A Knight Brave and Bold

Lyubka was standing in the yard, dolefully gazing at the pig. It had wrecked its pen and was now out and trampling the vegetable garden. “Lyoshka!” she yelled, from force of habit, before stopping short, because, whether called or not, he wouldn’t come. Her son had been taken into the army during the spring draft, along with another dozen or so local rubes just like him. The city boys, the ones with money, wormed their way out of it or signed up for college, but the village lads went where they were sent, every one. Still, after the army they might be able to score a job in some city or other, as a security guard if nothing else. There was no work in the village and no pay for whatever work there was. Anyone who stayed drank themselves sick or got an occasional side hustle with the seasonal visitors, mowing their grass in summer and chopping wood or shoveling snow in winter.

Her son, Lyoshka, was good with his hands (if not with his head). He drank (but not too much), could drive a tractor and a car, could take apart a motor and fix a television. Now, after three months without him, Lyubka was starting to think that Lyoshka was simply the perfect son, although only six months earlier she’d been chasing him around the village with an oven fork after finding out that he’d swiped the money she’d been putting aside for her old age.

Lyubka looked down at her feet; yesterday’s rain had turned the yard into an impassable mud puddle. She’d asked her son umpteen times to spread sand there but could never quite get through to him. The fence on the street side had rotted way back when and was now splayed out like a fan, so Lyubka had to keep patching it up with wooden slats. But the outside privy was the worst. It too had rotted long ago and collapsed onto the neighbor’s property. In winter, you could go in a bucket in the entryway, but that was no good at all in summer, and Lyoshka kept promising to put up a new outhouse, but, as usual, he hadn’t done a thing. Everything was falling apart before their very eyes, and there was no money to make it right, and Lyubka’s meager pension melted away within a week after she got it.

Her way had been to deny herself everything, for so long she couldn’t even remember when she had last splurged on anything beyond the chemical-pink sausage that even looked raw, pasta that clumped up when you cooked it, and cheap tea that left an aftertaste of dust broom. Whatever she pocketed by selling pork for the November celebrations she put away, being always mindful that in Russia, a rainy day can come out of nowhere.

Lyubka had been born in the USSR. She remembered the collective farm workers not getting the internal passports that allowed them to travel within the country until 1974, when she was in first grade. And in a jiffy, half the village had taken off to the cities. Life settled down in the late seventies. A hardscrabble life it might have been, but at least they weren’t still on the barter system, being issued produce or goods pegged to the number of “workday units” they’d amassed. No, they were now paid in cash.

Lyubka’s mother and father broke their backs for the collective farm and for themselves too. They’d gone in with grandma on three cows, selling the milk and pilfering grain and cattle fodder wherever they could. And dad siphoned gas from the collective farm’s truck. So there was money, but nowhere to spend it. Lyubka remembered her mother and father counting out the crumpled one-ruble notes and deciding what they were going to buy in town. They even bought her older brother a motorcycle with a sidecar, which the whole family, guffawing and singing, rode out into the fields to mow hay or to the forest to pick berries. Then her brother had died in Afghanistan, and Lyubka remembered her mother crying out and banging her head against the stove’s whitewashed side, and her father sitting in silence, tapping his knife point on the table.

After Lyubka’s brother died, her mother took to her bed, the illnesses coming one after the other. Her father would go with his ailing wife into town but then gave up and just let it be. Already a drinking man, he now hit the bottle in good earnest, beating on Lyubka and her mother both, and one time, after getting hammered at the regional center, he tumbled out of the bed of a big old truck and fell to his death. Like the other girls in her class, Lyubka had dreamed of going to study in town, but instead she stayed in the village, because there was no one to care for her sick mother, and besides, she couldn’t just let the house go like that. She was hired by the collective farm’s bookkeeping office. It was a cushy job that paid on time, and she and the young chairman hit it off, and he threw her a ruble or two, for giving him some good loving off the clock.

He couldn’t marry her, being married already, and he was scared stiff of being called on the carpet by the Party. Lyubka gave birth to a daughter and kept waiting for the chairman to claim the child as his, but he up and left, and then, all of a sudden, perestroika began, and nothing made sense anymore, but in the village there was a whiff of something new and dangerous that didn’t yet have a name. Lyubka carried on working for the new management, sent her daughter to the collective farm’s kindergarten, and thought and thought of ways to leave that dump of a village behind and head off to start a new life.

She’d never been in a big city, like Moscow. She’d never even been farther than the district center, where all of twenty thousand people lived. And she fancied the world out there to be like in a Bollywood movie – gold galore, fountains, marble, and lovely girls in colorful dresses, all singing and dancing. But back home in Russia, things were bubbling over. The chatty one with the red splotch on his head made way for a gray-haired good-looker, also chatty, and everybody told Lyubka that happiness lay ahead but for the time being, she should hold on. And this was nothing new to Lyubka, so she held on and waited for a better life, like the rest of the country.

The money disappeared. Groceries got expensive in a hurry, and then they disappeared too, and for long enough that the only thing you could count on was yourself. At which point, the earth that feeds us all came to the rescue. The cow gave milk, and that made sour cream, cottage cheese, butter, and thick, tart buttermilk. The hens laid eggs. The vegetable garden gave everything anyone could need, from potatoes to cucumbers. The forest gave berries and mushrooms. Lyubka even learned to make jam without sugar and to produce a home brew from grain and stolen molasses.

In 2000, a new guy came along, and Lyubka liked him. He was young, all smiles, so modest. He dressed simply, whether on a plane flight or at a church service, and he spoke persuasively, and he even had that funny line about “capping ’em in the lavatory.” And he too promised a better life.

Lyubka, who had been waiting for that better life since the day she was born, had no problems with holding on, and she gave birth to Lyoshka, her Aleksei, fathered by a seasonal visitor who had come to stay with his neighbors and get some fishing in. After Lyubka called him from the post office to tell him he had a son, he didn’t pick up her calls any more and never came back to the village, but Lyubka didn’t take that amiss. Her daughter was married and had left by then, and now Lyoshka was there, to warm his mother’s heart.

Thinking about her son, Lyubka came so unglued that she said to hell with the pig and went back into the house, to the living quarters that were Lyoshka’s home before the army. Her face pressed into the pillow that still smelled of him, Lyubka dozed off and dreamed that her son was riding in a tank, going to fight the Nazis. The Nazis were in black uniforms with silver trimmings, while Lyoshka was dressed like a Russian knight of yore, brave and bold, wearing chain mail and a helmet. On he rode, looking into the distance, a hand shading his eyes, and the frightened Nazis scattered. In her dream, Lyubka was as proud of her son as a mother could be and wept with happiness, and on waking, she thought, “When Lyoshka passes away, they’ll pick a street in the village and name it after him.”