Lyubov Mikhailovna said that Mama’s breathing had been bad, heavy. She found that out from the priest. That’s the way dying people breathe. The light was good, and there was no wind. The light was golden, like it is in August.
Lyubov Mikhailovna’s arm lay across the back of the couch, a little swollen, grayish. How strange, I thought, looking at that arm, as if without a priest’s say-so you can’t understand that a person is dying, when it’s plain to see that she is.
Lyubov Mikhailovna’s face looked calm. She believed in God, and her own cancer was in remission. She probably thought her cancer was in remission because she believed in God. There was also superiority written across her face. As though in her lap laid life’s invisible trophy, which she’d won from my mother.
Andrei said that at ten o’clock tomorrow morning I’d get a call from Mikhail Sergeyevich. Andrei had already given some cousin of Mikhail Sergeyevich money for gas, so that he’d drive me to pick up the ashes. I could have done it myself, but concern is important here. Care and concern. The light was very good, very warm. And the noodle soup turned out fine. Everything turned out fine, just as I promised. Concern is important.
The husband of Mama’s old neighbor, as he was leaving the wake, said that Andrei shouldn’t let himself get down. He said Andrei should call him if he wanted to go fishing. Andrei said he would call. But I knew he wouldn’t, it’s just that it’s important to accept people’s care and concern in these situations.
Lyubov Mikhailovna asked me to accept her condolences. I accepted them. For a month, she had dosed Mama with holy water: three tablespoons and a prayer in the morning, three tablespoons and a prayer at night. She said that after the priest’s visit my mother had brightened and got to her feet. Lyubov Mikhailovna said that Mama had laughed and made some soup.
Mama had said that the priest laid some kind of bauble on her head and asked her to repent, while he himself read a prayer. Mama said she didn’t understand a thing. But she never admitted to Lyubov Mikhailovna that Orthodox Christianity doesn’t help much when you’re sick. Particularly if you don’t believe in God.
When I was a child, I was told that it’s a good thing if it rains during a funeral. On the one hand, rain at the start of a journey is a good sign, and on the other, it’s nature mourning. Nature doing its part, commiserating. There was a light drizzle when my father was buried. But it doesn’t rain in February; instead of rain there’s this good light. Everything looks very rosy and complete in this light, like an apple.
Everyone sat there on the couch where Mama had lain dying. And then they all left, all at once. Andrei and I cleared the table and washed the dishes. Andrei said that you aren’t supposed to throw out any food from a wake, and that it can only be eaten with spoons. He said he’d wash everything, turned on the TV in the kitchen, and started doing the dishes. I brought him the empty plates. It was a long way to evening.
Andrei asked if the crematorium kept working at night. I don’t know, I replied, but I know that our turn was at 4:30 p.m., which means they’ve already burned the body. Andrei said it was a disgrace, burning up living people. I didn’t say anything, just thought that she wasn’t living, she was dead. I sat on the couch and watched TV. And then lay down on the couch and fell asleep with a feeling of bitter relief. At night I dreamed of darkness.
Andrei told me that Mikhail Sergeyevich’s cousin was a peculiar guy. He said I shouldn’t pay him any mind. Andrei said he had given the cousin three hundred rubles for gas, to drive me to the crematorium at the central cemetery.
This is tough country. The steppe is all around, and in places where water flows there’s greenery and moisture; locals call a spot like that poima, water meadow. My father lived five hundred kilometers from here, in Astrakhan, where ferries wait at the mouth of the Volga to be launched into rivers when the winter ice melts. In the towns, ferrymen are well respected—you can’t get by without them. In the old days, the ferrymen had someone walk around collecting payment from the passengers for the crossing. But now, my father would tell me, there was an electronic payment system, and a camera had been installed on every ferry. And they brought in ticket collectors. There was one ferryman who said that he never took payment for transporting the dead. After all, it’s already a loss if you’re taking a body across, and it’s not like the dead can pay for themselves. That’s concern for people’s grief.
But since the cameras were installed, there have been no fare dodgers on the crossings. Not even the dead can dodge the fare. A ferryman who didn’t charge a car with a corpse in it got fined three thousand rubles.
Mikhail Sergeyevich called at 9:50 a.m. and told me to come out. I picked up a pink vinyl bag for groceries and went down. Everything around was gray. The light was gray, like fur, and the wind was savage, like a starving animal. Everything was the way it usually is in February. And it was February, in fact.
Mikhail Sergeyevich met me by the entryway. Without speaking to each other, we walked through the courtyards.
The cousin didn’t say anything, just nodded at my greeting. They put me in the back. Then we waited. We sat silently waiting until a woman in a red down jacket showed up, carrying a shiny structured purse. She said hello and sat next to me. The cousin started the car and we drove out.
The woman said that the weather was nasty today. The cousin and Mikhail Sergeyevich agreed. We passed a Pyaterochka supermarket and some garages and entered a gray industrial district. We let the woman out there.
Nobody spoke to me. The cousin was complaining about the gas man, saying it was already expensive to replace the pipes, and now the fitter was asking for three thousand rubles on top of that. The cousin said that he told the gas fitter to go to hell and called the management office to complain about him. Mama had waited for the gas fitter for two weeks; a month before her death she bought a new gas stove, but she kept making soup on the old one because the fitter was never available. Mama had asked me to call the office again, and they told me that the fitter could only come in a week. In a week Mama was taken to hospice. And five days after that she died, and nobody was bothering about the gas. The sparkling new stove stood in the corner of the kitchen, all veiled in plastic, like a bride.
The cousin said that Western propaganda had gotten really shameless. What are they even doing over there in the West, he asked. Prancing around in sparkly underwear, those queers, and what if there’s a war? What happens if there’s a war? Sexual education is a travesty, said the cousin. Children should be taught how to hold a Kalashnikov in kindergarten. He would personally teach his grandson to assemble and disassemble an automatic rifle, so he’d know how it’s done. That’s how you do it, while all those American whores know how to do is pick up condoms by the time they’re three years old. Our Russian kids can handle a rifle in diapers. If there’s a war, everyone will go to defend the motherland. Young and old, everyone will defend the motherland. Anyone can fuck around, you don’t need any brains for that. But loving your motherland, that’s real work.
The cousin said that he had been talking to his friend, a German, over Skype. The friend made threats about World War Three. He said Germany had nuclear weapons, and the cousin told him, fine, come on over, but don’t forget the lard, I’m going to shove your nukes up your ass. I said nothing. The cousin said that all of them were queers and their women were all whores, hopping from dick to dick like a carnival ride. I began to feel like I was suffocating.
I was running out of air. The steppe showed gray through the window. Mama’s hair had been that color. When I stroked her hair, I saw that half of it had gone gray. And her hair was curly. Mama said that after chemo, the first hair she’d grown was all curly, as though she were Black. Mama said that after the first round of chemo, when some of her hair grew back, her own mother had mocked her for being Black now.
Queers and whores, said the cousin. I said, excuse me, could you be quiet for a little while. He stopped talking.
People talk a lot. I’m used to it. But we were going to pick up my mother’s ashes, and the ride had to proceed in respectful silence. I was supposed to be weeping quietly in the back seat, and the cousin wasn’t supposed to be saying anything. There could be hushed conversation, the radio could play, really anything was allowed except these political ramblings about queers and whores.
The cousin didn’t know that I was a lesbian. But I wanted to say to him that he knew nothing about gay people. Why do you have this fixation on anal penetration? Why do you want to insert an automatic rifle lubed with lard into the German’s anus? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t bother. And after all, condoms don’t hurt anyone, rather they help save lives. While what’s an automatic rifle for? A rifle exists to kill people.
It was stuffy from the heat and the stink of the little pine tree air freshener. What misery, I thought. And said nothing.
I asked them to wait for me in the parking lot by the cemetery. Then I walked behind the cemetery fence and lit a cigarette. The cemetery was strewn with bright artificial flowers. I turned my head to look at the cemetery office, which resembled a glass-walled provincial market. Beyond the roof of the glass building the crematorium chimney poured smoke. I went in through the first door I came across. Somebody said to me that documents were processed in the next department over. The door to that department had a line in front of it, and I sat down to wait. An older woman was speaking with a young man. They were discussing which plot would be better to buy for Granddad. Plots at the central cemetery were expensive, but he had to be buried next to his mother, like he’d asked. But they were so expensive at the central cemetery. Maybe he could be buried at the district cemetery with his son-in-law. But then Granddad would be angry and come at night and yell. All his life he’d yelled at everybody and he wasn’t going to stop now. The woman said that just a few days ago he’d come around and yelled at her. What an irrepressible old man.
I went through the neighboring door. There was a glass display case in a small room, and on its shelves stood a couple of urns, among which I recognized my mother’s. It was gray with a little beaded black flower on its lid. What a vulgar flower, I thought, like something you see on cheap underwear. Andrei had suggested this urn, while I wanted a bright red, hand-painted one. The flowers on it were like the flowers painted on decorative plates. But Andrei chose the gray one, since Mama didn’t like flashy things. The urn was gray like the side of a freshwater fish, or the hood of a nineties Lada sedan, like my father drove in ’97. The gray urn was half the price of the red, but I had wanted to get the more expensive one. I bought the most expensive version of everything—a pretty silk coverlet with embroidered flowers and the most expensive coffin for the cremation. The color of the coffin was like that of a mother-of-pearl perfume bottle. Mama had loved everything beautiful, and so she got a beautiful coffin.
Mama’s urn stood next to a red urn, the kind I had originally wanted to buy for her. And they could have gotten mixed up, in which case I’d be leaving here with a stranger’s ashes. But who could prove that Mama’s urn contained Mama’s ashes? Nobody, that’s who. After all, the cremation had happened without us present. They could’ve just filled up the urn with regular ash and thrown Mama’s body into a mass grave to save their energy. That would be illegal, but who worries about carrying out the law these days? Nobody, that’s who. The only option was to have faith in the integrity of the funeral workers.
Also, I couldn’t just take the urn and go. Without documentation of the ashes I wouldn’t be able to have the urn buried or bring it on a plane. But the display case was unlocked, anyone could steal any of the urns. Though why would you want a stranger’s ashes?
I returned to the place where the woman and her son wanted to buy a plot for the angry granddad. The waiting room was empty, so I knocked on the door. A woman told me to enter. She sat behind a desk, bundled in a dog-wool shawl. She said that she’d caught a chill and had a stiff back, and now she couldn’t reach the shelf that held the papers she needed. I suggested she pick up some Nimesil. She asked where I would take the ashes, since the papers said I needed a certificate confirming no illegal substances were present in the urn. I said that I’d be taking the ashes to our homeland, Siberia. The woman asked how I would inter the ashes. They’ll be interred in Ust-Ilimsk, I said. Then she said that I should send documentation to Volgograd, confirming that I’d interred the ashes. I promised that I would, although I didn’t plan on sending anything. It seemed like the woman didn’t really think I would, either, but she couldn’t just tell me not to bother with mailing the papers. In this way she was transferring to me a certain responsibility, and I appeared to accept that responsibility. The woman looked at my passport and at me and said I didn’t look like my picture. Then she gave me all of the documents and asked me to come along with her. I went.
She didn’t put on her coat to go out. I told her that she should wear a coat, or she’d feel even worse, and I had nowhere to be, I could wait. The woman waved her hand at this and went out into the wind in her synthetic blouse and dog-wool shawl. We walked through the adjacent door. She opened the display case and invited me to take the urn containing Mama’s ashes. I picked it up, smiling at her as though she were giving me bread or a slice of berry pie. In parting, I told her to feel better. The woman said she definitely would, and told me not to visit them again.
The urn was like a large, cold egg. Inside it lay a sealed capsule of ashes. I ran my hand over the capsule, and gray dust clung to my palm. Whose ashes were those? Mama’s or a stranger’s? I licked my finger. The ash didn’t taste like dust, it was larger and harder. Like slate powder, like gunpowder. At the bottom of the urn I found a torn slip with my mother’s initials and last name. The paper was also covered in ash. Whose ashes were these? Mama’s or a stranger’s?
I closed the urn and lowered it into my pink vinyl bag. On the internet it said that an urn containing ashes weighs no more than five kilos. This one weighed less. But it contained the ashes of a body, the ashes of clothes and coverlets, the ashes of an expensive cream-colored coffin, ashes of flowers, ashes of bandages that had been used to bind her arms and legs, ashes of chrysanthemums and roses. And maybe also the ashes of a plastic flower crown, though I had asked the funeral workers to remove it before the cremation. They had said that they would, but could I trust them? What if those terrible white plastic flowers were in there too? Were Mama’s ashes even in there? Where were her ashes? Were these her ashes or a stranger’s?
I smoked a cigarette, then got back in the car.
The cousin said nothing. Mikhail Sergeyevich didn’t turn around but asked me if I had them. I said that I had them and now I needed to go to the morgue.
The cousin started the car and we drove out. We drove back through the gray steppe. The radio played, the pine tree air freshener swung to and fro.
I love the road best of all. I love to look through the window, and it’s as if through looking I become the road. Once, in Kazakhstan, I saw camels in the steppe. They were grazing quietly, eating the short grass that grew out of the sand.
When Mama and I were traveling from Siberia to Astrakhan, she said that we would be approaching Astrakhan soon, and I would see some camels. I saw the steppe, but there were no camels in it. We’d been riding in a brown sleeper car for almost a week. We had some things to eat, probably doshirak noodles, hard-boiled eggs, and pies we would buy at the stations. I was ten. It was unbearably hot. Our neighbor in the sleeper car snored extremely loudly in the upper berth. We would choke with laughter, and the laughter was an ecstasy of closeness with Mama. There was no one else around, just us, laughing, because for us, in Siberia, it was already morning, but here in the south it was still night.
When the train approached cities in the south, there was always a fifteen-minute stop. Mama went to a kiosk to buy ice cream. And then the train began to move, rolling on very slowly, though Mama still wasn’t back. The stuffiness of the car and a feeling of panic pressed in on my head. I was watching the station slip away, the blue-gray tents where pastries were sold, the posts, the white station building, and I was losing them all, they were no longer in the window, because the train was leaving the station. ...
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