Alina Bronsky - Baba Dunja's Last Love

In addition, we are allowed four multiday visits and six short visits of up to three hours each. It’s a shame that you are so far away and can’t visit me. It’s also too far for Marja. Arkadij signs up for short visits as if he has nothing else to do. We are separated by a glass partition and speak by way of a telephone handset. He can’t say anything mean about anyone though, because if he does the guard who listens in on all conversations will interrupt us immediately. So he reads to me from the magazine Gardening Today . Once we had trouble because the warden mistook a manure schedule for a coded message.

I don’t count the days any more than I did in Tschernowo or anywhere else.

I don’t manage to finish this letter. My hand refuses to cooperate any longer. I try to stretch my fingers but they remain cramped. I look distrustfully on my treasonous appendages, which have never before left me in the lurch, and extricate the pen with the help of the other hand. Then I want to stand up. I realize just in time that I’m not able to, and I remain seated. A fall with a possible broken hip as a consequence is not something I need.

I sit there for what must be half an hour. Maybe more and maybe less. Then I try to call for help, but I’m not able. Slowly my eyes start to close. I know exactly what is happening to me, but the word for it escapes me. My back hurts from sitting too long. When will they come looking for me, I should have been back at work ages ago. Someone turns me onto my back — I hadn’t even noticed that I’d fallen over.

Some say the soul can leave the body and hover above it and decide up there whether to return to this shell. I don’t know if there’s anything to it, for I was raised a materialist. We didn’t go in for souls and baptism and paradise and hell. I also don’t hover over my bed, I lie in it. Out of one eye I look at Irina. Out of the other, Arkadij. I try to merge the two eyes. Against the wall I recognize an IV stand.

I’m wearing an unfamiliar nightgown and the covers are pulled up to my stomach. The only time I’ve been to the hospital in my entire life was for the birth of my children. I got pregnant with Alexej before Irina was even one year old. I had thought that nursing prevented pregnancy, and since I had waited so long for Irina I didn’t expect to have a second child at all.

Jegor was angry at me. During my second pregnancy he was rarely at home, and he made no attempt to explain away the absences as work trips. When he showed up back at home he smelled of cheap perfume. I’ve hated perfume ever since. I hadn’t planned to let Jegor back into the house at all. But then my water broke a few weeks early and somebody had to stay with little Irina while I gave birth to her brother. The fact that it was a boy filled Jegor with pride; the fact that it was a premature birth, with feelings of guilt. Jegor kissed my hands and cried in my lap.

I open my eyes again.

This is the second time in my life that I’ve seen Irina crying. She is sitting on a plastic chair beside my bed, a stack of photocopies in her hands.

I don’t understand the reason for her tears, since I’m doing well, after all, and I want to get out of here. I certainly must have missed time at my sewing machine. I didn’t come to prison to end up lying in bed.

I tell Irina exactly that.

“Do you want to look in the mirror, Mother?” Irina asks. I can feel that the corner of my mouth is sagging. But that never stopped anyone from sewing straight seams. And anyway, she is the last person who should be criticizing my outward appearance. Since the last time I’ve seen her she has aged decades.

“You didn’t need to come,” I say. “You’ll be in trouble at work.”

Irina startles me with the news that she has already been in the country for more than two weeks. She must have taken unpaid leave, German doctors couldn’t possibly take so much time off. Don’t want her to lose her job on top of it. Instead of cutting open German soldiers and stitching them up again, she has flown here. I learn that she has spent days together with my lawyer fighting for me to be transferred to a decent hospital. Even now her phone rings, and she says Amnesty is on the line. But I’ve never heard of that woman.

“And nobody is watering my tomatoes in Tschernowo,” I think out loud.

“Forget the tomatoes, Mother. In Germany we will lease a garden plot for you.”

“What is there for me in Germany? I don’t know anyone there except you.”

“But everyone knows you,” says Irina, holding up a photocopy of a magazine.

Seeing the photo frightens me. I wasn’t even photographed much as a young girl, and with good reason. The fact that I’m on the cover of a German magazine with my headscarf, my wrinkles, and my still fairly good teeth is proof that the outside world has gone crazy.

I look at more photos. Photos of Tschernowo in black and white. I remember the photographer who spoke a language we didn’t understand. He had a high-strung interpreter with him and took pictures of everything, Marja and her goat, Lenotschka and her apple trees, Sidorow and his telephone.

These are the photos that came out of that.

Even Konstantin is captured here. And I am standing in front of my house with the cats skulking at my feet.

There is a lot of writing. The photos are old, but the magazine is new. She copied the pages out of the latest issue. Irina reads the piece to me, a bit haltingly since she has to translate it as she goes.

“Baba Dunja is one of those women you envy because they can smile like children. She has a small, wrinkled face and narrow, dark-brown eyes. She is tiny and as round as a ball — she’s not even five feet tall. An iconic figure. An invention of the international press. A modern myth.”

I look at my hands. On the back of one, the faded O between the liver spots, which really does look a little like an eye. I didn’t want to live when Oleg took up with another girl, and now I can’t even picture his face anymore.

“I’m not an invention. I actually exist, right, Irina?”

And once again Irina starts to cry like a small child.

I would like peace to return. I would like to go back to work. Right now I’m still too weak on my feet, but I’ll get there. I would like to dress myself like a human being. I would like Irina to go home. And I would like to find out what is distressing her so much. She doesn’t want to tell me. She wants to talk about what is in the papers, what the world thinks of me, but what do I care about the world?

“Did Laura read my letters?”

“Laura?” Something in her face scares me.

“Yes. Laura. Did the letters arrive?”

“We haven’t received any letters from you in ages, Mother.”

“But I wrote to her.”

“Maybe you didn’t put on the right postage.”

“But I explained everything in them.”

She shrugs her shoulders. She doesn’t need my explanation. Nobody needs explanations. People need peace and perhaps a little money.

“How is Laura?” I ask.

“Laura?” she repeats again. And the way she says it sends a shiver down my spine. Because I realize I am about to learn something terrible.

“Laura is ill?” My lips go numb with anxiety.

Irina shakes her head. And then I think I should have known. Should have figured it out long ago, because all the signs point to it. “There is no Laura, right? You made her up. You are unable to have children. Or you don’t want to. Like Lenotschka.”

Irina looks at me. Her eyes are open wide and very blue. If she didn’t have such a severe face she would be beautiful. But I didn’t bring her up to be a beautiful woman. I tried to get her through it. That at least I managed.