My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

LUDMILLA PETRUSHEVSKAYA. I’m Here

HOW CAN YOU FORGET THAT FEELING, IT COMES LIKE A BLOW, WHEN life flees from you, and happiness, and love, thought a woman, Olga, watching as her husband plunked himself down and practically inserted himself next to, essentially, a child — everyone here a grown-up and suddenly out of nowhere this girl-child. And then he stood up with her and went over to dance, addressing Olga gleefully on the way, “Look at this little treasure! I knew her when she was in the sixth grade.” And laughed happily. It was the hosts’ daughter — of course. She lives here. How’d she forget that, Olga thought as they rode the subway home, her partly drunk husband, a hearing aid in his ear under cover of his eyeglasses, taking a folded-up newspaper, self-importantly, from his pocket, then squinting morosely under the harsh subway light. They rode, they came home. He settled down with that same paper on the toilet and then fell asleep, apparently, because Olga had to wake him up with a loud knock at the door, and everything was so petty, so embarrassing, though of course everything is always embarrassing in one’s own home, thought Olga. Her husband snored in bed, as he always did when he’d been drinking. “My God,” thought Olga to herself. “Life is over. I’m an old woman. I’m over forty and no one needs me. It’s all over, my life is gone.”

In the morning Olga fixed breakfast for her family. She needed to go somewhere. Anywhere — to the movies, to an exhibit, maybe even the theater. But who’d go with her? It’s a little odd, going alone. Olga called all her friends: one was sitting with a warm wrap — she had a condition she called “a movable feast,” her kidneys were bad. They chatted. Another friend didn’t answer, maybe they’d shut off the phone, another was just about to go out, she was at the door practically, yet another one of her elderly relatives had fallen ill. That one was a lonely spinster but was always cheerful, energetic, a saint almost. Not like us.

She might try cleaning the house — her boss used to say: “When I hit bottom, like when they gave me the diagnosis, the same as my sister’s and she’d just died — well, I came home and just started mopping the floor.” This was always followed by the tale of the diagnosis — magically mistaken! And the lesson was, Don’t give up! Keep the floor clean!

The laundry, the dishes — everything everywhere after last night’s preparations for that idiotic birthday with her husband’s college friends. So Olga should clean up and all the while think about how no one does anything to help her? Her husband will get up, hungover, won’t look them in the face, will nag, yell, brood over the magic vision of the little girl from last night, the daughter, that’s right. Then he won’t be back until evening. No, she needs to get out, get away, hide somewhere. Let them take care of themselves for once in their lives. She’s tired.

And then Olga realized: Why not visit the only place on earth where no one will turn her away, where they’ll always be happy to see her, where they’ll sit her down, make her tea, ask how she is and even invite her to stay over; why not visit their old landlady, from the dacha, where they lived so many years in a row when Nastya was still little, and she and Seryozha still hoped for a better life? She was an especially dear memory, this landlady, for Olga; with her complicated relations with her own mother, Olga had become attached to this stranger, this wise and touching old woman. She even seemed beautiful to Olga, and kind, and clever like a child. Meanwhile Baba Anya had been long divorced, if you can say that, from a daughter who never visited and was sleeping around on a grand scale, and who left the mother something to remember her by in the form of little Marina, a beaten-down creature in black hair who was afraid of everyone.

Yes! When you’ve been abandoned by everyone close to you, do a kindness for a stranger, and you’ll feel the warmth of their gratitude on your heart, and it will give your life meaning. And most of all, you will find a quiet refuge, and that’s all we want from our friends, isn’t it.

Inspired, Olga chuckled to herself, quickly cleaned everything, trying not to wake her family, and then went to look for her stash of Nastya’s old things that she’d been collecting over the years for Baba Anya, knowing that her little girl was being raised without any outside help.

She even found something for Anya, a warm shawl, and just two hours later was running across the square in front of the train station, having almost been hit by a car on the way (now, that would really be something, wouldn’t it, if she died, it would certainly be a solution to all sorts of problems, the disappearance of a person no one needs or wants, it would free everyone, Olga thought, and even paused on this thought for a while, amazed by it) — and a moment later, as if by magic, she was descending from the commuter train at the little rural station that she knew so well, and, dragging her big backpack behind her, walking down the familiar dirt road from the station to the edge of the settlement, in the direction of the river.

It was a Sunday in October. The place was light, empty, the trees were bare already, the air smelled of smoke and Russian baths. The fallen leaves gave off the scent of young wine and other people’s established lives, as well as a whiff of the graveyard, somehow, and the windows were already lit, though it wasn’t yet dark. Nostalgia, wide-open spaces, the pearly white skies and the happiness of years gone by, when she and Seryozha were young, when their friends came out here, all of them so happy, drinking, barbecuing, etc. And they helped Baba Anya, because something was always leaking, or collapsing, or needing someone to hammer something in. In those years you could leave little Nastya with her for an evening, Nastya had befriended silent little Marina. Baba Anya would put them in bed while Olga and Seryozha went into town for someone’s birthday party, drank and sang until sunrise, and maybe wouldn’t even make it back until the next evening. The whole time their daughter was safe, and Baba Anya would even say, Go on, take a vacation, you think I can’t handle these two? So they did, they went south for two weeks. And Baba Anya also enjoyed it, they left her money and groceries. True, when they got back Nastya was so excited she immediately got sick and stayed sick for exactly two weeks. Their whole vacation was forgotten, their tans erased, Olga didn’t sleep for ten nights: the girl almost died. Everything in life seeks equilibrium, Olga said to herself, walking with her backpack, said it with such assurance she might even have said it out loud.

The path was soft, the soil here was mostly damp clay, and up ahead, where the road curves, we take a left past the doctors’ fence. That was what they called their neighbors, and it was true, in a way, the husband worked for the local epidemics control office. On Saturdays they’d pump out the waste from under their outhouse and pour it all over their garden, supposedly in the interests of ecology (actually because they didn’t want to hire a truck to take it away), and the smell of this organic fertilizer carried through the village. The same rotten wind was blowing now (which explained the graveyard smell, thought Olga).

Baba Anya used to laugh at this agricultural program. She’d been a crops specialist herself, had worked at an institute, even went on business trips, and it was only after retiring and moving out here that she returned to her peasant roots, to the language of her ancestors, calling strawberries “redberries” (alternately, “victoria”), wearing a kerchief on her head and remains of rubber boots on her feet, going to the bathroom behind the bushes (now that was fertilizing). Everything grew in her garden as if by magic, all by itself. She’d moved out here a long time ago, leaving her apartment in the city to her daughter, supposedly to give her space (actually it was only after a protracted civil war that had led to the destruction of both sides, as civil wars always do).

Olga successfully navigated the overgrown path, through the thinning black wild grass; it looked like no one had passed this way in a while. She took the rusted ring, which they used instead of a latch, off the gate, ran the damp gate away from the fence, and happily swung herself toward the house, seeing that a curtain behind the window had just shivered.

Baba Anya was home! She must have been so happy to see Olga; she’d always loved their family.

Knocking on the door, which didn’t even have a lock, Olga passed by the cold front hall and banged on the canvas that Baba Anya used in place of wallpaper.

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” came the hollow little voice of Baba Anya.

Olga entered the warm house, the smells of someone else’s home, and immediately her spirits rose at the sweetness of it.

“Hello, Babushka!” she cried, almost in tears. Warmth, a night’s rest, a quiet refuge, awaited her. Baba Anya had become even shorter, dried-out, but her eyes shone in the darkness.

“I’m not bothering you?” Olga said happily. “I brought your Marinochka some of Nastya’s things — tights, warm pants, a little coat.”

“Marina’s not here anymore,” Baba Anya answered quickly. “She’s not here anymore.”

Olga, the smile still on her face, grew terrified. A chill ran up her spine.

“Go on,” Baba Anya said, quite clearly. “Get out of here, Olga. Go. I don’t need it.”

“I brought you some things, too. I got salami, some milk, a bit of cheese.”

“Then, take it all with you. I don’t need it. Take it and go, Olga.”

Baba Anya spoke, as always, in a thin, quiet, pleasant voice — she wasn’t insane — but her words were inconceivable.

“Baba Anya, what happened?”

“Nothing happened. Everything’s fine. Now get out of here.”

Baba Anya couldn’t be saying these things! Olga stood there scared and insulted. She didn’t believe her ears.

“Have I done anything wrong, Baba Anya? I know I didn’t visit for a long time. But I always thought of you. Just, life, somehow—”

“Life is life,” Baba Anya said vaguely. “And death is death.”

“I just couldn’t find the time, somehow…”

“And I’ve got more time than I know what to do with. So go on your way, Olga.”

“I’ll just leave these things with you, then,” she said. “I’ll put them out, so I won’t have to lug them all the way back with me.”

(God, what could have happened?)

“For what, what for?” Baba Anya asked in a clear, aggressive voice, almost as if to herself. “I don’t need anything anymore. It’s over. I’m dead and buried. What do I need? Just a cross for the grave, nothing else.”

“But what happened? Can’t you just tell me?” Olga persisted in desperation.

The house was warm, and the floor of the corridor in which they stood was covered, as always, with cardboard, so there’d be no dirt in the house. The door to Baba Anya’s room stood wide open and inside you could hear the radio, buzzing like a mosquito, and through the windows you could see out into the trees in the yard. Everything had remained as it was — but Baba Anya, it seemed, had lost her mind. The worst thing that can happen to someone still alive had happened to her.

“I’m telling you what happened,” she said now. “I died.”

“When?” Olga asked automatically.

“Two weeks ago now.”

Horrible, it was horrible! Poor Baba Anya.

“Baba Anya, where’s your little girl, where’s Marina?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t bring her to the funeral. I just hope Svetlana didn’t take her. Svetlana was no good, oh she was no good, she must have sold the apartment and spent the money, she came dressed in rags to the funeral. She fell apart completely. She had sores on her feet, open sores, wrapped in newspapers. Dmitry buried me. She was useless there. Dmitry shooed her away.”

“Dmitry?”

“The one she left Marina with when she was just a baby. She was a one-year-old. Dmitry, Dmitry. He put little Marina in an orphanage then, I picked her up. You don’t remember, or maybe I didn’t tell you?”

“I remember something like that, yes.”

“Maybe I didn’t tell you. There were plenty like you here. They come, they leave, not a letter, not a word. I died alone. I fell down here. Marina was in school.”

“But I’ve come! Here I am!”

“Dmitry buried me, but he just had me cremated, and he still hasn’t picked up the urn. I wasn’t buried, so I came here. I’m just here for the time being. Svetlana has gone all bad, she’s a bum, a real bum. She doesn’t even realize she can live here. Dmitry scared her out of the crematorium when she sat down and started wrapping her feet in newspapers. Somehow she found her way to me in the hospital, then the morgue. She came off the bus, pus was leaking out of her sores. She found a newspaper in the wastebasket. Svetlana, I know, she was hoping to get a drink at the wake. Dmitry found her somehow, he didn’t know she’d become like that. But I won’t be here long, just until the fortieth day. After that, it’s good-bye. And that’s it, Olga, now go.”

“Baba Anya! You’re just tired, that’s all. Lie down! Maybe you’d like it if I stayed here with you a while? I’ll find little Marina. When did she disappear?”

“Marina disappear? No, no. When I fell down, I couldn’t remember anything at first, but then afterward, when they were taking me away, the only one I saw was Dmitry. Where was Marina? And Dmitry was the one who took me from the morgue.”

“Dmitry, what was his last name?”

“I don’t know,” Baba Anya mumbled to herself. “Fedosev, I guess. Like Marina. She’s Fedoseva. God bless him. He brought a priest to the funeral. That was it, they were the only ones there — no one was told, he didn’t know who to tell. He told Sveta and then chased her off forever. She’ll be here soon, I’m waiting for her. She’s about to die.”

“No one told me,” Olga said suddenly.

“And who are you, Olga? You rented the cottage a long time ago. You haven’t been here in how long — five years? Marina’s twelve already! I just hope she’ll stay away from here, oh I hope she doesn’t come!”

Five years. Nastya is fifteen already, a teenager. They haven’t had a summer here in five years! Nastya’s grandmother has a house in the town of Slavyansk in the Kuban. There’s a river there with ice-cold water in it. The girl comes back from there a total stranger, wild, smoking cigarettes. Already a woman, for certain.

“Forgive me, Baba Anya!”

“God will forgive you, he forgives everyone. Now go. Don’t stay here. And take your old rags with you. The thieves have been here already. I open the door for them all. I’m no one now.”

“These aren’t rags, these are nice things for a little girl. Wool tights, a little coat, some T-shirts.”

Olga was trying to convince Baba Anya that everything was fine, that this horror was just a fantasy imagined by her aching heart, which was, like Olga’s, abandoned and hurt.

“Baba Anya, I came out here thinking this might be the last refuge for me.”

“There’s no such refuge for anyone on earth,” Baba Anya said. “Every soul is its own last refuge.”

“I thought at least you wouldn’t chase me away, you’d take me in. I thought I’d sleep over.”

“No, Olga, what are you talking about. I’m telling you. You can’t, I don’t exist anymore.”

“I brought some food, please try it.”

“You’ll try it yourself later. Now go, go.”

“It’s cold out there. Here, in the village, the sky and the air are just. Baba Anya! I so much wanted to come here, I was hoping—”

Baba Anya answered firmly: “I’m worried about Marina. I’m very worried about her.”

“I know, I understand that,” said Olga. “I’ll find her.”

“Svetlana’s on her way, she’s lost everything, but she’s still alive. If she were dead, she’d be here. But I don’t want to see anyone here, do you understand? Leave me alone, all of you! Where’s Marina? I don’t want to see her. I don’t want to, you get it?”

Baba Anya was obviously talking nonsense. Want, not want. But she stood firm, blocking the hallway with her diminutive frame.

Olga imagined walking home with her heavy load, the bread, the groceries, the liter of milk.

“Baba Anya, do you mind if I just sit here a minute. My legs hurt. My legs really hurt all of a sudden.”

“And I’m telling you one more time: Go in peace! Take your legs from here while you still have them!”

Olga went past her, as if Baba Anya wasn’t even there, and sat down on a chair in the room.

The smell of an outhouse from the neighbors came in even more strongly through the open window.

The room looked abandoned. There was a wrapped-up mattress on the bed. That never happened at Baba Anya’s, she was meticulously neat. She always made the bed very carefully, topping it with lace-covered pillows. And that awful smell!

“Baba Anya, can you put some water on for tea?”

“There’s no teakettle, I’m telling you, bad people came and took everything,” Baba Anya said from the hallway in that same crystal-clear voice.

“And the water, is there any water?”

“Water. There hasn’t been water in a while, only in the well. But I don’t go out.”

“I’ll run out and get some water?” Olga offered from the room. “You haven’t had tea in a while, probably?”

“I died two weeks ago.”

“You still have the bucket for the well?”

“They took the bucket, too.”

Olga took a deep breath, walked into the kitchen, and found it completely ransacked. The small cabinet was wide open, the floor was covered in broken glass, a beat-up aluminum pot lay on its side on the floor (Baba Anya used to make kasha in it). In the middle of the floor stood an empty three-liter can from some beans. Seryozha had brought that can once for some dinner, but they didn’t open it, they had baked potatoes instead, and they left it for Baba Anya when they went back to the city in the fall.

Olga took the can in her hands.

“And take all your luggage, too!” Baba Anya said.

“How am I going to drag all this to the well?”

“Take it, take it! Take your purse!”

Olga obediently slung her purse over her shoulder and went out the door with the can. Baba Anya dragged the backpack after her, but for some reason she didn’t come into the outer hall.

The cold met Olga outside, along with a strong fresh breeze, and everywhere in the abandoned garden were tall blackened weeds, their hollow seeds swaying in the wind. Olga stumbled over to the ravine, where the nearest well was. They’d put in running water for everyone long ago, except they didn’t quite reach here, to the impoverished Baba Anya, who couldn’t raise the funds for it.

The ravine was covered with old trash, it was practically a dump, and there was no bucket at the well, just a piece of folded brown string. The bucket had been expropriated, as Baba Anya used to say.

Here Olga’s head began to spin, and everything around her turned clearly, blindingly white — but only for an instant. Without losing consciousness, Olga found a big crooked nail, and pulled a chunk of brick from the ground. She broke a hole in the side of the can, though in doing so slashed the index finger on her left hand — she sucked the blood out with her lips — found a fresh ribwort leaf, placed it on the wound, then somehow managed to tie the rope to the can, and released the catch. Her improvised bucket dropped, picked up water, she brought it back up, now as cold as ice, untied the rope from it, and, holding it away from her body, carried the cold can, full to the brim, thinking only of poor Baba Anya, who didn’t have a drop of water in the house. She went up from the filthy ravine, up the clay path, her legs weren’t used to it and hurt, or rather they were numb. At the top of the path Olga put the can down and looked around.

Baba Anya’s tattered fence was filled with gaps, and you could see the house clearly from here. Now there were no curtains in the windows! Olga felt an ice-like fear, the dark fear of a healthy person before insanity — the sort of insanity that can tear all the curtains from the four windows in seven or eight minutes.

Still, Baba Anya needed to be fed or at least given something to drink. She’d call the doctors, lock the house, find Marina somehow, or Svetlana, or Dmitry Fedosev. As for who should live here — the homeless Sveta, the heir, who’ll drink away the house in the blink of an eye, or poor homeless Marina — wasn’t for us to decide. Or she’d take Marina herself! That’s what she’d do, now that she was involved in this business. You wanted to leave your life, well, now you’ve left it and ended up in someone else’s. No place in the world is free of lonely souls in need of help. Seryozha and Nastya will be against it; Seryozha won’t say anything; Nastya will say, That’s interesting, Mom, as if we didn’t know already you were koo-koo. And her mother will of course cause a terrific scandal over the phone.

Olga stood there thinking all this over, with difficulty, knowing that she should keep going, but her legs had filled with lead, they refused to take orders, didn’t want to carry three liters of ice-cold water to the pillaged house of the crazy old woman, didn’t want to experience more hardship in this life. The sharp wind howled up the hill where Olga stood, frozen, a mother and wife, standing there like a homeless woman, like a pauper, with her only worldly possession at her feet in the form of a three-liter tin can filled with water. The sharp wind blew, the black skeletons of the trees screeched, and the fresh watermelon smell of winter appeared. It was cold, bitter, it was getting dark quickly, and she immediately wanted to transport herself home, to her warm, slightly drunken Seryozha, her living Nastya, who must have woken up by now, must be lying there in her nightshirt and robe, watching television, eating chips, drinking Coca-Cola and calling up her friends. Seryozha will be going to visit his old school friend now. They’ll have some drinks. It was the usual Sunday program, so let it be. In a clean, warm, ordinary house. Without any problems.

Olga took the can in both hands and carried it down to Baba Anya, but slipped and fell on the clay, spilling half the water on herself. Oh, God! Her legs were hurting now for real.

But Baba Anya’s door was locked, and no one opened even though she kicked at the door with her sick legs and yelled like a woman possessed.

Someone above her noted, very clearly, very quickly: “She’s yelling.”

But Olga knew another way into the house, through the ladder into the attic, and there through the chute, along the steps in the wall, you could make your way down to the terrace — they’d climbed into the house that way more than once, she and Seryozha, late at night, when they couldn’t find the keys.

Olga left the can at the door.

Baba Anya was sitting inside that house, insane, without water, and there’s no way she’d be able to take the food out of the fastened backpack, not in the mindless state she was in. How quickly it can happen to you, when you lose everything, and the intelligent, kind, wonderful human turns into a wary silly little animal.

With some difficulty Olga got the ladder out from under the house, placed it against the wall, climbed up the rickety rungs, the third one gave way and she fell, hurting her legs again (were they broken?). Moaning, she kept climbing, got up on the roof after all, managed to injure her hands, too, and her side was now in pain, and her head, and once again, for a moment, this great white space opened before her, but that was nothing, it disappeared right away, and then she barely dragged herself along the dusty attic, made it down to the terrace — the tortuous unbearable journey. And then the door from the terrace turned out to be locked, too. Apparently Baba Anya had thought of this, and put it on a hook, for fear of thieves.

All right.

Olga broke into tears and began banging on the door with her fists, yelling: “Anna Sergeevna! Hello! It’s me, Olga! Let me in!”

She stood and listened for a moment — there was nothing — just a distant sound like some earth trickling down in a little stream.

“All right,” Olga said finally. “I’m leaving. The water is in a can next to the door. There is bread and cheese in the big pocket of the backpack, at the front. The salami is there, too.”

The way back up the wall was even harder than the way down, her hands wouldn’t listen to her at all as she took hold of the notches, and Olga descended the ladder already in a state of half-madness, somehow avoiding the broken third rung. The white light shone in places through the twilight, the white light of unconsciousness.

When she made it to the station, she sat down on an ice-cold bench. It was so cold, her legs were frozen and ached terribly as if they’d been crushed. The train was a long time in coming. Olga curled up on the icy bench. Trains kept passing by the station, she was the only one on the platform. Now it had gotten dark for real.

And then Olga woke up on some kind of bed. Once again there opened before her (there it is!) that endless white space, as if she were surrounded by snow. Olga moaned and turned her gaze to the horizon. There she saw a window, half obstructed by a blue curtain. Outside the window it was night, and lights shone far away. Olga lay in a vast dark room with white walls; her covers were weighing her down like rubble. She couldn’t raise her right arm, it was pressed down by some kind of weight. She raised her left hand and began examining it; it was so pale as to be almost transparent. There was a large dark scratch on her pointing finger — from where she’d picked up the brick at Baba Anya’s house. But the wound was almost healed.

“Where am I?” Olga asked loudly. “Hey! Hello! Baba Anya!”

She tried to raise herself up — without any success. Her legs hurt fiercely, that much was certain. And a pain was cutting into her lower abdomen.

There was no one around.

Finally she managed to raise herself up, leaning on her right arm, and look around.

She was lying on a bed; a semitransparent tube was protruding from this bed.

A catheter! They’d put a catheter into her! Like they’d put one into her dying grandmother long ago, in the hospital. And this was a hospital. Nearby there was another bed with an inert mass of white in it.

“Hello! Oy! Help!” Olga called out. “Help Baba Anya! And Marina Fedoseva! Help them!”

The mass of white in the next bed started moving.

A nurse who’d just woken up walked into the room in her white robe.

“What are you yelling for?” she said. “Quiet. You’ll wake everyone.”

“Where am I?” Olga cried. “Let me up! Marina Fedoseva, you need to find her. Let me up!”

“And you will be up and about, you will. Now that you’ve. returned.” She left and came back with a big needle. While she received her shot, Olga was trying to remember, painfully.

“What’s wrong with me, nurse? Tell me.”

“What’s wrong is that your legs are broken, and your arm, and your pelvic bone. Lie still. Your husband will come tomorrow, and your mother, they’ll tell you everything. Also a concussion. It’s good you woke up. They’ve been coming here, waiting, and nothing. Can you feel your legs?”

“They hurt.”

“That’s good.”

“But where, where? What happened?”

“You got hit by a car, don’t you remember? Sleep now, sleep. You were hit by a car.”

Olga was amazed, she gasped, and once again she was knocking at Baba Anya’s door, trying to bring her water. It was a dark October evening, the windows in the cottage rattled from the wind, her tired legs hurt and so did her broken arm, but Baba Anya didn’t want to let her in, apparently. And then on the other side of the window she saw the worn-out faces of her loved ones, covered in tears — her mother, Seryozha, Nastya. And Olga kept trying to tell them to look for Marina Fedoseva, Marina Dmitrievna, Baba Anya’s Marina, something like that. Look for her, Olga said, look for her. And don’t cry. I’m here.

— Translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers