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

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  “Let’s start evacuating everyone,” ordered the colonel. “We’ll begin with the military files, then the coats of arms and the heavily wounded.”

  “This plane won’t fly anymore,” the pilot noted.

  The colonel drew his pistol and promised to shoot the pilot then and there for disobeying an order. But the pilot ignored him and went on trying to stand the stump on the ground, first one way, then another, saying over and over, “Come on, let’s go.”

  The colonel fired his pistol, but he must have missed because the pilot kept mumbling, “Come on, come on,” to his navigator, and in the meantime the roar of vehicles could be heard, and suddenly the field was filled with a mechanized column of German infantry.

  The colonel took cover in the grass as the trucks kept coming and coming, but there was neither shooting nor shouting of orders, nor did the motors stop running. Ten minutes later the column was gone, and the colonel raised his head—the pilot was still fussing with his charred stump, and over by the fire people were still lying down, sitting, walking around. The colonel stood and approached the fire. He didn’t recognize anyone—this wasn’t his division at all. There was infantry here, and artillery, and God knows what else, all in torn uniforms, with open wounds on their arms, legs, stomachs. Only their faces were clean. They talked quietly among themselves. Next to the fire, her back to the colonel, sat a woman in civilian dress with a kerchief on her head.

  “Who’s the senior officer here?” demanded the colonel. “I need an immediate report on the situation.”

  No one moved, and no one paid any attention to the colonel when he started shooting, although when the pilot finally managed to roll his charred stump over to them, everyone helped him throw his navigator on the flames and thereby put out the fire. It became completely dark.

  The colonel was shivering from the cold and began cursing again: now it would be impossible to get warm, he said—you can’t light a fire with a log like that.

  And without turning around, the woman by the fire said: “Oh why did you look at my face, why did you lift my veil? Now your arm is going to wither.”

  It was the voice of the colonel’s wife.

  The colonel lost consciousness, and when next he woke up he was in a hospital. He was told that they’d found him in the cemetery, next to his wife’s grave, and that the arm on which he’d been lying was seriously injured, and now might have to be removed.

  Revenge

  THERE ONCE LIVED A WOMAN WHO HATED HER NEIGHBOR—A single mother with a small child. As the child grew and learned to crawl, the woman would sometimes leave a pot of boiling water in the corridor, or a container full of bleach, or she’d just spread out a whole box of needles right there in the hall. The poor mother didn’t suspect anything—her little girl hadn’t learned to walk yet, and she didn’t let her out in the corridor during the winter when the floor was cold. But the time was fast approaching when her daughter would be able to leave the room on her own. The mother would say to her neighbor, “Raya, sweetie, you dropped your needles again,” at which point Raya would blame her poor memory. “I’m always forgetting things,” she’d say.

  They’d once been friends. Two unmarried women living in a communal apartment, they had a lot in common. They even shared friends who came by, and on their birthdays they gave each other gifts. They told each other everything. But then Zina became pregnant, and Raya found herself consumed with hatred. She couldn’t bear to be in the same apartment as the pregnant woman and began to come home late at night. She couldn’t sleep because she kept hearing a man’s voice coming from Zina’s room; she imagined she heard them talking and moving about, when in fact Zina was living there all by herself.

  Zina, on the other hand, grew more and more attached to Raya. She even told her once how wonderful it was to have a neighbor like her, practically an older sister, who would never abandon her in a time of need.

  And Raya did in fact help her friend sew clothes in anticipation of the newborn, and she drove Zina to the hospital when the time came. But she didn’t come to pick her up after the birth, so that Zina had to stay in the hospital an extra day and ended up taking the baby home wrapped in a ragged hospital blanket that she promised to return right away. Raya explained that she hadn’t been feeling well. In the weeks that followed she didn’t once go to the store for Zina, or help her bathe the baby, but just sat in her room with warm compresses over her shoulders. She wouldn’t even look at the baby, though Zina often took the girl to the bath or the kitchen or just out for a little walk, and kept the door to her room open all the time, as if to say: Come look.

  Before the baby came, Zina learned how to use the sewing machine and began to work from home. She had no family to help her, and as for her once-kind neighbor, well, deep down Zina knew she couldn’t count on anyone but herself—it had been her idea to have a child, and now she had to bear the burden. When the girl was very little, Zina could take finished clothes to the shop while the baby slept, but when the baby got a little bigger and slept less, Zina’s problems began: she had to take the girl with her. Raya continued to complain about her bad joints, and even took time off from work, but Zina wouldn’t dare ask her to babysit.

  Meanwhile, Raya was planning the girl’s murder. More and more often, as Zina carried the child through the apartment, she would notice a canister on the kitchen floor filled with what was supposed to look like water, or a steaming kettle left precariously balanced on a stool—but still she didn’t suspect anything. She continued to play with her daughter just as happily as before, chirping to her, “Say Mommy. Say Mommy.” It’s true, though, that when leaving for the store or to drop off her work, Zina began locking the door to her room.

  This infuriated Raya. One time when Zina left, the girl woke up and fell out of her crib—at least that’s what it sounded like to Raya, who heard something crash to the floor in Zina’s room, and then the girl started crying. Raya knew the girl didn’t yet walk well on her own, and she must have been badly hurt because she was emitting terrible cries on the other side of the door. Raya couldn’t bear them anymore, and finally she put on rubber gloves, poured bleach into a bucket, and began mopping the floors with it, making sure to splash as much as possible under the girl’s door. The cries turned into heart-wrenching screams. Raya finished mopping, then washed everything—the bucket, the mop, the gloves—got dressed, and went to a doctor’s appointment. After the doctor’s, she went to a movie, walked around to some stores, and came home late.

  It was dark and quiet behind the door to Zina’s room. Raya watched a little bit of television and went to bed. But she couldn’t sleep. Zina was gone all night and the whole of the next day. Raya couldn’t stand it anymore. She took an ax, broke down the door, and found the room covered with a thin film of dust, with dried spots of blood next to the crib, and a widening trail of blood to the door. There was no trace of the bleach. Raya washed her neighbor’s floor, cleaned the room, and sat down to wait, feeling great anticipation.

  Finally, after a week, Zina came back home. She said she’d buried her girl and found work on a night shift. That was all she said. Her dark and sunken eyes and her sallow, haggard skin spoke for themselves.

  Raya made no attempt to console her neighbor, and life in the apartment came to a standstill. Raya watched television alone while Zina went to work nights and then slept during the day. She seemed to have gone mad from grief and hung photos of her little daughter everywhere. The inflammation in Raya’s joints grew worse. She couldn’t raise her arms or even walk, and the shots the doctors gave her no longer helped. In the end, Raya couldn’t even make herself dinner or put water on to boil. When Zina was home she’d feed Raya herself, but she was home less and less, explaining that it was too painful for her to be there, where her daughter had died. Raya could no longer sleep because of the pain in her shoulders. When she learned that Zina was working at a hospital, she asked her for a strong painkiller, morphine if possible. Zina said she couldn’t do it. “I do
n’t smuggle drugs,” she said.

  “Then I need to take more of these pills,” Raya said. “Give me thirty.”

  “No. I’m not helping you die.”

  “But I can’t do it myself,” Raya pleaded.

  “You won’t get off so easily,” Zina said.

  So with a superhuman effort, the sick woman lifted the bottle of pills with her mouth, removed the cap, and spilled its entire contents down her throat. Zina sat by the bed. Raya took her time dying. When the sun came up, Zina finally said: “Now you listen to me. I lied to you. My little girl is alive and well. She lives at a preschool, and I work there as a cleaning lady. The stuff you spilled under the door wasn’t bleach—it was baking soda. I switched the cans. The blood on the floor was from Lena bumping her nose when she fell out of bed. So it’s not your fault. Nothing is your fault.

  “But neither is anything my fault. We’re even.”

  And here, on the face of the dying woman, she saw a smile slowly dawn.

  Incident at Sokolniki

  EARLY IN THE WAR IN MOSCOW THERE LIVED A WOMAN named Lida. Her husband was a pilot, and she didn’t love him very much, but they got along well enough. When the war began he was assigned to a base near Moscow, and Lida would visit him there. One time she arrived and was told that his plane had been shot down not far from the airfield, and that the funeral was the next day.

  Lida attended the funeral, where she saw three closed coffins, and then returned to her room to find a draft notice for a brigade digging antitank ditches outside the city, and off she went to dig. It was autumn before she finally returned, and she began to notice that she was being followed by a strange young man, very malnourished and pale. Lida would see him on the street and in the store where she bought potatoes with her ration card. One night her doorbell rang and there he was. “Lida, don’t you recognize me?” said the man. “I’m your husband.” He hadn’t been buried at all, it turned out. They had buried some dirt instead of him, whereas his fall from the plane had been broken by the trees in the forest at Sokolniki, and after he’d disentangled himself, he decided not to go back to fighting.

  Lida didn’t ask how he’d survived these past two and a half months alone in the woods—he told her he found some civilian clothes in an abandoned building—and they began living together again. Lida was nervous the neighbors might notice, but almost everyone had already been evacuated out of Moscow, and so no one did.

  Then one day her husband told her that winter was coming soon and they should go right away and bury the flight suit he’d left in the forest.

  Lida borrowed a small shovel from the superintendent, and off they went to the forest. They had to take a tram to the Sokolniki station, then follow a brook deep into the woods. No one stopped them, and finally toward evening they reached a wide clearing, and at the edge of it a large pit. It was growing dark. Lida’s husband told her that he was too weak to help but that it was important they cover up the pit, since he remembered now that he’d thrown his suit down there.

  Lida looked into the pit and saw that, yes, something resembling a flight suit lay at the bottom. She began throwing dirt on top of it, while her husband kept hurrying her along, saying it was getting dark. She shoveled dirt into the pit for three hours, and then, looking up, saw that her husband was gone.

  Lida was frightened. She searched for him, running around, then almost fell into the pit and saw that, at the bottom, the flight suit was moving. It was completely dark now, yet somehow Lida made it out of the forest, emerging at her tram stop as the sun was coming up. She rode home, and once she finally got there she fell asleep.

  And in her dream her husband came to her and said, “Thank you, Lida, for burying me.”

  A Mother’s Farewell

  THERE ONCE LIVED A YOUNG MAN NAMED OLEG WHO WAS left an orphan when his mother died. All he had left was his older sister, for though his father was still alive, that man turned out not to be his real father. Oleg’s real father, as he learned when he was going through his mother’s papers after her funeral so he could know her better, was some man his mother had met when she was married. In the papers he found a letter from this man saying he already had a family and had no right to abandon his two children for the sake of some future child he wasn’t even sure was his. The letter had a date on it. Shortly before Oleg was born, in other words, his mother tried to leave her husband and marry this other man, meaning that things really were as Oleg’s sister had once hinted, cruelly and vengefully, in the middle of an argument.

  Oleg kept going through the papers and soon found a black folder filled with photographs of his mother in various stages of undress, including completely nude. They were staged photos, as if his mother was performing, and even when nude she wore a long scarf. All of this came as a great blow to Oleg. He’d heard from relatives that as a young woman his mother had been known for her beauty, but the photographs showed a woman already in her mid-thirties, in good shape but not very pretty, merely well-preserved.

  After this Oleg, who was sixteen, dropped out of school, dropped out of everything, and for two years, until the day he went off to the army, did nothing, listened to no one, ate what was in the refrigerator, left whenever his father and sister came home, and returned when they were asleep. In the end he collapsed mentally and physically, and his father used his influence to set up an appointment with a medical commission that would declare the boy a schizophrenic and put him on government subsidies and, most important, keep him out of the army. But just before Oleg was to appear before the commission, his father died in his sleep, and everything fell apart. Oleg’s sister quickly traded her share of the apartment for an apartment of her own, and left Oleg in his room by himself.

  Soon he was drafted.

  In the army, Oleg was involved in an incident. He had been placed as a lookout on a mountain path that an escaped prisoner was supposed to be crossing. This man had been on the loose for a month and had already managed to kill five people, including a young woman, and was now about to travel over the only part of the mountain that led away from the prison zone and into the European part of Russia. He wasn’t supposed to pass this way for some time, but the ambush was set up in advance, three days in advance, because who knew what kind of transport the prisoner might get his hands on, and maybe he’d get there faster? The ambush consisted of Oleg, a sergeant, and three other soldiers. They sat on a large rock, their machine guns beside them, and took turns at the watch.

  It was during Oleg’s watch that a man appeared on the trail. He looked like the man whose photograph they’d been shown. Oleg shot him, but it turned out to be the wrong man. He had also been a prisoner once but had served his time and was now going back—although, it’s true, he didn’t have a permit to move around from place to place. As for the wanted man, he was soon caught on a nearby trail.

  Oleg was treated well by the army. They declared him temporarily insane, placed him in a hospital, then discharged him altogether as unfit to serve—and this turned out to be a good deal, since the wife of the man he’d shot kept trying to find the soldier who’d killed her husband when all he’d done was attempt to leave the area without a permit, the poor wretch.

  Oleg returned home. He was almost completely bald now, his teeth had fallen out one after the other, he had nothing to eat, nothing to do, and no education to help him find a job. But then out of nowhere his sister appeared, took everything under her control, got Oleg into a vocational program, cleaned up his room, and provided him with groceries and money, even though she wasn’t his real sister and had never betrayed any affection for him before.

  One night as she was getting ready to go she said offhandedly to Oleg: “You shouldn’t believe what I said that time about our mother, you know. Our father was a very suspicious man, that was all. He was a very difficult person and could have driven anyone insane.”

  Then she left.

  As soon as she was gone Oleg took out the suitcase with his mother’s papers. This time all he f
ound was an envelope with photos of her funeral. The folder where the nude photos had been now contained a single sheet of crumpled old black paper, which dissolved into dust as soon as he tried to touch it.

  Oleg began rifling through the papers. Everywhere he looked were letters from his mother to his father, the father he’d grown up with, speaking of love, of faithfulness, of Oleg’s resemblance to him. Oleg cried all night, and the next morning he got up to wait for his sister to tell her how he’d lost his mind when he was sixteen, and imagined some terrible things, and even killed a man because of it—for the man he’d shot didn’t look at all like the photograph of the real criminal.

  But his sister never came. She must have forgotten about him, and that was all right because he soon forgot about her, too—he was busy with his new life. He finished the vocational program, went to college, got married, had children.

  And what was funny was that both he and his wife had dark eyes and dark hair, but their two sons were blue-eyed and blond, just like their grandmother, Oleg’s dead mother.

  One time his wife suggested they visit his mother’s grave. It took a long time to find it: the cemetery was old and the gravestones crowded together, and also, on his mother’s grave, right in the middle, there stood another, smaller head-stone.

  “That must be my father,” said Oleg, who had not attended his father’s funeral.

  “No, look,” said his wife, “it’s your sister.”

  Oleg was horrified—how could he have neglected his sister like this?—and he bent down to read the inscription. It really was his sister.

  “Except the dates are wrong,” he said. “My sister came to visit me much later than that, after I came home from the army. Remember I told you how she got me back on my feet? She literally saved my life. I was young, and small things were always sending me over the edge.”