Alina Bronsky - Baba Dunja's Last Love

I’m awoken in the night again by Marja’s rooster, Konstantin. He’s like an ersatz husband for Marja. She raised him, and she pampered and spoiled him even as a chick; now he’s full-grown and good for nothing. Struts around the yard imperiously and leers at me. His internal clock is messed up, always has been, though I don’t think it has anything to do with the radiation. You can’t blame the radiation for every stupid thing in the world.

I lift up the covers and let my feet drop to the ground. On the floorboards is a carpet I crocheted out of strips of old bedsheets. I have a lot of time in winter because I don’t have to tend to my garden. I rarely go out during winter, only to fetch water or wood or to shovel snow from my doorstep. But it’s summer now, and I’m on my feet at five in the morning to go wring the neck of Marja’s rooster.

Every morning I’m surprised when I look at my feet, which look knobby and swollen in my German hiking sandals. The sandals are tough. They’ll outlive everything, surely including me.

I didn’t always have such swollen feet. They used to be delicate and slim, caked with dried mud, beautiful without any shoes at all. Jegor loved my feet. He forbade me to walk around barefoot because so much as a glance at my toes made men hot under the collar.

When he stops by now, I point to the bulges protruding from the hiking sandals and say, See what’s left of all their splendor?

And he laughs and says they’re still pretty. He’s been very polite since he died, the liar.

I need a few minutes to get my blood pumping. I stand there and brace myself on the end of the bed. Things are still a bit hazy in my head. Marja’s rooster Konstantin is screeching as if it’s being strangled. Maybe someone has beaten me to it.

I grab my bathrobe from the chair. It used to be brightly colored, red flowers on a black background. You can’t see the flowers anymore. But it’s clean, which is important to me. Irina promised to send me a new one. I slip it on and tie the belt. I shake out the down-filled duvet, lay it on the bed and pat it smooth, then put the embroidered bedspread on top of it. Then I head for the door. The first few steps after waking up are always slow.

The sky hangs light blue over the village like a washed-out sheet. There’s a bit of sunlight. I just can’t get it through my head that the same sun shines for everyone: for the queen of England, for the black president of America, for Irina in Germany, for Marja’s rooster Konstantin. And for me, Baba Dunja, who until thirty years ago set broken bones in splints and delivered other people’s babies, and who has today decided to become a murderer. Konstantin is a stupid creature, always making such a racket for no reason. And besides, I haven’t had chicken soup in a long time.

The rooster is sitting on the fence looking at me. Out of the corner of my eye I see Jegor, who’s leaning against the trunk of my apple tree. I’m sure his mouth is contorted in a derisive sneer. The fence is crooked and leaning precariously, and it wobbles in the wind. The dumb bird balances atop it like a drunken tightrope walker.

“Come here, my dear,” I say. “Come, I’ll quiet you down.”

I stretch out my hand. The rooster flaps his wings and screeches. His wattle is more gray than red, and it shakes nervously. I try to remember how old the creature is. Marja won’t forgive me, I think. My outstretched hand hangs in the air.

And then, before I’ve even touched him, the rooster falls at my feet.

Marja said it would break her heart. So I have to do it.

She sits with me in the yard and sniffles into a checkered handkerchief. She has turned her back to me so she doesn’t have to see me plucking out the pale speckled feathers and tossing them into a plastic bag. Down floats on the air.

“He loved me,” she says. “He looked at me a certain way whenever I entered the yard.”

The plastic bag is half full. Konstantin is nearly indecent, naked in my lap. One of his eyes is half-open, gazing up at the sky.

“Look,” she says. “It’s like he’s still listening.”

“There’s certainly nothing he hasn’t heard out of you before.”

That’s the truth. Marja always talked to him. Which makes me worry that I’ll have less peace and quiet now. Aside from me, everyone seems to need somebody to talk to, and Marja more than most. I’m her nearest neighbor, the fence is all that divides our properties. The fence might have been solid at some point. But these days it’s not much more than a notion of a fence.

“Tell me exactly how it happened.” Marja’s voice is like a widow’s.

“I told you a thousand times already. I came out because he was screeching, and then he suddenly fell over. Right at my feet.”

“Maybe someone put a curse on him.”

I nod. Marja believes in that stuff. Tears run down her face and disappear in the deep wrinkles of her face. Even though she’s at least ten years younger than I am. She doesn’t have much of an education, she worked as a milkmaid, she’s a simple woman. Here she doesn’t even have a cow, though she does have a goat that lives with her in the house and watches TV with her whenever there’s anything on. At least that way she has the company of a living, breathing entity. Except the goat can’t hold up its end of the conversation. So I answer.

“Who would want to put a curse on your stupid bird?”

“Shhh. Don’t speak ill of the dead. Anyway, people are evil.”

“People are lazy,” I say. “Do you want to boil him?”

She waves her hand dismissively.

“Fine. Then I’ll do it.”

She nods and looks furtively at the bag of feathers. “I wanted to bury him.”

“You should have told me earlier. Now you’ll have to bury the feathers with him so his people don’t laugh at him in heaven.”

Marja thinks for a moment. “Ach, what’s the point. You cook him and give me half of the soup.”

I knew it would work out that way. We don’t eat meat very often, and Marja is a glutton.

I nod and pull the shriveled eyelid down over the rooster’s glassy eye.

The stuff about heaven I didn’t really mean. I don’t believe in it. I mean, I believe there’s a heaven above our heads, but I know that our dead aren’t there. Even as a little girl I didn’t believe that people snuggled in the clouds like in a down-filled duvet. But I did think you could eat the clouds like cotton candy.

Our dead are among us, often they don’t even know they’re dead and that their bodies are rotting in the ground.

Tschernowo isn’t big, but we have our own cemetery because the people in Malyschi don’t want our corpses. At the moment their city council is debating whether to require a lead coffin for Tschernowo corpses buried there, because radioactive materials continue to give off radiation even if they’re no longer alive. In the meantime we have a provisional cemetery here, in a spot where a hundred and fifty years ago a church stood and thirty years ago a village schoolhouse. It’s a humble plot with wooden crosses, and the few graves there aren’t even fenced in.

As far as I’m concerned, I don’t even want to be buried in Malyschi. After the reactor mishap, I left like almost everyone else. It was 1986, and at first we didn’t know what had happened. Then liquidators showed up in Tschernowo in protective suits, carrying beeping devices up and down the main street. Panic broke out, families with little children were the fastest to pack up their things, rolling up mattresses and stuffing jewelry and socks into teakettles, roping furniture to their roof racks and roaring off. Speed was now a necessity, since it wasn’t as if the mishap had taken place the day before, it was just that nobody had told us about it until then.