There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  * * *

  Now they are living together in Tamara’s little apartment, away from prying eyes. A.A. eats regularly, before and after visiting the library. Tamara keeps house, looks after him, complains often but receives no sympathy; the blessed path is thorny. A.A. now owns two writing pads, which Tamara has purchased for him. She wants to have his pension recalculated and to make sure he receives benefits like a free subway pass—he used to beg and fake injuries to be let in.

  Tamara’s whole family is up in arms about this cohabitation, especially her nephews, who are terrified that the old fools may marry. They cannot deny, though, that Tamara looks fresher, or that she is full of plans and new energy. For example, she has located that mythical book warehouse and now takes books to nursing homes and hospitals, where people cannot afford them.

  At night they squawk to each other about their day. Tamara complains and recites her grievances, and A.A. doles out advice and admonitions like an austere paterfamilias. Then they go to their beds and read, exchanging notes; in the morning they resume their squawking and arguing. Who knows why this A.A. screams so much—he may be scared of losing her, of finding himself back in the flooded attic.

  She refuses to marry him, although she did once kiss his hand when he was prostrate with illness. At night A.A. cries and howls with grief, but in the morning he plays boss again, and Tamara, barely awake, hurries with his eggs. He continues to show up uninvited at people’s houses, but now he holds himself more assertively and makes frequent allusions to his wife, “so-called Tamara,” and her undefended thesis on Charles Dickens.

  Eggs is the luxury that graces their breakfast table the first three days after pension, but A.A. is shaved and dressed in everything clean, and Tamara walks around in practically new winter boots that A.A. fished out from a Dumpster. A.A. often criticizes her appearance: “So-called Tamara, go fix your hair!” Tamara crawls around her little apartment, always thinking about the next meal for this parasite. Where did he come from, helpless like all parasites and parasitic like all helpless people? And yet he criticizes and instructs, while she has no strength left to look after him. At the end of the day she drags herself to the food market to pick up from the floor squashed veggies and fruit for his dinner. She feels ashamed in the presence of some imaginary friends and nemeses, but she does have a justification: a certain old photo, the holiest of her secrets.

  In the evening he comes home, gobbles down her vegetable stew in a second, and starts flailing his arms again, this time thrashing the very personage whose bibliography or biography he’s been putting together for ten years. The man was a fraud, it turns out, and Tamara says, “I told you so,” and they squawk some more and then watch television, exchanging acerbic comments.

  That night he cannot stay asleep. He wakes up in tears. Tamara Leonardovna tucks him in and blows on his bald forehead, as she would have done for her baby if he had lived. And now for Tamara’s secret: she never believed the baby had died at birth! No, you see, here was her son, with an altered date of birth; he was back to sleep. There is a photo of him, the baby’s father, that she once thought she’d destroyed. It turned up mysteriously in the folder with her yellowing thesis. It’s the same face as A.A.’s, only younger.

  She holds out the photo with a trembling hand, but he pushes it away: “What does that have to do with me? What’s wrong with you? Look at the date: I wasn’t even born yet.” He goes back to watching their tiny old television, and she puts away the photo, wanting to say to him, “My little one.”

  A HAPPY ENDING

  Young Berries

  A mother brought her girl to a sanatorium for sickly children and then left. I was that girl.

  The sanatorium overlooked a large pond encircled by an autumnal park, with meadows and paths. The tall trees seemed ablaze with gold and copper; the scent of their falling leaves made the girl dizzy, after the city’s stench. Once upon a time, the sanatorium was a gentleman’s stately manor, with classical pillars, arched ceilings, and upper galleries. The girls’ dormitory, called a dortoir, was once a drawing room with a grand piano.

  The revolution had repurposed the estate into a sanatorium and school for proletarian children with tuberculosis. By the time the girl reached fifth grade, of course, all Soviet citizens were proletarians. They lived in crowded, communal apartments, traveled in streetcars packed with commuters, waited in lines for seats in public cafeterias, and so on. (They waited also for bread, potatoes, shoes, and, on rare occasions, a luxury like a winter coat; in communal apartments, workers stood in line to use the bathroom.) A well-regulated line represented fairness. One had only to wait long enough for one’s portion, as, indeed, the girl had waited for her spot at the Forest School—that was the name of the sanatorium.

  I cannot describe the girl’s appearance. Appearances cannot reveal inner life, and the girl, who was twelve at the time, carried on a continuous inner monologue, deciding every second—what to say, where to sit, how to answer—with the single purpose of behaving exactly like the other children, to avoid being kicked and shunned. But the girl wasn’t strong enough to control her every step, to be at all times a model of neatness and moderation. She wasn’t strong enough, so she would run through the rainy autumnal park in torn stockings, her mouth flapping open in an excited yelp, simply because, you see, they were playing hide-and-seek. Between classes she’d stampede the hallways, snot-nosed, hair undone, fighting and cawing, what a sight.

  The sanatorium expected all students to keep track of their basic belongings. One week into the school term, no one, including the girl, could locate his or her own pens, pencils, erasers. But the girl lost her handkerchief, too, followed by her right mitten, her scarf, and one of her two stockings. (One lies there by the bed; the other, God knows where.) Plus, she was missing one of her rubber boots! Without her boots, she could neither walk through the park’s muddy puddles nor enter the dining hall. In an old boot from her teacher, she dragged herself like a pariah behind everyone in class.

  Such was my condition at the very moment I needed to look no worse than the others. There was this boy, Tolik. We were the same age, but he was six inches shorter, and unspeakably beautiful: a chiseled nose surrounded by freckles, thick lashes over starry eyes, his mouth poised for a coy smirk. The girl was too tall for him, but this young god radiated his charm evenly and meaninglessly a hundred yards around like a little nuclear reactor. When he entered the dining hall, the space around his table lit up, and the girl felt a surge of merriment—Tolik’s here!—and Tolik’s eyes would grow larger, as though under a magnifying glass, as he surveyed his kingdom. Heads turned toward him like sunflowers to the sun. The girl felt stabbed in her heart. There was a swelling right above it, the size of a young berry.

  In a commune, no one is entitled to private meals; that’s considered hoarding. Everything, even poor biscuits from home, must be shared. A commune also dislikes nonconforming behavior, such as arriving late or wearing mismatched boots. The girl, inevitably, became an outcast in her class. She began to straggle behind on purpose to avoid scornful looks. One October night, at the end of her second week, she fell so far behind the other girls that she found herself alone among the boys. Dark shadows fell across the path, cutting her off from the girls and their teacher up ahead. The boys, like a pack of wolves encircling its prey, surrounded her.

  The girl stood there on the edge of the park. The other girls, protected and safe, she could barely see.

  I screamed after them. I bellowed like a tuba, like a siren.

  The boys nearest to me grinned stupidly. (Later, in my grown life, I could always recognize that dumb smirk, a companion to base, dirty deeds.) Their arms opened wide, ready to grab me. Their fingers danced, and their berries probably hardened. I stood still, screaming toward the girls. A few glanced back, but they all continued to walk away, even faster. I screamed louder.

  What would they do to me?

  They’d have to tear me to pieces and bury my remains, but before t
hat, they would do everything that could be done to a person who becomes their property.

  For now, they just wanted me to shut up.

  When they were only five feet away, something made them pause. I hurled myself through their ring and ran wildly across the meadow, losing my oversize boot in the mud. At the door, I overtook the last of the girls. She heard me thumping and looked around: on her face I saw the same dirty, complicit smirk. I tumbled inside, red and swollen from crying. But nobody asked a single question as to what caused all that yelling in the park. Those girls knew instinctively. Maybe they’d shared a past in the caves where their female ancestors had been chased down and raped. (How quickly children can regress and accept such hard, primitive truths! Fire and women to be used in common; collective meals shared equally—where the strong get more, the weak get less or nothing at all; sleep together on a filthy floor; grab food from the pile; dress in identical rags.)

  That night the girls seemed quiet in a strange, contented way, as if their hunger for primitive justice had been stoked and sated. They didn’t know I had escaped! They assumed I had come back alive but broken, soiled.

  Excreted was the word for such children. The girl herself had known excreted kids in her schoolyard. The excreted were outside the commune, up for grabs—anyone could abuse them in any way. The thing to do was to stalk them, then to slam them into a wall in plain view. The excreted wore the look of dumb cattle; two or three stalkers tailed them. Nothing less than constant adult supervision could protect them, but one can’t expect an adult presence on every path, or around each corner.

  The next day began like any other. I fished my boot out of the mud. The boys greeted me as usual (slugging me on the neck, shoving me into a puddle) while the girls watched me like hawks. But no one hollered, no one pointed fingers—eventually it became clear that nothing truly awful had happened to me. I must have escaped. Life returned to normal.

  One person at the sanatorium, Tolik, sensed that something had happened. Tolik, a prime chaser, possessed the sharpest hunter’s instincts in the pack. He began stalking me. In dark corners, his starry eyes searched my body while his cohort guarded the perimeter glumly—this chase wasn’t theirs. It wasn’t a courtship, exactly; it was something else, something the girls couldn’t find a name for. They shrugged their shoulders. I alone understood that Tolik was drawn to the whiff of shame that clung to me.

  The girl was left alone. She’d won her place in the sun, with her powerful lungs and her refusal to cave in. It turned out she was blessed with an exceptionally strong voice (she could bellow as low as a hippo and screech as high as a drunken cat), and this talent could kick in at a moment’s danger. In addition, she’d pushed herself academically, and this, too, mattered at Forest School, which wasn’t just any public summer camp where a child was measured by her ability to wake up on time. Good grades were considered an honest achievement here—you couldn’t get an A by punching noses—so if a teacher read your composition in front of the class, then that was hard to sneer at.

  I’d spent my childhood in lines at public cafeterias and in the kitchen of our communal apartment, where academic excellence didn’t matter to my survival. Now, pitted against this hostile tribe, I applied myself feverishly to writing a composition about autumn. My final draft piled azure skies upon turquoise dusk, bronze upon gold, and crystals upon corals, and the astonished teacher—a consumptive beauty in an orthopedic corset—passed my opus around to the other teachers and then read it aloud to the entire class—the same class that had nearly destroyed me.

  I followed up with some verse for a special edition, in honor of Constitution Day, of the school’s newspaper. It wasn’t real poetry, the kind that spills out of a dying person like blood and becomes the butt of ruthless jokes. No, my creation was beyond mockery; it could bring only respect. The Soviet people are the strongest in the world, I wrote, and they want peace for every nation—six lines in all. “Your own work?” the beautiful teacher asked as her corset squeaked.

  A new pair of rubber boots arrived from home. At night, in the electric light of the girls’ latrine, I memorized spelling rules. My powerful new voice was now part of the school choir, and I was chosen to dance, too, in a swift Moldavian circle dance—the school was preparing the New Year’s program. After this, we would all go home.

  That meant I would never again see my tormentor, my Tolik—your name like sweet, warm milk; your face shining over me like the sun; your eyes alive with indolence and lust.

  In dark corners, Tolik showered me with obscenities. Six inches shorter but straight and unwavering as an arrow, he was a high-strung, consumptive boy keen on his target. Everyone at school grew used to the sight of the tall girl pushed against the wall, trapped between Tolik’s arms. Every night I dreamed of his face.

  The girl pulled on her new boots and trudged through the snowy park to meet her mother—her time in paradise was up; she was going home. At the winter palace, among crystals and corals of frozen trees, Tolik was living the final hours of his reign.

  At the New Year’s concert I performed solo in front of the choir, then swirled in a wild Moldavian dance. (For you alone, my Tolik.) Tolik performed, too (it turned out he possessed a beautifully clear soprano), singing of Soviet Motherland and her brave sons, the aviators, to the accompaniment of a grand piano. He was visibly nervous. The absence of his cynical smirk so struck his classmates that they clapped uncertainly, surprised at their king’s need for their approval.

  After the concert there was a dinner, followed by a formal dance. In the early 1950s, children still were taught the orderly dances of the aristocratic finishing schools—polonaise, pas de quatre, pas d’Espagne—and so a slow minuet was announced, ladies ask gentlemen. Tolik, recovered from his stage fright, was exchanging smirks with his entourage. I walked over to him. Our icy fingers entwined. We curtsied and bowed woodenly across the floor. Tolik, discomfited to see me sniffling in public, didn’t crack jokes. Instead, after the dance, he respectfully walked me over to my nook behind a pillar. I retired to the dortoir and wept there until the girls returned. There were no more heady interrogations in dark corners. Tolik didn’t know what to do with me anymore.

  I was picked up last, as always. We walked along the white highway, under dark skies, dragging my poor suitcase. The dortoir windows were throwing farewell lights on the snowy road.

  I never saw Tolik again, but I heard his silvery voice over the phone. He called me at home, in Moscow.

  My grandfather’s daughter from his second marriage occupied the next room in our communal apartment. She yelled for me to come to the phone. “For you,” she announced with her usual bug-eyed look. “Some guy.”

  “What guy? There’s no guy…. Hello?”

  “It’s Tolik, remember?” the high voice sang out.

  “Oh, it’s you, Lena,” I greeted Tolik, with a significant glance at my aunt and my mother, who’d also come into the hall. “It’s Lena Mitiaieva from school, Mom.”

  The unmarried Uncle Misha, a radiologist at the KGB clinic, decided to join the party. He stood in his blue army long johns between the black draperies of his doorway. The apartment’s entire population now stood in the hall (minus the Kalinovskys, minus my grandfather’s second wife, minus the grandfather who was smoking shag tobacco in bed, minus the janitor, Aunt Katya). The conceit was that everyone was waiting to use the phone after me.

  “It’s me, Tolik,” continued the voice.

  “No, Lena, I can’t tonight—they are going to the movies, Mom,” an aside to my mother.

  “What movies? It’s late,” my mother answered quickly, while Uncle Misha and my aunt seemed to be waiting for more.

  My love, my holiest secret, was calling me! And I had to speak to him in front of everyone!

  “No, Lena, why?” I kept repeating vaguely, because Tolik was inviting me to join him right away at the Grand Illusion for a movie. Swooning, I kept mumbling nonsense for my listeners’ benefit. The listeners guessed the t
ruth. They wanted to see me squirm.

  Azure skies, turquoise dusk, minuet, my tears, his icy fingers all vanished, and remained in paradise. Here was another story—here I was a fifth-grader with a chronic cold and torn brown stockings. The world of crystals and corals, of miraculous deliveries, of undying love—that world couldn’t coexist with the communal apartment and my grandfather’s room in particular, full of books and bedbugs, where my mother and I (officially homeless) were allowed to sleep in a corner under his desk. My Tolik, my little prince, my dauphin, couldn’t possibly be standing in a dark stinking phone booth near the grimy Grand Illusion.

  I didn’t believe Tolik, and rightly so, for I could hear coarse voices in the background and hoots of laughter. Again, the tightening circle of dirty smirks. But this time I was far away.

  “Neighbors want the phone,” I concluded indifferently (choking back tears). “Bye, Lena.”

  Tolik called again after that, inviting me to go skating or to see a movie. “No, Lena, why?” I mumbled. “What do you mean, ‘Why?’” giggled the shameless Tolik.

  Tolik, that prime chaser, had figured out how to use my unhappy love for his dark purposes. But—the circle of animal faces had never crushed the girl; the terror remained among the tall trees of the park, in the enchanted kingdom of young berries.