There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself (4 page)

Klava pursed her lips again, Oksana shrugged, and the doorbell rang. Nina opened the door a crack and saw a strange young
man.

“A happy New Year to you, ma’am,” said the man. “You should call the cops: somebody’s getting killed downstairs.”

“Don’t worry, the cops stopped coming here a long time ago. They’ll come when someone finally dies, they told us,” said Oksana’s mother, shutting the door and then rushing to the kitchen, where the chicken was burning. The doorbell rang again and kept on ringing. Oksana sighed, grabbed the phone, and shuffled to the door. Alcoholics are human, too, she thought—let them use the damn phone.

The young man was still standing on the doorstep, holding his expensive leather suitcase. When he saw Oksana, his jaw dropped. “Excuse me,” he mumbled, “may I speak with you?”

“What is it?” Oksana asked impatiently.

Suddenly Klava began screaming, “Misha!” Downstairs a man drunkenly yelled, “Friend, friend, come back!” and a woman begged them to call an ambulance—their own phone had been disconnected. Klava continued screaming, “Misha, is that you?”

The stranger nodded silently, staring at Oksana, unable to say a word. “May I come in?” he finally asked—the voices from downstairs were approaching. Oksana sighed and stepped aside.

“Babushka, please stop yelling; let me get undressed,” said Misha. Then he addressed Oksana: “May I ask your name, Miss?”

Oksana looked at him with her enormous eyes, straightened her long neck, and answered quietly, “Xenia.”

“Xenia,” repeated Misha. “What a lovely name. I need nothing else in this life.”

Klava was brought to the scene. Oohs and aahs, hugs and kisses followed, along with Misha’s assurances that Klava would have a new apartment; that everything would be taken care of—here are some presents for everyone.

Mama Nina observed her daughter and wondered where this new slow grace in her movements had come from, the twinkles in her laughing black eyes, the wave in her hair, the gorgeous dress. . . . Of course: she had made it herself.

Ali-Baba

T
hey met in line outside the bar, but that didn’t mean anything—people meet in all kinds of places. Ali-Baba glanced over her shoulder, saw his blue eyes and his good suit, and thought, “Aha,” without suspecting how easy her prey would be. Victor watched her little dance without interest. He knew no woman of sound mind would pick him up; they could always smell it on him. Five or six years ago he might have worked up some excitement, but now he just waved them away, the pretty ones who made eyes at him. In this case, though, there wasn’t much to wave away—just an ordinary-looking Jewish woman with large dark eyes.

Victor’s boss had dispatched him to an office near the bar to deliver one thing or another (after a series of mishaps, he’d been demoted to courier). Finding the place empty, he decided to lunch early on liquid bread, as he called beer. The establishment lifted him to the level of respectable people—Ali-Baba, for example—although he wondered briefly what a well-dressed woman was doing among cursing men. The bar was located in a good neighborhood and had some pretense of design (little lights on the walls), but there was the swearing, not to mention the cleaning woman who swiped half-empty pints, pretending they were empty. (Angry customers once stormed her closet and discovered her chasing one down; a scandal followed, but the police didn’t get involved.) Since Victor and Ali-Baba were waiting in the same line with the same end in mind, they began talking—a harmless exchange between decent citizens.

They discussed this and that but mainly how long one had to wait here and at other places. Ali-Baba knew all the local spots, including the Saigon, to Victor’s growing respect. Ali-Baba was beginning to see that Victor hadn’t been spoiled with attention, and she felt a kind of protective tenderness for him, as if he were a stray kitten of a rare breed. Inspired by this warm feeling, she began to recite aloud a long love poem, originally composed for her latest life partner. Recently that partner had tossed her over the railing of his balcony for stealing his booze. She hung four floors above the ground, clutching at the railing, until two truck drivers forced their way into the apartment and rescued her. Her beloved was hiding in the kitchen, inventing a scenario for the police: that
she
had tried to kill
him
. As soon as the ambulance called by the neighbors was gone, the beloved, seized by an unforgiving fury, gathered up her things and tossed them over the same railing. Ali-Baba had managed to crawl down the steps, to pick her stuff up off the pavement, and to reach her mother’s apartment. She’d been staying there ever since, still unable to work or even to unbend her fingers. The visit to the bar was supposed to mark a new beginning.

“Another?” Victor asked. But she insisted on buying this round, and again he marveled at her manners and sophistication. Already he had paid for six rounds and had just enough money left for two more pints. This money was to last him until his next paycheck—that is, the whole next week. Ali-Baba didn’t mind: she was flush from selling another volume of her mother’s edition of Alexander Blok. (Her mother didn’t know it, but she now owned only four volumes of Bunin’s works out of her original nine.) Ali-Baba told herself that since half of her mother’s property was hers, she might as well make use of her half. Her mother was undergoing medical tests at the hospital and didn’t know that Ali-Baba had returned to her apartment. Otherwise she would have checked Ali-Baba into rehab, as she had done twice before.

Ali-Baba usually preferred to stay at her friends’ apartments. By now she had one girlfriend left, Horse, and recently Horse had found a man, Vanya, who beat her (and her guests) to a pulp. Vanya preferred his own friends, movers from a nearby supermarket, who supplied him with booze and food. As for Ali-Baba’s numerous gentlemen friends, they all lived with their wives or mothers, so staying the night was out of the question. That very morning Ali-Baba’s mother had called home from the hospital to see if her phone line was working, and Ali-Baba had answered without thinking. The mother called back again and again, but Ali-Baba didn’t answer. She gathered up some things—the volume of Blok, her mother’s new panty hose and makeup, and a bottle of sleeping pills—and was soon standing in line outside the
bar.

To Ali-Baba’s delight, Victor wasn’t married and lived alone, without his mother. Victor wasn’t overjoyed at her request to stay the night but in the end agreed. They got to his house; he unlocked the door to his communal apartment, then the door to his room. It was warm and completely dark and also a little smelly. Victor turned on the desk lamp and changed the sheets, and the two began their night of love. Ali-Baba was pleased to have shelter for the night, and Victor was pleased because he found clean sheets and received a decent woman in style. Overwhelmed by a sweet, almost maternal feeling, Ali-Baba began reciting the same love poem, but before she could finish, Victor fell into a rhythmic snoring. Ali-Baba stopped her recitation and drifted off, too. Almost immediately she woke up: Victor had peed the
bed.

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

I
n 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 fell 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.