Village Notes

I had just finished washing the dinner dishes one night when I realized I had left the barn door open – where the goats are kept. There were wolves lurking around; I had seen their tracks earlier in the day out on the muddy road to the hay fields. I pulled the bucket of potato peelings out from under the sink, to take to the two goats as an evening treat. 

It was dark outside and the sky was clear. I looked up and saw a half moon gleaming in the sky, surrounded by a halo with an orange glow. A bad sign, the villagers say. Could mean trouble. I dumped the tailings into the goats’ trough and closed the door, putting the dowel through the latch. I had just returned to the yard and latched the gate behind me, when I heard our neighbor Kalkanikha yell out at me from across the way.

“Petrovich! Petrovich!” she cried, thinking I was my husband Igor, and calling him by his patronymic. The sound in her voice was desperate. She screamed as though she had been rezanny – cut with a knife, as the Russian expression goes. 

“It’s me, Laura,” I called back. “What’s wrong?”

“Laura, help! Please help! I don’t know what to do!” she cried, in tears. 

Though I couldn’t see her in the dark across the way, I could tell by her slurred words she had been drinking.

Kalkanikha, whose real name was Maria, is the wife of Kalkan, whose real name is Vasily. Kalkan is the word for the pine sap that male wild boars rub on their shoulders before they spar with their competitors during mating. He had inherited the nickname from a farmhand at the collective farm, who was rumored to be his father, but no one knew for sure. Still, the nickname stuck. Kalkan and his wife were both in their 70s. Kalkanikha is a very small, stout woman, who always wears a scarf on her head and a rag wrapped around her hand. This is used to cover a defect she’d had from birth; her hand isn’t fully developed and had only two fingers. I frequently used to see Kalkan sitting on the bench in front of his cabin, but of late he was bedridden, because his legs had given out on him. Their nephew, Balyk, whose real name was Nikolai, came to live with them several years back. The three of them were usually drunk, or at least for a time after the postlady brought the pension money around. 

Thinking something had happened to Kalkan, I unlatched the gate and hurried over to her hut. 

“Come in, come in! Please, hurry!” she cried. She was hysterical.

“What happened? Is anyone home?” I asked cautiously, having become used to her getting all flustered over nothing.

“Laura, it’s the telephone! It’s ringing! What if someone is calling? I don’t know how to answer it!”

What? I couldn’t believe it. All this panic over a phone? I thought.

There is no landline service in the village. So the only thing she could be talking about was a cellphone. First, I was surprised they had one at all. Then I was surprised it worked in their hut, as coverage in the village was poor. The only place our own cellphone works is up high on the windowsill, and even then we only get one or two bars at best.

She opened the door to the dark foyer and fumbled a minute or two for the light switch, which was well above her head. I felt along the logs and found the switch. We went in the small hut, which only had one room. The room was dark. The woodstove had recently been heated, so it was warm inside. Kalkanikha turned on the light, reaching high above her head. 

“What if someone is calling, Laura? I don’t know what to do,” she repeated, calmer now that help was at hand.

“Well, does anyone know your number?” 

“I know the number,” she said. 

“I mean anyone else?” I clarified.

I don’t think she understood the meaning of the question through her drunken haze.

I stopped for a minute to listen. I heard a sound, alright. A beeping sound. But not that of a cellphone. It was the soft beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep of an alarm clock.

“That’s an alarm,” I cried, “not a phone!”

She looked at me in disbelief. I was going to have to prove it.  I listened closely and followed the sound. I opened up a curtain dividing the room and there was Vasily, lying in bed under a thick, downy blanket. I greeted him, and repeated that the sound was from an alarm clock. 

He looked at me first incredibly, then nodded and pointed to a niche next to the bed. Kalkanikha moved some clothes and dug out a small, star-shaped, plastic alarm clock. She held it in her hands for a long time, staring at its black face and neon green numbers.

“It’s the alarm clock,” I repeated. “Not the phone.” When I saw that she still wasn’t sure and made no move to turn it off, I took the clock from her hands, turned it over, and flipped the off switch.

They both started abruptly, as if the alarm had sounded off, not been silenced. Then they smiled and sighed with relief. I wondered how many hours they had endured the sound.

“I thought it was the phone,” she said.

“Do you even have a phone?” I asked.

“Nema,” she answered, “no” in Ukrainian.

“Well, how could you have thought it was the phone if you don’t have a phone at all?” I inquired.

“Balyk, my nephew, he said was going to buy one,” she explained. “I thought maybe he bought one. He’s gone now, to the next village. He took the pension money, you know?” she asked, seeing if I did or not.

I knew.

You can read about Kalkan and Kalkanikha and all the other villagers in Laura’s book about her life with Igor in the village, The Storks’ Nest: Life and Love in the Russian Countryside.