The Bridegroom at the Gate

“Natasha!” Mother yells out the window, sending the chickens scuttling every which way. “Come on, get the laundry in, can’t you see the clouds? Fetch the basins from the bathhouse! Get a wiggle on, you lazybones, or it’ll be raining before you know it!”

Natasha pours water into the wash tub where the bed linen is bubbling, with a whiff of chlorine, and runs to the clotheslines at the bottom of the garden. The laundry there is more than dry but still full of the fragrance of newly-mown grass. Father did the cutting earlier, and now the grass lies wilted and smelling intoxicatingly sweet. And the bed linen has been blued to make it brighter, and it’s starched too, all in Grandma’s way. Her laundry was always crisp and brilliantly white.

The tulle curtains, the bed skirts, the little napkins... “Ugh, middle-class chic,” Natasha thinks. “Just embarrassing.” But she’d never say that to her mother. She hauls the laundry back and leaves it on the porch.

Everything in the home is topsy-turvy. Mother is just finishing washing the floors, the hot water laced with lye steaming off the magenta-painted boards. The windows were washed the day before, smeared with a paste of powdered chalk and then rubbed with newspapers that left nasty grayish smudges on the hands. The corners have been swept for cobwebs, and Father had wanted to whitewash the stove again but never found the time. All the heavy quilted mattresses have been taken out to the barn and hung there on the crossbeams; the pillows have been pounded; and the hand-woven floor mats, made back in the day by Grandma’s kind and gentle hands, have been draped over the poles behind the vegetable beds.

The little brothers have been tearing senselessly about, doing nothing but getting under the feet, making silly faces, and yelling “K-I-S-S-I-N-G” at Natasha, but she, her legs being so strangely heavy and all, is so fussed, she doesn’t even have the strength to smack them on the head and just flaps a towel at them.

As evening comes on, the bathhouse is heated, and Father has brought such a lot of water, he’s used up all the milk cans. The brothers are sent to the wood for green switches, and they come back hooting and hollering, with a whole cartload of birch branches, for all the world as if Trinity Sunday is coming up.

The table has been set outside, under the apple tree, and Mother has gone all out with her new scarlet oilcloth, which is already laid with plates, tumblers, and pressed-crystal shot glasses. The brothers have been told to chase away the chickens so they won’t mess in the yard, and the neighbor lady has gone to head off the cow.

Natasha’s girlfriends are finding any excuse to get a look in: “Do you have a television schedule, Natasha?" “Can you lend me some washing powder?” “Did you see if Granny Nyura’s come back from the post office?”

Natasha flaps a towel at them too: “Lay off, girls. Can’t you tell I’m a bundle of nerves? The dough hasn’t risen, so that’s that, no pie for us. I said to her, didn’t I, that the yeast was old, but Ma was all” – in a fine mockery of her mother – “‘It’ll rise, it’ll rise.’”

“It’s time, Natasha,” Mother cries with a glance at the pendulum clock. “Where’s your brains? The bus from the district center’ll be here at eight-twenty. I’ve ironed your dress. It’s on the back of the chair. Take my beads, you hear?”

“Mama!” Natasha fires back as she races around the room. “What beads, Ma? But where’s my pendant? Ma?”

“Where you laid it, that’s where it lies. When do I ever get into your things, eh?”

Natasha’s heels can be heard clattering, and a chair falling over, and the cracked doors of the polished wardrobe squeaking, and the sun has started setting by degrees behind the far end of the village when the bus comes rumbling along and the doors open noisily and the crowd of passengers starts jabbering, and the dust cloud churned up by the bus, which is right on schedule, settles onto next door’s front garden.

And the brothers installed on the roof send up such a roar, yelling the time-honored warning.

“Natasha!” they shout. “The bridegroom’s coming! Hey, Ma! Natasha’s bridegroom’s coming!”

The young man, carrying a bouquet of faded flowers and a backpack with a strap that is cutting into his shoulder, has pushed open the gate. He stands a while, looks around, shakes his fist at the brothers – “Get yourselves down from there!” – and goes to introduce himself. Natasha, red and radiant, comes flying out and throws her arms about his neck, and he hugs her and swings her around, reveling in seeing her again, in the warm summer evening, and in thoughts of the nights he’ll be able to spend with Natasha now, all legal and above board.

Father and Mother, peering through a gap in the curtains, keep waiting for a proper time to show themselves and say hello, and Mother is the first to give in. She bangs the front door open louder than she needs to and makes a stately entrance onto the porch, straightening the shawl on her shoulders as she goes.

“Welcome,” she says. “I am Lyubov Mikhailovna, Natasha’s mother, and who might you be?”

At this, Ilya puts Natasha down and says, “Don’t you know already, Mama? Or maybe you’re not the mama – the sister, then? But Natasha told me she only had brothers.”

Lyubov Mikhailovna flushes with pleasure and, wiping her sweaty hand on her apron, chirrups, “Come in, come on in, don’t be shy. Why are we keeping our dear guest out here on the threshold?”

Father follows up, and Ilya gives his hand a firm squeeze and a shake.

“I’m Ilya,” he says, “and I am, as it were, asking for your daughter’s hand in marriage.”

“We make no objections,” Father replies with a cough. “No reason to. We have the goods, you have a buyer, as the saying goes.”

Natasha, schooled by her girlfriends, has put a twig from a birch switch under the doormat. According to village lore, that will give her power over her future husband, and now all she’s concerned about is getting rid of it so no one notices. Also a towel has to be laid down, and the first to step on it will be the boss, but that’s for the church, and afterward the towel will be tucked under the mattress.

“You’ve had a long journey. Come along to the bathhouse.” Father is tugging on the backpack strap, but Ilya won’t let him have it. He wants to put his pack down himself.

The bathhouse is well heated and smells of birch switches and steamed mint. The youngsters can’t go in yet; Father and the groom-to-be and old Pakhomov from next door are the only ones allowed to enjoy the first round. And while they are doing just that, with an occasional yell of “More steam!” Natasha and her mother are scampering around like crazy people. For quite a while already, the neighbor women have been dashing to and fro in the outdoor kitchen, where pink young potatoes are boiling in a cast-iron pot, pike cutlets are sizzling in a sturdy frying pan, and the first little white mushrooms are simmering in sour cream.

The ladies’ deft hands have chopped up the salad, sliced garlic-rubbed lard from the market into thin strips and prime sausage with oval specks of fat in the cross-section into thick ones. Recently harvested cucumbers – the first crop of fingerlings, given just a quick brining – breathe out a dizzying aroma. Small fish caught by the village lads and smoked on alder sticks until they are golden and sizzling are put into bowls so that everyone can get some. Booze and more booze too... The bride-to-be’s girlfriends are running back and forth, crowding the table with bottles of cheap, store-bought port and hearty moonshine. Last year’s gooseberry jam is spooned into huge jars, and cranberry juice is poured into a glass jug, where it catches glints of the sunset.

The men have left the bathhouse in a mellow mood, the groom-to-be relaxed and cheerful after washing off the dust of the road, and it is plain to see that he and his future father-in-law have sealed the deal with a drink or two. Father has shown him the cowshed and the barn and the drying house for the hay and even the woodshed packed to the roof with firewood, and has bragged about his Soviet-era Zhiguli car and his newish compact motorbike, and is now droning on in Ilya’s ear about how good the fishing is in these parts and how wealthy the community farm is, and telling him they’ll put in an order for wood and build a house for the happy couple, while Ilya nods amiably and wonders how he can break it to them that he is bound and determined to carry Natasha off to the city, because she can hardly live her whole life in the village herding cows out to pasture, now, can she?

And meanwhile the bride-to-be’s girlfriends are kicking up a ruckus around the table, and the neighbors are discussing what kind of a dowry Natasha will have, and the little brothers are at the table as well, nodding off after several public servings of lemonade and private swigs of that awful port.

The sleeping arrangements have put Natasha in her maidenly bedroom and Ilya in the parlor on the fold-out divan. And Father and Mother will be listening all night long for the creak of a floorboard under Ilya’s foot, but they’ll hear nothing of the sort, because Ilya will have gone out onto the porch for a smoke, and Natasha will have climbed through her window, and they’ll be kissing away in the hayloft until the rooster crows and Mother gets up to milk the cow.