Andrea White: Radiant Girl

“Katya!” my mother called to me. She was a big-boned woman with cinnamon freckles on her shoulders. Her brown hair had reddish highlights that matched my own fiery red hair.

Every year, Mama spent thousands of hours sewing clothes for the wives of the men who ran the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station nearby. Although she wore thick glasses, she had a deep tan from working in our garden, and that kept her looking young. “How was your day?”

“Good,” I answered. Nina Ivanovna, my teacher, was kind. I wouldn’t admit it to my parents for fear of seeming conceited, but I could tell I was the smartest girl in the class.

Mama pointed at the wooden hut she used for a kitchen in the summer to keep our house cooler. This hut, half the size of our regular kitchen, was behind the cottage next to a fenced garden and the outhouse. Nearby, a wooden table sat under an expansive old oak tree. The red barn and a chicken coop were on the other side of our yard.

“Your play clothes are in the hut,” Mama said.

I looked at her, puzzled. Usually I changed in my room before I ate my snack.

Mama’s quick smile reminded me. April 25, 1986, had finally arrived. My eleventh birthday. My parents had asked some relatives, neighbors and friends over for a birthday celebration tonight. “Your Papa and I have a few things to do, and we don’t want you in the house,” she said.

Recently, along with several unexplained trips to Kiev, my parents had peppered me with questions about my favorite color and my favorite flower. Several times my parents’ conversations had stopped abruptly when I entered the room. One particular phrase I had overheard, “teen room,” sent a tingle of delight up my spine.

Although my story begins five summers after my Granny Vera’s death, I still slept in the room that she used to share with me, and from what I’d been told, it looked exactly as it had since long before I was born. Granny Vera’s pot of geraniums still bloomed on the window. Her wooden wardrobe took up one wall. The old mirror, spotted with age, rested on top.

“After you’ve eaten, why don’t you go play in the woods for a while?” my mother asked. Underneath her casual tone, I detected a current of excitement. She was letting me play in the woods on a school day! More proof that my parents’ surprise this year was special.

“O.K., Mama.” I worked to keep my voice equally indifferent. But the moment she disappeared through the carved frame, I pressed my ear to the splintery door.

“Go right,” Papa ordered Mama. “No, a little bit left.” The soft sound of my mother’s tennis shoes chased the clunk of my father’s boots. One of my chores was to clean those boots of Papa’s. They were black and stopped at his mid-calf. Too often, they were caked with the rich mud of our country, the U.S.S.R.

“Ouch!” my mother shouted.

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine which pieces of furniture they were moving. Papa’s big chair? Our small breakfast table? But no picture formed in my mind. I must have giggled because Mama called, “Katya, are you listening?”

Her footsteps pattered towards me. She called through the closed door, “Usually you’re in a hurry to spend an afternoon in the woods.”

Reluctantly, I stood up. My dog, Noisy, had been curled up beside me as I eavesdropped, and now my movement startled him. When he hopped off the front stoop onto the grass, he looked expectantly up at me. Noisy was a feisty terrier with flopped-over ears and a brown and white coat, but I especially loved his nose. It was blue-black and curious about every smell on this earth.

I walked to the summer kitchen with Noisy barking at my heels. Since my mother had a rule— no animals inside —I shut the door in the dog’s face. He howled pitifully.

As always, strings of garlic and dried peppers dangled from the low ceiling. Their pungent odor was familiar, but new smells wafted from the pots bubbling on the iron stove and the stoneware dishes crowded on the counter. I spied a few favorite dishes, garlic buns and the crepes called nalysnyky , but my birthday cake was nowhere in sight.

As Mama had said, a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt lay on the rough wooden table. Gratefully, I slipped off my brown school uniform and dropped it in a pile on the floor.

My mother bustled into the room, stirring the flavors as she moved. “Katya, please, a little neatness,” she scolded me.

I began clumsily folding my dress and the black apron I wore over it.

Mama ladled a bowl of sausage and cabbage soup and set it down in front of me. “How about some bread and hot chocolate?” she asked.

I shook my head and sat down. “No, thank you.” “You should eat more,” my mother complained. “I’m saving room for tonight,” I explained. “Did you make a chocolate cake?”

“Did you ask me for a chocolate cake?”

“You know I did.”

“Well, I don’t know….” Her voice trailed off in a maddening way.

She was probably teasing, but I couldn’t be sure. “Mama….”

With a grin spread across her broad face, she headed for the door. “Now, go. I’ve got quite a bit of work to do,” she said. “But be sure to be back well before dark.”

I waited for her to leave before opening the door for Noisy.

He bounded in, his tail a whirl of motion. Barely had I set my half-full bowl down by the rough-hewn table leg before the dog greedily lapped up the soup. Without further thought, I placed the tongue-cleaned bowl on the counter like I always did and ran out the door.

On my way to the gate, I picked up a tan straw basket that leaned against the vine-covered garden fence. By June, the fields would be covered with poppies, daisies, forget-me-nots and cornflowers, but April was probably too early for wildflowers. Still, maybe I’d get lucky.

As I passed by my neighbors’ wooden cottages, Noisy trotted at my side. Although each of them had its own personality, I thought of these homes collectively as the Ancients. Like our own cottage, they were squat structures, a few with thick straw roofs, most with peeling paint, all with a fenced area for cows, goats, chickens or pigs. Bicycles, motorcycles and scooters, alongside a few carts and horses, were parked nearby. On laundry lines, hand-washed shirts and patched trousers flapped in the breeze. Against the backdrop of the tall trees, the Ancients looked timeless.

When the lane dead-ended into the woods, I started down a dirt trail made by the elk and deer. Mama and I used these trails on our hunts for mushrooms and berries, and Papa and I followed them on our weekend hunting and fishing trips. Unless it was the dead of the Ukrainian winter, we counted it an unlucky Sunday when he didn’t have boar, deer, rabbit, or trout for dinner along with seasonal gifts from the forest like mushrooms, wild strawberries and dandelions.

I don’t know how to explain what always happened to me on my visits to the forest. I forgot all about the long division we were reviewing in school and about Sergei Rudko, a boy in my class, who had a newfound interest in me. Today, I forgot my excitement over my parents’ surprise. I even forgot that it was my birthday.

My head filled with the chirping of the doves, magpies, and blackbirds, the swish of the wind, the swaying of the grass. My body grew lighter, my feet surer, my eyes quicker. A woven roof of tree branches covered my head, and the moist forest air enveloped me. By the time I rounded the first bend in the path, I had ceased to be Katya Dubko and had become a child of the forest. My playmates, the wood nymphs and water sprites, were creatures that no one but Granny Vera and I could ever see.