There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  • • •

  He wouldn’t touch me. I didn’t know anything then.

  • • •

  (Bastard! Bastard!)

  • • •

  I was relieved. I was so exhausted with the baby, my back hurt, I was bleeding for two months. There was no one to ask—among my girlfriends I was the first to give birth. I thought it was normal.

  • • •

  (You should have asked your mother. I would have told you that the bastard was terrified of another pregnancy.)

  • • •

  He slept next to me, ate, drank tea (burped, peed, picked his nose), shaved (his favorite occupation), read, wrote his term papers, slept some more, snoring gently, while I adored him and was ready to kiss his feet. What did I know? What?

  • • •

  (Take pity on the poor darling!)

  • • •

  I knew only that one time, on the farm, when he proposed to go for a walk after dinner. It was white nights, the sun never set, we walked and talked, and ended up in the hayloft. Why did he choose me? That day we worked on the same row of potatoes; suddenly my Lenka yelled out, Careful! I turned around and saw right behind me a huge dog with something ugly and enormous pointing at me.

  • • •

  (That’s what you get for sending your daughters to a farm!)

  • • •

  I leaped aside, and Shura shooed it away with a shovel. What are you doing tonight? he asked. “Don’t know.” In the evening we climbed up to the hayloft. He pulled me up. Then he hugged me. We sat like that for a while, like idiots. I kept telling him to stop, that I didn’t want that. Then we heard a noise, and he lowered my head and covered me with his body like a child. I felt so warm next to him. It was as if we’d found each other after a long separation. This is love, I kept thinking. We no longer cared who was making that noise (mice, it turned out). He whispered that it hurt only the first time, that I needed to be strong, and he kept pushing into the bloody mess, the straw underneath me all wet—he must have tried every trick he’d heard about in college. I was squeaking like a rubber toy, but was thinking only of him, afraid he’d get tired and leave. I loved him like my son.

  • • •

  (If only!)

  • • •

  Later he said there was nothing more beautiful than a woman. And I couldn’t stop stroking him, he had become part of me; this time we didn’t hurry, he wanted to reach the end. I knew I was leading him in the right direction, and finally he reached his destination, and I stopped squeaking—that’s it. . . .

  • • •

  (That’s it, indeed. Children, children. . . .)

  • • •

  Pleasure, that’s what it’s like. Please, don’t ever read this. He twitched and trembled, moaned, then pressed himself to me and whispered, “I love you.”

  • • •

  (Love? Love?)

  • • •

  Later, at first light, he nodded off, and I pulled myself up and shuffled to the pond to rinse my bloody camisole. Then Shura walked over, too, naked and bloody. We washed each other off and for a long time bathed in the warm brown water. And that’s how our best student, Veronica, found us—she was always the first to come to the pond to brush her teeth. She saw my bloodied cami, looked at us with crazy eyes, and ran. Shura dove from shock. I hurried to wash my clothes; Shura pulled his on and left. It was that moment that scared him for life. That’s it. He never touched me again.

  • • •

  (And out of this filth and blood came innocent Tima, who is gorgeous like a Greek god, despite what they say—that beautiful children come out of only loving unions. No, I want her children to read this—but later, when they grow up. Let them know what I was and what she was! I’ll put it back on the wardrobe; she’ll find it eventually. Never have I let a man hurt me. And what do we read here? She calls this suffering? This nonsense? I’ll allow myself a digression. From this, from what my poor daughter describes here, moans and pain and blood, comes to life a little cell, and this cell is each of us. Oh, great mother nature! Why do you have to trick us? Why do you need all this mucus, stench, violence, our sleepless nights and exhausting work? Presumably to make things right, but nothing ever turns out right.)

  • • •

  I was standing in the shower, weeping, in the apartment of our deputy director, a serious man in glasses. Suddenly he climbed into the tub; I barely had time to toss my wet panties over the shower curtain. He looked at me in silence, panting heavily, while I was weeping, pleading that he must go, that he’ll be late. I could no longer imagine myself without him and just wanted this moment to last forever. . . .

  • • •

  (Mamma mia. What is this, could somebody please tell me? Next to her I’m a little lamb. And this is her second man. Men must sense her willingness to flop on her back as soon as they so much as glance at her.)

  • • •

  He dressed me and dried my hair. I started crying again, almost delirious, like years ago, when Papa was leaving us for good and I hugged his knees and Mom was pulling me away, telling him to get lost, telling me to have some pride before this scum.

  • • •

  (Her own father she compares to this . . . this father of her bastard!)

  • • •

  He flew around the apartment, picking up every crumb, every little hair, all while telling me to write to his PO box. Then he changed the sheets and rolled around on the clean ones, to give the impression of deep, solitary sleep. He packed the used, stained sheets and gave them to me. “Here, have them washed,” he said. “And then?” He paused. “As the situation dictates,” he pronounced finally.

  • • •

  (Why not just let her keep the damn sheets? So this is what she washed, boiled, and ironed! And then—get this!—she actually returned them. And she was right: such men can’t bear the smallest expense.)

  • • •

  When we were ready to leave, he glanced with longing at his marital bed, then at me, and it was clear that all he wanted was an excuse to undress me again. But then he simply pulled down my tights. After that he told me to walk up one flight and only then to call the elevator. When I walked outside he was already gone. Only on the subway did I remember that I’d left my wet panties on the shower curtain!

  • • •

  (Probably knew what she was doing, ha-ha. The wife comes back, hop, a homecoming gift drops on her head—to slap her dear hubby with! And him—he had to use her again, already dressed, since she was there for the taking, gratis. Where’s your pride, Alena? Why don’t you say no?)

  • • •

  Imagining his wife with my wet panties, I felt my hair stand on end. It’s nighttime, and I’m choking with shame. How I betrayed him! I’ll never forget how he looked at me in the cafeteria, how he pressed down on my foot and then put his hand on my knee, but I pushed it off. How he and his buddy walked me to the door and suddenly he said he needed to discuss a few things with me and then scribbled a time and the address. I went there the same night. How happy I felt! On my way there I felt so happy! And what a sad, shameful ending!

  • • •

  But that wasn’t the ending; it was the beginning. The ending came later. Soon after the described events, Tima and I lost sight of our young mother, who was taking final exams, finishing her internship under this same deputy director at the research institute, where she was also defending her thesis, ostensibly, but really spending all her time with this much older man. When she finally came home she announced she wanted to talk.

  “Good. Me too.”

  “I’m getting married.”

  “How so? Is he a polygamist? One can’t be married to everyone at once.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “What don’t I understand? Has he divorced his
wife?”

  “That’s not the point, Mama!”

  “It’s not? So do you intend to be the mistress of a married man?”

  “We are going to have a baby. He’s renting an apartment for us.”

  “Who’s us? What about him? Where’s he going to live?”

  “I can’t bring him here, can I? And I’m not taking you with me,” she said with familiar hatred. “Tima, yes, but not you!”

  She didn’t take me, but she took Tima’s child support. Not right away—later, when it became clear that her so-called husband wasn’t going to spend a dime on her. Such men’s love is always platonic, immaterial. They always need their money for themselves. They’ll starve to save a penny! They are always saving for some major purchase—computer, video camera, car—and they love to get married for free, flattering themselves that their sperm represents some kind of investment. So this is whom we were feeding. My poor deceived daughter, where are you?

  • • •

  The time is night. The little one’s asleep. I continue to defend the gates against Alena’s occasional onslaughts. Last New Year—I’ll never forget—she showed up with a present for Tima: the ugliest blue plastic monster on the planet. But Tima covered it with kisses, played with it all night, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his mother had shamelessly taken two boxes of Christmas ornaments, leaving us with only three. No one had invited us over; we stayed home as always. In the evening we went to the Christmas tree vendor to collect branches off the floor for a bouquet, which we decorated with handmade garlands. Luckily my daughter had missed the box with the Christmas lights and Tima’s favorite ornament: a little glass house with a glittering roof and two windows. I turned on the lights, the glass house sparkled, and Tima and I, plus the blue monster, walked a slow circle dance around our bouquet as I wiped away tears.

  We exchanged presents. Tima had wrapped a drawing in an old newspaper, and I had made a rag doll for his puppet theater, his fourth. These dolls are very difficult to make. I always have trouble with faces, especially noses, and in the end just paint a comma. But I can’t always be knitting, gluing, and drawing something for him. He wants to make things himself, he tries, but he’s too clumsy and impatient; after a few minutes everything is a tangled mess. But I’m busy! I need to work! In response his mouth twitches nervously.

  I tried to give Andrey a present, too—a pamphlet on decorum with underlined passages. He rejected it rudely and demanded his usual price. And again he threatened to jump. He made this threat not to me but to his wife—she must have insulted him again. He has jumped before, without a warning, from their second-floor window—heavily intoxicated, it turned out. He broke both legs and damaged—permanently, it appears—a nerve in his heel. The pain is unbearable, his wife tells me, although on the surface there is nothing, not even a scratch. He is incapable of any work that requires standing, which rules out pretty much everything except night watchman. It was five years ago that it happened. A tragedy.

  I’m afraid of both of them, husband and wife. On the phone she tells me everything’s fine—last night Andrey ripped a sleeve off her robe again. She’s a nurse—hard, hard work, but she gives Andrey shots for his heel, and massages. And he’s still so young! They both are—Alena and Andrey. On her last visit I told Alena, You’ve got to take care of yourself! Look what you’ve turned into! She looked away, slowly welling up with tears and hatred, then got up without a word and rolled out the heavy carriage with her new fat bastard. Dragged it down four floors—absence of elevator is our curse.

  This jealousy toward Andrey—she had it as a child, but later it passed. As teenagers they grew closer and talked in the kitchen late at night. How much I wanted to be a part of their youth, their dialogue, but the kitchen door was closed to me, as were their hearts. When Andrey went to prison, she sent him letters; I’ll talk about them later. Yes, she did write for a while, until she brought home that bum of hers, Shura of the Southern Provinces, who ate every scrap of food, completely oblivious. Every morning for thirty minutes he massaged himself with an electric razor—his idea of meditation. Tima screaming in a wet diaper; Alena trying to use the toilet; Andrey, fresh from prison, barred from both bathroom and toilet, boiling in the kitchen, where he slept. He jumped a year later, but that was at his wife’s, not our overcrowded home.

  The day he got out, I waited at the gate—wrong gate. He walked out still in his garb; I had his clothes with me. I ran home, and there he was, dressed in all gray, the prison cap in front of him on the table. Spring, warm weather, streets full of people—everyone must have stared. Pale and thin, chapped mouth—gorgeous beyond words. I knelt before him, unlaced his shoes. And who is this? he asked quietly. I wouldn’t have come if I’d known, he said, after I told him just what I thought of his brother-in-law and what it had cost me to marry him to Alena. At that moment Provinces scrambled past the kitchen and into the bathroom like a frightened bunny and began banging on the rusted latch, trying to lock it.

  • • •

  Tima was born in June. Sixteen days later Andrey came home. Oh, what a mess it was. I’d just managed to marry Alena and Provinces, barely, with the help of their classmates who worked with them at the farm. In the end, college authorities threatened him with expulsion and immediate draft if he refused to marry. Such were the sad facts. But finally he arrived. He flopped at our kitchen table without even a glance in my direction. Alena was there, eight months pregnant, with greasy hair and bags under her eyes. “Alena,” I said, “what’s the matter? Haven’t you been pregnant before? Go wash your hair! I didn’t look like a scarecrow when I carried you!” (It’s true: I’d never let myself go like that—clean hair always and a fresh complexion whenever possible.) “Honey,” she informed him, “remember: Mommy’s nuts.” Her intended drooped a little and took cover in our only bedroom, where he proceeded to polish off all the food in the house—Alena didn’t get a crumb. “The kid sure has a healthy appetite. Eat mine, then,” I told her quietly. She glared at me, tears welling, and sobbed that she hated me, hated, hated!

  “Why, what did I say? Provinces came to the capital undernourished, I understand, but you are carrying a little one. He must pay his way—or is he planning to live off me? I’m a poet; I don’t make much, as you know.”

  “A goddamn graphomaniac is what you are.”

  I didn’t know then—how could I?—that she was carrying him, my Tima, Timothy, named after someone in Provinces’ family. I’d wait on her hand and foot, if she’d let me, but the thought of Andrey was tearing me to pieces, and I simply couldn’t provide for them all: her and her baby, plus that husband of hers, that coward who married her only to avoid the draft and expulsion. (He feared army rape, but think of what my poor son must have gone through in jail! Who’s going to pay for his suffering?)

  So they got married. I set out a spread in the bedroom: salad, pasta, and a pie with dried fruit. Their two witnesses were present—not the ones from the potato field; our husband had turned these down. Next morning my dear daughter was in the kitchen bright and early, scrambling our last three eggs for her beloved, standing over him with a napkin like a footman. I told her later, “Look, waitress, I had three eggs for the two of us, for pancakes. Now there’s nothing left to eat. Let him pay something, anything, or did he marry you for room and board? Make some oatmeal for yourself, at least. How are you going to feed the baby? Look at your breasts!” I wanted to hug her and have a cry together, but she pushed me away.

  And that’s how it went, our life together. Alena used all her strength to please her beloved, as she called him. Her beloved! I stopped leaving my room, and I turned off the fridge: first, to save energy, and second, what was I expected to do, her abandoned and insulted mother, when after a day waiting in food lines and then lugging home two heavy bags of groceries I return from a library the next day into a complete wasteland? A wasteland left behind by their endless guests, who visited the im
poverished young couple in hordes, she proudly feeding them their sausage, cooked with their butter, filling our little apartment with gut-wrenching aromas. They even snatched my teakettle! I subsisted on boiled water with plain bread, the same food my son lived on in his cell, and my daughter explained away my passing to and from the kitchen with pots of boiled water with “Mom’s off her rocker.”

  But my hatred for Provinces, it turned out, was the glue that kept their family together. To be honest, all I wanted was for them to disappear, to vanish somewhere and leave the room to Andrey. But where would they go? I told them that I wouldn’t allow Provinces to be registered at our address; this way maybe they’d get a room in a dorm for married couples—or had he married her for a Moscow registration? That caused a storm of tears, followed by a counterthreat: she’d stop Andrey from registering here, too. Later she came into my room, tears still falling. I was pretending to work. “Do you want me to die? Is that it?” she asked me. “Go on,” I said. “Go on living, you and your future fatherless brat. But let me ask: Is it worth it for your so-called family to exist at the expense of homeless Andrey and your granny hospitalized?”

  She cried so easily back then. Tears streamed from her bright eyes, my sweet darling’s eyes. I tried to hug her, and this time she let me. “Fine,” she said. “I know you don’t want us here, me and my baby; all you ever wanted was that criminal son of yours; you just wish I’d vanish, cease to exist. But that won’t happen, you understand? And if anything happens to my precious, your Andrey will go away for much longer.” So that’s how she spoke of Andrey, who alone shielded eight friends with his sentence; for whom she used to shed tears every night; her suffering brother, to whom she wrote those lovely, funny letters. (She wouldn’t let me see them, but I read them anyway, admiring her talent; I quoted her once as a joke, and oh, what a scene she threw, accusing me of spying and God knows what else—what a terrible, terrible scene.) True, she did cry over Andrey the first two months; the rest of the time she had every reason to cry over herself. And now we were all expecting an amnesty, in honor of Victory Day.