Free The Sky Unwashed by Irene Zabytko Page B

shifting into second gear to pull up a steep hill. It almost turned over when the driver swerved into the opposite lane to pass the slower buses in front of him. He beeped his horn and swore out loud.
    “Sorry, darling,” someone said. Yurko’s eyes snapped open. His upper lip was bristling with sweat. He unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt, hoping to breathe easier in the stench of the diesel fumes.
    The bus slowed down in front of the
kolhosp
. Three tractors were mowing the fields for hay. Mounds of grain were piled by the side of the road, and strong women in bright head kerchiefs were emptying the sacks and handing the depleted bags to a man with a pickup truck.
    “What are they doing?” someone wanted to know. “Why are they wasting food like that?”
    “They need the sacks for sand. To put out the fire,” said the driver to no one in particular. He stopped the bus near one of the women on the roadside. She was younger than the others and wore a pair of faded jeans that stuck tight to her ample thighs and backside.
    The bus driver opened the doors. “Hey, beautiful,” he shouted in Russian to the girl. “Forget that work and come with me to Kiev. I’ll buy you a mink coat.”
    She laughed and took off her kerchief, stroking back her straw-blond hair. “Thanks, but we’re going on another bus after we finish here,” she said. Then she giggled and sauntered closer to the bus door, where she posed with one foot on the bottom step.
    “Good, then meet me at the relay station tonight in Kiev. I stashed away a bottle of the best
sovietskoye champanskoye
and I got a nice bottle of perfume for you . . . from Paris.”
    She giggled again. “Get out of here! Paris! Who do you think you’re kidding!”
    “All right, Prague, then. But you should pour it over your beautiful neck tonight. Or better yet, let me do it.” He blew her a kiss and put his cigarette back in his mouth before closing the doors. The girl waved, and the driver’s eyes kept staring into the rearview mirror until she was completely out of sight.

Chapter 7
    T HE BUS THAT carried Marusia and her family ended up in front of a hospital near the center of Kyiv in the early hours of the evening. The trip took longer than usual because the driver made several more stops along the way to talk and flirt with other women. Finally, when an angry female passenger in the back of the bus yelled at him to stop pimping or she would throttle him with her fists and drive the bus herself, he made no more detours and took them directly to their stop.
    Marusia was awed when she saw the city’s skyline for the first time. She watched in respectful silence as the bus turned down various streets and boulevards. Kyiv was so imposing with its broad high-rises, so important with its spacious gardens filled with manicured hedges and colorful rows of tulips and elaborate war monuments, and the heavily sculpted statue of Lenin that was so prominent in the center of the main street.Large red banners bearing slogans of the Revolution in both Russian and Ukrainian billowed high above the immaculate white sidewalks that Marusia had heard were kept in that pristine condition by hundreds of old women and their brooms.
    Crowds of weary people were already waiting in long lines outside the emergency ward entrance. They had come from other villages that surrounded Chor-nobyl and had been dropped off long before Marusia’s bus arrived. They were still waiting their turns to be processed by some official and to be given a place where they might sleep that night.
    Except for her family, Marusia lost sight of the familiar faces from the bus ride. Nor did she see any of her friends and neighbors; everyone here seemed to be a stranger to her.
    The family joined a group of evacuees from another village called Narodochyi because Zosia insisted that the lines in that group were not as long. Actually, Zosia wanted to avoid running into her ex-lover from the plant or other people