Snow in May: Stories (8 page)

Mama climbed over into the backseat and curled up next to me, her head on my lap. This made me uncomfortably hot, but I was too weak to move.

“Don’t listen to us, Alinochka. The most important thing is for you to get better.” She kissed my hand and put it under her cheek, which was pink and covered in fine hairs, like a peach.

*   *   *

We stopped for a picnic lunch; I was too nauseous to eat. I wanted to crawl into a cool, dark hole and stay there with my eyes closed. My ears burned—two red signal flags for the incoming UFO.

After lunch Mama returned to the front seat, and I lay down in the back. From time to time she turned back and looked at me with worry, circling her lips with her finger. She and Babushka kept arguing, but I no longer heard them.

Soon we arrived at the witch’s house. Instead of the cabin on two chicken legs like I had imagined, it was a regular
izba
on the edge of a small village. The airport inside my brain pulsated with light. The UFO beamed its invisible radioactive rays at Mama and turned her into a gray rabbit, while Babushka became a brown bear. At least this was one of the less scary of their transformations.

Babushka the Bear got out the plastic bag for the witch, and Mama took my hand in her soft paw. The three of us went up to the witch’s doorstep. Babushka crossed herself and knocked. My forehead shook under the UFO’s landing gear. I closed my eyes and braced myself for the pain.

The door opened. “Hello. Come in, come in.” The witch’s voice was low and kindly. I felt a light touch on my head and opened my eyes. Instead of an old hag with rotten teeth and eyes like live coals, before us stood an orange fox in a blue housecoat. She wore metal-framed glasses on her long, thin snout and a headscarf. “So, this is Alinochka, our little patient. Does your head hurt now?” I nodded. My temples had just begun to throb. “
Nu,
don’t be so gloomy. We’ll cure you.”

We went in. It was pleasantly dark inside. The room was dominated by a giant old-fashioned stove, on top of which Ivan the Fool, the youngest and laziest of the three fairy-tale brothers, usually snored away his days. And where Baba Yaga cooked naughty children for dinner! Orthodox icons hung in the far corner; the gold halos around the stern faces of the saints shimmered in the glow of several church candles. An episode of
The Rich Also Cry,
Babushka’s favorite Mexican soap opera, played on a small black-and-white TV on a bookshelf in front of the bed. I recognized the two-tone spines of the World Literature Series, the same one we had. Multicolored carpets covered the walls and the floor. It was a disappointingly ordinary home for a witch.

“Welcome. Please sit down.” The Fox turned down the volume on the TV and motioned to a table with a samovar, several teacups, and a plate laden with honey cakes. Mama smoothed her denim skirt. She looked so pale next to the lustrous Fox. I was getting a bit suspicious: in the fairy tales, foxes were crafty, treacherous creatures—probably not without a reason.

“Thank you. This is for you.” Babushka offered her the bag. I’d seen her pack a bottle of vodka and a box of chocolates along with the money.

The Fox waved it away. “Afterward, afterward. Alinochka, why don’t you sit on the bed while I talk with your mama and grandma?”

As I settled on the scratchy plaid throw, the Fox poured them some tea and added a coffee-colored liquid from a brown bottle. The black label was covered with ornate golden designs and lettering, some not in Russian. At once a sharp herbal smell filled the room, which made me nauseous again. “Now, tell me about your daughter from the beginning, from birth.”

Mama laid out my migraine diary in front of her, then hesitated for a moment, looking around the room and at the Fox with reservation, as though she’d forgotten how we got here and why. “All right. Alina was born in the winter and caught pneumonia when she was two weeks old. She skipped the crawling stage and began walking at seven months. She had already begun talking at six. Chronic sinus infections.”

She gave the dates and durations of all my colds, flus, and childhood illnesses. The Fox listened attentively, wrinkling her nose after each sip of tea. From my shadowy corner her fur appeared almost flat, like freckled human skin. Her hind paw, clad in a high-heeled slipper, danced under the table. Babushka took a big bite from a honey cake.

“As a toddler, prone to tantrums. Often in a bad mood. The migraines started a year ago, but Alina still finished first grade with all fives. The doctors advised to keep a diary.” Mama slid the diary toward the Fox. “The average episode lasts four hours, the auras before are…”

I tuned out. The aliens had begun drilling and pounding on the right side of my skull. Then they moved on to the left side. I took off my shoes and wound into a kitten ball. The Fox’s pillow was uncomfortable: hard, cold, and pierced with stems of goose feathers. My vision was full of holes. A low choral humming came from the corner where the Orthodox icons hung. I squinted to see whether the saints were moving their mouths, but their dark, mournful faces only stared, flickering in and out of the candlelight’s yellow fog.

White light strobed in front of my eyes, and the usual countdown began. Ten, nine … I jumped off the bed and stumbled toward the table, hoping to reach someone before the explosion. Babushka caught me. Eight, seven … She sat me on her sturdy knees and held me tight.

“You’re forgetting Chernobyl, Vika,” she said.

“I need to know everything before I can start the healing.”

“Alina was in Kiev,” Mama said to the Fox apologetically. “With her grandparents, on her father’s … my husband’s side. But the cloud didn’t go over Kiev. There was no direct radiation. She wore that radiation meter for months.”

I’d been four then, but I remembered that day at the zoo. I’d looked so many times at a photograph we’d taken: me sitting astride a big stuffed bear; Grandpa Sasha and Baba Lera, who had been recently diagnosed with cancer, on either side. A donkey flanked Baba Lera, and a monkey in a red vest and skullcap sat on Grandpa’s shoulder.

Suddenly, my migraine lifted. The countdown stopped, and the aliens retreated. I saw them all clearly now: Babushka, Mama, and the red-haired woman in glasses and a blue housecoat. She was much too beautiful and young to be a witch. Her pink lips were lined with maroon pencil, and a small gold cross twinkled on her freckly chest.

“We never know the whole story,” she said in a doctorly manner, the way Babushka spoke to her patients. “I don’t trust the news. I don’t trust anyone. These days we have to take matters into our own hands.”

“Exactly what I’ve been telling her,” Babushka said. “She doesn’t listen to anyone’s sensible advice. About anything.”

Mama rubbed her nostrils.

“There are many causes for ailments. But, besides a few microbial and viral infections”—the witch nodded at Babushka—“the causes are rarely biological. For one, Russia … Well, what am I saying, the whole world, the whole world is full of spirits thirsty for revenge. Wars, revolutions, genocide. The crafty ones find their way into a new life. But most are too broken. They linger around, haunt the streets, haunt our homes, contaminate the minds and bodies of the most innocent. They hide in the hollows of the heart, warming themselves in the downy scarf of a child’s soul, leaking poisons of old hurt.”

“This philosophy seems rather—” Mama began.

“Listen carefully, Vika, and think,” Babushka interrupted her, as though Mama were a disobedient child. “She is very sensitive.”

I was about to tell them that it didn’t hurt anymore when the witch called me over. She took out a measuring tape from her pocket and wrapped it around my head. I was nervous. With a magician’s flourish she showed Mama and Babushka a thumbed number. Then she dug her cold fingers into my scalp.

“Ah yes, I can see the pain now, strong pain. You poor child,” she chanted in a low voice. “The pain is like black ink, filling your head, and your head is a giant inkwell. All those spirits are floundering in the ink—I see them. They want to express their pain through you, but we will banish them out of your head—banish! banish! banish!—tell them to go and cry elsewhere!”

She encircled my head with her fingers and rubbed it, singing something folky under her breath. She smelled more like Mama than a witch—of dishwater and borsch and Lancôme perfume. She massaged her song into my head, hard and fast, now building my hair up into a crown, now letting it fall to my shoulders. “Into the forest they go! Into the forest! Into the forest!” she shrieked.

It felt good, but so what: this witch didn’t know what she was doing. She had been wrong in her diagnosis of my pain, which was gone. I was doomed.

She lifted her hands and blew hot breath on my nape.

“How do you feel?” Mama said. She was pale, her big, gray eyes shining with fever. No, I never wanted her to die or go away, even if it meant I wouldn’t get the magical helping doll like Vasilisa’s. Instead of growing up, I would shrink, I would turn into a doll myself and ride in Mama’s pocket everywhere.

“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” I said and smiled. “She stopped the pain.”

Mama jumped from her chair and clutched me to her chest. “Oh God, thank you. Thank you, Galina Kirillovna.”

The witch’s name turned out to be just an ordinary Russian name. “You’re welcome. This one wasn’t too hard because she’s so young,” she said. “May your daughter grow up healthy and happy. And remember that the child’s health depends on the mother’s.”

She measured my head again and showed the mark to Mama and Babushka. My head had shrunk two centimeters. I touched it all over. Ears, mouth, nose, eyes—everything seemed intact. Maybe something had happened after all. Maybe she’d somehow altered the surface of my skull so it was now impossible for the UFO to land. I wouldn’t know until the next attack.

“Galina Kirillovna, do you by any chance do card readings?” Mama asked.

“Card readings? Of course. I do everything.”

“I wouldn’t trust the cards with such matters,” Babushka said but didn’t make a move from the table. She handed Galina Kirillovna the payment and took another honey cake.

“Alinochka, drink this and go lie on my bed. You need to rest now,” Galina Kirillovna said and gave me a cup of tea. Its bitter herbal smell made me sneeze.

My eyelids became heavy once I lay down. The bed didn’t feel as uncomfortable anymore. Through the syrup of sleep I heard the familiar incantations of the fortune-telling:
For you, for the home, for the soul. What was. What will be. What will calm the heart.

*   *   *

I woke up in the back of our Zhiguli on the way home, nauseous again, this time from hunger. Babushka drove, occasionally dropping her head forward to stretch her neck. Beneath the neckline of her striped red dress she had a small fatty hump. Mama was asleep in the front seat, her face turned to me. Her lips were smiling. But whatever had calmed her heart was most likely a lie or a mistake. This Galina Kirillovna could be a healer witch or an evil witch, like the one in Babushka’s story. Or not a witch at all.

The morning is wiser than the evening, Vasilisa’s doll always said. And if the doctors can’t help and the witches can’t help, and Papa and Babushka can’t—who else is left?

The ink of the night was leaking from the corners of the sky onto the day’s bright canvas, as Galina Kirillovna would have probably said. She liked talking about the ink. Maybe she’d make a better poet than a witch.

Birches, birches, birches forever. The notches on their white trunks looked like sad black eyes. They had long tired of staring at the world without blinking, but they could never close and go to sleep.

Strawberry Lipstick

1958

Olya lay in bed between her younger sister, Dasha, and her older sister, Zoya, feeling that, at eighteen, her life was over. For what was life without love? A never-ending shift at a factory assembly line. Left and right, her friends went to the dances at the Palace of Youth, fell in love, and got married. They moved out of their parents’ tiny apartments and no longer shared a bed with their sisters. They lived real lives. Plus, as married women, they could wear lipstick without attracting judgmental stares from nosy babushkas on the street. Olya was dying to wear lipstick.

The room was hot and stuffy even with the windows open. She sat up and looked at her sleeping sisters. Dasha’s lips were pinched by a secret smile. She always seemed so much happier in her sleep. Zoya gripped her corner of the sheet and ground her teeth with the same intensity she applied to her waking activities, from stirring sugar into a cup of tea to expounding the virtues of the Party over dinner. Olya was fed up with Zoya’s lectures, fed up with the poverty and having to put in hours and hours of work at the three different vegetable plots her parents had. She was fed up to death with everything in this town.

She climbed out of the bed and tiptoed into the living room. The old wooden floor creaked in betrayal. On the pullout couch, her mother and stepfather groaned in their sleep. She’d already heard one of them use the chamber pot—a big metal bucket in the hallway—earlier in the night. She was sick to death of that bucket. The nighttime deed made the kind of shameless trickling sound Olya imagined woke the neighbors not only in their house but also on the other side of the courtyard. It gunned the message into the metal: I am alive and I don’t care what you think of me.

Which was very different from Olya’s current state of mind. First, the love of her life, Kostya, had jilted her. Second, she had been denied admission to the Nutrition Institute in Odessa, where Kostya was now stationed. And third, she’d just found out that her tall and handsome Kostya, the dark-haired and green-eyed Kostya, a newly graduated officer of the Stavropol Military Academy, witty Kostya, guitar-playing and campfire song–singing Kostya, had married Olya’s former classmate—she wasn’t even that pretty—and taken her with him to Odessa.

On top of this, another graduate of the military academy, a certain Alek, whom Olya had met just two weeks ago, had unceremoniously proposed to her. He was a communications officer and had been assigned to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a port city on the Kamchatka Peninsula nine hours away by plane. He didn’t have to say it, but this was his last chance to secure a wife before the lonely military life in the Far East swallowed him whole. Olya always had so many friends, so many admirers from school and the academy. She was the most popular girl in her neighborhood and the star at the dances. How had it happened that her choice now came down to this?