Baba Dunja's Last Love by Alina Bronsky, Tim Mohr

allow your family to visit you? What are your blood counts? Have you had your thyroid checked? Who will you allow to move into your village?
    I don’t know if they ever understood that it isn’t my village. I tried to talk to them, showed them my house and garden, the other houses that were empty then. That, too, was a mistake, I should have turned away from the cameras and closed the door in their faces. But I was raised differently, and that outweighed decades of professional experience as a nurse’s assistant.
    â€œYou shouldn’t have told them that you love this land,” Petrow had informed me later. “They will construe it as a provocation, as a purposeful trivialization of the reactor disaster. They will hate you for it, for letting yourself be exploited.”
    â€œYes, should I have told them that in reality I don’t care whether I die a day sooner or a day later?”
    â€œMaybe you should have,” Petrow said.
    Laura’s letter burns furiously at my soul. It’s too much for me to deal with alone. I must find a way to read it.
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    The next morning I sit on the bench in front of my house with heavy feet and a heavy head. The cat skulks around me. It is steadily gaining weight, I watch as it catches spiders one after the next and giddily destroys their webs. One shouldn’t think that animals are any better than people. The cat jumps onto my shoulder and licks my ear with its rough tongue.
    â€œI don’t like the way you look today,” says Marja. I didn’t hear her coming. She’s standing there with her big body, her broad feet in worn-out slippers, her unkempt golden hair. She’s wearing her greasy bathrobe and beneath that a negligee that’s faded to gray from being washed so many times.
    â€œWhy don’t you get dressed?” I ask sternly.
    â€œI am dressed.”
    â€œOther people live here, too. Men. You shouldn’t walk around like that.”
    â€œDo you think Gavrilow could rape me? Move over.” She shoves me to the end of the bench with her massive rear end.
    â€œSidorow asked for my hand,” she says without looking at me.
    â€œCongratulations.”
    â€œI told him I needed to think about it.”
    â€œWhy string along a decent man?”
    â€œIt’s not the sort of thing to enter into lightly.”
    I nod and straighten the kerchief on my head. The heat of her body ensures that sweat begins to trickle down my right side.
    â€œI’ve been without a man for a while now,” Marja continues and then looks at me from the side, as if anticipating a reaction.
    â€œYou’re no less lonely when you have a man. And what’s worse, you have to take care of him.”
    She whistles through her teeth like a schoolboy. “Would you be angry with me if I said yes?”
    My ribs still hurt so badly that I can’t turn to her. “Why would I be angry with you? I’d be happy for you.”
    â€œAch, I don’t know.” She reaches for the seam of her washed-out nightgown and wipes her nose. “There are enough reasons to be angry with me.”
    â€œNot at all. He is a very old man but noble of heart. You are a beautiful woman. You make a good pair.”
    Out of the corner of my eye, I can see her blushing.
    That night I dream that my cat gets married to the dead rooster Konstantin.
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    News travels fast in any village. In ours you need only think something and the neighbors already know. The first one to turn up at my door is Sidorow.
    â€œCongratulations,” I say, cautiously, because something in me refuses to believe this development.
    â€œThank you.” He tries to kiss my hand but I take it away from him and tell him he should save his gallantry for his fiancée.
    He begins a long speech, loses his train of thought, stops, confused, and then starts again from the beginning. I listen intensely. At some point I realize that he is worried about