I WAS WAKENED BY THE VIBRATION OF MY PHONE. Eyes still closed, I reached out to my night table, knocking over a glass of flat seltzer.
Dad passed away overnight. It was a message from my ex-husband.
I picked up the phone and the fallen glass and wrote: Please accept my deepest condolences.
It was late September. A Virginia creeper vine wound around a pine trunk. The vine had turned red and drooped down. The garden had lost its vitality. The birds were no longer singing, the insects no longer rustling. Across the empty road behind high stone walls stood deserted luxury houses. Their owners had gone, together with their money, to lands where the sun always shines. Weighed down by heavy clouds, the sky hung low over the tile roofs. There had been practically no summer this year. Rains soaked us, and some unknown epidemic disease had appeared. People were whispering to each other, saying that, having destroyed the economy and robbed the country for years, the government was now trying to get rid of its population. All the TV channels were screaming about thousands of infections, about overflowing hospitals and morgues. People began to panic. A curfew had been imposed, and you could only leave your home with special permission. Those caught outside were being taken to special holding camps, and their worriaed relatives had to search for them for a long time. The borders had been closed for several days at this point, and we found ourselves cut off from the rest of the world.
At around noon, I managed to scarf down a late breakfast and went out into the autumnal garden. The roses and phlox had finished flowering long ago, and the grass by the fountain, where I had spent the summer months reading books on a striped chaise longue, was covered with the dry leaves of the apple tree, but the lilac was still green. My neighbor waved to me over the chain-link fence.
“It’s supposed to rain,” I said, smiling guiltily.
“My whole garden’s ruined. Just look,” she said, lifting up a handful of collapsed peony stalks, “my best flowers.”
“Did you hear? Starting from today we can’t go out. Only with a special pass. Free public transport for seniors has been blocked.”
“The bastards. Who’s going to feed my two?” The woman turned her head toward the brick outbuilding.
My neighbor has two grown disabled sons. They live in separate quarters slapped onto the house. I haven’t seen one of the brothers for years. He’s long been a hopeless alcoholic.
“The police could pick you up. Tell me what you need, and I’ll get it for you.”
“Oh, my girl. What can they do to me? I’m eighty-one,” she answered.
“At least let me get you some milk.”
My neighbor is hard of hearing, so I have to speak very loudly to her. A tress of gray hair fell across her forehead.
“I’m just exhausted,” she said, turning away from me and heading up the path, which is overgrown with tall nettles. A lonely old woman. I looked at the apple trees my grandfather had planted. The dead branches need to be pruned, but there’s no one to do it. There are no workers left in town. Having gone back inside, I overcame my inner revulsion and called to ask for a pass. A metallic female voice asked where I was going.
“The hospital,” I lied.
A couple of minutes later, I received permission. Free for a whole day. I opened the garage, started the car, and slowly drove out onto the highway. Pillars holding up blank advertising billboards flashed by. The feeling that everything happening was somehow unreal had been with me for some time already. The radio was playing foreign blues, but the music was interrupted by a five-minute bulletin about the latest disease victims. It was as if a dome of absolute, inescapable evil was hanging over us. Normal life seemed far away and forever lost, as if we were living in a Hollywood dystopia. The epidemic, which had been rampaging for half a year now, was like water from a poisoned well. The fear of an invisible threat was eating us from the inside out, passed from person to person. No one really knew what was going on, and that was what truly drove people crazy. A phone call from a friend interrupted my anxious thoughts. I pulled onto the shoulder and turned on my hazards. Only now did I realize that I had sweated through my cotton blouse, which was sticking to the car seat.
“Hi, darling, how are you?”
“Bad. A lot of people are being laid off, the rest are being told to work from home,” said my friend.
“What about you?”
“No idea. For now, they just cut my salary. Employers are being required to tell the mayor’s office the phone and license numbers of all their employees. To surveil us.”
“Sounds like it.”
“I’m afraid. Afraid to get sick, afraid to end up in one of those horrifying hospitals. You know what’s happening there? There’s no medicine, no space. They couldn’t care less about other people’s lives.”
“Where did you hear that? Have you got some kind of real information?”
“No. But everyone says so.” I heard a rasp, then sobbing.
“Don’t panic. What everyone says is not information.”
“I have to get out of here. I’m a quarter Jewish. The embassy can’t turn down a citizenship request!”
“With the borders closed, where precisely do you propose to run?” I asked, staring at a maple leaf that had stuck to my windshield.
“I don’t know. I’m simply exhausted,” she answered quietly.
“Take a drink of water and calm down. I have to go. I promised my neighbor to get her some milk. I’ll call you tonight,” I said, hanging up.
At the intersection I was stopped by the highway patrol. A short policeman waddled slowly to my car and asked for my papers. Heart thudding, I started rooting around in my purse, trying not to look at him.
“Where are we going, Miss Eitz?”
He looked over my insurance papers and glanced into the car.
I saw the crutches in the passenger seat, opened the door and, without saying a word, put my leg in the brace that went from calf to thigh. The brace was left over from a fall years before, when I tore some knee ligaments while skiing in the Swiss Alps. It had been a gorgeous March day. The blinding sun outlined the contours of the pines, the new-fallen snow was glistening on their needles, and no one in our big group thought the problem was serious. They waited lower down the slope, laughing and waving their hands, calling for me to come down to them. After skiing through the Three Valleys, we were all thirsty, and a table with beer, garlic bread, and smoked meat was waiting for us.
“To the hospital,” I said to the policeman, grimacing with pain.
“Have a good day,” he said, touching the brim of his hat.
I slipped into the store and bought some milk. Back in the car, I looked up through the sunroof at the sky. It had finally cleared. The clouds had parted and it looked like spring. A full moon rose. For a long time I stared at the outlines of the lunar mountains, which looked as if they had been drawn on an astronomical map, trying to imagine the landscape there. How wonderful it would be to fly into the cosmos, far from our unhappy, unlucky life. What had been happening to me all these years? Why had I let my heart part from those who had been close to me? Why in my cold and arrogant youth had I been unable to find the necessary words? I didn’t feel like going home. I hadn’t wanted to for a long time. I’d been searching, but I no longer felt safe beneath my own roof. I was beset by loneliness no matter where I found myself. I wanted to forget everything and head off to some uninhabited island in the middle of the ocean. It doesn’t take so much mental effort to live amid green hills and salt waves. But that was just an illusion.
I drove slowly down the highway, wasting gas. Occasionally I was passed by a large semi. It had gotten completely dark. Having turned down a fork onto a country road, I suddenly decided not to stop. I drove through a little town with its small square where the dull neon light of the cinema was reflected in puddles. The suburbs began, detached houses with lovely lawns surrounded by high brick walls. Pines creaked and swayed in the wind. I stopped in front of a freshly painted gate. To its left, a familiar hawthorn. A small metal plaque read Beware of Dog. I looked around—no one. The fence was well built, but through the narrow chinks between the wooden boards I could just see the garden, drowning in darkness. The streetlight lit up a section of the clapboard façade and the big, glassed windows of the patio and kitchen. The country house of my ex-husband’s parents, where they had spent some thirty years. I could find my way through all the rooms with my eyes closed, without bumping into anything. The strange silhouettes on the summer table indicated that the houseplants had still not been taken inside for the winter.
“Misty,” I called.
The sound of my voice was answered by the barking of a dog. I looked through the narrow opening in the fence, unable to tear myself away from the dead landscape. A house from which life had departed. Something inexorable, alien was hanging over it, pouring into the air. I called to mind the evening before a religious holiday, my mother-in-law bent over the stove despite her husband’s terrible diagnosis. Violets on the windowsill, the soft light of a spherical floor lamp, and fat snowflakes dusting the outside porch. I began to feel unwell. After stamping my feet by the locked gate for some time, I went back to my warm car. Before I headed off, I turned one more time to the fence and the leaf-strewn path. It seemed not long ago, after a summer dinner, that the two old folks had come outside to say goodbye to us—happy, carefree youths who did not understand their own happiness. They stood waving at the car, and I watched their figures for a long time through the side mirror. “Don’t stand out in the cold!” I yelled, suddenly annoyed. They couldn’t hear me. As we drove away, the old folks grew ever smaller until the night swallowed them up completely. I shifted my glance to the potholed road in front of me, to the feral dogs running out of driveways, and I thought that my whole life would go on just like this, normal and unremarkable, lost amid a long series of days and Sunday evenings with my parents-in-law and their boring family happiness. Just one more unnecessary life.
Translated from the Russian by Andrew Wachtel
Anzhelina Polonskaya was born in Malakhovka, a small town near Moscow. She has been a member of the Moscow Union of Writers since 1998 and the Russian PEN-Centre since 2003. Her work has appeared in Iowa Review, Agni, Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and Kenyon Review. A collection of her poems, Take Me to Stavanger (Pittsburgh), appeared in 2023.
Andrew Wachtel is cofounder and director of Compass College of Art and Design in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, his interests range from Russian literature and culture to East European and Balkan culture, history, and politics to contemporary central Asia.
Photo by Karmishth Tandel on Unsplash
