Aunt Polia
Amidst the crazy race of the past few days, Alexander hasn’t forgotten, even for one second, that he needs to get to the hospital and visit aunt Polia. As the time to the departure grew short, the fear of that final meeting increased in him.
When he said farewell to his relatives and friends he did not experience a true feeling of loss, despite realizing full well that the possibility of a future meeting with some of them is but theoretical.
With aunt Polia he needs to say goodbye for good. Aunt Polia is dying. The cancerous metastases inside her body were quickly wrapping up their cruel and destructive journey, and – as destroyers usually do – will only stop in wonder once only ashes and dust are laid at their feet. A gruesome transformation took place right in front of Alexander’s eyes. Aunt Polia, the thick bodied, round faced, still having her beauty, had become a wrinkled yellowish elderly. And despite that in his mind he realized there is no hope, his heart refused to accept the inevitable.
Three weeks prior, the treating doctor proclaimed: “She has but one month left, at most”. On that day, Alexander found a postcard from the immigration office in his mailbox. He was given fifteen days to leave. His application for extending his visa was denied. The officer in the immigration office peeked at the letter from the hospital and asked Alexander: “Well then, how are you related to the citizen Prokhorova Apolonia Kozminichena?”. “A neighbor”, Alexander replied softly, immediately understanding the illogical nature of his answer. “A neighbor?”, the officer’s eyes almost popped out of their sockets. “So why are you wasting my time? Are you kidding me? I would have understood if it were a mother, wife, sister, even an aunt. But a neighbor?”. Alexander was unable to let a single word out, the pain and despair choked him. In the corridor, people gathered around him and asked one another: “What happened? Was he refused?”. After slightly regaining his strength, Alexander exited to the street, walked up the alley, boarded the tram, placed his head on the cold window glass and closed his eyes.
She leaned over his bed and spoke quietly: “It’s me, Saniok, it’s me buddy”. Besides her was a man in military uniform. Aunt Polia picked little Alexander up and carried him to his room in her arms. He hugged her warm and soft neck with his hands and fell asleep as she was walking, when in the background, loud noises of displacing furniture could be heard from his parents’ bedroom. The next morning, he saw his mother cry, and aunt Polia consoling her: “What do they think to themselves? Kidnapping innocent people? The day isn’t enough for them? They can’t let people live even at night? Don’t beat yourself up, Isakovna, look, everything will be alright, we’ll get our Yakub Markovich back. You have to put up an application, beg the managers, and I’ll watch over Senia, after all we’re no strangers. I’ll ask to take the morning shift and be able to bring him home from kindergarten”.
His mother’s pleas didn’t help. His father never returned. Alexander seldom saw his mother. She was working, as one of her friends used to say, 25 hours a day. During the breaks between shifts at the hospital she used to pet her son’s head, looking at him with her sad, anxious eyes with a sense of shame. Little Alexander loved her very much and pitied her. He felt as if someone had stricken his good, quiet mother a mortal blow, of which she had never told a living soul. He wanted to calm her and assure her that when he grew older, he would avenge her affront. And while in his mother’s eyes, Alexander always tried to appear mature and strong, with aunt Polia he felt comfortable being little. She was always around him, nicknaming him, unimpressed with his make-believe seriousness. When he fled the streets with the despair of one who does not understand his guilt in the eyes of the children who offended him, aunt Polia knew how to cure his wounds quickly and efficiently. Her soothing words did not only
comfort him but also placed in him the seeds of confidence in the certain victory of the righteous. “They don’t know what they’re talking about”, said aunt Polia. “They sucked their malevolence along with their mother’s milk. Evil is like a poisonous snake, strangling a man to the core. Your people, Senia, live on, because they have no evil in them”.
During the long winter nights, Alexander use to lie in aunt Polia’s wide, nickel-barred bed, with a thick blanket and a cup of tea and jam keeping him warm. He listened, fascinated, to her tales. She was very pretty his aunt Polia. He used to love watching her thick, white hands skillfully braiding her hair into a heavy braid, laying on her head like a royal crown.
Aunt Polia used to have a family too, once. But in the winter of 1942, she received notice that her husband is missing and one year later, her only son, at five years old, died of pneumonia. Many men sought aunt Polia’s hand in marriage, but she never wanted to hear any of it, hoping that her Fudor, the bright haired and joyous, would return to her.
“Believe it or not, Isakovna”, she used to tell my mother, “I feel my Fudor is still alive. I had a dream last night, where he stood at my doorstep, famished and plucked and unable to enter. I ran towards him but his eyes were staring as if he did not know who I was. I was crying, yelling, it is I, your Polia. But he didn’t move and only his lips muttered silently”. Aunt Polia’s heart was not wrong. Once, an unfamiliar man approached her and said her husband is serving a ten years sentence at one of the labor camps in Madgan. “What for?”, aunt Polia asked. “He was captured by the Germans”, the man bitterly chuckled. “Could it be that he was captured out of his own free will?”, wondered aunt Polia. “He was wounded, but no one cares. The same goes for everybody, ten years and that’s that”.
“City hospital number four”, Alexander heard the loud conductor’s notice. He jumped outside, and his legs sank in the muddy March terrain. Aunt Polia laid with her eyes closed. When she heard footsteps approaching, her eyelids heavily opened and she said quietly: “I have been waiting for you, son. I was afraid we would not have a change to say farewell. Don’t say anything, I already know it all for a long time. Six months ago, the neighborhood constable Pavel Ivanovich came to see me. He was interested in you, who is visiting you, what kind of conversations you have been having. Your neighbor, he said, is planning on fleeing to Israel. You know Pashka, he’s your age, you played in the backyard together. Now he’s a bigshot, proudly presenting his shiny lieutenant’s ranks. But to me he was and will always be Pashka the tramp. And so I told him, goodbye Pavel Ivanovich, off you go. I kicked him out, but my heart skipped a beat. I have no one in the world but you, Saniok. After your mother passed, God bless her soul, I thought I’d be your mother for the rest of my life”. Alexander tried to answer, but she quietly interrupted him: “It’s hard for me to speak, son. There once was an aunt Polia and is no more. The Lord must have spared me a useless life. I don’t blame you, you wandered the corners of the earth long enough, it is time for your people to have a home of your own”. She became silent, and two transparent tears dropped from her partially opened eyes. “Approach me”, aunt Polia requested. Alexander leaned over her and kissed her wet, warm cheek. “Goodbye, my son”, don’t hold a grudge against our tormented mother Russia, God is with you, go. She lifted her yellow arm and marked him with a cross.
Alexander turned to leave, surrounded by a deafening silence. An acute pain shattered his chest, and he felt, that here, amidst the walls of this hospital, his entire Russia is now enclosed, and here is where he leaves a piece of his heart behind.
1974