Daughter by Tamara Duda

Author:Tamara Duda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mosaic Press
Published: 2022-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

It was not a metaphor, calling it a ‘drained’ city. I have always had a hard time with metaphors, like my Ukrainian teacher, Halyna Stepanivna, told me, who said I would be better off ‘taking minutes, not writing stories’.

At first, children and men started disappearing. Public places fell silent and empty; the grass in the stadium grew tall without footballers running over it every week. The markets and newsstands closed; the bread stall on the corner lasted the longest, until the day finally came that instead of bread, we saw only shutters in the window. Cars disappeared, and even taxis stopped going through our neighbourhood. You could walk right down the middle of the highway if you wanted, backwards and with your eyes closed. Still, the lonely pedestrians kept behind the railings on the kerb, scuttling from shadow to shadow.

I was burdened with a dozen new responsibilities: drawing water from the pump, as much as possible; filling up buckets and casserole pans as a reserve; going round the houses I was acting as caretaker for, turning on the lights, opening the curtains, treading the path from the gate to the door, so it looked like someone was living there; and feeding the cats.

We now had seven cats and a slobbering bulldog called Bucks. Bucks was afraid of doors, the sound of the toilet flushing, laughter, and sudden movements. He would involuntarily shit himself from fright, which would end up frightening him even more, and then he would skitter around the flat before huddling on my feet, after which he would keel over on his side and play dead. As such, we could now only walk slowly and evenly round the flat, like when you’re wading through water, and Tanya would place the saucepan lids on a special felt square to muffle the clang of the lid.

Several neighbours who had gone away for a few weeks brought us their pets to look after, and I did not refuse them (don’t ask me why). I wanted to say, ‘no’, right up to the last minute, but for some reason I said, ‘yes’. I need to go to a psychologist to work on my boundaries, clearly.

Alongside the cats and dogs, which were at least quiet, I would host a crew of my grandmother’s confidantes, who conversely never shut up. My Baba Olya had practically moved into her companion’s detached house, where they, the four Mohicans, made a shelter in the loess and now spent their days awaiting the shelling, drawing pictures of bullets and scaring each other with horror stories. Whispers started going around that Donetsk residents were now no longer eligible for Ukrainian pensions. No matter how much I tried to convince the oldies that there was no way that this could ever happen, that their pensions would persist like a golden statue to Chairman Mao, they would not listen to me, and panic ensued.

We could not work out what to do with our workshop: close it? Move it? Where, and how?

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