Сергей Огольцов – The Sweets At Dawn (страница 16)

The next day, an ambulance was called again, but they didn't take the suffering woman away; they only gave her an injection.

Granny Katya quieted down for a while, but soon began to thrash about on the couch again, repeating the same cry: 'Oh, my God! Oh, probi!'

A couple of years later, I realized that 'probi' is a Ukrainian abbreviation for 'forgive me, God.'

Granny Katya was dying for three days.

Our families huddled out in khatas of neaarby neighbors—the Arkhipenkos in No. 15, and we in No. 21, on Ivan Kripak's half. Elderly neighbors advanced vague advice to my parents, like breaking down the threshold of our khata, or one of the floorboards inside.

The most practical suggestion came from Ivan Kripak's wife, Aunt Tamara. She said that the couch with Grandma Katya was under the hinged pane ajar in the window above her head, and the fresh air was protracting suffering of the poor thing.

That same evening, my mother and Aunt Lyuda popped into our khata to grab a couple of blankets. Then they turned off the lights and went out onto the porch. There, Aunt Lyuda went to the kitchen window and squeezed the half-open window pane into the frame. Tightly.

Somehow stealthily, she climbed the two steps down to where Mother and I stood holding the blankets. A smile of a mischievous little girl stayed stilled in Auntie's face, or so it seemed to me, in the nook between the verandas, where the moon hadn't yet reached to spill its shine…

. .. .

The next morning, Mother woke the three of us, sleeping on the living room floor in the Kripaks' half-house, with the news of Grandma Katya's death.

The funeral took place the following day. I really didn't want to go, but Mother said I had to.

I was consumed with shame. It seemed everyone knew that Grandma Katya had been strangled by her own daughters.

So I unfastened the earflaps of my rabbit-fur hat and pulled it down over my eyes. I walked like that all the way from the house to the cemetery, my head bowed in shame, watching the heels marching in front of me.

Or maybe no one realized it was from shame, and not because of the sharp wind whipping icy pellets across my cheeks.

At the cemetery, when the pipes howled for the last time near the uneven bed of frozen earth and dirty snow after the refill, all of Grandma Katya's children burst into tears—Mother, Aunt Lyuda, and even Uncle Vadya.

(… living further and further, we grow callous, irreversibly… the day will come, and I will turn into an insensitive as iron biscuit in the knapsack of the wanderer who roved, searching: where, where did he disappear to, Finist the Bright Falcon?…)

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