Baba Dunja's Last Love Read Online Free Page A

sits around stewing, and she’s wilting as a result.
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    There are about thirty houses lining our main road. Not even half of them are inhabited. Everyone knows everyone else, everyone knows where the others are from, and I suspect everyone could tell you what time of day his or her neighbors go to the bathroom and how often they turn over in their sleep. Which doesn’t mean that everyone here spends time together. People who move back to Tschernowo have no desire for companionship.
    Money is also a factor. There are places available in Malyschi, but the gray five-story buildings from the Khrushchev era have leaky pipes and thin, moldy walls. Instead of gardens there are courtyards with a rusty swing, the remains of an old slide, and a row of never-emptied garbage barrels. Anyone who wants to plant tomatoes needs a dacha outside of town, to which an overly crowded bus goes once a day. I would have to have rented, and my pension would have only been enough to cover living with strangers as a lodger. And the room would have been tiny.
    Though we do have people in Tschernowo for whom money is not an issue, as far as I can tell. The Gavrilows, for instance, are educated people, I can tell from the tips of their noses. And also by the fact that they are accustomed to living in comfort. They could win prizes for their garden. They have a raised bed with cucumbers, a greenhouse, and a contraption that they grill meats on during the warm months, just like on television. And they have roses, a never-ending supply of roses in every color, which grow in bushes that entwine the fence. Mr. Gavrilow often stands in front of those roses in a suit, and as soon as he catches sight of a withered blossom he cuts it off. Mrs. Gavrilow dabs the leaves with a soapy cloth to ward off aphids. When you walk past their property it smells like honey and perfume. But they never speak to anyone, so if I urgently needed salt I’d go somewhere else.
    I could go to Lenotschka, who from the back looks like a girl and from the front like a doll. A doll like the ones Irina had, but aged for decades. Lenotschka mostly sits in her house, knits an endlessly long scarf, and smiles when someone addresses her. Doesn’t answer, though. She has a lot of chickens, and they seem to multiply at her place like flies. I could go to Lenotschka if I needed something, she always shares if she has it.
    I would go to Petrow, too, except that he has no salt in his home. He is cancer-ridden from head to foot. After his operation they wanted to keep him in the hospital to die. He fled like he was in prison, jumped out the window in his surgical gown, his IV pulled along behind him. He moved into the house of his ex-wife’s grandparents in Tschernowo and didn’t have much more in mind than to die quickly and peacefully. But that was a while ago now. He’s been here for a year, to date the last one to arrive. Petrow doesn’t grow anything in his garden because he says he doesn’t want to feed the cancer anymore. He considers salt and sugar unhealthy, so he doesn’t have either in his home.
    I put in a spoon, carry the bowl of chicken soup across the street, the German hiking sandals raise dust. I call loudly at Petrow’s gate, and when he doesn’t answer I walk in. He is still alive, and he emerges from the hedges zipping up his fly. A hatchet with a rusty blade is stuck in his belt. Beneath his left arm he squeezes a yellowed little book that he probably found in some empty house. The first few months he annoyed the whole of Tschernowo knocking on doors and asking for reading material—he had arrived with nothing but a bag with underwear and a notebook in it.
    â€œGreetings, Baba Dunja,” he says. “I’m not much when it comes to gardening, and these blackberries are wearing me out.” He shows me his scratched arms and I shake my head apologetically.
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