“Well, I just mean that he should, at least, be good looking.”
“Huh?”
“Well, it would be a miracle if he was, for who’d want to look twice at an elephant like her?”
“Mama! It’s me no one ever looks at.”
The classic abandoned-wife complex, common to girls from fatherless families.
“It’s true, Mama! Last summer, at the beach, all the Georgians courted her and thought she was eighteen!”
“You’re kidding. Eighteen, not thirty?”
“Mama, you make everything sound so vulgar!”
“That’s why I’m asking. Lenka’s admirer—he isn’t a Georgian, is he?”
“Just leave me alone,” she pleaded, almost crying.
The reason for all this talk was that it was as clear as day that horrible Lenka wasn’t worth my daughter’s little finger. My little beauty, my warm little nest, who was my consolation when Andrey was wreaking havoc as a teenager. She was nine when her father left; my mother did him in with her nagging. On another dig, he picked up someone else in the same way he picked me up, only this time both children were with him. When they came back Alena confided that everyone loved them so much there, so very much; one woman, Lera, literally cried the last night when they were leaving!
After a month of tense, pimple-producing, long-distance negotiations, my husband left for Krasnodar, and for Lera the crier, in whose studio apartment he is currently living with a stepson plus a blind mother-in-law, so my children don’t get invited. As for archaeology, he now travels to digs in Rwanda and Burundi, but Africa is full of AIDS, and there is every reason not to romanticize these trips. As for my mother, she considered our papa a conniving hanger-on and a leech, among other things. How she celebrated when he came for the last time to get his things! How she never passed up the opportunity to remind me that she had told me so! How sweet she was with me, this toothless cobra, who now cries on her pillow and gulps down her food.
I began receiving child support—all of forty rubles. I worked: they let me help out in the poetry department, reading and responding to submissions—a certain Burkin threw me a crumb, a kindly man with permanently shaky hands and cheeks swollen so badly I suspected double inflammation of the gums. A ruble a letter—sometimes I sent off as many as sixty letters a month; plus two of my poems would be published—that was another eighteen rubles.
And this is the consolation my daughter offered when the door closed for the last time behind my husband, and I stood with a burning face and dry eyes, contemplating jumping out the window to greet him outside with my corpse. Mommy, she asked, do I love you? Yes, I told her, you do.
• • •
My princess, whose every toe I’d washed and kissed. I adored her curls, her enormous blue eyes—where did her looks go?—which exuded such kindness, such affection, such innocence—all for me, for me alone. All this, all this tenderness was taken from me and thrown at the feet of the horrendous Lenka. Day and night she thought only of Lenka and her demands. Andrey and Alena pummeled each other because Andrey needed to make a call while Alena was waiting for that brat to call—hoping, that is, that she’d call, to tell her if anything was happening, if they were going anywhere, if they had been invited to anyone’s birthday party.
My children fought each other tooth and nail—another cute detail of our family life. Only at night could I experience the joy of motherhood. I’d creep over to their beds and listen to their breathing, inhale their scent, adore them in silence.
My darlings, my soft ones:
Rest awhile, don’t stir.
Your mother is with you,
You are always with her.
They didn’t need my love. Without my care they’d perish within hours, but I was a nuisance. Paradosk, as my subliterate neighbor Niura likes to say.
Andrey played soccer and hockey; by ninth grade he had more scars than a feral cat. Other boys would carry him home—unconscious, because local ladies had decided to dig up the lawn and plant carrots, and then fenced off their orchard with invisible wire right at the height of a child’s throat. Another time some little angels decided it would be fun to throw a handmade knife, and they threw it right into Andrey’s foot. This was after my husband had disappeared in the direction of Krasnodar, and I had a friend over—A.Y., a very attractive man, although a married alcoholic, whose wife regarded me in only one sense—as all wives always. So this A.Y., on seeing Andrey spouting blood all over the stairs (I later washed it off, with my tears), asked him, “What’s that, old man, a battle wound?” When, six years later, Andrey didn’t come home until two in the morning, and my mother screamed, “Go back where you came from!” and whacked him with a chair, something happened to my heart, I couldn’t breathe. In the morning I called A.Y., to ask for advice. “To be on a safe side, call the ambulance, Andrianovna,” he told me in the cheerful voice he always used between binges. “But remember, women rarely have heart attacks.” This only proved that while recovering from his own heart attack A.Y. never looked into the women’s ward. Then he asked Andrey’s age. “So you expect him to jump up from a woman’s bed screaming, ‘Mommy expects me at ten’? I was going to become a father at fifteen, and this one is already sixteen!”
• • •
The time is night.
My squawking angel is finally asleep, arms akimbo on the pillow. I’m alone with my scraps of paper and a pencil—pens are beyond my means. Everything is beyond my means now, thanks to Andrey, who has taken me for everything this time. This time wasn’t like his previous robberies, when he tried to break down my door and in the end set my mailbox on fire. He was demanding a huge amount, twenty-five rubles, for what he considered his room, and calling me horrible names, the most obscene in the Russian language. I huddled over trembling Tima, covering his ears. Luckily Andrey is a coward, and he left when I yelled that I was calling the police.
My poor son, he can’t believe I’m capable of calling the cops on him. He has never recovered after the prison, never come back as a human being. Instead he lives off his so-called friends, those boys he saved with his sentence. Some time ago I received a call from the completely crazy mom of one of the eight friends, Andrey’s potential codefendants.
“Is this the apartment of such and such? Hello? Does Andrey such and such live here?”
“Nope. Who’s asking?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Good-bye, then. But no.
“Where can I find him? Hello? I’ve tried calling the building where he works.”
Persistent hag!
“He now works at a ministry.” Let her call human resources at every ministry in town.
“Can I have the number?”
“It’s classified.”
“This is the mother of his comrade Ivan. When I was out, Andrey stole Ivan’s new leather jacket! Hello?”
“I’d advise you to search your son’s room. By the way, how come he’s not in jail? I’ve heard Alesha K.’s case is being retried.” This Ivan of hers is still wearing the sweater I bought for Andrey’s birthday with the last of my money. “By the way,” I added, “could Ivan compensate me for the things he stole from me?”
Click.
To grovel, to pray
At the feet of a son
Who returned from the dead:
May he stay. May he stay.
Back from prison that day, Andrey was in our kitchen eating my herring, my potatoes, my bread, himself made with my blood and marrow, yellow and emaciated, terribly tired. I said nothing. “Go take a shower” was hanging on my lips. (Since childhood it has made him feel disgust and humiliation—for what was he worth, dirty and sweaty, compared to me, always clean, who showered twice a day, thank God for the free hot water?)
“I need money.”
“What money? I’m feeding three people! And I’m the fourth!”
<
br /> (Behind a floor molding in my room I had stashed my mother’s insurance plus an honorarium for five translations from unknown languages, work that came my way after I dumped my tragic story—son coming out from jail, daughter pregnant, unmarried—on every editor in town.)
“Why don’t you take a shower? Want me to run you a bath?”
He stared at my collarbones.
“I bought you some jeans, Soviet made, don’t laugh—and a pair of canvas shoes. Go change, but first take a shower.”
“I’m fine like this. Just give me money.”
“And how much do you need?”
“Fifty. For now.”
“Are you off your rocker? Look! All I have is five rubles.”
“Then I’ll go and kill someone.”
“Andrey.” My beautiful daughter stood in the doorway. “Come. Shura received his stipend yesterday. This one will choke first.” Andrey stomped away with the fifty rubles and didn’t come back for two days. When he was gone, our patrolman came asking for him and warned us not to register him. Alena and I panicked and agreed to register both Andrey and her Provinces. Swapped prisoners, so to say.
When Andrey returned he was dressed in a new denim suit and accompanied by two young ladies of such appearance that I gasped for air. Alena took one look at them and quickly retreated into her sweet-smelling nest. The three visitors marched into my room, locked the door, and stayed there for an hour. I knocked and pleaded that I needed my things; all I could think about was my stash behind the molding. When the door finally opened, I met Andrey with my hand outstretched. “Fifty rubles, please.”
“What the . . .”
“I reimbursed them.”
He was going through the contents of my wardrobe. The sluts were waiting.
“I’ve packed your things. The suitcase is over there.”
Where did you go, my silky baby boy who smelled of phlox and wild chamomile?
“The patrolman stopped by to warn us.”
“What the . . .”
“That we must not register you.”
“Ah, you . . .”
“Please. Of course we’ll register you. Of course.”
“Fuck that. I’m getting married. You know what you can do with your registration?”
“Who are you going to marry? These two?”
“Why? You think they’ll make bad wives?”
The girls brayed with merriment, revealing missing teeth.
“By the way, where’s Granny?”
“I didn’t want to put it in a letter. . . . Granny’s not well.”
“You mean dead?”
“Worse. Much worse. The worst that can happen to a person. Do you understand?”
“But where is she?”
“Kashchenko Asylum. Where else?”
“So you two got rid of her.”
He grabbed the suitcase, and they rolled out.
• • •
The time is night. Everything’s quiet. Only Niura, my neighbor, is pounding soup bones for her children’s breakfast.
What’s interesting is that Deza Abramovna, the chief at the psychiatric clinic, believes that inside the clinic are mostly normal people who simply lack something. The true lunatics, she told me, are outside. Big deal, I thought at the time, like an idiot. I, too, lack lots of things. Only later did I understand. I would come to her crying that my mother had left the gas on, or almost burned down our apartment, or left meat on the balcony while we were gone for two weeks—we came back and there it was, under the layers of flies and eggs, imagine the smell. That was a frightening time in our lives, when Andrey was summoned daily to the detective’s office (I went once and was yelled at), from which he ventured home yellow and lifeless. He was constantly getting calls and being dragged off to meetings—with the parents, I understood later, of his so-called friends, who wanted to convince him to take the blame.
My mother couldn’t wrap her poor old mind around what was happening and only repeated anxiously that the boy didn’t look well, that he must eat, or that the girl came home last night with a dirty spot on her coat, she must have laid on her back somewhere. Then her nagging stopped and she disappeared into her room, and Andrey left for yet another interrogation and didn’t come back. She didn’t even ask where he was. Months passed; she carefully arranged her teeth on a bookshelf, and one day she produced a plastic bag filled with bloodied cotton balls so I could see how many times she spit up blood. What for? Mama! Who, what committee is going to see this? Give it to me—I’ll throw it away! Look at yourself: What are you wearing? You have a closet full of clothes; what are you saving them for? For better times, as I understood, for that special day when the door will swing open and she’ll come out, young, in a beautiful new dress and everyone will swoon, and then—attention!—someone will marry her (but not some bed-wetting retiree, oh no). Instead, she invited me into her room and whispered that they had come.
“My God. Who?”
“They. The ambulance. Don’t yell.”
Outside, an ambulance was passing in the rain.
“Yesterday, when I stepped out, they followed. A policeman, too. I turned around and began walking right at him, grinning. I’m not afraid of them!”
My God. I stood frozen in the middle of the kitchen, then shuffled into Alena’s room and told her that Granny had lost her mind. She replied that it was I who had lost my mind. Don’t worry, I told her, it happens—heredity, nothing you can do. It happened to Granny’s sister, who lived a long time, incidentally. Alena rolled out of bed and went to talk to my mother, then came out in tears, shocked. I told her that she, too, needed to be examined, because it runs in the family. I didn’t mention to her that I had already invited a psychiatrist, who posed as a regular physician making a house call. During that visit Alena was rude; asked why she was in bed in the middle of the day instead of school, she marched into the bathroom and stayed there until the doctor left.
“You call yourself normal?” I appealed to her. “Look at yourself. Again you missed class. You read all night and can’t get up in the morning. This is psychosis. Hereditary. Please, honey.” But she just laughed hysterically and slammed the door in my face.
I only said that to shock her into action, to get her out of bed; my heart was bleeding for her. Imagine the horror my life had become: my son in jail, my mother on her way to a crazy house. I simply wanted to drive her out of the trance caused by bad grades, pimples, and some first love of hers, all described in her diary, which I’d read. Here it is.
Please don’t read this diary! Mama, Andrey, Granny: if you read this I’ll leave—for good.
Yesterday we had a seminar with Tatarskaya. S. sat in front of me and kept looking back, over my head, kind of wistfully, laughing. He and Lenka kidded around; I was just sitting there with a serious expression, trying not to swoon. In the cloakroom Lenka suddenly asked me, “Do you want to get together with S. for New Year’s? Because he does.” I could barely walk home. S. and I will be together on the thirty-first!
December 22. Again Lenka announced that S. must be in love with me because he often asks about me and refuses to go to the movies if they tell him I’m not going. She looked at me with suspicion, but I let on nothing. Of course I know she loves him; about me she isn’t sure. I was so happy I couldn’t sleep. Today S. wasn’t at school. I must discipline myself! I must stretch in the mornings! Last time S. told me that he got up at noon.
December 30. New Year’s Eve is tomorrow. Barely passed exam today. Cried in the hall. S. finished first and left right away. Gathered up courage and asked Lenka where she and S. were going tomorrow. To the club of the University of Transport, she told me, like it was nothing. S. declared that he hates all-nighters. Lenka bought them two tickets, which included a glass of champagne, a party favor, an American movie, a dance party, and a costume ball. The tickets are sold out,
she said. She didn’t have enough money for three. I was invited to come along anyway; someone might have an extra ticket. But I’ll need a costume: she’ll be a gypsy, he a pirate. After this announcement I crawled home like a punished dog. Granny and Mama were fighting. Grandma was screaming that I don’t go to bed all night, can’t get up on time for my exams. They should be yelling about their precious Andrey, who smokes.
January 1. Sensational news. Lenka and S. weren’t at the club. I was there at ten sharp, like an idiot, in Granny’s black dress and with a rose in my hair: Granny had dressed me as Carmen. I bought a ticket without any trouble and then shivered in the half-empty hall, watching a so-called concert and a ridiculous dance party until almost midnight. Then bought a glass of champagne, drank it, and left. At home, Mama and Granny were finishing their annual brawl in front of the television. The subject, as usual, was Andrey: he hadn’t been home for three days, called earlier, Mama grabbed the phone and really gave it to him—that Granny was going to have a heart attack, they had to call an ambulance, and so on. He hung up, of course, and Granny didn’t get a chance to speak to her Only One.
January 5. Lenka showed up at the review before the dialectical materialism exam; told me she’d decided not to go to the costume ball, instead got on the train and spent New Year’s in Leningrad with her relatives: little kids squealed, not wanting to go to bed, and Lenka had to discipline them. Tears and misery all over our fair land. S. wasn’t at the review.
January 8. I received a C; will have to take it again. There’ll be screaming at home—I may lose my stipend. As always, S. answered first, got an A, and left. Lenka reports that S. called her and told her that he had been at his high school friend’s for New Year’s; Lenka says he must be gay. We had such a laugh.
January 15. S. came to the library with T.I., who is a junior. Everyone knows she’s a slut. They kept smiling at each other, and then S. put his coat over her shoulders. Lenka sat red as a beet, trying to smile. Later we smoked in the bathroom; she cried. I didn’t cry, just felt empty inside. Life is a bore, ladies and gentlemen. S., I love you, even though you don’t see me. I’d like to give him my photo with just one word: Remember. T.I. is an old slut, twenty years old. I turned seventeen in December. S. will be seventeen in February. He went to first grade at six. Lenka is nineteen. Life’s not going to be easy for her, because she’s so heavy. She’s on a diet now. She has pimples all over her forehead; I do, too, sometimes, but around my nose. She smokes a lot. And she’s already slept with boys. She says she knows just as much about sexual positions and such things as the slut T.I. Lenka’s convinced S. is gay.
There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In Page 5
