“I won’t come visit you there.”
“I know,” I said, “but you don’t come very often anyway.”
“Is that a reproach?”
“No. I think it’s good. Why should anyone hover around their parents?”
She had looked at me suspiciously, like she used to many years before, when she was still little. She didn’t believe me. But I meant it just as I said it. There’s nothing for her here, and I don’t try to make her feel guilty about that, either.
“We can meet every couple of years in Malyschi,” I said. “Or whenever you come. As long as I live.”
I knew she didn’t have a lot of vacation days. And when she took them she didn’t need to spend them here. And back then flights were still really expensive, far more expensive than they are now.
There was one thing we didn’t talk about. When something is particularly important, you don’t talk about it. Irina has a daughter, and I have a granddaughter, who goes by the very pretty name of Laura. No girls are named Laura around here, only my granddaughter who I have never seen. When I went back to the village, Laura had just turned one. When I went back home, I knew I would never see her.
Grandchildren always used to leave the cities during their summer breaks and stay out in the country with their grandparents. The school holidays were long, three hot summer months, and the parents in the cities didn’t have such long vacations. It was the same in our village, from June until August city kids ran around and in no time at all they had sunburned faces, bleached hair, and dirt-crusted feet. They went together into the woods to pick berries, and they swam in the river. Noisy as a flock of birds they went up and down the main road, stealing apples and wrestling in the muck.
When they got too wild, we sent them out into the fields to collect potato bugs, which threatened our crops. They would pick them off the plants by the bucket-load and then burn them. I can still hear the sound of all the shells popping in the fire. We really miss the little thieves now — the world’s never seen a plague of potato bugs like the one we’ve had since the reactor.
Everyone in Tschernowo knew that I was a nurse’s assistant. I was always called when children had broken something or had abdominal pain that wouldn’t stop. Once a boy had eaten too many unripe plums. The fibers caused a blockage in his gut. He was pale and writhing around on the floor, and I told them to get him to the hospital immediately, and the boy was saved by an emergency operation. There was one with appendicitis and another who turned out to be allergic to a bee sting.
I liked the children, with their fidgety feet, scratched-up arms, and high-pitched voices. If there’s anything I miss these days it’s them. Those of us who live in Tschernowo these days don’t have any grandchildren. Or if we do we never see them. Except maybe in a photo. My walls are covered with pictures of Laura. Irina sends me new ones in almost every letter.
It probably wouldn’t take Laura long to become a carefree summer holiday child. If everything were like before. Though it’s hard for me to imagine it. In her baby pictures she had a serious little face, and I wondered what sort of thoughts lived in her head to project such darkness from her eyes. She never wore bows or barrettes in her hair. Even as a baby she didn’t smile.
In the most recent photos she has long legs and hair that’s almost white. She still looks very serious. She’s never written to me. Her father is German. Irina promised me a wedding photo — one of the few promises she hasn’t kept. She always sends greetings from him. I collect all the letters from Germany in a box in my dresser.
I never ask Irina whether Laura is healthy. I never ask about Irina’s own health, either. If there’s one thing I’m afraid of, it’s the answer to that question. So I just pray for them, even though I don’t believe there’s anyone who listens to my prayers.
Irina always asks about my health. When we see each other — every two years — the first thing she always asks about is my blood counts. As if I have any idea. She asks about my blood pressure and whether I’ve had a breast cancer scan.
“My dear girl,” I say, “look at me. Do you see how old I am? And I made it this far without vitamins or operations or checkups. If something bad manages to worm its way into me now, I will leave it be. I don’t want anybody touching me or sticking needles in me, and that much I have earned.”
Irina shakes her head. She knows that I’m right but she can’t escape her surgeon’s mind-set. At her age I thought the same way. And the way I was at her age, I would have picked a huge fight with the me of today.
When I look at our village, I don’t feel as if it’s nothing but a collection of living corpses running around. Some people won’t last long, it’s true, but the reactor alone isn’t to blame for that. There’s not many of us, you can count us all on two hands. Five or seven years ago there were more of us, when all at one time a dozen people followed my example and moved back to Tschernowo. We’ve buried a few of them in the meantime. Others are like the spiders, resilient even if their webs are a bit erratic.
Marja for instance is a little crazy with her goat and her rooster, which is simmering so nicely in my pot. Unlike me, Marja knows her blood pressure exactly because she takes it three times a day. If it’s too high she gulps down a pill. If it’s too low she gulps down a different pill. That way she always has something to do. But she’s bored anyway.
She has a medicine cabinet that could kill the entire village. She restocks it regularly in Malyschi. She takes antibiotics for a cold or diarrhea. I tell her she shouldn’t take them, that they actually do more damage than good, but she doesn’t listen. I’m too healthy, she says, I wouldn’t understand. And it’s true, I can’t remember the last time I had a cold.
The aroma of the chicken broth fills my whole house and wafts out the window. I pull the rooster out of the pot and lay it on a plate to cool. The cat brays and I raise a cautionary finger at her. I fish out the vegetables, too, they’ve already lent the broth their flavor and now they’re just limp. I wrap them in an old newspaper and take the bundle out to the compost pile. There are pumpkins growing on my compost pile, in the fall I’ll harvest them and pass them out to people in the village, otherwise I’ll have to eat gruel with pumpkin all winter.
I pour the broth through a sieve into a second pot. A thousand fatty golden eyes peer up at me from the new pot. I read in a newspaper that you should skim off the fat. But I disagree. If you want to live, you have to eat fat. You have to eat sugar once in a while, too, and first and foremost lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. In summer I eat cucumber and tomato salad almost every day. And herbs by the bunch, they grow thick and green in my garden — dill, chives, parsley, basil, rosemary.
The meat isn’t too hot anymore, I can touch it with my fingers. I carefully remove it from the bones and put it in a bowl. I used to cut it up into small pieces for my children and make sure I divided it evenly between them. Even though Alexej was just eighteen months younger than Irina, he was a skinny little fellow, and I was sometimes tempted to save the best bits for him.
We ate a lot of chicken soup because there were a lot of chickens in Tschernowo. I made borscht and schi and solyanka from the broth. It was never boring. I can picture Irina cutting meat into small bites for Laura when she was younger. If Laura was here, I would tell her what her mother was like as a child. But Laura is far away and stares out at me from the wall with sad gray eyes.
The day goes by quickly when you have things to do. I tidy up the house. I wash a few pairs of underpants and hang them on the line in the garden. The sun dries and bleaches them, and it takes just two hours before I can fold them and put them away.