Yordan D. Radichkov

A Good Day

For the umpteenth morning Ivan Galyoshin was the first to wake up. He tiptoed to the wooden door of his house where he put on his wellies and walked out closing the door on his family’s wheezing chests and bad cough.  His was a large family of three kids, a wife, a sister-in-law, a mother-in-law, a cousin and his boy, and a cat.

In the street Ivan Galyoshin paused to look in both directions only to discover that today the grey clouds hung menacingly low over the small town in yet another attempt to press the remaining number of people against the earth. The naked trees and the dead leaves fed the feeling of gruesome dark finality which had clawed itself into people’s souls.

Ivan heard a horse neigh and waded through the mud to reach the small stable next to his house. There was his thin scrag of a horse which seemed to have been waiting for him all night long. He went up to him and started stroking his neck affectionately whispering into his ear words of consolation and a busy day’s work. Then he harnessed the horse to an old two-wheeled cart which he generously covered with a spadeful of quicklime.

He held the horse by the reins and led him out into the street. Both of them headed towards neighborhoods studded with houses. What kept Ivan Galyoshin and his family still alive was the secluded and remote pocket of town they lived in. That pocket held death at bay.

While he was walking Ivan Galyoshin was singing a long-forgotten song. The horse listened to the song and probably travelled back to the past when he had listened to people singing the same tune. It told of a sad story which might have taken place in the same neighborhood where Galyoshin and his family lived.

Walking along the street the man and his animal friend were the silent witnesses of the sun’s rays struggling to break through the clouds. It was only the weak light that told the sun had come up. Otherwise, the townscape was gloomy and unwelcoming. To cap it all, the wind rose blowing straight into Ivan’s face as if to force tears out of his eyes.

Tears were no stranger to people’s eyes here: they had been running down their cheeks and into the earth for so long that their salt perhaps drove it barren. People’s tears had long since dried making their eyes sink deep into their sockets.

The first workmen’s houses in the Ish neighborhood hove into view. Walking past the one-floor mud and straw buildings, Ivan studied their doors and a smile flickered across his face. His spirits sank once he saw a bunch of dead yellow leaves left at the door of one of the houses. With a sigh he picked it up and went round the house. There in the backyard he saw a dead body in a small white death bundle. Before Ivan could heave a sigh, he heard a woman sobbing. She tried to stifle her sobs as she was leaning out of the window.  Then she rushed out of the house and fell to her knees.

‘Misha! My only little blue-eyed hard-working Misha! He is gone! He is gone! Why did God take away the only joy of my life? Why did you, Ivan, stop in front of our house?’

This plump woman was standing in front of Ivan asking him questions as if he was the master of townspeople’s destiny. She knew full well that Ivan had arrived to help her family and do what very few people would be willing to do so thank God there was Ivan. The terrible realization hit her that now she was saying her final goodbye to her Misha and would never see him again. She thought of Ivan as the person who purified souls in the mystery of the confession. And what is more, she believed he had the answers to all the questions.

‘Go and take care of the others’, he advised. ‘Go inside, go inside. And don’t look this way. Your Misha is no longer in the death bundle. He went somewhere else. Don’t look at me and don’t look at the cart either. Go and take care of the others’, Ivan helped her in. He kept tiptoeing so that nobody heard he had come to forever take away little blue-eyed Misha’s body. 

The woman turned round and Ivan went and picked up the child’s dead body and gently laid it in the cart.

‘What sins did God punish them for by sending the plague?’ Ivan thought to himself while checking on the other houses. ‘Why did it have to be him checking the neighborhoods for bunches of dead leaves telling him of families who had recently lost a relative, a brother, a husband or a son?’

‘Why did he have to collect the bodies of those poor wretches and drive them to the other side of town on their last journey on this sinful and discontented earth?’

There was nobody to answer his question so Ivan kept studying his reflection in the eye of his horse. He was gaunt and exhausted, wearing patched and tattered clothes. He noticed his eyes were bloodshot through lack of sleep and asked himself if there would ever be an end to the epidemic. Then he continued his silent march round town.

In the Ish neighborhood Ivan stopped at several other houses. It was well after sunrise and the town was waking up and people who had not left the dead leaves bunch at their doors looked at the doors of the bereaved ones. Ivan stopped at one such door and as he did so a large bear-like man lunged forward trying to give him a hit. Ivan stepped aside and the man fell face down and started crying. He let out cry after cry but did not shed a single tear. His wife passed away yesterday evening and he kept drinking all night long.

Everybody would take off their hat when they saw Ivan Galyoshin. Ivan carried his hat in one hand and held the reins with the other. He would look down whenever he met people’s blank stare.

With the dead bodies of several poor workmen Ivan continued on his way to the Servet neighborhood. Its houses were bigger, and its people were richer, but the dead leaves bunches he found at some of the doors were exactly the same as in the Ish neighborhood.

He found one such bunch of leaves at the door of the tallest house in the neighborhood. A few dozen people had gathered in front, all of them neat and carefully dressed. One figure stood out among them – that of an old white-moustached man in a smart suit.

With quick short steps Ivan came up to them only to see that they had gathered round a table with a body laid on it. Over it was the whitest cover in town.

‘Ivan, can you give us some more time to say goodbye to her?’ the man turned to Ivan and he stepped back and stood next to his horse. The people were still standing there; the look of emptiness on their faces spoke volumes about the burden of helplessness that weighed them down for they knew there was nothing they could do.  They continued to stand motionless and Ivan stepped ahead to shake them out of their mindless stupor. No for the first time, he had had to handle the crippling numbness of the loss of a loved one.

‘Ivan, this is our Lyuba! She was the loveliest creature on earth! The finest and the best of us all! You can’t just chuck her in your cart. You can’t lay her next to those people from the Ish neighborhood! I’ll carry her to the end of town if I have to!’ the man spoke in a voice that was not his own for he was beyond himself with inconsolable helplessness.

‘Look, here is little Misha! Lyuba will be fine next to him. Anna Evdokieva is also here - she was the model housewife of the Ish neighborhood. They are, all of them, decent people. Alyosha, there isn’t a single sinner among them – take it from me!’

‘Did you say not a single one?’ asked Alyosha Ferosiev, the mayor of this godforsaken town, with childish naivety.

“That’s right, Alyosha. All of them are pure souls – the purest of the pure ones. Your Lyuba will walk into the light with them. Just ask your family to get into the house. They should not be here.’

‘She will find the light, right? She will find it and lead the others into it for our Lyubichka always took care of other people. She always gave a helping hand to the weak. You remember what she was like, Ivan, do you?’

Ivan Galyoshin remained next to Lyuba Ferosieva’s dead body, while the others got into the house. Then he carefully lifted it up and laid it next to the poor wretches in his little cart.

He continued his journey to the end of the town where he would commit their bodies to heaven and earth. It had been a fine day. Few people had succumbed to the plague this evening and Ivan cherished the hope that tomorrow there would be none, not a single plague victim. He would just walk around town with his horse, and then he would go back to his family to let them know that he had seen the last of the plague.