Who Is Martha? by Marjana Gaponenko

Author:Marjana Gaponenko
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781939931177
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Published: 2014-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

How long ago that was!, Levadski thinks, the bathwater slowly getting cold and the bubbles having disappeared. Nothing is hiding my nakedness. In fact, both of his legs are blowing about like two white flags of surrender at the bottom of the tub. How long ago that was. My beautiful record player, my library yet to be collected. And the neighbor, if she really had been born during the Crimean War, would have been no less than one hundred years old the year that I moved in. It was spring. Or late fall. No, it was spring! Levadski chases away with his arm some remaining wisps of foam. It was March, a time of year filled with hope, when so many women were forced to shed tears, the old ones too. She once came up the stairs with a tear-stained face. With a tear-stained face, and looking disheveled. “Our great leader has died!” she sobbed in the stairwell. If I had not opened my door at the time and seen the old woman’s face twisted into a beaming smile, I would have taken her words as a lament from the heart. “Women are crying on the streets and tearing their hair out: what is to become of us, what is to become of us! Thrown to the dogs!”

If I had known it was he, thinks Levadski, letting more hot water into the bathtub, the news would have pleased me. That it was he who bundled us two and the whole of Chechnya into cattle cars, Levadski raises his scrawny forefinger, that it was for him that I bent my back like a mule at the edge of the world – Levadski wriggles into a more comfortable position in the bath – in completely hostile terrain, pure derision! If I had known at the time it was he, I would have embraced the witch in the door-frame and shed tears of joy with her. If she really was a hundred years old, then she was a few years older than I am now.

“Would you like your dentures?” Habib whispers through the slit in the door. In the background the second movement of the Ninth is budding, bees with bodies of metal plate, loaded with pollen of fine iron dust, smashed to pieces on the buds that turn into the flowers of a thorny violin shrub.

“Thank you, I bathe without my dentures.”

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