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

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  But his daughter now came over and began looking at the sandwich with a strange expression on her face. The father tried to hide the little bag in his pocket and press his hands over it, so his daughter couldn’t take it.

  She stood next to him, with her head down, and reached out her hand: “Give me the sandwich, Papa. I’m really hungry.”

  “You can’t eat this filth.”

  “Give it to me,” she said ponderously.

  She was reaching her hand toward his pocket—her arm was amazingly long all of a sudden—and the father understood that if his daughter ate this sandwich, she would die.

  Turning away, he took out the sandwich and quickly ate the raw heart himself. Immediately his mouth filled with blood. He ate the black bread with the blood.

  “And now I will die,” he thought. “I’m glad at least that I will go first.”

  “Can you hear me? Open your eyes!” someone said.

  The father opened his eyes with difficulty and saw, as through a fog, the doctor’s blurry face.

  “I can hear you,” he said.

  “What’s your blood type?”

  “The same as my daughter’s.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  They carted him away, tied off his left arm, and stuck a needle in it.

  “How is she?” asked the father.

  “In what sense?” said the doctor, concentrating on his work.

  “Is she alive?”

  “What d’you think?” the doctor grumbled.

  “She’s alive?”

  “Lie down, lie down,” the wonderful doctor insisted.

  The father lay there—nearby he could hear someone’s heavy breathing—and began to cry.

  Then they were working on him, and he was carted off again, and again he was surrounded by green trees, but this time he was woken by a noise: his daughter, on the cot next to him, was breathing in a terribly screechy way, as if she couldn’t get enough air. Her father watched her. Her face was white, her mouth open. A tube carried blood from his arm to hers. He felt relieved, and tried to hurry the flow of blood—he wanted all of it to pour into his child. He wanted to die so that she could live.

  Once again he found himself inside the apartment in the enormous gray house. His daughter wasn’t there. Quietly he went to look for her, and searched in all the corners of the dazzling apartment with its many windows, but he could find no living being. He sat on the sofa, then lay down on it. He felt quietly content, as if his daughter were already off living somewhere on her own, in comfort and joy, and he could afford to take a break. He began (in his dream) to fall asleep, and here his daughter suddenly appeared. She stepped like a whirlwind into the room, and soon turned into a spinning column, a tornado, howling, shaking everything around her, and then sunk her nails into the bend in his right arm, under the skin. He felt a sharp pain, yelled out in terror, and opened his eyes. The doctor had just given him a shot to his right arm.

  His girl lay next to him, breathing heavily, but no longer making that awful screeching noise. The father raised himself up on an elbow, saw that his left arm was already free of the tourniquet, and bandaged, and turned to the doctor.

  “Doctor, I need to make a phone call.”

  “What phone call?” the doctor answered. “It’s too early for phone calls. You stay still, or else I’m going to start losing you, too . . .”

  But before leaving he gave the father his cell phone, and the father called home. No one answered. His wife and mother-in-law must have woken up early and gone to the morgue and now must be running around, confused, not knowing where their daughter’s body had gone.

  The girl was already better, though she had not yet regained consciousness. The father tried to stay near her in intensive care, pretending that he was himself dying. The night doctor had left already, and the poor father had no money anymore, but they gave him a cardiogram and kept him in intensive care—apparently the night doctor had managed to speak with someone. Either that or there really was something wrong with his heart.

  The father considered what to do. He couldn’t go downstairs. They wouldn’t let him call. Everyone was a stranger, and they were all busy. He thought about what his two women must be going through now, his “girls,” as he called them— his wife and mother-in-law. His heart was in great pain. They had put him on a drip, just like his daughter.

  He fell asleep, and when he awoke, his daughter was no longer there.

  “Nurse, where is the girl who was here before?” he said.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I’m her father, that’s what. Where is she?”

  “They took her into the operating room. Don’t worry, and don’t get up. You can’t yet.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Dear nurse, please call the doctor!”

  “They’re all busy.”

  An old man was moaning nearby. Next door a resident was putting an old lady through some procedures, all the while addressing her loudly and jocularly, like a village idiot: “Well, grandma, how about some soup?” Pause. “What kind of soup do we like?”

  “Mm,” the old woman groaned in a nonhuman, metallic voice.

  “How about some mushroom soup?” Pause. “With some mushrooms, eh? Have you tried the mushroom soup?”

  Suddenly the old woman answered in her deep metallic bass: “Mushrooms—with macaroni.”

  “There you go!” the resident cried out.

  The father lay there, thinking they were operating on his daughter. Somewhere his wife was waiting, half-mad with grief, his mother-in-law next to her, fretting . . . A young doctor checked in on him, gave him another shot, and he fell asleep again.

  In the evening he got up and, barefoot, just as he was, in his hospital gown, walked out. He reached the stairs unnoticed and began descending the cold stone steps. He went down to the basement hallway and followed the arrows to the morgue. Here some person in a white robe called out to him:

  “What are you doing here, patient?”

  “I’m from the morgue,” replied the father. “I got lost.”

  “What do you mean, from the morgue?”

  “I left, but my documents are still there. I want to go back, but I can’t find it.”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re saying,” said the white robe, taking him by the arm and escorting him down the corridor. And then finally he asked: “You what? You got up?”

  “I came to life, and there was no one around, so I started walking, and then I decided I should come back, so they could note that I was leaving.”

  “Wonderful!” said his escort.

  They reached the morgue, but there they were greeted by the curses of the morgue attendant on duty. The father heard him out and said: “My daughter is here, too. She was supposed to come here after her operation.” He told the man his name.

  “I tell you she’s not here, she’s not here! They’re all driving me crazy! They were looking for her this morning! She’s not here! They’re driving everyone nuts! And this one’s a mental patient! Did you run off from a nuthouse, eh? Where’d he come from?”

  “He was wandering around the hallway,” the white robe answered.

  “We should call the guard in,” said the attendant and started cursing again.

  “Let me call home,” said the father. “I just remembered—I was in intensive care on the third floor. My memory is all confused; I came here after the explosion on Tverskaya.”

  Here the white robes went quiet. The explosion on the bus on Tverskaya had happened the day before. They took him, shivering and barefoot, to a desk with a telephone.

  His wife picked up and immediately burst into tears.

  “You! You! Where have you been! They took her body, we don’t know where! And you’re running around! There’s no money in the house! We don’t even have enough for a taxi! Did you take all the money?”

  “I was—I w
as unconscious. I ended up in the hospital, in intensive care.”

  “Which one, where?”

  “The same one where she was.”

  “Where is she? Where?” His wife howled.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m all undressed—bring me my things. I’m standing here in the morgue, I’m barefoot. Which hospital is this?” he asked the white robe.

  “How’d you end up there? I don’t understand,” his wife said, still weeping.

  He handed the phone to the white robe, who calmly spoke the address into it, as if nothing at all strange was happening, and then hung up.

  The morgue attendant brought him a robe and some old, ragged slippers—he took pity finally on this rare living person to enter his department—and directed him to the guard post at the hospital entrance.

  His wife and mother-in-law arrived there with identically puffed-up, aged faces. They dressed the father, put shoes on him, hugged him, and finally heard him out, crying happily, and then all together they sat in the waiting room, because they were told that the girl had made it through her operation and was recovering, and that her condition was no longer critical.

  Two weeks later she was up again walking. The father walked with her through the hospital corridors, repeating the whole time that she’d been alive after the explosion, she was just in shock, just in shock. No one noticed, but he knew right away.

  He kept quiet about the raw human heart he’d had to eat. It was in a dream, though, that it happened, and dreams don’t count.

  The Shadow Life

  SHE’S A TALL, GROWN-UP, MARRIED WOMAN NOW, BUT SHE was once an orphan living with her grandmother, who had taken her in when the girl’s mother disappeared. That happens sometimes—a person will just disappear. Her father had disappeared earlier, when the girl was just five. She hadn’t been allowed to go to the funeral, and so she thought he’d simply vanished, and worried very much that the same would happen to her mother. The girl clung to her mother whenever she tried to go out at night, though she never cried—her mother didn’t spoil her. She was a quiet, well-behaved girl, and she remained that way until one day her mother really did vanish, just as the girl had feared, and, only nine years old, the girl spent the night alone, using her mother’s bathrobe for a blanket. In the morning she washed up and went to school just as she was, in the same dress as the day before. The neighbors noticed something wrong on the third day, when the girl stopped going to school. Strange sounds came from her apartment, like someone laughing, and no cooking smells came from the kitchen, and no one—not the girl, not the girl’s mom—came in or out. One of the neighbors got the girl—her name was Zhenya—to admit that she hadn’t eaten in two days and that her mother was gone. The neighbors sprang into action, composed a telegraph to the girl’s grandmother, and so in the middle of winter the grandmother came to their little town on the River Oka and took her granddaughter away to the quiet seaside town where she lived.

  The road was familiar—Zhenya had come to visit her grandmother during all her school vacations—but there was no vacation now. They couldn’t find out anything about her mother—not a single trace. The girl’s grandmother told her that her mother had always fought for truth, had never stolen, even while everyone around her was stealing. She worked in a kindergarten, and the grandmother thought she’d gone to Moscow to seek justice—she had just been fired from her job—and had probably been locked up in a mental hospital. That happened sometimes, according to the grandmother.

  Zhenya grew up a quiet and good-looking girl, and even began attending a teachers’ college in a nearby town. She studied hard and was known and liked throughout her dorm for the fact that whenever she received a package from her grandmother, with vegetables, bacon, and dried fruits, she’d put it out on the table and share it with everyone. Afterward they’d go hungry again, but all together. Zhenya had never been spoiled by her mother and grandmother, and so she didn’t complain about life in the dorm.

  She soon found a boyfriend, a construction worker—a foreman, even—named Sasha who would take her on the train out to the countryside during the spring and read her his homemade poems—though unfortunately, as it turned out, he was married.

  The wife learned about Zhenya and sought her out in the dorm, took her outside, and told her that she was married to Sasha, and that they had two children, though at the moment they lived apart because Sasha had a sexually transmitted disease and was being treated for it. The wife was being treated for it too, though where Sasha had picked up this disease was the question, said the wife, and then looked at Zhenya with hatred. They were sitting in the little park outside Zhenya’s dorm. “As for you,” the wife concluded, “you should be shot like a sick dog, the way you’re spreading that disease.”

  The penniless student had no one to ask for advice. She was afraid to go to the university clinic (everyone would find out!), but, luckily, while wandering around the market one day she saw a sign for VENEREAL DISEASE TREATMENT. An old woman doctor met her inside, but Zhenya had no money, and without money the old doctor wouldn’t even hear her out. So Zhenya removed her earrings, the only possession she still had from her mother. The doctor took the earrings, examined Zhenya, and announced that they’d have to run some tests. The tests came back negative. Zhenya had managed to avoid being infected; either that or Sasha’s wife had been lying. But Sasha no longer came by, and Zhenya began to see that things weren’t so simple among people, that there existed a whole other secret, stubbornly flourishing animal side of life, where revolting, horrible things collected, and maybe her mother had been killed, thought the now grown-up (eighteen-year-old) Zhenya: after all, her mother had been young still and might have fallen into that shadow life, from which so many people never return.

  Also that summer, back home, something bad happened to Zhenya. The week before, two bodies had been found at the town dump. They were women, and they had been slashed and mutilated, their arms twisted behind them like dried rags, their heads cut off. The town was abuzz, though the women must have been tourists, since none of the locals was missing.

  One night—not too late—Zhenya was walking home from a friend’s house when, not far from home, she was suddenly grabbed from both sides. Her attackers were three teenagers, around sixteen or seventeen, and dark-skinned—that is, migrants from the South. Zhenya didn’t know them, and they didn’t know Zhenya; they’d have grown up while she was away at school. They gagged her and led her away, twisting her arms behind her back, as if they had done it before, and Zhenya hobbled along bent over, and was pushed and shoved, a knife pricking her back. They addressed each other in their tongue; Zhenya understood some of it—though they called themselves Greeks in the town, they were not Greeks. Zhenya could tell they were arguing about who should go first, since one of them supposedly had a bad disease. They yelled in the darkness of the night, arguing (partly in Russian), dragging Zhenya with them, when suddenly everything became bright. It was as if someone had turned on a projector. The three man-boys stopped, momentarily letting go of Zhenya, and, seeing a construction site lit up before her, and an old man and a woman standing there among the broken rocks, she rushed toward them as fast as she could, taking the rag out of her mouth and yelling, “Kill me! Kill me!” She stopped beside the old man, reaching out her swollen arms to him and begging: “Kill me! Just don’t let them have me!”

  The three boys started arguing indignantly that she was a whore, that she owed them, they’d paid! They yelled this in Russian.

  The old man dismissed them with a single wave of his hand, saying, in their language, “Leave.” And the three turned around like soldiers and disappeared back into the night, having received an order in their own tongue.

  The old man told Zhenya that he would walk her home. The woman stayed at the construction site; she held her head down, and Zhenya caught only a brief glimpse of her but was struck by her resemblance to her mother. Zhenya was afraid to leave, but the old man started off, and she had to follow.
The old man brought her to a strange house. Zhenya couldn’t see anything in the dark, and entering a room that looked like a cupboard, she heard the old man lock the door behind her and walk away. Zhenya sat down on the floor, felt with her hands for the rough, uneven wall, then leaned against it and fell asleep.

  In the morning she awoke outside. She was sitting with her back against the rough trunk of a poplar tree in the middle of an overgrown empty lot. Zhenya began to run, not knowing in which direction, until finally she found the road back to town and her grandmother’s and went to sleep in a little shack outside the house. It was early morning when she finally got home. She told her grandmother that she’d slept over at a friend’s house since she was afraid to walk at night. Zhenya also said that she wanted to return to school right away.

  Her grandmother probably understood everything—Zhenya’s arms were badly swollen and covered with bruises, her face was puffy, and the corner of her mouth was torn.

  The grandmother said she hadn’t slept all night and had instead gone through the chest with all their old things and found her daughter’s earrings and an icon. She wanted to give them to Zhenya.

  Zhenya put on her mother’s earrings, which were exactly the same as the ones she’d recently used for payment, gathered her few things, including the icon, and set off for the train station. She decided to go by the construction site on the way, so as to see the old man and the woman who looked like her mother. But there was nothing there: no construction site, no empty lot. It was a sunny day, and all around were houses and gardens.

  Walking alongside her, her grandmother kept silent about the fact that they weren’t heading toward the train station at all but rather in the opposite direction, toward the dump on the edge of town. Suddenly Zhenya said that she thought her mother’s grave might be nearby, and that they should look for it under a poplar log in an empty lot. The grandmother objected that her daughter had disappeared in an entirely different town, but Zhenya didn’t hear her. She simply kept looking for the log, and at the first one she found she sat down on the ground and burst into tears.