They told each other what they’d long suspected—that this was the beginning of the end, that Vladimir had decided to get rid of Marilena and take all the money for himself, and that the clinic was a trap.
But their performance was barely over when fat Marilena devoured the dinner that had somehow appeared outside the door.
After her dinner, Marilena felt terribly sleepy and had just enough time to realize she’d been poisoned before she collapsed right where she was, next to the wardrobe.
When the prisoner awoke, she decided to fight for her life and not eat anything—she’d just drink water from the tap. But you know how fat people are—they can’t go an hour without eating something—and sure enough Marilena soon had to eat what was left for her outside the door—a pot of thick meat-and-cabbage soup with the bone still in it.
After eating this she literally crashed onto the bed and lay there unconscious until she was stirred awake by the soft strains of music that announced her evening dances.
Now Maria and Lena danced together with difficulty. It was a slow, clumsy waltz, a farewell waltz, because by now it was clear: someone had decided to poison big Marilena.
For much of the time the sisters talked about their imminent death, prayed and wept without tears, bid farewell to each other, remembered their childhood, their father, who left them so early, and their mother, who died soon after.
And where their parents’ souls had gone, so the sisters were now destined to go.
The next day, big Marilena didn’t even have the strength to get out of bed and drink some water from the tap.
She lay there under her own enormous weight, and talked quietly to herself in her two voices—one of which was whiny and petulant, while the other was soft and kind.
“If you’d agreed to marry that wizard, none of this would have happened to us,” said one voice.
“Right, and now you’d be a teakettle,” said the other.
“No, we’d have convinced him not to do that! And anyway, I’d rather be living as a teakettle than dying like this.”
“Don’t worry,” said the first soft and kind voice, “soon the angels will bring us to Mother and Father.”
“We don’t need anything!” wailed Marilena. “No money, no Vladimir—just let us go live somewhere on the islands of Fuji-Wuji!”
“If only,” Marilena answered herself curtly.
And then a miracle occurred: with a soft rustle one of the walls slid aside, and Marilena felt the night’s dampness against her skin, though she couldn’t believe it.
The room slowly filled with an evening fog and the smell of jasmine and hyacinths.
The head of Marilena’s bed now pushed against a wild rose bush, and its simple pink flowers hung over her pillow.
With great difficulty Marilena picked herself up, crawled into the garden, and collapsed into some stinging weeds, and a whole rain of dew fell upon her.
With her dry tongue, the thirsty Marilena licked the moisture from the grass and from her wet hands. Then she jumped up—the quiet music was already playing—and began to perform some kind of dance among the bushes, either a cricket dance, or a mosquito dance, with hops and jumps.
“Don’t you see?” Maria cried out happily. “We’re in heaven!”
“Oh no, already?” Lena sobbed without tears. “What about my life? Is it over?”
Just then the two ballerinas were grabbed by two sets of strong paws, and as it happens they belonged to people without any wings or white robes—just regular security guards with guns and sweaty shirts.
And the moment Lena squeaked out something like “I don’t think this is heaven,” they grabbed the ballerinas and dragged them along roughly, even though they didn’t resist in the least bit.
The guards apparently dragged their prisoners through the wild rose bushes, because pretty soon their hands and shoulders were scratched and even bleeding, so that by the time the girls were dragged into the porter’s room, they looked like a pair of wild bums.
Right away the guards wrote up a protocol about the violation of a secure zone, and then they began interrogating the sisters as harshly as they could, especially on the subject of whether the prisoners could immediately pay a fine of three million rubles. If so, they’d be released.
“Where would we get that kind of money?” the blonde Maria asked them. “We don’t even know anyone here; we’re just passing through. We’re dancers from the ballet.”
“Are you out of your minds?” the brunette Lena yelled at them. “Just grabbing people for no reason! We’ll file a complaint!”
“All right—if you have no money, you’re going to get a prison sentence of life without parole!” the guard said cruelly. “You don’t maybe have two million? We’re not greedy.”
But here something strange happened. Another guard ran into the room and barked: “Who’s this? This isn’t her! You let her escape! What are you two doing here? Nelly’s yelling like a madwoman! There’s supposed to be one fat one—and you’ve got two ragged clothes hangers! You’ll answer for this yourselves, then. She’s coming now.”
And sure enough, a woman all bundled up in bandages ran into the porter’s room, accompanied by a suite of doctors in their robes. With all her bandages, you could recognize her only by her low, mean voice.
“What’s this? Where is she? What? You want to go to back to prison? Why were you hired, huh? As soon as she escaped from her room, you kill her in self-defense! Who’s this you’re showing me?”
“They were just, just standing right where the wall opens,” the guard defended himself. “These two rag dolls. There was no one else there.”
“What, what—you crook! You dead man! Why, I’ll send you to Fuji-Wuji for this! Did you forget what your sentence was? Vladimir did everything for you! He saved you from death row, and now this? What are you waiting for? Get out there and comb that garden! And put these two in separate rooms and interrogate them. Maybe they know something.”
With that, Nelly and her suite of doctors left the room.
The only one left was the head guard, the one who had asked for the three million.
With a sweet smile he said: “Oh, you’ll tell me everything! I have such methods—such nice methods! Oh, you’ll talk, you’ll confess that you killed the fat girl yourselves and ate her. And raw, at that. There’s no other way. And you’ll be executed! Whereas we’ll be paid three million for our hard work. Marilena was supposed to be killed accidentally, anyway. Do you hear? And anyway that big fatso was all filled up with narcotics. And she was supposed to kill one of us here, by the way. That one, she looked in, she doesn’t know, naturally. Telling everyone what to do. Too bad it didn’t work out. But this is even easier. Oh, I have such terrible methods of torture! You’ll be amazed, I guarantee you. You’d be better off confessing now, so as not to suffer too much before your execution. Because you ate her, didn’t you?”
But here the two hours of dancing apparently came to an end, because Maria began to be drawn inexorably toward Lena, and Lena toward Maria, and the guard found himself in between them.
“Hey!” he yelled. “What are you doing? What’s gotten into you two? I’ll shoot! Stay where you are!”
Maria and Lena were already melding into each other around him.
Here the desperate guard reached behind his belt for a knife and began blindly chopping the air with it.
And right after the first blow, when he divided Maria’s arm from Lena’s arm, the sisters felt that they no longer needed to join together.
The bloodied, scratched-up ballerinas found themselves standing there, just staring at each other. The guard was gone.
“You know what happened?” cried the incredulous Lena. “It’s just as the wizard predicted. Whoever tries to divide us will turn into a little dysentery germ!”
“Eww,” said Maria, “let’s get out of here! We’ve had enough trouble without picking up dysentery.”
Shocked and staring at the floor—where, accord
ing to their calculations, right now a fat, hairy dysentery microbe should have been crawling—the sisters ran out of the room.
Sometimes one evil defeats another, and two minuses make a plus!
No one stopped them.
They ran out into the garden and stumbled around for a long time in the wet bushes until they found a gate and a guard on the lookout.
“Hurry, there’s a fat woman with a knife in there! She threatened to stab us!”
“A fat one?” The guard became excited and hurled himself toward the telephone.
Lena and Maria jumped out the gate. They were free. They ran away from that cursed place as fast as they could, ran and ran, until they reached the train station, familiar from long ago.
Where else is a homeless person to go?
They washed up, first in a puddle behind some bushes (apparently it had rained in the city that night, while they were escaping) and then in the bathroom.
The few scratches on their foreheads and hands were nothing—all sorts of things can happen to wandering poor people.
At the train station, Lena and Maria looked through some newspapers that were lying around and learned that tomorrow would see the long-awaited triumphant return of big Marilena, the star of the circus, who now weighed fifty kilograms instead of one hundred.
Next to this announcement was a photo of the new Marilena (quite obviously the secretary Nelly, but with big teeth and widened eyelids, which made her look a little cross-eyed, like a bulldog—but what can you do) and an ad for a remarkable clinic where in three days a person can get a new body and also adopt a new healthy diet through the use of miraculous herbs.
It also said that Marilena was leaving the circus to pursue a new life, since she can no longer lift heavy things or eat whole lambs, and is no longer in fact the world’s strongest woman nor the champion of the islands of Fuji-Wuji.
But now she’s bought herself a dieting clinic and an institute for herbal remedies and appointed her husband, Vladimir, as director—they’d been married long ago, according to the paper, but kept it secret, because a great artist can’t belong to just one person; she belongs to everyone.
Moreover, the new Marilena has opened a museum of the old, fat Marilena, where the fat strongwoman’s old things will be displayed, including her underwear and photos of her with her husband, Vladimir.
The newspaper also printed photos of the gradual transformation of the old fat Marilena into the new Marilena, although this was obviously a fake and a cheat, as both Maria and Lena well knew. But what can’t you do with photos these days!
Here, too, there was an interview with Vladimir in the family car, a Rolls-Royce, King-Sized (the king size was made special for the old Marilena, but they couldn’t just throw away a perfectly good car, could they?), in front of a new palace and in front of the very clinic the sisters had escaped from that night.
“He set everything up so well,” Maria said.
“It’s good we never told him about the dances!” Lena said. “That’s thanks to you—you were afraid of what he’d do if he found out he had two fiancées.”
They were quiet for a moment, standing in the dark train station.
“So what do we do now?” asked Lena.
“We dance,” said Maria.
“Of course! Remember the old rule? In any predicament, one must dance!”
They assumed the first position and, quietly invoking the magic phrase, “one-two-three, one-two-three-four,” began to perform their steps.
Immediately around them formed a small circle of bums, station workers, and sleepy late-departing passengers with their suitcases and children. Everyone clapped in delight and threw some very small coins to show their appreciation (rich people don’t sit in train stations at night).
The ballerinas gathered the money quickly, knowing that wherever there’s a crowd there will soon be policemen with their nightsticks, and departed from their temporary stage. They bought tickets for the next train and left this terrible town where they’d had so many adventures because of their talent and beauty.
A year later, the LenMary sisters were famous in the next town over for their wonderful dance performances in the most expensive theater, and now they were accompanied everywhere by their own bodyguard, a frail old man in a general’s uniform (generals are more feared, for some reason), and they had a house on the sea and contracts to visit all the countries of the world, including the obscure islands of Fuji-Wuji.
Among their audience, incidentally, you can quite often meet the wizard, who sends them flowers, emerald crowns, and fans made from peacock feathers—he has strange tastes. He’s also afraid of the sisters and their unseen protector, the Fairy Butterbread, since she was able to defeat his own powerful spell.
Now he enjoys loving from afar, in secret and out of harm’s way.
Especially as the unknown and fearsome Butterbread might still punish him for his little tricks of long ago.
Strangely enough, the sisters also often receive love letters from a man named Vladimir.
He writes to say that he’s loved Maria and Lena ever since he first saw them, and he doesn’t even know how to choose one over the other, and so is willing to marry each of them in turn.
In the meantime, he writes, he has found himself in some financial difficulties, having been robbed by his cruel wife Marilena, who somehow put all of their shared property in her own name and then ran off to who knows where. Meanwhile the clinic that he, Vladimir, headed has been infected by dysentery, and the government forced him to burn the whole thing down! So for the time being Vladimir asks for a temporary loan of just thirty million, with a payback period of forty-nine years.
These letters are always accompanied by photos of Vladimir in his swimsuit, in a tuxedo at a fancy ball, in a turtleneck reading a book, and in a leather coat and hat next to the smoking ruins of his clinic, with a rueful smile on his pale face.
The sisters, it’s true, never read these letters. They are read in his free time—and with great interest—by the old general, who then files them into a folder, affixes a number, and places it on a shelf, hoping that someday he will be able to retire and in his retirement write a novel, with photographs, about the surprising power of the love of one young man, V. The Sorrows of Young V., it will be called.
The Old Monk ’s Testament
THERE ONCE LIVED AN OLD MONK WHO CLIMBED UP TO HIS mountain monastery with a small box of donations.
Things were not going well at the monastery, which was far away from all the roads. The monks had to fetch their water from a stream deep in the canyon, and their meals consisted of scraps of bread and dried pancakes, which they collected as donations in the godless villages nearby. The monks gathered wild fruits and nuts in the forest, as well as berries and roots, and they also looked for honey and mushrooms—they ate those, too.
It was useless, in those parts, for the monks to try to keep a vegetable garden: during harvesttime someone would come along at night with a shovel and make off with everything. Those were the ways of the area, unfortunately.
Because of this, the peasants in the nearby towns were extremely unkind to strangers and beggars. They guarded their little plots with rifles in hand, the entire family taking shifts. They buried extra vegetables underground in the basement.
The impoverished monastery, on the other hand, stood unguarded in the forest. It was a popular target for local kids who needed money for vodka. Eventually the monks learned to do with the absolute bare minimum—tin cans for boiling water in, some straw to sleep on, old sacks for blankets. As for the honey and berries, which could after all be stolen, they hid them in the forest, in the hollows of trees, like squirrels.
They used kindling for heat, since even their ax and saw had been stolen from them.
Then again, that was the monks’ vow, wasn’t it—to work only with what God had given them, to work only for Him, and to make do with the same food as rabbits and squirrels.
They ate neither
fish nor fowl, and each day of this existence they blessed.
But they did sometimes need a little bit of money to buy candles, and oil for their homemade tin burners, and to fix the roof, for example, or to help really and truly poor people buy some medicine.
Their icons had all been stolen, so the monks painted the walls of the monastery themselves—in fact they did this so beautifully that people tried to get in and cut these paintings out of the walls. But that didn’t work. You needed real museum training to extract a painting from a wall, and since when did thieves work hard and master a craft?
During winter, the monastery was freezing. There wasn’t enough kindling to heat the space, and the monks refused to break branches off living trees. But cold and hunger are hardly problems for a monk—in fact they’re blessings, and, what’s more, during the winter months the monastery got a break from being robbed. Who’s going to drag himself through the hills and snow to break into a frozen monastery—even though every morning the monks rang, not a bell, because the bell had been stolen and sold for its metal, but an iron crossbeam.
It was an ancient crossbeam—the old bell had hung from it—and the hardworking local thieves, try as they might, weren’t able to bring it down.
The monks rang their crossbeam with a secret metal crowbar they had. It was the only defense they kept on hand to fend off wild animals, say, or to break through the ice for water when their stream froze, or to beat a path through the forest.
And it’s not like the local thieves really cared that much about this piece of secret scrap metal—who’d want to drag it through the forest, for one thing, and for another it wouldn’t fetch more than a few kopeks at the market anyway.
And so every morning the people in the surrounding villages could hear the melancholy sound of the metal crowbar against the old crossbeam. Of course no one was so stupid as to heed the call and come there for prayer.
Who calls a doctor to heal a healthy person? Who fixes what isn’t broken? Why run off to pray to God when everything is fine?
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby Page 14
