Baba Dunja's Last Love (5 page)

Petrow asks me for good news.

“Don't joke around,” I say. “I can bring you honey.”

“I don't want any honey,” he says. “I don't eat honey because it's made of bee vomit. Bring me good news.”

That's how he always is.

In the morning I get up before five. The ghost of Marja's rooster is sitting on the fence looking at me reproachfully, but at least he's quiet. I wave to him and start to get ready for the trip to the city. Since I got the hiking sandals I no longer have to put lotion on my feet before a long march, that's how comfortable the shoes are. I put on a fresh blouse and an old skirt that feels a bit loose, apparently I've lost weight. I get money out from under the dirty laundry pile in the cabinet and put it in my wallet, and the wallet I stick in my brassiere.

I don't need to write a shopping list, I have it all in my head. I slice a fresh cucumber and put the slices in a plastic container that Irina sent me last year filled with paper clips. I have no idea what I would do with paper clips, but the container is useful. I don't salt the cucumber because I don't want it to lose too much water in transit. There are still a few pieces of the homemade bread I left in the sun to dry into zwieback, and I take those, too. The food you get in the city doesn't agree with me.

It's a long trek, and I know that by evening the fresh socks in my hiking sandals will be dusty. A year ago it still only took me an hour and a half to make it to the bus stop, but now it takes over two. A few years ago I still used to ride my bicycle but now I feel too unsteady. The Gavrilows always go by bicycle but they never ask if they can bring anything. It's probably to do with the fact that they are the only couple and can't imagine what it is like alone.

I can't help thinking of Jegor and our wedding. It was a huge wedding, the whole village celebrated. I had a small wedding ring and he had none at all because we wanted to save for the child that was growing in my belly. At thirty-one I was an old bride. Originally I hadn't planned to say yes to Jegor. Three long years we used to meet up before the child nestled inside me and surprised us both. I had thought myself barren. And even though I knew that older first-time mothers experienced more problems and had sick children, the pregnancy was like a miracle to me.

After we'd been to the civil registry office and everyone had eaten and drunk, I took off my shoes in the yard and danced. All the men sang, whistled, and howled. Jegor pulled me out of the middle of them, pushed me into a corner, and said that from now on I had to keep my shoes on. He gestured like he was going to step on my bare toes with his heavy boots. I knew I had made a mistake.

I don't hold it against Jegor; most men were like that back then. The mistake wasn't picking the wrong one. The mistake was marrying at all. I could have raised Irina and Alexej myself, and nobody would have been able to stipulate what I did with my feet.

 

 

The bus stop is called “Former Golden Rabbit Factory” and it's the last stop on the 147 line to Malyschi. The old factory is a few hundred yards from the stop. It's an abandoned brick building with looming towers. The windows are all broken. Inside you can see rusty machines in an eternal state of sleep.

I can still remember how, earlier, so many people from Tschernowo and neighboring villages used to ride to the factory by bus or bicycle to work on the conveyor belt. The pralines were very good, dark, melting chocolate shells, a filling with little pieces of nuts, packed in gossamer paper and then wrapped in foil and another sheet of paper that had a picture of a little rabbit and her baby rabbits on it. For the New Year's holidays, the foremen received a special collection in a giant gift box. Just thinking about the fillings made my mouth water back then: jelly, cognac, truffle cream.

For special occasions I bought a handful of pralines for Irina and Alexej, and once a patient who supervised the night shift at the factory gave me one of the New Year's gift boxes. He had probably received two. It was great fortune.

We opened the box, as was intended, when the clock struck midnight. We divided each praline into three—Jegor didn't eat any. The box lasted for three-quarters of a year. We kept the packaging, too: out of the foil we made ornaments for the New Year's tree the following year, and the rabbit paper we flattened between the pages of books and hoarded like treasure. The children traded pieces of the rabbit paper for other praline wrappers with bears and foxes and red-cheeked, pigtailed girls on them.

When my children were little there were none of the overpoweringly scented stickers that come in packs of Turkish chewing gum that I smelled for the first time in the nineties, before I moved back to Tschernowo. In Tschernowo there was no Turkish gum, no counterfeit Chanel perfume or fake cognac, no girls with lurid make-up on their faces, no faded jeans, and no shrill music. In Tschernowo there was just silence and me. A few months later Sidorow arrived, and then the lights came on in one house after another.

The memory makes my mouth fill with sticky saliva. I had once been a sweet tooth, but these days the thought of chocolate just makes me feel sick. I'd rather eat currants from my garden than cream-filled pralines. It's a function of age and my pancreas. I pull a small bottle with a twist cap out of my bag and drink a sip of springwater.

I sit on the bench, the factory at my back, and look out at the dry, summery yellow landscape. The fields haven't been tilled for decades but they have retained their structure. Here and there scattered ears of grain grow skyward, grain that reseeds itself year after year. If you walked on you could find corn, sugar beets, and potatoes. They've been grown over by thick, green weeds, by large-leafed plants with light purple stems the name of which I don't know because it wasn't around during my youth.

The bus station shelter is painted green and clean. Nobody would come this far to scrawl on it. The area is considered scary. The factory is in what many call the death zone. Tschernowo is deeper inside the zone. This bus station marks the border. A soldier with a machine gun used to stand here, bored to death. These days the border is no longer guarded. In the Ukraine, on the other hand, they make a big drama over their zone, with barbed wire and guard posts. Petrow told me that. I understand less and less of what happens beyond the border.

All of us in Tschernowo know the bus won't keep running for much longer. What we'll do then, we don't know. Maybe by then there will be someone who can bring us the things from Malyschi that we can't grow ourselves. Petrow already tried to hire somebody, but nobody would do it. We scare people. They seem to believe that the death zone stops at the borders people draw on maps.

 

It's a joy every time the bus turns up.

I had to wait for less than an hour and could enjoy the fresh air in peace and quiet and lose myself in my thoughts. The few kilometers from the village to the bus stop are no longer just a stroll at my age. When I return, my basket will be full and the walk will feel even longer.

The driver has been driving this route for five years. His name is Boris and a year and a half ago his first grandson was born. I cautiously ask how the baby is doing. It's a delicate subject and I don't want to cause anyone pain. Boris answers hoarsely that the boy has a good appetite and is growing well.

I exhale.

He takes the exact change from my hand. The transit authority hasn't raised the fare for thirty years. You couldn't even get a glass of water for this amount in Malyschi anymore. It's fine by me, my pension hasn't gone up at all either.

I sit in the front so I can chat with Boris. He has a big belly and slumped shoulders, and there's something in his face that makes me nervous. When I was a nurse's assistant I was often called to men like him who were lying next to a conveyor belt or in a garage with cardiac arrest.

We have more than an hour's ride together. The road is bumpy, gravel shoots out from under the tires as they labor along the unpaved surface. The little bus shakes and the soccer team pendant hanging from Boris's mirror rocks back and forth.

I look out the window, hawks circle above the fields, between the trees I see a deer and a rabbit. The animals seem to act as if they discovered the area for themselves. We pass two abandoned villages on the way to the city, a cat sitting on the main street of one, licking its paw.

Boris tells me what he's seen on television. Lots of politics in the Ukraine, in Russia, and in America. I don't pay too close attention. Politics are important, of course, but at the end of the day, if you want to eat mashed potatoes it's up to you to put manure on the potato plants.

The important thing is that there's no war. But our president will see to that soon enough. Sometimes I feel queasy about the fact that Irina now has a German passport.

The jerking of the bus makes my old bones rattle, and I have the impression that one can hear them clanking against each other. I doze off now and then. When I open my eyes we are in the middle of the city. Boris steers his way through the rust buckets at the bus station to a parking spot at the rear.

The noise in Malyschi seems to get more deafening all the time. Despite the fact that there are fewer and fewer people on the streets, even here at the bus station there are at most a half dozen bus drivers and twenty passengers waiting in various lines. But they are all making a racket. I'm not used to it anymore.

My objectives are set. First I'll go to the bank where Irina opened an account for me into which my pension gets paid. Even though I can't buy anything at home, I withdraw it all because life has taught us not to trust the banks.

There are machines in the foyer of the bank. A girl with a scarf asks if I need help. I don't need help, I just need my money, and not from a machine but from a person at a counter. So I go into the main room. While I'm waiting, an icy wind blows up my calf and I'm happy about my wool stockings. When finally it's my turn, I mention the chilliness. The girl at the counter, who smells of perfume and chewing gum, says proudly that they have an air conditioner now. She looks as if she has never in her life had a potato bug on her hand. I see the goose bumps in her décolleté and warn her that she will catch a cold. She says she's had a cold for ages and shoves me the money from my pension, which I count and then divide into two halves and put into the cups of my bra.

Every time I pick up my pension I have an intense desire to buy something for Irina, Alexej, and Laura. When Laura was first born I sent her things, teething rings, rattles, leggings, until I realized that nobody needs that stuff. There are nicer things in Germany anyway. Maybe the tomatoes are bigger here, but the rompers are better there.

That's why I stopped buying useless things and instead put all my money in my old tea caddy. When Laura is eighteen, and that will be very soon, I will give it all to Irina, except for a reserve fund for my funeral. I will ask Irina to change the money into marks or dollars and put it into Laura's piggy bank. Laura is the youngest member of our family and young people need money.

Irina always corrects me, tells me that the mark no longer exists, but I can never remember what they have instead.

Next I go to the post office and on the way I pass the market. I indulge myself with a break, go into the market hall, which smells of fish and rotten vegetables, and lean against a stand selling crullers. The scents drifting by bother my nose. I eat a piece of cucumber from my garden.

The vendor looks down at me from the stand and I realize that it bothers him when I stand in front of his stand and eat something I've brought with me. It's impolite of me. I reach for my bag and apologize to him. He just throws his hand up and continues to stare at me. Then he asks me if I am Baba Dunja from the death zone.

I could ask him where it is he thinks he is right here. But I don't. If he feels safe here behind his greasy rings then let him indulge himself. Not to mention that I'm flabbergasted he knows me. I can't get used to it.

He hands me a baked good in oily paper. “On the house,” he says. I don't want to offend him and take it even though I know that so much as a bite would ruin my pancreas.

“Do we know one another?” I ask and act as if I'm going to take a bite. When I was a nurse's assistant lots of people knew me, even in the neighboring villages. They always came to me when something was wrong. But in Malyschi they had their own doctors and nurses even back then. Maybe this man is from one of the villages. I have a good memory, but it contains only the faces of the children.

I ask him who he is.

He says I wouldn't know him but that everyone here knows me because they all talk about me. And the other returnees.

He turns and rummages in a box for a newspaper in order to show me something, but I tell him it's not necessary. I don't need to know what somebody said about me or, worse, wrote about me. In the past few years reporters have come again and again and taken photos of our gardens and asked us questions.