Yulia Ivanova
Granny Xenia
Yana suddenly wakes up and sits down on her bed being on the point of crying of fear. She is alone; in the room it is quiet and stuffy despite the open window. No cool and no sound come from outside, the curtains don't move. There is something unusual and ominous in this adhesive stuffy silence. Suddenly the yard outside lighted up and appeared not like in the daytime but in ghostly, unsteady and unreal light. The yard flashed and was gone out. And immediately something faintly roared in the distance. Gradually increasing the roar blew over the house and the glasses jingled in the window.
And mum is in a night shift.
Already knowing the name of this "something" and its cause, Jana always feared of thunderstorms even in later times.
"O-o, a-a," cries Yana but feels even more fear because of her grievous and alone crying.
"Yanochka, what's up? Come to me", is heard from behind the curtain.
Granny Xenia is ill. Her illness differs from other people's illnesses that come and leave; it's a usual state of her health. She is almost always in bed. She doesn't groan and complaint, and if she had no cough with crackling, whistling and snapping, it's not a cough but a whole orchestra, though granny vainly tries to deafen her cough by her pillow, everyone would completely forget that at the dark corner behind the bed curtain granny Xenia lives.
Granny's corner is in the living room, which is a dining room too, and the room where Yana and her mum live - a vast bed, a wardrobe and a picture over the bed with a green pond, green moon and green bathing girls. "I think this thing can croak," mum once said. The green picture corresponds to the conception 'good furniture', and we must pay additional money for it. But granny Xenia is considered as 'discomfort', and the landlady offers a discount for this discomfort, which is equal to the cost of the picture. So it's an even trade.
Whimpering Yana goes barefoot behind the bed curtain. Granny stretches out her hands, and Yana dives under a patchwork blanket and snuggles up to the dry hot body of Xenia.
"O Lord, save," granny crosses, "Don't frighten the child. Don't cry but say after me and everything will be over... 'Give us this day our daily bread'"
"Give us this day," sobbing Yana repeats. The thunderstorm is raging. The picture of the room is pulsing in disorderly rhythm of blinding violet flashes. It appears and disappears. The roar and thunder are heard. It seems that the house is about to crack and split like an eggshell. Yana covers her head with the blanket and holds her ears with her palms.
"Why are you raging like this?" granny grumbles at God. You have frightened a little already, and that's enough. You'd better sent a rain. You'd better watered the kitchen garden. You know how it is to water it by hand.
"Give us this day, give us this day", Yana repeats it like an invocation. Spiny and burning hot granny's palm touches her wet cheeks and eyes, and her tears immediately disappear and dry out. It's the same as to immerse your head into hay. And it smells of hay.
"It' raining, Yanochka, it's raining".
The room is still pulsing and rumbling; 'something' behind the window is growling and tearing the darkness by its claws but Yana understands that it's not fearful already. It seems as if 'something' was caged and separated from the world by a wall, and that wall was a monotonous noise behind the window; there are also sudden cool, smell and other calm and unshakable 'something'.
"Yanochka, fire and water are separated from each other. Fire runs and escapes from water. What rain it falls! If only cucumbers remained whole. O Lord, save cucumbers..."
"Granny, where is He, God".
"God, He is in heaven."
"And why doesn't He fall?"
"It's late, enough of it, Yanochka, it's a sin. Go to your bed."
"Granny, what is He like?"
"We can't know it."
"Why?"
Granny began to cough and wave her hands.
"Go with God's help... go."
Yana went to her already cold bed, with enjoyment stretched herself after lying in granny's tight bed and yawned.
The wind filled out the wet curtain like a sail. On the floor at the window a large puddle glittered. There in the yard the rain lived. The rain walked. He walked down streets by its wavy feet, sticking in wet clay and foaming puddles. Then the rain ran. He ran faster and faster pursuing the fearful 'something', which ran away roaring faintly. Yana imagined all of that and tried to imagine granny Xenia's God but she couldn't and fell asleep.
***
"For the health of our soldiers Habakkuk, Averkius, Abraham, Agabus," granny Xenia prays muttering.
She asked to pull away the bed curtain so that there can be more light, tied her clean polka dot headscarf under her chin, put on her glasses with a cracked right glass. In her hand she had a church calendar.
"For the health of Ananias, Akepsius" she sings looking into the calendar.
"Mother, you are listing wrong names. Nobody is named so now."
Today is Sunday and the landlady herself is at home. The sound of the samovar is heard. The landlady puts dark slices of stewed beet into dishes. Mum gives Yana a true sweet in wrapper with a butterfly for the tea. A sweet wrapper is considered as riches that are even more expensive than a sweet itself. You can play with sweet wrappers, exchange them or change for colourful glasses, penny whistles, rubber balls; a good sweet wrapper can be changed for many things. Yana is happy.
"Maybe there are people who have such names. Maybe, there is such a soldier Ananias, and I can omit him. One cannot do so. And what names are there now?"
"Pyotr, Sergei, Vladimir, Victor..."
Remember Arkady," mum says.
The silence is hanging over the table; everyone is looking at mum. The landlady's son Kolya advantaging of the confusion grabs a handful of beet slices and pushes them into his mouth.
For some reason the landlady asks whispering. "Sonya, do you think he is alive?"
"Kolya is stealing the beet," Yana snitches but nobody pays attention to her. Then Yana also stretches out for the desired plate.
"Pray for Arkady's health, aunt Xenia," mum repeats. Granny stops coughing and asks carefully.
"Maybe, for the peace of his soul?"
"For his health," mum is fearlessly smiling; she can't bear being pitied. The landlady's son Kolya again stretches out his hand for the beet but this time gets a heavy slap and cries. Yana generously breaks of a piece of her sweet for him.
"For the health of the soldier Arkady," granny Xenia is imploring.
***
"Granny, why are you so hot?"
Granny Xenia writhes and gasps. Her cough breaks her yellow dry body; it crackles like an autumn leaf in the wind.
"I have a fever, Yanochka," granny tries to smile. I feel bad, Fire, fire is in me. Maybe, I'll die, God willing...
"Why?"
Granny catches her breath.
"Yes, I will. Xenia will rest forever, be put into a coffin like a fianc?e in a white dress and covered with flowers, and my soul will fly away on silver wings...
Granny's eyes are shining and she happily laughing.
"Yanochka, I have everything in store already. I have a white dress and I have sewn clean underclothes."
"Show, granny..."
"Open and draw it out by yourself."
Her heart missed a bit. Here is the key to the cherished chest, from which granny Xenia drew yellowish photos, clews of many-coloured threads, buttons, shreds of cloth, old letters and other crisp papers with and without seals, obsolete useless money, cheap glass earrings, beads, odds and ends. All Xenia's past life was there. It was mingled at random like a card batch and interested for nobody except granny herself who looked through this life of hers being at death's door. Leavings, fragments and shreds of once sewn dresses, peoples who once lived with granny and past events.
Yana was her only thankful listener and her friend, and granny told long stories about origin of one or another paper, things or photo not to herself, not to emptiness, but to her, Yana. For granny Xenia it was meaningful and blissful in her last days.
Shreds, rags and fragments are absolutely of no worth for reasonable adult people but they draw old people and children.
Yana stretches his insatiable palm into granny's life fearing that granny Xenia can change her mind and take the key back. Before granny's past became known to Yana by small portions, and the right of choice belonged to the owner of the chest.
Now Yana can own it completely.
"The dowry is here on the top in the cheesecloth - all I have prepared for my funeral" granny instructs inhaling hoarsely. "Be careful and not crush it up... Put the pillow under me...
Reclining in the changeable ring of light of the oil lamp, which is rushing around the walls, around the patchwork blanket, granny Xenia at every attack of coughing lays out her white 'dowry', admires, strokes, smooth it out by her spiny fingers inviting Yana to look and admire.
The "dowry" is for birthday, for wedding day and for funeral day - it's the same word and the same colour.
Mumbling something with delight and sneezing of naphthalene smell Yana rummages in the chest; her arms are in the 'treasures' up to her elbows, and on the very bottom there is something round, smooth and cold... Her fingers have squeezed and drawn something. Oh, it's a bottle! Yes, it's the one with a sticker from the celebration table. It belonged to the landlady and disappeared from the table when everybody had gone to the yard to dance. The landlady searched for it, shouted, was outraged and suspected everyone: guests, Yana's mum and Yana herself... But that bottle is here, that particular one. And wine is splashing in it.
The 'dowry', flowers and wine... the funeral clothes are sewn, flowers can be picked up, in the last resort there are paper ones, but wine is a hard-to-get thing now, and who knows whether they will be able to get it when a time comes to bury granny Xenia? Granny could be guided by these suggestions, and also she could filch the bottle from the celebration table because of her selfish motives to take a drink from it when she feels particularly bad. With some sort of tenth sense of hers Yana understands that it is indecent to ask granny Xenia about the bottle. And she hides it on the very bottom of the chest where it was before.
***
The scantily lit kitchen, a clay bowl with tomato sauce is on the table. The cleanly washed burning hot cooker, the burning hot landlady at the cooker with a ladle in her hand. And the delightful smell of these pancakes. The landlady artfully overturns pancakes by a knife, and they already have brownish crusts.
Yana becomes weak in her knees; her tongue is being covered by saliva and her eyes are in tears. She desires for pancakes.
A hot pancake gets into Yana's hands. She can stick her teeth into it, crack its crust and burning her mouth swallow it without chewing...
"Dip it into the sauce."
She has forgotten about the sauce but the pancake is almost eaten; only a very small piece is left. And only now when the burning crust of the pancake is being softened by sour-sweet cool of the sauce Yana at last feels its taste until its last crumb is melt in her mouth. Yana was immersed into something forgotten from pre-war time. A warm earth, fruits warmed by the sun with red sappy pulp; their sap nips at her tongue and runs over her chin and fingers...
And right before her more pancakes are again being bubbled and becoming brownish.
"What I know, what I have seen," Yana says.
Now Yana is going to betray granny Xenia. She is going to tell that she saw that bottle in granny's chest. She will do it in order to get another pancake, and she will get it, dip into the sauce and eat it up while the landlady scolds granny at the top of her voice and throws about rags from her chest. At these moments Yana will again be there in the sunny kitchen garden among huge and warm fruits of the pre-war summer.
Bad, incomprehensible and distressful things will begin not immediately but later. Yana will feel that she can't come in to granny Xenia though nobody forbids her to do so. And she will be perplexed where this 'you cannot' have come from. Again and again she will approach granny's bed curtain and go back every time. That was a hard and shameful punishment, which was devised by somebody unknown.
Yana will comfort herself that it's not she but granny Xenia feels bad because Yana doesn't communicate with her, that Yana has the yard, grass, summer, sweet wrappers, colourful glasses, the dog Tobik, a neighbouring yard and a junkyard where one can find whatever you wants to. But granny Xenia lies alone behind the bed curtain - it looks as if granny is punished but Yana is not.
But when Yana is rushing in the yard, plays with Tobik in colourful shards or sweet wrappers and finds in the junkyard whatever she wants to, all the time she knows that she cannot come in to granny Xenia, and this knowledge is like an illness, like granny's cough, one can't get rid of.
***
Granny Xenia lies on the table being grand and unapproachable. She is in a white dress with flowers as she dreamt. Her wrinkles have been smoothed; the flush on her face is not as usual in unequal spots but like a girl's in all her cheeks. She has a white funeral headband on her combed hair; her closed lips are also painted.
"She is like a fianc?e... she looks like she is sleeping," women are whispering around. They don't go away but wait; there are more and more people, and Yana knows what everybody is waiting for, and she herself is waiting with awe. Now granny Xenia is a chief person. Yana is proud and glad to be her friend. Also she is proud of granny that everything has come true as she wanted, and a misunderstanding between them, this shameful "you cannot' is a trifle in comparison with what is going to happen now.
"Mammy, how will she fly?"
"Where will she fly?"
"To heaven, to God. The ceiling won't allow her to."
She will fly nowhere; don't worry, my little silly."
"Don't you know she will fly to God? He is high in heaven, and so you can't see Him," asserts Yana.
The women near them approvingly smile at Yana; they are clearly on her side.
"She will fly," repeats Yana. "She said so.
"Stop talking or go to the yard!"
The threat has an effect, and Yana becomes silent. But from the yard she won't see anything. And what about the ceiling? Maybe, it's necessary to open the window or the door?"
Mother is called to come to the other room to give valerian drops to the landlady who is 'out of her mind'. It's also something strange; what does it mean "out of one's mind'? And why is the landlady crying? Recently she asked God to take away granny Xenia as soon as possible. Yana herself heard it many times.
Yana comes nearer Kolya who always knows everything.
"Kolya, why is she lying and lying?"
"And what must she do? She has died and is lying now," Kolya with a wearied look chews a piece of chewing gum and spits through his widely spaced and awry teeth. "Now she is being driven to the graveyard and will be lying in the earth."
"In what earth?"
"In a usual one," Kolya stamped his foot down the floor, "They will bury her into a pit, and she will be lying."
"You story!" Kolya's inventions are so absurd that they are making her laugh. "Why then flowers, a dress and all beautiful things are needed? Aha, you have told lies."
"As we have funerals, flowers must be too. And music will be played, and they will drink wine. They will bury her and then drink."
"You story!"
But mum and other woman help the landlady to go out of the next room taking her arms. Yana can see her swollen face with unseeing eyes and completely freeze of her terrible inhuman lament.
"My dear mother, why have you left me alone? I will follow you to mother earth!
Women around also lament quietly, wipe their noses and eyes with brims of their headscarves. Now Yana is also going to cry - mother called this weeping of hers 'eruption' - with ringing in ears and hiccup, with inexhaustible stores of tears that immediately wet everything up to hair and collars. She is going to cry not because she fears for granny Xenia, the landlady, mum and women wiping their noses. This is a lament-protest against horrible absurdity of the scene played by adults in her world where even several minutes ago everything was so reasonable and reliable.
Mum will take her away and even give up her Komsomol atheism. "Of course, Xenia will fly to heaven; she will fly from the graveyard at night when stars appear. To them will she fly, and they will show the way to her."
And Yana will calm down. On the day of granny Xenia's funeral, particularly after instructive words a priest said at the funeral repast that death will take everybody from the earth, and sooner or later everybody will be buried at cemeteries, but God will surely take all those who believe in Him to His place in heaven but the others will remain to lie in the earth forever, Yana made her choice in favour of God. Yes, He created everything. He can do everything what nobody can - to stop a thunderstorm, help our people to win fascists and even to find somebody playing hide-and-seek. He is Sorcerer, the head of all sorcerers. All 'where from', 'why', 'when', 'where' and 'what for' that she began to ask to herself and others converged and were solved only in Him. He is always and everywhere; He is all-seeing, almighty and all-knowing. From now on before going to sleep she will inwardly repeat by heart the mysterious Xenia's prayer, and then ask in her own words for mum's and already killed father's happiness. That the war should finish as soon as possible, that she should become grown up as soon as possible, and, of course, for comrade Stalin who leads us to the victory and will defend mum from fascists who kill Jews. She will get used to talking to God, and He will hear her. She will rejoice together, sometimes be angry, offend and forgive. "And may you always do well!" will she pray to God for God.
Translated in English by Vladimir Glushchenko