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

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  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 truth. 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.

  The Adventures of Vera

  Vera turned sixteen, and nothing but scenes followed, one after the next. Her father begged her to have some self-respect, not to fall to pieces over every stranger. He even threatened to send her to a juvenile facility but, in the end, didn’t act soon enough. When Vera was twelve, her teachers observed that her mental development lagged behind her extraordinary physical maturity; one of them, who respected Vera’s father, told him she couldn’t imagine what would happen to Vera when she turned fourteen. But Vera did turn fourteen, and fifteen. At sixteen she quit school, without asking anyone, and apprenticed herself as a junior salesgirl at a department store. Vera’s coworkers haloed her with gentle understanding and slightly patronizing friendship, agreeing that she wasn’t all there.

  Often they said to her, “Greetings from Ivan the Fool!” They were referring, of course, to love, for what else could girls of eighteen talk about? They discussed other things, naturally: books, weather, terrible accidents in the city, injustice and deceit, their childhoods, the constant ache in their feet, and problems at work. But mostly they spoke about friendship and love, tried to analyze their feelings, applied intuition or simply closed their eyes to everything and cried their hearts out, and gradually, in the course of those conversations, acquired a protective layer of hardness that sealed their mouths and left them to fight their grown-up battles alone, wordlessly.

  Vera’s father didn’t understand the benefits of such friendship, considering it unhealthy for Vera. When Vera announced that she was ready to leave the store, he agreed, despite misgivings, to arrange a position for her at his institute. The father was understandably afraid that after four years behind a sales counter, in a corrupting atmosphere of intimate women’s talk, Vera might go a little cuckoo from the institute’s abundance of men, might be willing to bestow her trust on any man—any man, of course, other than him.

  Barely a month after Vera started at the institute, her father was informed that Vera’s coworkers found her behavior odd to the point of indecency. She carried on long conversations over the office phone, wore too much makeup, giggled loudly, and, in general, behaved as if she were at a party rather than a place of work. The first thing she did, her father was informed, was type a personal letter, on the office typewriter, to a certain Mr. Drach. Vera thanked Mr. Drach for returning five rubles and apologized for not agreeing to disclose her friend Tatiana’s address without her permission. Vera’s father considered the dates in question and decided, with no small relief, that the letter to Mr. Drach must have referred to details about Vera’s recent vacation at a country resort, and did not represent a new crisis.

  Soon enough, however, he learned that Vera was pursuing an employee in her department, a married man who had invited her for a car ride one night but the next day avoided her and then had to ask a coworker to tell her quietly, “Now’s not the time.” Yet Vera continu
ed to follow him around, demanding an explanation! She moped over this aborted romance, as she thought of it, for weeks. She couldn’t have known that the man’s wife, a former ballerina, had found out about their little excursion and made a horrible scene. No one told Vera anything, including her father, who felt determined to have a little talk with her but, as before, couldn’t work up the nerve.

  While he hesitated, another employee, a rising star in Vera’s department, asked Vera to stay late to take dictation. About this young man, it was known he had recently filed for divorce, on the grounds of childlessness, and that he lived alone, without his parents, in a condo in the suburbs. The next morning Vera returned to the office convinced she had experienced a life-changing romantic event—she had found the love of her life, a future husband. She cast mysterious looks around the office, and trembled with anticipation. This employee, however, behaved exactly like the first one, as if Vera reminded him of something unpleasant that he wanted to forget. When one of his colleagues, a woman, mentioned to him that Vera was crying and was ready to quit the institute, he told her (the exact quote was reported to Vera’s father), “Let Vera bring me a doctor’s note saying she’s healthy; then I’ll do it.” He said this in front of everyone. They all laughed. Again, poor Vera didn’t have a clue. Imagining that someone had informed him of her unfortunate car ride, she hung out in the corridors and halls, looking for a chance to reassure him—nothing had happened that night in the car, none of it was her fault, nothing was ever her fault, and so on. Vera would have dumped her entire biography on the poor fellow—or anyone else, if they had cared to listen.

  Her father was absolutely determined to open Vera’s eyes to the reality of the situation, to clarify the circumstances and motives. But he was afraid of Vera’s reaction, and besides, none of his past explanations had done much good. For a long time after her disappointment, Vera performed her duties automatically, ate very little, went to bed early, and read a lot of poetry. To her friends she admitted she had lost interest in living. She felt like an old woman.

  Between this disaster and the final, decisive romance from that period of Vera’s life, there was a brief friendship with another one of her coworkers, a man of very short stature who always winked and smiled at Vera, and called her Miss, and tried to steal a kiss when no one was looking. This man, who was known in their department for his prim manners, entertained Vera with sexual anecdotes and once brought her an illustrated volume on the subject. Sitting on top of her desk in her little nook, he relaxed, cursing out everyone in the department and making personal phone calls that made Vera blush. All this, too, ended on an odd note, but not before Vera became fond of his visits and learned to think of him as a close friend.

  When the man asked Vera to help him buy a warm coat (it was impossible to get one off the rack in his size), Vera raised a flurry of activity among her friends in retail, and arranged for him to pick up a fine, imported coat in a certain store, at a certain time. On the day of the appointment, the little employee didn’t come to work. Vera called his office number all day at regular intervals, announcing in the same flat, official voice that it was Ms. Vera calling about the coat. At first her calls were answered with muffled laughter, then simply ignored. The next day the little employee read Vera a forceful lecture on the subject of appropriate behavior in the workplace, after which he stopped what he called Vera’s “education”—the jokes, sitting on her desk, and so on.

  This insignificant episode shook Vera to her core. She felt she’d been abandoned by a fiancé, whom she had come to like and even find attractive, despite his obvious shortcomings. Her father received a full description of the incident: how the little employee’s officemates doubled up with laughter during Vera’s calls; how the next day they all congratulated him on becoming the latest victim of Vera’s prowess; and how, on hearing about this, the married employee with the car talked about Vera with disgust and almost malice, while the department’s rising star also made ironic comments, although not as harsh, restraining himself out of respect for his female colleagues. Nothing the little employee could say about his real need for a coat stopped the giggling; finally, he gave up and, when no women were present, made a remark so dirty that his audience choked with laughter.

  * * *

  Vera fell in love with the head of her department when he returned from an overseas business trip and asked her to type up his report. All through the dictation he interspersed amusing little comments about the trip and its participants, as if only Vera with her superior taste and understanding deserved to know the real facts. Vera was smitten. Never before had she been addressed by a superior with such complete trust, as an equal. She didn’t consider, of course, that her boss simply wanted to deploy his charm on a new employee, or that, like most men in his position, he needed from time to time to feel the spontaneous adulation of the lowest ranks. Isolated in her nook, barred from general staff meetings, Vera wasn’t aware of the atmosphere of jealousy and of love for the boss (absolutely platonic) that permeated the entire department; nor was she familiar with his notorious habit of alternating charm with outbursts of the deepest cynicism in his personal relationships with his employees. During the next dictation, the boss grew even more relaxed and had a playful argument with Vera about some movie whose name they couldn’t remember. The loser had to fulfill a wish; Vera lost. With a mix of anxiety, regret, and bubbling joy, she prepared to give all of herself to the man she loved. But the boss didn’t ask for anything like that. Instead, he quickly wrapped up his report, grabbed his briefcase from his office, and practically ran home.

  Over the next few weeks, Vera waited for a phone call or a note. After another sleepless night she called his office from a pay phone and asked for an appointment. This in itself was a strange request—employees at Vera’s department dropped in on their boss at any time, without formalities. The boss agreed, however. He told Vera to come by at the end of the day and to knock slowly on his door three times. Vera showed up at the appointed time and stayed for more than an hour, talking and talking about herself, as if a dam had burst. The boss listened with interest, saying now and again, “Fascinating” and “I’m going to study you.” At the end of her monologue, he agreed to meet her for a date later that night, adding that they must leave the building separately, in case someone might see them and think God knows what.

  As her father might have warned her, Vera waited for ninety minutes at some tram stop, in the cold, in a remote blue-collar neighborhood where her boss must have spent his factory youth. Luckily, she had another date planned for later that night, and also luckily, that young man waited patiently for her. Vera’s evening wasn’t entirely wasted.

  Eros’s Way

  At work her nickname was Pulcheria, after the meek and faithful wife in Gogol’s famous story. Pulcheria was a model spouse by nature, but that hadn’t stopped her husband from making a certain acquaintance at a vacation resort, after which came anonymous phone calls and threats that the lady would “take gas.” The closing act was the appearance of a mutilated photograph of Pulcheria outside her door. In the epilogue Pulcheria was left alone, raising two daughters.

  When her younger daughter married, Pulcheria aged rapidly, almost willingly, her lovely eyes and innocent soul withdrawing beneath heavy flesh, seemingly forever. Her soul still flickered on occasion—at work, for instance, where she cared deeply about her little subject. She fell ill when a new boss swooped into their division like an evil genius, threatening to ruin years of painstaking research. That was when Pulcheria and her colleague, Olga, formed a strategic alliance and became friends.

  This Olga, for whom work was her life, hated their new boss with a special intensity. At home, people said, Olga had a sick husband who was hospitalized routinely, and, they added, her only son had married an older woman, had a baby with her, and now demanded one-third of the parental apartment. Olga fought ferociously. In the end the young family settled into a
tiny room in the woman’s parents’ house. Olga lost her rosy complexion but remained in her palace, with her sick husband.

  One evening Pulcheria stayed late at the office—earlier in the day she had been invited unexpectedly to Olga’s house for a birthday party. She called her daughter (who lived with Pulcheria) to give her instructions for the night but continued to worry about her and the baby; in retrospect this seems almost funny because only a day later she would barely remember their faces or anything else from her previous life. Everything happened so fast; she seemed to have gone to sleep, or else to have lost her mind from shock, as her colleagues (Olga among them) believed. When she left the office, she began following in Eros’s way—of which she hadn’t the slightest awareness.

  At the party Pulcheria wound her way into a dark corner and sat there quietly, while the hostess and her coiffed girlfriends set the table in the dining room (Pulcheria couldn’t even count the rooms in that fabulous apartment). She understood Olga’s motives for inviting her—she always understood people’s true motives, to her discomfort. Olga simply wanted to crush Pulcheria with the glamour of her party, then oust their hateful new boss with Pulcheria’s help (there were only three people in their division), and, finally, get herself appointed in the boss’s place.

  Pulcheria was angry with herself for wasting her whole evening on this party where everyone and everything felt alien and uninteresting to her. But she was angrier with their boss, who intended to turn their archives into a profit-making tabloid featuring personal letters and who-slept-with-whom exposés. The employees nicknamed the boss Tsarina and quickly figured out that she intended to write her doctoral thesis from their research. They also discovered that she’d been installed there by her husband, the deputy director at a sister research institute, who, in turn, found a position for their own director’s nephew, an equally useless careerist. Knowing all this made them want to cry from shame and hopelessness—but what could they do?