Fiction By Jasmine Wu
The Rabinovich family isn’t sentimental. I have few existing baby photos, all taken by my grandparents when I lived with them in Ukraine. When I was born, my parents were students in the United States, newly immigrated and ostracized by language. Menial jobs like housekeeping and cashiering proved insufficient for raising a newborn, the heaviest burden in their list of burdens. And so, I was packed into a plastic car seat with a yellow blanket, given to a flight attendant, and shipped to Zalischyky to live with my babulya and dedulya. I called them Baba and Deda, their pet names reflecting the simple, affectionate infanthood they gave me.
I’m not naïve enough to claim I remember anything from when I lived with them—I was barely two when I left—yet I know the warm feel of their soft, wrinkled hands, gently straightening the hems of my clothing and patting my bulging stomach until I drifted to sleep. I felt Baba’s cotton-candy hair tickling my face as she raised me above her head, smiling at me with yellow teeth. I spent my afternoons with Deda as he gardened, grasping the grass and suckling on the rough cucumbers we would pickle in the fall. Our little village, famous for tomatoes and wine, was a fantasy; a temperate peninsula isolated by a horseshoe-shaped river, tethered to the bustling city by a wooden bridge.
When my parents decided they wanted me back, I was taken across this bridge back to America, leaving Baba and Deda and our pickled cucumbers behind. My mother’s foreign arms held me on the flight back. She jokes that I was inconsolable during those twelve hours in the sky. “You’ve never been an easy one, that’s for sure,” she would laugh.
The only baby pictures I have were taken by Deda and lovingly printed. Glossy and smooth to the touch, they rest protected in a butterfly-blue photo album with silver edges. Thick and cream-colored, the pages inside press against those photos, pinning them in place against plastic film covered in fingerprints. A faded ink message is scrawled inside the front cover. Below, is an English translation painstakingly written in large, childish letters, surrounded by sloppy crayon hearts.
“Мы любим тебя, Данило. Вспомни нас, когда вырастешь, и не забудь позвонить своему бабе и деде, когда сможешь! Тысяча объятий и еще тысяча.
We love you, Daniela. Remember us when you’re all grown up, and don’t forget to call your Bbaba and Ddeda when you can! A thousand hugs and a thousand more.
When I was four, I taught myself how to use Mama’s phone and learned her password from the reflection in her glasses. I wasn’t normally allowed to touch it, but I learned early on that if I slid something into my shirt, pressed flat against my stomach, I could sneak anything into my room. I would search for “свекруха,”, or “mother-in-law” and press the bright dial button. I remember calling Baba for the first time (Deda passed away shortly after I left Ukraine), waiting to hear her voice and compare it to the hazy vocalizations in my brain. And when those first words reached my ears, “Анастасия, зачем ты мне звонишь? [Anastasiya, why are you calling me?]” I could feel the sheep’s wool of her warm sweaters against my cheek and taste bitter cucumber skin.
When I spoke, Baba cried, and I cried with her.
“Данило, мой цветочек! Моя радость!
Daniela, my flower! My joy!”
I looked forward to Baba’s static-filled stories every week. I would sit cross-legged and silent on the carpet in my square room and unwind time like a thread, driving back across the bridge to Zalischyky, crawling through Deda’s garden, and falling asleep in the sun beside his crouching figure.
“Daniela, do you know where your name is from? Your parents named you after the Russian name, Danilo. It means ‘“God is my judge.’” Now, your baba doesn’t know anything about God. Your deda might, but it doesn’t help now, does it?. We both know the pastor back home in Zalischyky is a fool. What matters is that you judge yourself. Be good, be honest, be kind, and the world will smile at you. Баба любит тебя. [Baba loves you.].”
Baba died six months later. I have one picture of her, a round, freckled woman feeding a dupa-clad baby bits of homemade honey cake on the kitchen floor. Baba taught me about who I was and who I could be.
Between my leaving Ukraine and the age of five, there is a blank in our cameras and our memories. Our family computer, a clunky green machine, and the contents of its hard drive had been stolen. In an instant, a petty thief took our past. Sometimes, I try without success to remember life when I was five. The result is always a darkish swirl and a nagging feeling of loss. Since then, my parents have been obsessed with documenting every moment, lest they forget it.
Two girls appear in my parents’ phone cameras, one more than the other. A large, round, cherub-like smile fills most of the album, beaming at the camera with shiny gums and crowded teeth. A face with flushed, wide eyes and blonde hair brushing over bunched fat, one that will eventually lose its charm.
My sister was the cute one, a baby that adults fought to hold and entertain during house parties. While the other children and I raced in the living room, pretending we were soldiers or playing “cat and mice” with an uncle, she was seated on someone’s lap, telling stories to willing listeners. Without fail, as Mama was preparing dinner for our house guests, some foolish adult would say “Lyudmyla, why don’t you tell me a story?” And Lyudmyla would spin a plotless yarn about jesters and flowers, making others laugh without intending to.
The two of us had always been treated differently. Lyudmyla was to be pampered and spoiled, eating all of my favorite honey cakes first even though she preferred pillowy pampushky. She refused to admit she liked honey cakes, always sticking out her cake-covered tongue and pretending to spit the wet mush out. She drove me to fury with her hypocrisy and pretension.
“Oh, stop yelling and let her have some. You’re older, aren’t you? This is just what older siblings do. Besides, after Mama and Tato die, the two of you will only have each other. The two of you will only love each other. So, treat her generously now because you’ll be sharing love for a long time and there won’t be any more after we’re gone. We are the only three people on this Earth who will ever love you for who you are.”
Mama and Tato called her “маленький ангел,” little angel. They gave her lots of hugs and kisses, and never failed to let her know how much they loved her. When this would happen, I would think about the angels in the stories Tato used to read before bed, the ones that tricked the tzar, stole his clothes and fortune, and rode off leaving him naked and shivering in the woods.
Our parents would take us to a local park every weekend, an unremarkable plot of land with forests and wooden play structures. We would run into the woods and play “ogres and knights” as Mama and Tato caught up with friends on the park benches. She was always the ogre, although she desperately begged to be the knight. It brought me a cruel, brittle joy to know that she didn’t always get everything she wanted. We fought with the thick sticks scattered across the forest floor, pretending they were iron swords. I was rougher with her than I should have been, poking her side with the rough branches and swiping at her knees so her legs would buckle. She never cried and was always happy to play with me.
When Lyudmyla was four and I was nine, I had an idea to create the trap that hunters used to trap wild hares in Russian folk stories. Spring had just begun, the air was sweet with grass, and young trees had branches springy enough to recoil upward if you held them down. I told Lyudmyla to stay put on the swing set, lest she see what I was doing, and began my work with nothing but rope and a switchblade. I tied two thick branches together to a stone and used a second rope to create a noose slightly bigger than her foot. Slicing through the anchoring rope would release the branches, causing the noose to whiplash upward and hang any creature caught in its grip by their foot. I stood back and admired my handiwork. I didn’t bother to cover the rope, knowing that Lyudmyla, as thoughtless as she was, wouldn’t notice. I cut the anchoring rope until it hung by a thread, ready to sever it completely in an instant.
I checked on Lyudmyla’s bright figure on the swings. Her blond hair streamed behind her, and her white backpack and sweater camouflaged her against the brilliant clouds. I crouched several feet behind my trap.
“Lyudmyla! I’m ready to play now! This time, you can be the knight and I’ll be the ogre.”
Lyudmyla leapt off the swings, floating before landing on the wood chips, scattering them with her sneakers. She beamed at me, racing my way with outstretched arms jouncing with every stride. I had never seen her run so fast before, and before I knew it, she had stepped over the noose. Hoping my work hadn’t been in vain, I cut through the remaining fibers holding the trap together and jumped to my feet. I watched the branches cut through the air and blood spatter onto her sweater.
When Mama and Tato asked her what happened, she said the wicked trees had tried to grab her and eat her. They just shook their heads, blaming themselves for encouraging her flighty storytelling. She must have fallen while being reckless, they mouthed to each other on the drive to the hospital. A smaller, outward-jutting branch had punctured her pupil and torn through the retina. The only thing the doctors could do was remove her eye entirely, leaving its fleshy socket exposed under a sagging, long-lashed eyelid split by a stitched-together, bloody slash.
This angelic, cherubic child with blond curls and pale skin had turned into a winking blight. She now reminded me of Likho, the one-eyed male goblin who emerged from forests and brought evil fate and misfortune unto frightened villages.
For the first time in Lyudmyla’s life, she faced judgment. Children pointed and adults whispered on her way to school. During our first party since the accident, our uncles and aunts looked at her with grief in their eyes, whether they intended to or not. They were careful around her, snapping at other children if they wrestled nearby or threw toys into the air. They asked for her stories with pity, none of them offering their lap. Pity was something Lyudmyla had never known before, and instead of spinning a fairytale she excused herself, mouth set in a crooked line, and trotted toward the children playing in our living room. Scared of her taffy-pink socket and angered by feelings of past jealousy, they were unwilling to let her join their teams for “cat and mouse.” Lyudmyla sat on the worn leather couch and turned her face away from the guests.
I felt shame, and a horrible, twisting heat rose in my throat. I thought about God and my Baba and Deda and what they saw from the sky. I retreated into my room, unable to face what I had done to my sister and read the folktale books that Baba had gifted my parents when I was born. I imagined the faded pages were Baba’s soft, wrinkled skin, and I rubbed my thumb rhythmically on the colorful illustrations. I could heard her gravelly voice reading the words on the page.
I heard the rusty hinges of my bedroom door creak. I buried my chin in my hands and stared at my book, waiting for Mama or Tato’s voices to chide me for hiding.
“Daniela, do you still love me?”
Lyudmyla’s watery voice trembled. She stumbled toward me, still adjusting to navigating a world without depth, and fell to her knees, her head bowed over clenched hands.
“Mama and Tato won’t look at me. My friends won’t play with me. I’m so ugly now, and I want things to go back. I don’t want to look like this anymore.”
I held Lyudmyla’s small hands tightly between my own. I tried to smile through my tears at her blurry, watercolor face, a pale blot with streaks of scar-tissue red. I tried to give her hope.
“Lyudmyla, let me tell you the story of where I came from. In Ukraine, there’s a magical sky kingdom called Zalischyky, home to a civilization of fairies. This town, Zalischyky, has talking flowers that sing in the sun and is only accessible by a rainbow bridge that appears once a year. I was just a tiny baby, no bigger than your thumb (I gently shaped her hand into a “thumbs up”) carried by a stork from a fierce storm to the humble home of two older fairies. Their names were Baba and Deda.”
Lyudmyla giggled. I suppose their names were a little silly.
“Baba and Deda loved me very much. They saw how small I was and made hundreds upon hundreds of honey cakes in their tiny brick ovens to feed me until I became big and strong, like I am today. I even became a little fat.”
I puffed up my cheeks with air and blew a raspberry. Lyudmyla laughed and did the same.
“I ate so many honey cakes, that I grew bigger than their home and had to be raised outside, in the fairies’ farmland where they grew delicious foods like potato pancakes and pampushky on pretty vines. I played with the fairies every day and they read me stories about Ukraine, where we come from.
“One day, the people on Earth realized that there was a baby, me, living in Zalischyky.
They had heard me laughing in the clouds, and sent someone to come bring me back down to Earth, where they said I belonged. And Lyudmyla, I was so sad. They took me from Baba and Deda and I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.
“They put me in a dungeon (she gasped) and told me I couldn’t go back to Zalischyky. I felt so alone. The prison guards didn’t care for me, no one on Earth did. I began to give up hope of ever seeing Baba and Deda again when I received a message, carried by a butterfly. I had seen those kinds of butterflies before, with blue and silver wings, in Baba and Deda’s farm. A little message was tied to its foot. It told me that one day, I would have a little sister named Lyudmyla, as pretty as an angel. And that an evil goblin named Likho would take away her eye, and that things would be harder but she musn’tmustn’t be afraid…,”
I was crying now, big, ugly gasps and hiccups.
“B…because the name Lyudmyla means ‘loved people,’ and someone would always love her and protect her for as long as she lived. I promise.
“One day, when we’re older, we’ll go adventuring and find the rainbow bridge to Zalischyky so we can visit Baba and Deda and live the rest of our days together, happy and full of honey cake. I’ll see Baba’s smile again, and you’ll play with all the other fairies until the sun sets.”
Lyudmyla wiped her eye with the pink sleeve of her sweater. We sat on the floor of my room together, her blond curls on my shoulder and her weightless, tiny body kneeling between my legs, frail as a bird. She reached deep into her pants pocket and pulled out a packet of the small honey cakes we bought at the Slavic grocery store once a week. She pressed it into my hands. We split the cake, right down the middle.
I reopened my book of folktales, and found one I thought she might like. I smoothed Lyudmyla’s hair and patted her arm, pressing her into my side. I told Lyudmyla the story of a beautiful girl, dressed in rags, who wais turned into an angel by a magic heifer for her kindness. Dressed in rich gold embroidery, she soared into the clouds and married a fine young prince with the blessing of the tzar (Lyudmyla especially liked this part).
I can hear Baba’s voice in my head, reading with me for the last time.
