Too Great a Sky, page 6
—I’ve forgotten the name of that woman, I’m forgetting things. My, how I’m forgetting, that’s what old age is like. I can see her eyes, her face, I remember how her hands were always balled into fists, I thought she was hiding something valuable, I hear her voice, how she spoke, I can almost seem to remember even how her clothes rustled, but I can’t remember the person’s name. People from her village said she was related to someone named Şakaliuk. I think that’s right, but what her name was . . .
—Why don’t we give her a name?
—Alright.
—Maybe Maria was her name?
—No, it definitely couldn’t have been Maria!
—Maybe Nicoleta?
—No, it couldn’t have been Nicoleta either, names like that didn’t exist in Bucovina back then.
—Cristina, Dana, Rodica, Dora, Viorica?
—Viorica suits. Or Dora . . .
That woman who had drawn up lists, only to find herself on one of them and put inside the same railcar with the women from her village who she hated, envied, and wanted as far away from her as possible. How hard must it have been for her to bear a burden like that! All of us prayed earnestly for her miserable soul. But she was also incredibly mean! We’d all be dying of thirst after that salted fishtail we’d received and the train wouldn’t always stop to let us replenish our reservoirs, to fill up our dishes with water. Usually, when the train stopped a soldier would bring us a bucket and shut the door. Someone would use a cup to evenly distribute the water, so everyone would get some. If there was any left over, they’d continue to take the little that was left around to everyone again, or they’d leave the tiny bit in the bucket for emergency use. A bucket was, in any case, very little for an entire railcar full of people, especially since we didn’t know when we’d get another. It could be even several days until the train stopped again and we received water.
One day, when the doors opened and we saw the long awaited bucket, Dora raced over from her corner, she elbowed everyone aside, and before we realized what she was doing, she stuck her entire head in the bucket, and then she did it again, hair and all, as if she didn’t want just to quench her thirst but to drown herself in that bucket. She had completely lost her mind. “If you insist on drowning yourself, do it in your own water, not in our communal water.” The women took her away from the bucket but strands of hair and snot remained in that murky water, contaminated by an unbeliever. Someone tried filtering the water as much as they could with a spoon, but we couldn’t drink it, we were very thirsty but also nauseated, it was better to be thirsty. We poured the water into our cupped hands and wet our faces, and body parts that water hadn’t touched in some time. It was such a pleasant feeling, Mother had wet a napkin and wiped me with it, that’s what other mothers and other women did as well, so we forgot a bit about our thirst. Lucky for us, we soon had more water and we made sure some crazy person didn’t contaminate it. When it rained, we stuck a small plate through our tiny window, one that wasn’t very deep and could fit through the hole. After it was full, we stuck another one out, we did this by turns and then we poured out clean rainwater for everyone.
That was the only time we washed ourselves with water in the railcar, then they let us out near a pond, where the water was very cold and Mother said I shouldn’t go in all the way, because I might catch a chill, that I shouldn’t go in farther than my knees, because it’s easier to die from a chill than from filth. Those who went in all the way later caught a fever and were thrown from the railcars in the hope that someone would bury them. Even though we were traveling during the summer, it was hot only in the first weeks, then it was warm only during the day and got cool at night. Our bodies, accustomed to the kind, gentle sun from back home, couldn’t adjust to the freezing Russian summer. Ha, one month later, not even the freezing dead of winter could scare us, nothing could. People don’t know how much someone can shoulder if they have a strong, faithful soul.
Dora seemed to have completely lost her mind after she lost the child. She would lean over the hole which we used as a toilet and stare into it, silently, as if waiting for a miracle. She didn’t join in with the rest of the railcar, she didn’t speak, didn’t get upset or happy about anything, her gaze was absent, her entire being was absent, everyone avoided her, we, children, were kept away from her by our mothers. She was adrift, lost, with something cold and hardened in her expression. Then she stopped looking at the hole and instead laid down on the floor and acted as if she were dead, that’s how it seemed to us, as if she were dead. Someone would dab her dry lips with water, she didn’t ask for anything, she didn’t cry, nothing.
I remember another incident with her, one I can’t forget, how we prayed for her soul, all of us in the railcar, at first a few women who were next to her, then others joined in, then everyone prayed the same prayer. When we prayed, we’d touch each other’s hands or bodies, we’d get close to each other, either we’d hold hands, or hold onto someone’s shoulders, so that the prayer would be more powerful. The five Gherman girls stood next to her, it was hard for a bunch of children to be stuck there by her. Right then Aglaie, the eldest, holding her doll, happened to be next to Dora. We were praying and Aglaie must have thought, the way children do, that if we were all holding hands, maybe she would hold Dora’s hand. Maybe the prayer would help her, if she touched her, squeezed her hand? The entire railcar seemed to understand what the girl was thinking and waited to see what Aglaie would decide. Would she be able to hold her hand or not? Silently, I, too, prayed that Aglaie would grab onto Dora’s hand. Come on, grab her hand. But Dora might refuse it. Aglaie held out her straw doll to Dora while she prayed quietly, we couldn’t hear her but we saw her lips moving, trembling. I don’t know what Dora felt, but she took the doll and reached out for Aglaie’s hand on her own, as if our thought had been transmitted directly to her hand, and held it. We, when we saw that, started to pray even more fervently, while tears sprang up in Aglaie’s eyes, her hand hurt from being squeezed too tightly. I’ve heard that the grip of people on their deathbed is like a vice. And Dora began to cry quietly, gently, to our relief. She looked at Aglaie and I heard her say “forgive me” to her. And she also said: “Forgive me, Lord.” Someone brought over a piece of a candle (we didn’t have a whole one left, because there were many weakened and sick people and everyone kept a candle for those in their family, while Dora didn’t belong to anyone). “Will you forgive me?” she asked Aglaie again. “Yes,” Aglaie said. Our prayer turned into a barely whispered song. Dora let go of Aglaie’s hand and she hugged the doll as if it were a child, maybe she actually thought she was holding her dead child to her chest, she rocked it in time to our song, she smiled, and died. “At least she died at peace,” someone said. Death reconciles us all.
I wondered what would happen with the doll, Aglaie was looking at it as well, as if she were sorry to leave it with the dead woman. But when her mother asked her if she wanted us to take it from her arms, if she wanted it, Aglaie didn’t, she didn’t want to hold it anymore after Dora had held it to her chest as if it were her dead child. I wouldn’t have wanted mine back either. Aglaie had dressed her doll in a piece of a cloth, pretending it was a dress, and she took back the dress, that’s all. Then Dora was taken outside the railcar, because it was summer, the day was hot, and the body smelled, they set her down with the straw doll still in her arms. Something seemed off to the soldier and he wanted to take the doll from her arms and toss it, he tried to tear it away, but he couldn’t. Dora was smiling and she no longer looked like a dead woman. Eugen didn’t make Aglaie a new doll because we didn’t have any straw left and we were already too exhausted, it was hard to do such painstaking work after being on the train for so long. After this incident, I kept my dolls carefully hidden, so there was no chance of anyone dying while clutching them to their chest.
Those first days, we didn’t know that Dora was pregnant. The whole train found out about her when she lashed out at a wife with children, who was very gentle, from the same village as her. The young woman had been telling us how, in the hubbub, her husband had gotten lost, he had managed to hide and the soldiers left without him because they were hurrying to get them to the train station before the train left. Then Dora yelled hatefully: “He ran after me. I’m bearing his child!” The middle daughter of the woman who was telling the story, a very beautiful little girl, started crying. We children didn’t understand all of what Dora was saying, but the woman’s children gathered around their mother, as if to protect her from the cruel and unjust words of the pregnant woman. She wasn’t feeling well, none of us were feeling well, but that didn’t mean we could attack our neighbor.
The night when Dora was in labor was torturous: she screamed, squealed, oh-godded, turned into her worst self, she ballooned, she curled up like a leech, snorted like a cow, but the baby still died. I don’t even know if he was born alive, I never heard him cry and I don’t think he could have anyway from the very first. And the formerly pregnant woman became just a shell. The face of a person abandoned by God changes, their empty eyes betray the existence of the inhabitants of hell, mirrored there as their light grows dim.
The train went on without stopping, no one opened the doors, no one came to take away the body. It stank and it reeked, the corpse started decomposing from the heat. We were suffocating from the lack of air and sultry temperatures, because the sky in June was still deciding whether or not to take off its sheepskin cojoc. Nights were cool, but days were very hot. Our pregnant woman’s little baby was rotting. We hadn’t seen how she had given birth, because we had been made to face the wall, so we wouldn’t see anything, then we covered our ears as well, because of how loudly the woman was screaming, but what could we use to cover our noses? Where could we get more hands? That baby reeked so badly that I could see it turned even his mother’s stomach. We went on like that for about two days, without a river or a deserted field along the way, without an open door to throw out the body. They once brought us a bucket of water, along with that salted fish, but they wouldn’t allow us to take anything out of the railcar, they refused to let us throw out the body, because we were near a city. We kept our noses pinched, but didn’t let out a single word. The hole we used as a toilet was always busy, so many times we vomited from the stench wherever we happened to be, the baby’s mother couldn’t stand it anymore and she let him slip into the latrine. I heard her sobbing as she let him go. Then she fainted, we thought she had died. We dabbed her lips and face with water and she came to.
The gentle mother kept crying and she’d give her tears to her baby to drink. I asked Mother to let me try one of her tears as well to see how they tasted. “But don’t really cry, don’t be sad, just let a couple tears fall and that’s it.” It wasn’t hard to convince Mother and she let a few big tears roll down her cheeks. “You’re a spring of crystal clear water,” I said to Mother, licking her cheek. Mother, since I praised her, let flow another two tears, long as a couple of little streams, and she said, smiling, that she wasn’t crying, that they were happy tears, she was happy she could ease my thirst. Then I thought that maybe she was thirsty too and I asked her: “Don’t you also want to taste a couple happy tears?” She said: “No, I’m not thirsty.” But her lips were dry, we hadn’t received any water for about two days. We stayed next to and curled up against our tiny little window, but others, who were taller, stretched up to reach the barred window up top, where you could still get a whiff of air, you could still breathe a bit. But you can’t stand all day in that uncomfortable position, and sometimes you had to let others have a turn. As soon as we moved away from the window, our stomachs twisted. But as soon as I saw that the small corpse had disappeared, the air in the railcar immediately seemed more breathable. And I don’t think I was the only one who thought that. The dead really do stink!
It was peace and quiet for two days, then one night, before bed, the formerly pregnant woman leaned over our latrine, holding on with both hands to the very dirty and smelly edge of the hole, and stared into it. Then she started calling to her son, who she had thrown inside because she couldn’t stand the stench anymore: “Dumitraş!” she yelled slowly and pitifully. “Mama’s little Dumitraş!” She called to him, asked him for forgiveness, waited for him to show up, she’d go over to his spot, see that it was empty, and take up her post at the toilet hole again. She screamed, wailed for him, she tore out her hair. The poor woman had lost her mind. No one could sleep that night. We didn’t have medicine, we didn’t even have water, what could we do? We were embarrassed to go relieve ourselves because we had the impression that she was watching what we were doing, that she was staring at us. She seemed to be guarding that spot. Then she got sick, she lay flat like a dead person, she no longer made any noise.
“If these I had, I’d break the spell, and from her illness make her well,” we heard our dear Tudoriţa begin singing, “if I had three walnuts in their shell, willow from the river, meadowsweet for fever. The leaves or seeds at least of jewelweeds, arnica, horsetail, valerian, yellow gentian, borage, lovage, sage, thorn of sloe, lady’s mantle, mallow, burdock, and yarrow, some woodruff, wormwood’s enough, viper’s bugloss, bulrush, comfrey, danewort, smooth cicely . . . These in sweet Bucovina are found, in fields and gardens in the ground, plants that heal and take away the pain you feel . . . if I had at least one, her sickness could be undone . . . But in the train there’s no chance . . . No sun for the plants, no water that’s clean, prayers don’t reach the Unseen . . .”
Train conductor, open the door or I’ll die! oh, oh!
Train conductor, open up or I’ll die of hunger!
The little children who died, through the hole they’d slide,
And the mothers would pray for someone to take them away
And put them in the ground so they wouldn’t stay earthbound.
Hundreds, thousands died, only a few of us children left on this side
And we suffered there. Hunger, sickness, no clothes to wear,
But no one we told seemed to care.
For what fault of ours are you taking us from Bucovina in cattle cars,
Oppressed and distressed, and dispossessed? Oh, oh!
Make us, Lord, Your travelers on the paths of this life and bring us safely to the end of the road! Hold us tightly, Lord, in Your Holy Church, where we find all Your comfort! Guard us and protect us, Lord! After those difficult days, from lack of oxygen and food, maybe from the unsanitary water as well, two more old people died, they were unassuming and quiet, like two shadows, they were probably someone’s parents or grandparents to some children. And once again it began to smell in our railcar. Starting about then, the stench of death accompanied us until the end of the road. It continued to follow us even when we lived in the barn, but at least there you could go outside for air whenever you wanted to and here you couldn’t. When the door of the railcar would open, it was such a release, the air was like medicine, it healed you, we seemed to come back to life, we were happy. We, children, joyfully waited for the dead to be taken out of the railcar and we looked at the grownups with pleading eyes: all of you stop dying so much, hang on until the end! But they didn’t listen to our silent appeal. Now I think about how wrong it is to be tossed out that way, what a sin for that to be your burial . . .
When the pregnant woman felt that she was about to die, she began talking. I don’t know if she felt guilty, but she was trying to hold off death by telling her story. How the communist in her village, that striboc, promised to marry her, she slept with him, cooked for him. Her mother said it was a great sin, that they shouldn’t be living together if they weren’t married. If he’s a decent, loving man, why doesn’t he marry her? Her mother didn’t like the communist at all. Who did? Then he made her write up the lists of “enemies,” but he didn’t tell her they would be deported, just to write those lists.
“He asked me: ‘Who are the enemies of our regime?’ ‘There aren’t any enemies in this village, only peaceful people,’ I said to him. Then he asked, ‘Who here doesn’t love communists?’ I couldn’t well say to him the whole village. ‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘Who was a member of a party besides the communist party, who exploited the labor of others, and made farm hands work for them, who ran across the border, who are the most important landowners with the most land, who speaks badly of the communists and isn’t happy enough about our new regime?’ He said he needed a certain number of people and that’s how many I should list.
“After I gave him the lists, telling him about everyone on them, because he was a newcomer to the village and didn’t know people, my striboc started going around to people and you’d see him coming out with a horse, a carpet. When I told him I was pregnant, he didn’t act as if he were happy. He told me to go to my mother’s and give birth there, because I couldn’t give birth in his house, which was actually the house of a rich landowner who had left everything and fled. That we’d see afterward what we’d do about it. He told me not to cry or yell so people wouldn’t find out. I went back home and began waiting. My mother said to me: ‘Your communist left you, you’ve barely walked out the door and he’s already chasing skirts, but don’t worry, we’ll raise the child ourselves, we’ll get by.’ I didn’t believe it, but I asked around, it’s not hard to find things out in a village, people talk. He’d approach the rich and beautiful girls on my list and ask them directly or through their parents for their hand, saying if they refused . . . but the girls wouldn’t hear of it, what kind of man is he, who lives with a woman and wants to marry a different one?
