LITMIR.BIZ

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feeling the need for movement; she cleaned the kitchen cupboards, clanging about at three a.m. and finding four dead cockroaches, two bottles of tomatoes from 1975 and a mouse trap (empty); she forced down weak tea with so much added jam you could stand a spoon up in it; she had a bath with oil of lavender so strong it took her breath away; and eventually, giving in, she took a tablet. Galia wasn’t one for tablets: the only discernible effect of this one was to turn her water green for the whole of the following day. Still she did not sleep.

      At five a.m., after several half-hearted attempts at a gardening crossword, she went back to bed feeling cold and despondent despite the promising glow of the rising sun. She turned from one side to the other and then back again, replaying all the events of the evening and things that could have turned out differently, and most of all chiding herself for being a stubborn old idiot and not getting the dog a collar from the outset. If only she hadn’t stood on a principle, none of this would ever have happened. Poor Boroda would not be awaiting execution, and old Vasya would be asleep in his own bed instead of languishing in some prison cell far across town. And slowly, once all the scenarios had been churned over and re-jigged to exhaustion and started getting jumbled up with one another in her tired mind, she absently and unwittingly turned to examining problems further back in time: situations, places and people she had left behind a long time ago. The theatre behind her eyelids was filled with scenes and characters about whom she hardly ever thought when she was busy with her garden, her card games, her vegetables and her Boroda.

      She dozed fitfully, and remembered a time when she was young. Back then, when things were different, life was properly difficult and her memories of it were dark. She remembered clattering footsteps in the stairwell, and the dry choking dust coming off the unmade roads in huge silvery plumes all summer. It was a time when work was a twelve-hour day at least, and sparse summer harvests had to be made to last all winter. When they first moved in to the apartment, the electricity, which they were very lucky to have, went off in the evening. That was no great problem, as they had no fridge and no TV, and generally no need for light after eight p.m. In those days, the lazy got nothing, unless they were the bosses, in which case they got theirs and a slice of everybody else’s, and more besides. She remembered her elderly neighbours: they were respected, but had nothing, and hoped for nothing, except maybe a better future for their grandchildren, if they survived. She tried to visualize the faces of some of those friends and neighbours who had gone away years ago and never come back, but the images were smudgy, lacking detail. Too much time had passed. There had been no miracle reunions, no matter what the films in the mobile cinema tried to make you believe. The disappeared did not come back.

      The war had left Galia an orphan, but found her a husband, for which she was grateful. The move from active duty to dealing with the burdens of married life came very quickly. Galia found her new domestic chores rather stifling: occasionally, her heart beat fast against her ribs and she felt a little nauseous, a little trapped, a little desperate, sitting on her stool in the stuffy flat, waiting for Pasha to return from the factory.

      She had no previous connection to the town of Azov: Pasha was required to work at the factory, which produced things that she was not allowed to know about, so they were posted to the town by the Regional government soon after the war’s end. At first they lived in a wooden shack, along with the old lady who was the original tenant and a number of her livestock. Once the factory had been fully rebuilt, new apartments for workers were slotted together with amazing speed, and Galia knew they were lucky to be among the first to be re-homed. At first, they shared the two rooms plus kitchen and bathroom with another family whose baby girl howled all night and whose grandfather howled all day. After a year or so the others were re-housed, and Galia missed the baby once she had caught up on her sleep.

      Azov was a sociable southern town: the people promenaded in the summer evenings, slapping mosquitoes from their legs and always wearing Sunday best if they had it, no matter what day of the week. In the wintertime, when the river froze over and the icy wind snarled in from the north, the locals would wrap up in all the clothes they possessed and go skating over the fishes and the weeds. Married men would seek the silent companionship of ice-fishing as long as the river would take their weight, and day and night, blizzard or sun, they sat over tiny holes drilled through the leaden surface, waiting for a bite or a nip from their own bottles hidden away under piles of bread and pork fat supplied by their loyal wives. Pasha never went ice-fishing though. Galia would have liked it if he had, but her suggestion was always met with a shrug and a sardonic smile. Pasha kept himself to himself.

      Galia loved the river with its changing face and wide, sunlit banks, but no more than she enjoyed the old town walls and the crumbling fortress, red brick and fusty, which repelled invasion by no-one these days, but was chock-full of stories and ghosts. As a young woman, Galia had been impressed with Shop No. 1, Shop No. 2, the shoe shop and the newly built Palace of Culture. It seemed to her that her country was indeed building Communism and rebuilding itself into a better, fairer, and brighter place. The factories and the schools that sprang up around the town were right on her doorstep. It was all new and as fresh as dew on green tomatoes, for a while. Galia felt part of this beginning and wanted to take a role in the real work of the collective, her union, the Soviet Union.

      But at home, life was never simple, and it never reflected the Soviet model that, for a while at least, Galia hoped it would. When Pasha chose to sit and drink, she would stay in the kitchen and work methodically on enough vareniki for a month, gifting them out to the toothless old men and women from down the hall, when they were well enough to be roused by her knock at the door. When Pasha fell asleep at the vegetable patch during the harvest, she carried on, working all day without a break, and ensuring that he was shaded as far as possible so that his translucent pale skin did not peel. When he’d slap her backside with a pink hand and lead her into the shed for a glass of home brew and a cuddle, she tried not to think of her aching back but instead focused on the love that she hoped his attention signified. His stubble and the stale tang of sleep on his tongue sometimes brought a tear to her eye, but the intimate rub of bare wood on her buttocks as he moved inside her sent little shock-waves of desire through her belly and down her legs, and made her toes and fingers curl into tight knots of pleasure.

      But in truth, Galia had realized fairly early on that she didn’t really like Pasha at all. Once she had accepted this to herself, as a woman of principle, she became determined to make a good wife for him, as far as was possible: he was to be clean, his socks darned, meals provided, and other needs met. But despite her good intentions, it was not many years before her interest in him shrivelled like a late rose caught in a sly first frost. Once the home brew had dried up and the shed became a place where only the seedlings received any attention, she squared her shoulders and got on with other things. In time, this became her mantra: get on with things, and don’t complain, and all will be well.

      Pasha had started being away when he should be home almost before the wedding feast (boiled meat, potatoes, kvas and apples) had been fully digested and forgotten by all those concerned. Not that there were many guests to be had at their nuptials, most of their relatives and friends being missing, dead, in prison or building Communism elsewhere in the huge Union. Pasha’s absence hurt Galia at first, but in a dull sort of way. She had expected a man who would be there, making demands on her, eating her food, sleeping with her, giving her ultimatums, making a mess and demanding her attention when she was busy. But mostly she saw the back of his head: as he sat at his desk in the main room, studying papers from the factory, fingers and stubble streaked with ink; or as he stood on the balcony staring out into the evening, smoke from his cigarette rising straight and listless into the still summer sky; or as he slept on the sofa, sucking air noisily out of the room and hiding it in the cavity of his chest like a miser hoarding candle ends. And then there was the quiet mockery of the click of the closing door, sometimes mid-sentence, sometimes just before a meal. Galia ate many meals for two alone. When she was lying on the bed waiting for him, wondering if there was something wrong with her, with her frizzy blonde hair and her pale skin, she’d finish off his pie, lick the fork, and tell herself it didn’t matter. Good food, honesty, timeliness, good neighbourliness: these were worthy enough causes.

      At first she would listen to the familiar bossy tones of the radio while she waited. Sometimes housework kept her occupied, or some mending. She’d watch the children playing in the courtyard between the

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