“All I could understand was the,” I say. “I wasn’t able to find anyone who could translate it for me.”
Irina rips the letter from my hands a little too hastily. My betrayal of Laura’s trust pains my soul. But Irina needs this now. She bends over the sheet of paper, her lips move silently.
“What does it say? Can you read it?”
She doesn’t answer, her eyes jump around the page, and her chin begins to tremble.
“Tell me, Irina.”
She lifts her head and looks at me. “It says exactly what I told you. What a screwed-up life she’s led. How awful her family is.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t mean it.”
“Oh, yes, she does. It says she hates us all. Just not you.”
“And where is she now?”
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t say.”
I know that Irina lied. There was more in the letter than she told me. She left quickly and said that she would come back as soon as possible. I told her not to worry about me. I will be just fine. She needs to tend to her child. I don’t want to believe all the stories she told about Laura. Laura is a good girl.
“You are still young and can even marry again if you would just learn to smile and to buy yourself some nice clothes,” I told her as she was leaving.
“From whom would I have learned how to do that?”
“I eventually learned it, too. And I was over seventy by then. I really only learned to smile after I moved back to Tschernowo.”
She cringed.
I took back the letter and this time hid it in a shoe. Irina didn’t like it, but I stood firm. She was allowed to read the letter but it belongs to me. And now I know it is written in English. Good girl, she probably thought her grandmother could speak a foreign language. Or that it would be easier for me to find someone to translate English than German.
I have my spot at the sewing machine back. As long as I have work to do, I can breathe easily. Our country needs pillowcases.
I’ve stopped writing letters. I’m trying to learn English instead. I got lucky: the woman who sits at the machine to my left can still remember her English lessons from school. She’s twenty-one years old and is serving a sentence for something she did to her newborn child. She doesn’t talk about it and I don’t ask. She teaches me an English word every day; in exchange I help her with her sewing.
My fingers feel as if they no longer belong to me. I pay no attention. Since the stroke I’ve sewn six hundred and fourteen pillowcases. That’s not so many, younger women work twice or even three times as fast as I do. But six hundred and fourteen people no longer have to sleep on bare pillows thanks to me.
At noon, as always, we have a break, we get ourselves thin fruit tea from the canister, most of the women go out into the yard for a smoke, I stand up and do some vein exercises and watch the sparrows as they flit between all the feet in rubber shoes looking for invisible crumbs. I think of the bullfinches of Tschernowo and wonder if I’ll ever come face-to-face with a crane again. In between I repeat the English words I’ve learned in the last few days. Bag. Eat. Teacher. Girl.
I’m not finished with pillowcase number six hundred and fifteen when a commotion erupts outside. I don’t look up; I’ll learn soon enough what it’s about. When they come inside I’m startled because they make a beeline for me. This can’t be good, I think, when so many come to get me. It is women in uniform and men in civilian clothes and vice versa, their faces blur together, and I feel very old.
One of them steps forward, stoops down to me, and says loudly that our president has pardoned me.
Our president is a good man. He looks a little like Jegor in his good years. Except that Jegor was a dishrag and our president is a man of iron will. With a man like him I would have had more respect for my marriage. He wouldn’t have shown any fear of Tschernowo, he wouldn’t have let himself be forced to abandon his village, he would have laughed at the offer of compensation and at the pointless vision tests and the vitamins that you received for free as a reactor victim.
Because our constitution is celebrating an anniversary, the president has pardoned a lot of criminals. I’m one of them. My crime is more serious than many others, but my age must have swayed him. Maybe he read about me in the paper and thought, Baba Dunja from Tschernowo should not die in prison. He has a soft heart, like all great men.
I’m just sorry about the pillowcase I’ve started. I make every one like it’s my last, and this one isn’t finished, and it bothers me. I’m urged to hurry along because I’m now free. I’m not prepared for this. I don’t know what to do. Pack up your things, they say. So I pack.
I don’t have much, the clothes belong to the prison, I lay them out tidily. Someone keeps looking into the cell. I hiss at him, hasn’t he ever seen an old woman fold three pairs of underpants. I make the bed and fluff the pillow. My things I place in the pillowcase, which I then tie closed.
I’m not surprised to see Arkadij. He probably wants to make sure everything is done properly and that nobody swaps my blood thinning medication for toilet cleaning fluid, as happened recently.
Arkadij urges me to hurry. So that I can leave in peace, the press has been told that I won’t be released for another three days. But soon the first of them will arrive, as rumors travel fast. He braces me, I have to make an effort to keep up with him step for step. We cross the yard, I want to go to the workshop one last time to say my goodbyes. Arkadij holds me back as if his only concern is to get out of here as quickly as possible. The young woman who sits next to me runs up and shoves a rolled-up piece of paper into my hand.
“English vocabulary,” she whispers. I run my hand across her delicate cheek and wish her many more healthy children. Then I turn toward the workshop. Women in gray prison clothes are standing at the window. And then they applaud.
Arkadij Sergejewitsch drives a dirty little car. He has brought me a new, slightly too long winter jacket and gloves because I had to hand in my warm clothes to the prison. I feel bad that criminals like me keep him from making decent money. He didn’t get a single ruble from me for his work. I’ll have to give him some money from Laura’s tea caddy.
“As soon as I get home I’m going to send you money.”
“Better just to hurry, Baba Dunja,” he says and holds open the car door for me. And so in my old age I take a ride in a private car.
Arkadij says we can get everything I need at the airport.
“Get what? At what airport?”
“You are flying to your daughter’s in Germany. It is all arranged.”
“I am not flying anywhere,” I say. “I am going home.”
Arkadij understands immediately.
The little television on his dashboard that tells him where to go doesn’t recognize Tschernowo.
“My garden is surely overgrown,” I say. “Maybe you can drop me at the bus station.”
“Your daughter would kill me,” says Arkadij.
He stops briefly in Malyschi to buy a chocolate bar and a bottle of water. Never before has a strange man spent money on food for me.
“You are a good boy,” I say, sticking the things in my pocket.
He just looks at me. It’s the same later during the drive. It would be a shame if I were to die in a car crash now, of all times, and just because he didn’t keep his eyes on the road.
I ask him about his life and work. We’d never had the chance to talk about anything but the axe in the head. He answers cautiously, as if every word were a step in a minefield. Then he says he’s going to become a father in two months.