Luba had grown to like the stinging—not just the relief it brought to her swollen, twisted hands, but the prick itself. She imagined it must be like getting a tattoo. Her husband had had his name crudely tattooed on his arm during the war. Or was it in the displaced persons camps afterward? Such details got lost, they were less important to hold onto than other memories. Happier ones.
She knelt beside her husband’s grave in front of the hollowed-out log and listened to the buzzing deep inside. It was a soothing sound that reminded her of concentrating in the night to hear Kalyna’s breathing when she had been a baby, a nightly ritual to make sure that her daughter did not follow her older brother into death’s embrace. Kalyna eventually did, but many years later . . . From cancer brought on by the bright betrayal of too many sun-bleached days on the coast of the Black Sea.
Luba placed her hand atop the log and felt the soft vibration. It throbbed familiar and comforting, so similar to the feeling of resting her hand atop her husband’s chest as his heartbeat slowly stopped. She had touched so much death with her hands: resting her head as a child atop the starving body of her mother while her mother’s hair came away in clumps in Luba’s small hands; squeezing in solidarity the hands of friends bruised and beaten at the hands of Nazi soldiers; the cold hands of corpses she helped carry into the mass graves; holding the fearful hands of wounded rebels and revolutionaries; the gnarled hands of other babas finally succumbing to old age or disease. Her time would come soon. But not yet. That was why she needed her hands, and why she loved her bees.
The steady enthusiasm of this hive was so different from her other hives. Each one had its own personality: the constant diligence of the three sister hives in the ancient wooden boxes she had inherited from her father, the wild and unpredictable energy of the hive in the birch tree in her garden, the quiet hum of the forest hives beside the river. She loved them all, and visiting them was one of the bright spots in her day. As she tended to them, Luba would talk about her day: collecting eggs from the chickens; chasing off the fox; harvesting her enormous garden full of tomatoes, potatoes, beets, and peas; foraging for mushrooms in the forest; collecting wild raspberries for jam; perhaps a visit from one of the scientists who came every few months to collect samples for radiation testing; or a rare but treasured visit from one of the other babas in the neighboring villages.
She kissed the bark of the wild hive. “Good morning, my darlings.”
In many ways, a hive was more like a single creature than many individuals, working together much like her hands working with her arms working with her heart working with her imagination. Together. When they worked, that is. But that was why she came here for help, so that they could work.
Luba placed her bare hands inside the log, her youngest hive. Even without the usual sparse dusting of wormwood powder, the bees kept their distance and did not sting her all at once.
Luba began to sing to them, slowly moving her fingers to get their attention.
“Beloved sister bees,
a few of you must surely be ready,
a few of you must have lived long enough—
a good life full of sweetness.
Is it time to say farewell? To return to the earth?
Would you gift me your venom before you go?
Would you give me relief before I die?
Would you trust me to help care for your sisters?
Aren’t we all sisters? Sisters all are we.”
She felt the first sting, and the second, but after that only heat and pressure as more and more stung her wrists and fingers. After a few deep breaths, Luba slipped her hands out from the hive. Those bees who sat atop her skin flew off, but a handful fell to the ground after completing their sting. More would get carried out of the hive to join their sisters in a small pile of dead at the base of the log.
Luba rubbed her hands to help spread the venom. Miracle creatures, they were. What kills one, can heal another—lessons learned from her father and grandfather. She watched as several dead or dying bees got tossed out to join the others on the ground. So good at handling their dead. For a moment Luba flashed back to the war, when she had been among the young people forced to dig the deep pits for mass graves. She shuddered with the weight of the remembrance.
She pulled out the bottle of samohonka, her homemade moonshine, from an apron pocket and poured a little onto each of the graves of her loved ones, allowing herself a small sip before closing it up and putting it back into her pocket.
“Na zdorovya!” she said aloud, then walked toward her house to finish the day’s chores. Luba paused to pluck a few choice apples and pears off those trees heavy with beautiful shining fruit. Carrying them home in her apron, she thought about baking a nice apple cake sweetened with honey.
Tonight was the full moon, and that usually brought visitors to her house on the edge of the forest—young men in their secondhand army fatigues looking to stop someplace on their way to the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat. Luba wondered if they saw her as some sort of Baba Yaga, a witch guarding secrets they hoped to discover. She did not see them as the heroes of any folktale, and they had no idea that their “adventure” would lead them to an unhappy ending.
She felt bad about the first few, until she came to better understand their motivation. These boys were not like the young men of her own generation. No, these boys did not have war or famine or disaster to test their character, so they went looking for death in the “toxic” wilderness of her backyard. Eager to prove that they were even less afraid of radiation poisoning than of police and guards and scientists, they dared each other to drink the muddy waters and eat in the archaic cottages of one of the dozens of old babas who, like herself, had found ways to sneak back into their homes, back into the Exclusion Zone after being forced to evacuate. Luba felt anger course through her, and she squeezed one of the apples in her newly-healed fist until she felt the skin break and juices spill out over her fingers. She and the other babas had walked on foot for kilometers, crawled under fences, and snuck through brambles to reclaim their cottages and gardens and graves. This was their land, not the playground of foolhardy young men eager to take advantage of their just a desire for the fleeting fame that came from photographs and videos of their “daring adventures.”
She steadied herself against an ancient birch tree, the same one she and her sister used to sit beneath as girls. Luba relaxed her rounded back and shoulders against the trunk, released the tension in her face and neck, and closed her eyes to feel the energy of that tree, another sister in this place. She smiled. The babas knew something the young ones did not. These boys had forgotten that there were older and more dangerous things in the ground than buried radioactive buses, and there were creatures much hungrier in the forest than bears and wolves. Let them come. Nature has her own rules, stronger than the folly of these young men.
Luba sat beside her table, the only light from a single oil lamp and from the fire burning in the stove. The table was dressed with her finest embroidered tablecloth, delicate red and black cross-stitch from the days when her fingers could more steadily hold the tiny needle and thread. Atop the cloth was a bowl of bright red borscht beside plates of still-steaming potato varenyky and kapusta, cucumbers and tomatoes tossed in dill, sliced salo, homemade pickles, and fresh baked apple cake. Everything must eat, her own Baba used to say. A hungry dog is stronger than a satisfied wolf.
She whispered, “Never let it be said that Luba Ivanova let a guest go hungry.”
Outside the window the moon shone over the tops of the trees. Luba waited, hand around her teacup. She would not touch any food until her guests arrived, and if they did not arrive by midnight, she would pack up the food until the next night. It was only a matter of time. Her home was directly along the most commonly traveled path to Pripyat. One of the scientists had once told her that her tiny cottage even appeared in a popular computer game set in Chornobyl, making it a “tourist destination.” Besides, she had seen more strange shadows than usual gathering in the trees the past few nights, and the flickering of so many glowing eyes from her window. The forest was restless. Hungry. Luba smiled and sipped her tea, waiting for the knock.
At ninety years of age, she was patient and unafraid. She had nothing for them to steal: her small pension was well hidden, her food was readily shared, and her body was too old and broken. All she had left was time and memories. And her home.
Home was why she and the other babas had returned to the land that held their mothers and fathers and children. This land was her family, and she was a part of it. They all were, and they knew that the ancestors and nature spirits would ultimately be stronger than the poison that human beings spilled into the air and soil. One by one the babas were taking their turn to feed the land, like the Motherland had always fed them. It was their bond and their promise.
The land must be loved and cared for. It was part of the cycle of life and death. For creation, there must be destruction. Sometimes the sacrifice was gentle and peaceful in one’s old bed with honey on their lips; sometimes it was sudden and bloody with bits of bone and teeth left behind.
Luba saw the branches swaying with more force outside her window. The winds had picked up. Perhaps a storm? Or perhaps the creatures in the woods were getting restless, hungry? She had grown up with stories about the dangers: folk tales of hairy backward tricksters deep in the woods, tortured souls of drowned women waiting in rivers, haggard old women in huts on the edges of civilization—
Knock. Knock. Knock.
She jumped.
Knocking, again, but it was against her window, not the door. Luba crossed herself and listened to the noises increasing outside: the howling of the wolves, the owl nearby, the crying of something like a child farther off, and a faint whistling that seemed to be coming closer.
Nature had found ways to reclaim the spaces where men had built towers and fences: trees broke through the concrete, vines wore down brick and mortar, the city and nearby towns were transformed into wilderness faster than Luba would have thought possible.
She thought back to the first waves of young men who wandered into the Zone dressed in shades of green, their faces smeared with paint, their backpacks filled with cameras and video recorders. Like forest creatures come out of the trees, she thought of the first time two men came out of the trees and greeted her. Then a familiar but ancient panic as she remembered so many other young men with a similar hunger in their eyes who had also come out of the trees—when Russian and German armies marched through during the war leaving broken homes and gardens and women in their wake.
But these were not those. These boys were neither magical creatures nor monsters. They had Ukrainian faces. So much like her son.
The face in her window looked so much like her son Mykola that she initially thought him a ghost and inhaled sharply, crossing herself. Then as his breath made warm fog on the glass, she jumped to her feet to answer the door.
“Dobriy vechir, Babusia!” said the young man with a dramatic bow in her direction. “I see you have dinner set out. Do you have enough for a poor traveler?”
This one did not barge in like so many others had before him. He stood on the threshold and waited for her to invite him. He was a polite one, at least, she thought to herself. Perhaps they would have a little conversation before his imminent disappearance.
“I do, and you are welcome,” she said and gestured for him to join her at the table. He took off his shoes and then came in, sitting down at the table opposite her teacup. Luba took her place across from him and began to pile food onto his plate, watching his eyes dart from dish to dish. Still he waited to eat until she had also served herself, and only then did he take the first bite. She watched him eat hungrily. It was a hungry kind of night.
“What are you doing here?” she asked in between spoonfuls of borscht. ”Have you come to explore the abandoned town like so many others before you?”
“Not exactly,” the young man answered, straightening his shirt and smoothing down his trousers. “I’m an artist.”
“Is that so?” she asked. She wondered what kind of art. Another photographer, no doubt, trying to make new money on old images, since they all went to the same places: the ruins of the Palace of Culture, the overgrown fairground and rusted Ferris wheel, the peeling paint on the children’s classroom mural, so many broken dolls with gas masks and missing limbs.
Her visitor moved like a cat, long and lean with smooth fluid movement. Luba looked at his hands that seemed rough and strong. At least he was not one of these boys with manicured nails and baby-soft fingers.
“I’m a sculptor,” the young man said. “I make things with my hands, and I like to incorporate things from the world around me that I find. I like to create things that most people cannot see. I especially like to go to places that are abandoned, to find secrets there and share them with my art.”
Luba nodded and pulled her shawl tighter around her as he talked about sculptures that he’d made from bark and branches, copper and wire. He had a nice voice, and she liked the way he kept looking in her eyes when he spoke. It would have made her blush when she was younger. Back then, Luba would have looked away because her mama always told her that she should play coy with boys. Thankfully she was past such games now. She held the young man’s gaze and looked at the way he studied her. It made her smile.
“What are you thinking, Babusia?” the young man asked her.
She did not tell him that she was wondering what manner of beast or spirit would scoop him up after he left her house. She did not say that she hoped his affairs were in order. She never told them. She never warned them. It seemed a betrayal to the forest.
Luba was loyal to the land in a way that these young men could never understand, a promise renewed when she gratefully placed that small handful of dirt into her mouth after returning home. She was of this earth, and the forest was her family—the only one she had left.
“It is nice that you do not chew with your mouth open,” she answered. “And you are very well-mannered. Your mama did a good job.”
He gave her a grin that would have melted her young girl’s heart. “It is nice that you are such a good cook, and you are a very good listener. Your children are lucky.”
At that, she put her hand to her chest.
“They were not lucky,” she said.
He frowned and reached over to touch her arm. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”
She pushed his hand away. Then she reached for her samohonka. “Would you like a taste?” she asked. “For luck?”
He grinned again. “Please.”
They first toasted to each other’s health. With the second shot they toasted to Ukraine’s freedom, and after that to family, then friends, followed by poetry, fine cheese, and the cleverness of foxes. Luba welcomed the warmth that flooded her body with each sip. It was a nicer evening than she’d had in months. The last visitors, three months prior, had been rude and gruff, two large men who ignored her completely and ate like pigs. She was not sorry to see them go, nor sad when she found strips of their shirts braided with hair tied to the tree down the path from her house. She was not sure if the bones she later saw on the riverbank and arranged in neat piles were theirs, but she suspected they were.
“It must be lonely here,” the young man said to her. He had pulled a notebook and pencil out from his pack and was softly sketching something. She closed her eyes and listened to the gentle scratching sound. Soon it was joined by soft whistling from outside, still far off but carried closer by the wind.
“It’s quiet,” Luba said. “But that’s not the same as lonely.” Neither one of them spoke for a while.
“What about you?” Luba asked him. “You choose to travel alone, to places where there are few people. Are you lonely?”
The young man smiled, and Luba was once more reminded of a cat. “Like you, I appreciate the quiet,” he said. “It helps me to understand that we are never really alone.”
The young man sketched, and Luba listened as, all around them, the night seemed to get louder. He did not jump when the wolf howled. He said nothing when there was a crash in the woodpile, and he just kept sketching when the inhuman laughing began not far outside her door. Luba had grown used to all the sounds, but strangers usually found them unsettling at best. One young man several years ago ran out of her home and into the rainstorm leaving behind his camera and bag. She left them on the road the next morning.
“There are many still alive here?” ’ he asked, but it was not really a question.
“A few of us came back home after the evacuation, and many things that live here never left,” she said, opening her eyes to stare out the window into the darkness. “Some have changed. A few have died off. Most I recognize, some I do not.” She paused remembering her early explorations after returning home. “The worst of all is the Red Forest. A graveyard of trees stripped and stained red that remind me too much of Stalin’s skeletal sacrifices during the Holodomor.”
“I am haunted by a story I heard on a documentary when I was a boy,” the young man said, “about birds living in the Red Forest who fly in and out of holes in the reactor building. I have dreamt of those birds ever since, sketched and sculpted them my entire life. Can you imagine? Such misshapen magical things able to come and go in a place both poisonous and beautiful.”
Luba did not have to imagine. Many times she had watched the birds in Pripyat. In the early days she never knew when one of them might suddenly fall to the ground, dead or dying. She always tried to find and bury them, saying a little prayer for their souls—tiny victims of human folly.
He looked at her. “Of course you know.”
Luba fought against her heart softening for this strange young man. “There is something about those birds that started me on this path,”
the sculptor said, and Luba didn’t know if he meant the path to Pripyat or his choice to be an artist, but she didn’t want to interrupt him.
“I think that magical things happen in places of great tragedy,” he said. Luba could not argue.
He continued, “Do you know about the large dam that Stalin’s troops blew up in 1941? In Zaporizhzhya?”
Luba shook her head. She knew about many things that happened in the war, but mostly only to her and her family and friends.
“As the Nazis were making their way through Ukraine,” the sculptor continued, “Stalin’s police blew up the hydroelectric dam to slow their advance. But it flooded the nearby villages along Dnipro river and killed tens of thousands of people.”
“I am not surprised,” she said. “Stalin had so much blood on his hands.” Luba looked down at her hands, wriggled her fingers, and said a tiny prayer of thanks to the bees.
“I went there and spent several nights sleeping outdoors along the Dnipro river,” said the sculptor. “I like to look for things that no one else can see—legends and mythic creatures. I came home to my studio with a bag full of driftwood and wreckage and photographs, and I created a mobile of rusalky dancing in the air. They are terrifying and lovely, drowned souls dancing in pain and pleasure. It’s hanging in a gallery in Zaporizhzhya.
“Those nights on the river continue to inspire me—I listened to the rusalky singing and weeping from my tent. I still dream of their songs.”
“I think he must be a lucky boy,” she said softly.
She had been in the habit of talking to herself for years, but usually only when she was alone. Luba was embarrassed when she realized that she had done so in front in the sculptor.
“I mean you,” she said, “you must be a lucky boy.”
Maybe it would be enough to save him? Maybe he would be the first? Maybe he would come back. To see her.
“And you must be getting tired,” the sculptor said. “I suppose I should leave soon, so that I can reach the city.”
She thought again of warning him. Would that be a betrayal? She had made a promise to protect this land and all her creatures. They were all connected, like the bees. Luba wished she could ask another of the babas, but they never spoke overtly of the strange lights that flickered in the trees, or the blood in pools at the roots, or the wreaths of hair floating on the surface of the river.
To talk about these things felt wrong somehow, so the babas hinted around them instead. They discussed new additions for their bottle trees—a suggestion from one of the scientists, who told them that sliding colored glass bottles onto the branches of a tree close to the home would entice and trap evil spirits. Luba and her friends embraced the tradition with enthusiasm and traded colored bottles the way children once traded marbles: a blue one for a green, an amber one for a red, and so on. They shared flasks of holy water, compared samohonka recipes, and remembered prayers and blessings. On one of their infrequent reunions, they might admire the colored glass gleaming so bright in the sunlight, praising each one for doing its job of trapping evil spirits, daring to ask if there were many more wild animal attacks around than usual. They spoke often about death, but in the language of symbol and story.
“You could stay here,” she offered, for the first time, “tonight. My couch is soft and my home is warm, and the night is not kind to strangers.” It made her a little sad to think of finding traces of the sculptor in the woods in the weeks to come, a patchwork of skin and bone.
He looked surprised. “I should go, but thank you.”
He set down his sketchpad. Luba tried to take a look at what he had been drawing, but he folded his hands on top of it. “You are a most kind and generous hostess.”
He grinned at her, and this time she could feel a flush warm her cheeks. Something crashed against the outside wall, and then the sound of nails or claws scratching against wood. Without flinching, he looked around the cabin. “Are you never afraid?”
“No. Not in my home. Not for myself. This place, this land, all of it—it is a part of me. It is in my blood.” She poured them each a final shot of samohonka, emptying the bottle. “I was never more afraid than those nights after evacuation, when we didn’t know what was happening, when we didn’t know whether or not we’d ever be able to return home. Those nights, away from here, I thought I was going to die. I knew that if I stayed there, I would.”
She looked into the eyes of this boy who so much resembled her son. “I am old, and I have lived a long and full life. I am not afraid of dying, but I am afraid of dying away from here. That is the only thing I fear.”
The lamp on the table turned on and off. It was another sign she had come to recognize—after the loud crash and the laughter always came the flickering light. Luba stood up, feeling the weight of her years in each joint.
“Then I would not worry if I were you, Babusia,” said the sculptor, stepping closer to take her arm to steady her. “I do not think there is a force in Hell that could take you from this place.”
She envied him the strength and confidence of his youth, so like a tree she might lean against, so certain that he could withstand any storm.
“May I have one last slice of your delicious cake with a little honey to take with me?” the sculptor asked with a dramatic bow.
“You may,” she said with a small curtsy, then she packed him a small package. Luba knew it was futile, but perhaps the birds and bears might find his bundle and enjoy the snack.
She walked him to the door and as he stood there against it, she was overwhelmed with the desire to reach over and hug him, as she had long ago hugged her own son. But she couldn’t. She felt frozen to the spot, and emotion welled up in her throat and chest and eyes.
“What is it, Babusia?” he asked. “Is there something wrong? Are you hurting?”
On cue, the window rattled and the walls of her home squeaked as if under strong pressure. Luba’s chest felt tight and her knees weak.
“Nothing. It’s nothing,” she said. They stood looking at each other, the sculptor and the baba.
Luba wondered what was out there this night, what would catch him, whether or not he would fight, if he could possibly escape. She wondered what his family would think, if he would be missed, if the world would be worse off without his art. She had a feeling it might. Some people left bigger holes than others. Her own hole would be small, so very small. The holes left by death got smaller the fewer people left behind to remember.
He leaned over and kissed her cheek, and he smelled like the woods, like smoke and wet leaves and the deep brown forest musk that leaked into everything in autumn. “Be well, Babusia. Until our paths cross again.”
After that, he turned and walked past her bottle tree and down the path into the woods. Luba quickly closed the door and leaned with her back against it surveying the room. She saw a piece of paper from the sculptor’s sketchbook on the table and walked to it, all the while listening for signs of struggle outside. Luba turned the page over and saw a sketch of herself, an old, tired baba sitting beside the fire, and behind her stood all manner of creatures drawn lightly to look like ghosts or shadows, their claws sharp, the teeth pointed and dripping, their fur and clothes and scales splotched with mud or blood. She could not tell if they were standing there to attack her or support her.
Luba felt cold, and the hairs on her neck stood at attention, as if their eyes were actually upon her. Someone was watching. Something was gathering around her, and she started to feel breath coming closer, a movement of air, a low breeze at her ankles. Luba closed her eyes and thought about the song she sang for the bees:
“ . . . You must surely be ready,
you must have lived long enough—
a good life full of sweetness.
Is it time to say farewell?”
She heard whistling outside, then screaming followed by laughter, and the sound of boots running up to her threshold. Her doorknob rattled and then stopped. Luba concentrated on her breathing: in and out, in and out, unable to open her eyes. It’s time, she said to herself over and over. At least I’m home. It’s time. I’m home. It’s time. I’m home.
A quiet knocking on her door, but Luba did not open her eyes. She could not move and tried to convince herself that it was the sculptor, changing his mind, coming back to stay. But she knew it wasn’t. Luba knew that the sculptor was gone. It was not him.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
It’s time.