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

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  The woman retreats to the living room, closing the door to the bedroom as if for the last time.

  If she could just catch the Creature by its ugly invisible tail. But then what? She’d just die of fright and disgust. You couldn’t kill It, after all. You couldn’t crush It with your heel. So there wasn’t any point to catching It, really.

  It clearly wants something, this Creature, It’s trying to get at something. Like the mother was trying to get at something with her daughter. Now if she could just figure out what It wants, she could—she’s done this before—defeat Its design. She could seize the initiative. That’s a classic maneuver—meet your enemy halfway. Like when they light a fire to battle another fire in the forest—if they intersect in the right spot, they’ll both go out for lack of oxygen.

  Once upon a time, for example, the mother had owned an expensive set of German china, an investment for a rainy day, and she guarded this china with her life in case they’d have to sell it to pay for a funeral (hers)—and one time, when, in a fit, the daughter had hurled one of the cups to the floor, the mother cold-bloodedly began smashing the rest of the set (“slut!” went the noise it made, “slut!”), piece by piece by piece, nearly driving her daughter insane, and declaring, to top it off, “I’m going to die, all right, but you’ll be left with nothing.”

  Yet here’s the question: Does the Creature want her total annihilation, or just to drive her into the street?

  Well, she can’t leave the house. There’s nowhere to go. And maybe a certain someone will want to come back (thinks the mother-daughter). So she has to stay. If It’s wreaking havoc, she’ll have to fight It. The way Kutuzov fought Napoleon—by making his position uncomfortable. This is very wise, thinks the woman. The Creature will be defeated.

  The decision came painfully at first, but then it grew easier. She went into the kitchen and smashed all the plates and cups. She flung the fragments through the apartment. With great difficulty, but triumphantly at last, she pulled down the kitchen cabinet and let it drop on top of the broken dishes. Having done this she noticed that the cabinet had in fact been hanging just barely on its screws. One section simply fell off the wall when she pulled it down, like a fish leaving a pond—which is to say easily, very easily. And the cabinet itself, it turned out, was falling apart, the back panel having come undone in the corner. So in fact this cabinet had been poised to fall and destroy all the dishes anyway! Not to mention anyone who happened to be standing underneath it at the time.

  Now the mother-daughter gained courage. What intuition she’d had, it turned out! She’d made this first step in her defense and immediately uncovered a plot! It was a battle of wills, clearly—and it had been joined!

  She spent the night on the couch in the living room, then lay in wait for a day, plotting.

  Her patience was rewarded: There came a noise from the bedroom, now covered in dust, the records fanned out across it, the echoes from yesterday still hanging in the air. In she went. A plot was clearly underfoot. Her ancient sofa bed stood there, unfolded. In the mornings she used to remove the bedding and place it under the sofa, then fold the whole thing, but at some point she’d stopped—after all, what was the point? Now the m-d (mother-daughter) grabs a hammer and lifts the mattress, sliding the records all to one side. Then she starts pulling out every screw from the frame. She is bent over under the dusty mattress, working frantically in the darkness. And once again it turns out she was right! The screws come out so easily; clearly they were on their way out already. Another day or two and the whole thing would have collapsed on its own. Once again she’s anticipated a terrorist attack. Once again she’s outwitted It.

  Now the fold-out sofa won’t fold at all—so be it. Covered with debris, with dust, with a pile of records and her crumpled-up sheets, that’s just how it will remain forever, like a sacred funeral ground that you must give a kilometer’s berth to. Like the memorial to a terrible earthquake.

  And now she must stay ahead, refuse whatever comes easily, seek new avenues, find what is still whole and unbroken.

  With one blow of the hammer she smashes the television set. The noise is moderate. It was an old television, but it still showed all the programs, though now only in black and white.

  She couldn’t have thought of a better plan. If It had wanted to strike a truly terrible blow, It would have blown up the television first. She could well imagine the results: her face cut by glass shards (she always placed herself right in front of the screen when she watched) and her apartment on fire. Everything burned. Including of course you-know-who, carried from the apartment in a body bag. It was the sort of thing they regularly showed on that very television.

  And it is the most painful blow because television was everything to the m-d. It was her support, her joy, the center of her little household. It was to the television that she hurried when she returned home from grocery shopping. It was for the sake of the television that she’d pick up the free advertising supplements containing the TV guide. Nor would she throw them away afterward, but would pore over them sometimes, remembering.

  Still the roof over her head is more valuable than television.

  So as not to dwell on this painful dilemma (i.e. , to be or not to be), the m-d takes all her clothes out of the wardrobe and shoves them into a big potato sack she finds under the pile of old rags in the cupboard. She’s been meaning to throw away that pile forever, but now it’ll have to wait—it is filled with worn-out jackets and skirts and rubber boots, all in case she decides to take a trip to the countryside, or, alternatively, if a war (or famine) breaks out and she has to evacuate. She also keeps her old curtains and blankets in there, including children’s blankets, in case the heat is shut off during the winter the way it was during the Siege. The cupboard is a monument to generations of poverty, whereas the wardrobe contains her current life. And so it is the clothes from the wardrobe that go straight into the potato sack.

  It is dark already, on this second day of her counteroffensive, and she drags her sack of clothing-potatoes to the open window and pushes it out into the empty space beyond. In the sack are her blouses, dresses, a jacket, her winter coat. Her underwear, scarves, gloves, hats, berets, belts, kerchiefs. A good pair of winter hose. Pants. Three sweaters. Two full skirts and one midi-length skirt. And then her sheets—clean sheets, smelling of freshness and soap. All her towels. Her pillowcases and sheets, and duvets, one with embroidery. Oh, God. But at least they hadn’t been lost in the fire.

  In the wake of her potato sack she launches a painting in a gold frame and three chairs, one after the other.

  From down below she hears someone yelling, some curses, a hollow male cry.

  She quickly closes the window. Phew.

  There is nothing to wear now, just her bathrobe over her nightshirt and her last pair of underwear.

  She lies down on the cot, on top of the old TV guides. The blanket and pillows remain in the bedroom, victims of the earthquake. She covers herself up with a fresh advertising supplement and goes to sleep.

  In the morning, after a good night’s sleep, the m-d looks around and thinks that now she really fears nothing, absolutely nothing, and that now in fact she isn’t even afraid to abandon her current life, her household, the roof above her head.

  She begins a gradual retreat from the apartment. Carefully the m-d steps through the doorway, leaving her keys in a purse on the table. But first she has to let her cat out.

  She thinks about this for a while. Theoretically she could leave the cat inside the apartment, but the cat isn’t a strategically valuable object (supposedly) and isn’t worth sending into the Creature’s maw. That is, the sacrifice of a living thing was never part of her battle plan. The m-d wishes to be harder on herself than on her cat. The question is, whom will it be worse for, her or her cat, when m-d begins her new life, without anything, but still somehow hearing the fading sounds of the meowing, straining, locked-in Lulu. The m-d begins debating herself—it would still be worse for the cat
, she decides. Who was Lulka that someone should take the trouble to starve her to death? Just an accidental animal, taken down, once, from a tree.

  Trying not to think about it too hard, the m-d decides to kick the cat out of the apartment. But here an interesting thing happens. The m-d is prepared for life on the outside—but the cat is not. When the m-d picks her up and drapes her over her elbow, determined to carry her out with her, the cat begins to shake with tiny tremors, like a boiling kettle. Like the suburban train right before it sets off. Like a very sick child in the grip of fever. The cat is shaking—fearing, it seems, for its life.

  “What is it?” the m-d asks soothingly. “What are we afraid of? Come on, kitty. You were always trying to run out. So run. Run for your life!”

  It’s true—the cat was always rushing out to the stairs, or guarding the door, driving everyone crazy with her hoarse moans. She cried at night. But it was dangerous to let her out—what if she never returned? After all, the m-d loved animals. Even if, just now, she doesn’t.

  Joyful, alive, she drops the cat to the floor on the landing outside the apartment and then slams the door behind them both—there!

  In a robe and slippers, she stands at the precipice of her new fate. She is her own master: she’s defeated the Creature. It can romp and slither around all it wants, if it intends to follow her, in these huge wide-open spaces of the great outdoors.

  The cat sits on its tail as if it’s been kicked. It huddles down pitifully and looks somehow . . . pensive. The woman descends half a flight of stairs and turns around: The cat sits frozen still and staring straight ahead, its eyes filmed over as if with cataracts, its pupils like little black seeds drowning in the green lakes that are its eyes. Its little face looks bony. Its skull suddenly emerges, it seems, and you can see its outline under the cat’s black fur. Death itself is on that stairwell, dressed up in a thin fur coat.

  The woman nearly bursts into tears! The cat is preparing to die. The street awaits it, and wild dogs, and hunger. The cat can’t fight for its life—it doesn’t know how. Tonight they will kick her out of the entryway, plant a boot in her stomach as soon as she takes her first pee.

  The m-d pauses on her triumphant march downstairs. She imagines the cat falling apart the way everything else has—the dishes, the chairs, the television, her clothes.

  The Creature will celebrate a total victory.

  “That’s a little much,” the m-d thinks to herself. “To give up everything to such a nothing. I think we’ll make it, after all.”

  Lulu sits there like the scarecrow of a cat, her glassy, cloudy eyes popping out of her head. Her tail, usually so energetic, subtly expressing all her thoughts, now lies like a dusty dead little rope. All her fur is dusty, drab, and sick.

  The woman immediately takes the kitty up in her arms, presses its stone-cold body to her own, rings the neighbor’s doorbell, quickly calls the super, and sits down on the chair she is offered to wait for someone to come up and force open the door.

  She walks into her ruined apartment, sets Lulu down on the floor, and looks around her with the eyes of a new owner. It is as if everything were new, strange, and interesting.

  There are still shoes in the hallway! In the kitchen, all her pots and pans have survived, as has a salad bowl and a coffee mug. Her forks and spoons! “What luxury,” thinks the woman, who’s been ready to graze downstairs, outside, near the trash containers, looking for a discarded can she could use for drinking water, and a moldy piece of bread to eat.

  “Would I ever find this kind of luxury in the trash?” murmurs the woman as she opens the refrigerator and sees a saucer and a soup bowl, with the boiled (!) fruits of the earth, with beets and potatoes. And a little plate of fish for Lulka!

  This apartment has everything. It is warm, and outside of the kitchen it is relatively clean; the water runs in the bath, there is soap, a telephone! And her bed! There is still a sheet and a duvet, luckily. There are lots of records on the couch and a record player in the corner, forgotten there; someone in this house used to like to listen to music—either the mother or the daughter, she can’t remember which.

  The mother-daughter quickly cleans the shattered dishes in the kitchen—and so what: it isn’t the first time this has happened in this particular house. She makes a series of trips to the trash container outside; on the third trip, as she spills her shards into the container, two men in soiled, dirty clothing and sacks over their shoulders approach carefully, wait until she moves away, and immediately dive into the trash. They behave like shades of men—shy, unnoticeable, dark.

  The m-d takes a look at the ground beneath her window. Naturally the contents of her potato sack have been picked off long ago. Well, someone else would have to walk around in her sweater and pants, while she, liberated, would walk around in nothing. That’s right. Returning to her clean, swept, washed apartment, m-d is surprised first of all by how timid she’d been—she failed to throw away her groceries, failed to smash the insides of the refrigerator, and kept all the lamps and bulbs intact.

  Suddenly she remembers, and puts out the plate of fish for her Lulka.

  But Lulka just sits there like a post, frozen in the middle of the front hall, and her eyes still look like grapes cleared of their skin, with a barely visible pit inside.

  The breath of death must have frozen her frightened soul.

  The woman doesn’t try to console her cat—her task now is to put everything in order as quickly as possible, and then the cat will also be all right.

  And, as often happens when one member of a family is momentarily indecisive, afraid, or hysterical, the other takes heart and saves the situation. The woman begins moving faster—quickly placing the shelf atop the piano, gathering the records, removing the blanket and quickly washing it in the bath.

  It turns out there are still some towels left—a little one on a hook in the kitchen and two drying on a radiator in the bath.

  “It’s all right,” the woman tells Lulu. “We’ll make it.”

  Not only that, she immediately finds a screwdriver and gathers the screws from the fold-out sofa and screws them back in tight, then folds it into its daytime position.

  There!

  It had been so easy to destroy everything, and it is so hard to fix, clean, and order it again. She has to bend, crawl into corners, gather shards, carry out trash, drive the screws back in! The television is the worst. She has to wait for dark and then throw it out the window with all her might, then pick it up downstairs—the woman lives in a walk-up—and carry the remains to the trash in her little grocery cart.

  It is as if a war had ravaged the territory of the m-d’s peaceful apartment—a veritable war.

  The living room looks empty without the television and the chairs.

  But a person can make do without all sorts of things, so long as she’s still alive. There is nothing to watch, true, but all of a sudden in the darkness you could make out a shelf of the m-d’s favorite books. She puts on her once-favorite record—the tango!

  Then, as the music plays, she begins to go through the backpacks and suitcases filled with her old clothes. Her whole life unspools before her, like a newsreel. The beloved apparitions rise up before her and around her, though none of the old things quite fit the m-d anymore—she must have grown fat sitting in front of the TV all day. All right. She has a few pieces of fabric, and there is a sewing machine in the corner of the closet, and she could probably put together a reasonable skirt to go with the several blouses that still more or less close on her.

  And anyway for many years the m-d has worn only her old and ragged things, keeping her clean and nearly brand-new clothing for special occasions—which never arrived.

  As she is working this out for herself, the m-d also gathers a big bag of old clothes and shoes, recalling the shades of men who’d greeted her last trash trip with such enthusiasm.

  God, what a life now opens before the m-d! But the cat still sits in shock in the hallway, like someone who’s
lived through too much, and stares ahead at the same spot with murky, unseeing eyes.

  Then suddenly the cat pricks up her ears.

  The woman laughs.

  Obviously the building is settling, drying, aging, boards are cracking—that’s first of all. Moreover in all these apartments above, below, and to the sides, people are living, living people, and some of them are moving, something is breaking or being fixed, something is falling or cooking. “That’s life!” says the woman loudly, addressing herself, as always, to the cat.

  As for Lulu, she stands up lightly and heads for the kitchen, raising her front paws slowly, like a heavy tigress, which is strange given her emaciated state. Then she deliberately sits herself at her place, her nose to the corner, leans over, and takes a piece of fish into her mouth, nodding her head. She’s decided to live.

  Fairy Tales

  The Father

  THERE ONCE LIVED A FATHER WHO COULDN’T FIND HIS CHILDREN. He went everywhere, asked everyone—had his little children come running in here? But whenever people responded with the simplest of questions—“What do they look like?” “What are their names?” “Are they boys or girls?”—he didn’t know how to answer. He simply knew that his children were somewhere, and he kept looking. One time, late in the evening, he helped an old lady carry her bags to her apartment. The old lady didn’t invite him in. She didn’t even say thank you. Instead she suddenly told him to take the local train to the Fortieth Kilometer stop.

  “What for?” he asked.

  “What do you mean, what for?” And the old lady carefully closed the door behind her, bolting it and fastening the chain. Yet on his very first day off—and it was the middle of a cold, northern winter—he went off to the Fortieth Kilometer. For some reason the train kept stopping, for long stretches of time, and it was beginning to grow dark when they finally reached the station.