There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself (5 page)

Father and Mother

W
here do you live, light-footed Tanya? In what little apartment with white curtains have you built a nest for yourself and your little ones? Quick and resourceful, you find time for everything, and fear of tomorrow never disturbs your sleep.

In what pits of misery this miracle of efficiency grew, this oldest girl in a family of many daughters and a single boy, whom Tanya’s mother carried at her breast to the final days of her marriage when she would run after her husband almost every morning to prevent him from escaping to his so-called job? Tanya’s mother was filled with despair; again he was escaping her clutches. She gathered her last reserves of strength and chased him with the baby in her arms just to knock the cap off his head with her free hand—all this in view of the neighbors, other military families, who had witnessed dozens of such scenes.

The mother was sick with hatred for her husband, for that scoundrel who betrayed the family daily. Every night he returned home to rock the youngest child, but even this innocent gesture she interpreted as an admission of guilt, a sham confirmation of his fatherhood to which, she felt, he had no right. They almost tore the baby in half. The children seemed little more than material evidence of her suffering and inhuman labor, which her husband daily trampled into dirt. During her ravings he shook with fear that the neighbors would hear, but the neighbors in that small military town had long been aware. She had told them everything, and how the wives pitied her, called her intimately Petrovna and advised her to go to his Party supervisor since things were so
bad.

Still the father stayed, came home every night with peaceful intentions and a blithe expression on his face, always at eleven sharp, never earlier; he had never in his life come home earlier—it was his ironclad rule. And every night he found the same tableau: none of the children was asleep; his tearful wife was sitting up in bed, the youngest at her breast. If the father attempted to put the kids to bed in his gentle way, Tanya’s mother pulled them away, screaming that no one was going to sleep, since that was what he wanted. Let everyone admire their so-called father—fresh from somebody’s bed where he was kissing God knows what with his filthy mouth, and now he wanted to kiss his innocent daughters and jump into their beds, and so
on.

The squalor of that household was beyond description, because the mother did her housework sloppily, saving her energy for the high point of her day: for eleven at night, which bled into midnight and later, so the children got no sleep and couldn’t get up in the morning for school. The mother went further in her sacred rage, appearing at the officers’ mess with the little one and kicking her husband as he walked out the door, as if to disprove the conventional wisdom that such methods never brought anyone’s husband back (quite the opposite). Leaving behind her children unfed, she’d chase her husband through town, screaming the most horrible things—that, say, she had found bloody rags tucked in a hole in the wall and that Tanya had had a miscarriage by her father.

No one understood what Tanya’s mother was hoping to achieve with these displays; possibly all she really wanted was to shatter the illusion her husband had been trying to create for the children’s sake, with his nonchalance and conciliatory manner. Of course the mother knew that people had sympathy for her husband and wanted to protect him from her. Once, someone warned him that she was on her way to the store, where she knew he would be buying small presents for her and the girls (it was Women’s Day, when even little girls expected at least a flower from their fathers), and he managed to escape through the back door.

Despite all this ugliness, a baby was born almost every year, and the last one, the only boy, was born just six months before the father finally left. What inspired their conjugal embraces, how and when father and mother became one, was a mystery to everyone—even to the smartest in the family, Tanya, who watched her parents closely.

The mother wouldn’t give up her attempts to humiliate her husband, and she sank deeper and deeper into shame while he maintained some semblance of family cohesion at all costs and refused to be kicked out on her terms. Eventually the least determined combatant stopped caring about the outcome of this endless rout and walked away, exhausted. Tanya’s father was transferred to another garrison, with damage, it was whispered, to his career. So he had every reason not to show his face to his long-suffering family. He settled in a new place with some woman who was said to be much more common than Petrovna.

Tanya stayed at home one more year, until she turned seventeen. Then she was noticed by Victor, an electrician in town on a temporary contract, who saw right away what treasure had fallen into his hands. The first night, on the way back from the dance hall, she agreed to move away with him, and the following morning they left, even though the mother had told her she couldn’t cope without Tanya and that the children would suffer. “Enough,” Tanya (reportedly) said. “I’ve had enough.” And she set off with her older (twenty-four-year-old) electrician and never once looked back.

Everything that happened to her afterward—homelessness, then a landlady who drank nothing but kefir and tried to hang herself every March but was rescued by her son—all this adversity she considered happiness, and not a shadow of doubt or despair ever touched
her.

The Impulse

W
hat terrible fits she threw, this proud fighter for love! It’s incredible what she went through. Take, for example, her departing husband’s good-bye punch that knocked one of her front teeth inward (they managed to pull it back out). Take her children: the daughter would hang up after ten seconds of Dasha’s sobbing; the son, well, he had to stay with her, with his mother—there was nowhere to go. They survived in her moldy shack outside the city, the mother and her young son. The boy went to the village school; they bought their groceries at the understocked local store: potato chips, ice cream, and frozen pizza, on occasion bread and butter—there was nothing more on offer. That’s where she and her son stayed year-round except for the time she chased her lover, the light of her life, who happened to be a most ordinary man—stingy and not particularly young. She shaved her head from all the stress, but everything looked becoming on her: her permanent fatigue and near emaciation, her cracked lips, shaved head, dilated eyes.

Until recently Alyosha’s life had been well and good. He had a wife, who was a foreign national, a son in college, a pleasant apartment in a comfortable European country, a summerhouse in Lithuania, and, in addition to all that, any number of quick liaisons during business trips. (His fling with Dasha began with a quick roll on a hotel bed during one such trip.) Then, the following summer, his company sent him to Moscow on a long assignment and rented him an apartment. That was where Dasha visited him, leaving her young son alone in the shack. During Dasha’s absences the boy subsisted on ice cream and frozen pizza, which he and his village friends would try to heat up on his father’s old grill. Dasha didn’t mind; on the contrary, she was proud of her son’s resourcefulness. (Here are some potatoes for you, Son; try to cook them as well!) On each of her passionate visits, however, Dasha had to roll out of bed in time to catch the last train back to the shack. How the two lovers howled and wept at those partings!

Suddenly the skies brightened. Dasha managed to find a spot in a summer camp for her son. As soon as the boy left, she dashed to the city to announce to her “husband” that for the next twenty-four days they belonged to only each other. (She did this in person because he wouldn’t answer his phone.) She was planning to surprise her beloved in their love nest with a romantic dinner. But upon reaching the front door, she discovered that the key to his apartment was missing from her key ring.

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!

T
his, 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 wanted 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.