Babushka

I awoke with a headache that went away slowly. At first, I had no idea where I was — I still don’t, in all fairness — and the pain and unfamiliarity of my surroundings made me panic. The old woman soothed me with wet cloths and kindly muttered foreign words. I started calling her Babushka.

She says she found me outside while foraging some time ago among the ruins of what looked like a parachute and some other equipment, and that I’d been unconscious for almost a week. She was worried that I might not make it. After I regained consciousness, she nursed me back to health with warm soup, an unforgiving liquor that couldn’t be anything but vodka, and several strange poultices that smelled of mud and cabbage. I have a hard time understanding her, although I suspect that I know or used to know her language somewhat. I know nothing of who I am or how I got here, however. She says that my memory ought to come back once I’m healed enough, and I don’t argue.

The apartment is small and modest, but furnished in a homely way, with the defiant pride the less fortunate take in the little they have. I noticed that she rarely uses any electric lighting, mostly relying on candles and the slowly burning embers in her little iron furnace. When I ask about it, she is reluctant to answer, but I’ve disentangled from her mutterings that it is because of the war. I’d suspected this, just as I had suspected that I had somehow been involved in this war, given the condition in which she found me. Indeed, it is rare to see light in any of the windows of the other apartments around, and so far I have not seen a single person outside. Nor have I met anyone, since Babushka absolutely refuses to leave — or let me leave — her apartment. She seems to have a stock of rudimentary provisions in this little flat, but I suspect that by feeding me, she inevitably brought the eventual exhaustion of her supplies closer.

I look out this 7th floor window at the world outside. All is dark and calm, although on occasion giant, vaguely metallic shapes lumber about in the misty darkness of the fields just beyond the edge of visibility. It has been like this ever since I woke up, and so I tell Babushka rather than ask: „The sun never comes up here.“ She seems to have understood my crooked butchering of her language, as she remarks: „No. Not since they did something. Sometimes you can see its black disc in the sky, a faint red glow around it. But that is all. That is all.“ She is strangely melancholic when she says this, and turns away to hum a rueful tune under her breath.

I stand at the window and stare out at the darkness. A kettle of tea is softly boiling next to me, the flames under it casting a tentative glow around the little kitchen. A small black cat sleeps peacefully on a counter. Our supplies are running out. I know that I should leave, that I don’t have anything to do here, but every day I decide against it. I have no other way to repay her kindness. I look into the dark and hear the muffled patter of rain now, and something else, some great rustling and faint, deep thuds. Something moves in the gloom far out. I have no recollection of what’s out there or how I got here, and I’m not sure if I want to remember anymore.