Ali-Baba leaped off the filthy sheets and changed into her clothes in the reeking darkness. She perched on a chair by the desk and cried softly. Now she understood why he was alone, why he hadn’t protested when his wife left him with a tiny room and took a whole apartment. To the accompaniment of Victor’s snoring, Ali-Baba reviewed her life and swallowed the pills. The next morning Victor found her lying facedown on the desk. He read her note and called an ambulance. Paramedics pumped Ali-Baba’s stomach, then took her to a mental hospital. Shaking with a hangover, Victor pulled on some clothes and trotted off to work to wait for the liquor store to open.
Ali-Baba was lying in a clean bed in a ward for the insane. She would stay there at least a month. Soon there would be a hot breakfast and a conversation with a friendly doctor. Later, as she knew, her neighbors would swap life stories. Ali-Baba also had a story or two to share. She wanted to tell them, for example, about the first time she took pills, when she went blind for twenty-four hours. The second time put her to sleep for two days, but the sixth time she woke up in the morning fresh as a daisy.
HALLELUJAH, FAMILY!
Two Deities
In reality, life doesn’t stop with a wedding, with heroic action, or with happy coincidence, as in films, when a certain person misses his boat (Titanic) or, as in this case, when an unmarried woman of thirty-five decides to keep the child born of a random tryst with a boy of twenty. They were having a little office party; all five employees were dancing and drinking, including our Evgenia Konstantinovna (Genya), the senior editor in glasses. Young Dima, their courier, looked at his watch with a tragic expression, because he lived far outside the city and the subway had already stopped running for the night. Never mind, he told them, I’ll get there somehow (it was a cold November night). Evgenia Konstantinovna and Dima spent that night together.
How did it happen? Upon arriving home, with the uneasy Dima in tow, Genya saw her grandmother’s cane in the corner of the hall. Her grandmother had practically raised Genya. Later on, she sold her country house to buy Genya a studio apartment in Moscow. The grandmother, of course, now visited without warning—she had her own set of keys. And if Genya wasn’t home, then her grandmother would stay all night waiting for her.
The cane in the corner suggested this might be one of those nights. Very quietly Genya made up a kind of bed for Dima on the narrow kitchen sofa, using a towel and a tablecloth for sheets. She gave him another towel for the shower, then showered herself. When she came out she found Dima curled up on the short sofa like a dollar sign. He was clearly suspecting something—young boys are scared of older women, just like girls are scared of grown men. Poor Genya lowered her head onto the kitchen table and quietly began to cry. She couldn’t tell him about the cane—he wouldn’t understand. As everyone in the office knew, he lived in the same house as his two beloved grandmothers, not to mention his mother and aunt. All those women must have doted on him ever since he was a baby, and now he began to stroke Genya’s hair, gently pulling her toward him. They managed to fit on the tiny sofa. Dima didn’t dare undress Genya; he simply hiked up her skirt. The first time was chaotic, the second a little better paced—during army service Dima had acquired theoretical knowledge, which he now applied. The grandmother never left the room.
Early in the morning Dima jumped off the sofa, kissed Genya on the forehead, and ran off to his remedial courses. They never slept together again, but eight and a half months later Genya gave birth to a son.
Why did she keep the baby? When later that morning she finally peered into the room, she didn’t find anyone there, just the cane and her grandmother’s purse in their usual places. Genya’s next-door neighbor told her that, coming home late from the theater, she found the grandmother in the doorway, unconscious. The ambulance didn’t come for an hour, but when they finally took her, the grandmother was still alive. The neighbor’s voice was full of reproach. Two weeks later, having buried her grandmother, Genya vowed to keep the child who was now her only family—a touching but impractical decision.
Dima soon transferred to another department as a junior editor; he was preparing to enter college, was overworked, and always greeted Genya with a luminous smile, the way people greet their old teachers whom they’d love to chat with if only they had time. By spring, however, his sunny expression became a mask of stunned politeness, for Genya had grown very big and shuffled around heavily; she still looked relatively well groomed, despite the ungodly heat, only her lips had puffed up like an African woman’s, and she constantly wiped them with a big crumpled handkerchief. Dima continued to smile politely at her, appearing not to notice her transformed body. An innocent country boy, he didn’t seem to understand what causes what and how long it takes.
But Genya’s department could tally the months, even though they knew nothing of what had happened to Genya, who never made a secret of anything, and who was much loved and trusted by her colleagues. Toward the end, one of her colleagues, Artem Mikhailovich, Genya’s devoted admirer, took Dima aside and informed him that soon he was going to become a father. A child was going to have a child. Dima beamed his usual smile. For the last time Genya passed through the cafeteria like a yacht, white with blue shadows under her eyes, but Dima still noticed nothing. All May he was gone, studying for the final exams at his extension school. He came back for a month and then disappeared again, to stand his university entrance exams.
In the middle of August he appeared again. Artem stopped him in the corridor and informed Dima he was a father to a son. Here’s the address.
Three of Genya’s colleagues went to the hospital to greet her at the gate, in accordance with tradition. The department’s head, Svetlana, carried flowers, vodka, and cake for the nurses. Artem carried a passel of baby clothes. Dasha carried Genya’s personal items. All three were pleased: their mom was no worse than others. They gave everything to the attending nurse and sat down on the porch beside a small crowd of someone’s country relatives. Among grandmas in kerchiefs and uncles in cloth caps they spotted the shining Dima with a bouquet of gladioli—it was his family, it turned out. Finally Genya herself appeared with a nurse.
Dima received the baby from the nurse’s arms and presented it to his family. Grandmas took a long look and proclaimed, “Dima’s!” The uncle produced a bottle and plastic cups from his sack, and everyone drank to the baby’s health. Then Genya took the child, waved everyone good-bye, and departed in a cab with a girlfriend. Genya’s colleagues and Dima’s confused relatives began to walk to the subway. Dima was beaming; he told Svetlana his college exams had gone well.
A year passed. Genya returned to work. Times were hard. The nanny consumed Genya’s entire salary, while Genya subsisted on bread and potatoes and dressed in hand-me-downs. Like many impoverished women she gained a lot of weight. At work she no longer smiled and always tried to leave early. Dima, skinny as a stick, was still on the floor below, working full-time and studying at night. Despite being overworked, he visited little Egor every Saturday, sitting by his crib and watching over him. He slept in the kitchen. His family was dirt-poor, it turned out, and both brother and uncle drank heavily. The uncle soon died. Before Dima finished his six-year college marathon, his brother died, too, also from moonshine poisoning. Only a single aunt was left, and Dima stayed with her in her two-room apartment in Moscow. He was a full editor now, with a college degree. Genya, who had long given up the unaffordable nanny, sent the boy to a boarding preschool, where he stayed Monday through Friday. Every Friday night Dima picked him up and brought him home to Genya. He stayed with them on weekends. On Mondays he took the boy back to his school.
Little Egor called Dima Papa. He had both papa and mama, like other children. When the boy was to go to first grade, Dima moved his family to the apartment bequeathed to him by his aunt, whose crutches were still standing in a corner. In spite of the smell of frugal poverty, the apartment was clean, with freshly washed floors, homespun runners, and a white cloth on the kitchen table. Little Egor fel
l in love with his new home, where he had his own little room and a real desk, which papa had found and fixed for him. Genya quit her old job and began selling potted plants at an outdoor market. Dima was admitted to graduate school and picked up some teaching there; in addition, he tutored high school students. They had a small house in the country, Dima’s old family nest, where they spent summer weekends and where Genya grew her plants. She rented out her studio apartment.
They never fought. Occasionally Dima drank himself unconscious—the legacy of generations of alcoholics—but Genya knew how to end his binges. In a brilliant move she saved some money and bought him a secondhand car. Dima spent all his free time under that car, fixing and tuning. Now they could travel to the country in comfort, in their own vehicle, instead of a packed commuter train with a sweaty crowd and their luggage.
Is that it? Not quite. First: Genya never married Dima. Second: Although life had hardened Dima and Genya to the strength of steel, little Egor grew into a softhearted boy without will or ambition. One could see in him the ghosts of Dima’s male ancestors—useless, sweet-natured drunks—while on his mother’s side the story of his conception foretold frivolity and random liaisons.
Sobered and grim, mother and father looked back on their few minutes of half-naked passion on the cramped kitchen sofa, that sinful, impure moment when their child was conceived. What will become of him? the poor parents asked themselves as they disciplined little Egor, who always smiled and gave away his possessions and longed for friendship and kisses and hugs. After punishments he often cried in his little room and then threw himself on the necks of his only family, his only loved ones, his two grave deities—Papa and Mama. He’d weep and forgive, while they froze in a grim foreboding.
Father and Mother
Where do you live, light-footed Tanya? In what little apartment with white curtains have you built a nest for yourself and your little ones? Quick and resourceful, you find time for everything, and fear of tomorrow never disturbs your sleep.
In what pits of misery this miracle of efficiency grew, this oldest girl in a family of many daughters and a single boy, whom Tanya’s mother carried at her breast to the final days of her marriage when she would run after her husband almost every morning to prevent him from escaping to his so-called job? Tanya’s mother was filled with despair; again he was escaping her clutches. She gathered her last reserves of strength and chased him with the baby in her arms just to knock the cap off his head with her free hand—all this in view of the neighbors, other military families, who had witnessed dozens of such scenes.
The mother was sick with hatred for her husband, for that scoundrel who betrayed the family daily. Every night he returned home to rock the youngest child, but even this innocent gesture she interpreted as an admission of guilt, a sham confirmation of his fatherhood to which, she felt, he had no right. They almost tore the baby in half. The children seemed little more than material evidence of her suffering and inhuman labor, which her husband daily trampled into dirt. During her ravings he shook with fear that the neighbors would hear, but the neighbors in that small military town had long been aware. She had told them everything, and how the wives pitied her, called her intimately Petrovna and advised her to go to his Party supervisor since things were so bad.
Still the father stayed, came home every night with peaceful intentions and a blithe expression on his face, always at eleven sharp, never earlier; he had never in his life come home earlier—it was his ironclad rule. And every night he found the same tableau: none of the children was asleep; his tearful wife was sitting up in bed, the youngest at her breast. If the father attempted to put the kids to bed in his gentle way, Tanya’s mother pulled them away, screaming that no one was going to sleep, since that was what he wanted. Let everyone admire their so-called father—fresh from somebody’s bed where he was kissing God knows what with his filthy mouth, and now he wanted to kiss his innocent daughters and jump into their beds, and so on.
The squalor of that household was beyond description, because the mother did her housework sloppily, saving her energy for the high point of her day: for eleven at night, which bled into midnight and later, so the children got no sleep and couldn’t get up in the morning for school. The mother went further in her sacred rage, appearing at the officers’ mess with the little one and kicking her husband as he walked out the door, as if to disprove the conventional wisdom that such methods never brought anyone’s husband back (quite the opposite). Leaving behind her children unfed, she’d chase her husband through town, screaming the most horrible things—that, say, she had found bloody rags tucked in a hole in the wall and that Tanya had had a miscarriage by her father.
No one understood what Tanya’s mother was hoping to achieve with these displays; possibly all she really wanted was to shatter the illusion her husband had been trying to create for the children’s sake, with his nonchalance and conciliatory manner. Of course the mother knew that people had sympathy for her husband and wanted to protect him from her. Once, someone warned him that she was on her way to the store, where she knew he would be buying small presents for her and the girls (it was Women’s Day, when even little girls expected at least a flower from their fathers), and he managed to escape through the back door.
Despite all this ugliness, a baby was born almost every year, and the last one, the only boy, was born just six months before the father finally left. What inspired their conjugal embraces, how and when father and mother became one, was a mystery to everyone—even to the smartest in the family, Tanya, who watched her parents closely.
The mother wouldn’t give up her attempts to humiliate her husband, and she sank deeper and deeper into shame while he maintained some semblance of family cohesion at all costs and refused to be kicked out on her terms. Eventually the least determined combatant stopped caring about the outcome of this endless rout and walked away, exhausted. Tanya’s father was transferred to another garrison, with damage, it was whispered, to his career. So he had every reason not to show his face to his long-suffering family. He settled in a new place with some woman who was said to be much more common than Petrovna.
Tanya stayed at home one more year, until she turned seventeen. Then she was noticed by Victor, an electrician in town on a temporary contract, who saw right away what treasure had fallen into his hands. The first night, on the way back from the dance hall, she agreed to move away with him, and the following morning they left, even though the mother had told her she couldn’t cope without Tanya and that the children would suffer. “Enough,” Tanya (reportedly) said. “I’ve had enough.” And she set off with her older (twenty-four-year-old) electrician and never once looked back.
Everything that happened to her afterward—homelessness, then a landlady who drank nothing but kefir and tried to hang herself every March but was rescued by her son—all this adversity she considered happiness, and not a shadow of doubt or despair ever touched her.
The Impulse
What terrible fits she threw, this proud fighter for love! It’s incredible what she went through. Take, for example, her departing husband’s good-bye punch that knocked one of her front teeth inward (they managed to pull it back out). Take her children: the daughter would hang up after ten seconds of Dasha’s sobbing; the son, well, he had to stay with her, with his mother—there was nowhere to go. They survived in her moldy shack outside the city, the mother and her young son. The boy went to the village school; they bought their groceries at the understocked local store: potato chips, ice cream, and frozen pizza, on occasion bread and butter—there was nothing more on offer. That’s where she and her son stayed year-round except for the time she chased her lover, the light of her life, who happened to be a most ordinary man—stingy and not particularly young. She shaved her head from all the stress, but everything looked becoming on her: her permanent fatigue and near emaciation, her cracked lips, shaved head, dilated eyes.
Until recently Alyosha’s life had been well and good. He had a wife, who w
as a foreign national, a son in college, a pleasant apartment in a comfortable European country, a summerhouse in Lithuania, and, in addition to all that, any number of quick liaisons during business trips. (His fling with Dasha began with a quick roll on a hotel bed during one such trip.) Then, the following summer, his company sent him to Moscow on a long assignment and rented him an apartment. That was where Dasha visited him, leaving her young son alone in the shack. During Dasha’s absences the boy subsisted on ice cream and frozen pizza, which he and his village friends would try to heat up on his father’s old grill. Dasha didn’t mind; on the contrary, she was proud of her son’s resourcefulness. (Here are some potatoes for you, Son; try to cook them as well!) On each of her passionate visits, however, Dasha had to roll out of bed in time to catch the last train back to the shack. How the two lovers howled and wept at those partings!
Suddenly the skies brightened. Dasha managed to find a spot in a summer camp for her son. As soon as the boy left, she dashed to the city to announce to her “husband” that for the next twenty-four days they belonged to only each other. (She did this in person because he wouldn’t answer his phone.) She was planning to surprise her beloved in their love nest with a romantic dinner. But upon reaching the front door, she discovered that the key to his apartment was missing from her key ring.
There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself Page 4