Plov
The woman kept quiet. The man, too, poking at hot coals with a long, crooked stick. A twig snapped. The man dropped the stick and reached for the hatchet on his knees. They listened. The wind swept through the trees, shaking off the leaves. A somnolent moon idled in the blushing sky.
The woman got up and, pushing the tangled spirals of hair away from her face, stepped deeper into the woods.
"Where are you going?" the man whispered.
"To pee."
Mara gathered up her housedress and, spreading her legs, bruised and sore from days of walking and climbing and crawling, squatted, listening to the sound of her urine splattering against the leaves. She sat a while longer and then stood and wiped between her legs with her dress. As she pulled her underwear up and stared at her swollen feet, her toes sticking out like mushrooms—bald and pale, Mara thought of the white lacquer shoes that her mother had bought for her when she was five or six, but she refused to wear. They felt so uncomfortable and made her feet sweat. But that had been a long time ago, long before they'd moved to Grozny and her father had been put in charge of the oil plant.
Mara was seventeen when the USSR collapsed and a few of the former Soviet Republics had fallen out and become sovereign states, urging the remaining republics to follow and fight for their rights. Checheno-Ingushetia was no different and sought freedom and independence but had been denied both. The rebels formed groups and broke into shops, restaurants, houses. Men were killed, women raped and killed. Girls disappeared. Mothers tried to keep their children off the streets and out of the schools. Cars blew up, banks, theatres. Pogroms ensued. Panic rose among the Russian troops guarding the borders. Soldiers turned up dead, with bayonets driven through their hearts, their necks or bullets piercing the backs of their heads. Small, clean wounds. Pea-sized openings in teaspoons of blood.
The man had been their neighbor, back when everyone had a neighbor, when everyone lived together like fruit trees in their gardens—Chechens and Russians, Ingushes and Ocetins, Jews, Ukrainians, Georgians, Tatars. Mara remembered the man's wife, a slim, swarthy woman with black hair parted in the middle and petite hands plucking fruit from trees, and their two teenage daughters, always silent, moving gracefully like two sleek cats. The woman had been in the habit of cooking plov in her back yard. The strong, overwhelming aroma of lamb stewed with rice and onions and carrots, mixed with a dollop of raisins, prunes, nuts, garlic, and a delicate bouquet of home-grown herbs and dry spices, floated up and through an open window of Mara's bedroom as she did her homework or studied for final exams or just lay on her bed, reading Anna Karenina, crying, thinking that only a man could've written such a cruel, ugly ending, committing his heroine to such a fate.
One day, after Mara had sex for the first time with a Chechen boy she'd met at the University of Oil Industry, where she'd been accepted without really having to sweat the entrance exams, due to her father's connections and her mother's perseverance, Mara stood by the window, watching the woman split a short, scrawny log with a small hatchet and feed the pieces to an old-fashioned clay barbeque grill. Picking up a wooden spoon and stirring the contents of a giant pot atop the grill, the woman raised her head and saw Mara's face and smiled and, adding a pinch of something to the pot, grabbed at the spoon. Mara began to braid her hair twisting down to her breasts like the grapevines under her window. When she finished, the woman looked up again, still working her spoon inside the pot, and hollered if Mara would like some plov. Mara's parents were on vacation, so Mara decided to come down and share a bowl as soon as the boy left.
As far as Mara could remember, the woman hadn't uttered but two sentences during the entire hour that Mara sat on a bench in her yard, picking onions out of the plov and drinking koumiss, her lips wet and cool. First, the woman had asked, "What's your name?" And then, "Really?" After Mara explained to her that Mara was short from Marina and that she was named after her father's mother, whom her own mother couldn't stand, the woman shrugged and rushed toward a narrow wicket-gate to greet her husband, bending her head and letting him place a kiss on her head, right where her hair parted. Mara was amused, watching the scene with keen interest, not as a teenager who'd spent the afternoon touching and kissing and poking around, but as a young female aware of a male presence nearby and of another woman who'd seized his attention first. The softness of the man's lips and the intimacy with which he pressed them to the woman's head, a timid expression on her face, a shy movement of her bare neck, with her hair braided and twisted into a flower, a rose—black and lustrous, forced Mara to look away and made her somehow embarrassed about the things she'd let that Chechen boy do for three hours straight. She set her bowl down and scurried home, yanking a few red grapes off the vine.
Her father hadn't taken the rebels seriously until Mara's mother didn't return from work. They waited the entire evening, Mara rushing toward the kitchen window every time a car screeched by and while she fried squash for dinner. Her father called the hospital where his wife worked and then the police. He drove away without eating and searched the city for hours, afraid that his wife might be lying somewhere on the road or in a gutter, hurt, unable to move. They never found her body or anything except for a baby-blue ribbon she'd tied in her soft, blond hair on the morning of her disappearance and that caught in the limbs of a plum tree halfway between the hospital and their house. Her father wanted Mara to leave immediately, to go to Pskov and stay with her grandparents, whom Mara hadn't seen since kindergarten. But Mara refused and cried herself to sleep for a month or longer, watching a shy moon creep up the sky and thin into a fake smile.
Mara's love affair with the Chechen boy was in full bloom when the government building exploded in the middle of the day, killing everyone in it and a group of passers-by. The Lenin monument toppled down and crushed the tulips that grew at the base and wagged their full, red heads against the wind. Mara's classes were canceled for the rest of the year or until the situation calmed down and all the rebels were caught and brought to justice.
Mara and the boy continued to see each other night after night. Cutting grapevines and weaving them together with limbs of a hazel-wood tree, the boy made a rope ladder and then screwed two metal hooks under the sill of Mara's bedroom window while her father was at work. Mara kept the ladder in her closet and attached it to the hooks at night and threw it out and went back to bed, imagining that she was Karenina receiving Vronsky as she assumed voluptuous poses—her rampant hair tossed in all directions, a shoulder strap of her nightie rolled down, revealing the ripening softness of her breast and her nipple as small as a cherry pit. In fear of her father's wrath, trembling with passion and at the thought of what he might do should he discover the petulant lovers, they cuddled quietly in her bed until dawn, and the boy always left the same way he'd come in, with the same promise to come back the following evening and a kiss placed on the tip of Mara's freckled nose and an impish smile that reminded her of the sun dancing out of a cloud.
One evening, as Mara and her father were about to eat dinner, the lights went off in the house. Mara grouped for matches in a kitchen drawer and lit the candle that sat in the middle of the table and hadn't been lit since her mother's disappearance. Her father went to check a fuse box in the basement, and when he got back, he picked up the phone and stood for some time, pressing the receiver to his ear and then dragging it down to his cheek. Mara scooped fish bones off his plate and dumped them in the trash and glanced out the window. The houses were black as prunes. Here and there, she could make out tiny candle flames winking behind windows.
"They cut off the phone lines," her father said, laying the receiver down. "I can't even call for help." He stepped toward the table and blew out the candle.
"Now I can't see." Mara turned her head, a long curl bouncing at her upper lip. "And I have to wash the dishes."
"Do we even have water? You better fill all the pots and pans in the house, and I'll carry them to the basement. That's where we'll be eating and sleeping from now on. I'll help you move down your mattress."
"But…I don't want to sleep in the basement."
"Why the hell not?" He opened the refrigerator and got out a bottle of Stolichnaya and poured the vodka in a small crystal glass.
That night, under the pretence of using the bathroom, Mara had sneaked into her bedroom twice, cowering under the window, listening to the old, tired vines gripe in the dark. The boy didn't come, and Mara felt first angry, then frightened, then bereaved. She tried to convince herself that it was just once, that everything would be different tomorrow, that the sun would come up and disperse the night's terror. But somehow, deep down, she already knew that it wouldn't happen, that terror wasn't born yesterday and thus wouldn't die tomorrow, that the massacre was just starting and would wipe out more people than the entire Russian army would attempt to save.
The man knocked on their door the next morning and asked to talk to Mara's father, who hadn't slept the whole night, mixing instant coffee with tap water that was cut off, too, by the time Mara awoke. The man needed to know whether his wife and daughters could stay at their house while he was at work.
"But you are Chechens, aren't you? You have nothing to fear." Mara's father saw the man into the living room and offered him a seat on the couch.
"I am. My wife is Georgian, though. But it doesn't matter. Nobody asks for your passport before pulling a trigger."
"But doesn't your wife have any relatives to go to?"
"Yes. In Georgia. But there's no way she can get there. The city is under siege. Roads are blocked. Cars get attacked. Trains, too. The airport is shut down—the pilots refuse to fly."
"I don't blame them."
"Neither do I. But until your troops are here, no one is safe."
"So now it's my fault? That I don't let those ignorant bastards loot the place, take charge of the oil wells, and sell the oil to America or blow up the whole country?"
"Don't underestimate them. Not all of them are that ignorant, and they won't give up that easy. You'll lose more soldiers than you think."
"But we'll save the country."
"You mean the oil wells."
"I mean what I mean, but I won't harbor no Chechens or Georgians under my roof. I won't risk my daughter's life."
"You're risking her life now."
"Are you threatening me?"
"No. How can I? I'm no rebel. I have no political ambitions. I make and sell fruit preserves. I get paid by your people. I don't complain. Come over for dinner sometime. You eat plov, don't you?" The man strode out of the room, through the kitchen, where Mara had opened a can of sardines for breakfast and was dipping a heel of bread into the oil. Mara's father followed the man out the door and urged Mara to double-lock it, forbidding her to open it under any circumstances, no matter how extreme or bizarre. Thirty minutes later, he was pounding on the door while Mara toiled with the lock and then jerked it open and saw drops of blood blossom on the steps. Holding his arm, her father rushed to the bathroom, where she could hear him cuss, twisting the faucet handles on and off, yelling at her to bring water.
"They started shooting at my car as soon as I pulled on the road. I couldn't go anywhere." He sat on the commode, squeezing his shoulder, while Mara ripped the sleeve of his shirt and washed his wound with a towel. "I'll figure something out," he said. "Don't be scared." A few minutes passed, and they heard an explosion. Mara ran to the window. The man's house was on fire. She thought she saw his daughters thrashing about the rooms. Flames rose up their skirts and caught in their long, loose hair. And then that cry, that awful, heart-splitting cry, like that of a shot loon or the cut goose that her mother had raised for a year and her father had tried to kill on New Year's Eve. The goose ran amok across the yard with its neck slit-open and its head drooping to the side, shaking blood. It sidled under the vines and made no more sounds.
That evening the man returned, banging on their living-room window, his hands and face covered in soot. Mara's father was running a fever but rose from the couch and hobbled toward the door, Mara at his side. As her father let the man in, Mara saw flakes of ash on their doormat where the man stood, the burnt toes of his shoes curving up. The man said that he lost his family—his wife, his daughters. His voice trembled. He shut his eyes and bit his lips and jerked his head from side to side. Tears gushed down his cheeks, washing off the soot. Then he asked if he could spend the night and promised that he would be gone in the morning—they wouldn't even know that he'd been there.
Her father moaned and leaned against the wall, holding his hand to his shoulder.
"He's wounded," Mara said and felt that she was about to cry, too. "Can you help?"
The man wiped his face, smearing the soot across his jaw line and to his earlobes, his lips swollen and raw. "We need to get him to the hospital."
"No." Her father exhaled. "You won't get through." His eyes were half-closed. He was fainting, sagging to the floor.
The man helped Mara carry her father down the basement steps and lay him on one of the mattresses, pulling a blanket over him, asking Mara how much water they'd saved. Mara pointed to three saucepans covered with lids and backed against the wall, next to a TV box stuffed with teddy bears, plush rabbits, and a one-eyed cat.
"Keep a wet towel on his forehead and make him sip some water," the man said. "But if we don't get any help by tomorrow morning, we'll have to leave the house and do something."
Mara sat on the floor by her father and gazed at the bloodstain that soaked through layers of bandage and a sleeve of his clean, cream-colored shirt. "We're going to die, aren't we?" she asked.
"Don't say that."
"What do those people want?"
"The same thing everyone wants—money and power."
"I don't want that."
"It's because you haven't grown up yet, but your father has."
They spent the night in the basement, lying side by side on Mara's mattress, listening to her father's moans and the sound of trucks grinding pebbles with their wheels somewhere so close Mara thought they were driving through their living room. In the morning, her father's fever seemed to have subsided, and he fell asleep with a serene expression on his face, the corners of his mouth pointing up in an enigmatic smile, reminding Mara of the Mona Lisa. Mara and the man went upstairs to eat but discovered that most of the food in the fridge had spoiled except for grape jelly and a few eggs, as well as a slab of butter and a wedge of cheese, both soft and sticky. They split and finished the last piece of bread, which they ate in mournful silence without taking their eyes from their plates, as if guarding what was on them. Mara noticed the man's black fingernails as he picked up a knife from the table and cut a few slices of cheese and began to spread jelly on one of them. He laid the other one on Mara's plate.
"Thanks."
He nodded.
They chewed, the man's eyes puffy and bloodshot, his mouth dry but red, with a thin cut in the middle of his lower lip.
"Well, I'm leaving." He got up. "I'll try to find you some help."
"I need to go to the bathroom."
"So?"
"I'm scared to go outside."
"Pee in the tub or in a pot. Here." He raised an empty cup from the sink.
"I need to poop."
The man kept quiet for a second or two, his eyes roaming about the kitchen until they stopped, fixed on a pile of newspapers in the corner. He walked to it and grabbed one and handed it to Mara. "You can use this and then roll it up, and I'll carry it outside when I go. Or you can just throw it out the window."
She peered into his face, trying to decide whether he'd lost his mind or he really meant what he said. His cheeks and his chin were sooty in places, with a hint of stubble, and his brown hair, matted to one side and standing up, was full of dust or ash or both, making him look like a desperate man who'd escaped from a mental institution or a prison after twenty years of being held there by mistake. The man wasn't looking at her but in the direction of the window, where the charred walls of his house still stood—sullen and impotent, no longer able to protect the ones who'd once lived behind them. Mara watched him bite his lips again and wad the newspaper in his hands and then tear it into pieces that fell to the floor like dry, wilted flowers or leaves.
Mara rose and touched his shoulder. "I'm sorry," she said and felt so stupid, so inadequate, like that time when the Chechen boy had said that he loved her and wanted to marry her, and she tried to decide what to say back so as not to hurt his feelings because marriage was the last thing on her mind. Maybe that was why the boy hadn't come back and probably never would.
The man shed the last of the newspaper on the floor. "Let's go. I'll guard you."
Mara squatted under the vines, facing the man's back yard. The barbeque grill was in the same place, with the same giant pot atop, and Mara wondered if it had plov inside.
The man brought the pot in later that afternoon, when he came back for the third time and informed Mara that he hadn't had much luck going into town and contacting the authorities because apparently they were no longer in charge. Instead, he'd run into more confused, angry people, whose houses and apartments had been burned or invaded and whose loved ones had been killed or gone missing. He'd also seen a few army planes furrowing the sky.
"What do you mean, they'll bomb us?" Mara asked and took the lid off the pot.
"There's nothing left for the government to do."
"But they'll kill civilians, too."
"That's the price they're willing to pay. Unfortunately."
Mara sniffed at the cold plov. "Did it spoil?"
The man bent his head and smelled inside the pot. "I don't think so, as cool as the nights are. And she just cooked it yesterday morning." His voice rattled, hoarse and low, like an out-of-tune piano.
"What are we going to do?" Mara spooned the plov into a bowl.
"There's nothing we can do, except try to cross the mountains and get to Georgia or somewhere.
"Are you serious?"
"Yes."
"I can't leave my father."
"We'll take him with us."
"He won't survive the journey."
"He'll die here, too."
As they stepped down into the basement and Mara relit the candle, she could see that her father was feeling worse. His cheeks burned with fever, and his arm was swollen. His eyes remained closed, but his eyelids fluttered as the man and Mara cut through his sleeve and the bandage and washed the wound with the remaining vodka and dressed it in clean gauze. Her father didn't flinch or open his mouth, even when they dripped water on his lips.
They were awoken by the sound of broken glass and something exploding upstairs, right above their heads. The man bolted up from the mattress and climbed the steps in two jumps, and Mara heard him stomping and beating on the floor and hitting the walls. She sat up on her mattress, not sure of what to do next—to rush upstairs or just stay where she was. Fumbling for matches in a pocket of her housedress, she cracked one alight and saw that her father was awake, too, staring at white dust that sifted from the ceiling, landing on the saucepans and her old toys. The man ran back down the steps, screaming that the house was on fire and that they had to get out quick. He bent over Mara's father and threaded his arms under his, telling her to grab his ankles.
By the time they made it out of the basement, the fire had engulfed the kitchen and was eating through the living room.
"We can't go out this way." The man held her father under his armpits, pushing his arms further around his chest.
"I have a rope ladder in my bedroom upstairs." Mara summoned the last of her strength so as not to drop her father's legs. "Well, sort of…but we'll never…he'll never…." She looked at her father, whose eyes were opened but resembled that of a baby startled by all the flashing lights and the loud, crackling sounds around him but otherwise unaware, oblivious of the world that had birthed them.
"Let's try." The man took a step forward.
The fire chased them through a long hallway, licking the bottom steps of the curved, wooden staircase as they began to ascend it. In Mara's bedroom, they laid her father on the floor, and Mara jerked the rope ladder out of her closet and secured it to the hooks, the man's eyes following her every move, as if guessing her secret and picturing all the shameless, beautiful things that she'd done in this room, shrouded by darkness and the blind walls.
The man opened the window and dropped the ladder down. Mara thought she heard someone calling her name. She poked her head out, but all she saw was the vines rub their twisted, nodular limbs against each other, hissing at the wind.
She turned but couldn't make out her father's face. Squatting, she leaned forward, her lips at his cheek. "Did you say something?"
"Go with that man." His breathing came in spurts, wet and heavy, like that of a dying, age-whipped horse.
"No."
"Yes."
"I won't go without you."
"You have to. The ladder won't hold more than one."
"You don't know that."
"I've seen it before."
"He's right." The man stood by them, touching the tips of his fingers to Mara's head.
The fire flicked its malicious tongue through the door.
"We need to hurry. Sorry…but…."
Mara sobbed, clinging to her father's neck as the man pulled her away and dragged her toward the window.
On the ground, they crouched under the vines for a minute, trying to determine where to run. They heard voices behind the picket fence, then laughter, a few gunshots, and another explosion. Mara looked up. The fire was gorging itself on the window frame.
Squeezing through an opening in the fence, they slinked across the man's yard, where he stopped and snatched a scrap of headscarf from the ground. He gazed at the burnt ragged ends then stuffed the scarf inside his back pocket and, jerking the hatchet out of the log pile by the grill, motioned Mara to follow him.
The dawn sky broke sappy-red when they made it into the woods at the bottom of the mountains, running short distances the entire time, stopping and hiding behind half-burnt shacks or squatting in gutters or under bushes as they heard voices or vehicles approaching.
They'd been roaming about the woods for nearly two days, without anything to eat, sleeping in shifts and drinking out of shallow springs gurgling between the rocks, which the man led her to, as though somehow smelling their weak currents under the ground. She'd lost her one slipper as they crawled through the brush, up the hill or a mountain, Mara couldn't tell which, trailing after the man with the relentless determination of a dog or a child and thinking of her father—silent and pallid, shrinking inside a fiery nest.
Something hard and round cracked under Mara's foot as she sauntered closer to the small fire the man had started with the scarf remains and a few twigs. She bent down. A hazel nut. Picking it up and opening the tight brown shell, she pulled the kernel out and was about to eat it but held it on her palm and offered it to the man. He shook his head and continued to prod the fire with the stick, holding the hatchet on his knees.
They heard a voice, and another. Brush crackled. Leaves stirred. Somewhere not far—behind half-naked trees, in the mountains that surrounded them like prison walls, cold and dismal.
"You should go," the man said, releasing the stick, his lips barely moving, wasting no sounds.
"Where?"
"Across that mountain. It isn't as far as it looks. As soon as you see huts and sheep—lots of sheep—you're in Georgia. Just knock on any door."
"Please, don't leave me." Mara's teeth chattered.
"If they find both of us, they'll kill us. And I'm a Chechen man. They don't know that anyone was with me. So, they won't touch me or come looking for you. Go. I'll catch up with you later."
Tears sped down her cheeks.
Laying the hatchet down, he took his shoes off and his socks. "Here. Put them on."
He watched her feet dive into his socks and then into the shoes, their burnt toes pointing at him. "And take this, too." He handed her the hatchet and got up.
"I won't need it."
"You never know."
She lifted the hatchet in her hand and felt its weight. Stepping forward, she rose on her toes to kiss him but bent her head instead, lowering her eyes to the ground as he pressed his lips to her unkempt curls.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Mara."
"Really?"
She was about to explain to him why she was called that when they heard a crunching step, and another one. A hushed cough. Breaking limbs.
"Go." The man pushed her away. "And don't look back, no matter what. You hear?"
She nodded, locking her fingers around the wooden handle of the hatchet, and started to trudge up the mountain, her back meandering between the trees.
As Mara climbed higher and higher, jamming the hatchet into the ground a step ahead of her and then holding to its wooden handle and resting and pulling herself up, the trees began to thin out and the sun rolled about the sky like a head of cheese—fat and yellow, making Mara squint and cover her eyes with her hand. When she took her hand away, she spotted a few sheep at the bottom of the mountain and a lonely stone hut no bigger than the box of matches she'd given to the man for the fire.
Lowering the hatchet to the ground, Mara slumped beside it. She pulled the shoes off and rubbed her feet, gazing in the direction she'd traveled from, hoping for the man to come up the mountain, so she could ask his name.
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Kristina
Gorcheva- Newberry
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