“Fine. I’ll stay a little longer.”
Marja drinks down her sweetened coffee and drops her feet to the floor. They are bare, the toenails painted pink. They gleam like raspberry candies.
“You know,” she says, “I’m so happy that you’re back. Every time you go to Malyschi I worry that you will never come back.”
There are days when the dead trip over one another on our main road. They talk all at once and don’t even notice what nonsense they are speaking. The babble of voices hovers over their heads. Then there are days when they are all gone. Where they go, I do not know. Maybe I’ll find out when I’m one of them.
I see Marina and Anja and Sergej and Wladi and Olya. The old liquidator in a striped shirt, his sleeves rolled up, with muscular forearms and polished shoes. He was a dandy at the outset. He died quickly.
The baby that was stillborn in my hands seven months after the reactor. I wrapped it up, unwashed, in a towel and handed it to the mother. She had given birth in her old farmhouse rather than in a birthing center. Se we had time and nobody disturbed us. The father turned away and left the room, the mother pulled open the corner of the towel and smiled. I knew what that smile meant. She would soon follow and thus didn’t feel any sense of loss.
The little girl with red pigtails who didn’t die so nicely, I’d have liked to give her something, but I wasn’t permitted. The entire family badgered me and the doctor, demanding things that were out of our hands, fighting among themselves over trivialities.
Those are my dead, the ones that followed me to Tschnernowo, and there are dozens of others that were already here, along with their cats and dogs and goats. The village has a history that is intertwined with my history, like two strands of hair in the same braid. We’ve come part of the way together. I always greet the dead with a slight nod of the head, my lips barely move.
A man and a little girl are walking down the main road, I’ve never seen either one of them before. He’s carrying a backpack, and she’s pulling a small suitcase. Her feet are in red Sunday shoes. I greet them the same way I do the rest of the dead, but then I realize they aren’t dead.
I stop and so do they. We look at each other. We never have visitors here, unless you count the film crews and photographers and biologists. And the nurse from the city who pops up every couple of years and wants to measure our blood pressure and take blood samples.
Her most recent visit was seven months ago, she was no longer wearing a radiation suit, just a lab coat, and too much rouge on her powdered, unnaturally white face. She parked her old Lada on the main road and tugged her equipment around behind her. Petrow closed the door in her face, Sidorow acted as if he couldn’t see or hear her, Lenotschka smiled at her kindly and asked her not to touch her. Only the Gavrilows and Marja monopolize the poor woman’s time and don’t let her go until she has palpated their livers and tested their vision. When she knocked on my door, totally spent, I let her in and offered her a cup of tea. The harried look on her face and her bad perm reminded me too much of myself forty years ago.
People who come here normally stay until they are carried to a little plot by the former village school. The girl is probably terminally ill.
Even if I live to a hundred I will never learn to take something like that lightly. I look at the girl so intently that she nearly starts to cry. Then I introduce myself by name and ask what I can do for them.
The man doesn’t want to say his name. He’s different from all the others I’ve seen in these parts. He is a city person, but not from Malyschi. He’s from the capital city. Everything about him, his shoes and his smooth face and his way of speaking, everything cries out that he doesn’t belong here. I’m not the sort of person who quickly develops sympathy and he’s making it particularly difficult for me to feel any towards him. The girl is named Aglaia. So it’s true what Marja told me, that they name little girls like ancient women in the capital these days.
“Aglaia, right, so it’s Glascha then,” I say. The girl smiles and her hand moves from her father’s to mine. She doesn’t otherwise seem particularly trusting. Maybe I remind her of someone. She looks healthy, rosy cheeks, dark hair, only her eyes are sad, and her smile is crooked.
I lead little Glascha to a house that I want to show them. I nearly took it myself but it’s too big for me. But the two of them need two rooms, it’s not good when a girl and her father have to share a room. The eyes of the others follow us as we walk down to the end of the main road.
The house that I have in mind is painted blue. Glascha’s eyes begin to light up and my heart softens. I force myself to let go of her hand. But she clings to me.
“Does it have running water?”
I don’t look at her father as I answer. “Nobody here has running water. The well is at the end of the street. Some yards have their own, but not this one. We have electricity. There’s a stove that you can heat and cook with. I don’t know how long… ”
I look at the girl and don’t want to say it. It’s not as easy in Tschernowo in winter as it is in summer. But will there still be two of them by then?
“I don’t know, either,” says the man.
He enters the gate. The girl lets go of my hand and follows him. She runs through the garden and I’m reminded of the fact that Irina and Alexej used to play here, too. An old woman, Baba Motja, lived in this house back then, and she let the village children munch her raspberries. She had not only red ones but also a yellow kind that Irina sometimes brought me, closed carefully in her fist so as not to squash the delicate berries. Yellow and larger than ordinary raspberries, they shone in the palm of her hand. But they didn’t taste particularly sweet.
Glascha’s father goes into the house and tries to open the window from inside. He has to tug and jiggle it, but then his face appears in the window, looking suddenly content. He disappears. There’s a bustling sound and then something falls to the floor, and his upper body appears in the window again, as if he’s framed in an old picture.
“Okay,” says the man. “There’s nothing better?”
If at my age I still spent time wondering about people I’d never manage to get around to so much as brushing my teeth.
“No,” I say. “This is the best place as far as size, furnishings, and condition are concerned.”
He seems surprised that I’m able to produce such long sentences.
“Okay,” he says again. “Does it belong to anyone?”
“No,” I say again. “You can live in it.”
“And what if someone comes and demands I pay the rent retroactively?”
I don’t begrudge him his suspicions. When it comes to the reactor, you can’t trust anyone. There was a scandal just recently in our region. The residents of irradiated villages who moved to other places were promised compensation for their homes, and they claimed them at values the cabins wouldn’t have had even if they’d been on Red Square. Bureaucrats dutifully approved them in exchange for a portion of the inflated compensation. At least that’s how Marja told it. I was happy that on paper my house still belonged to me. Not to mention that my conscience is clear, which is something that becomes more and more important with age.
“Nobody just drops by. How did you get here anyway?”
“Somebody drove us. But not all the way to the village. The driver was scared.”
I nod. The girl has found some raspberries in the garden and pops them in her mouth.
The man watches her from the window. “Are the berries irradiated, too?”
“Do you not know where you are?”
“Yes, yes,” he says. “Do I ever. You don’t like stupid questions, do you, Baba Dunja?”