Alina Bronsky - Baba Dunja's Last Love

From the squeak of the hammock I can tell that Petrow is still in the land of the living. He is lying there like a giant grasshopper, his dark, bulging eyes looking at me. I approach him and put the fruit in his lap.

He waves a book he has in his hand. “Have you ever read Castaneda, Baba Dunja?”

“No.” I sit down on a chair with a sawed-off back that he keeps in the yard and fold my hands.

“You’re not much of a reader, isn’t that right?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You have never read much, I asked,” he yells, even though I can hear him very well.

“We didn’t have any books at home. Magazines maybe. And reference books, for work. Textbooks during my training. I sent them all to Irina when she began to study medicine.”

“All of them? Don’t you have any left?”

“No, they’re all gone.”

“And what if you have to look something up here?”

“I don’t need to look anything up. Whatever I need I already know.”

“Funny. For me it’s the other way around.” He tosses the book carelessly to the ground. “And don’t you get bored without any books?”

“I don’t get bored. I always have work to do.”

“You are a wonder, Baba Dunja.”

I don’t respond.

“Have you ever heard of the Internet?”

“I’ve heard of it.” And it’s true, I have. “But I’ve never seen it.”

“Where would you. We live in the Stone Age here. Instead we have a ghost telephone that works once a year and nobody can explain why.”

“You can’t explain everything in life.”

“From anyone else that would be an unbearably banal statement.”

That’s how Petrow talks. He’s a man who needs books the way an alcoholic needs liquor. When he doesn’t have enough to read he’s insufferable. And he never has enough. Tschernowo doesn’t have a public library, and he’s already devoured everything here, right down to instruction manuals that are older than he is.

“I wonder if the phone will work when my time is up.”

“We’ll see.”

“Nothing rattles you, does it, Baba Dunja?”

I don’t answer. Laura’s letter is burning against my skin. It’s giving me abrasions. Petrow looks at me intently.

“You sometimes talk about your daughter, but why never about your son?”

“He’s even farther away. In America.”

“America is big. Where exactly?”

“On the coast. It’s warm and oranges grow there.”

“Florida? Or California?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why doesn’t he ever write to you?”

“He sends me a card every Christmas. American Christmas. He doesn’t like women.”

Petrow takes half a second to digest this.

“And because of that you have disowned him?”

“I haven’t disowned anyone. But it’s good that he’s no longer here.”

“Do you miss him?” He looks at me searchingly.

I look down at the ground. The dirt on Petrow’s property is sandier than elsewhere. It absorbs a lot of water. Petrow’s voice is like a rustle in the wind. He talks about all the places he’s been. That he, too, lived in America, in New York and California. That he has traveled the world. That there are people who not only eat no meat but no milk and no eggs, and don’t buy leather shoes because of the animals. These are things that must come out of him again and again, things I already know. He talks like a broken radio receiver. But he is still here, and he bites off half of one of the cucumbers I brought over.

“So you can speak English, then, Petrow?”

“Of course I can speak English.”

Laura’s letter throbs beneath my sleeve.

“And you know other languages, too?”

“Others, too.”

It would be so easy to ask him. It’s not that I have anything against Petrow. I just don’t trust him or anyone else.

“What are you thinking?” he asks, reaching for a peach.

“I’m thinking that you are very different from me.”

“If at some point you are no longer here, Baba Dunja, Tschernowo will disappear.”

“I don’t believe that.”

He spits out the peach pit and follows its trajectory with his eyes.

“Do you think a new peach true will grow out of that?”

“No. Peaches are usually propagated with cuttings.”

“I mean, will this area forget one day what has been done to it? In a hundred or two hundred years? Will people live here and be happy and carefree? Like before?”

“What do you know about what it was like here before?”

It’s possible that he is a little offended. He is the only one here who talks like that, and I don’t think it’s right. It’s the type of thing written in the papers and has nothing to do with those of us here in Tschernowo.

“Thanks for the cucumbers and peaches,” he calls after me when I’ve taken my leave.

I realize that it takes me a few minutes longer than usual to make my way back along the main road. As I pass the garden with the grave I notice that someone has strewn rose petals on top of the newly filled spot.

The grief hits me without warning and, as always, at an inopportune time. The worries concentrate behind my forehead and I can no longer think straight. It’s moments like these that take me back to a life that I no longer have. A talk with Petrow is always a good trigger. He asks questions that go straight to the heart and that you have no answer for.

During the first year in Tschernowo I was asked many questions. The most difficult came from Irina. The most inane from the reporters. They followed me at every turn, wrapped up like astronauts in their radiation suits. Baba Dunja, they shouted agitatedly, what message are you trying to send? How will you survive in a place where there is no longer any life? Will you allow your family to visit you? What are your blood counts? Have you had your thyroid checked? Who will you allow to move into your village?

I don’t know if they ever understood that it isn’t my village. I tried to talk to them, showed them my house and garden, the other houses that were empty then. That, too, was a mistake, I should have turned away from the cameras and closed the door in their faces. But I was raised differently, and that outweighed decades of professional experience as a nurse’s assistant.

“You shouldn’t have told them that you love this land,” Petrow had informed me later. “They will construe it as a provocation, as a purposeful trivialization of the reactor disaster. They will hate you for it, for letting yourself be exploited.”

“Yes, should I have told them that in reality I don’t care whether I die a day sooner or a day later?”

“Maybe you should have,” Petrow said.

Laura’s letter burns furiously at my soul. It’s too much for me to deal with alone. I must find a way to read it.

The next morning I sit on the bench in front of my house with heavy feet and a heavy head. The cat skulks around me. It is steadily gaining weight, I watch as it catches spiders one after the next and giddily destroys their webs. One shouldn’t think that animals are any better than people. The cat jumps onto my shoulder and licks my ear with its rough tongue.

“I don’t like the way you look today,” says Marja. I didn’t hear her coming. She’s standing there with her big body, her broad feet in worn-out slippers, her unkempt golden hair. She’s wearing her greasy bathrobe and beneath that a negligee that’s faded to gray from being washed so many times.

“Why don’t you get dressed?” I ask sternly.

“I am dressed.”

“Other people live here, too. Men. You shouldn’t walk around like that.”