I exhale.
He takes the exact change from my hand. The transit authority hasn’t raised the fare for thirty years. You couldn’t even get a glass of water for this amount in Malyschi anymore. It’s fine by me, my pension hasn’t gone up at all either.
I sit in the front so I can chat with Boris. He has a big belly and slumped shoulders, and there’s something in his face that makes me nervous. When I was a nurse’s assistant I was often called to men like him who were lying next to a conveyor belt or in a garage with cardiac arrest.
We have more than an hour’s ride together. The road is bumpy, gravel shoots out from under the tires as they labor along the unpaved surface. The little bus shakes and the soccer team pendant hanging from Boris’s mirror rocks back and forth.
I look out the window, hawks circle above the fields, between the trees I see a deer and a rabbit. The animals seem to act as if they discovered the area for themselves. We pass two abandoned villages on the way to the city, a cat sitting on the main street of one, licking its paw.
Boris tells me what he’s seen on television. Lots of politics in the Ukraine, in Russia, and in America. I don’t pay too close attention. Politics are important, of course, but at the end of the day, if you want to eat mashed potatoes it’s up to you to put manure on the potato plants.
The important thing is that there’s no war. But our president will see to that soon enough. Sometimes I feel queasy about the fact that Irina now has a German passport.
The jerking of the bus makes my old bones rattle, and I have the impression that one can hear them clanking against each other. I doze off now and then. When I open my eyes we are in the middle of the city. Boris steers his way through the rust buckets at the bus station to a parking spot at the rear.
The noise in Malyschi seems to get more deafening all the time. Despite the fact that there are fewer and fewer people on the streets, even here at the bus station there are at most a half dozen bus drivers and twenty passengers waiting in various lines. But they are all making a racket. I’m not used to it anymore.
My objectives are set. First I’ll go to the bank where Irina opened an account for me into which my pension gets paid. Even though I can’t buy anything at home, I withdraw it all because life has taught us not to trust the banks.
There are machines in the foyer of the bank. A girl with a scarf asks if I need help. I don’t need help, I just need my money, and not from a machine but from a person at a counter. So I go into the main room. While I’m waiting, an icy wind blows up my calf and I’m happy about my wool stockings. When finally it’s my turn, I mention the chilliness. The girl at the counter, who smells of perfume and chewing gum, says proudly that they have an air conditioner now. She looks as if she has never in her life had a potato bug on her hand. I see the goose bumps in her décolleté and warn her that she will catch a cold. She says she’s had a cold for ages and shoves me the money from my pension, which I count and then divide into two halves and put into the cups of my bra.
Every time I pick up my pension I have an intense desire to buy something for Irina, Alexej, and Laura. When Laura was first born I sent her things, teething rings, rattles, leggings, until I realized that nobody needs that stuff. There are nicer things in Germany anyway. Maybe the tomatoes are bigger here, but the rompers are better there.
That’s why I stopped buying useless things and instead put all my money in my old tea caddy. When Laura is eighteen, and that will be very soon, I will give it all to Irina, except for a reserve fund for my funeral. I will ask Irina to change the money into marks or dollars and put it into Laura’s piggy bank. Laura is the youngest member of our family and young people need money.
Irina always corrects me, tells me that the mark no longer exists, but I can never remember what they have instead.
Next I go to the post office and on the way I pass the market. I indulge myself with a break, go into the market hall, which smells of fish and rotten vegetables, and lean against a stand selling crullers. The scents drifting by bother my nose. I eat a piece of cucumber from my garden.
The vendor looks down at me from the stand and I realize that it bothers him when I stand in front of his stand and eat something I’ve brought with me. It’s impolite of me. I reach for my bag and apologize to him. He just throws his hand up and continues to stare at me. Then he asks me if I am Baba Dunja from the death zone.
I could ask him where it is he thinks he is right here. But I don’t. If he feels safe here behind his greasy rings then let him indulge himself. Not to mention that I’m flabbergasted he knows me. I can’t get used to it.
He hands me a baked good in oily paper. “On the house,” he says. I don’t want to offend him and take it even though I know that so much as a bite would ruin my pancreas.
“Do we know one another?” I ask and act as if I’m going to take a bite. When I was a nurse’s assistant lots of people knew me, even in the neighboring villages. They always came to me when something was wrong. But in Malyschi they had their own doctors and nurses even back then. Maybe this man is from one of the villages. I have a good memory, but it contains only the faces of the children.
I ask him who he is.
He says I wouldn’t know him but that everyone here knows me because they all talk about me. And the other returnees.
He turns and rummages in a box for a newspaper in order to show me something, but I tell him it’s not necessary. I don’t need to know what somebody said about me or, worse, wrote about me. In the past few years reporters have come again and again and taken photos of our gardens and asked us questions.
“I have to get going,” I say and leave the market hall. The cruller I wrap more tightly in the paper and then in a napkin from my basket. Then I stow it in the basket. Marja will be pleased.
There’s a big sign at the post office saying it’s closed for lunch. I look at the clock. It’s a bad sign if they are already on lunch break shortly before eleven, they’re going to be a while. I go to the park, sit on a bench, and catch my breath. Walking on asphalt is poison for your joints, and the air is also polluted.
The park might as well be a cemetery, there’s just one young couple hugging on the lawn. I sit with my back to them so as not to make them feel bashful, and fan air on myself with a magazine I’ve just bought for Marja at a kiosk. It’s one of those foreign magazines that now has a Russian edition. The pages glisten, there are lots of pictures of thin women in sumptuous clothing. At the back are recipes, but they’re mind-boggling to me. I don’t know what tahini is and I’ve never even heard of risotto. I only know cream of rice with apples, maybe risotto is a foreign word for that.
Once I’ve rested sufficiently, I’m on my way again. I pass the time by going shopping. I buy cream that won’t spoil in the heat, cheese, a ballpoint pen, and notepaper with roses on it. I want to write to Laura. I buy salt and five lemons. I see plastic containers with colorless mushrooms which are marked “imported champignons,” the word “imported” is in block letters and underlined.
I buy three bananas and eat one straightaway. Bananas are baubles for the senses, they’re really too sweet but they are nice to chew on. I tuck the peel into my basket until I come across a garbage bin.
At the pharmacy I look at the list of medicines Marja has given me and grab this one or that one from the shelves. The ones I regard as nonsense I don’t buy. Then my gaze falls on a pallet of pain relievers and I buy a huge container just to be safe.
My basket is filling up. I haven’t gotten much for myself. That’s good because it means more money is left over for Laura. I go back to the post office and see that the sign is gone.