Life Stories

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  Nadezhda Stepanovna obediently counted the change in the wallet, but she could not just take it and leave now, and she stood stupidly in front of this old woman in the men's boots not knowing how to redeem the shameful difference between her attitude toward her loss and the other woman's toward her find. Unable to think of anything better, she suggested, "Why don't I buy some more bird cherries from you."

  "Go. No need," the old woman replied wearily, still trembling from the unbearable burden of responsibility that had rested on her shoulders.

  After that she did let herself be persuaded, and Nadezhda Stepanovna paid for another two glasses' worth, but her sense of guilt would not go away. She watched the little black spheres roll into the paper cone and heard a distant, protracted howl rushing in from the northeast, from the direction of the dam, where a solid shroud drew heaven and earth together and gigantic waves rampaged on the reservoir's vast expanses. He who the old woman with the bird cherries had been talking about probably was in fact on vacation, otherwise it would be hard to explain a storm like this in late September.

  The sky turned black, and they started turning on the lights at the school. The monitors were putting out pots of flowers on the ledges to give them a little rainwater. "I hope their stems don't snap," Nadezhda Stepanovna thought. She took the second cone, and at that instant the skies split open with a crash, the gray shroud that had long clothed the northeast moved in rapidly, and the rain lashed with such force that the drops shattered as they hit the asphalt. There was a thunk and a watery spray spread over the ground. Then the thunk was replaced by a rustle—water falling into water. A river was coursing down the street and the opposite bank was fogged in, her paper cones were soaked through and Nadezhda Stepanovna's fingers had turned purple. She stepped back under the awning of the Soyuzpechat newsstand, and the old woman took cover with her pot under the ledge of the grocery, which was still closed for lunch.

  Water was streaming from the ledge, and an undulating fringe of water was heaving in front of her. She thought she might not live till spring, which meant this storm would be the last of her life, but she had no fear of death. Her soul, weightless from her awareness of a duty fulfilled, longed for the heavens, longed to go where the electrical charges were bursting and glittering. When she died, her daughter would put a copper wire ring on her finger and thread the end of the wire out of her grave to the outside. That was what her neighbor had advised, to make it easier for her soul to quit her body. It would flow up the wire through the ground and go up to heaven. The more honestly you lived, the more electricity there was in your soul, and it was the same everywhere: on the earth, in the earth, and in the sky. So what was she to fear? Death?

  6

  Alevtina Ivanovna had scattered all the sawdust from the bucket, picked up the broom propped by the window, and started to sweep the second floor. In her pocket, two keys kept clinking against each other on the ring—one to the cloakroom and one to the fireproof box on the wall where the red plastic bell button was safely shut up, out of reach of children's fingers. It still wasn't time to press it. Alevtina Ivanovna was calmly sweeping the sawdust, which was darkening up from the dirt it was absorbing. She always did this during the break. Her inner voice still hadn't told her, It's time!

  From the fourth floor, from his laboratory window, Vladimir Lvovich saw Nadezhda Stepanovna returning to the school carrying some kind of paper cone and then heading back across the street. With his mature, married man's natural, nonbinding interest in a mature unmarried woman, he couldn't help but notice the grace with which she balanced on the tottering boards thrown across the ditch dug next to the front steps. From behind, this made a special impression, and Vladimir Lvovich regretted having declined to go with her for the cake. He locked the laboratory, walked past the teacher's lounge, where they had already started drinking tea without cake, and went downstairs to greet Nadezhda Stepanovna on the front steps.

  Outside, the pre-storm wind was gusting, and there was the smell of electricity such as you can never recreate in laboratory conditions. Around the corner from the school, three workers were sharing half a liter out of a single folding cup.

  "What are we celebrating, muzhiks?" Vladimir Lvovich inquired in a false basso.

  "The Day of the Virgin of Paris," was their surly response.

  Vladimir Lvovich thought that they were probably the kind who hung a photograph of Stalin on their truck windshield.

  He moved a little ways away and loitered on the steps for five minutes or so, feeling the heat of his fleeting temptation cool, and then headed for the teacher's lounge to drink tea. En route he stopped in at the bathroom and saw Filimonov sitting on the windowsill.

  "Why are you here? Is your lesson over?" Vladimir Lvovich asked, stepping up to the urinal.

  "I felt sick," Filimonov answered proudly.

  This was the password that opened all doors and ensured sympathy and aid from adults, but Vladimir Lvovich did not treat it with the proper respect. He left in silence, and Filimonov was left alone in the bathroom once again.

  Sitting on the windowsill, he looked at the stormy sky, which lay over the city like a coat. Occasionally, white scissors of lightning skimmed across it, ripping open its lining.

  The window faced the street. Cars stopped at the light with a piercing squeal, jerking their rear ends around. The drivers were watching the road anxiously; they didn't know the rain was about to come down in torrents, increasing their braking distance on the wet asphalt.

  The light turned green, and in the stream of vehicles Filimonov saw an ambulance, and right then, squeezing his left hand into a fist, he made a wish. He knew this trick from Vekshina. Today in the lunchroom she had taught him that if you saw an ambulance on the street you had to make a fist and not let go until three people wearing glasses walked by. Then you had to open your fist quickly, say your wish out loud, and it would come true.

  Filimonov wished the public safety instructor would be struck dead by lightning.

  Almost immediately after that, one bespectacled person walked by the window and a minute later a second—but the third never showed. There were fewer and fewer people out walking. His fingers, balled into a fist, were sweating and had started dripping.

  Suddenly confident steps rang out in the corridor. They approached and stopped by the bathroom door. A second later the door flung open, banging its handle on the wall, but no one came in. Silence ensued, and then a familiar female voice ordered, "All right, come out!"

  It was the head teacher, Kotova, who everyone was afraid of, even Nadezhda Stepanovna. Filimonov hid. Unexpectedly he had only just found a "mint pea" candy in his pocket and eaten it, and Kotova might think he had eaten it on purpose so that he wouldn't smell of tobacco. He took a few swallows of the remains of his saliva, which had dried up out of agitation, and breathed softly, airing out his mouth. He was afraid to come out.

  No one emerged, so Kotova came in herself. She was famous for being the sole woman in the school who could boldly walk into a boy's bathroom full of upperclassmen when there was smoke drifting out. In cases like that, other teachers would call in the gym teacher or the military instructor.

  It was empty in the bathroom now, and if it smelled of smoke, then it was old. Fifth grader Filimonov was standing all alone at the window.

  "Why are you here? Why aren't you in class?" Kotova asked, getting her glasses out of their case to make sure there were no pornographic drawings or graffiti on the walls.

  Filimonov explained the way he was by now used to explaining. He looked at her in hopes she would put on her glasses and become his third.

  "What's that in your hand?" Kotova inquired.

  "Nothing," Filimonov answered with just his lips.

  "That's not true. I see you have something in your fist. Is it a cigarette?"

  "No."

  "What then?"

  "Nothing."

  "Show me," she demanded, and then finally she did what Filimonov had been waiting for he
r to do.

  That moment he quickly opened the fingers of his left hand and whispered his wish. Kotova saw an empty palm but did not hear what he said. Everything was drowned out by a clap of thunder.

  7

  "Anyone who gets behind the wheel drunk in Singapore is arrested and put in jail for fifteen days." Rodygin cited that figure for clarity, though he had no idea what term was stipulated in that article of Singapore's criminal code. Behind the Wheel didn't say. "There wouldn't be anything particularly original about this if it weren't for one piquant detail: those drivers are put in jail with their wives."

  "What about their children?" a transparent little girl at the second desk asked.

  "The children are taken home by their grandmothers and grandfathers," Rodygin found the right thing to say.

  "But what if they're dead?"

  "Then some other relatives have to move home with them temporarily or take the children to their house."

  "What if they don't have anyone?"

  "Then they're put into a children's home for two weeks."

  "And do they make them wear children's home clothes? Or do they let them wear their own?" Vekshina's neighbor asked.

  "They let them wear their own," Rodygin reassured her.

  "It's only here that they give everyone the same haircut," the boy with Jewish ears said sarcastically.

  "Quiet," Rodygin ordered him.

  He looked at Filimonov's empty chair again and continued.

  "When the husband drinks, often the wife is to blame. It's the woman who creates the kind of family atmosphere where a man either takes to drink or doesn't. That means the wife has to answer to society for her husband. That's what they believe in Singapore. But what do you believe?"

  In his talks he always presented the children with problematic situations. He taught by training and trained by teaching, the way the best pedagogues did.

  "Well?" Rodygin asked with an inviting smile. "Are they right to put the wives in jail with their husbands?"

  Buxom Vera said they were, that a husband and wife made a single Satan. The other girls were cautiously silent. One boy objected to Vera, saying that they were wrong in Singapore, but he couldn't explain why he thought so. Another boy came to his rescue and explained that the man wouldn't be as bored in jail with his wife.

  "Aha." Rodygin nodded. "In your opinion a wife's presence eases his punishment, and you want it to be more severe. Is that right?"

  "Yes," the boy agreed, and he added that it's bad being alone in a cell, but together, if you scratch the stone with something sharp, you can play Blockhead or Battleship.

  "Or Tic-Tac-Toe," someone suggested from the last desk.

  The list of entertainments available to prisoners began to get out of hand. Finally Vekshina's neighbor looked at the problem from the other side. She said that for people who loved each other the real punishment should be separation, and the class fell quiet, stunned by the profundity of this thought. The gusts of wind and the mournful ringing of the hollow metal basketball backstops were becoming more and more audible outside.

  In the silence the lop-eared boy raised his hand.

  "What now?" Rodygin asked him in a resigned voice.

  The boy stood up and said that the children hadn't said that in jail the husband and wife could play chess made from bits of bread. Under the tsar, the revolutionaries always played chess like that in prison. He'd read about it in a book, The Rook Is a Springtime Bird.

  "In Singapore they eat rice. Rice!" Vekshina shouted at him.

  "What about breadfruit?" the boy parried.

  "They have rice. Rice, rice, rice!" Vekshina, choking on tears now, said over and over, unable to stop.

  Rodygin lay his hand on her head.

  "What's the matter?"

  Vekshina felt her neck stiffening. His hand felt like an ice cube on her head. That kind of cold could only come from a very big official. Even his chalk-marked trousers couldn't shake his soul-chilling grandeur. This person was perfectly capable of transferring the laws of Turkey and Singapore to their city.

  "Her papa's an alcoholic and he was put in jail," Vekshina's neighbor told him.

  Rodygin realized that in the whole class this one short-cropped little girl with the key around her neck was the only one capable of fully appreciating the monstrous efficacy of the Singapore punishment.

  "Don't cry," he said. "Your papa will go through rehabilitation and he'll get behind the wheel again. And you could help him in that, by the way. Do you know how?"

  Vekshina didn't answer. She was sitting with her face buried on her desk, and her shoulders were shaking from her sobs.

  "Who knows how Vekshina could help her papa be cured of his alcoholism?" Rodygin asked.

  The answer was so obvious that no one said it out loud. A few voices reported at once from several seats.

  "She already is a good student."

  Rodygin was a little embarrassed.

  "That's not all I had in mind. I had in mind that children can affect the family atmosphere, too. Not just wives."

  "But are there countries where they put children in jail with their parents?" Vekshina's neighbor asked.

  "No," Rodygin answered.

  Trying to suppress her sobs, Vekshina hiccuped loudly once, twice, three times. While everyone was listening to her hiccup, the big-eared boy offered to tell them about breadfruit in more detail.

  "You can tell them in geography," Rodygin interrupted him.

  He turned to Vekshina.

  "Stand up now."

  She stood up. An evil little imp was hiding in her throat. When he jerked his foot, an uncontrollable spasm squeezed her throat.

  "Do this," Rodygin said, and he demonstrated.

  He rose up on his toes, stood there a little, balancing his body, and then plopped down on his heels with the full weight of his body. This method, described in a book by the famous aviation designer Mikulin, helped rid the body quickly of harmful dross, the hidden wastes of our vital functions.

  "It will pass quickly." Rodygin gave her a smile of encouragement and repeated the demonstration.

  Vekshina didn't budge, and the same inquisitive boy announced, "I have a question."

  Rodygin looked at him with hatred.

  "Well?"

  "Who lives in Singapore?" the boy asked.

  "Singaporeans."

  "But who are they?"

  "People. Just like you and me."

  What he said in reply had a Jewish categoricalness to it.

  "No, not just like you and me. They're Muslims."

  "What of it?"

  "Muslims have lots of wives. Do they put all of them in jail with their husband, the whole harem? Or do they take turns?"

  "Come see me after the bell and I'll answer your question," Rodygin promised.

  He looked at Vekshina, who was stiff as a statue, and he shrugged.

  "As you like. All the worse for you."

  "I'll bring her some water. May I?" the smallest and most poorly dressed boy spoke up.

  Rodygin nodded, thinking that it was in just such children that the ability to be compassionate was most strongly developed. The boy took his book bag and left. When the door shut behind him Rodygin was informed by someone in back with knowledge of the matter.

  "He's not coming back."

  Vekshina hiccuped again.

  "Sit down," Rodygin told her.

  She sat down, catching her book bag between her knees; it had fallen out of its cubby, and her textbooks and notebooks had scattered over the floor. The little glass slipper from last winter's vacation, which she kept in her bag always as a reminder that happiness was possible, flew off separately.

  Rodygin picked it up and ran his finger thoughtfully over the cut above the heel, made to hold an unfinished cigarette.

  "Why are you carrying this ashtray with you?" he asked.

  "Give it back," Vekshina said, stuffing everything that had fallen out back into her bag.

  The litt
le imp in her throat jerked his foot one last time and jumped through the open pane and into the rain, which lashed at the windows for another five minutes or so, swathing the class in its steady, hypnotic drone.

  "Is this your papa's ashtray?" Rodygin asked.

  "My papa doesn't smoke," Vekshina answered.

  "Don't lie. Someone who drinks, smokes," post-pubescent Vera with the green chin shared her life's experience.

  Rodygin passed through the class holding the slipper on his palm, feeling Vekshina's eyes on him the whole time, even though she not only did not turn her head in his direction but did not even move her pupils. She was watching as if she'd been drawn on a propaganda poster. Rodygin felt like the victim of an optical illusion.

  "I hope," he said, "there aren't any children in your class who already smoke."

  "Filimonov smokes," the cheerful boy squealed as he climbed out from under his desk again.

  "And he drinks," someone added from behind, and he snorted.

  "Give it back, please," Vekshina asked again.

  Rodygin hesitated. Fate had sent him a marvelous graphic aid for a story about the harm of smoking. He didn't want to part with it, but he still didn't know the right way to use it. His thoughts slid along the lines of the idea of the beauty of the slipper, with its feminine curves and sharp predatory nose being the beauty of sin, and you had to know how to tell it from genuine beauty, which makes a person better and doesn't arouse base desires in him. He had even started talking about this, choosing his words with difficulty, but he was interrupted by two well-dressed girls at the same desk.

  "Please, give it back to her! Yes, please!" they whined, looking at Rodygin brazenly and lovingly at each other.

  "Or I won't tell you about anything else!" the well-read boy threatened.

  At that moment Rodygin suddenly realized that he still hadn't talked about the scariest thing, even scarier than smoking and even alcohol. You had to talk about drugs with extreme caution to an audience of children, but he was already off and running. Surprising himself, he plunged right in, asking,

  "Who knows what mulka is?"