Sisters in Sorrow

On Saturdays, Polina fires up the banya, washes down her hut, and beats the rugs. For her, this is party time. Her husband took off long ago, but Polina wasn’t too broken up about that: he never brought in much money, he drank, was quick with his fists, so what fun was he? Polina has wangled herself a pension on account of having been employed at the timber company, her older son tosses a bit of cash her way now and again (pretty good to his mother, he is), so she’s living happily ever after. She has it all, and the village isn’t a village anymore. It’s a proper town.

She has a washing machine and a vacuum cleaner and a new television that takes up a whole wall. The television is Polina’s pride and joy. The colors are turned way up, painfully bright – so lovely, just like at the movies, Polina would sigh. The only pity is that the television being on the wall means you can’t put a doily on top.

The television is her only confidant, her only friend and advisor. Recently, mind you, it’s been all politics, with the men yelling and arguing and the women shrieking and saying scary things. But Polina has learned to get along with them. “Come on, now,” she’d say. “Shush, or I’ll turn you off!” She argues with them, or perhaps she agrees. The noisiest of the lot, the one with a fat, meaty face, makes good points, says it right every time. When Polina listens to him, she always thinks of the peddler from the district center who used to sell all sorts of Chinese-made junk door-to-door, and the way he talked, you’d stand there and listen and end up buying something.

Polina couldn’t be happier. “It’s good now,” she thinks, “because how many newspapers would you have to wade through before, and they all wrote the same thing, dull as could be. And now look! It doesn’t bother him a bit to say bad words, and that tells you he’s not lying. But how come he doesn’t get an earful from his bosses?”

Polina wipes the television with a cloth and picks up her bag. She’s heading for the banya when, wouldn’t you know it, the telephone starts chirping. On the screen, there’s a color photo of Marina, her younger sister, identified as “Birdbrain.” Polina purses her lips, reluctantly sets her bag on the floor, and picks up the phone.

“Hello, is that you, Marina?”

“Like you can’t see,” the caller snipes back, cranky as usual. “I bet you have me in your contacts as ‘Ninny,’ like I don’t know any better.”

The sisters have been feuding since they were little. Polina, always the boss, needled Marina on purpose, and the younger girl whined and cried and complained to mom and dad. Their father made short work of it, smacking them both on the back of the head just in case. He didn’t feel bad for his girls. The one thing he did feel bad about was that his wife hadn’t given him any boys.

The two of them went to the eight-grade village school and brought home middling grades, except that Polina was more perky and did well in the Komsomol. People thought she’d end up in the district center or maybe even in Moscow. But she never did. Instead, she rushed into marriage and got herself a job as a rate clerk at the timber company.

“Look, girls,” she’d say.” I have so much of everything – sacks of money, a husband, a home, and a car, and there you are, carping and grousing and envying me.”

And the whole village surely did envy her, for having so much happiness all to herself.

In the nineties, a lumber company was started up in the village, a joint venture with people from Germany. The Germans came, yammering away in their outlandish language, though to this day the folks in the village can’t bear to hear German spoken. Still, they bit their tongues, because money’s money. There was, truth be told, no one to interpret, until somebody remembered Marina. She’d studied German and was able enough. Peter, an engineer, fell in love with her straight off and stuck to her like glue. The whole village poked fun: “Lookit, here comes Marina’s Fritz,” they’d say, and she’d bristle but shrug it off. “It’s Peter,” she’d tell them. “Is that so hard to remember? Pyotr, just Pyotr, to you.”

Once the place was up and running, her German went home. He sent letter after letter and pretty cards at Christmas, with Santa Claus and sleighs pulled by reindeer. He sent those letters, but he never came himself. Marina got tired of waiting and decided to put in an application to move to town and go to a technical college, because now she couldn’t even walk through the village in peace, not with all the taunting.

So off she went to the bus stop with her suitcase. And on that very bus was Peter, coming from town. For her.

Sister Polina told sister Marina what a ninny she was, how she must be out of her mind to marry a German. “He killed our grandad,” she said, “and he killed half the village, and you’re a traitor, that’s what you are.”

Marina shrugged that ancient history away and left. Ever since then, she’d been living far away, in the city of Hanover, and driving her older sister distracted. She would send huge packages crammed with beautiful things, such good quality too, and Polina couldn’t figure out which of the two of them was living better. Hadn’t Polina’s people won?

So now she’s talking through gritted teeth into the phone.

“A lot you know. I’ve got your photo here, from the year before last, and it says ‘Marina.’ Do you remember when we went to grandma’s to help bring in the hay?”

Marina softens and goes on and on, saying how much she misses them and how good it would be to see her nephew, the older one, and asking how the younger one’s doing and if it’s true that he’s been drafted.

“He’s been drafted,” Polina says gruffly. “So what? Everyone’s been drafted. We’re all waiting for you Germans to attack us. You and your NATO.”

While Marina’s telling her that no one’s about to attack anyone, Polina’s remembering what the fat-face on TV has been saying, and rattles it off pretty much word for word. “We’ll take Berlin and that Vienna of yours,” she says, “and then we’ll show you what’s what.” Her younger sister’s sniffling on the other end of the line, but Polina, her brain all aflame with the sound bites she’s learned by rote, goes on scolding her for living with the enemy instead of doing the right thing and coming home to her Motherland.

“Have they drafted Viktor, though?” Marina brings it up out of the blue. “He’s the right age, and he’s had that special training.”

“They’ll be drafting him soon,” Polina says with pride. “And I’ll sign up too, if it comes to that.”

“If you want, I can hide him away here, ’cos he’s got a passport for travel abroad,” Marina jabbers. “He’s my nephew, I feel so bad for him, I can’t do this anymore.”

Polina cuts her short. “We don’t need that, but you and your... Pyotr can come here if you want. For the winter. Because they told us on the television that you’ve no gas for heat, no water, no light, no way to wash, and it’s cold. And we’ve got three winters’ worth of firewood, there’s water in the well, and they hardly ever turn the lights off. Come, sister.” Suddenly Polina’s sniffling too. “Come. We’ll make it through the winter somehow – the more, the merrier...”

The banya cooled off a long while ago, but Polina is still sitting on the wobbly stool her father made, complaining to her sister in faraway Germany that there’s no money, and the gas has gone up, and they’re going to draft Viktor and she’ll be alone, all alone. And on the other end, in the neon-flooded city of Hanover, on the second floor of a building on Bremer Damm, Marina sits in a comfy armchair, and the Christmas tree, decorated with silver bells, winks at her, through tears.