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

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  In fact she’d long since disposed of her braid and her dimples, and instead toiled for her husband and her mother, raised the children, loyally ran for him, her lord and master, to the fresh food market, didn’t have time for anything, and yet miraculously was always everywhere on time (she tried so hard to be organized)—and naturally at night, having put everyone to bed, she’d sit in the kitchen with her books, or work for extra cash, or else prepare her classes. Coming home from work she’d tell stories about her students, and once in a while she’d cook a whole bucketful of meatballs and a bucketful of kasha, and her students would come, they’d bring flowers and even make a bit of noise; shyly, they’d eat up everything and then entertain her with their clumsy singing. But this was only if the man of the house was away; otherwise, it was out of the question.

  When the kids were born, a boy and a girl, even then her first thought had been of her husband: making sure he had breakfast before work, and a warm dinner after work, and that she was available to listen to everything he wanted to tell her. There was only one interruption, when her mother started dying, and then continued to die for three years: then everything was cast aside and just kind of hobbled along, it wasn’t clear how, and the man of the house was reduced to self-service in the kitchen, to eating breakfast alone, whatever had been left out for him, and eating supper by himself, and then withdrawing into his room as gloomy as a storm cloud, but still he was there to carry the coffin, and was indistinguishable in his genuine grief from everyone else. After the funeral the grandmother’s room remained empty, closed—no one had the strength to do anything about it. And in fact the wife quietly resisted doing anything, slept in the big room with the kids, or rather sat as always in the kitchen; sleep had abandoned her.

  For the husband this was a difficult time, too: his love began complaining, demanding a real, independent, family life; she refused to accompany him anymore to friends’ empty apartments during lunch, and she went even further: she started flirting with the men in adjacent offices and in the cafeteria. And the men, sensing that she’d “let down her guard,” as they put it, beat a path to her door, and her telephone rang off the hook, and someone came to pick her up in a car, and so on. Our husband endured the torments of hell—love and duty tore him apart. He took a hard line with his girlfriend (though he did, occasionally, find solace in crying on her shoulder). What could he do? The wife, for all her desperation and grief, nonetheless noticed that her husband had somehow dried up, that his eyes had gone dangerously blank and that he was just drifting away. She roused herself, quickly fixed up her mother’s room and moved in there with the kids, and the main room again became a meeting place for guests, and talks, and little parties, and the husband would greet the guests as the father of beautiful children and the head of a household (and not as an abandoned homeless dog), and as a beloved, worshipped husband (not just as anyone). Now he received his breakfast before everyone else, and suddenly a few new dresses were sewn from cheap cotton, and on Sundays the wife began taking the kids away for long excursions—to the park, the circus, the planetarium. But in the husband’s room the photograph still hung, with its skirt, its bare chubby legs, and the heels: he wasn’t giving up.

  Finally thunder shook them all. The husband of the blonde—“our husband,” as the illicit couple called him—came apart at the seams, completely lost it, chased the blonde around the apartment with an ax. She locked herself in the bathroom until evening, then somehow slipped out of the house, called our hero from a pay phone, and he ran to meet her and didn’t come back until it was almost morning. A few hours later he was again awoken by a terrible—as all news is that comes at dawn—phone call: the husband’s mother had found him hanging in the doorway from a rope. Of course the new widow spent the next month with some caring friends who took pity on her, and meanwhile our husband couldn’t bring himself to invite her over, and eventually the friends who had taken her in had to terminate the blonde’s stay, she was just too pretty, pale and in mourning, so that the husband of the house had begun to experience toward the blonde certain feelings of Platonic Friendship and Sympathy, which are much more dangerous than our plain human filth, in and out, in and out, and it’s over. The man’s wife kicked her out.

  It took a while, but eventually things settled down. The blonde was given her own apartment, and someone decided he wanted to buy the old run-down place where the mother-in-law still lived. He convinced the mother-in-law to trade it for a smaller place, closer to her niece, and the blonde got a place farther out and less attractive but still her own, and here our husband, our hero, finally had to choose once and for all, yes or no, and start remodeling the place, and find furniture, fix the wiring, winterize the windows, etc., in his girlfriend’s new apartment. Instead, he began setting up his own household with renewed vigor, wallpapered the main room with the help of the kids, once again started exercising, pouring cold water on himself in the mornings, running, and he began looking after the kids, drilling them, because they’d grown up and were getting in the way, was the thing. With the blonde he remained in the role of counselor and visitor. She took care of everything herself—that occupied her time. She asked for advice, showed him floor plans, and already there was someone else coming around—he had a car, he brought her hard-to-get tiles for the bathroom and even harder-to-get kitchen furniture. The blonde assessed the situation correctly and kept everyone in sight, faced with the prospect of loneliness.

  The photo still hung above his desk, and he already had an assigned day for visiting the blonde—he had, incidentally, left the institute where they’d worked, his relations with it having soured when she, the blonde, was supposed to be promoted and get a raise but was turned down because the others complained. He left in protest and promised to bring her with him eventually, whereas his wife didn’t understand anything and just shone with relief, and there was a party in the house, and they baked pies, because the husband had finally left Her, though the photo still hung in its place.

  He did well at his new job, and the little kids grew up, athletic and tall, well-mannered, the way kids can be when they’re in a family that worships its father, strengthened by the love and servitude of its self-effacing mother. The word of the father was law, and that’s how they walked, in order: the father first, then the children shoulder to shoulder, and then behind them, a bundle of a mother, directing the family from a distance, as with a remote control. It was a joy to see them, though the photo of the legs was still there.

  The mother of the house waited until the boy, the younger one, entered college, and then surrendered entirely, just as her mother had done. Standing in the kitchen one evening, she collapsed in front of everyone, began to choke and continued choking for three nights in the hospital. The family, disciplined and hardworking, instantly regrouped, set up a watch in shifts, and old friends and relatives came to help, as well as her long-ago and still loyal students. And from the other side, from inevitable death and oblivion, the husband rescued his wife. By the time they brought her home she was already a shriveled old lady. The only thing she could move was her right hand, and only a little. She would make sounds with her lips that no one could understand, and often, often, a tear would come running out of her eye. It was as though she were apologizing with her whole being for this state of things, apologizing for her entire former life, for not being able to create anything for her demigod, and in the end making herself a cripple. In time the members of the household grew used to their heavy burden, though sometimes they’d grow frustrated and yell at one another—all those bedpans, and daily baths, and bed sores, and then thoughts, involuntary thoughts, about how long this might go on, how many years, this animal or even vegetable state—they suffered these thoughts. But the husband seemed to calm down suddenly: his soul became anchored, and all his movements around his wife were soft, patient, his voice gentle. The kids still sometimes screamed at each other and at their mother. They had their own uncertainties—they were losing her, their foundat
ion and their pillar—and they became weak, unsteady parents to her. They felt that something was wrong, that they didn’t have a future, or rather that they did, but that it was awful. The kids blamed each other, said everything to each other, and, oh God, in front of their mother! But their devotion did not diminish. Their mother lay there clean and fresh, and they put a little radio transmitter next to her pillow and sometimes they’d read aloud to her, but still she often cried, for no reason at all, it seemed, and would try to say something with just vowel sounds, without using her tongue.

  On the night she died and they took her away, her husband collapsed, and in his sleep he heard her—she was there, and she lay her head down on the pillow next to him and said, “My love.” And after that he slept happily, and at the funeral he was calm and dignified, though he’d lost a great deal of weight, and was honest and upright, and at the wake, when everyone had gathered at his apartment, he told them all that she had come to him and called him “My love.” And everyone froze, because they knew what he said was true—and the photograph no longer hung over his desk. It had disappeared from his life. It had all evaporated—just ceased to be interesting at some point—and suddenly, while still at the table, the husband began showing everyone the pale little family photos of his wife and kids—of all those excursions they’d taken without him, all their fatherless entertainments that were so poor but so happy, in the parks and the planetariums to which she’d brought the children when she tried to make a life for them on the tiny island, the only one still left her, where she shielded the children with herself, while towering over everything was that photo from the magazine. But the photo was gone now, everything was fine, and she’d managed to say to him, “My love”—without words, already dead, but she had done it.

  The Fountain House

  THERE ONCE LIVED A GIRL WHO WAS KILLED, THEN BROUGHT back to life. That is, her parents were told that the girl was dead, but they couldn’t have the body (they had all been riding the bus together; the girl was standing up front at the time of the explosion, and her parents were sitting behind her). The girl was just fifteen, and she was thrown back by the blast.

  While they waited for the ambulance, and while the dead were separated from the wounded, the father held his daughter in his arms, though it was clear by then that she was dead; the doctor on the scene confirmed this. But they still had to take the girl away, and the parents climbed into the ambulance with their girl and rode with her to the morgue.

  She seemed to be alive, as she lay on the stretcher, but she had no pulse, nor was she breathing. Her parents were told to go home, but they wouldn’t—they wanted to wait for the body, though there were still some necessary procedures to be done, namely the autopsy and determination of the cause of death.

  But the father, who was mad with grief, and who was also a deeply religious man, decided to steal his little daughter. He took his wife, who was barely conscious, home, endured a conversation with his mother-in-law, woke up their neighbor, who was a nurse, and borrowed a white hospital robe. Then he took all the money they had in the house and went to the nearest hospital, where he hired an empty ambulance (it was two in the morning), and with a stretcher and a young paramedic, whom he bribed, drove to the hospital where they were keeping his daughter, walked past the guard down the stairs to the basement corridor, and entered the morgue. There was no one there. Quickly he found his daughter and together with the paramedic put her on their stretcher, called down the service elevator, and took her to the third floor, to the intensive care unit. The father had studied the layout of the hospital earlier, while they waited for the body.

  He let the paramedic go. After a brief negotiation with the doctor on duty, money changed hands, and the doctor admitted the girl to the intensive care unit.

  Since the girl was not accompanied by a medical history, the doctor probably decided that the parents had hired an ambulance on their own and brought the girl to the nearest hospital. The doctor could see perfectly well that the girl was dead, but he badly needed the money: his wife had just given birth (also to a daughter), and all his nerves were on edge. His mother hated his wife, and they took turns crying, and the child also cried, and now on top of all this he had of late been assigned exclusively night shifts. He desperately needed money for an apartment. The sum that this (clearly insane) father had offered him to revive his dead princess was enough for half a year’s rent.

  This is why the doctor began to work on the girl as if she were still alive, but he did request that the father change into hospital clothing and lie down on the cot next to his daughter, since this apparently sick man was determined not to leave her side.

  The girl lay there as white as marble; she was beautiful. The father, sitting on his cot, stared at her like a madman. One of his eyes seemed out of focus, and it was only with difficulty in fact that he was able to open his eyes at all.

  The doctor, having observed this for a while, asked the nurse to administer a cardiogram, and then quickly gave his new patient a shot of tranquilizer. The father fell asleep. The girl continued to lie there like Sleeping Beauty, hooked up to her various machines. The doctor fussed around her, doing all he could, though there was no longer anyone watching him with that crazy unfocused eye. In truth, this young doctor was himself a fanatic of his profession—there was nothing more important to him than a difficult case, than a sick person, no matter who it was, on the brink of death.

  The father slept, and in his dream he met his daughter—he went to visit her, as he used to visit her at summer camp. He prepared some food, just one sandwich, and that was all. He got on the bus—again it was a bus—on a fine summer evening, somewhere near the Sokol metro station, and rode it to the paradisial spot where his daughter was staying. In the fields, among soft green hills, he found an enormous gray house with arches reaching to the sky, and when he walked past these giant gates into the garden, there, in an emerald clearing, he saw a fountain, as tall as the house, with one tight stream that cascaded at the top into a glistening crown. The sun was setting slowly in the distance, and the father walked happily across the lawn to the entrance to the right of the gate, and took the stairs up to a high floor. His daughter seemed a little embarrassed when she greeted him, as if he’d interrupted her. She stood there, looking away from him—as if she had her own, private life here that had nothing to do with him anymore, a life that was none of his business.

  The place was enormous, with high ceilings and wide windows, and it faced south, into the shade and the fountain, which was illuminated by the setting sun. The fountain’s stream rose even higher than the windows.

  “I brought you a sandwich, the kind you like,” said the father.

  He went over to the table by the window, put his little package down, paused for a moment, and then unwrapped it. There lay his sandwich, with its two pieces of cheap black bread. He wanted to show his daughter that there was a patty inside, and so he moved the bread pieces apart. But inside he saw—and right away he knew what it was—a raw human heart. The father was terrified that the heart had not been cooked, that the sandwich was inedible, and quickly wrapped the sandwich back up. Turning to his daughter he said awkwardly: “I mixed up the sandwiches. I’ll bring you another.”