I don't believe there's anyone who listens to my prayers.

Irina always asks about my health. When we see each other—every two years—the first thing she always asks about is my blood counts. As if I have any idea. She asks about my blood pressure and whether I've had a breast cancer scan.

“My dear girl,” I say, “look at me. Do you see how old I am? And I made it this far without vitamins or operations or checkups. If something bad manages to worm its way into me now, I will leave it be. I don't want anybody touching me or sticking needles in me, and that much I have earned.”

Irina shakes her head. She knows that I'm right but she can't escape her surgeon's mind-set. At her age I thought the same way. And the way I was at her age, I would have picked a huge fight with the me of today.

 

 

When I look at our village, I don't feel as if it's nothing but a collection of living corpses running around. Some people won't last long, it's true, but the reactor alone isn't to blame for that. There's not many of us, you can count us all on two hands. Five or seven years ago there were more of us, when all at one time a dozen people followed my example and moved back to Tschernowo. We've buried a few of them in the meantime. Others are like the spiders, resilient even if their webs are a bit erratic.

Marja for instance is a little crazy with her goat and her rooster, which is simmering so nicely in my pot. Unlike me, Marja knows her blood pressure exactly because she takes it three times a day. If it's too high she gulps down a pill. If it's too low she gulps down a different pill. That way she always has something to do. But she's bored anyway.

She has a medicine cabinet that could kill the entire village. She restocks it regularly in Malyschi. She takes antibiotics for a cold or diarrhea. I tell her she shouldn't take them, that they actually do more damage than good, but she doesn't listen. I'm too healthy, she says, I wouldn't understand. And it's true, I can't remember the last time I had a cold.

The aroma of the chicken broth fills my whole house and wafts out the window. I pull the rooster out of the pot and lay it on a plate to cool. The cat brays and I raise a cautionary finger at her. I fish out the vegetables, too, they've already lent the broth their flavor and now they're just limp. I wrap them in an old newspaper and take the bundle out to the compost pile. There are pumpkins growing on my compost pile, in the fall I'll harvest them and pass them out to people in the village, otherwise I'll have to eat gruel with pumpkin all winter.

I pour the broth through a sieve into a second pot. A thousand fatty golden eyes peer up at me from the new pot. I read in a newspaper that you should skim off the fat. But I disagree. If you want to live, you have to eat fat. You have to eat sugar once in a while, too, and first and foremost lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. In summer I eat cucumber and tomato salad almost every day. And herbs by the bunch, they grow thick and green in my garden—dill, chives, parsley, basil, rosemary.

The meat isn't too hot anymore, I can touch it with my fingers. I carefully remove it from the bones and put it in a bowl. I used to cut it up into small pieces for my children and make sure I divided it evenly between them. Even though Alexej was just eighteen months younger than Irina, he was a skinny little fellow, and I was sometimes tempted to save the best bits for him.