The Sky Unwashed (16 page)

Evdokia and her husband sat down near the woodstove and took off their boots. Marusia rushed to fetch them some felt
kaptsi
for their feet.

“Well, we would’ve come earlier, but my old man here had to take so many leak stops.”

Marusia was relieved to see Evdokia’s high cheeks bloom and redden and that familiar pug nose twitch when her old friend lifted the soup lid and sniffed the pot. “Smells good, but needs more salt, Marusia,” Evdokia said. She sat down at the table. “But thank God we came before it got too dark. We heard the church bells when we came to the village and I felt so much better. I said to my old man, ‘See, we’re not all dead yet.’ Then we saw your chimney smoking. No one else’s, although we knocked on just about everybody’s door along the way.”

Marusia kept crying and wrung her hands and rocked back and forth with joy. “I’m all alone here, I came back first. Just me. Nobody else. Now you’re here.
Slava Bohu
. Praise God!”

“But how did you manage by yourself like this?” Evdokia asked.

“I don’t know. I’m so alone. I prayed someone would return. But, even better, I’m so glad it’s you, my friends!”

Marusia insisted that the old couple sit at the table, where she set out three shot glasses and a special bottle
of the rose-petal vodka she and Yurko had prepared so many years ago. She served them huge portions of the cabbage soup that was bubbling in her pot.

The three of them raised their glasses. “Bless you. You came back.
Dai Bozhe
,” Marusia said. They downed their drinks.

“Okh, that was good,” Evdokia said. “It’s been so long since I had that.”

Marusia refilled the glasses.

“Let’s see,” Evdokia continued, “the last time we saw you was in town, before we left on those bumpy buses. Yoy, my butt still hurts from that ride!” She and her husband slurped the hot soup. Evdokia took out a hard piece of dark bread from the pocket of her sweater and gave half of it to her husband. She dunked the other half into her bowl. “We ended up in the Carpathians,” she said.

“Karpaty!”
repeated the man dreamily. His mustache was wet and dripping from the soup he drank without using the spoon Marusia had given him.

“The mountains! Is that where our people went? I was in Kyiv.”

“That would’ve been better. Many of us were put in with families near the Polish border. They spoke so differently from us, who could understand anything? But so many of us won’t be back. Old Paraskevia, the priest’s mother, got sick. She refused to eat anything. They took her to some hospital. I heard she didn’t last long after that.”

Marusia made the sign of the cross.

Evdokia named many others from Starylis who had died—too many young ones who caught leukemia. “Well, my son-in-law gone as well,” Evdokia said, her eyes streaming. “He had cancer anyway. He was a commie, but you know toward the end, he asked for a priest.

“And you know, Marusia, Hanna stayed with us for a while. But that wasn’t good enough for her. She went to Lviv—the big city. She lost the baby, and then her stupid husband got sent back to clean up in Chornobyl. We never heard again from him. She got involved with some Party big shot—an old fart who left his wife and six children. She’s living with him in a
dacha
in Odesa. And before I left, her mother—my own daughter—was about to move down there with them. What sins! Of course, we didn’t want to go with them.”

Oleh laughed.

“This old fool is too stupid to know anything. Just as well,” said Evdokia, grinning at her husband.

“My Yurko is dead,” Marusia said. She sobbed through her own story, and appreciated her friends’ echoes of sympathy.

After a while the tears were wiped, and Oleh asked for more soup and poured himself another shot glass full of vodka.

“How is my home? Is it all right? Tell me if it’s not,” Evdokia said.

“I don’t really know. I never went into anyone’s house except my own and the church.”

“I worried about my house. I had my vegetables and my root cellar. It may have all gone bad. And this one here”—she pointed to Oleh—“cried himself to sleep over his wine and his still. But my cow is dead I suppose,” she said quietly. “And my pigs and ducks . . .”

“My bees!” Oleh cried out.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know. I just couldn’t go into the houses to look. I went into the Metrenkos’ when I first came back—for only a few minutes—and it made me so sad and lonely that I didn’t have the heart . . . you know. I was so lonely.”

Evdokia nodded her head. “Well, we should go back to our own home. I don’t care how bad it is. I won’t sleep until I know that it’s at least standing.” She rose and collected the soup bowls.

“Leave that, I’ll take care of it. Stay here tonight. You can see your house in the morning.”

“No. I want to see it now. Hey you, old man,” she scolded her husband, “leave that bottle alone and put on your boots.”

“Wait.” Marusia jumped out of her chair. “Let me get a candle. I’ll go with you.”

The three of them walked down the road in the cool darkness. Evdokia lived three houses away from Marusia, and just like her, she fell on her knees and kissed the earth before entering through the door. Oleh laughed and shuffled a little dance, his mouth black except for one front tooth. Inside, Evdokia lit the candles that were left over from the last Easter, because there was no electricity.
She stumbled around until she found a kerosene lamp and set it on her kitchen table. The house was musty. Evdokia immediately attacked a large cobweb with a broom. A dried dead spider fell to the ground, and its brittle shell shattered when it hit the floor.

“What a mess!
Feh!
” Evdokia complained. Although the light was dim, her quick eyes darted around to see if anything was stolen. She hurried to the pantry. “Well, looks all right. But who knows. . . .” she muttered. “My food!” she said. She lit another kerosene lamp and coaxed Marusia to follow her down to the root cellar. But something made Marusia stay in the room with the old man. She watched Oleh head toward his favorite rocker, which was where he left it, in front of the brown-tiled stove. It was dark in that corner, and he didn’t bother to light a candle and set it near him. He sat down, found his pipe in his coat pocket, but didn’t know where he had left his matches.

He sat there sucking on the cold pipe, a hungry child on his mother’s nipple. Marusia could hear the contentment of his smackings and see how his cheeks sank in a bit to draw out the last taste of the old tobacco when he sucked harder. She watched as he looked around his old home, felt its safety, and heaved one more sigh—a large one. When his wife returned to ask him if he wanted the stove lit, he wouldn’t move for her.

E
VDOKIA STAYED THE
night in Marusia’s house. They left the old man sitting in his chair. In the morning, they
returned to where he waited. They decided not to practice the custom of washing the dead because water was too scarce, so they bundled him in a blanket and carried him in Marusia’s wheelbarrow to the cemetery behind the church. He was light enough, so it was easy to lower him into a shallow pit they dug in Evdokia’s family plot. Marusia made a cross out of three small branches tied with some chicken wire she found. They lit candles and sang the
Vichnaia Pamiat’
for his soul before burying him.

“I wish we had some flowers,” Evdokia said. “We’ll plant some in the spring, and I’ll bring him a fresh bouquet. You’ll just have to wait, old man,” she said to the fresh mound of earth.

That evening at Marusia’s kitchen table, Evdokia shared a bottle of mead that Oleh had kept hidden under their bed. “I think it was that damn walk that did it to him. He was too old,” Evdokia said. “You’d think that he might have had a few more minutes with me to say good-bye. He should’ve called me, damn him.”

Evdokia poured another round. “He was always in a hurry to get somewhere.” She stared at the bottle still half full of the thick, syrupy alcohol. “That Oleh knew how to make a great wine, and he always held his bottles with more gentleness than he ever held me.

“And you know what else? He always loved his smokes more than me, too. It’s true, I never knew how to kiss that man as good as that old pipe of his.” She took his pipe from her pocket and kissed its base. “Now it’s mine. My rival. It’s the last thing he touched.”

Evdokia was silent for a moment, and so was Marusia. “I want to be buried with this,” she said, and began to cry.

Marusia stared at her glass and listened to her friend’s sadness throughout the bitter and cold night.

E
VDOKIA’S GRIEF KEPT
her at Marusia’s house. She slept in Yurko and Zosia’s room and complained of chills at night because the stove was barely warm. “So, she hasn’t changed at all since I last saw her,” Marusia grumbled to herself. “Just the same—always saying what she thinks without thinking first.”

When she felt stronger, Evdokia went back to her house. Marusia went along with her, and together they closely assessed her pantry, root cellar and beehives. The yard was covered with tiny hillocks of dead bees, but the rich honey was ready to collect. It was decided that the two women would pool their food reserves, sharing their canned goods and preserves for the winter, or until they were able to contact an official who would send them supplies.

Evdokia was generous—she had an untouched pantry filled with cans of caviar from the Black Sea and
sardines and herring from Israel, and a large tin of squid that she had never tried before in her life. “From Italy,” she boasted. Whenever her son-in-law traveled on official Soviet business, he always brought back exotic foodstuffs as a way to appease Evdokia, since she used to openly blame him for turning her daughter into a Bolshevik. They decided they would save the seafood for Christmas eve dinner and also drink a bottle of Evdokia’s
sovietskoye champanskoye
if the two of them made it to Christmas on January seventh.

Marusia believed that Evdokia had enough dry wood for one winter. “It might be wiser to stay together in one house and conserve the wood,” Marusia suggested. “At least this first winter together.”

Evdokia frowned. “I want to stay in my own house, even though I’m still afraid my dead husband might visit me in the night and bother me to bring him something to eat the way he used to, the fool.”

“But your house is so much bigger than mine and takes more heat.”

“So, I’ll close off some of my rooms,” Evdokia countered. Marusia knew why she did not want to live with her. It would be too cramped, and she had too small a kitchen. They would kill each other in such a closet of a kitchen! And she knew that most of all, Evdokia hated the cat who hung around Marusia’s garden and sat on a window ledge, where it watched them through the window.

“That cat is a devil,” she had said to Marusia. “It scares me.” Marusia didn’t want to shoo it away too often—she liked its presence, sometimes in preference to Evdokia’s blabbering ways. But the cat would at times sense that it wasn’t wanted and would hide from them for a few days until it forgave the old women’s rudeness and returned.

“I would feel better if you stayed with me,” Marusia said. She surveyed the uncut logs in Evdokia’s shed and dreaded having to help her slice the gnarly wood with Oleh’s rusty bow saw. “Stay through the worst of the season, then go back to your home in March or so.”

Evdokia reluctantly agreed, although Marusia could tell she believed it wouldn’t work. Her fears were proven true from the beginning. The women quarreled and insisted on their own ways, which they acted out almost deliberately at the inconvenience of the other. For Evdokia, Marusia’s house was “too damn cold.” She was used to blazing fires heating her house until she had to open a window to cool it down.

Marusia didn’t approve of the way her friend wasted water for cooking—you didn’t really have to rinse the dishes so much, she often grumbled in an undertone that always caught Evdokia’s ear. Worse was Evdokia’s constant chattering, a bona fide
nunya
, a blabbermouth, Marusia thought, who has to give her unwanted advice and opinions on every single little detail in the universe. And here she goes complaining about everyone . . . even Father Andrei
who could be dead!
Nunya!
She wanted to shout out.
Nunya
, grab your tongue and tear it out!

Still, they shared their meals, preserved the last of the honey from Oleh’s dead bees, and took turns ringing the bells. Evdokia felt safer ringing in the mornings; she didn’t like to go near the church in the evenings so near to where her husband was buried. “He might come and scare me to death for a joke,” Evdokia said in earnest. “He’d do something like that, you know.”

“But the cemetery is holy earth,” Marusia said. She also didn’t care to ring the bells in the bleak evenings, now that the weather was cooler and the sun disappeared sooner into the swiftly darkening skies.

“Ah, but we never gave him a real funeral.” Evdokia’s eyes flashed with triumph. “So, his soul is still wandering. Anyway, even so, it takes forty days for the soul to go to heaven.”

Marusia had nothing to say to that and agreed to take the evening shift.

T
HE WOMEN MANAGED
well enough despite their physical ailments. Evdokia experienced sore eyes and scratchy skin, and Marusia still coughed up phlegm, and her head throbbed from the cold. When the miseries of their bodies subsided, they were plagued by loneliness. Evdokia cried in the middle of sentences that had nothing to do with death, and Marusia would, in her turn, feel so lost she had to retreat to her own room and chew on the hemp gum to quiet her nerves.

The full moon in November brought a hard frost, and the women spent less time outdoors. Marusia still hoped that the dogcatcher would show up again, or some other people from the village or officials from Chornobyl. “Oh, to have fresh milk again,” she complained too often to Evdokia. She longed for her grandchildren. She missed their hugs and wet kisses laced with candy. She still hadn’t unpacked the suitcase she’d brought back with her. She couldn’t bear to find Tarasyk’s hair or the big white ribbon Katia used to wear. Loneliness ate at her soul, and Evdokia’s taciturn whines and howls of grief tested Marusia’s belief in deliverance. She secretly wished that the cat would come jump on her lap or caress her cheek once in a while.