The Sky Unwashed (22 page)

T
HE SPRING TURNED
into another humid summer, and the women tended their gardens. Lazorska was busy trying to revitalize her medicinal shrubs, but many of the plants and herbs were too withered to grow or had altogether disappeared from the garden. “This earth is too sick for my healing plants,” she joked.

At summer’s end, they decided to chop down some birch trees for the coming winter. They wanted to stack the wood so that it would dry in time for the frosts. Yulia winced at the work. She had spent her youth doing this
work in exile in Siberia and could feel her strength diminishing. Her limp was worse, and her arm was stiff with pain. Still, she refused to ask the others for help and wanted to cut her own wood. Trying to pull down an old rotted tree by using leather straps she tied to her chest and waist, she collapsed and couldn’t move. She managed to heave herself up and drag her twisted body to her kitchen. There, she crumpled and lay on the floor until Evdokia and Marusia found her the next day.

Yulia was dying—it showed in her thin face, which folded into pain whenever she coughed up gobbets of warm, dark blood. She lingered for three days before she asked Lazorska to take her away.

Early that morning, Marusia woke up to find a worn Lazorska sitting on her doorstep. “We had to let another go,” she said, concentrating on the sun that was mating with the morning clouds.

Evdokia was the most sorrowful over Yulia. “I hoped I’d go first so that she could sing for me.”

The funeral was still and quiet, because no one had the heart to sing without Yulia’s voice.

W
HEN
E
VDOKIA’S TURN
came, she would not go without a fight. Evdokia had caught pneumonia harvesting her squash and potatoes in the early fall. The squash vines were especially hearty and blooming when she fell over in her patch and could not stop gasping. Marusia happened to have seen her bent over her garden on her way from ringing the church bells. “
Koo-koo!
Hey, did
you find a man you are going to reject and give a squash to?” Marusia called out to her friend. It was a folk custom for a woman to give a suitor a squash if she rejected his love. When Evdokia didn’t answer, Marusia ran to her and half carried her friend into the house.

Evdokia’s condition grew worse, but she survived and with great will lingered most of the difficult winter. Marusia had moved in, and she and Lazorska tended her.

Gradually, Evdokia grew less interested in her own life and slept without the aid of the dried hops Marusia brewed for her in teas. She had turned a jaundiced yellow and lost weight. With her high fevers, she often hallucinated. Other times she was lucid. In the middle of a great frost that winter, Evdokia complained in a clear voice that her skin was about to explode and begged to be taken away. Marusia ran down the road to call for Lazorska, who followed her and brought with her the sack of forbidden medicines.

Marusia watched as Lazorska caressed Evdokia’s head and spoke quiet, soothing words to calm her fears. “It will be fine,” she whispered.

“I’m so afraid,” Evdokia gasped out. Her face glistened with sweat. Marusia blessed her with holy water. Lazorska gave her a root herb mixed with spearmint and valerian to chew on, then a drink that smelled of sweet almonds. Evdokia slept hard, her breathing dropping to shallow wisps.

Lazorska and Marusia were with her when Evdokia quietly sighed her last breath. The three held each
other’s hands until Evdokia’s grew cold. Before the women left, Marusia placed Oleh’s pipe on Evdokia’s still chest.

The winter dragged on for the last two women, who made sure to see each other at least once a day, although they had little to say. Marusia liked to visit the new graves alone so she could think about her two dead friends—not the way they were in the last miserable months of old age and torment, but when they were all young together. Yulia had been a tall, dark girl with a loud booming voice that drowned out the choir at church. She was an athlete, too—always running away from the boys who tried to catch her around the waist. Her long, wavy hair had a way of coming undone in the wind. And Evdokia—Marusia’s best school friend. They had liked the same boys, shared their silly girlish secrets and squabbles together, and were inseparable until Marusia married. Evdokia never liked Antin. “And you were right about him, you bossy one,” Marusia said, smiling through her sadness. “I should’ve listened to you, my friend. I wish I could hear you now.”

Marusia kept busy canning what she could, including Evdokia’s squash, which she boiled and strained but, out of grief, simply couldn’t bring herself to eat.

A
NOTHER SPRING CAME,
bringing the welcome trickle of water from the icicles that had formed beneath the roof eaves and were melting away in the warming sun. Yellow crocuses and snowdrops grew strong and hearty in the snow. Thin shrills of young birds were heard on the budding trees, and Marusia brushed a new caterpillar off a dead oak.

More people came back. Some returned because they had read a story in
Pravda
about villagers returning to the zone. When their patience was worn through by the deaths of families and the sorrow of lost homes, many of the older former Starylis villagers returned home. Almost all of them were welcomed by Marusia’s bell ringing when they arrived. By the end of May, the village had grown to a community of fifteen people.

Marusia was only too happy to have them come and take over the duties of the co-op and the post office.
She was relieved to return the foodstuffs to their rightful owners and to hand out the rest of the old mail to the survivors. From them she heard their stories and learned about what had happened to the others she once knew and who would never be seen on earth again. Unfortunately, no one had any news about Zosia or the children.

At last, the mail was coming through to Starylis again. With the others, Marusia visited the post office once a week when the mail truck stopped by. She was always disappointed. She never received any word from Zosia. Someday she would, she hoped. The government had mailed her some of her pension, but she felt too weak and weary to attempt another trip to the
magister
for the rest of her lost money. “Maybe somebody else could handle such matters,” she told herself. “I can’t fight anymore.”

The church doors reopened, another priest came, and the entire Mass was sung every Sunday morning. But Marusia kept her custom of ringing the bells more in memory of the dead and because it eased her soul. All of the newcomers replanted their gardens, and a few of the stronger ones cultivated and harvested some sections of the
kolhosp
. They were intent on selling their new crops into the cities, just as before.

Still, each survivor suffered from ailments that were blamed on the radiation. Lazorska did all she could when she could be found. As time passed, she kept more
and more to herself and grew thinner and quieter, and gradually, fewer people sought her skills.

Only one death occurred that summer among the returnees, and it was one that was not related to the poison. Ivan Avramenko tried to repair old Paraskevia Volodymyrivna’s ruined roof because he thought he would live there instead of in his own much smaller house. He fell off a ladder that wobbled away from the side of the building and broke his neck. After that, Paraskevia Volodymyrivna’s house was considered cursed and was left to rot.

In late summer, Marusia noticed that the mosquitoes nipped her again, and that normal butterflies were feasting hungrily on sunflower heads. Blueberries grew in robust abandon alongside the dirt roads, and all the returnees except for Marusia had a proliferation of cabbage heads blossoming in their gardens. Her cow did well enough, but it was obvious that one cow—and a motley one at that—could not feed the entire village, and some of the new arrivals petitioned for more cows. The hay field was threshed, and the clover grew back on the green land. Three more cows were soon grazing in the fields. Another miracle was evident when a few storks returned to nest on the roofs of some of the reoccupied homes.

On the morning of the feast day of the Transfiguration, the cat that had kept Marusia company for so long was found dead on her front step. She hadn’t seen it for
a long time, but she recognized its crooked body. “So you did want me to bury you after all,” she murmured. “That’s why you’re here.” She took an old shawl, wrapped the cat in it, and buried it near her yard. She felt lonely for the forlorn animal, although she remembered how sullen and unfriendly it had become before it abandoned her completely.

The cat’s little funeral made her melancholy. Marusia’s thoughts floated to Lazorska, whom she hadn’t seen for over two weeks. She decided to visit her after she’d rung the bells.

But when she knocked on Lazorska’s door, there was no answer. Marusia let herself in and found a dark room that was crowded with old potted plants on the shelves and tables all dying from lack of water and care. Dried herb posies veiled in cobwebs hung upside down on the low ceiling beams.

Lazorska sat at her table near two long windows that overlooked her once beautiful, abundant garden, now unkempt and grown over.

Marusia tapped the healer gently on the shoulder and was relieved to see her look up, but was surprised by how gaunt and cavernous her face had become. “I’m glad you’re here,” Lazorska said in a high-pitched voice that wasn’t her own. “My time is coming. I don’t know how much longer I can stand this. . . .” She pushed herself closer to Marusia. “God should’ve taken me already.”

She smiled a crooked grin, exposing gaps where her fine white teeth had once been. Her jaw was extended,
and her skin was a thin sheath over her protruding cheekbones. “
Samohon?
” she said, nodding slightly to a bottle with clear liquid on a shelf. Marusia took it down, poured two small ceramic cups full, and placed one in Lazorska’s clawlike hand. She drank it, spilling most of it down her mouth and throat before dropping the cup. Marusia picked it up, filled it again, and raised it to her friend’s gray lips.

“You, too,” Lazorska whispered. Marusia raised her cup in silence to her friend, then drank it up.

“There are some gladioli bulbs I saved for you. And hollyhocks,” Lazorska said. She wiped her mouth. “There—on the table, next to the other things.”

Marusia found the bulbs. “These?” she asked, her eyes on the brown bottle she had watched Lazorska pour from for Yulia and Evdokia. She understood what her friend wanted from her.

“Thank you. I’ll plant them so that we can have flowers in the church.”

“Plant them soon,” Lazorska whispered. “Plant them so you can see them soon.” Her eyes were glazed with tears. “Marusia, I’ve been afraid for my death. What if it was a sin?” She grabbed Marusia’s hand and hooked herself to her. “What if what I did all those years was a sin? What happens to my mortal sinful soul if I do it myself and I roast in hell next to all the ones I killed? That’s why I can’t do it to myself. What is next for me?” Lazorska’s thin, humped shoulders shook. She released Marusia’s hand and dropped her head on the table.

“Listen to me—I will take it on my soul,” Marusia said. “You did nothing but good in this life. You’ve helped the sick and dying ones. Now, let me help you. I take it on my soul. Let me end your suffering like I promised. Let me help you face God.”

Marusia waited until Lazorska finished her silent prayers, and then she kissed her friend’s thin face that always reminded her of spun linen—smooth and cool and imprinted with the faint marks of fine lines woven into her flesh for strength.

O
N THE MORNING
of Marusia’s last day in life, the air was dry and the sun’s scorching rays beat hammers on the top of everyone’s head. Even the farm animals’ tongues hung out of their mouths like dowsing sticks in the grass, twitching for invisible water.

The air steamed. Marusia was unable to thoroughly drench her garden because her well was running dry. She took her watering can and sprinkled the browning plants, but the water wasn’t enough for their thirst. “Even my tears are dried up,” she moaned.

She had to get out of the garden. Her head was soaked beneath her babushka, and she was dizzy. The last few weeks she had been unusually light-headed and in constant pain—every joint ached, and the insides of her eyelids felt like sandpaper scraping the last bit of moisture from her sore red eyes. Her body felt hot and inflamed, not only from the heat, but from some internal
source that fired every pore in her skin, worse than a rash that wouldn’t heal.

She needed to feel better and took out a bottle of
samohon
from the kitchen cabinet. She sat at her table, where she filled a fifty-gram shot glass full. The strong drink burned a glow in her chest and made her feel hotter. She wiped the sweat from off her eyebrows and above her upper lip and tried to finish the drink, but her hands trembled and she felt nauseated from its gasoline smell.

She sat down and took from her pocket a wad of her black hemp gum and slowly chewed it soft with the nubs of the few teeth she had left in front. Lately, so many of her back teeth, even the silver ones, had fallen out, and her gums had swelled and turned dark, thick, red and fleshy, like the inside of a plum. The drug made her feel calmer and not quite as hot.

Two days earlier she had started to clean her house. She found the old suitcase she had taken to Kyiv. It stood dormant, wedged between large round bottles of fruit compote made and sealed years ago. In her solitary grief, she had not been able to unpack the suitcase since her return to Starylis.

Now she had an enormous desire to open it. She wheezed and coughed her way to the pantry, knelt on the dusty floor, and dragged it loose from its hiding place. She sprang open the lock and looked inside. One by one, she took out the bulky items she had wrapped so long ago in inky newspaper—the few clothes that she
had taken to Kyiv: a flannel nightgown, a pair of woolen stockings. Inside a sock, she found Yurko’s wedding ring, the plain gold band she’d been given by the nurses after he died. In the matching sock, she found his watch. It read 2:30. She put it on her wrist. The last item was a striped shirt of Yurko’s that he had never had a chance to wear. She sighed and put all of the things, except for the watch, back inside the suitcase.