Dasha stared wildly at Alyosha’s windows. His balcony was directly above the first-floor balcony, which was protected by iron bars. She and Alyosha used to wonder why anyone would want to live imprisoned behind those ugly bars. They had decided that potential burglars could climb up them to get to their balcony, which meant they, too, should install bars, and so should the people above them, and so forth. That’s how they would joke, these carefree owners of nothing, who had no property in the city or anywhere near it except for Dasha’s crumbling country shack. The shack, it was true, was in an upscale area. Here we must point out that this Dasha wasn’t exactly broke; we are not talking about a penniless divorcée with a child—not at all. Dasha was making more money in her job than her cuckolded husband or even this Alyosha, her most recent passion. She only appeared to be a charity case; in fact, ground had been broken on the site of her new mansion.
But now this successful Dasha felt she must enter her lover’s house. Who knew when he’d be back? She couldn’t just sit and wait, this impulsive nymph, could she? She scrambled up the bars of the first-floor balcony and hopped up to the second. Alyosha’s balcony door was unlocked.
Dasha stepped into the hall with delicious anticipation. She was going to get a drink of water from the kitchen when something caught her eye: a semi-unpacked suitcase in the bedroom, a purse by the bed, and the bed itself, which looked like the site of a recent sexual conquest—Dasha noticed fresh milky spots on a rumpled towel.
So, Alyosha had just slept with another woman. From the kitchen came sounds of cooking—the slut was obviously making use of Dasha’s new porcelain chopping board—and also of an intimate conversation between the slut and Alyosha. The slut was making herself at home here—and not for the first time, that was clear.
Dasha was hysterical. She stumbled into the kitchen, choking on her snot and tears, appealing to her “husband” for reassurance, the very husband who had just screwed another woman. She screamed at the terrified hag, who held a chopping knife in midair. Looking through her tears, Dasha stretched out her arms toward the blurry figure, the pale, frightened Alyosha, who could be heard muttering something.
Her performance that day was the cry of a betrayed, rebellious soul. Never again did she produce a monologue of such force. She gave one final moan, spun around, and flew out of the apartment. Once outside, she ran blindly through the traffic to the highway, and there she halted to flag down a car with a shaking hand. This was where her impulse let go of her, finally, and she was overtaken by Alyosha, who got into the car with her and rode out to her shack—for good.
It was his wife, he told her. She had arrived without warning.
So the wife had arrived, the phone had been disconnected, and the door to the apartment had been locked with a special safety button to trap burglars inside—only Dasha and Alyosha knew about it. On her way out, Dasha had unlocked this clever button without thinking. The wife, however, couldn’t have known about it; it must have been Alyosha who locked it against Dasha’s arrival. Also, what could have happened to her key? How could it have disappeared from the ring?
In all their life together she didn’t ask her husband these questions, not once.
Hallelujah, Family!
This, in short, is what happened.
1. A young girl worked as a secretary during the day and took classes at night. She came from a respectable family, although her mother had a certain history:
2. She was the illegitimate child of two mothers and one father. You see,
3. there were two sisters: one was married, the other was just fifteen, and she got pregnant by her brother-in-law, who hanged himself while she gave birth to a daughter she hated.
4. That daughter grew up, got married, and had a baby, a daughter.
5. That daughter was our little secretary/student, Alla. Our Alla began to go out with men as soon as she turned fifteen. Her mother cried and scolded her, but nothing helped, and the mother began to lose her mind. In addition to which she was diagnosed with an illness
6. that promised immobility. She and Alla got along horribly, because
7. Alla was raised by her grandmother (3), who hated her daughter, Alla’s mother, and who at thirty-five took her little granddaughter to live with her in a provincial town where she shared a house with her uncle, a much older man.
8. Who knew what lay behind the cohabitation of a fifty-year-old uncle and his niece, who were the only ones left from a large family after all the wars, arrests, divorces, forced and unforced deaths?
9. Then they were joined by little Alla. The girl lived in fear that her mother, Elena, would eventually take her back, and once had a nightmare in which her mother was an evil witch.
10. But nothing could be done: her mother and father missed her, and soon after this nightmare the girl went back to Moscow, where she entered first grade. Poor Elena: the middle link in this chain, hated on both sides—by her child and by her mother.
11. Then Alla, unmarried, gave birth. Her mother, stooped over, shuffled around, washing diapers, cooking, cleaning. All this she did grudgingly, as there was no money in the house. Elena lived on her invalid’s pension; her husband had died, and Alla wasn’t working, having just given birth to a daughter, Nadya. Elena’s memory of her terrible past—of her illegitimate father’s death in the noose, of her quiet teenage mother—weighed Elena down, and she nagged and nagged poor Alla, who’d huddle by the baby’s crib and try not to cry.
12. Little Nadya had a father, but he lived with Alla only sporadically, considering her used-up material. He had made her pregnant twice, and when it happened the third time, Victor—who saw himself not as a future father but simply as a facilitator of another abortion—put Alla in a cab and directed the driver to the same hospital. He told the driver to wait, walked Alla to the ward, and pecked her on the cheek. This time, though, he left before she changed into the sterile hospital robe, so he didn’t take her street clothes from her.
13. Alla spent the night in the ward, thinking—that she was twenty-five, that Victor had left her, that all her future held were random liaisons with married men. As morning approached, Alla hugged her belly and felt she had a family, that she was no longer alone.
14. She put on her street clothes and left the hospital.
15. Victor never called. Alla was taking her exams; she was a good worker, and her boss had agreed to promote her to engineer before she got her diploma. As for her belly, nobody noticed anything; her colleagues decided that skinny girl had finally blossomed. At the same time, an attractive intern started at the office and assumed Alla’s old secretarial position.
16. Alla did mention to her boss, at a good moment, that she and her mother were in bad shape; that they needed extra money for the mother’s medications.
17. But she never revealed her pregnancy, neither to him nor to Victor, whom she ran into during finals. The rogue took one look at Alla’s swollen breasts and invited her to his place after the exam.
18. Alla politely greeted Victor’s mother, Nina Petrovna, whom she’d always liked. (It’s not uncommon for estranged daughters to look for mother figures in older women.) Nina, too, was well disposed to Alla: she was the only girl Victor brought to the apartment openly.
19. In his tiny shoebox of a room, Victor entered Alla like she was his old home. Everything was familiar—the smell, the skin; only the body itself was different, and Victor couldn’t get enough of it. You just don’t age, he kept telling her in the dark. Finally they went out into the living room. Victor made some tea, and that’s when Alla announced
20. that things had changed. Victor was sure Alla’s transformation was attributable to a new affair, and he chewed his cookie regretfully.
21. That’s right, Alla said. I’ve met someone, and I love him as much as I love you.
22. Ah, well, Victor sighed, and kept on chewing.
23. We are going to have a baby.
24. What? Another baby? Victor felt sleepy and confused. He just wante
d to be left alone.
25. Then it occurred to him that perhaps Alla knew how to determine pregnancy right after the act—girls these days knew all kinds of things. When did you get knocked up? he croaked.
26. In September!
27. In September? I see….
28. She explained what had happened at the hospital, but he refused to believe her. Two weeks later he proposed to the daughter of a nice family that lived in a house with clean floors and polished furniture. The girl resembled Marguerite from Faust: blond hair, blue eyes, endless braid.
29. However, some friends informed Nina Petrovna that Alla was pregnant by her son, and so she boycotted the wedding, which was held a month later.
30. Victor must have sensed some danger from the beautiful Alla, from her full breasts, her moist mouth, silky hair—he must have sensed that this gorgeous body was meant to seduce him, as Alla’s fifteen-year-old grandmother, consciously or unconsciously, had seduced her brother-in-law, who thereby became the husband of two sisters and so quickly dispatched himself.
31. Victor wanted to find refuge in his ideal Marguerite, but Alla’s belly grew remorselessly, and on his birthday Alla presented it to him, like a gift.
32. To cheat fate, Victor signed a three-year contract at a big industrial site two thousand miles away. He reckoned that in three years they’d all forget about him, including Alla, who’d find herself a husband. It was like a temporary suicide, he thought, a thing that everyone desires at some point—to step out for a while, then come back to see what happened.
33. Victor partied all night before his departure, and Alla was there, too, at his mother’s invitation, ballooned like a drowned corpse, with cracked black lips. By the morning he had second thoughts about his impending three-year death and lost some of his nerve—but what could he do? Life in his hometown with swollen Alla appeared no less terrible, for only teenagers are drawn to everything that reminds them of their earliest days. Besides, Victor was in love again, with a superbly skinny and lithe contortionist named Zhanna, whose amateur act he’d caught in a nearby town where he’d gone to escape his amiable but unyielding mother. After the performance Victor slipped out and waited for Zhanna by the back entrance. He walked her to the bus, took down her address, and the next day met her in Moscow at her dorm. They took a walk through a park where trees were beginning to turn, and Victor’s only reward was a kiss on her bony little hand.
34. With Zhanna’s address in his wallet, and shedding bitter tears, Victor was dragged by one of his buddies to the train station.
35. At the industrial site, Victor shared a single room with a young married couple. They arrived a day after he did and were embarrassed to find him lying on a bed in their assigned room. But it wasn’t a mistake: housing was tight, and with this couple Victor witnessed the entire cycle of child-making, up to the day the young mother returned from the hospital with her baby. The baby was covered with a septic rash—his whole little head felt like a cactus due to the tiny bumps. His parents bowed before this new catastrophe and tended to him day and night until he got better. Victor did what he could, didn’t sleep either, and ran around to various offices trying to get them alternate accommodations. Then one day he stopped by their place to pick up the couple’s paperwork, and the young mother, who was trying to nurse, looked at him with such intense hatred that he thought, What am I doing? If this is death, there is no room for me here.
36. He’d accumulated several notes from Zhanna as well as a number of letters from Alla with pictures of little Nadya, who was a replica of Victor plus dimples and curls. His mother also wrote—that Alla’s life with her mentally ill mother (2–5) was becoming unbearable, that the crazy woman had put washing detergent in Nadya’s cereal and wouldn’t let Nina Petrovna see her own granddaughter.
37. On receiving this news Victor felt uneasy, almost scared, for until now the fact that he could return home anytime made his life at the industrial site a little more bearable. Now, he realized his mother would probably move little Nadya to their apartment, and also Alla, so there wouldn’t be anywhere for him to go.
38. Then he caught his wretched roommate looking at him as though she wished him dead, and suddenly he understood why these wretched people were so indifferent to his attempts to find them a separate room: all they wanted was for him to disappear, to let them be; a separate room he needed really for himself, so he could bring there Tanya, Galya, and Liuba.
39. Zhanna had stopped writing and wouldn’t answer his calls. Victor spent half the night at the post office in the nearest town trying to reach her, and in the end fell asleep on a chair inside the phone booth. The first bus back to the industiral site was at four in the morning. On his way through the dark he upset a basin full of water for the child who woke with a wail; his parents crawled out of bed, blind with exhaustion; Victor tried to collect the water; the baby kept wailing….
40. In the morning Victor went to the personnel office and handed in his resignation on the grounds that in eleven months he hadn’t received housing. Zhanna was seducing him with her silence.
41. I guess I’ll marry her, he decided with tears in his eyes. Nina Petrovna had sent him a telegram that romantic Marguerite had divorced him in absentia.
42. Free at last! he thought happily, and pictured Zhanna’s face.
43. Although it was a bit strange, he considered, that Nina Petrovna had reported the news so openly in a telegram.
44. Two weeks later Zhanna was scheduled to meet him at the station. In fact, the whole gang was there.
45. It was August, and the small train platforms outside Moscow were filled with brightly dressed vacationers. Victor was peering through a dusty coach window, trying to make out Zhanna’s silhouette, but instead he saw two women and a stroller with a rather big baby, and one of the women was crying, covering her face. Nina Petrovna wasn’t crying—she lifted the baby and held it in front of her like a shield.
MY LITTLE ONE
Give Her to Me
This Christmas story has a sad beginning and a happy ending. It begins in March with a certain Misha, a struggling composer from the provinces. He’d written a dozen children’s songs and two symphonies, Fifth and Tenth, so named as a joke. Misha survived by moonlighting at clubs with various bands. Onstage he wore a lace blouse and a fake bust, like Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot. That spring he was hired to write a score for a senior show at a drama school, an assigment for which he got paid by the hour, next to nothing. He wrote in his kitchen, at night, while his wife’s family, who unanimously despised Misha, slept nearby.
Now enters our second character, an extremely thin and unattractive senior at the drama school. Karpenko (her last name) was one of those unfortunate creatures forced to compensate for their appearance with a pleasant disposition and a carefree attitude. She was accepted to the school for her undeniable talent, but a successful actress needs other qualities—no one quite knows exactly what: feminine charm, perhaps, or steely ambition. Karpenko was as humble as a beggar. While her classmates rode off with their admirers in expensive cars, she inspired interest solely from her graying professors of voice and dance. Although she practiced at the barre every day, her froglike appearance condemned her to roles of servants and old ladies who neither sing nor dance.
Luckily Karpenko was assigned the part of a horse, with a little dancing, in the senior show Getting Matches, which was based on a Finnish novel. Her voice professor insisted that Karpenko perform one short song. As there were no songs in the play, Karpenko and Misha met in an empty auditorium to write one. Misha composed a catchy tune, and Karpenko assembled some lyrics. Misha, impressed, batted his eyes and shook his head in disbelief.
Karpenko, blind with happiness, flew to her dorm. No one had ever looked at her with such admiration. She’d grown up in the Far North, in a family of political exiles. Her ancestors owned country estates and danced in their own ballrooms, but now the family counted as many as four children, the mother worked as a nurse, and th
ey all lived off their vegetable patch. The Karpenko women were known for their reticence and regal beauty, but the little froggy took after her father, a bush pilot who left his family when he retired. A little later Karpenko departed for the capital to become an actress, and her mother seemed to forget her. They didn’t meet for five years. To get from the capital to her village, one had to ride the train for seven days, then a bus for thirty-six hours, then another bus, which sometimes didn’t run, for seven more. Froggy’s letters went unanswered for three, four months.
Misha and Karpenko had a fruitful collaboration, and at the end of March the play was performed before the faculty and students. The maestro praised the part of the horse, especially her tap dance, and the voice professor bored everyone with a lecture on how to teach singing to students with insufficient talent. The audience loved the horse and yelled “Bravo!” Misha and Karpenko, both exhausted, took a long time packing their music and texts. By the time they finished, the subway was no longer running. They climbed up to the attic, and there, on an old mattress, Misha betrayed his wife for the first time, and Karpenko became a woman. That summer their play was performed at a student festival in Finland, where Karpenko was named the best supporting actress. Her certificate, written in Finnish, was displayed in the department.
The maestro selected a new professional company. Municipal authorities allowed them to use a warehouse on the city outskirts. The maestro’s old friend Mr. Osip Tartiuk became the company’s general manager. He proceeded to cast about for a new play, as Finnish-singing horses couldn’t be expected to attract much interest in that blue-collar neighborhood or among the theater’s municipal benefactors. Karpenko didn’t win the job. Tartiuk liked his women fat; on every heavy derriere he commented, “What a centaur!” At the banquets, after the third glass, he liked to confess he was interested in only a large butt.
There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself Page 5