There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  • • •

  In the beginning, “we” meant, first of all, our hosts, Serge and Marisha, and their daughter, Sonya, who stoically slept in the next room through the racket. (All three are now my relatives—such is the absurd result of our communal life.) Then there was myself, for no good reason; my husband, Kolya, Serge’s oldest friend; Andrey the informer, first with his wife, then with a string of temporary women, and finally with a new wife, Nadya; then there was Zhora, whose mother is Jewish, something no one but me ever mentions; and then Tanya, a blond Valkyrie, Serge’s favorite—sometimes, when especially drunk, he stroked her hair.

  Once, there was also Lenka, a D-size beauty, twenty years old. At first Lenka behaved like a common con artist: at the record store, where she worked, she talked herself into Marisha’s favor, borrowed twenty rubles from her, and disappeared. Later Lenka reappeared without four front teeth but with Marisha’s twenty rubles and said she had been at the hospital, where they told her she could never have children. Marisha showered her with affection, Serge found her a position at the 36 percent unit, and Lenka replaced her missing teeth and married a young Jewish dissident who turned out to be the son of a famous underground cosmetologist, a fantastically rich woman. According to Lenka, the contents of a single closet in her new home could feed us all for the rest of our days. Lenka, however, didn’t appreciate her new comfortable position and continued to run around the seediest holes. Finally she declared that her husband’s family was immigrating to the United States, via Vienna, but she wasn’t going with them. So she went and divorced her nice Jewish husband, and at our gatherings she developed a new habit of flopping on the lap of every boy in turn. Only Serge she considered untouchable, because he belonged to her deity, Marisha.

  But Andrey the informer wasn’t untouchable, and Lenka regularly mocked him by flopping on his lap, so his super-young new wife, Nadya, turned purple and fled to the kitchen. That Nadya was just eighteen, even younger than Lenka, and looked like a corrupt schoolgirl. No surprise there: as Andrey’s previous wife told everyone, Andrey was impotent. Only something like this Nadya could arouse his interest. When this corrupt nymphet got married, however, she changed her tune and became a plain housewife: what she cooked, what she bought. Her only remaining perversity was a wandering eyeball: at moments of stress it would literally fall out and hang over her cheek like a hard-boiled egg. Andrey, I suppose, lived for these dramatic moments: he would grab Nadya, carry her to the ER, and on those nights, I imagine, he was able to perform.

  Andrey’s life with his previous wife, Aniuta, was similarly punctuated by high drama, involving the attacks of her so-called venomous womb. This venomous womb, which prevented them from having children, was a popular subject among us, their friends. By then we all had had children: Zhora had three, I had my Alesha, and if I missed two Fridays in a row they joked that I was in bed with child, a reference to my figure. Tanya had a son who as a baby crawled all over her, from breast to breast, the mother and child’s favorite amusement. But Andrey and Aniuta were sentenced to childlessness, and we all pitied them; for the whole point was to live normally, to worry about feedings, childcare, illnesses, but then one night a week, on Friday, to escape the routine and relax so completely that the neighbors across the street would call the cops. Then one day, almost without any physical change, Aniuta gave birth to a daughter. That night Andrey bought two bottles of vodka, he and Serge invited my Kolya, and the three of them spent the night boozing. That was the high point of his family life, and after that, I expect, Andrey forsook his conjugal duties for a long time, while Aniuta became an ordinary woman without any venomous womb and expanded her circle of friends, so to speak, especially when Andrey was gone squealing for six months. Andrey found consolation in a string of gorgeous girlfriends, all of whom he brought to Marisha’s.

  Lenka once flopped on my Kolya, too, and Marisha turned away abruptly and began to talk with Zhora. This was when I first began to understand. Lenka, I said, you’ve gone too far: Marisha’s jealous of you. Lenka just grinned and stayed on top of Kolya, who drooped like a little flower. From that moment on, Marisha’s affection for Lenka began to cool, and eventually Lenka disappeared from our gatherings. Lenka never flopped on Zhora, because Zhora, like many runty men, demonstrated constant sexual excitement and was in love with all our girls—Marisha, Tanya, and even frigid Lenka. Flirting with Zhora was dangerous, as one incident demonstrated, when at the end of a dance with Andrey’s girlfriend, Zhora simply grabbed her by the armpits and dragged her into the next room, where he threw her on Sonya’s little bed (Sonya was at her grandmother’s that night). Except for the attacked woman, we all knew, of course, that Zhora only played at being a ladies’ man; that in reality he spent his nights writing a dissertation for his wife and attending to his three children, and only on Fridays did he throw on Casanova’s cloak. But the careful Lenka refused to play sexual games with Zhora, for then it would be two performances: she’d flop on his lap, and he’d have to grope her, which Lenka didn’t enjoy—and neither did Zhora. But Lenka has long been gone, and when I mention her name it’s received as another of my blunders.

  • • •

  Recently my memory grew hazy and I began losing my eyesight. How many years passed in our Friday gatherings? Ten? Fifteen? We heard of the political unrest in Czechoslovakia, then in China, then in Romania, then in Yugoslavia; after that came the news about the trials of the culprits, followed by the trials of those who had protested against the original trials, then the trials of those who had collected money to support the families of the incarcerated dissidents, but all these events rolled past our nest on Stulin Street.

  Occasionally we had a visitor. One night the neighbors summoned the local patrolman to quiet the noise. On Fridays Marisha’s door was always open, so this patrolman, Valera, barged in and demanded to see everyone’s papers. None of our boys had a passport, and the girls Valera didn’t ask, which led us to believe he was looking for someone. After days of nervous phone exchanges we decided that Valera was looking for a certain Lev, a naturalized American whose Russian visa had expired and so he could go to jail for a year. This Lev had been coasting from house to house, but I never saw him at Marisha’s. Her neighbors—a couple of eternal students and their ever-changing lovers—accommodated him for a night, and he, by mistake, took the virginity of the government minister’s daughter, a sophomore in the journalism department. Apparently the girl woke up covered in blood, panicked, and dragged her bloody mattress to the kitchen sink—they didn’t even have a shower in that apartment. The neighbors told us all this with a laugh when they came the next day to borrow a ruble for vodka. The daughter, they said, was now looking high and low for Lev, considering him her intended after the Russian custom, but Lev disappeared from Stulin Street, and the patrolman wasted his visit.

  The following Friday, however, Valera returned to turn off our boom box at five minutes past eleven and didn’t leave. He stayed all night, watching in silence, as we drank. What he wanted remains unclear. Marisha was the first to find the right tone, and addressed him as a misunderstood, lonely young boy. (In that house, everyone was welcome and comforted, but few chose to impose.) Marisha offered Valera bread and cheese with dry wine—all they had on their poor table—and, followed by Serge, engaged him in a conversation. Valera answered their questions calmly and unselfconsciously. Serge asked, for example, if Valera had joined the police to get a Moscow registration, and he said no, he’d had registration before; he chose that neighborhood because of its toughness and because he knew karate. He’d had to quit the sport after an injury: during a practice he didn’t signal to his opponent to stop. “What kind of signal?” I asked. “Well”—he blushed—“one has to cough or, pardon me, pass wind.” I wanted to know how one can fart on demand, but Valera ignored me and proceeded to tell us that things were soon going to change back to where they were under Stalin, when we at least had some order.

  We trie
d to subject Valera to the same mocking interrogation we inflicted on all our guests, but either he was very clever or we were too passive. He deftly avoided our hesitant questioning and revealed nothing of himself or of his work duties and instead went on and on about Stalin, and we were too afraid of his provocations to reveal our own political opinions. Who reveals them anyway? It was considered childish and rude, and so Valera remained untapped and unstudied, and at midnight we all slunk away, but Valera stayed on. Maybe he had nowhere else to spend his shift, or maybe he was in fact waiting for Lev—who knows? We all felt put on the rack. Lenka didn’t sit on anyone’s lap, and Zhora didn’t shout “hey, virgins” at the passing schoolgirls; only I wouldn’t shut up about the one subject he avoided, and he couldn’t do anything—he introduced the subject himself, plus fart wasn’t on the list of obscene words punishable with fifteen days of prison. I alone kept interrupting the flow of Serge’s condescending questions, but Valera didn’t give a damn about Serge’s condescension and persisted in his dangerous speeches about the army and those who control it. “But still, tell us, do they teach you how to fart in the army?” I asked him again and again. “You, obviously, didn’t learn the trick and sustained an injury. . . .” The army, Valera intoned in response, you can’t begin to imagine; hands of gold they have, they know every weapon inside out. . . . Serge asked Valera how often he was on duty and where they gave him a room, and Marisha asked if he was married and had children. Tanya quietly commented on Valera’s most idiosyncratic remarks, always addressing Zhora, who was half Jewish but looked entirely Jewish, as though supporting him in this difficult situation. Zhora was the only one with a passport, and Valera read his data out loud: Georgy Alexandrovich Perevoshchikov, ethnically Russian.

  I was curious to see how Andrey the informer would react to Valera’s presence, but he was calm and reserved. When Valera turned off the music, Andrey had to sit down next to his Nadya, who despite looking like a perverse teenager was dying of banal jealousy. Her father, however, was an army colonel on the rise, and she listened to Valera’s macho speeches through the prism of his lowly rank of lieutenant. She relaxed, went out to call a girlfriend, and then walked off with her Andrey, and Valera said nothing. Who knows, maybe we all could leave and he would have allowed that. But then again, maybe he wouldn’t. In the end Marisha gave up and went to sleep on the floor in Sonya’s room, and Serge stayed to ply Valera with diuretic herbal tea. Yet in the course of the night, Serge reported later, Valera hadn’t once left the room to pee. Serge held it, too, afraid that Valera would search the room in his absence.

  That night Kolya and I made it in time for the subway and, on coming home at half past one, discovered that Alesha was snoozing in front of the television, which was transmitting only static. When I put him to bed, he said he was afraid of the dark and of sleeping alone in the house. The lights were on in every room. He didn’t used to be afraid, but then my father, his grandfather, was still with us. My father died recently, three months after my mother. She died from an illness that began with blindness, the same illness I now seem to have. My parents had raised him, surrounded him with love and care. And now he is to remain completely alone, for I am going to leave soon, too, and as for Kolya, I can’t rely on him to take care of our son. Kolya, so generous and kind to the others, quickly gets bored and irritable at home and yells at Alesha, especially at mealtimes. In addition, Kolya was preparing to leave us, and not just for anyone—for Marisha.

  • • •

  Many years, I’ll repeat, passed over our peaceful Friday gatherings. Andrey the informer turned from a golden-haired Paris into a father, then an abandoned husband, then the owner of a condominium bought for his new wife by her father the colonel, and finally an alcoholic. But as in college, he remained in love with Marisha, who knew and appreciated it. All other women in his life were just replacements. Once or twice a year Andrey performed a sacred ritual, a slow dance with Marisha.

  Zhora grew from an unruly undergraduate into a penniless research fellow with three children, a future star of his field, but his essence remained unchanged, and that essence was his ardent love for Marisha, who had always loved Serge and no one else.

  My Kolya also worshipped Marisha. All our boys lost their heads over Marisha in our freshman year, and their competition continued up until the shocking moment when Serge, who was married to Marisha and alone had rights to her, suddenly up and left her for another woman, whom he had adored, it turned out, since grade school. It happened on New Year’s Eve, in the middle of the charades: he simply got up with an announcement that he must call his beloved, to wish her a happy New Year. Just like that.

  We were all deeply shaken, for if the boys worshipped Marisha, we all of us collectively worshipped Marisha and Serge as a couple. Many years ago Serge fell in love with Marisha and offered her marriage, but Marisha was seduced by a charming scoundrel, a certain Jean, and rejected Serge’s pure first love. After Jean had left her, she crawled back to Serge and proposed marriage to him, forever rejecting the idea of erotic love on the side. She used to say that Serge was a sacred crystal vessel. (“Not easy to make love to,” I would remark.)

  In those early days we lived for camping trips, drinking by the bonfire, mocking everything and everyone. The only aspects of the sexual sphere that caught our attention were my white swimming suit, which turned transparent in the water, and the absence of a lavatory at our camping site, because Zhora complained that in the ocean poop didn’t swim away. Romantic Andrey walked three miles to the TB sanatorium to dance with the patients; Serge expressed his masculinity through scuba diving. At night I could hear rhythmic knocking coming from their tent, but her entire married life, Marisha remained a jittery creature with shining eyes, which didn’t speak well of Serge’s abilities.

  The sexual flame that flickered around Marisha in combination with her inaccessibility held our circle together for so long. The girls loved Serge and wanted to replace Marisha, but at the same time pitied Marisha and wouldn’t betray her. Everything and everyone was full of their undivided, irresistible love, but Serge, the only one with the right of access to the beautiful Marisha, was restless with anger, and one time this ulcer partially broke. We were sitting at the table discussing sexual themes—innocently, for we were pure people and could discuss anything innocently. Someone mentioned the book Sexopathology by a Polish author. Now, that book was an entirely new phenomenon for our society, where every citizen lived as if on a desert island. In the book, I announced, sex is divided into three parts: in the first, the spouses arouse one another by stroking their earlobes! Did you know that, Serge? Everyone froze, and Serge began to shake and sputter and scream that his attitude toward me had always been deeply negative—but what did I care? I knew I had hit the mark.

  • • •

  All this had taken place before Serge rediscovered the love of his life and before the patrolman Valera began his vigils on Stulin Street, and also before I found out that I was losing my eyesight, and definitely before I realized that Marisha was jealous of my Kolya. Suddenly all the knots became untied. Serge stopped sleeping on Stulin Street; our Friday gatherings moved to the room Tanya shared with her teenage son, who was pathologically jealous of her and who had to be moved to Stulin Street, where he spent the night with Sonya. I remarked that it would do them both good, they should get used to sleeping with each other, but as usual no one paid me any attention.

  In between Fridays we were overtaken by a wave of tragic events. Marisha’s father was run over by a car outside her house—he was heavily intoxicated, as the autopsy showed. That night he had had a conversation with Serge, man to man, about his decision to leave Marisha. The conversation took place early, when Sonya was still awake. They were keeping from Sonya that Serge had left the family. Serge came home after work and stayed until nine to put Sonya to bed, then went back to his childhood erotic ideal. Poor Marisha’s father, who himself was onto his second family, walked in
on them right in the middle of this fake family time, said some useless things, and uselessly perished under the car at nine thirty, when there is no traffic.

  During that time my mother melted from 160 pounds to 70. She held up bravely, but right at the end her doctors decided to look for a nonexistent ulcer: they opened her up, then by mistake sewed a bowel to the stomach muscle, leaving her to die with an open wound the size of a fist. When they rolled her out to me, dead, crudely stitched up with a gaping hole in her belly, something happened: I couldn’t understand how this could have been done to a human being, let alone my mother, and began to imagine that my mama was somewhere else, that this couldn’t be her.

  Kolya wasn’t with me that day. He and I had separated five years earlier but didn’t pay for the divorce and continued to live like roommates, as is often done. After my mother’s funeral, though, he informed me that he had paid his share and suggested that I pay, too, and so I did. Three months later my father died from a heart attack, in his sleep: I got up to put a blanket over Alesha and saw that Papa wasn’t breathing. I went back to bed, waited till morning, and saw them both off: Alesha to school and Papa to the morgue.

  • • •

  So I missed several Fridays, and then came Easter, when by tradition we congregate at my house. My parents used to help me with the cooking; then they and Alesha would travel for ninety minutes to our allotment, where they would stay the night in an unheated shack so my guests could party all night in our house. This year I told Alesha that he was going to the allotment alone: he was big enough—seven years old—and knew his way there perfectly. I also forbade him to come back and ring the bell under any circumstances.