I scrub the dirtied stockpot with sand, rinse it with well water, and leave it, too, to dry in the sun. I have to take a break at some point, and I sit down on the bench in front of the house with a newspaper. I get the papers from Marja. She found them in her house when she moved in. The single woman who used to live there had read a lot of papers, including the good women’s papers: Factory Woman and Woman Farmer, every issue. Bundles of them, each bound with twine, were stacked under the bed and in the toolshed. Marja gave them all to me. I read them whenever I have time during the day and also before I fall asleep at night.
In the issue of Woman Farmer I open are recipes using sorrel, a sewing pattern, a short love story set on a collective farm, and a disquisition on the theme Why women shouldn’t wear pants in their free time. It’s from February 1986.
I pour half of the soup into a smaller pot and look around for a top that will fit it. Holding it by the handles, I carry it over to Marja’s. I have to suddenly blink as I pass the fence because Konstantin’s ghost is sitting there swaying in the wind. I nod at him and he answers by flapping his wings wildly.
Cats are crowded in front of Marja’s house, and no wonder: it smells like valerian inside. Marja is a large woman, particularly in width. She’s sitting in armchair and her body arches over the backrest. Her gaze is fixed on the TV, which is equipped with two antennas. The screen is black.
“What’s on today?” I ask and put the pot on the kitchen table.
“Nothing but shit,” says Marja. “Same as always.”
That’s why I never turn on my television. I dust it off once in a while and the cat likes to sleep on top of it, on a doily. On my last visit to Malyschi I saw in a shopwindow that there are now TVs you can hang on the wall like a painting. Marja’s by contrast is like a potbellied chest, and it takes up half the room.
“What did you bring?” She doesn’t turn toward me because it’s difficult when you’re wedged into a chair the way she is.
“The soup,” I say. “Your share.”
She immediately starts to cry and the goat, which is lying in Marja’s bed, adds a baleful “meeeeeh.”
When I get out a bowl, I can’t help but notice that Marja has really let things get out of hand lately.
Her dishes are covered with a fatty film, which tells me she’s scrimping on soap. The sink is stopped up and moldy. And this woman says I should clear out the spiderwebs in my place. There’s a pile of colorful pills on the table.
“Marja,” I say sternly, “tell me, what’s going on?”
She waves my question off with one hand and with the other rummages around between her breasts. From between various layers of unwashed clothing, she pulls out a photo and hands it to me.
I push my glasses up to my forehead and hold the picture closer to my face. It’s a black-and-white photo of a couple: a girl in a white wedding dress with a long train, and a fellow with broad shoulders and a low forehead in a black suit. The girl is heartbreakingly beautifuclass="underline" big eyes beneath thick lashes and a mouth that promises sweet kisses. She looks fragile in the slightly too big dress that’s not been fitted quite right. And although the contrast couldn’t be more stark, I recognize immediately that the girl is Marja.
“That’s your Alexander?” I ask.
And Marja cries more and says that she got married fifty-one years ago today.
I should have realized that Marja isn’t just lazy and messy. She’s lazy and messy because she’s suffering from depression. Back when I was a nurse’s assistant nobody had depression and when people killed themselves you called them insane, unless it was out of love. Later on I read in a newspaper that there was such a thing as depression, and I asked Irina about it on her last visit.
She looked at me as if she didn’t want to answer at first. She wanted to know why I was asking, like it was some kind of state secret.
I told her I just wanted to know if there was anything to it. And Irina said in Germany it’s very widespread, practically like a stomach bug.
And when I look at Marja, I think maybe it sloshed across the border at some stage. Perhaps if she’d moved back to Tschernowo earlier, she could have avoided it — if there’s one thing that can’t harm us here, it was the epidemics that sweep through the rest of the world.
Marja has told me a lot about her Alexander. Most importantly, that he beat the living daylights out of her and at some point while in a drunken stupor got run over by a tractor. She took care of him for a while after that, and he continued to curse her and to throw his cane — and whatever other heavy objects he could grab — at her from bed. A few days before the reactor he threw a radio at her and managed to hit her. The radio was totally destroyed, which made Marja so upset that she left with the liquidators and a sack of clothes without ever turning around to look at Alexander. He was discovered only after he was dead, and now she’s reproaching herself and painting a rosy picture of her past.
I’m of only one mind about that sort of thing: when two adults live together but have no children, they can just as well live apart. That’s not a marriage, that’s just a lark.
But I keep my opinion to myself.
I thoroughly wash two of Marja’s bowls and dry them with a dish towel that turns out to be a piece of curtain. Marja mutters to herself that I’m wasting her water and that she’s too weak to go to the well. I click my tongue, she needs to pipe down.
She wrenches herself out of the armchair and comes to the table. Her body is massive and the rickety dining chair groans beneath her backside. It’s a mystery how someone can get so fat in a village where you have to either grow all your food or drag it all laboriously home from town.
I shove a bowl of chicken soup over to her.
As she takes the spoon in her hand, dunks it in the golden broth, and guides it to her lips, I suddenly see it: Marja as a young bride with a fear of the future flickering in her eyes. Her former beauty hasn’t completely disappeared, it’s still here in the room like a ghost. How much easier I’ve had it my entire life: never being beautiful means never being afraid of losing your beauty. Only my feet drove men wild, and now I can’t even cut my toenails. Lately Marja has helped me do it.
The goat jumps out of Marja’s bed and comes over to us at the table. It puts its head on Marja’s lap and peers over at me. I take a mouthful of soup, which is clear and salty like tears.
And I think to myself that Marja should never have come here. It’s not the radiation. It’s the peace and quiet that is so bad for her. Marja belongs in the city, where she can quarrel with the baker every morning. Since nobody here has any desire to fight with her, she’s lost her sense of self and just sits around stewing, and she’s wilting as a result.
There are about thirty houses lining our main road. Not even half of them are inhabited. Everyone knows everyone else, everyone knows where the others are from, and I suspect everyone could tell you what time of day his or her neighbors go to the bathroom and how often they turn over in their sleep. Which doesn’t mean that everyone here spends time together. People who move back to Tschernowo have no desire for companionship.
Money is also a factor. There are places available in Malyschi, but the gray five-story buildings from the Khrushchev era have leaky pipes and thin, moldy walls. Instead of gardens there are courtyards with a rusty swing, the remains of an old slide, and a row of never-emptied garbage barrels. Anyone who wants to plant tomatoes needs a dacha outside of town, to which an overly crowded bus goes once a day. I would have to have rented, and my pension would have only been enough to cover living with strangers as a lodger. And the room would have been tiny.