The Woman Behind The Waterfall by Meriel Leonora

Author:Meriel,Leonora [Meriel,Leonora]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary fiction, magical realism, Ukraine, family, motherhood, love, poetic, novel, contemporary fiction, contemporary literary fiction, heartbreak, transformation, Mothers, magic, countryside
ISBN: 9781911079248
Publisher: Granite Cloud
Published: 2016-09-30T23:00:00+00:00

20

The bus comes to a shuddering halt outside the grey, concrete hospital block, and Lyuda steps up onto it and drops her token into the slot. She can feel the driver looking down at her tight dress, at her legs, and she walks past him without a word and makes her way down the narrow aisle to the back of the bus, through the stale summer heat, past outstretched feet and sweat and the smell of unwashed hair and blue-and-red checked bags crammed with fruit and vegetables from village gardens.

She pushes past a young man in a short-sleeved nylon shirt and sits down, leaning her head against the scratched glass of the window. The hot plastic of the seat sticks to her bare legs, and as the bus jolts along, the arms of the young man push into hers, his damp hairs rubbing against her skin.

Lyuda stares out of the window, her body turned away from the man, and she watches the villages passing by, the winding roads leading back to her village, to the house on the hill. Back to him.

She thinks about her visit to the hospital, and the doctors. Her first appointment had been some weeks ago, but today was her final check-up. It was always painful lying on that high, flat bed, legs suspended in cold metal stirrups. The white rubber gloves, the soreness. She sat and waited. Sat on the hard bed until he came back into the room in his white coat holding some files and not looking at her, just looking at the papers as if it were nothing to do with him, what he was about to tell her, as if those sheets of paper alone were responsible for everything.

There had been no sheets of paper in the other clinic, seven years before, when Mother had taken her to have the abortion. No papers; just money exchanged and her child gone, the future of her body decided. No white coats and no papers. Just cold eyes and women and blood and her child gone.

Out of the bus window, Lyuda watches the village they are driving through. It looks similar to her village. White houses with bright blue windows and long gardens full of vegetables, fruit trees and flowers. Black soil. Fat white geese pecking and goats tied to fences. Narrow, winding roads between the villages, up-and-down hills, miles of fields and forests in the distance stretching out towards the Carpathian Mountains and the borders of countries where Volodiya has been and where she once wanted to go. Romania, Moldova, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary.

And now she can’t have children. He read it from the piece of paper without looking up at her. The tests all confirmed the same thing. Her blood. The examination. The papers. His words.

She feels her head aching and she breathes in the stale air of the bus. The small window above them is open but only hot air is blowing through it. The young man next to her gets up and moves down the aisle towards the front, his shirt stuck to his back with sweat.

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