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

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

They gave you an order—and either you killed, or they killed you for disobeying the order.

  “So my grandfather was a soldier,” said Nadya, wounded. “But what does that have to do with the boy? What did he do? Maybe I should suffer, but why should he? Everybody killed back then—so what?”

  Uncle Kornil didn’t say anything; he lay there like a corpse. A drop of blood began to run down his forehead. “Oh, no,” said Nadya, blanching.

  She didn’t have anything to wipe it away with. He was holding the handkerchief, and she couldn’t very well use her skirt—she’d be walking around town in a bloody skirt.

  And without the handkerchief, he wouldn’t be able to say anything.

  The handkerchief held the traces of her suffering and her son’s suffering.

  Once again laughter exploded behind her.

  She turned and saw the drunks sitting around the table, laughing. They were paying no attention to her at all.

  “I have nothing to hope for!” she suddenly blurted out. “You know that, Uncle Kornil.”

  Time passed.

  The stream of blood dried on the forehead of the man on the floor.

  He was unshaven, filthy, skinny; a bad smell wafted up from him; he probably hadn’t stood up in days.

  Empty bottles piled up in the wardrobe next to him.

  Apparently this Kornil had already helped a number of people today by drinking vodka he couldn’t refuse.

  He was waiting for her to pour him more.

  The woman had warned that without a drink he wouldn’t say a thing.

  Nadya poured out another glass of vodka.

  Holding it up, she said: “You asked what I wanted: I want my son to be happy. That’s all I want.”

  She stopped, imagining how this twisted Kornil would grant her wish—because happiness for her son consisted of leeching off her, drinking, partying, motorcycling.

  “I want him to study. I want him to go back to school and study,” she said.

  She stopped again, thinking he still had two years of school left, and in the meantime she’d have to slave away at three separate jobs to feed him. And she was tired.

  “He should help me,” said Nadya. “He should get a job, earn some money, learn how to work hard.”

  But then she remembered they were going to take him into the army soon, and he’d come back very quickly in a coffin, as he’d promised.

  “Let him go to college,” Nadya concluded firmly. “And stay out of the army.”

  Then she imagined six more years (one of school, five of college) of constant torment and sleepless nights before exams. She remembered how she got whenever Vova was late from school, how she cried and yelled at him when she got summoned to school when he failed his classes or lost his textbooks or got in a fight.

  “All right,” Nadya said finally. “I want him to study, and work hard, and do what I say, and come home on time, and . . . no more of these friends of his! Especially the girls. And the drinking and partying. It’ll end in jail, that’s what. So he gets up early, leaves for work, comes back on time, cleans the house, helps me out . . .”

  Then poor Nadya realized it would be best if her son were alive, healthy, a diligent student, a good worker, and never, ever at home.

  When he was home it meant a racket, loud music, his stuff flung all over, phone conversations late into the night, eating standing up like a horse, accusations, demands for money followed by tears . . .

  She thought of how much she’d had to endure from her one and only son, and said bitterly: “You call me a sinner, but when did I get a chance to sin? When? I don’t live for myself. I live only for him . . . only for him. All I think about is how to feed and clothe him. I saved every penny, and now there’s nothing left—he stole it all. Oh, and I’d like for him not to steal anymore, Uncle Kornil. No one in our family ever stole before. And I don’t want him drinking. His health is bad; he has allergies, chronic bronchitis. He should go to college. After that, he should get married to a nice girl. And live with her. God bless them. It’s bad enough with just him, but to have them both running around the house? And then a child? I’m tired; I’ve no strength left. The psychiatrist at the hospital said I should get treatment myself! But I’ll help them. As for me, as for me—when can I live my life? I think only of him. I cry myself to sleep every night. What kind of sinner can I be?”

  She sat back down with the glass of vodka still full in her hand. So many tears streamed from her eyes that she couldn’t see anything around her.

  “Work a miracle, Uncle Kornil,” she begged him. “I’m not a sinner. I have no sins on my soul. Help me. Do something. I don’t even know what anymore. I’m all confused.”

  Uncle Kornil lay motionless; he was hardly breathing. Nadya raised the glass, gingerly, to his half-open mouth, figuring how best to pour it so she wouldn’t lose a single drop.

  She’d have to lift his head a little—then it would work.

  And it did, just as she’d planned it. With one hand she held up Uncle Kornil’s head, and with the other she began carefully moving the glass to his thin, desiccated lips.

  All the while she was crying and pleading that her wishes be fulfilled, though it wasn’t clear anymore what they were.

  “Now, now,” she said soothingly. “We’ll just drink this and everything will be fine.”

  At that moment his eyes shot open, like a dead man’s—Nadya knew the look well, the one that stared hard into a dark corner as if all the truth of the world were there.

  Nadya could see that her wishes were not coming true, that Kornil was going to die at any moment, without having done a thing.

  The vodka was her last hope.

  If she could just pour this last glass into him, maybe he would come alive for a moment. Then he could die if he wanted. He’d said himself that one more glass and he was done for.

  But that glass: she hadn’t got it in yet!

  How could this be? Uncle Kornil had promised!

  He’d helped everyone else, but not her. Look at all those empty bottles in the wardrobe from all the people he’d helped.

  At this point she heard the men behind her start speaking all at once.

  “Ah, here’s Andreevna, Andreevna’s here. Open up for Andreevna! Kornil, look, your mom’s here. She sensed there was a bottle open, oh, she sensed it!” And they laughed.

  A female profile flitted past the window outside.

  Nadya froze in confusion, the glass still in her hand.

  She had to finish this quickly, before Uncle Kornil’s mom appeared.

  “It’s always like that,” thought Nadya bitterly. “Everyone else manages, but I can’t.”

  She was still holding the heavy hand of the dying man, whose wide-open eyes continued to stare at the ceiling.

  “Uncle Kornil!” Nadya called to him. “Uncle Kornil, here, drink this!”

  His mouth was wide open now, his jaw hanging down loosely.

  Someone was knocking at the door, and someone was already moving to open it.

  “I just have to keep from spilling it,” Nadya thought hysterically, “otherwise it’s all over for me.”

  She was convinced that if she could keep from spilling the vodka, all her wishes would come true. This life of torture would end. She raised Kornil’s head to a better angle.

  “That’s good now,” she was saying, again bringing the glass to Kornil’s lips. “Now let’s drink. Yum.”

  Just the way she’d fed her son milk when he was little.

  This was in the countryside, where they’d lived when Vova was a baby, and her husband would come out on weekends.

  Vovochka was always opening his mouth, with his two little teeth, so awkwardly, and the milk would spill.

  Here the door slammed, and a loud drunk female voice called out, “What’re you drinking, my low-life friends?”

  “It’s his mother,” Nadya thought in terror. “I didn’t make it. I’m too late.”

  The glass trembled in her hand.
<
br />   The mother was going to come over and put an end to this.

  “Andreevna, you better start collecting for a coffin,” someone said. “Your Kornil is being fed his last one over there.”

  “What’s he need a coffin for?” the woman answered heartily. “We’ll sell his body to the med school. First round’s on him!”

  She was met with a roar of approving laughter.

  “You, over there—Nadya, right?” said the woman without looking over. “Keep working on that bastard. Go ahead. He’ll die, oh he’ll die all right. Just open his trap and shove that last one down.”

  “How does she know my name?” thought Nadya, terrified.

  “Give it a good push,” the woman went on. “Finish him off. He knew you’d come, he did. He’s had enough of it here. Everyone loves him; they all bring him something to drink. He can’t refuse—there would be hurt feelings, and he just can’t hurt anyone’s feelings. He’s like that.”

  The men all brayed happily. Nadya was afraid to turn around. From what she could tell, the woman had sat down at the table, and they were pouring her a glass. “He was just waiting for her,” someone said. “ ‘My cup will runneth over,’ he said.”

  Nadya was no longer thinking. Both her hands shook.

  “Go ahead, ask him—he’ll do everything!” yelled the mother. “He did everything for everyone. He worked miracles. He gave sight to the blind. He healed the lame. He even brought this one Jew, Lazar Moiseivich, back from the dead. This Lazar’s family had already started suing one another over the inheritance—that’s how dead he was! He was resurrected, and they all got mad at Kornil. ‘Who asked you?’ they said. Actually, it was his second wife who asked him to do it. She’d lived with him after his first wife died, raised his children. When he died, the children sued her right away for the apartment, said she should get out or pay them off—there were two of them. So this wife found Kornil, put two bottles before him. Lazar was resurrected; he didn’t know what hit him.

  “Then Kornil raised a legless man. His mother came here, said she didn’t know what to do, her son was rotting away before her eyes. So Kornil gives him legs, and what does the son do? He starts drinking just like before, chasing his mother around the apartment with a knife in his hand. She runs back here and says: Put him down again!”

  The men all laughed terribly at that one.

  The mother took a shot of vodka, coughed, and went on.

  “Whatever you wish for, that’s what will happen, Nadya—believe me. Give him the drink—that’s what you’re here for. He chose you to do it. Remember the woman at the post office? That was me. He told me: Nadya is ready for anything. She has what it takes. She needs to resolve the Vova situation once and for all. Now, don’t you worry, Nadya. You have a tough time with your son—well, my son has a tough time, too. He really shouldn’t have come down this time—he really shouldn’t. And now he’s waiting for someone to see him off. He can’t just go back himself—that’s not allowed. He needs someone to help him.”

  Nadya wasn’t listening. She looked at Uncle Kornil, whose head still lay on her arm, and nodded, carefully setting the glass of vodka down on the towel.

  “No offense,” she said finally, “but we’ll manage on our own. Your son here is very sick—you should get him to a hospital. And not give him anything more to drink. Really, what’s the matter with you? You’re his mother, after all. He’s dying as we speak. My husband died on my arm—I know what I’m talking about.” And, to punctuate this speech, she gave the glass a little poke, and it tottered and fell. The vodka spilled out on the floor, and everything was suddenly enshrouded in fog.

  Nadya found herself on the street, walking home. She felt a little lightheaded. Her mind was clear and free of all burdens.

  She walked lightly and happily, not crying, not thinking about the future, not worrying about anything.

  As though she’d passed the hardest test of her life.

  Requiems

  The God Poseidon

  ONE TIME WHILE VACATIONING BY THE SEA I RAN INTO MY friend Nina, a single mother in middle age. Nina invited me to her house, and there I saw strange things. The entrance, for example, had cathedral ceilings and a marble stairwell. Then the apartment itself—dominated by dark wood and vermilion tapestries, its floor covered with a plush gray carpet. It looked magnificent, like something you’d see photographed in the magazine L’Art de Decoration, and the bath especially was impressive, the floor carpeted in gray, with mirrors and a light blue china wash basin—it was simply a dream! I could hardly believe my eyes. Meanwhile, Nina, who had kept her look of eternal suffering and passivity, led me into the bedroom with its three open doors, a little dark but still very elegant, with a surprising number of unmade beds. “Did you get married? ” I asked Nina, but she just walked out one of the doors with a look of concern, like a busy housewife but somehow not touching anything. The bedroom was glorious—like in a hotel—with enormous closets, twelve feet long, filled with gowns. How did all these riches fall on poor Nina, who’d never even had decent underwear, who had one ancient coat for every season and three dresses, all told? She got married—but here? This wild place where no one lives, where people just wait in the seaside emptiness for summer, when they can let their rooms to strangers? But how could she rent this house with its stairwells, corridors, arches . . . and what’s more, I happened to open a wrong door and found myself in a white-marble courtyard, where a teacher was leading schoolkids on a field trip.

  All right, so she got married, but it turned out she’d also traded her small one-room apartment in Moscow, where she’d been getting by with her teenage son, for this glorious apartment, with all the furniture and even bedsheets! Which is to say, the owners didn’t touch anything—they just left—except in fact they hadn’t left at all, which is why Nina looked so glum, I think. The extra beds in the room were for the landlady and her son, a quiet young fisherman with puffy cheeks. The landlady still bustled around the house, and in fact we sat down to dinner under her patronage. She behaved exactly as if she were a quiet and docile mother-in-law and Nina her honored daughter, for whom she bent and toiled in the house, all the while maintaining her position as the head of the household and not allowing Nina close to anything, in fact.

  It turned out the woman had exchanged apartments with Nina, and Nina had left her job at the newspaper and moved here, planning to write about this new place, about the sea, which she’d always loved—she’d always had a weakness for anything to do with it—but in the meantime she was just moping around this new place, which the owner hadn’t yet left. Formally everything was in order—Nina had all the papers, and she and her son owned the house and lived there—but the old landlady had stayed there all winter, with her son, and they hadn’t mentioned leaving. Nina had always been a disorganized person who let things go; thus her leave from the newspaper to go “freelance” and the apparent total unraveling of her life. Nina accepted things here as she found them. She ate, drank, walked out to the sea; her son attended the local school, which was quite good; and they didn’t need any money, since every day the young fisherman would bring the fruits of the sea home to them.

  “Who is he?” I asked, and Nina, without any hesitation, answered that he was the son of Poseidon, god of the sea, that he could live and breathe underwater, that he brought home literally everything from there, that he walked sometimes on the floor of the ocean to other countries, and brought home shells and jewels, and everything else for the house and the family.

  Meanwhile Poseidon’s old wife, who had for some reason taken poor Nina under her wing, sat at the head of the table, underneath the tall window, and kept feeding and feeding us, and as I ate I kept thinking of that gorgeous hotel-like bedroom with its four beds and their sheets as white as sea foam—and I was thinking Nina was right: you should let things take their course, not fight the current, just lay down your oars and you will breathe underwater, and the god of the sea will take you in and set you up in a lovely a
partment. Because, returning home to Moscow, I learned that Nina hadn’t moved anywhere, in fact, but had drowned with her teenage son in a well-known ferry accident not far from the spot where I had just been, not suspecting anything.

  My Love

  GIVEN TIME HIS DREAMS MIGHT HAVE COME TRUE, AND HE might have found himself with the woman he loved, but the road was too long and it brought him nowhere. All he had with him that barren time was a page from a magazine, with a photograph of the woman he loved, and in fact only a few people from work knew it was her. It was just a pair of legs, that was all, a little chubby at that, bare, in heels; she herself had immediately recognized it—by her purse, and the hem of her dress. How was she to know that just her lower half was being photographed?—the photographer had rushed out into the street and taken a few quick snapshots, but they published only the hem and the legs. He—this man—kept the photograph tacked up over his desk at home, and his wife never brought it up with him, though she was a strict woman and ran the entire household, including her mother, and her children, and even her distant relatives and students. On the other hand, she was also a kind, generous, hospitable woman—she just didn’t give any slack to the children, and also her meek mother lived with them, lay on the cot, read aloud to her little grandkids while she still could, and enjoyed the warmth, peace, the television, and then afterward she spent a long time dying, also meekly, barely alive now, and went without much fuss in the end.

  As for him, having buried his mother-in-law, he began waiting patiently for his wife to die as well. For some reason he knew that she would go first and set him free, and he began to prepare for this event very actively: he was healthy and athletic, went running in the mornings, even toyed with weights, kept a strict diet, and in the meantime managed to work like a bull, was promoted to the head of his department, traveled abroad—and waited. His chosen one, the pretty plump little blonde, every man’s dream (she looked like Marilyn Monroe), worked in the same place as he did and sometimes came along on business trips—and that’s when their real lives would begin. Restaurants, hotels, strolling and shopping, tours and talks. How lonely he felt on those nights when he had to descend from heaven back into his hell, into the warm, poor nest where his graceless, cramped home life slowly bubbled, where his children got sick, went crazy, ran around like maniacs, not allowing him to concentrate, so he had to quiet them down, and sometimes this meant strapping them with his belt, after which he felt even more insulted and humiliated. His wife screamed at the kids too—she had no time for anything, she could barely turn around in that apartment, in which, as in any decent household, they also had a dog and a cat, and the cat would howl all through the night when she was in heat, and the little dog would bark every time the elevator reached their floor. The nights were the worst: he would lie in his bed and fall into cheerless dreaming of the warmth, calm, and beauty that emanated from his forbidden friend on their trips abroad. When they weren’t together, she too was hounded by life: her husband and her mother-in-law literally hung on her neck, her mother-in-law forcing her to scrub the apartment every Saturday, to the point where she was scrubbing the tiles in the bath with ammonium! Her husband would get drunk and forbid her to go to office parties, birthdays, or to anything else, always made trouble before her business trips, suspected her of everything—together he and the mother-in-law were crushing her like Scylla and Charybdis, and what is more they fought each other, the husband and his mother. The mother-in-law was always demanding to know of the pretty blonde why her husband drank so much and ate so little—even that was her fault! The girl would complain about it at work, but only obliquely; she was discreet and never threw it all up in his face the way his wife would. Sometimes you find a woman like that, the lonely husband would think as he tossed in his bed, while on the other side of the wall his children cried and whimpered in their sleep, and his wife snored heavily because of her heart problem, growing older and more loving with each day. Now here was something the mind could never grasp: how she, a dried-up old woman past forty, so loved and took such care of him! It seemed as though she could never quite believe that this elegant man, with his handsomely graying whiskers, could be her husband; in fact she was too shy to accompany him anywhere. She tailored her uniformly plain dresses herself, long and baggy, the better to hide her girth and the runs in her panty hose—there was never enough money to buy new ones. This was known as “dressing modestly and tastefully” by the many guests and relatives who came crowding in during all the holidays, devouring her pies, cakes, and salads—they were all her guests, not his, her classmates, her colleagues, her relatives—they remembered her young, pretty, with cute dimples and a long thick braid, and they didn’t even notice that she was already someone else, that she had dimmed.