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

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  The hapless traveler found himself on the edge of a forest; for some reason he started tramping through snowdrifts until he reached its very heart. Soon he was on a well-beaten path, which in the twilight brought him to a little hut. He knocked on the door, but no one answered. He stepped into the hall, knocked again, and again there was nothing. Then he quietly entered the warm hut, took off his boots, coat, and hat, and began to look around. It was warm and clean inside, and a kerosene lamp was burning. Whoever lived there had just gone out, leaving their tea mug and kettle and bread, butter, and sugar on the table. The stove was warm. Our traveler was cold and hungry, and so, apologizing to anyone who might hear, he poured himself a cup of hot water. Then, after some thought, he ate a piece of bread and placed some money on the table. Meanwhile, outside it had grown completely dark, and the traveling father began to wonder what he should do. He didn’t know the schedule of the trains, and he was in danger of finding himself in a snowbank, especially as the snow had been coming down hard and covering all the paths. The father collapsed on the bench and fell asleep. He was roused by a knock at the door. Raising himself from the bench he said, “Yes—come in.”

  A little child wrapped in some kind of frayed rag entered the hut.

  He stopped at the table and froze, uncertain what to do.

  “Now what’s this?” said the future father, who wasn’t yet fully awake. “Where are you coming from? How did you get here? Do you live here?”

  The child shrugged and said “No.”

  “Who brought you here?”

  The child shook his head, wrapped in his torn-up shawl.

  “Are you by yourself ?”

  “Yes,” said the boy.

  “And your mom? Your dad?”

  The boy sniffled and shrugged his shoulders.

  “How old are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “All right. What’s your name?”

  The boy shrugged once again. His nose suddenly thawed and began to drip. He wiped it on his sleeve.

  “Hold on there!” said the future dad. “That’s why we have handkerchiefs.” He wiped the boy’s nose with a handkerchief and then started carefully taking off the boy’s things. He unwound the shawl and took off the old fur hat and then the little overcoat, which was warm but very shabby.

  “I’m a boy,” the child said suddenly.

  “Well, that’s something already,” said the man. He washed the boy’s hands under the faucet—they were very small, with tiny fingernails. In fact the boy looked a lot like an old man, and at other moments, with his face scrunched up, his eyes and nose puffy, like he was wearing a space helmet. The man gave the boy some sweet tea and began feeding him bread.

  It turned out the boy didn’t know how to drink—the man had to give him the tea with a spoon. The man even began sweating, it was such hard work.

  “All right, let’s put you to bed,” said the man, by now completely exhausted. “It’s warmer on the stove, but you’d fall off. Sleep tight, sleep tight, till the morning comes all bright. We’ll put you on the trunk and surround you with some chairs. Now as for sheets . . .”

  The man searched the hut for a warm blanket but couldn’t find one, and instead put down his warm coat for the child to lie on. He took off his sweater to cover the child with it. And then he looked at the trunk: What if there were something in there, some kind of blanket? The man opened the trunk and removed a blue silk quilted blanket, a pillow with lace, a little mattress, and a pile of little sheets. Under those he found a bundle of thin little shirts, also with lace, and then some warm flannel shirts and a knot of little knit pants, tied together with a light blue ribbon.

  “How do you like that? There’s a whole dowry here!” cried the man.

  “Of course this belongs to another little boy—but all children get equally cold and equally hungry, so they should share with one another!” the future father concluded aloud. “It wouldn’t be right for one child to have nothing, to walk around in rags, while another child has too much. Right?”

  But the child had already fallen asleep on the bench.

  With his clumsy hands the man prepared a luxurious blue bed, very carefully changed the child out of his old clothes and into clean ones, and put him down to sleep. For himself he threw his jacket on the floor next to the trunk and its chairs and covered himself with a sweater. The future father was so tired he fell asleep right away, and slept as he’d never slept before.

  A knock on the door roused him.

  A woman, all encrusted with snow but barefoot, entered the hut.

  Leaping up and shielding the trunk, the man said: “I’m sorry, we made ourselves a little at home here. But I’ll pay you.”

  “Excuse me,” said the woman, not hearing him, “I got lost in the forest. I thought I’d come in here for a minute and warm up. It’s a real blizzard out there; I thought I’d freeze to death. May I?”

  The man realized that this woman didn’t live here, either.

  “I’ll make you some tea,” he said. “Please, sit down.”

  He had to feed firewood to the stove and look for the water bucket in the hall. Along the way he discovered a clay pot with potatoes that were still warm and another one with millet kasha and milk. “All right, we’ll eat this,” said the man. “But the kasha we’ll save for the child.”

  “What child?” said the woman.

  “Why, that one,” said the man, and pointed to the trunk, where the baby slept sweetly, his little arms up over his head.

  The woman knelt before the trunk and suddenly began to weep.

  “Oh God, it’s him, my little one!” she said.

  And she kissed the edge of the blue blanket.

  “Yours?” said the man, surprised. “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know—I haven’t named him yet,” said the woman. “I’m so tired after this night, a whole night of suffering. There was no one to help me. Not a soul in the world.”

  “What is he, then,” said the man suspiciously, “a boy or a girl?”

  “It doesn’t matter—whatever he is, we’ll love him.”

  And once again she kissed the edge of the blanket.

  The man looked closely at the woman and saw that her face really did show traces of suffering—her lips were cracked, her eyes were hollow, her hair hung like string. Her legs turned out to be very thin. But some time passed, and the woman warmed up, apparently, and became prettier. Her eyes began to shine, and her sunken cheeks became rosy. She looked thoughtfully at the ugly, bald little boy. Her arms, holding tightly to the edge of the trunk, trembled.

  The boy, too, changed. He shrank, and now looked like a little old man with a puffy nose and little eyes like slits.

  This all struck the man as very strange—the way the woman and boy changed before his very eyes, literally in an instant. The man even grew frightened.

  “Well, if he’s yours, I won’t bother you anymore,” the failed father said, turning away. “I’ll go. My train is leaving soon.”

  He dressed hurriedly and went away.

  It was already growing light out, and the path, strangely, was clear and well-beaten, as if there had been no blizzard the night before. Our traveler went away from the house quickly and after several hours of walking found himself at a house exactly like the one he’d left. No longer surprised, he went in without even knocking.

  The hall was the same, the room was exactly the same, and just as before there was a teapot on the table and some bread. The traveler was tired and cold, and so without pausing he gulped down the tea, scarfed down a piece of bread, and lay down on the bench and waited. But no one came. Then the man leapt up and threw himself at the trunk. Once again there were kids’ clothes inside, though this time they were warm little clothes—a little coat and hat, tiny little felt boots, warm little flannel pants, even a resplendent snowsuit, and at the bottom of the trunk a little fur sleeping bag with a hood. The man immediately thought that the boy must have nothing to wear out
side—sure, he had some shirts, and all sorts of junk, but that was it! Apologizing to the empty room, he took only the most necessary items—the fur sleeping bag, snowsuit, boots, and hat. Then he also grabbed the sled, which stood in the corner, because he noticed there was another one in the other corner.

  Once again begging forgiveness, he took from the pile of felt boots behind the trunk one adult pair that looked like they would fit a woman—she had been barefoot! With this load he ran as fast as he could through the cold back to the first hut. Already there was no one there. The teapot was still hot, and there was bread on the table. The trunk was empty.

  “She must have dressed him in silk and lace,” said the failed father. “But that’s so silly—I have everything he needs!”

  He ran out the door onto the other path and, dragging the sled behind him, soon caught up with the woman, who could barely stand and even swayed a little. Her bare feet were red from the snow. She carried the child wrapped in all his silky things.

  “Hold on!” cried the father. “Wait! This won’t do at all! First you need to dress a fellow up. I have everything he needs.”

  He took the child from her, and she, obediently, closing her eyes, gave him her burden, and together they walked back to their hut. Only then did the father remember the strange old lady whose bags he had carried home, and he asked the woman: “Tell me, did the old woman give you the address, too?”

  “No,” said the woman, who was nearly asleep on her feet, “she only told me the name of the train station, Fortieth Kilometer.”

  But just then the child started crying, and both of them rushed to change his clothes, and he was suddenly so small that no boots could fit him, and instead they had to put him in diapers, wrap him up in a blanket, and that’s when the fur sleeping bag with its hood came in handy. The rest of it they tied up in a bundle. The woman put on her new boots, and the three of them continued back together. The newfound father carried the baby, and the woman dragged the things, and along the way they forgot all about how they met, and the name of the station. They remembered only that there had been a trying night, a long road, and painful loneliness—but now they’d given birth to a child and found what they’d been looking for.

  The Cabbage-patch Mother

  THERE ONCE LIVED A WOMAN WHO HAD A TINY LITTLE DAUGHTER named Droplet. The girl was just a tiny droplet of a baby, and she never grew. Her mother took her to doctors, but as soon as she showed her to them, they refused to treat her! No, they said—and that was that. They didn’t even ask any questions about her.

  So then the mother decided to play a trick: she wouldn’t show her little Droplet to the next doctor. She went to his office, sat down, and asked: “What should you do if your child isn’t growing properly?”

  To which the doctor replied, as a doctor should: “What’s wrong with the child? What’s the child’s medical history? What is the child’s diet?” And so on.

  “This child wasn’t born,” the poor mother explained. “I found her in a head of cabbage, young cabbage. I took off the top leaf, and there she was, a little cabbage-patch girl, a little dewdrop, this big”—she showed him with her fingers—“a little droplet. I took her with me, and I’ve been raising her ever since, but she hasn’t grown at all, and it’s been two years.”

  “Show me the child,” said the doctor.

  The girl’s mother took out a matchbox she kept in her breast pocket, and out of this matchbox she took half of a hollowed bean, and in that cradle, wiping the sleep from her eyes with her tiny little fists, sat a tiny little girl.

  The mother took a magnifying glass from her purse, and with this magnifying glass the doctor began examining the child.

  “A splendid girl,” the doctor said under his breath. “In good health, well nourished—you’ve done an excellent job, mother. Now get on your feet, little girl. That’s right. Good.”

  The little droplet climbed out of her little bean and walked around on the doctor’s desk, back and forth.

  “Well,” the doctor said. “I’ll tell you this: She’s a splendid girl, but this isn’t the right place for her to live. Now where exactly she should be living, I can’t tell, but definitely not here with us. We’re not the right crowd for her. This isn’t the right place.”

  The mother said: “It’s true. She tells me she has dreams about her life on a distant star. She says everyone there had little wings, and they flew through the fields—she did, too—and she ate pollen and dew from wild flowers, and they had an elder, who was preparing them, because some of them would have to leave, and they all waited in terror for the day their wings would melt—because then their leader would take them to the top of a high mountain, where there was an opening to a cave, and steps leading down to it, and the ones whose wings had melted would descend into the cave, and everyone else watched them as they went down, farther and farther down until they were as small as little droplets.”

  Sitting on the desk, the girl nodded.

  “And then my little princess also had to leave, and she cried and walked down the steps, and that’s where her dream ends, and she wakes up on my kitchen table, in a cabbage leaf.”

  “Interesting,” said the doctor. “And, tell me, what about you? What’s happened in your life? What’s your medical history?”

  “Me?” said the woman. “What’s it matter? I love my girl more than I love my life. It’s so terrible to think she’s going to return to the place she came from . . . As for my history, well, my husband left me when I was pregnant, and I didn’t have the baby . . . I went to a doctor who referred me to a hospital, and there they killed my baby inside me. Now I pray for him. Maybe he’s in that place, in the land of dreams?”

  “Interesting,” said the doctor. “I see now. I’m going to write you a note, and you’ll take it to a certain person. He’s a hermit, and he lives in the forest. He’s a very strange man, and sometimes it’s impossible to find him, but he might help you. Who knows.”

  The woman put her little girl back into the cradle made out of a little bean, put the bean back into the matchbox, put the matchbox back into her pocket, and took her magnifying glass and left—directly for the forest, to look for the hermit there.

  She found him sitting on a pile of garbage near the road. Without uttering a word she showed him the doctor’s note and then pointed at her breast pocket.

  “You need to put her back where you found her,” the hermit said, “and not look at her anymore.”

  “Back where? The produce store?”

  “Stupid woman! Where’d they find her?”

  “In a cabbage patch. But I don’t know where that is.”

  “Stupid woman!” the hermit yelled. “You knew how to sin; you must know how to save yourself.”

  “Where’s the cabbage patch?” the mother asked again.

  “Enough,” said the hermit. “And don’t look at her.”

  The woman cried, bowed down, crossed herself, kissed the hermit’s smelly, frayed sweatshirt, and walked away. When she turned around a minute later, there was no longer any hermit, or any trash pile—just a wisp of fog.

  The woman grew scared and ran. Evening was approaching, and she kept on running through empty fields. Suddenly she saw a patch filled with rows of little cabbage buds poking through the earth.

  It was growing dark out, and the woman stood there in the drizzle, holding her breast pocket, thinking she couldn’t leave her daughter here in the cold and the fog. The girl would get scared and start crying!

  So with her bare hands the woman dug up a big clump of soil and a cabbage bud with it, wrapped this into her slip, and dragged the heavy bundle with her to the city and all the way home.

  As soon as she crossed the doorstep, falling down with exhaustion, she took out her largest pot and placed the clump of soil and the cabbage into the pot and then put all this on her windowsill. And to avoid ever looking at it, she closed the curtain.

  But then she thought: she’d have to water the little cabbage. And
in order to water the cabbage, she’d have to look at it.

  So she took her pot out onto the balcony, into real field conditions. If there was rain, there’d be rain, and if there was wind, there’d be wind, and birds, and so on. If the baby lived and grew inside her, like all other babies, then she’d be protected from the cold and the wind, but her little Droplet was different—she couldn’t hide inside her mother’s body; she’d have only one cabbage leaf to protect her.

  Carefully moving aside the young, firm leaves of the cabbage bud, the mother put her little daughter inside it. Her Droplet didn’t even wake up—in general she loved sleeping and was an unusually quiet, happy, and easygoing child. The cabbage leaves were hard, naked, and cold, and they immediately closed around little Droplet.

  The mother quietly stepped back from the balcony, closed the door, and began living all by her lonesome again, just as before. She went to work, returned from work, prepared herself some food, and never looked out her window to see what was happening with her cabbage plant.

  The summer went by, and the woman wept and prayed. So as to hear even just a little of what was happening out on the balcony, she slept on the floor right next to the door. When there wasn’t any rain, she worried that the cabbage would wilt; when there was rain, she worried that it would drown; but the mother forbade herself to think for even one second about what her little Droplet was doing there, what she was eating and how she was crying, there by herself in her green grave, without a single motherly caress, without any warmth at all . . .

  Sometimes, especially at night, when the rain came down in buckets and the lightning flashed, the woman tore herself up trying not to go out on the balcony and cut down the cabbage plant and take out her little Droplet and feed her a drop of warm milk and put her into her cozy bed. Instead, she ran downstairs and stood in the rain, making quite a spectacle of herself, to show her Droplet that there was nothing scary about rain and lightning. And the whole time she told herself it must have been for a reason that she’d met the filthy hermit-monk and that he’d told her to put her little Droplet back where she found her.