The Sky Unwashed (2 page)

“Sh, I won’t wake him,” she said with a smile. Bosyi thumped his tail and whined as though he were apologizing in advance for intervening in case she bothered his master. “See, I’m going,” she whispered, and returned to the kitchen to resume her washing.

The water had turned blue from the cheap dye of the socks. She opened the drain stopper and watched the water gurgle slowly down the drain before she twisted and rinsed out the wet bundles. Marusia hung the clothing on the pegs fastened to the ceiling beams directly above the large tiled cookstove, where the dripping water caused a steady hissing on the cast-iron lids.

As Marusia was hanging up the clothes, Zosia came into the kitchen in her thin cotton robe which only half concealed her lacy black bra and slip. She drank milk straight out of the glass bottle and ignored Myrrko, the gray cat, who appeared out of the shadows to rub herself against Zosia’s firm legs.

“
Bozhe
,” Marusia whispered, eyeing her. “You’re going to have another?”

Zosia quickly wiped her mouth with her sleeve. “What about it?” she said defiantly. “Anyway, I’m not sure I want it.” She poured the milk into a dish for the cat. “Here sweetie, have the rest.”

Zosia was still a good-looking woman at twenty-eight, with classic high cheekbones that sculpted the otherwise flat planes of her face. She was shapely and slender, with a matronly softness settling into her hips and waist. Her dark blue eyes were duller than the turquoise luster they’d had when she was a girl, but could still radiate great warmth whenever she smiled, which wasn’t often. She would have been prettier without the stiff blond hair that she kept teased up into an unflattering beehive with the tattered ends tucked severely
behind her ears. Her natural color was a softer, quieter chestnut, but she chose a shade of blond that became more brittle with each monthly dye treatment she received at the beauty shop near the Chornobyl plant.

Zosia pulled her robe around her stomach. “Don’t worry—it’s easier for me to keep this one than to get rid of it.” Because abortion was the only available birth control in the Soviet Union, Zosia had not mourned her four past abortions. She knew women who had had twelve or fifteen, and she expected as many for herself if she kept up her sexual lifestyle. Unfortunately, the last time she was at the abortion clinic, the anesthetic failed her, and she had screamed from the pain when they suctioned the tissue out of her. The nurses in their starched white coned hats and shifts had held her down and yelled at her to shut up, it was nothing, what a fuss she was making! Zosia had thought she was going to die.

She felt nauseated from the memory and blamed it on the rich creamy milk. “I’ll probably keep this one,
Mamo
,” she said.

“Thank God,” sighed Marusia, who had herself miscarried three babies before Yurko was born. Marusia cleared her throat but would not ask if this child was really Yurko’s. It doesn’t matter, she sternly told herself. It was Yurko’s as long as he was married to Zosia. That’s how it had to be. She would coddle it and love it and teach it lessons, the sort that Yurko and Zosia did not approve of, like the chants for the Mass and knowing whether or not to fast before certain holy days.

“Don’t tell him about it, not yet,” Zosia said, nodding her head toward the other room. “I’ll tell him later. When things are better.” She clopped out of the kitchen to watch television. Marusia heard her changing the channels and turning the volume on louder, and then she heard the dog barking and Yurko’s hoarse voice telling Zosia to turn it off and leave him alone.

“When will things get better?” the old woman asked the cat, who sat staring at her empty bowl, expecting more milk. “I haven’t seen them get along for one complete day since they were married.” She ran fresh water into the sink for the next load, turning the water taps on full blast so as to drown out Zosia’s voice calling out to her son.

W
EDDINGS WERE A
common occurrence in Starylis. So were divorces, but those weren’t publicly celebrated as much except by the men in the community who got together to slander the women, and to drink the home-brewed hundred-proof
samohon
someone would always bring to offer the man who was set free.

Most of the marriage celebrations in the village were planned for the late spring, because the Soviet government encouraged the young people to openly defy the Lenten prohibition against weddings. The older people were too powerless to protest, and would go along with their grandchildren’s weddings if they could somehow include some of the old traditions. Gradually, more weddings were performed in the Soviet city halls and in the churches which the Communists allowed to operate provided that a government-appointed priest officiated. The government’s priest in Starylis was Father Andrei,
who happened to work at the Chornobyl plant. He was glad enough for both jobs, and eager to perform any church wedding the KGB allowed him, regardless of the contradictory situation he and his flock had to endure.

Marusia could not remember a spring when she and her family had not attended many weddings. She decided that out of the several that would take place in the village over the coming weekend, she would attend the wedding of the granddaughter of Evdokia Zenoviivna. Evdokia had promised that the ceremony would be traditional and Christian, held in the village church and performed by the priest, and not the usual unholy service where the bride and groom simply signed a register at the ZAKS, the magistrate’s office.

Evdokia had expressly asked Marusia to bake her famous wedding bread—a
korovai
—for the reception, a party that Evdokia declared would be special because her son-in-law, “that stupid Bolshevik,” had been able to rent the
klub
, the village social center, for the occasion. The
klub
was also the village headquarters for the
komsomol
meetings, and everyone knew that because Evdokia’s granddaughter and bride-to-be, Hanna Koval, was past
komsomol
president, and because her father had paid off the
klub
’s director, theirs was the only wedding party given permission to use the building that weekend. Since Evdokia had insisted Hanna get married in the church, Hanna balanced public opinion by having the rest of her ceremony—“the best part,” as she put it—at the most obvious Communist building in the village.

Marusia spent all day Thursday preparing the dough for the huge
korovai
before carrying it to the communal outdoor oven a short walk down the dirt road from her home. She liked using the old-style oven better than her own stove that heated either too quickly or not at all. She sat down on one of the wooden benches and thought what a warm day it was, warmer than the past few weeks.

“
Slava Isusu Khrystu
,” said the reedy voice of Slavka Lazorska, who was making her way up the little hill to where Marusia sat. Slavka Lazorska held a jar of clear liquid.

“
Slava na viky
,” answered Marusia. “God give you peace and health.”

“And you,” said Slavka Lazorska. The tall, lean woman sat down beside Marusia. “I smell your famous work of art. Whose wedding is it for this time?”

“Hanna’s.”

Slavka Lazorska snorted. “Oh, her. That one. She has to get married you know.”

“Yes, I know.” Marusia shook her head. “Well, these young ones with their, you know, modern socialism and . . .” She bent toward her friend and whispered, “sex.”

“At least we had the decency to blame our bad behavior on the war,” said Slavka Lazorska. The old women laughed.

“Now, no one bothers to excuse themselves,” said Marusia. “They just sew material enough for two white wedding dresses and there it is, for anyone to see.”

“So true. The little whores.” Slavka Lazorska laughed. “I’m going to attend that other one’s wedding—you know, Ania Podilenko. The one with the fake red hair. Somehow she’s related to me, I don’t know how. Probably from some bastard’s side of the family I’m not even sure of. Everyone’s related to me all of sudden when they want a present.”

“What are you getting her?”

Lazorska untied her green and black paisley babushka and wiped her face with it. Her lank iron-gray braids were coiled tightly like chain mail and wrapped around her head several times. “Well, she—that other one, Ania—is not like that rabbit, Hanna. Ania has a hard time getting a baby. So I made up an herbal potion to help her along. She’s no young chicken, either. Way past thirty, and this her fourth marriage.”

Marusia was impressed. Slavka Lazorska was the village healer, as all the women in her family had been. She boasted that she was never sick a day in her life, not even during the war when people dropped in the streets like acorns after a windstorm. Her garden was the largest patch of privately owned land in Starylis. In it, she grew all of the herbs and plants she used in her treatments. And she worked with the cups—large glass jars heated over a flame which she strategically applied to soothe the arthritis in a sore leg or loosen the phlegm in an inflamed chest. Lazorska was famous for her poultices and mustard plasters and was particularly revered for knowing the right cures for women’s ailments, especially
when a woman lost her female pleasure juices or the “gripping powers” in a womb that should cushion and hold a child inside.

Marusia was a little afraid of Lazorska and only called on her when prayers and conventional medicine failed.

She had first met Slavka Lazorska during the horrible typhus epidemic right after the war. The Red Cross had not gotten medical supplies through to Starylis. Marusia’s mother was near death before she begged her daughter to fetch the “
dokhtor
,” the title given to Slavka Lazorska’s own mother. Marusia couldn’t find her, but brought back the daughter, whose hair was coal black then, as were her arched eyebrows that met in the center of her high forehead, her skin taut and smooth as an olive. When Marusia first saw her, she felt sure she was a witch or a Gypsy and distrusted her exotic darkness. Even so, Slavka Lazorska cooled Marusia’s old mother with a healing poultice mixed in snow that quenched her fever and resurrected her.

The second time Marusia called on Lazorska was when she was far along into her sad marriage and begged for an herb to conceive a child. “It might keep him at home,” Marusia had confessed to Lazorska in shame. From it, Yurko her son was born, and Marusia always remembered that she owed the healer two more major, unrepayable debts—one for her son’s birth, the other that Lazorska never betrayed Marusia’s secret.

“Is that the gift?” Marusia asked shyly, pointing to the jar.

“This? Oh, no! This is just some vintage leftover
samohon
Fed’ko at the co-op wanted me to sample. Here, have a taste.” She unscrewed the top of the jar and held the pure grain vodka out to Marusia.

“
Na zdorovia
,” Marusia said. She took a long swig. “Ahh. Thank you. Very good.
Luxe
. First class.”

“Yes, it’s about the best I’ve had all season. But he better not try to sell me any. You know, I gave that devil’s son my own recipe. And then he has the nerve to tell me it’s from an ancient family formula that was handed down from his great great great Kozak grand-father who slept with the tzarina’s horse or some such cow shit.”

The women laughed. Slavka Lazorska took her turn and wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her woolen cardigan before handing the jar back to Marusia. The healer smiled openly at her, exposing the gold in her teeth and brightening her sallow, triangular face.

Marusia’s head felt light, and the sun’s rays were warm and comforting on her face. She remembered a lullaby her mother had taught her a long time ago. Lazorska’s voice was off key and lower than Marusia’s, but she hummed along as she tried to pick up the melody. Marusia’s eyes misted, and she blew her nose into a handkerchief she had tucked in her dress pocket.

“Sometimes, I miss my mother so much,” she confessed, thinking that she would sing the song to her grandchildren later that night.

“She was a good woman,” Slavka Lazorska said. “Bless her soul.”

Marusia sighed and, measuring the sun’s shadow on the grass beneath their feet, reckoned that she had had the bread in for about the right amount of time. She peeked into the clay oven and took the loaf out carefully with a long, flat wooden shovel.

“Oh, what beautiful bread,” whispered Slavka Lazorska, as if the loaf might cave in if her voice were too loud.

Marusia placed the walnut-brown loaf on the picnic table. She was pleased. It was a magnificent
korovai
, a huge round braided bread decorated with several birds also made of dough, kissing one another. Later, when it cooled, she would place some sprigs of periwinkle and flowers among the birds.

“Yes, it turned out very well.”

“I hope that silly little potato appreciates it,” Lazorska said. She took her turn with the vodka.

“I don’t care,” Marusia said, gladly taking the offered jar. “As long as it’s noticed as much as the bride’s dress.” She spotted a brown skylark flying in circles with a twig in its mouth. On a nearby branch, its mate stood chirping at him. The women watched.

“Look, she’s telling him what to do,” Slavka Lazorska pointed. The male flew back to his mate on the branch, who abruptly took the twig from out of his beak and flew alone to another tree. He followed her to a half-built nest well concealed in the cradle of the higher branches and humbly watched her entwine his meager donation within the delicate bowl of twigs and straw.

Slavka Lazorska laughed. “You see how it is! The females always have to do the work of the males! Even the male
birds
can’t do anything by themselves, because they don’t know how.”

“That’s the blessed truth!”

Then they sat in idle silence, breathing in the air and the scent of the fresh bread, listening to the low rumbles of a threshing machine in the distance.

Marusia made a small sign of the cross over the bread. “Well, anyway, thank God we’ve made it through another winter.” She shooed away tiny flies lingering over her bread and covered it with a towel. “I wish I could offer you some of this bread.”