Life Stories

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  Mom always used to say that it's not a place fit for living.

  "I'll die trying, but we have to get away from here. We have to run away from these projects."

  I listened to her and wondered what "projects" were.1 I thought they must be some kind of buildings with projections and chimneys, only nasty ones, unpleasant and coarse. And I was surprised, because there were no chimneys in our region. No one even used wood stoves. Although things were pretty awful where we lived.

  Later I began to understand her.

  That was when the police came and broke down our door. They were looking for someone. Someone who shot at them with a shotgun. Then they began going from house to house, breaking down doors. And when they left, Mom said for the first time that we should go to France.

  "There is nothing here for us anymore. And who'll fix our door for us?"

  She began writing all sorts of letters and buying expensive envelopes for them, but she never got any answers.

  "We are going to Paris," Mom told the neighbors. "This is why I won't lend you any more money. Especially since you never pay it back, and waste it all on vodka."

  For this reason it became difficult for me to go outside. Especially where they were building parking garages.

  "Get lost," Vovka Spike-Eye would say, hitting me with a bicycle pump. "Stewardess Joan."

  I would leave. It hurt and I was afraid of him. He was in second grade already. Although that was back in the wooden schoolhouse. His father was building those garages. Which was why if you wanted to jump off them into the pile of sand, you had to ask Vovka's permission first.

  He wouldn't let me jump.

  "Get lost, Stewardess. You can go jump off a garage in France, along with your mom. She's an idiot. You're both idiots. Get lost."

  And he would hit me over the head with his pump.

  He always walked around with that pump, even though he never rode a bike. He could never learn to ride and was constantly falling. And then he would beat up other boys who laughed at him.

  Tolik never laughed at him. One day he came up to him and said: "Let her stay. What do you care?"

  Then they started to fight, and after that they fought all the time. Until Tolik fell off the construction site. That was because we used to climb up to the third floor. We used to play school up there. When he fell, I looked up and saw Vovka Spike-Eye's face up there. Tolik's breath was loud and his eyes didn't open.

  "Look how his eyes have opened," the nurse told me and showed me little Sergei. "You have a baby boy. See how big he is?"

  I couldn't see anything because I was in pain. I thought I was going to die. I only saw that he was all covered with blood and couldn't tell whose blood it was, mine or his.

  "Go on, hold him... Like this... Go on. You must start getting used to him now."

  But I couldn't get used to him. Mom said she too had forgotten everything about little babies. She said: "My God, is it possible they're so small? Just look at his tiny hands. Look, look, he smiled at me."

  I said: "He's just making a face. The doctor explained it to us in the class. It's reflexive contraction of facial muscles. He doesn't recognize anybody yet."

  "Reflexive contraction my foot," she said. "Your doctor doesn't know anything about babies, either. He's happy because he's going to France soon. Have you seen where I put my Edith Piaf tape? For some reason it's not in the cassette player."

  Our cassette player was very old. It rattled everywhere. I had hidden her tape on purpose. Because I just couldn't bear the joke anymore. Even our neighbors' kids called us Frenchies. And now little Sergei was born. It was time to put an end to it.

  But she moped around the apartment all evening, not herself. She tried to check exams and then turned the television on. She was watching the news, but she was still not right. She just sat in front of the TV, and even her back seemed out of sorts. By then little Sergei had been screaming for maybe two hours.

  "Here it is," I said, "your tape. Lying on the bookshelf. Except you won't hear a thing, what with all this screaming."

  "I'll go to the kitchen," she said.

  Then little Sergei stopped howling. Immediately.

  I put him in his carriage and began listening to Edith Piaf singing in our kitchen. It's very good music.

  My arms were stiff, and my back hurt a little. But I still thought he couldn't recognize anybody yet. He was too little.

  Tolik recognized me when he turned eleven. Right on his birthday. Mom told me to go upstairs and take something to him. Otherwise they'd all get drunk up there again and forget about him.

  She was worried that he would start eating potato peelings again and would end up in the hospital. Because he had just had surgery for appendicitis.

  I had no idea what to give him, so I took our cat's ball and an old photograph up to him. It showed a few kids, Tolik and me. Uncle Petya, Mom's friend who owned a car, had taken it.

  He took us for a car ride around the apartment block and then took that picture on the steps. The picture slid out of the camera right away. I had never seen anything like it before. But then mom said that I had to stop asking about him. "Stop it," she said. "I'm tired of your questions."

  And covered her ears with her hands.

  In the picture, we were six. That was before we began playing on the construction site.

  "Wait," I said. "Don't stick it in your mouth. Look, this is you, see? Next to you is Mishka. See? He's sticking his tongue out. Next to him is Slavka and Zhenka. Remember how one time they hid in the attic the whole night and their dad chased them around the whole street with a belt? And this is me. Somebody put horns over my head from behind. Stupid Mishka most likely. He always used to do this. He doesn't live here anymore. His parents moved downtown. Mom and I may also go away one day. Wait. Wait. What are you doing? Don't bend it. It will break it and you won't see anything on it. Why are you pulling at it? What? I can't understand you. You're just grunting, nothing else. What? Are you trying to say something?"

  He kept pulling the picture out of my hands and poking his finger at it. I looked at where he was poking and gave him the picture. Because he was pointing at me.

  That's how he recognized me. On the day of his birthday.

  "The birth of a child," said the doctor in the class, "is the most important event in every woman's life. From the moment he arrives, the child must be surrounded by care and love."

  I sit there and look at the whole lot of us. It's as though we have swallowed air balloons. Here we are, sitting and listening about love. Wearing hospital coats. Except I didn't care about it anymore. I was thinking that I might die. And that it will be very painful. I didn't care about love at all, by then.

  "You know," all the girls said when I got to the summer camp, "he's great. He's even cooler than Venya the P.E. counselor."

  I say: "Who?"

  And they say: "What are you, stupid?"

  I say: "You're stupid yourselves. How am I supposed to know your Venyas? I just got here. I was helping Mom renovate her classroom."

  They say: "Venya works as an airplane pilot. He has a car and he's 25 years old. On his vacations, he works here as a P.E. teacher. Because he needs to stay in shape. But he is not as cool as darling Vovka. Because Vovka—he's just out of this world."

  I say: "Wait a minute. What darling Vovka?"

  They say: "What are you, stupid? He's in the same school with you. He told us he knows you."

  I say: "Do you mean Vovka Spike-Eye?"

  They say: "We call him Darling Vovka."

  That is when I tell them: "Vovka Spike-Eye is a creep. The worst creep of all the creeps in the world."

  They laugh and say: "Well, we'll see. We'll see."

  I worked at that camp to make some money. I wanted to buy myself a pair of new jeans for eleventh grade. I also needed a pair of sneakers. That's why I stayed.

  Mom kept telling me love is cruel. But even she never suspected how cruel.

  The first week the girls kept
buzzing in my ears about him. Which one of them he looked at, who he danced with, which boy he socked in the eye.

  I say to him when I finally ran into him: "You're a superstar here. A local Jackie Chan. A martial arts champion."

  He looks me straight in the eye and says: "Come to the dance tonight. I'll teach you a funny little dance."

  Then he smiles and says: "Stewardess Joan."

  For some reason, I went.

  "A normal baby," the district doctor told me, "should start walking at ten months. He's already two years old, but he's crawling like... Like a cockroach."

  She didn't say right away how he crawls. She thought about it for a while and then said it. And pushed him away. Because he kept crawling to her. Usually he used to cry whenever she came, but now he was reaching for her boots and grabbing at the bottom of her coat.

  "Look," she says, "He's drooled all over me. How am I supposed to go visit other kids?"

  I say: "I'm sorry."

  She says: "What of it, that you're sorry? You should've thought about it beforehand, whether to have this baby or not. Had you had an abortion, you wouldn't have been sitting here alone with him, without your mother. You would've graduated from high school, like you were supposed to. Who knows whether he'll develop normally. A trauma like this is no joke. You already have one retard upstairs."

  I say: "He is not a retard. He fell from the construction site when he was six."

  She says: "Who cares whether he fell or not. What I'm telling you is that traumas are no joking matter. Do you want to spend your whole life wiping his drool? You should be playing with dolls yourself, at your age. They make babies and somebody has to pick up after them. What were you thinking of? There is no reason to cry."

  I say: "I'm not crying. I got something in my eye."

  She says: "You got something in a different part of your body. I'll be back in a week. Same time. Please be home."

  I say: "We're always home."

  She stood up in her boots and left.

  When she left, I picked up little Sergei, stood him on his feet and told him: "Come on, little one, please. Walk."

  And I can't see anything because I'm crying, I want so much for him to walk.

  But he doesn't walk, and every time he plops softly on his behind. I keep lifting him, and he smiles and sits down again.

  Then I stand him one last time, push him in the back and yell: "It's all your fault, you stupid log. Why can't you walk normally for once?"

  He falls face first and hits his face on the floor. Blood comes out of his mouth. He's crying because he's frightened of me. I grab him and squeeze him against me. I'm crying too. I can't stop. I keep wiping blood from his face and can't stop crying.

  "Don't stop," I yell to Tolik. "Don't stop. Come forward. Don't stand still."

  He doesn't understand me. He hears what I'm yelling but thinks we're still playing. But the ice is already cracking under him. He yells back to me and waves his arms, and I'm worried he'll start jumping. Because he is always jumping in place whenever he is happy. I yell to him: "Don't stop, please. I beg you."

  Because the ice is very thin, and he is walking on the thin ice after the cat's ball I gave him for his birthday two days ago. He takes it everywhere now. He even eats holding it in his hand. Because it's my ball. Because I brought it.

  When we came back, Mom looked at me and said: "Why do you bother with him? Your friends came by looking for you. You should play with normal kids."

  I say: "Tolik is normal. He recognized me in the picture."

  She says: "Still, they should have arranged for him to be sent to a special school. Except for you, nobody looks after him here. Those drunks will one day see him fall again and break his neck. Although maybe that is exactly what they're waiting for. And the construction pit near the school, it doesn't look like it's ever going to be filled in. Don't go there with him. He might run onto the ice and fall through. Do you know how deep it is?"

  I say: "I do. We don't go there to play. We almost always play in the courtyard."

  She says: "When I take you to France, who is going to look after him? See how it sometimes happens in life? Nobody cares about him."

  Now nobody cares about me either. By winter, Mom's money ran out and I had to look for work. But nobody would ever hire me, not anywhere. Even the school principal turned me down. She said I'd set a bad example for girls.

  I didn't want to set an example. All I needed was to feed little Sergei. And by then my boots completely fell apart. That's why I was running around looking for work in those sneakers I bought that summer. They were pretty scuffed, too, after almost three years. And your feet get really cold in them. Especially if you're waiting for the bus for so long. So you stand at the bus stop, stomp your feet like they're made of wood and worry yourself crazy whether or not little Sergei is already crying alone in the locked apartment.

  It was horribly cold that winter. Everybody had just celebrated 2000. But I didn't celebrate anything. Because I had already sold the TV set. And the sewing machine. And the vacuum cleaner. But money ran out quickly anyway, and so I began selling Mom's things. Even though at first I didn't want to sell them. Except when I got to the cassette player, for some reason I couldn't. I sat in the empty apartment, watched little Sergei crawl on the floor and listened to Mom's Edith Piaf tape. Little Sergei liked her songs. I watched him and wondered where I could get a bit more money. Because, in general, by then it was nowhere.

  And then the letter came. Some time in mid-March. My feet were no longer freezing in those sneakers by then. At first I couldn't figure out who it was from, but then when I opened it I was very surprised. Because I never really believed that this letter would ever come. Even though Mom waited for it probably every day of her life. I didn't believe in it. I thought she was probably a little nuts. I thought there would be no miracles.

  The letter said that, in response to numerous requests from Mme. my Mom, the Embassy of France in Russia made the requisite inquiries with the proper sources and now apologizes for how long the procedure has taken. Because of legal and political reasons beyond its control, the Embassy of France had not been able to clarify the circumstances of this complex case until very recently. Nevertheless, it now hastens to report that, after lengthy research, they were indeed able to locate a Mme. Boche, who does not deny her family connection to my Mom through her grandfather, who during World War II was an internee in France and, at the end of the war, decided to take up permanent residency in France, having married a French citizen. The difficulty of the Embassy of France in this particular case was due to the fact that the progeny of the interned grandfather and the aforementioned citizen of France had moved to various other countries and assumed different citizenships. In particular, the parents of Mme. Boche are citizens of Canada. However, inasmuch as Mme. Boche has returned to France and married a French citizen, the Embassy of France in Russia no longer sees any reason why Mme. my Mom should not apply to them for permission to obtain a residency permit in France. The Embassy of France will be glad to provide all the required documents for this purpose at the following address.

  After that there was a fax number. And some words. But I can't read French, and I had sold all of Mom's dictionaries. Because by then, Mom had been gone almost six months.

  And I had no idea what "interned" meant.

  But the envelope was very pretty and I gave it to little Sergei. He loves to rustle all sorts of papers.

  He grabbed it and started to purr with pleasure. I looked at him and wondered: "Why haven't you started walking already?"

  Because I had no intention of going to any France. Who's waiting for me over there? And I already knew that, as to Tolik, I couldn't just leave him. His parents by then had gone completely nuts. They got drunk almost every day and often beat him up. He couldn't understand why they were hurting him and screamed very loudly. The neighbors said that even people in the next building could hear him. I would then go upstairs and bring him down to my p
lace. He would calm down right away. He would crawl around the rooms with little Sergei and whistle like a train. Little Sergei would turn on his back and laugh. A little, laughing boy, lying on his back. So I had no intention of going anywhere.

  The only thing was, I felt sorry for Mom.

  That was why next morning I went to look for work again. One of my old classmates had told me that her boss was looking to hire another salesgirl. For the night shift. It would be good for me. Because little Sergei had by then turned two and was sleeping through the night. He didn't even pee till morning.

  And, she said, the pay wasn't bad.

  But in the end, nothing came of it, as usual.

  "You know," she said. "He doesn't want to hire a salesgirl with a baby. He says it'll be more trouble with you than it's worth."

  "There will be no trouble with me," I said.

  She only shrugged her shoulders.

  I say again: "There will be no trouble with me."

  And so we stand there and stare at each other, and she's waiting for me to leave, because she's already regretting that she asked me to come. The space is all crammed with Snicker bars and "Baltika No. 9" beer bottles. But I want to stay there all the same. Because I know that there is no other place for me to get money anymore.

  And then I see a very small boy in the corner. He's just four years old or maybe a little more, and he's sweeping some dirt off the floor. Not really sweeping, actually, because the broom is taller than he is and he can't easily move with it from place to place.

  I say: "What's he doing in here? Is it your nephew maybe? No one to leave him home with?"