Vaclav & Lena (19 page)

Lena looked again at Radoslava’s face, which had not changed. The water was coming down on Radoslava, and it was hitting her in the belly, in the chest, where her breasts started before they sloped off, one to each side, nipples wide and purple, like the eyes of the characters on
Sesame Street
, looking two places at once when they were being silly.

There was a bathroom smell coming from the shower, and Lena saw that there had been poop but that it had mostly been taken down the drain by the water, except for some big pieces that did not fit.

There was no blood anywhere, which was how people on television died, and so Lena was unsure about the whole thing. She thought she should turn the water off, but she thought that somehow that would wake up Radoslava, and then somehow she would know about Lena looking at the hair from between her legs to her belly. She would tell the neighbors, and Lena felt that this was embarrassing. Lena left the bathroom and closed the door.

When Mrs. Yablokov came by for tea at four o’clock, Lena was in front of the television again, watching from too close. Mrs. Yablokov came in without knocking, and saw Lena, and she said, “Where is Radoslava?”

“Ona miortvaia v dushe,”
said Lena.

“She’s dead in the shower.”

THESE PEOPLE MIGHT BE THE THEM
…

W
hat happened next was that Mrs. Yablokov screamed and ran to the bathroom and screamed a lot in the bathroom and turned off the water (what a waste!) and called 911 on Radoslava’s telephone, and then called everyone else she knew. Lena stayed watching the television while Mrs. Yablokov cried and called. Finally, Mrs. Yablokov came out and knelt on the floor next to Lena and said, “You poor thing,” and then put her arms around Lena, and hugged her, and cried in Russian, “Your
babushka
, she’s dead! She’s dead, forever! You have no one. You have no one!”

Pressed to Mrs. Yablokov’s perfumed bosom, Lena felt trapped. She wanted Mrs. Yablokov to let go of her so that she could watch the television.

“Where are you going to go? What are they going to do with you?” Mrs. Yablokov wailed.

Lena kept watching the television, in a language she did not understand, trying to ignore Mrs. Yablokov.

Mrs. Yablokov seemed to think that the paramedics would come right away, and while she called and cried on the phone to all the neighbors, she watched out the peephole to see if the paramedics were there yet, and occasionally she would open the door and peer out into the hallway, to see if the paramedics were there. She also spent a lot of time telling the people who had gathered in the hallway what was going on, and how she had been the first to find Radoslava, since she was Radoslava’s closest friend.

After fifteen minutes, Mrs. Yablokov became nervous. She began a second round of phone calls.

“Can I tell you? They have not arrived yet to take the body away. She is rotting in there in that bathtub. Fifteen minutes ago. It is horrible. What a disgrace.”

After thirty minutes no one had arrived.

“No, just me and the little girl in the apartment with the body, just lying there. No. I don’t think she really understands what is happening. No, she’s sitting watching television. I think there might be something wrong with the girl. Trapped in here with the dead woman, it can’t be good, just to have her rotting in there. Rotting! It’s too much.” Mrs. Yablokov said this in Russian, in full earshot of Lena. After two hours, Mrs. Yablokov became too nervous about being in the apartment with the body. She told the telephone that there could be diseases in the air. She told the telephone that she could smell the decay. Lena noticed no smell. Mrs. Yablokov told the telephone that she was having a nervous breakdown, that the day had been too traumatic. Then she left.

After three hours, when the paramedics arrived, Lena answered the door and pointed them to the bathroom. Then she went to Radoslava’s bedroom and took the envelope out of the top drawer of her bedside table. This envelope contained Radoslava’s will. Radoslava had told Lena, over and over again, “Give it to them when I finally pass on, when my suffering is over.” Lena thought that these people might be the “them,” might be the people who come and find you dead. She thought that perhaps she was not meant to find Radoslava, because these men knew what to do, they talked very much, and they had equipment.

When Lena handed the envelope to one of the men, he was talking on the phone, and he said into the phone, “Hold on.”

“What is your name, hon?” He said this in English, so Lena stared at him, and then at the floor, because she did not understand. The man went back to his phone.

“She’s not talking. I want to say around five, maybe four. She’s little. No. Alone in the apartment. Okay. We’ll stay here until then? Okay.” And then he hung up the phone and smiled at Lena.

“Someone’s gonna be here real soon to talk to you, hon,” he said, smiling. Then he went back into the crowded bathroom with the other two men, and Lena sat down in front of the television.

Lena could hear the noises of the men in the bathroom. She wondered how they would take Radoslava Dvorakovskaya out of the tub, not because she was large, and dead, and wet, but because she was naked. Lena could not imagine anyone touching another person who was naked.

For a long time the men talked, and Lena could hear their voices coming out of the bathroom. There were three men, and sometimes one would come out and get something from a big red bag that they had left in the hallway. After a little while, the three men came out of the bathroom, and the man who had talked to Lena before talked to her again.

“We’ll be right back, okay? So don’t worry. Right back.” He said this slowly, and then the three men walked out of the apartment and closed the door behind them. Lena wondered what he had said. She could see when the door was open that there were a lot of people in the hallway, and that these people were watching the paramedics, and that they looked very excited. No one came inside the apartment, and no one knocked.

Lena went back to the bathroom to see what they had done. Radoslava Dvorakovskaya was still in the bathtub, exactly the same, but she looked different. Her skin was the wrong color, and some little things had changed. The men had closed her eyes, so she was not looking up at the ceiling anymore. Also, her lips seemed to be going away, and more of her teeth were showing. Lena looked down at Radoslava and still could not think of how the men would get her out. She heard a knocking on the door and then the door opening, and a man’s voice saying, “Paramedics,” and Lena ran out of the bathroom, because she did not want the men to know that she had been in there. She felt that she was not supposed to want to look at her
babushka
dead and naked and wet, and with her eyes closed and her teeth showing.

The men did not see her coming out of the bathroom—they did not see where she had come from because they were struggling to bring a metal bed into the apartment. They brought the bed into the living room, they pushed it, and it rolled along on wheels, making deep marks in the carpet jungle.

On the top of the bed was a board with red cushions on it, and they took that off the bed and took just the board into the bathroom.

Even from the living room, even with the television on, Lena could hear the sounds of Radoslava’s wet skin moving against the bathtub. She could hear the men and their grunting noises, and their breathing. She could hear the wooden board banging on the tile bathroom floor, and then banging against the bathtub, and then a squeak, which must have been Radoslava’s skin moving a little bit harder against the bathtub. Lena had made this sound herself, with her body in the bathtub, when she moved herself against the bottom, so she knew what this squeak was.

The sounds coming from the bathroom were wet sounds and hard sounds. Lena wanted to see. This day was different, Lena could feel it, and the rules of other days did not apply. Her
babushka
could not see her. Lena could look at her naked in the tub and she would not know, and Lena wanted to see what the men were doing, and what the noises were.

Lena walked very slowly with her tiny feet in socks against the linoleum floor in the hallway, and she did not let the floor make any sounds. The bathroom door was open, and Lena looked just a little bit to see if the men were looking, if the men could see her. They all had their backs to the door.

Lena leaned farther, looked more, and then stepped into the doorway. Still, they did not see her. She could watch.

The men had turned Radoslava Dvorakovskaya on her side, so that now she lay on her side facing the men. Two of the men held her up that way: One of the men held her shoulders, and one of the men held her legs right below her bottom.

Lying on her side like this, she looked worse and scarier to Lena. Her belly lay in front of her like it was not attached enough, and there were lines all over it, and her belly button was an ugly dark thing. Her breasts were the same, covered in lines.

The third man, the one who had talked to Lena, then put the board behind Radoslava, and the two men then leaned her back against the board. Lena saw that now they could pick up the board to get Radoslava out of the tub instead of picking up her squishy body. They used some black straps to attach her to the board, and then one of the men said, “One, two, three.”

As they picked up the board, Lena could see that it was difficult to keep it straight, because the men’s arms were shaking a lot and they had to lean over the bathtub and squat down a little bit. All the men were very strong.

When they had Radoslava on the board and they were carrying it, they moved toward the door, and one of the two men who had not talked to Lena saw Lena now, standing in the doorway, and he was not expecting to see Lena there, and he sucked in his breath.

“Holy
Christ
!” he said.

“Shit,” said the man who had talked to Lena. “Honey, you shouldn’t be here. Why don’t you go watch some TV?” The man’s voice was nice; he was not angry. Lena did not understand the suggestion to go watch television, did not understand that the man wanted her to go away from where they were doing this difficult work. She did not think that she should walk away, especially since this man was talking to her, and so nicely.

Lena moved aside so that the men could get her
babushka
out of the bathroom, and she followed them into the living room, where they moved Radoslava onto the bed with wheels, and they covered her with a white sheet, her whole body, even her head and her face. This looked very nice to Lena. The talking man held open the front door for the other two men, and they wheeled Radoslava out into the hallway and past all the people who had been waiting just for this moment—to be so close to Radoslava Dvorakovskaya, who dropped dead in her bathtub, and to see, on the stretcher, a real dead person.

The talking man stayed behind with Lena, and closed the door, and looked at Lena and sighed as though he was very tired.

“I’m going to wait with you until the social worker can get here, and it might be a while. Do you need anything?” His voice was still so nice, and he seemed not to be frustrated with Lena for not answering.

“You’ve had a tough day, huh. Do you need a snack? Do you need a drink?” Lena wished she could understand, because she liked this man and hoped he would continue talking.

“Well, I’m going to have a glass of water, and I’ll get you one too. We might as well get comfortable, right?” Lena watched the man walk over to the kitchen, and she watched him reach up with his strong arms to open the cabinets, one after the other, looking for something. He found two water glasses, and he filled them at the sink, and he handed one to Lena, and then he sat on the couch. Lena took her glass and sat on the couch as well. The man picked up the remote control, and he turned on the television.

“I love this show,” he said. It was
Sesame Street
. “Watch it with my kids all the time.” He smiled, and he looked at the television. Lena loved
Sesame Street
, and she could see that this man loved it too, because he showed her with his smile.

Lena sat next to this man and thought,
Maybe he is here to take care of me
. He had come into the house when Radoslava Dvorakovskaya went away. He had walked right in and looked for water glasses as if the cabinets were his own cabinets in his own house.
He is acting like he lives here
, she thought.
Maybe he lives here now
.

Lena felt very excited to sit on the couch with the nice man with the nice voice who laughed at
Sesame Street
. Bert and Ernie introduced a cartoon that showed a boy and a girl and a plant. The plant looked very sad. Lena liked this cartoon because she understood it. There were English words in it, but she still understood what was happening.

First the boy called the girl over and pointed to his plant, which was sad. You could tell that it was sad because its big, green leaves drooped to the floor. Then the girl looked at the plant, and she said something, and the boy came back with an alarm clock. And the alarm clock made an alarm-clock noise. And then they said some things to each other, and then the boy went away and came back with a dog. The dog slobbered and barked at the plant. Then the boy and girl said some more things to each other, and the boy ran off, and he came back with a watering can, and he watered the plant, and the plant got happy, and its leaves sprung up and the music told you that the plant was happy and that the boy and the girl were happy.

The man liked this cartoon too, and they both laughed together at the end, Lena and the nice man.

The nice man received several phone calls on a phone he kept in his pocket, and each time he sounded a little bit sad to Lena, but when he hung up the phone he smiled and spoke to Lena in a tender voice.

The man even made them a plate of cookies, with cookies that were in the pantry. He poured a glass of milk for himself, and a glass of milk for Lena, and he showed Lena how to dunk her cookie in the milk and then eat it. Lena had never put a cookie in a glass of milk before, and she thought it was the most wonderful thing, and that the nice man must know so many of these wonderful things. She felt warm, and nice, and she fell asleep.