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

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  The dress is lost, as are three rubles’ worth of fabric. Her monthly stipend at the college is only twenty-three rubles.

  Here the mom intervenes. Her whole life, Mom relied on a seamstress, but then difficult times befell her; her girl turned eighteen, and she stopped receiving child support.

  The seamstress is out, and Mom considers what to do, except here’s the problem: there’s no money.

  There’s no money, the girl is eighteen, it’s a hot May (the kind you feel maybe once every hundred years), and there are exams to take. But her daughter can’t go outside. She’s lying behind the wardrobe—that’s where her cot is—weeping and moaning like a puppy.

  So Mom calls her wise older friend, Regina, a Polish Jewess from the clan of the Moscow wives (that is to say, the new wives) of the Third International. In the thirties this whole communist contingent left the countries where it lived underground, came to the USSR via mountains and seas, remarried in Moscow, and then went up to heaven from their labor camps. Regina had served her time in Karaganda, was rehabilitated after the war, got back her old apartment on Gorky Street. The girl’s mother, who’d also seen some things in her time, latched onto her to learn about life. Regina was a good friend of the girl’s mother’s mother, who has also been serving her time and is expected to return this spring.

  Regina always dresses with Warsaw chic. She’s sixty now and still has suitors, and she listens with sympathy to the confused mother of the girl.

  Regina has a houseworker named Riva Milgrom. Regina is a European lady; she has soft white hands like an empress, and her house is always in order, as Milgrom makes sure.

  That’s what she’s called: Milgrom—her last name, according to the old Party habit. Milgrom has a Singer sewing machine. The girl walks with the bundle of material through the May heat in her brown wool skirt. We know where the skirt came from—the mother had a dress she wore down until the underarms had sweat stains in the form of half-moons, at which point the dress was bequeathed to the girl, who wore it to school but could never raise her hand in class, her elbows clinging to her sides like a soldier’s; it was hell. Finally the top with the sweat stains was cut off, and though the mother protested that it could still become a nice vest, the girl ran out of the apartment and threw it down the trash chute. Still the crooked skirt remained, and that’s the skirt she’s wearing as she walks clumsily through the heat of May.

  Over the skirt, to cover the tear, which was hemmed crookedly with the wrong thread—the hands sewing them were the wrong hands—the girl wears her mother’s blouse, which also has sweat stains at the pits, so, again, elbows at her sides like a soldier’s.

  The girl walks like a draftee, head down, watching her green winter shoes with their thick soles, her elbows at her sides. She passes by Patriarch Ponds; there’s a gentle May smell in the air; young men are marching by, observing proud young girls in their new summer dresses.

  Milgrom meets her little customer in her room, which is high up, right beneath the scorching Moscow sky—it’s practically the attic—and here is quiet Milgrom with her big moist eyes, very white skin, and total absence of teeth. Milgrom looks like an old lady—her nose almost touches her sharp chin.

  She opens up her sewing machine, produces a tape measure, and as she records the girl’s measurements Milgrom launches into a saga about her darling son, the beautiful Sasha.

  Sasha was so beautiful, people on the street would stop and stare; once his picture appeared on a box of chocolates.

  The girl looks at the photograph on the wall that Milgrom points out to her: nothing special—a little boy in a sailor’s outfit, big black eyes, a thin, elegant nose. The upper lip protrudes like a visor over the lower one. A cute kid with curls, but nothing more. The lips are too thin for an angel’s—he has the Milgrom mouth.

  At this point in her life the girl not only has no thoughts of children herself, but she also doesn’t have an admirer even, not a single suitor, despite all her eighteen years.

  For her it’s all work, exams, library, cafeteria, shapeless green shoes, and a horrible brown dress with her mother’s pit stains.

  The girl looks indifferently at the wall and notices another portrait, an enlarged passport photo of a scrawny young officer in an enormous military cap.

  That’s the same Sasha; now he’s all grown-up. While they were measuring her waist and noting it all down and ruefully examining the cut-up fabric, Sasha got married and produced a granddaughter, Asya Milgrom.

  Old Milgrom pauses to console the girl and tells her she’s not the only one who’s clumsy, that she herself couldn’t do anything when she was young—boil an egg or hem a diaper—and then she learned. Life taught her.

  At some point during the long and bragging tale of Sasha it’s time to go, but the dress stays; it will be finished tomorrow.

  Three days later the girl—who wouldn’t leave the house in her awful outfit, but who doesn’t know how to wash, or iron, or sew anything; all she can do is read through tears in her corner behind the wardrobe—finally pulls herself together and says to her mother, “I’m going to Milgrom’s.”

  “That poor thing,” her mother says. “What a miserable life she’s had. Her husband dumped her, literally kicked her out of the house, and took away her child, a little boy. First he took Milgrom out of her Lithuanian village—she was a rare beauty, sixteen years old, but she didn’t speak any Russian, just Yiddish and Polish—and then he divorced her; you could do that then—with total freedom, he went and divorced her. And he brought another woman to live with him, and told Milgrom to leave. So she left. She was eighteen years old. She nearly went crazy; she spent all her days and nights on the street across from her old window so she could see her child. Regina found her half-dead, lying on the street—Regina being the protector of all the oppressed, of course. She put her in a hospital, and took her in as her maid—Milgrom used to sleep in the hall. When Regina was arrested, Milgrom apprenticed at a garment factory, earning herself a small pension and a room.”

  The girl listens to this absentmindedly, then goes to Milgrom’s without really understanding what she’s been told, and she sees the same little room just under the roof, where the smell of old woolen clothing chokes you in the heat.

  Everything melts in the light of the setting sun as Milgrom produces some cups and a teakettle from the kitchen. They drink tea with black salted crackers, the luxury of the poor.

  Milgrom once again brags about her son, Sasha, her shining face turned to the photographs on the wall, although the girl thinks, if her mother is telling the truth, where did she get those photographs?

  Grown-up Sasha looks back from the wall with a cold, closed-off stare, his cap sticking up like a saddle over his big black eyes. Now he really looks like his mother.

  With what tears, with what pleas did Milgrom get those photos from him?

  Milgrom sighs contentedly underneath her wailing wall and then announces that little Asya has just lost her first tooth. All the things that everyone else has, Milgrom has them, too.

  The girl puts on her dress; looks in the mirror; escapes from that sweet-musty smell, out into the street, the sunset; and walks by countless doors and windows, behind each of which, she thinks, live only Milgroms, Milgroms, Milgroms. She walks in her cool new black dress, and she is seized with happiness, filled with joy. It fills Milgrom, too, who is joyful for her Sasha.

  The girl is at the very beginning of her journey. She’s walking in a new dress, young men are already looking, and so on. In five years a boy will appear at her door with a bunch of roses he pulled out from a rose bush somewhere during the night. Milgrom is obviously at the end of her journey, but there might come a time when the girl will flash by at the end of Little Bronnaya Street, in a whole new form, carrying in her purse the photographs of her grown-up son, and bragging about him while sitting on a bench by the Patriarch
Ponds—but she doesn’t dare call him an extra time, and as for him, he’s too busy to call.

  The black dress shimmies down Little Bronnaya, which is wide and still filled with light, underneath the setting sun, and that’s it now, the day is burning its last, and Milgrom, eternal Milgrom, sits in her little pensioner’s room like a guard at the museum of her own life, where there is nothing at all but a timid love.

  The Story of Clarissa

  Until Clarissa turned seventeen not a single soul admired or noticed her—in that respect she was not unlike Cinderella or the Ugly Duckling. At an age when most girls are sensitive to beauty and look for it everywhere, Clarissa was a primitive, absentminded creature who stared openmouthed at trivial things, like the teacher wiping off the blackboard, and God knows what thoughts ran through her head. In her last year at school, she was involved in a fight. It was provoked by an insult Clarissa believed had been directed at her. In fact, the word wasn’t directed at Clarissa or anyone in particular (very few words had been said about her), but instead of explaining this, the boy simply slapped her back. During that time Clarissa imagined herself as a young heroine alone in a hostile world. Apparently she believed that every situation had something to do with her, although very few did.

  This tendency of Clarissa’s might have developed further under different circumstances, but it so happened that only six months after she finished school, her life changed. During Christmas vacation in a provincial town, she met and married a local resident, and returned home in the role of a wife with an absentee husband. One cannot testify to her emotional transformation during this time; externally, however, she changed from a young person under attack from a hostile world into a silly young female who gives no thought to her circumstances and just goes along blindly. Physically, she changed too. The clumsy girl with glasses became a curvy beauty with golden hair and exquisite hands. As should have been expected, this soft and feminine Clarissa grew tired of her long-distance marriage with its numerous obligations, and when asked about her husband she would say she had no idea and felt tired of it all.

  The next marriage followed quickly—to an ambulance doctor, a large man with thick arms. Soon after the birth of their child, Clarissa’s husband began to drink, to see other women, and to beat her. Clarissa seemed unable to stop arguing with him, even when he wasn’t around. At the office or when visiting a friend, she carried on her monologue in the same ringing note of protest, punctuated by sobs. Her husband’s indifference and contempt caught her off guard: she didn’t have a chance to regroup, to get used to her new role and think calmly about the best solution to her predicament. Even the youthful approach of dealing slaps for insults (remember the fight with her classmate) had abandoned her. One could say that during this period Clarissa moved like an amoeba, without direction, her goal simply to dodge the blows of her husband, who didn’t restrain himself in anything and continued to behave like a rowdy animal in the same room with Clarissa and their baby.

  The heaviest blow came when the husband left Clarissa and took the child to live with his parents. Clarissa threw herself again and again at the locked door of his parents’ apartment—uselessly, it turned out, because they had rented a dacha somewhere in the country and had gone there with the boy, or so the neighbor informed Clarissa.

  Clarissa’s subsequent behavior could be described only as illogical and pointless. Every weekend she took the commuter rail in a random direction and roamed the countryside trying to spot her son’s yellow hat. She called her husband’s friends and colleagues, busy people with serious jobs, to ask them to help her kidnap her son. The only outcome of these actions was a visit from a doctor and a nurse who wanted to know how she slept and whether she was followed by secret enemies, and who mentioned the possibility of a free stay in a wonderful sanatorium where she’d be allowed to sleep as late as she wanted—for a whole week! Clarissa pointed out that no one would give her sick leave just to sleep, but the doctor assured her it would be easy and she didn’t have to worry. “I see,” said Clarissa. “He sent you. I understand.” The doctor and nurse again tried to convince Clarissa to come with them, but Clarissa wasn’t listening. She was sitting at the kitchen table deep in thought, with burning cheeks.

  After this Clarissa disappeared from sight, and no one knows just how she resurfaced six months later in yet another role of divorced mother with child support for her small son and the perennial problem of child care.

  In this role Clarissa proved to be no better or worse than thousands of other women, but she did exhibit a certain practical intelligence. For example, she didn’t plan her future life with the boy. Any such plan was futile because the boy was extremely attached to his father and grandparents, who lavished him with care and comfort that Clarissa alone couldn’t provide. So she focused on the pressing problems that encroached from every side. She calculated, to the second, the time it took to travel from her son’s kindergarten to her work, spent her lunch break shopping for groceries, and treated her work duties as secondary, which was understandable for someone in her position.

  After a year of this drudgery, she took a vacation by the Black Sea. She was there alone, her son at a summer camp with his kindergarten. For the first two weeks Clarissa couldn’t let go of her motherly worries, and she ignored the sea, the sun, and the abundant southern fruit, thinking only of her son, whom she’d left in the rainy north. She spent hours at the post office, waiting to place a long-distance call to the kindergarten to find out if her boy was well and if he was still there. But eventually the sea, the sun, and the fruit worked their magic, and Clarissa experienced a second metamorphosis. A ripe woman of twenty-five, looking meek and detached behind her glasses, she was noticed (and deeply admired) by a certain airline pilot, Valery, who was spending a few hours at the beach between flights. That day he didn’t dare approach Clarissa, because he was wearing underwear instead of swimming trunks. Instead he watched from a respectful distance while she rummaged nearsightedly through her purse, finally pulling out a touchingly small handkerchief to wipe her glasses with. Two days later Valery was again at the beach, this time properly attired. He positioned himself closer to Clarissa, but she was so frightened and repulsed by his attentions that she fled the beach hours before her usual time. The next day things improved a little, and Clarissa was able to squeeze out a few sentences. Afterward, she felt an enormous guilt and spent an entire day waiting at the post office to call her son’s kindergarten. The boy was well; it hadn’t rained.

  Three months later Clarissa moved into Valery’s spacious apartment. In time her son went to school, a girl was born, and one could say that life had finally stabilized for Clarissa and even begun to flow toward a peaceful, healthy maturity with its rotation of summer vacations, children’s illnesses, and major purchases. On the days when Valery was on duty, Clarissa would call the airport dispatcher, demanding again and again Valery’s flight information, and upon his return Valery would be forced to listen to reprimands for his wife’s inappropriate behavior. Other than that, nothing clouded Clarissa and Valery’s horizons.

  Tamara’s Baby

  He never came by invitation—he never received one. He simply announced himself (often with a lengthy insult) through the door, then pleaded his way inside. At the dinner table he yelled and pontificated, spat out his food and bared his only tooth, wishing both to stuff himself and to have his say. He spoke in non sequiturs, always in a terrible hurry, never explaining anything. He must have believed it was the prerogative of an erudite man like himself to speak any way he wanted; didn’t he spend all his unfilled and unpaid days in reading rooms, working on some obscure bibliography or biography? Just wait till it’s done, he predicted to his poor hosts and their guests; he’d throw in some dirty laundry, some famous names, and voilà—we’d have a bestseller on our hands. But first he needed to finish this magnum opus with the help, he said, of foreign grants and lecture fees that never materialized.
In the meantime, he lectured gratis in the smoking rooms of public libraries, where he showed up empty-handed, with no tobacco or matches of his own. Hence, the awkward giggling and convoluted openings—“God has nothing to do with religion” or “All politicians want is to be reelected; may I bother you for a smoke?”

  The people who knew him feared he might ask to stay the night; women of the house shared the expression, “I could sense he was on the verge of staying over.” Besides, he was old. (That didn’t stop him from announcing into someone’s intercom, “Let me in; it’s up!”) When he stayed, everything needed to be washed, aired, and dry-cleaned. Officially he was not homeless: after the divorce he was assigned an attic room with a ruined ceiling and exposed plumbing—imagine the smell. All he could do after the divorce was read, so he found refuge in public libraries, where he drank tap water and cadged leftovers from the cafeteria. Abandoned by his wife and children, he longed for hot food. On pension days his biggest splurge was a hot dog and sometimes one or even two hamburgers. Also on those days he’d call on his acquaintances, under the pretext of paying back a debt—thereby giving them reason to have him stay for dinner. The next day he’d be broke again and would go back to the same houses for another loan, or wait outside people’s offices, ambushing them with requests for money to buy medicine.

  That’s how he lived for a long time, but things do change for someone like A.A., too. A fellow demagogue from the smoking room advised him about free health resort packages for the poor, and even helped him fill out an application at the office of social aid. That was over a year ago. Finally A.A. overheard someone bragging about going to a health resort for free. Ready to fight for his rights, he rushed to the social aid office and was informed that his request had been granted and that he had been expected at the resort two days ago. The woman at the counter blinked cleverly. He understood they were sending him in the off-season, in the worst weather, when no paying customer would go. He screamed and stomped his feet, but once outside he reconsidered. October wasn’t so bad. Pushkin liked October. And if you think about it, what is a health resort? Three meals a day, plus he could take extra bread to keep him full at night. At the thought of all that food, he began to salivate uncontrollably. He ran back to the library cafeteria to look for a leftover piece of bread.