The Golden Apple

"The fields are green, the milk is plentiful, and the children are healthy."

— Pravdya, June 1986

They told us to smile. Eyes white. Teeth on show. Beam.

"Ні, ні, люба. Очима. Посміхнися очима. Їм потрібно тебе бачити,"

I am sorry.

“No, no, darling. With your eyes. Smile with your eyes. They need to see you.”

Uchytelka Mariya Yevhenivna patted my ribboned braid flat against my shoulder and told me to stop looking down. “You are the face of our future, Katrusya,” she said. “Stand like a sunflower.”

The heat soaked into my vyshyvanka and sweat clung to my bare skin, unrelenting. But I looked up. Funny that really, when you think about it. A future smile.

Inside the house I remember I could hear my mother coughing again. A stifled kvetching. Not so loud that they could hear it, but I could. My ears had grown accustomed to the rough dry bark followed by the drowning wet splutters. The silence afterwards was the worst. Both wondering if the time had come as we knew it would someday soon. The cough had taken my father weeks before. We both knew what happened next. But we put it out of our heads. What else could we do?

They snapped me holding a basket of apples. Not ours, of course. Ours were bitter this year, puckered and poisoned at the stem, their skin a flailing orange. Coward fruit we called them. I don’t know where these came from. Somewhere the iodine mist hadn’t touched, I suppose. Somewhere far from here. We weren’t supposed to eat them but I couldn’t resist a bite as I smoothed my skirt ready for the next shot. The crunch of green skin cutting into white flesh reminded me of summers past. The yell of children free with the sun. Where were they now? The cries of glee as we jumped in the lake, the sun lapping our skin like water.

“Make it golden,” he said. “We need more gold.”

I think he meant the light. He may have meant the apple.

I was the golden child of the golden era. He might have meant me. Who can say?

But they never paid me for my smile. So, I buried my mother in the Уж, just beyond the Народичі watermill, carrying her there in the cart. She loved that place. The sound of water was a sanctuary, she always said when we would picnic there from time to time.

I didn’t see the pictures. Not until a long time afterwards. It’s odd now looking back at that smiling girl. If I didn’t know myself then, I would mistake myself for happy.

Still, there are small mercies for us all.

Mine came in winter after the summer that never was.

All that death and sadness was cleansed by the snow.

No one asked me to wear the ribbons anymore. The apples turned to mush in the cellar. Uchytelka Mariya Yevhenivna took sick at the signs of first frost. Of course, they told us that it was the bug in her heart. But by then we all knew what things were really called. But is it a lie if you will it to be true?

I was lucky to get the job in the school kitchen. There were fewer children now. Some families had moved west, some had vanished into the river with my mother. There were new rules too. So many rules. We were told not to gather mushrooms from the woods, not to swim in the river, not to dig too deep.

But of course, we did. Old enough to know better. Yet young enough to try. What else could we do? Stop living? We might as well have died with our parents.

The man with the camera returned. Well, not him exactly but close enough. He asked me if it was me in the photograph, the one with the apples. But he already knew the answer. Why else would he be there? So, I said nothing, just handed him his soup. He ate greedily and left the book on the table to be cleared with his empty bowl.

It was a shiny thing, the book. My face beaming out of the cover. My dress was a brighter red than it ever was. The apples, greener. They had blurred the background. Our house, the broken fence, the wall behind where my mother had died looked almost quaint. Cute. Like they do in those tales of fairies and frogs you’re foolish enough to kiss. It was supposed to be about recovery or some such. That’s what the blurb said on the back. Recovery and Resilience. I couldn’t bring myself to read the rest.

I didn’t cry. I couldn’t. You need something still whole left inside you for tears.

But I thought about the river. The sound of it in spring when the waters melted.

The way the current took her without turning to look back.

And I remembered the children who never lived to see the ice tears of the wheat in the winter of 1986.