May the Earth Be As Soft As Feathers

My neighbor Yevdokia Balakhonova, known by her patronymic Trofimovna, died on November 9. But no one noticed that day. A blizzard, the first of winter, raged over the village of Chukhrai. Three days later, my husband Igor passed her house and noticed that no smoke was coming from the chimney. Trofimovna always stoked up the stove in the early morning, just before dawn.

Igor knocked on the door, but there was no answer. He peered in the window. The overstuffed bed with overstuffed pillows where she usually slept was empty, the covers pulled back.

Silence loomed. Suddenly a cat appeared in the window and began to scratch feverishly, trying to get out. Igor bent back the nails holding in one of the small panes, and the cat shot out. That’s when Igor told me Trofimovna was dead.

Not a week earlier, I had watched the old lady sawing wood from my window. She heaved a large log onto a sawhorse and began to ply at it with her two-man saw, pushing it forward and back. The long saw bent and shuddered as Trofimovna pushed, then grew taut as she pulled.

The villagers find Trofimovna in the foyer, lying on her back, her stockinged feet wedged up against the door, her arms splayed out to the sides. Her long, gray hair is fanned out around her head. Rats have eaten half her face. One eye stares at the ceiling. Her yellow teeth are clenched together.

A man from the village makes a coffin. Two of the women wash and dress Trofimovna in a never-before-worn blue suit from her wardrobe. Trofimovna always wore an old ragged jacket, which had been patched and mended in a dozen places. It hung loosely over her humped back and the long cloth for a skirt she wrapped around her small waist. On her feet she donned rubber boots. In the winter, she added a dirty gray jacket of wadded cotton and several layers of thick, wool stockings under her skirt. She pulled valenki over her feet, warm boots made of thick pressed felt. That was her entire line of apparel, which changed only with the seasons, not with the fashions.

The two village drunks are commandeered to dig the grave. They are assured a sufficient allowance of moonshine, to be paid for out of Trofimovna’s bequest. (The villagers found 9,000 rubles – $300 – stashed under her floorboards). I am asked to host the wake, as Trofimovna’s house is too small and cold. Igor and I make borsch, blini, and kisel (berry juice thickened with starch).

When everything is ready, four men carry the coffin – a plain box of pine boards crudely nailed together – out of her house. Small and narrow, it is scarcely big enough to house Trofimovna’s body, shrunken with age and pulled down by gravity. The coffin is placed on a sleigh pulled by two men. I am directed to the front of the procession with a wreath of fake flowers, just behind my other neighbor Glukhaya (Deaf Woman), who holds an icon wrapped in a white cloth. The rest of the villagers follow. Two men toss spruce bows along the way to the cemetery, to help the soul find its way home.

We arrive at the small cemetery, which is enclosed by a wooden fence falling down in places. I walk over to the freshly dug pit. A pile of brown dirt flanks one side, dark in contrast with the white snow. Several bones jut from the pile of dirt. A cracked skull watches from the ground next to the pile. My 83-year-old friend Olga Ivanovna tells me that they are the bones of Trofimovna’s ancestors. Each family has their own section in the cemetery, so no one has to rest eternally with the bones of someone with whom they weren’t on speaking terms. People have been buried here for 300 years, she explains, and the cemetery has always been the same size.

The villagers approach the now open coffin for one last farewell, quietly saying, “Pust tebe pukhom budet zemlya” (“May the earth be as soft as feathers”), then cross themselves and move away. I hold back, afraid I might do something out of protocol. All I can see are Trofimovna’s hands, lying on her midriff, the fingers of one hand cupping the fingers of the other. They are not pale or blue, but seemingly full of blood, full of life. Her hands are muscular, yet bony. The fingers are crooked, yet graceful in the way they arch. These are the hands that she lived by, the hands that sowed seeds, plucked weeds, kneaded bread, chopped firewood, milked the cow. At last, her hands have come to rest.

The men loudly nail the lid on the coffin, then lower it slowly into the pit. They shovel the dirt onto the plain wooden box and toss the bones back in the hole. Two men thrust a cross made of thick oak beams into the newly formed mound. No words are said.

We file out of the cemetery to our house for the wake. This was the moment the men had been waiting for. The booze would flow to honor the dead woman. The 18 villagers funnel into our small kitchen.

I dish out the borsch, only one ladle in each bowl to make sure there is enough. Igor fills the glasses with moonshine. The villagers begin to drink without a word.

Then Igor interjects, “To Trofimovna – she was a hard worker.”

Yes, they agree. She was a difficult woman, but she was a hard worker.

The men drain their glasses, mopping their mouths with bread. When the food is gone, they depart one by one. Some of them wobble from drink, and one falls and nearly shatters the glass in the kitchen window.

On the ninth day after Trofimovna’s death, when God is said to pass judgment on the soul, we hold another wake at the cemetery. I spread a tablecloth over Trofimovna’s grave and cut bread and sausage. There are only three glasses for the whole village, so we fill them with drink and pass them around. No words are said. It saddens me that most of the villagers have come not to remember Trofimovna, but to drink at her expense. RL