She comes into the kitchen and says reproachfully to Olena, “Viktor is hungry,” when she means, “I’m hungry.”
“Da, da!” Olena says, to send Matushka back to the living room.
She opens the freezer above the refrigerator as if about to take out something. She holds the letter from Dedushka to the light to read it.
Her face chills.
A doctor writes to tell Olena Dedushka is no more. Something about a gas connection that Dedushka never got because a politician wanted the connection for his chauffeur. Poor Dedushka must have died of the cold last month — and Olena was not with him.
Olena pulls the freezer door toward her like a shield, holds the handle to keep from falling. Again she reads the letter. And again.
Oh, Dedushka, you who were more father than my father! I am truly an orphan now. You — keeper of memories, witness of my childhood — are lost to me. Forgive me for leaving you.
Now no one of her blood is left anywhere in the former Soviet Union.
• • •
August 1994
Matushka is trying her glass of Stoli with a drop of Tabasco because she cannot find Stoli Pertsovka in the local stores. What a waste of good vodka! But it keeps her sitting before the TV, waiting for Viktor to return from the lab and Olena to serve her holupki. Olena takes her time stuffing beef, rice and tomato filling into boiled cabbage leaves so she doesn’t have to sit beside Matushka on the sofa or on Galina’s floor cushion.
These days, thanks to Jewish Social Services, Matushka’s been retiring to her room at night smiling. “S bogom!” she says, and, coming out in the morning, “Shalom.”
“You know the accident,” Olena overheard her tell Galina. “It happened because of the communist atheism. They fell away from Yahweh.”
What a thing to tell a child. And Galina is still a child, even if she is almost fifteen.
And Matushka has begun opening the door to strangers who offer to replace her television-induced confusion with their certainty — Jehovah’s Witnesses, Evangelical Christians. This morning, she accosted Olena as she was leaving for work and made her listen to a passage from the book of Revelation. “The Third Angel blew his trumpet and a huge star fell on a third of all rivers and springs; this was the star called wormwood, and a third of all water turned to bitter wormwood so that many people died from drinking it.”
And Chernobyl means wormwood, she told Olena, as if Olena didn’t know.
Olena said, “I d idn’t know Jews believe in the book of Revelation.”
And left for work.
Always, Matushka’s logic leads back to Olena; Viktor is preabsolved by love. But what if it is Olena’s fault — Chernobyl is her fault? Yet many who believed in God and prayed surreptitiously died there and Olena survives. Which monster God allowed that?
She is still thinking about this when Viktor comes home. Dinner takes a long time now his thyroid is so enlarged. He chews and chews. Suddenly, he says to no one in particular, “What percentage of Russians do you think trust their leaders?”
For the first time in Olena’s life, the anger dwelling blue-hot in the crater within her shouts, “What per cent? How should I know? Is there no book or magazine in English that can answer your question? Did I just come back from Russia after interviewing every single Russian? Believe me, I don’t know! And I don’t know how many Ukrainians trust their leaders either, or Belorussians, or Lithuanians, or Americans. And I don’t know how many cockroaches fried at Chernobyl, either.”
Matushka looks shocked, Viktor merely surprised. He chews more. Swallows.
“Americans,” he says in a low voice, as if she hadn’t spoken, “think leaders and country and people are all the same — heh!”
Matushka’s eyelids flex like tiny bows releasing poison arrows at Olena. Then she turns back to Viktor. Her tone softens and changes to coaxing. Olena too would like to feed Viktor more, but Matushka’s solicitousness now stands in her way.
It’s good that she pushes him to eat. Everything tastes of lead to him. He’s always not hungry, just tired. So very tired.
Finally, Matushka waves to Olena to clear away his half-eaten meal.
“They trust too much,” says Viktor. “Just as we did.”
Were people too trusting, too accepting? Chernobyl may not be Olena’s fault, but, like Viktor, she too failed to speak. Should she have told someone about the many certificates of exemption, the boron control rods, recommended but never ordered, never installed? Rivka, perhaps?
Why would anyone have listened to her, what would she know about too-few control rods? She didn’t want Galina to lose her father, perhaps grow up in a camp as her grandmother did.
Oh, that’s only partly true.
Admit it now: Olena had not wanted to lose her nice airy apartment, Viktor’s motorcycle, the possibility of trips to the Black Sea. After Viktor had worked for ten years, she could have shopped at the kashtan for clothes for Galina, French perfumes and Kashmiri carpets. And should she have been willing to lose all these present and future advantages just to be right? She had the habit of obedience, unlike her mother, and by speaking she could have lost her Viktor.
Maybe Olena is losing Viktor, but if ever she could persuade herself to believe in a miracle it might be now — Viktor has survived so long, when so many of his former comrades and thousands of the liquidators have not.
Olena begins washing the dishes.
“Letter from Anatoli,” says Viktor. He gives it to Matushka to read aloud. Olena tries not to clink the plates so she can hear.
Anatoli writes to say that without defence contracts, many people have jobs but no pay. Even engineers. First he considered joining the army but heard even they are reducing pay. So now he and Laima have voluntarily given up the apartment allotted to them in Kyiv and moved to Slavutich. They must have stopped counting their rem exposure.
“The sarcophagus around Unit 4 must be tended forever,” he says, “or there could be another explosion.”
And he hopes that his pay will continue.
“No one is safe here, but is anyone or any place in the world safe now?” Still, he says, there is absolutely no truth to the Greenpeace report that there have been sixty thousand additional deaths in Russia from the accident. And it is not true that there will be ninety-three thousand cancers — Viktor’s cancer is caused by food carcinogens in the USA. And how can alarmists say there will be another hundred and forty thousand deaths in Ukraine and Belarus from Chernobyl, when Anatoli and Laima are still alive? And it is all Western propaganda that four to six million people were affected — Viktor should explain this to Americans.
A clipping included in his letter quotes an official study. “Only fifty-six people have died,” it says. “There is no evidence of hereditary defects.”
If it hadn’t been for Matushka, perhaps I could have had two, maybe even three children.
But later that night, when Olena is putting Anatoli’s clipping in a special folder for Galina, so she will not worry a few years from now, her hand trembles.
Anatoli and Laima have been married ten years now, but Laima has not had even one child. No child he has mentioned. Can he be sterile from radioactivity or …
No evidence, he said. No evidence of hereditary defects.
July 1995
At Viktor’s funeral, Olena sits behind Matushka and Galina as the rabbi intones the Kaddish. She tries to believe the words are not only for Viktor but also for Dedushka.
Olena looks at her clasped hands and does not speak as people around her say, “May His great name be blessed forever and to all eternity.” It’s good of them to come — they didn’t know Viktor very long.
Matushka accepts condolences from the rabbi and her friends from the synagogue as if only she were bereaved. It’s a short walk to the cemetery afterwards, and Matushka takes Galina’s arm, sniffing into her handkerchief as she recounts a story Olena has never heard — something about Viktor winning a chess match when he was six y
ears old. When Olena draws closer, trying to hear, Matushka and Galina seem to walk faster.
Members of the synagogue and the funeral director are kinder — a sad-eyed gentleman with a carnation in his buttonhole has handed Olena two roses. One to toss on Viktor’s wooden casket as they lower him into the soil, one to press between Taras Schevchenko poems.
That night, Viktor is not with Olena when she dreams Galina is in labour and she must take her daughter to the same doctor in Moscow. Viktor is not with Olena when she dreams she cannot reach that doctor, so Galina gives birth to a fish with human fingers and toes.
The wind from the Lenin reactor at Chernobyl has taken Viktor from Olena though they fled to the other side of the planet.
June - July 2000
Rose porcelina, pink tulip, hot pink mini carnations, white alstromeria, lavender lisianthus, pompons, galaxleaf, asters, geranium, ivy and limonium — the flowers clasped in Galina’s hands dazzle Olena, stab at the root of memory. She forgets she is moving down aisles in a humid cavelike store, selecting this cascade of fragrance, and returns to the day she carried her own bouquet.
How Viktor would have loved this sunny, balmy June! How many moments he has missed, moments he could have shared with Olena and Galina — and yes, Matushka. Proud moments when Kasparov triumphed over Deep Blue “for mankind,” or when Ukrainian teams competed in Atlanta. He missed the amazing moment when an American astronaut wore a Russian spacesuit to spacewalk from the space station Mir.
And this.
Could Viktor — could Olena — ever imagine that in the year 2000 her little mushroom, her little girl from Ukraine who just a few years ago watched MTV and sang Spice Girl songs would marry a man from America, in America? A man whose family is Italian and German? When Olena met Galina’s fiancé, she told him his great-grandfather and Dedushka must have fought each other in Europe, and they laughed.
Yes, everyone laughed!
Matushka helped Galina decide on a wedding hall and select the dinner menu — as if she has cooked even one dish for herself in America.
Olena has helped Galina choose, order and send invitations. And now these flowers.
Galina insists on paying with her own money, hard-earned from the accounting firm. She did the same for her bridal gown, when Olena could have sewn her one.
“Aw, Mom,” she says, “don’t worry. I put it on my credit card. More money will come.”
Olena says, “Only Americans think like that.”
“We’re American now.”
The door of the flower shop closes with a sigh. Olena blinks in the sunshine.
“I’ll make my own dress, then,” she says.
“Can you still sew?” Galina asks, as if sewing is something Olena’s hands should by now have decently forgotten. She would rather Olena forget all about Ukraine and Chernobyl and that Galina once traded haircuts for English and mathematics lessons. And that she once said she would study public health.
“Yes, of course.” Olena squares her shoulders and looks both ways before crossing the street to the bus stop.
She will buy the fabric today. She will sew a drop-waist dress of azure satin with a layer of lemon net. The old and new colours of Ukraine, from before and after the unthinkable. Two colours that must represent the thousand blues and thousand yellows of her old country. She will add a little embroidery — on the yoke, not on the buttons.
Olena and Galina are sitting on the bed in Olena’s bedroom. From the living room, Olena can hear the antics of guests on the Jerry Springer show — Matushka now finds them more understandable than Jehovah’s Witnesses or Evangelicals.
“Can’t you try to be friends with Grandma for one day? My wedding day? Make it a present to me?” says Galina.
Olena tells Galina she would give her many presents, but not this one. That she would give Galina her life if she needed it, but not this.
Galina strokes Olena’s hair, takes her hand and speaks to her in Ukrainian. “Why, why do you hate Grandma so much? She can be difficult but” — she looks into Olena’s eyes — “what did she do to you?”
Words stop in Olena’s throat, her tongue twists as if she is speaking English. If Olena and Matushka die like Viktor, who will Galina have? No one. Because of what Matushka did. How, how to explain?
“Please believe me …” she begins. And she tells Galina the story of the button. She thinks Galina is old enough to understand. She adds explanations — that in Moscow in 1980 she could not tell a husband he should even hold a baby much less put it on the pot. That she could not say, as Galina says to her fiancé with a sparkle in her voice, “I’ll let you make dinner tonight” or “Why don’t we make a reservation?”
“That’s it?” Galina’s hand slips from Olena’s. “All this is about a button?”
Olena’s heart shrinks to the size of a teaspoon. She doesn’t believe it will start up again. Blood has flooded backward, something will explode.
A breath has to be taken, then another.
The lifeline of this moment runs all the way back through Chernobyl and before, when events might have turned out differently. If Galina cannot understand about the button, how will she understand about the doctor, Olena’s soiled green dress, the movie actor Raj Kapoor, who smiled like Viktor?
“How many years ago did this happen?”
“You were about a year old,” says Olena.
“And that’s all?” says Galina. In English.
Does she mean is that all that happened?
“Many such things happened,” says Olena. “You were here, every day. You saw.”
“Small things,” says Galina. “Didn’t you always tell me I shouldn’t hold grudges over small things?”
Should Olena tell Galina more? Her inside voice is saying Oh no, oh no. Speak no further or you’ll lose Galina.
One second of decision — yes, no?
The second shivers, then flees into never. Olena is keeper of the memory of her older daughter. She will carry that bitter memory always, like wormwood at her core.
But no one, not even her Galina, can command her love.
After her wedding Galina will go with her man from America. And then? Olena and Matushka will live together? Maybe Olena will find a second job, mopping floors in a newspaper office. Maybe Olena will move to another city or Israel and leave Matushka in a home.
Who will stop her? God? She is not afraid of God.
But Viktor’s face comes before her — Viktor wearing his you-know-you-love-me look. Love is a trap, a noose. A tether running from Olena’s ankle to his grave.
She can’t leave old Matushka all alone.
“You’re right,” she says, and laughs. “It was only a button. You deserve the most beautiful wedding, where everyone who comes is happy for you and cares about nothing but your joy. And believe me, little mushroom, Matushka and I will be friends.”
For that day.
Naina
Naina has carried her baby inside her so long she cannot remember the day her fullness began. Dr. Johnson was just out of medical school then, apple-cheeked, without her streak of grey — Naina remembers her, cold disc of the stethoscope pressed to Naina’s mounding stomach, listening, shaking a very solemn head. “Any day now.”
And there was the due date, Naina’s heels wide apart in stirrups. She remembers every moment of excruciating pain from pushing, pushing, and nothing coming out, not even blood. That she remembers. Then the unwilled dilation, more pushing, more pushing. The brown balloon of her stomach trembling as her baby retreated from light.
She refused the knife that would have sliced from navel to her mound of spiky black hair. Refused so loudly, signing papers, more papers, and no one from the family with her. She remembers her own voice, fourteen years younger, still imitating Asha Bhonsle’s soprano because that’s all Daddyji ever played on the tape recorder, screaming, “Leave her. When she’s ready, she’ll come,” the pitying whispers of nurses, all the young doctors crowding about her bed, discussing h
er case.
“I am not a case,” she screamed. “Please, please go away.”
Naina knew it was a girl from the very beginning. Dr. Johnson didn’t have to show her the pictures — pieces of sky collaged to black plastic. Only a girl would be so comfortable in her mother’s womb that coming out and needing to grow would spoil her world. By then Naina had talked to the baby for so many months — now so many years — that if the baby hadn’t been a girl before she took residence in Naina’s womb, she surely became one.
Dr. Johnson confirmed it every month, and by now she uses the same words she used last month, last year. “Yes, I can hear her; her heartbeat is regular. Here” — she clips an ultrasound to the light box on the wall — “see where her toes curl, and look at her hands! Still so tiny after fourteen years.”
Also, every month for the past two years, Dr. Johnson says, “That Chinese woman called again to ask if you want her help.” This woman swears she’s not connected to Guinness or the Globe or Star or National Enquirer, but that’s where she read about Naina. She calls herself Dr. Chi and says she was a sinseh doctor, but she’s repeating her whole medical degree and training so she can practise in Canada. “Shall I tell her you’ll think about it?”
By now all the tabloids have written their pieces, had their say. The journals of medical research have taken note, moved on to the next freak show. They still follow up, once in a while, despite Naina’s unlisted phone number.
Naina turns wide eyes upon Dr. Johnson, and the bindi above them is a third eye that has become wary of the word “help.” “My baby will come when she is ready,” she says, as she has said every month.
Dr. Johnson paces. “What is it in your genetic makeup
— what is preserving this baby?” Her tone says Naina is being stubborn, refusing to provide critical information. “All the specialists I’ve referred you to, all the psychotherapists … I can’t think what to do next.”
Naina opens her mouth. Dr. Johnson breaks in. “I won’t override your wishes, Naina. Unless I think the child is at risk — amazing that all the tests show no danger there. Just amazing. Well, if it’s not hurting you or hurting the baby, I suppose there’s no harm. Two can live as cheaply as one. But upon my word, it’s a strange phenomenon!”