There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  The cat meowed and meowed, and the young man, hearing this lone living sound in the entire entryway, where all the knocking and screaming had by now gone silent, decided to fight at least for this one life. He found a metal rod lying in the yard, covered in blood, and with it he broke down the door.

  What did he see there? A familiar black mound in the bathroom, a black mound in the living room, two black mounds behind a door held shut with a chair. That’s where the cat slipped out. It nimbly jumped through a primitive makeshift window in another door, and behind that door the young man heard a human voice. He removed a chair blocking the way and entered a room filled with broken glass, rubbish, excrement, pages torn out of books, strewn bottles, and headless mice. A little girl with a bright-red bald scalp, just like the young man’s, only redder, lay on the bed. She stared at the young man, and the cat sat beside her on her pillow, also staring attentively at him, with big, round eyes.

  A New Soul

  YOU CAN RECOGNIZE THEM, BUT ONLY IF YOU YOURSELF ARE one of them. There are signs, and each sign happens twice. Those who see the signs don’t ever understand what they’re seeing. The heart flutters for a second, that’s all. A tear clouds the eye, but the memory remains out of reach. Twin souls have passed one another in space.

  It’s also called love at first sight (and you may never have that sight again).

  The double sign, the light from the proper direction, a house lit up by it—then the person will recognize the place. But everything that came before, and after, and why this place, and why this light, this house, this wind—the exiled soul won’t ever understand it. The soul will never return to that former time, that other life. It needs to drag along in this current one, unfortunately.

  Because it’s the former life that’s always dearest to us. That’s the life colored by sadness, by love—that’s where we left everything connected to what we call our feelings. Now everything is different; life just carries on, without joy, without tears.

  But this is all a prologue. The fact is a man is rushing home from a business trip. He’s late for his flight, he’s caught a cab, they raced to the airport, but the cab got pulled over, the driver had to pay a fine, that took up precious minutes, and arriving finally at the gate the man finds nothing: the plane is gone.

  He was rushing, this man, because the next morning his son is being drafted into the army—suddenly, without any warning, they’re taking him right out of college. The man learned about it this evening: he’d finally gotten a chance to call home from the post office to say that everything was fine, he was catching a flight in the morning, to which his wife barked back—“It’ll be too late!”—before telling him the news. So off he went—to say good-bye! Their beloved, only child was leaving for two years; their clumsy little boy, unprepared for the difficulties, and cruelties, for the ways of the army—their gentle little boy, loving, domestic, kind. He was always getting beaten up in the yard when he was little; in school there’d also been problems and sadists; now he was at the university, all that was behind them. He’d found friends like himself, well-mannered, thoughtful boys and girls—and suddenly there you go, they’re taking him in the morning.

  This man, the father, was no longer young, and the mother also was no longer very young. They’d met when neither of them was very young, and gave birth, miraculously, to this joy, this angel, whose peers, the parents believed, didn’t appreciate him, as a tribe never appreciates its first prophet.

  The father already had a daughter—his elderly daughter, as he liked to say, which was true, actually. She was the product of an early marriage, and what’s more the girl’s mother was older than the father by eleven years. Their marriage collapsed when he was forty-two and she fifty-three—how do you like that? A desperate age for husband and wife both. And then suddenly the husband met the love of his life. She too was not young, but was full of tenderness, with a cloud of hair around her golden head and blue eyes—she had just joined his firm. Everything was settled for them, and then they gave birth to this miracle, a fragile, golden-haired angel of a son. They lived together for eighteen years and a smidgeon, clinging to each other, living what seemed like an extra, bonus life, but always worrying about their little boy.

  And finally the payment had come due—the tears and threats of the first wife, her curse had come to pass: may everything that you put me through return to you in spades.

  The father has missed the plane. Nor are there any seats on the morning flight.

  He gets a partial refund for his plane ticket and hurls himself into the late bus, which takes him to the train station, where he somehow manages, tearfully, to say something to the conductor, a few simple words about his son, so that she steps aside and allows him on the train—which is already moving—and even, after hearing his few simple words, puts him into her own compartment, which is overheated, and where, on the top bunk, the father lies in torment until the morning. As soon as the train arrives he races to the apartment, but it is already empty: things are scattered on the floor; the phone is off the hook, beeping; his son’s unmade bed gapes like the bed of a condemned man on the day of his execution.

  The father quickly finds his bearings, learns the address of the draft board from a neighbor in the next entryway, where his son’s classmate lives—the boy was in fact his son’s tormentor, but who cares about that now. That boy’s grandmother tells the father where to run; her own family has gone to see off their child after a night of partying.

  The father makes it in time. He sees his son a crowd of pale, hungover, moronic, defeated boys.

  The father takes hold of his son’s sleeve, begins to scream, and wakes up in the United States, in the form of an unhappy immigrant named Grisha, who’s been abandoned by his hardworking wife six months after they arrived in the States. She went to work as a cleaning lady at the mall and then married a professor, an old childhood friend, whom she’d accidentally met there. A happy coincidence! And she cast Grisha away like an old rag.

  At the moment we’re describing, Grisha has just been released from the mental hospital, where, not knowing the language, he’d spent all his time in front of the television, though without participating in the vicious arguments about which channel to put on. He’d landed in the mental ward after his third unsuccessful suicide attempt.

  Somehow or other, one day he began to talk in an impoverished television language with a crazy black man, who was always yelling—nonstop—about how he was going to kill all the white people, that filth, how he’d killed ten of them already and he wanted to kill an eleventh, he was willing to go to the electric chair for it, to become a martyr for his beliefs. He was the first one Grisha understood, and he answered him in his own way, in the voice of a television anchorman. Kill me, said Grisha. Go ahead, pleeze—strangle me, if you’d like, or some other way, I don’t care, said Grisha, utterly surprised by his ability to form English words, and unaware that the soul of that unhappy father was already knocking about inside him and that it knew many things (including five languages). The weeping Grisha was taken to his room and tranquilized.

  The black man, Jim, was stopped short, knocked from his imaginary universe of righteous racial vengeance by this actual white person who was asking for his own death. Jim began wondering whether he could do it—commit this act for, he claimed to himself, the eleventh time, and immediately he went to find out what had happened to this piece of filth, who had turned out in fact to be a dirty Russian, which on the table of ranks in Jim’s head placed him below just about everyone. Jim was, after all, a full-fledged citizen of the United States.

  And he began to defend the rights of this dirty Russian. He taught him to recognize the main enemies of democracy on television—the senators and presidents and newspeople who spread their lies. Jim taught Grisha a great many things, nodding his wise old head and spinning his thin fingers, and Grisha just kept crying.

  He didn’t know he was crying for his wife and son, whom he’d left that day in the Moscow s
treet outside the draft board, weeping on their knees next to his body. He didn’t know that the boy hadn’t been taken into the army after all, that his wife had managed to hide him even while herself wailing terribly. That is to say she wept loudly next to the body of her collapsed husband but in the meantime whispered to the boy, “Hide out at your Aunt Valya’s in the country,” and off he’d gone even before the ambulance arrived.

  Grisha wandered around, weeping, unable to reach himself. He discovered a little hole below his neck, like an extra eye, from which tears poured out. He saw strange dreams—in which a cloudless joy and love surrounded him, sang lullabies to him, calmed him.

  The shots they gave him made him dizzy, high, and caused him to stop crying, but the little eye below his neck kept pouring out tears.

  With time the shock subsided, and Grisha was released while Jim was transferred to another building, where he found himself a protégé in the form of a little black-and-white kitten, from whom he never parted, as it too was a member of an oppressed race—America had no room in its heart for a homeless kitten. But he’d come from somewhere, and Jim had found him, and when visiting Grisha to say good-bye he showed him the little treasure in his hands.

  And Grisha eventually returned to his cave. He rented a basement room from a Russian woman—it had a toilet but no bath.

  Not long after his release from the hospital, Grisha’s landlady had a visitor—her cousin, a sad-looking gray-haired widow with a son back in Moscow. Grisha caught just a glimpse of her while going down to his basement; she was sitting on the porch drinking tea. She was stirring and stirring the tea with a spoon, and a speck of reflected light danced upon her face. Her face was tearful, dead.

  The woman stirred the spoon in her tea listlessly, and the little point of light bouncing off the surface of the tea blinked on her little red nose and in her blue eye. The blue eye especially was lit up in a very poetic way—it flashed like some living precious jewel.

  It was a genuine double recognition: two souls met and didn’t know it.

  Five minutes later, Grisha was up the stairs and sitting across from this old woman, this widow. His landlady, her cousin, had gone off to the college where she taught. This old woman never did get around to drinking any of her tea or lifting her gaze. Grisha fell in love with her with all his broken heart, married her, and came to Moscow to meet her melancholy, pale, blond and curly-haired son.

  When he shook hands with this son, this Alyosha, a tear rolled from the third, unseen eye below Grisha’s neck—a bitter, tiny tear from the dead father. Alyosha avoided the draft in the end: his father had died, as Grisha’s new wife explained it, and so the son became the lone provider for a pensioner (his mother), and by law such a person is exempt from army service. At the draft board that day they kept yelling and insisting that he should start serving now, they’d release him later (they needed to fill a quota, apparently, and without him they’d be one short). So the mother had to run around and gather the necessary papers while Alyosha was hiding—the police would come to the apartment at night looking for him—and meanwhile the funeral had to be arranged! Grisha listened to all these tales and wept every time, no matter how often he heard them.

  But Alyosha never accepted this new father. He was shocked by the speed with which his mother had experienced a change of heart. It seemed like a betrayal—she still wore the same slippers she wore while his father lived, and now she’d flung herself into another marriage. Alyosha refused to go to America with them. But his mother, looking younger than herself by twenty years, blossoming, golden-haired, blue-eyed, in love, flew off with her new husband to the place where her first husband’s soul now lived—and no one ever did explain it to either of them.

  The New Robinson Crusoes

  A Chronicle of the End of the Twentieth Century

  SO MY PARENTS DECIDED THEY WOULD OUTSMART EVERYONE. When it began they piled me and a load of canned food into a truck and took us to the country, the far-off and forgotten country, somewhere beyond the Mur River. We’d bought a cabin there for cheap a few years before, and mostly it just stood there. We’d go at the end of June to pick wild strawberries (for my health), and then once more in August in time for stray apples and plums and black cranberries in the abandoned orchards, and for raspberries and mushrooms in the woods. The cabin was falling apart when we bought it, and we never fixed anything. Then one fine day late in the spring, after the mud had hardened a little, my father arranged things with a man with a truck, and off we went with our groceries, just like the new Robinson Crusoes, with all kinds of yard tools and a rifle and a bloodhound called Red—who could, theoretically, hunt rabbits.

  Now my father began his feverish activity. Over in the garden he plowed the earth—plowing the neighbors’ earth in the process, so that he pulled out our fence posts and planted them in the next yard. We dug up the vegetable patch, planted three sacks of potatoes, groomed the apple trees. My father went into the woods and brought back some turf for the winter. And suddenly too we had a wheelbarrow. In general my father was very active in the storerooms of our neighbors’ boarded-up houses, picking up whatever might come in handy: nails, old boards, shingles, pieces of tin, buckets, benches, door handles, windowpanes, and all sorts of useful old things, like well buckets, yarn spinners, grandfather clocks, and then not-so-useful old things, like old iron teakettles, iron oven parts, stove tops, and so on.

  Three old women were the village’s sole inhabitants: Baba Anisya; Marfutka, who had reverted to semi-savagery; and the red-headed Tanya, the only one with a family: her kids would come around and bring things, and take other things away—which is to say they’d bring canned food from the city, cheese, butter, and cookies, and take away pickled cucumbers, cabbage, potatoes. Tanya had a rich basement pantry and a good, enclosed front yard, and one of her grand-children, a permanently ailing boy named Valera, often stayed with her. His ears were always hurting, or else he was covered with eczema. Tanya herself was a nurse by training, which training she received in a labor camp in Kolyma, where she’d been sent at the age of seventeen for stealing a suckling pig at her collective farm. She was popular, and she kept her stove warm—the shepherdess Vera would come from the next village over and call out (I could hear her in the distance), “Tanya, put the tea on! Tanya, put the tea on!” Baba Anisya, the only human being in the village—Marfutka didn’t count, and Tanya was a criminal—said that Tanya used to be the head of the health clinic here, practically the most important person around. Anisya worked for her for five years, for doing which she lost her pension because it meant she didn’t complete the full twenty-five years at the collective farm, and then five years sweeping up at the clinic don’t count, especially with a boss like Tanya. My mom made a trip once with Anisya to the regional Party headquarters in Priozersk, but the headquarters had been boarded up long ago, everything was boarded up, and my mother walked the twenty-five kilometers home with a frightened Baba Anisya, who immediately began digging in her garden with renewed vigor, and chopping wood, and carrying firewood and twigs into her house—she was fending off a hungry death, which is what she’d face if she did nothing, like Marfutka, who was eighty-five and no longer lit her stove, and even the few potatoes she’d managed to drag into her house had frozen during the winter. They simply lay there in a wet, rotten pile. Marfutka had nibbled out of that pile all winter and now refused to part with these riches, her only ones, when one time my mother sent me over with a shovel to clean them out. Marfutka refused to open the door, looking out through the window that was draped in rags and seeing that I was carrying a garden spade. Either she ate the potatoes raw, despite her lack of teeth, or she made a fire for them when no one was looking—it was impossible to tell. She had no firewood. In the spring Marfutka, wrapped in layers of greasy shawls, rags, and blankets, showed up at Anisya’s warm home and sat there like a mummy, not breathing a word. Anisya didn’t even try to talk to her, and Marfutka just sat there. I looked once at her face, which is to say w
hat was visible of her face under the rags, and saw that it was small and dark, and that her eyes were like wet holes.

  Marfutka survived another winter but no longer went into the yard—she’d decided, apparently, to die of hunger. Anisya said simply that, last year, Marfutka still had some life left in her, but this year she’s done for, her feet don’t look straight ahead but at each other, the wrong way. One day my mother took me along, and we planted half a bucket of potatoes in Marfutka’s yard, but Marfutka just looked at us and worried, it was clear, that we were taking over her plot, though she didn’t have the energy to walk over to us. My mother just went over to her and handed her some potatoes, but Marfutka, thinking her plot was being bought from her for half a bucket of potatoes, grew very frightened, and refused.

  That evening we all went over to Anisya’s for some goat milk. Marfutka was there. Anisya said she’d seen us on Marfutka’s plot. My mother answered that we’d decided to help Baba Marfa. Anisya didn’t like it. Marfutka was going to the next world, she said, she didn’t need help, she’d find her way. It should be added that we were paying Anisya for the milk in canned food and soup packets. This couldn’t go on forever, since the goat made more milk every day, whereas the canned food was dwindling. We needed to establish a more stable equivalent, and so directly after the discussion about Marfutka, my mother said that our canned foods were running out, we didn’t have anything to eat ourselves, so we wouldn’t be buying any more milk that day. Clever Anisya grasped the point at once and answered that she’d bring us a can of milk the next day and we could talk about it—if we still had potatoes, that is. She was angry, apparently, that we were wasting our potatoes on Marfutka instead of paying her. She didn’t know how many potatoes we’d invested in Marfutka’s plot during the hungry spring. Her imagination was working like a little engine. She must have been calculating that Marfutka didn’t have long to go and that she’d gather her harvest in the fall, and was angry in advance that we were the rightful owners of those planted potatoes. Everything becomes complicated when it’s a matter of surviving in times like these, especially for an old, not particularly strong person in the face of a strong young family—my parents were both forty-two then, and I was eighteen.