Mother Country Read online

  She knew little about his life except that he was originally from Moscow but stayed in Ukraine after being introduced to his future wife, who had once been a ballerina. He had a teenage daughter seriously studying the ballet. His Moscow provenance and proximity to culture lent him a romantic air of sophistication, catnip for the other girls in the office, but that in itself was not the draw for Nadia. It was an air of nuanced sadness beneath all that bonhomie and flirtatious crackle. There was an irresistible urge to unwrap the layer of fear and self-protection and peer underneath to what she imagined was a pure, sparkling kernel of truth.

  But he showed little indication of allowing her access to the heavily guarded fortress, so these days, she told herself that their repartee at work was enough for her. In any case, who needed the demands of some new husband? She told herself she would have even less time for Larisska than she already did.

  But as everyone shuffled back to their desks, she was spiraling with joy. He was interested in Larisska’s welfare in his own way. The extra mandarins hidden in her shawl proved that he had been paying attention to their little family all along.

  At home, she opened her satchel and out poured the mandarins. She had taken the tram holding them to her chest, trying to conceal the telltale bulge behind paper-filled folders. A row of pensioners had suspiciously stared at her during the entire ride. But once safely indoors, she allowed herself to emit an anticipatory scream.

  “Larisska, Mama, look at this.”

  Her mother emerged from their bedroom, picking one up and smelling its surface. “Larisska, look what your mother brought.”

  Larissa was already tucked into her cot, but she leaped out in her pajamas. Her eyes widened before the pile of fragrant fruit.

  “I will eat them all,” she cried. When she was overwhelmed like this, her torso, from arms to the tips of her fingers, spasmed.

  How could she tell them that this fruit was money? Her mother clearly thought them an extra gift, a bonus. “You can have two. The rest I will trade for bread and other things.”

  But oh, the full, full heart of witnessing her girl’s bodily excitement. Watching her daughter struggling with the pebbly skin, thirstily sucking out the juice then masticating the slivers and meat of the rinds, her hazel eyes animated with unrestrained joy. She and her mother split one, savoring each sweet segment.

  “These two you’re eating are a present from the technolog.” Nadia tucked a juice-dipped strand behind Larisska’s ear when she was finished. “He wanted you to know that he got them especially for you.”

  * * *

  Of course, her first instinct had been to get an abortion. Every woman she knew was getting them. Yulia had had three already, her mother referenced her own abortions when her father was still alive and she said they simply couldn’t afford a third, fourth, or fifth child. The head secretary to the director seemed to have an abortion every couple of months. An abortion was what you got done when your IUD failed or you could not bring yourself to voice a definitive objection when the pivotal moment arrived.

  When she became certain of the pregnancy, the first place she went was the gynecological institute. The doctor, a young, stout, Jewish-looking man, took blood samples and wrote out a prescription for all the items she would need to bring to surgery: the optional painkiller for injection, a robe, slippers, rubber gloves. She folded the paper and slipped it into her coat pocket. Suddenly, she felt she was a grown woman. Neither the onset of her period nor sex with her awkward and overly cautious institute boyfriend had given her that impression.

  But before she departed, the doctor stayed her by the forearm. “Let me ask you: what are you doing, devushka? You are twenty-three years old and this is your first pregnancy. Do you really want to take a chance of never conceiving again? You’re not getting any younger. Go home, throw out the prescription in the trash, tell the father the good news.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” she’d said. The words shadowed her out of the building and all the way home, Do you really want to take a chance of never conceiving? and You’re not getting any younger.

  In the end, she did as the doctor said. Except for the part about telling the baby’s father. She was sure she told the technolog multiple times with her eyes, with a few indirect references to her nausea, but he never acknowledged the hint or their one moment of intimacy. He continued the flow of his flirtation until he saw her protruding belly by August. For a few days after the sighting, he disappeared from her area of the office, busying himself with the chemists on data analysis, assessing cheaper packing materials, generating progress reports to the director or whatever she imagined a technologist did. Then one morning, during a Victory Day ceremony invoking this “glasnost” none of them entirely believed in, making sure the technolog was within earshot, she volubly told Yulia that she expected nothing from the father of the child, that in fact, she would find single motherhood a relief.

  “Tell the truth, Yul’ka, who’s happier among our friends, the single mothers or married mothers?”

  The next week, there was the return of his whistle down the hall. It was high, playful, familiar. When she returned from a meeting, a daisy was splayed across her chair.

  * * *

  When the baby Larisska was born, she refused the breast. Her mother and sister Olga contorted Nadia’s body into a variety of feeding positions. Leaning over the baby, lying next to the baby, plopping the baby’s head down onto the breast. But this sickly Larisska cried and cried.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake.” Her sister had her own family across town; she made it clear that she had no time to help correct such elemental impediments. She was constantly in stress mode because her husband had entered them in the lottery to emigrate and their number had just come up. “Let someone more qualified feed her already.”

  Nadia was horrified. “Have you gone crazy? This shouldn’t be so hard.”

  “Well, what do you think motherhood is, a walk in the park?” her mother said. No women they knew had personal experience with such prolonged rejection. There were difficulties at first, of course, but eventually babies figured it out. You swaddle the baby first, you trick her by shoving the breast at her while she’s asleep. When she’s hungry, she will give in. Babies don’t starve themselves on purpose. But even when Nadia self-expressed the milk and tried to offer it in a cup, Larissa craned her neck and twisted away as if from a vile smell.

  There was a formula shortage in the local new mothers’ disbursement office. Sour cream, milk, bottles, but only a few cans of formula. They had friends buy up the entire supply but soon they would have to travel to Lugansk. The provisions were waning; how long could they keep it up?

  “That baby hates me,” Nadia would joke, but inside she knew it was no joke. She had not wanted this baby, and a baby could sense maternal indifference in the womb. To make matters worse, Larisska only slept when in motion, and on most nights, when she could no longer take the crying, Nadia would walk her up and down the hall in her pram.

  “She is such an adorably willful little thing,” her neighbor Alesia said, flinging open the door to her apartment down the hall, her one-year-old daughter attached to her hip. Even in the full grip of despair, Nadia couldn’t help noticing how Alesia’s hair blended in with her taupe skin, her coin-shaped blue eyes set too far back into her skull. Hers was worse than a face you overlooked, it was a face that seemed likely to decompose at any moment. When her mother helped her prepare the apartment for the baby’s arrival, gathering the hand-me-downs from the women in the building, the only person whose donated baby things they immediately discarded was Alesia’s. Just in case. Who knew if radiation was contagious?

  “It’s been a nightmare,” Nadia said. “They tell me she’ll grow out of it. I’m going mad. I haven’t slept in weeks.”

  “She will. She’ll grow out of it,” said Alesia sweetly.

  “I didn’t get lucky with one of the easy ones.”

  “Feel free to come and keep us company. I’d be ha
ppy to hold a newborn again.” Alesia was so thin, she seemed in danger of snapping under the weight of the girl on her arm.

  “You must be busy yourself. I wouldn’t dream of imposing.”

  “Not at all. I could actually use the company.”

  Nadia felt a sharp twinge of guilt; Alesia was a Chernobyl widow. One of the many pregnant women who had stepped off the trolley with the other Belorussian refugees. She was dressed in only a housecoat over pajamas and slippers on her feet like many of the other refugees, her belly huge, holding no bag or purse. Her husband was dead just a month after the prikaz came for him and the other conscripted military to neutralize the reactor. Her child was holding her head up but not crawling or trying to stand. Her forehead was also unusually high, which she and her mother ascribed to womb exposure to radiation. Even if most of them knew it was probably nothing more than fear of the unknown, many in the building kept their distance from Alesia as if her body itself were a leaky reactor.

  Once in a while, Nadia’s mother would shake her head and marvel about that May in 1986 when they finally found out what happened. “How lucky we were, after all, that the wind blew west instead of east.”

  Alesia shifted her own daughter to the other hip, trying to get a better look at the flushed face in the pram. “She is so sweet. And she will grow up and then we will miss these days when they need us this desperately.”

  In the pause, Larissa started screaming again, pointing at Alesia, stretching her hands out to her. Instinctively, Nadia pushed the pram out of harm’s way.

  “I really should keep moving.”

  “Come by anytime.”

  She heard the door click shut, and relief flooded her body. But Larisska’s desire to reach out to Alesia did give her an idea.

  She knocked at Tanya’s door on the other side of the hallway. She was a new mother who had no relatives in the area, just a husband who welded pipes in Nadia’s factory. They conferred briefly, some money was exchanged, and Tanya agreed to unbutton her housedress. Larisska suckled at another woman’s breast even as Nadia’s was overflowing. The sight of her hungry baby becoming sated was both heartbreaking and a guilty relief. Larissa was getting what she needed even if the source was not herself. The shame was so strong she told no one, much less her sister, but she would bring Larisska down the hall three times a day, past Alesia’s door.

  Later, she would believe it was during those daily trips to another woman’s breast that she began to really love Larisska. Her red, scrunched face smoothed out into a uniform color, her sweaty twigs of tufted hair became softer and thicker. Once Nadia was allowed to sleep through the night, she understood how lucky she was to have a baby all to herself. Larisska’s father was somewhere safe in the city with his family, not dead of a smattering of tumors protruding from the skin. If something happened to her, she was sure the technolog could be mobilized to help them financially. She had a secure job at a historic factory highly valued by the Soviet government for connecting a gas pipeline from Russia to its Ukrainian territories. Her mother was strong enough to help with the baby.

  Nadia felt a sense of gratitude so profound, it cleared her addled brain. For the first time, she really grasped why everyone called babies miracles. Larisska was no calamity, no curse. Larisska belonged wholly to her, and Nadia would take care of her. She shook with pleasure when her mother made a silly face, her soft digits wrapped around a thumb. She slept on top of a pillow all pursed into herself like a potato dumpling, and Nadia’s heart exploded. So what if she drank the milk of another? It was, in the long view of such a wondrous lifetime bond, a small thing.

  * * *

  A new set of mandarin rinds were fanning the table a few weeks later when someone knocked on the apartment door. Nadia was in the bathroom, wiping her mouth with a towel. She had skipped that morning’s hunt for provisions. It was simply too cold, the trees shivering and naked. Instead, she would go to the Central Market on Saturday, begin the long string of bartering (mandarins for sugar, sugar for sunflower oil, sunflower oil for flour).

  “Come in, come in,” her mother was saying, pressing her robe tighter around her chest. Nadia heard the unmistakable voice of the technolog. His hat was in his hands and he was spinning and pressing its rim as if sealing down the edges of dough for vareniki. Here he was, the square shoulders of him, the easy cowlick of his hair, his uninterrupted eyebrows. He was actually in her home, standing in the middle of her living room. They stared at each other.

  Larissa sprang in with a piece of buttered, salted black bread wedged into her mouth, her two pigtails fastened with voluminous white chiffon bows.

  “I’m thirsty,” she insisted.

  The technolog bent down on one knee. He revealed from behind his back a box of chocolates wrapped in a shiny red velvet bow. “What a big girl you are. Do you remember me from the office?”

  “Let me get changed,” Nadia said, her palms suddenly clammy with sweat. “I’ll be right back.”

  Her mother sized up the situation at a glance. “May I make some tea? Let’s go, Larisska. Come with me to help. Yes, you can bring the chocolate.”

  In the bedroom, Nadia dressed slowly, paralyzed before the few nice clothes she’d sewn for herself. There was the red turtleneck, the itchy tweed skirt, the patchwork vest. Her heart was beating too intensely, the reverberations pulsing in her throat. On the first try, she pulled on the turtleneck backward. Her fingers refused to cooperate. He must have finally decided he wanted to help with Larisska. Or to tell Nadia he loved her? Or he was here because his wife found out and he wanted her complicity. An astute secretary or anyone watching them interact at work might have an agenda or just an itch for stirring trouble. She imagined the phone call at the ballet institute, that elfin woman with the frizzy, rust-colored hair picking up the receiver. “I’m listening.”

  “Your husband has a daughter by a subordinate in the accounting department,” the informant might say, then hang up. The expected domestic scene would ensue, the wife exploding with wrath, the technolog denying any wrongdoing. (Nothing happened, I swear to you. Do you want to ask her yourself?)

  She decided to skip the vest, to rely wholly on the impression made by the clinging turtleneck.

  “Nadezhda Andreevna.” The technolog sighed when he saw her.

  She had read about these types of scenes in novels, which usually resulted in proposals of unions. In the pre-Soviet variety, an urbane older suitor expressed his love for the inexperienced country girl, or in the Soviet version, a kolkhoz brigadier proposed to merge two equally impressive production outputs with his stocky female counterpart in the next town over.

  They could see into the kitchen where Larisska was sitting on the counter, swinging her legs. She was eating one chocolate after the next. The longer they stayed quiet, the more magnified the sound of her heels thumping against wood.

  “You are very welcome in my home,” she said, but it was not at all what she meant to say. “Please have a seat.”

  The technolog did not sit. He was shifting from foot to foot. His sideburns were ridiculously long, she now noticed, practically extending down to the very edge of his jaw. “I’m afraid they are closing the factory.”

  It took a few seconds to match what he was saying with the pieces in her mind. The factory? The factory that had been around since long before she was born? The factory that played such an important role during World War II that it was listed in textbooks for its contribution to the Soviet Union’s victory over the Nazis? The image of the phone call, the domestic rupture, the betrayed wife, all disappeared. What took its place was a picture as cold and black as the winter sky.

  “But you said things were looking up. They said the mandarins were temporary.”

  She wanted to reach for the certificate she had formulated for herself, the one that proved in official, government language how much back pay the company owed her. But of course she’d left it at work.

  He was murmuring into the raised collar of his jacket.
“It seems they had no plan once the mandarins ran out. We’re not getting bailed out. They say there’s no other choice but to close.”

  She was trying to formulate a response when the technolog moved closer, lowered his voice. He ran his fingers down her arm and unclasped her hands. “Just think of the bright future. We will band together. This is just a hiccup in our history. In a few years, we will be a great state. Independence can’t happen overnight.”

  “I don’t understand. A closed factory doesn’t just spring back to life. They’ll start taking it apart for valuable metal and that will be that.”

  She was unsure of whether to allow him dominance over her hand. This particular scene appeared in no novel she had read. But he was fighting for a decent grip, fingertips feeling around for a groove into which he could insert himself. Olga would have probably insisted she agree with anything he said, to extract some confession of his affection. She was aware of breaking some rule of womanhood, one her married sister had grasped intuitively. Or maybe she was supposed to be holding back, displaying the ideal amount of coldness. Machinations like this were foreign to Nadia. Her favorite character in literature had always been Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, a girl armed with no wiles, but whose sincerity turned out to be insufficient for the world-weary Onegin.

  “A factory might be closed but there are other opportunities for the resourceful,” he said.

  “You’re just giving up? Can’t we all go and put some sense into their heads? Who made this decision? Savchenko? Kulish?”

  “It’s not giving up. They have a lot to sort out. They can’t keep every factory open. But now that we’re no longer being economically exploited by Moscow, it’s bound to get better. Every week the percentage of coupons will increase. I’ve opened a savings account. Yes, the interest rate is higher…”