Tania Maliarchuk was born in 1983 in Ivano-Frankivsk. Studied for a degree in Philology in Prykarpattia National University. Currently lives in Kyiv.
She is the author of four books of short stories and novellas: Adolfo's Endspiel, or A Rose for Liza [2004], From Top to Bottom: A Book of Fears [2006], How I Became a Saint [2006], To Speak [2007].
The short story Me and My Sacred Cow is taken from her second book
Original Ukrainian text of the story
ME AND MY SACRED COW
by Tania Maliarchuk
1
I hated my cow and she hated me.
However, we made quite a pair: we both were loonies. We held constant competition in lunacy, and the cow always gained the upper hand over me because she could run faster. She had four legs, and me, I had only two.
Sometimes we walked through the village; it was lunchtime, there was broiling sun, skin was peeling off my nose, and she, pitch black (although her mother was white all over), was trudging discreetly in front of me casting cautious glances back now and then, trying to catch the changes of my mood. I was telling her:
“Listen, bitch, now that all’s over, can you explain why you needed to run to the forest?”
Sweetie was blinking her big black eye at me and kept silent.
“Did you think of me?!” I was starting to raise my voice. “Didn’t you see that I was reading a book? And the book was very interesting! If you read but one book in your life you’d know what it is when you’re reading and the stupid cow you got to look after is running like mad straight into the forest!”
Sweetie hoped that I’d lay all the blame on the gadflies.
“Gadflies? So what! They were biting me too, but I didn’t run to the forest!”
We walked past the Vulans’ house. In the gateway stood Liuba Vulan, a stout deaf-mute girl who was raped by her normal younger brother at the pasture every day. She always uttered roaring crazy laughter, which made me feel awe-struck.
“You know how much I’d like to whip you?” I continued. “Too much, indeed! But you run so fast that I’m no patch on you! Just wait till we come back to the barn and then I’ll whip you, I’ll do! For you to remember this!”
Then we passed by Kamaykina’s house. I hastened the cow a bit with a kick, not wishing to run into that old demented crone who had been hunting for me two years in a row. That was because Sweetie’s mother had scattered asunder a haystack in her field while I was reading Hugo’s Les Misérables.
Then there was another house and ours next to it and the local food store beyond. The store had nothing in it but apple-flavored soda, Turbo chewing gum, and matches.
“Oh, how I’ll whip you! I’ll make the earth quake!” The cow blinked her big black eye in disturbance and lowered her head as if trying to nibble at the grass growing by the roadside.
“Don’t try to stir my pity! I’ve pitied you so many times, but you do the same thing over and over again!”
The gate of Grandma’s yard was flung open and secured with a brick. Sweetie would plunge through the gate, drink some cold water from a pail under the ash (though I would shout to Grandma to give her some DDT cubes instead as she’d already guzzled her fill of rotten water from the pond). Sweetie would give Grandma a doleful look as if I hadn’t herded her but had tortured her with red-hot iron, and I would yell that Grandma should give her an orchik* or tie her legs together or put her on a tether, that crazy thing.
Sweetie slowed down in hesitation. The gate was only a few yards away. From here, the Vassyliovskis’ courtyard could be well seen; the tall slim mother and three red-haired mouse-like girls were sitting on the stairs of the brick house waiting for their old grandaunt to die.
“Go, go, don’t funk it, I’ll whip you but not too hard.”
All of a sudden, Sweetie made a serious and straightforward decision; she gained pace, flew past the gate in a moment, and galloped on.
“You bitch!” I yelled following her. “Come back, now! Where are you flying? You won't get away from me!"
But the cow knew where she was going to. She headed towards the store and before I managed to utter another “bitch”, Sweetie disappeared in the cool stone hall behind the broad iron doorway.
The store used to be the village's elementary school. Grandma had gone there for two years before she quit for she had to herd the cow. What was happening had great symbolic value. Sweetie hid out in the store to repent for the sins of all the ancestry of Grandma’s cows, especially the one that had left Grandma illiterate.
Behind the counter in the store stood Ant, the old saleswoman who saw it the matter of honor to stay in the desolate store until the closing hour. She gazed at the cow melancholically and the cow stared back pleadingly. If I hadn’t run in after the cow, Ant would have been sure to say to her:
“Good evening. How can I help you?”
“Sweetie! Go home! I won’t whip you, I promise,” said I, tired. Then, to Ant: “Ma’am, let’s slaughter this cow and you’ll have something to sell in your store.”
Ant felt happy about it but asked cautiously:
“What will your granny think about it?”
“We won’t tell her. I’ll lie that they took the cow to the asylum.”
Finally, we, the two loonies, came back home. Grandma was looking out of the gate, worried.
“What took you so long?” she asked letting Sweetie have some cold spring water from a pail.
“Give her some DDT cubes, not water!” I barely managed to protect myself with a single remark.
Sweetie rubbed her neck against Grandma’s decrepit sheepskin, like a dog.
“My sweet little thing”, Grandma caressed the cow, “You’re tired, eh? Thirsty, eh?”
“Tired like a dog”, Sweetie answered and nodded at me. “And what’s worst of it all is that torturer. When will her parents come to take her away?”
My parents were expected in a few days. Just a few days. Before school, I had to be washed and scraped well, especially my heels. They had to kill all the lice on my head. To buy copybooks and other stuff. So they might have arrived any moment, you see, bitch.
2
Liuba Vulan hadn’t always been deaf-mute. As a little girl, she had fallen off a neighbor’s cherry-tree, caught in the act. After that, she could not speak a single word, so scared she had been.
Although, some people said that she had been born with no roof of her mouth and had never spoken at all.
She wore long shabby dresses and walked barefoot in all seasons. To save on shampoo, her mother cropped her hair almost to the skin. So Liuba always was in the state of growing. When she had her period, she was spattered in blood all over. Her younger brother raped her at the pasture every day and she roared with ghastly laughter as he was doing that. Sometimes after the affair, Liuba held him in her arms and kissed his brow. Meanwhile I kept an eye on Liuba’s cows. If anything had happened to them, mother would have told Liuba’s brother to flog her with a cane what he would have gladly done.
Liuba was her brother’s first woman. Shortly afterwards, he would become her first and only gynecologist and perform a home abortion on her to save money.
Sometimes her crazy roar seemed to me a substitute for smiling.
3
The Vassyliovskis, tall slim mother and three red-haired girls, were sitting on the stairs of the brick house waiting for their old grandaunt to die.
When she died, they would own the house as they didn’t have a place to live. So far all four of them were packed in an old summer kitchen next to the house. They, especially the girls, were eagerly looking forward to finally moving into that luxurious mossy and moldy palace, jumping around on musty embroidered pillows, and sleeping on real feather beds, though stuffed with chicken down.
The first words of the youngest red-haired girl were: “Auntie, when are you gonna die?”
To which Grandaunt replied: "I will, someday, sweetheart.”
The girls brought her food and drinks by turns. They sneaked into the room on tiptoe, stopped by the bedstead, and kept silent for a while hoping that she would not talk to them.
Grandaunt had been living for a century or so.
Every day Mrs. Vassyliovski took a train to Kolomiya where she worked as a janitor in the History Museum. When museum caretakers didn’t come to work, which happened almost all the time, Mrs. Vassyliovski locked herself in the museum not letting anyone in. Scarce visitors, mostly lovers of antiques and tipsy Polish tourists, banged on the door and demanded admittance (as it was not a holiday, so the museum had to be open), and Mrs. Vassyliovski peeped from behind a curtain like a scared ghost or a museum exhibit from the 16th century and nodded her head meaning to say that History was unavailable, that she had depression, and that she was only a Vassyliovski who kept three red-haired daughters and a deathless aunt.
The Vassyliovski kids had nothing to eat, wore brightly colored dresses presented by the village people, but no panties. Their noses were running constantly and the girls licked the snot off their lips with relish. Their legs were covered in mud up to their knees.
The Vassyliovskis’ hair was so red and the freckles on their faces were so bright that sometimes I saw them as a huge sunflower with a tiny dirty imp hiding inside.
4
When the cow fell ill, Grandma started taking her for walks every night.
Sweetie’s milk had turned red and she mooed drearily.
I was sitting astride the gate looking out for my parents’ car, and Grandma was guiding the cow in circles around the yard.
“Honey, come down”, Grandma said to me. “It’s late. Can’t you see they won’t come tonight?”
“They may come even after midnight. They aren’t scared. They’re in the car.”
“Or they might have got things to do”, Grandma continued to think out loud.
“Hard, so hard”, added Sweetie. “There’s blood in my milk.”
I longed to see Mother but I was afraid at the same time. I imagined how she would press my head against her breast and suddenly move away startled.
“Tania! Your hair is full of lice!”
I would feign sincere astonishment.
“What are you talking about? What lice?”
“Lice are hopping around on your head like horses! How have you come down to this?”
“Mum, I got no lice!”
“Now what’s this?” she would take a big fat louse out of my hair. “Do you ever comb your hair? Do you ever wash it? How come there’s so many of them?”
“Mum, all kids got lice here! It’s not my fault! They hop from one head to another!”
I was much afraid of Mother’s arrival. Once Mother had been cross like that when she found out I had had pinworms. Then, I was sitting behind the barn picking pinworms out of my own crap with a little stick to persuade Mother of their persuasive absence.
“You shouldn’t leave me at Grandma’s for so long! Soon she’ll make me not only herd the cow but also milk her!”
Grandma stroked Sweetie on the forehead and took her on another circle around the yard. Sweetie shuffled her hooves meekly.
“Grandma, why do you make the cow walk about like that?” I yelled from up the gate.
“She just wants to walk for a while. Am I right, Sweetie?”
“Right”, Sweetie replied.
5
Kamaykina had a young and pretty daughter Liuda who used to be an enthusiast of converting the village children’s library into a pool hall. The old librarian was urged to hand part of the book collection over to the neighboring village and simply give the other part away to local kids. I inherited The Adventures of Elektronik and Die kleine Hexe so I was really happy about the pool hall opening.
Liuda played pool brilliantly. She also played guitar and had a tattoo on her left arm. Her boyfriend often came from Kolomiya on his motorbike to pick her up. Their wedding was fixed on fall, but at the end of summer Liuda went to Tlumach with her friends and jumped from a third floor’s window there.
“Don’t you come up to me or I’ll jump”, said Liuda to a drunken friend having climbed up the windowsill in one of the local dorms.
The friend did not believe her and tried approaching.
Liuda broke her spine and ended up confined to the wheelchair for the rest of her life. The money for the chair was provided by the village council. Her boyfriend visited her a couple of times to make sure that Liuda would never rise to her feet again, and the wedding was cancelled by mutual consent. The last thing he told her was:
“I love you and will love you forever. If you recover someday just let me know. Even if I’m married by that time I’ll come back to you.”
Right after that he married some other girl.
Liuda stopped playing pool but instead, she learned to embroider in various styles and not to walk. Her hands became her hands and feet.
It was then when my cow, Sweetie’s mother, scattered asunder Kamaykina’s haystack. I lost sight of the cow because I was reading Hugo's Les Misérables.
Straight away someone told Kamayakina whose cow scattered her haystack, and she, being in a good mood, ran to have a fight with me. I was trying to talk back but I had nothing to retort to what Kamaykina was repeating again and again. She shouted:
“Who’s going to stack the hay back? Who’s going to stack the hay back?”
6
And then there was Littlecap. He was a boy of about eight whose mother always sent him to a boarding school, but he always ran away from there. His mother ran away too. A few times every year. To Odessa. With lovers. She always came back, though.
Littlecap was epileptic. When talked to, he would reply:
“What?”
I was going to the graveyard which I called “graveorchard”, and Littlecap was following me. All the things I liked grew at the graveyard: strawberries as big as a fist, cherries, apples, pears, and plums, both golden and blue. I could stuff my bosom with all those fruit and then have a tasty stroll around, studying epitaphs.
I felt Littlecap’s breath on my back.
“Littlecap, I’m off to the graveorchard”, I said to him. “Are you coming with me?”
“What?” replied Littlecap taking one step backwards.
“You’d better keep an eye on the cows. If they get into the garden, we both will be in trouble.”
“What?” replied Littlecap taking another step backwards.
“Aren’t you afraid of the graveyard, Littlecap?”
Littlecap hesitated whether to say “What?” or “No, I’m not.” Then, he answered:
“No, I’m not. Why should I be? When I die, I’ll lie there.”
“Maybe not. Before you die, there’ll be no room for your grave at this graveyard”.
“What d’you mean, no room?” the revolted Littlecap plunged into shrubs.
When his mother eloped with a lover to Odessa again, Littlecap went to Beremyanski Pond, swam a couple of yards off the shore and drowned. He had a seizure in water.
“Littlecap", said angels to him in heaven, “why did you go swimming to Beremyanski Pond? Did you forget that you have seizures when you’re in water?”
“What?” Littlecap replied.
“Mind you, Littlecap, it’s nothing like a boarding school up here. You can't run away.”
Littlecap hesitated whether to say “What?” or “I will if I want to!” Then, he answered:
“I will if I want to!”
7
Some pears had better not be picked. They grew right upon graves. Those pears were huge and juicy. They looked like human skulls, but I was not superstitious so I ate a few dozens willingly.
Suddenly I saw Liuba Vulan standing nearby with her normal younger brother.
“Climb the pear-tree”, Liuba’s brother ordered. Liuba roared with laughter and tried to kiss her brother’s brow.
“Climb the tree, I tell ya!”
Liuba started climbing. Below that tree was the grave of Mr. Vassyliovski, the father of the three red-haired imps. Mr. Vassyliovski said to Liuba:
“Liuba, don’t climb. Once you climbed a cherry-tree. See where you ended up?”
“Climb faster!” Liuba’s brother snapped out.
Liuba mounted the first thick branch with a roar.
“Climb higher”, ordered her brother.
“Liuba, don’t”, Mr. Vassyliovski insisted. “Your brother’s a bad guy. He wants you or your baby dead.”
Liuba reached another branch, a bit higher. She dangled above us all with a grin on her face. The hem of her dress rode up, and I saw that she wore no panties either.
“Now jump, Liuba!” brother cried. “Down on the ground!”
“Liuba, don’t jump!” I yelled. “Don’t jump, I beg ya!”
Mr. Vassyliovski swung his pear-shaped skulls between the twigs sadly.
“Jump, Liuba!”
“Liuba, don’t!”
“Jump, Liuba!” and she prepared herself to jump.
And then Sweetie the Cow emerged. She yielded red milk and mooed drearily and would die before long but she knew which side was the good one.
Sweetie bellowed like a bull, breathed flames from her nostrils, tapped her hoof on the earth, and threw herself at Liuba’s brother.
Liuba’s brother had hardly even got scared when tremendous force pushed him into Littlecap’s freshly dug grave.
Sweetie tarried over the grave for a few minutes staring at Liuba’s brother and then turned back to the pasture to graze parched grass and moo drearily.
“Liuba, why do you obey this jerk?” I asked helping Liuba get off the tree.
“I love him”, Liuba answered.
“I say, is it true that you fell off a cherry-tree or were you born with no roof of your mouth and that’s why you can’t talk?”
“I got no roof of my mouth”, Liuba opened her mouth with a smile to show me that.
I gave her my panties.
8
My parents arrived on a Sunday morning and brought me chocolate bars and apricots. Mother pressed my head against her breast and suddenly moved away startled, crying about lice. Just like I had imagined.
“Mum, people are so miserable here, they don’t mind lice. Everyone’s got lice here, even Grandma’s chicken. How could I avoid them?”
In the evening parents were getting ready to leave.
“I’m going with you,” I said.
“Stay another week”, Mother asked. “The cow’s died and Grandma’s grieving so badly. How can you leave her alone like this?”
Grandma was sitting on a bench near the summer kitchen silently staring at Dad's car, the dog in the kennel, her lousy chicken, and the empty barn.
“I can’t stay here any longer!” I nearly burst into tears. “I just can’t! You never know who else is going to die in the next week!”
“Stay”, Mother continued. “There’s plenty of food here; apples and pears. And grapes will be ripe in a couple of days.”
“Yes, sweetheart”, Grandma added. “Stay, I’ve got this and that.”
“Wait for me”, I cried, “I’ll go and pack up my things! It won’t take long! I’m going with you!”
I ran into the house and tucked my shorts and T-shirts, my toothbrush, my books, the old Karpaty cassette player, and something else in a bag.
I heard my parents’ Zaporozhets start off.
“Wait for me!” I rushed to the road headlong only to find a trail of smoke.
“Why did you leave me here!” My tears rolled down on the dirt road like beads of glass.
Suddenly Sweetie the Cow appeared. She leaned down and I jumped on her back.
“Come on, Sweetie! Follow the car!”
Sweetie galloped away like a horse. I bobbed up and down on her back. The wind disheveled my hair and dried my tears. Me on Sweetie was like a louse on a horse.
“Sweetie, I can’t stay here! It’s a graveyard, not people! I can’t help them!”
The little Vassyliovskis ran out of their courtyard dancing around joyously.
“She died!” they yelled. “Grandaunt died!”
“How nice!” I said galloping on.
“I need to refresh myself” Sweetie turned her head to me. “Or I won’t catch up with the car!”
I tore off a piece of my hip and threw it into Sweetie’s mouth.
My parents in the car noticed us. Mother said to Dad.
“Step on gas! They’re catching up!”
“I can’t!” Dad retorted. “The gas tank is leaking!”
“Sweetie! Come on, my darling! We can even outrun them!” I shrieked victoriously. “It feels so good with no panties on, I see it now! Sweetie, come on! We’re overtaking! Let’s get out of here!”
“Oh, Tania”, Sweetie smiled at me archly. “Me and you, we are such loonies indeed! Such loonies!”
© 2009 Translated by Gennady Shpak
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*Orchik is a long shaft used for harnessing a horse in a cart. "To give a cow an orchik" means to hang it on a cow's neck so that the animal would not be able to run.
