Irene Zabytko: The Sky Unwashed

Marusia’s head felt light, and the sun’s rays were warm and comforting on her face. She remembered a lullaby her mother had taught her a long time ago. Lazorska’s voice was off key and lower than Marusia’s, but she hummed along as she tried to pick up the melody. Marusia’s eyes misted, and she blew her nose into a handkerchief she had tucked in her dress pocket.

“Sometimes, I miss my mother so much,” she confessed, thinking that she would sing the song to her grandchildren later that night.

“She was a good woman,” Slavka Lazorska said. “Bless her soul.”

Marusia sighed and, measuring the sun’s shadow on the grass beneath their feet, reckoned that she had had the bread in for about the right amount of time. She peeked into the clay oven and took the loaf out carefully with a long, flat wooden shovel.

“Oh, what beautiful bread,” whispered Slavka Lazorska, as if the loaf might cave in if her voice were too loud.

Marusia placed the walnut-brown loaf on the picnic table. She was pleased. It was a magnificent korovai , a huge round braided bread decorated with several birds also made of dough, kissing one another. Later, when it cooled, she would place some sprigs of periwinkle and flowers among the birds.

“Yes, it turned out very well.”

“I hope that silly little potato appreciates it,” Lazorska said. She took her turn with the vodka.

“I don’t care,” Marusia said, gladly taking the offered jar. “As long as it’s noticed as much as the bride’s dress.” She spotted a brown skylark flying in circles with a twig in its mouth. On a nearby branch, its mate stood chirping at him. The women watched.

“Look, she’s telling him what to do,” Slavka Lazorska pointed. The male flew back to his mate on the branch, who abruptly took the twig from out of his beak and flew alone to another tree. He followed her to a half-built nest well concealed in the cradle of the higher branches and humbly watched her entwine his meager donation within the delicate bowl of twigs and straw.

Slavka Lazorska laughed. “You see how it is! The females always have to do the work of the males! Even the male birds can’t do anything by themselves, because they don’t know how.”

“That’s the blessed truth!”

Then they sat in idle silence, breathing in the air and the scent of the fresh bread, listening to the low rumbles of a threshing machine in the distance.

Marusia made a small sign of the cross over the bread. “Well, anyway, thank God we’ve made it through another winter.” She shooed away tiny flies lingering over her bread and covered it with a towel. “I wish I could offer you some of this bread.”

“You make one for me for my wedding,” teased Lazorska, who had buried five or so husbands and outlived several more lovers than she cared to admit she remembered.

“I CAN’T HELP it if I have to work later tonight!” Yurko had raised his voice at Zosia. It was Friday morning. Marusia was still in her bed, in the room she shared with Tarasyk and Katia. Only a thin curtain separated it from Zosia and Yurko’s part of the house. The little boy, Tarasyk, was still asleep, his thumb poised on his lower lip. Marusia kissed his curls and brought the goose-down coverlet closer to his chin. Katia was already up and in the kitchen playing with the cat and dog before she was sent off to school.

“You always have to work. You knew about the reception two weeks ago,” Zosia shouted.

“How the hell can I remember something as stupid as somebody’s wedding two weeks ago.”

“Yes, that’s how you are. But six months ago you made a date with your friends to go fishing, and you remember it like your own birthday.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I didn’t have any date to go fishing. The weather just turned to spring a few damn days ago….”

“Right. So like a thief in a palace, off you’ll go next weekend with your drunken, rotten friends on a boat… that you’ll do. But when I want to go somewhere, where there’s a wedding and dancing, and people, you have to work….”

“All right, I’ll go to the damn wedding. I’ll go to the stupid reception. But I have to leave by nine-thirty for the night shift. You can stay all night and dance with every goddamn fool and his brother’til your big feet swell like rockets, and you can do whatever the devil else you want to do. I don’t give a good goddamn….”

“ Oy, yoy, yoy ,” Marusia grumbled out loud so that they would hear her. They can’t go a day without fighting about something stupid, she thought.

Marusia didn’t like to overhear their arguments, but the house was small, only three and a half rooms, built in a circle with the kitchen in the center. Zosia and Yurko’s room was so close to hers that it was hard to ignore the sounds of suppressed rage and anger or of the sporadic lovemaking that in their earlier years together used to always follow their battles. Zosia was usually the more emotional and dramatic of the two, sometimes—when she felt especially wounded or when he ignored her—adding to the venom of her voice by throwing things at Yurko. Yurko was more controlled perhaps only because he was so much older than she. Marusia had been relieved when her son finally married at the elderly age of thirty-five, although, when she first laid eyes on the young Zosia, surly and demanding even then, with her thick makeup and wild yellow hair, she thought to herself, What a prostytutka .

Zosia and Yurko met working together at the electronics section of the nuclear power plant. Yurko was Zosia’s supervisor, and they had become lovers on the long lonely nights when they should have been preoccupied with the instruments on the generators that connected to the turbines of the nuclear reactors. They married when Zosia was pregnant with Katia.

Marusia crawled out of the bed and stiffly put on her sweater over her flannel nightgown. “Good, they stopped,” she said to herself. She knelt on the cold hardwood floor and said her morning prayers, praying especially for Zosia to mend her mean ways and be more myla —quieter and kinder—to Yurko.

Katia skipped into the room. “I fed Myrrko.” Katia giggled. “I gave him all your beautiful bread.”

“Oh you naughty one,” Marusia said, pinning the little honey-haired girl against her and kissing her head. “Would you like some breakfast yourself?”

“Yes.” Katia began to brush Marusia’s unplaited, wavy gray hair. “ Babo? I didn’t really give Myrrko your bread. Just a mouse.”

“Much better, but I was saving that mouse for your dinner, dorohen’ka ,” Marusia said. They both giggled loud enough to awake Tarasyk, who was rubbing his eyes.

“Wake up darling, the birds are singing, the sun is shining,” Marusia sang to Tarasyk, who smiled. It was the same song she always sang for the children in the mornings.

IN THE KITCHEN, Marusia was surprised to find Zosia ironing a dress shirt for Yurko. “So, good morning,” Marusia said. Yurko sat at the veneered wooden table in his T-shirt and his best navy blue striped trousers, drinking his black tea from a tall glass and eating leftover potatoes and sour cream. His rounded shoulders were stooped from worry, and his face was more haggard-looking from the new growth of heavy beard sprinkling his chin.

“So, sonechko , you and Zosia are going to the wedding?” she asked, trying to sound casual.

“Well, Mama, it’s hard to keep anything from you,” Yurko said, slumping further into his chair.

“A regular Cheka agent,” Zosia said, and suppressed a short laugh.

Marusia pursed her lips and ignored them. She turned her attention to preparing kasha for the children. Katia was helping her brother wash at the sink. Bosyi the dog was at his usual place, beneath the table at Yurko’s slippered feet, his tail thumping happily whenever he felt Yurko’s leg twitch. Except to the children, Marusia did not speak again until Zosia noticed the korovai in the larder when she went to fetch some powdered cornstarch which she used to stiffen Yurko’s shirt collar and cuffs. “Oh! Mamo ,” she yelled. “It’s beautiful! The best one you ever made! Yurko, come in and take a look.”