I was still very young, fiftysomething, but my children were no longer at home. So I wasn’t too worried. Irina was studying in Moskow, and Alexej was on a tour of the Altai mountains. I was one of the last to leave Tschernowo. I helped others to stuff their clothes in sacks and to rip up floorboards to get at the money they’d hidden underneath. I didn’t really see why I should leave at all.
Jegor shoved me into one of the last cars that was sent from the capital and squeezed in beside me. Jegor had let himself get swept up in the panic, as if his balls needed to produce any more children and needed to be rushed to safety. Despite the fact that he’d long since drunk his crotch sterile and limp. The news of the reactor brought him temporarily to his senses, and he started yammering on about the end of the world and got on my nerves.
I don’t have any large pots at home because I’ve lived alone since I returned. Houseguests aren’t exactly lined up around the block. I never cook to save leftovers, I always cook fresh every day. Borscht is the only thing I warm up day after day. But it gets better with every day it sits.
I take the biggest pot I can find out of the cabinet. And look for a top that will fit. I’ve accumulated a lot of tops over the years, none of which fit properly, but they’re good enough for me. I cut the head and feet off the rooster, they’ll go into the soup. Then I cut off the rump, which I give to the cat. I put the rooster in the pot along with the head and feet, a peeled carrot from the garden, and an onion with the skin on so the broth will have a nice golden color. I pour water in from the bucket, just enough so everything is covered. It’ll be a nourishing broth, fatty and glistening.
When the reactor happened, I counted myself among those who got off lightly. My children were safe, my husband wasn’t going to live much longer anyway, and my flesh was already toughened with age. In essence I had nothing to lose. And anyway, I was prepared to die. My work had taught me always to keep that possibility in mind so as never to be caught by surprise.
I marvel every single day at the fact that I’m still here. And every second day I ask myself whether I might be one of the many dead who wander around unwilling to acknowledge that their name is already inscribed on a gravestone somewhere. They need to be told, but who is that brazen? I’m happy that nobody has anything left to say to me. I’ve seen everything and have no more fears. Death can come, just let it come gracefully, please.
The water in the pot is bubbling. I turn down the heat, grab a ladle from a hook, and begin to scoop off the thick gray foam that’s pushing up the sides of the pot. If the water were to keep boiling so hard, the foam would break up into tiny bits and get mixed into the broth. On the ladle the foam looks dreary and unappetizing, like a collapsed gray cloud. I let it drip into the cat’s bowl. Cats are even less sensitive than we are. This cat is the daughter of the one that was in my house when I came back. She was really the lady of the house and I was just her guest.
The nearby villages are all abandoned. The buildings are still there, but the walls are flimsy and collapsing, and the nettles grow as high as the eaves. There aren’t even rats because rats need garbage, fresh, greasy garbage. Rats need people.
I could have taken my pick of houses in Tschernowo when I came back. I chose my old one. The door was open, the gas tank was only half empty, the well was just a few minutes’ walk away, and the garden was still recognizable. I cleared the nettles and cut back the blackberries, for weeks I didn’t do anything else. I knew: I need this garden. I can’t manage the walk to the bus stop and the long ride into Malyschi very often. But I need to eat three times a day.
Ever since, I’ve planted a third of the garden. That’s enough. If I had a large family I would use the entire garden. I benefit from the fact that I took such good care of it before the reactor. The greenhouse is a jewel, handcrafted by Jegor, and I harvest tomatoes and cucumbers a week before everyone else in the village, just as I did before the reactor. There are gooseberries in green and red and currants in red, white, and black, old bushes that I carefully prune each fall so they produce new shoots. I have two apple trees and a raspberry patch. It’s a fertile area here.
The soup is simmering on the lowest flame. I’ll let it cook for two or even better three hours, so the old flesh softens and falls from the bone. It’s the same with people: it’s hard to choke down old flesh.
The smell of the chicken soup makes the cat twitchy. She slinks around my feet, meowing, and rubs herself against my calves in their thick wool stockings. I know I’m getting older because I’m always cold. Even in summer I don’t leave the house without wool socks.
The cat is pregnant, I’ll give her the skin and gristle of the rooster later. Sometimes she hunts beetles and spiders. We have a lot of spiders in Tschernowo. The amount of bugs has increased since the reactor. A year ago a biologist came and photographed all the spiderwebs in my house. I leave them be, even when Marja calls me a slovenly housewife.
The good thing about being old is that you don’t need to ask anyone’s permission anymore — you don’t need to ask whether you can live in your old house, or whether it’s okay to leave the spiderwebs be. The spiders were here before me, too. The biologist took pictures of them with a camera that looked like a weapon. He set up spotlights and lit up every corner of my house. I didn’t have any objection, no reason he shouldn’t go ahead and do his job. He just had to turn down the sound on his device because the beeps sent chills down my spine.
The biologist explained to me why we have so many bugs. It’s because there are far fewer birds in the area since the reactor. So the beetles and spiders can multiply unhindered. He was unable to tell me, however, why there are so many cats. Cats probably have something that protects them against bad things.
A second cat slips into the doorway. The cat that lives with me immediately arches her back. She’s a beast and doesn’t let anyone across the threshold.
“Come on, be nice,” I say, but she isn’t nice. She makes hissing noises and her hair stands on end. She has only half a tail, someone clipped off the rest. I always had cats and chickens and, earlier, a dog, it’s a part of village life that I like. Another reason I came back. The animals here aren’t sick in their heads the way they are in the city, even if they are irradiated and crippled. The noise and constriction of the city makes cats and dogs crazy.
Irina flew all the way from Germany just to try to keep me from moving back to Tschernowo. She tried all means, even crying. My Irina, who never cried, not even as a little girl. It wasn’t that I forbade her to cry; on the contrary, it would have been healthy to cry sometimes. But she was like a boy, climbing trees and fences and sometimes falling off, even getting smacked, and still she never cried. She ended up studying medicine and now she’s a surgeon with the German military. That’s my girl. And then, of all times, she thought she needed to cry because I wanted to move back home.
“I have never told you what you have to do,” I explained to her. “And I don’t want you to tell me what I have to do.”
“But, Mother, who in their right mind could possibly want to go back to the death zone?”
“You’re saying words that you don’t understand, my girl. I’ve already gone to look, the buildings are all still standing, and weeds are growing in the garden.”
“Mother, you know what radioactivity is. Everything is irradiated.”
“I’m old, nothing can irradiate me anymore, and even if it does it’s not the end of the world.”
She dabbed her eyes dry in a way that made it clear she was a surgeon.