The Sky Unwashed (8 page)

“Well, with so many alcoholics on the job, no wonder there was a fire,” a woman was heard to say, which brought out a round of laughter.

“That’s right, darling. A bottle of vodka, a hot man, mix them together and poof. . . .” said an old man without front teeth.

“Where are we going,
Babo?
” Katia asked. She was rocking a naked baby doll in her arms. Its blue eyes stared coldly up at the sky.

“We’re going for a nice trip to the city.” She’d heard on the radio broadcast that they were going to Kyiv, maybe Moscow. Marusia was afraid. She had never been to the big city and dreaded the idea of having to walk the big streets where cars could run you down at a hundred kilometers an hour. How would her son manage that? She glanced at Yurko, who sat with his head bent down. He was ignoring Tarasyk, who tried to sit on his lap. Zosia peered into his face. “You need a doctor.” She stood up. “
Mamo
, I’m going to find out if any of these buses go to the hospital.” Before Marusia could object, Zosia hurried away from them, and Tarasyk started to cry. “Come here,
soloden’kyi. Tato
is too tired right now.
Mama
will be back soon. Come to
Baba
.” Tarasyk shook his head no, until Marusia coaxed him with some chewy apple slices she had dried the previous winter. “That’s my baby,” she whispered to the child, who settled down, sucking on the fruit held in his even white baby teeth.

People in line were joking and talking until their attention was drawn to two
militsioner
dragging Paraskevia Volodymyrivna.

“Make way, good people,” one of the
militsiia
shouted. As they approached the village center, Paraskevia wrung herself free from her escorts and sat down in the middle of the street.

Two men in front of Marusia guffawed when they saw the scene. “Oh, oh!” one of them said, pointing to a goat who jumped away from a group of
militsiia
.

“Her and her goats! They had a hell of a time getting her out of her cellar with those animals,” an old woman declared.

The crowd laughed and watched three more uniformed men try to corral the goat after it butted one of them in the rear. A woman
militsiiantka
threw rocks at it, which steered the animal back on the dirt road toward its home.

“Look, they’re hurting the goat,” Katia cried out. “Why are they doing that?”

“Now behave yourself,
babo!
” one of the
militsioner
yelled at Paraskevia. He and another man helped her roughly to her feet. She spat in his face.

Marusia darted her way through the crowds close enough to yell out to the old woman. “Paraskevia,” she said. “Please wait with me and my family. They won’t hurt you.”

Paraskevia did not recognize her friend and shouted wildly, “I’d rather die here. This is my home. My home, you bandits! I have to wait for my son to come back.” The old woman started to cry. “He is the priest. No one else is here for him to come home to. Just me.”

Marusia heard someone honking a horn. A driver was in one of the buses, waiting for his instructions.

“All right, get her in first,” a
militsioner
shouted. Two men forcibly lifted the old woman and carried her into the bus.

“No! No! I want to go home,” she protested.

Marusia turned away when she saw Paraskevia’s tattered slip hanging out in full view as they hoisted her into the bus.

“Hey, don’t be so rough on the
babtsia
,” shouted a blond-haired man in a torn T-shirt. His arms were stained with tattoos.

“You don’t know what a mean old lady she is,” the
militsioner
with the bullhorn answered. He wiped his perspiring face with his wide black tie. “It took four of us to get her out of her cellar, and she had six goats with her.”

“What a hero!” the tattooed man shouted. “Is that who we have protecting us? Even the old ladies are tougher than our dear little policemen.” Everybody laughed.

“All right, your attention now,” the
militsioner
brusquely shouted into his bullhorn. “Keep the lines moving. There is room for everyone on these buses.” As he spoke, more drivers in black leather caps strolled leisurely to their buses, sat down in their seats, and waited for their passengers.

Zosia returned and led her family to another area of the town square where they stood with other groups
of villagers. Suddenly, the pace of the lines picked up and moved faster than Marusia was used to, and she panicked when it was her turn.

“Wait a minute.” Marusia turned from the bus doors.

“
Mamo
, come on,” Zosia said, helping her children to climb in while Yurko struggled with the large suitcase.

“I’ll be right there.” She forfeited her place in line and went up to the officer with the bullhorn. “Excuse me, please . . . I have a cow. . . .”

“Don’t worry about your stupid animals. I’m so sick of these damn old ladies and their animals. . . .”

“But my cow was supposed to calve. She might have a problem. . . .”

“You’ll be compensated. We have to save people first.” He dismissed her with a shove toward the bus. Marusia’s heart sank, and she had half a notion to sneak back to her house and wait for her family to return in a few days. But then she thought of how they forced Paraskevia.

Marusia searched for her bus. They all looked the same until she saw Zosia standing on the steps and blocking others from entering.

“
Woo-uh
,” Marusia shouted, shoving her way back into the right line. “
Wooh!
Wait for me!” Zosia was arguing with a man who tried to pull her off the steps. “I’m here,” Marusia said, relieved.

“Come on,
Mamo!
” She pushed the surly man to the side and helped the old woman on. “Good thing you
came. Otherwise I’d have to kick him where it hurts, the bastard.”

“I’d like to see you try, you whore,” he said.

“Why bother, there’s nothing there to kick,” Zosia retorted.

“Oh yeah! I’ll show you what I got!” He started to unzip his pants.

“Hey you, not here,” cried a
militsioner
. “You can’t piss in the middle of a street. Against the law!”

“Arrest me then! To the Gulag!
Davai!
Come on.”

“Drunk, too,” he called to another
militsioner
. They argued and shouted at one another while the others in line shoved in.

The bus was packed with more than three times as many passengers as seats. Old people crouched in the aisles. Marusia and Zosia sat on top of their bundles with the children on their laps near the front of the bus. Yurko stood over them, holding on to one of the hanging straps, his eyes closed, struggling just to stay upright.

The minute his own space was invaded by bobbing heads and elbows jamming into his back, the driver slammed the doors. He didn’t care that he might have cut off a part of a family, perhaps separating a parent from a child. Once he saw that his own legs might be cramped by too many bundles, he was ready to roll. Doors shut, he zoomed the bus out of town.

Yurko appeared as lifeless as a corpse on a gallows as he swayed with each jerking motion of the vehicle.

“Sit down,
bratiku
,” said a tired voice. A bald man with an eyepatch tapped Yurko on the shoulder. “You, please sit down.” He stood up and gave Yurko his seat.

“Thank you,” Yurko said, embarrassed. He felt that he should offer his seat to Zosia or his mother, but he felt weak and truly wanted to sit down. “I’ve been ill,” he confided, ashamed of himself.

“Really?” said the bald man, waiting for more. He tried to open the window behind Yurko, but all the windows were stuck shut.

“From the plant. It’s bad. . . .” Yurko suddenly turned his head toward the window. Outside, a pack of dogs was following the bus. The dogs howled after their masters.

“Look at that, they want to leave, too,” said the bald man.

“It’s Bosyi, my dog,” Yurko mumbled. He wasn’t exactly sure if Bosyi was in the pack, but he liked to think he saw him one last time. He had hardly patted his head before he left, although Bosyi whined and nudged him and licked his face almost as if he was desperate. “Good-bye, my friend,” Yurko said to himself.

“Damn, stupid animals,” the bus driver shouted, stepping on the gas. He was an ugly man in his twenties with a bad complexion who wore his black leather cap jauntily perched on the side of his head. He lit a cigarette and turned on a portable radio that was hooked up to the dashboard. Russian rock music blared over the hacking coughs and whimpering children.

The dogs followed the bus, yelping and whining, but gave up once the vehicle picked up speed on the smoother, paved highway. Yurko sank back into the torn leather seat.

Marusia looked over to her son but could not see him behind the crowded travelers standing over her. She glanced out the window and caught a passing glimpse of a small group of young men burying their cars and television sets deep in the ground on the town’s outskirts.

“We should have done that,” a woman behind Marusia said.

“What for? We’ll be back in a couple of days,” said someone else, probably her husband.

The bus took a back road, shifting into second gear to pull up a steep hill. It almost turned over when the driver swerved into the opposite lane to pass the slower buses in front of him. He beeped his horn and swore out loud.

“Sorry, darling,” someone said. Yurko’s eyes snapped open. His upper lip was bristling with sweat. He unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt, hoping to breathe easier in the stench of the diesel fumes.

The bus slowed down in front of the
kolhosp
. Three tractors were mowing the fields for hay. Mounds of grain were piled by the side of the road, and strong women in bright head kerchiefs were emptying the sacks and handing the depleted bags to a man with a pickup truck.

“What are they doing?” someone wanted to know. “Why are they wasting food like that?”

“They need the sacks for sand. To put out the fire,” said the driver to no one in particular. He stopped the bus near one of the women on the roadside. She was younger than the others and wore a pair of faded jeans that stuck tight to her ample thighs and backside.

The bus driver opened the doors. “Hey, beautiful,” he shouted in Russian to the girl. “Forget that work and come with me to Kiev. I’ll buy you a mink coat.”

She laughed and took off her kerchief, stroking back her straw-blond hair. “Thanks, but we’re going on another bus after we finish here,” she said. Then she giggled and sauntered closer to the bus door, where she posed with one foot on the bottom step.

“Good, then meet me at the relay station tonight in Kiev. I stashed away a bottle of the best
sovietskoye champanskoye
and I got a nice bottle of perfume for you . . . from Paris.”

She giggled again. “Get out of here! Paris! Who do you think you’re kidding!”

“All right, Prague, then. But you should pour it over your beautiful neck tonight. Or better yet, let me do it.” He blew her a kiss and put his cigarette back in his mouth before closing the doors. The girl waved, and the driver’s eyes kept staring into the rearview mirror until she was completely out of sight.

T
HE BUS THAT
carried Marusia and her family ended up in front of a hospital near the center of Kyiv in the early hours of the evening. The trip took longer than usual because the driver made several more stops along the way to talk and flirt with other women. Finally, when an angry female passenger in the back of the bus yelled at him to stop pimping or she would throttle him with her fists and drive the bus herself, he made no more detours and took them directly to their stop.

Marusia was awed when she saw the city’s skyline for the first time. She watched in respectful silence as the bus turned down various streets and boulevards. Kyiv was so imposing with its broad high-rises, so important with its spacious gardens filled with manicured hedges and colorful rows of tulips and elaborate war monuments, and the heavily sculpted statue of Lenin that was so prominent in the center of the main street.
Large red banners bearing slogans of the Revolution in both Russian and Ukrainian billowed high above the immaculate white sidewalks that Marusia had heard were kept in that pristine condition by hundreds of old women and their brooms.

Crowds of weary people were already waiting in long lines outside the emergency ward entrance. They had come from other villages that surrounded Chor-nobyl and had been dropped off long before Marusia’s bus arrived. They were still waiting their turns to be processed by some official and to be given a place where they might sleep that night.

Except for her family, Marusia lost sight of the familiar faces from the bus ride. Nor did she see any of her friends and neighbors; everyone here seemed to be a stranger to her.

The family joined a group of evacuees from another village called Narodochyi because Zosia insisted that the lines in that group were not as long. Actually, Zosia wanted to avoid running into her ex-lover from the plant or other people who knew about them. She would hate to have to explain things to Yurko and Marusia now.

Marusia was made more nervous by the fearful and uncertain voices around her. Instinctively she knew that survival depended upon a different set of rules than anything she had known back in her little village. She allowed Zosia to try to lead the family to safety—at least until things made more sense to her.

Zosia carried Tarasyk. Katia held on to Marusia’s hand, and Yurko straggled behind them, half carrying, half pushing the suitcase. They ambled between groups of people crammed together on the sidewalks jealously guarding their few possessions and protecting the little space they had secured in the lines.

Zosia went boldly up to the doors of the emergency room and announced that her entire family was contaminated with radiation. They must be let in immediately.

A toady little man who was in charge of the doors was either intimidated by her temper or by her good looks. He didn’t argue with her, but opened the doors and even smiled at Zosia. Inside, more people waited in more lines, many too tired and dejected to stand. Babies were howling, men were coughing, women were shouting. People were sprawled out everywhere on the floor and propped against the walls. Some luckier folks were asleep on stretchers and on abandoned examination tables.