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

A Murky Fate

This is what happened. An unmarried woman in her thirties implored her mother to leave their studio apartment for one night so she could bring home a lover.

This so-called lover bounced between two households, his mother’s and his wife’s, and he had an overripe daughter of fourteen to consider as well. About his work at the laboratory he constantly fretted but would brag to anyone who listened about the imminent promotion that never materialized. The insatiable appetite he displayed at office parties, where he stuffed himself, was the result of an undiagnosed diabetes that enslaved him to thirst and hunger and lacquered him with pasty skin, thick glasses, and dandruff. A fat, balding man-child of forty-two with a dead-end job and ruined health—this was the treasure our unmarried thirtysomething brought to her apartment for a night of love.

He approached the upcoming tryst matter-of-factly, almost like a business meeting, while she approached it from the black desperation of loneliness. She gave it the appearance of love or at least infatuation: reproaches and tears, pleadings to tell her that he loved her, to which he replied, “Yes, yes, I quite agree.” But despite her illusions she knew there was no romance in how they moved from the office to her apartment, picking up cake and wine at his request; how her hands shook when she was unlocking the door, terrified that her mother might have decided to stay.

The woman put water on for tea, poured wine, and cut cake. Her lover, stuffed with cake, flopped himself across the armchair. He checked the time, then unfastened his watch and placed it on a chair. His underwear and body were surprisingly white and clean. He sat down on the edge of the sofa, wiped his feet with his socks, and lay down on the fresh sheets. He did his business; they chatted. He asked again what she thought of his chances for a promotion and got up to leave. At the door, he turned back toward the cake and cut himself another large piece, then licked the knife. He asked her to change a three-ruble bill but, receiving no reply, pecked her on the forehead and slammed the door behind him. She didn’t get up. Of course the affair was over for him. He wasn’t coming back—in his childishness he hadn’t understood even that much, skipping off happily, unaware of the catastrophe, taking his three rubles and his overstuffed belly.

The next day she didn’t go to the cafeteria but ate lunch at her desk. She thought about the coming evening, when she’d have to face her mother and resume her old life. Suddenly she blurted out to her officemate: “Well, have you found a man yet?” The woman blushed miserably: “No, not yet.” Her husband had left her, and she’d been living alone with her shame and humiliation, never inviting any of her friends to her empty apartment. “How about you?” she asked. “Yes, I’m seeing someone,” the woman replied. Tears of joy welled up in her eyes.

But she knew she was lost. From now on, she understood, she’d be chained to the pay phone, ringing her beloved at his mother’s, or his wife’s. To them she’d be known as that woman—the last in a series of female voices who had called the same numbers, looking for the same thing. She supposed he must have been loved by many women, all of whom he must have asked about his chances for promotion, then dumped. Her beloved was insensitive and crude—everything was clear in his case. There was nothing but pain in store for her, yet she cried with happiness and couldn’t stop.

The Fall

That summer we watched a transformation by the sea. We were staying across the street from a resort for workers; she was one of the guests. We couldn’t ignore her—she was too vulgar. We overheard her laughter on the beach, at the local wine seller, on the way to the market—everywhere. Just imagine her: a tight perm, plucked eyebrows, gaudy lipstick, a miniskirt, new platforms. It was all cheap and tasteless but with an attempt at fashion. She strained, pathetically, from her curls to her heels, and for what? To look no worse than the others, not to miss her chance—her last one, perhaps—for a little womanly happiness (as imagined in soap operas). A blue-collar Carmen, searching for some seaside romance.

So here’s the setting: the sun, the sea, a new perm, and—attention everybody—she’s off to the fruit market with a pack of admirers representing every breed. At the head of the pack parades a tall one in a heavy wool suit, despite the heat (we nickname him Number One). He is followed by a potbelly in a shapeless tank top; next comes, incongruously, a skinny youth with hippie locks; and the procession is finished by a runt in a tracksuit—he’s obviously there for a drink. Our Carmen laughs shrilly, but not as shrilly or loudly as one would expect—her laugh is not the war cry of some neighborhood whore who invites all and sundry to her table; this Carmen laughs softly. She doesn’t want to collect every male in sight—she’s already got plenty; any more, and things could get out of hand. The tall one, in the meantime, maintains his position at the head of the pack. He’s the hungriest and toughest in her entourage, the alpha male with the most serious intentions.

Seriousness rules the ball—soon, the other suitors vanish, and Carmen and Number One are now seen together. Number One has changed his winter suit for a pair of sober gray shorts, which she must have selected for him here at the resort. Carmen and Number One walk about with dignity: she’s curbed her laughing; he carries her purse. They follow the resort’s regimen of eating breakfast at the dining hall, then taking in the sun on the beach, then visiting the produce market for fresh fruit.

On the crowded bus to the market they stand as a single unit, the top of Carmen’s head barely reaching Number One’s chin, even with her in those atrocious heels. She keeps looking up, not meeting his eye—the sign of a serious crush, by the way. Number One gazes abstractly over everyone’s heads, looking out for his little lady—and suddenly anyone can see these two are in love, that they have separated from the crowd. And so the crowd shuns them, spits them out. In this sweaty pell-mell they are marked, singled out, doomed.

Yes, it’s happened to them, the biggest misery of all—a doomed love. Both look sad, on the verge of tears.

In the elapsed days Carmen has mellowed and acquired a golden sheen. Her ridiculous curls have loosened up and lightened in the sun. Blond and delicate, no worse than any movie star, she seems lost, consumed by her doomed passion. Number One hasn’t changed, only darkened from the sun, like a workhorse in the summer that will lose its color in winter. But he, too, seems marked by the grief that shadows hopeless romance. He seems tense and steely, like someone facing the end point of his fall. What awaits them is worse than death. What awaits them is eternal separation.

Yet there they are, trying to dance, clutching each other to the beat of that summer’s pop anthem. Her purse is still bouncing on his arm. A few days remain. At the beach they walk away from the crowd, from cots and umbrellas sunk into the sand, and disappear in the sunlight.

The new season has begun. The beach is crowded with shapeless white bodies and smug new faces. Our golden couple has departed. The delicate Carmen and her faithful husband, Number One, are jetting through the frozen air away from each other, back to their children and spouses, back to the cold, and to hard, grim work.

She’ll wait for his long-distance call in a phone booth at the post office. For ten prepaid minutes they’ll become one soul again, as they did over the twenty-four prepaid days of their vacation. They’ll shout and cry across thousands of miles, deceived by the promise of eternal summer, seduced and abandoned.

The Goddess Parka

A.A., a schoolteacher in a provincial town, decided to spend his summer vacation near a lake and woods, not far from where he lived. He rented a screened porch in a cabin (he couldn’t afford a whole cabin) and began to live there very quietly. He left in the morning with a backpack and returned late at night; he never asked for anything and refused offers of dinner leftovers, to the chagrin of his landlady, who had planned to charge him for food or, at least, for the use of a hot plate.

A.A.’s search for privacy and independence didn’t take into account a certain Aunt Alevtina, a resident of Moscow and his landlady’s distant relative. Alevtina visited the cabin every summer. She’d stay two weeks and leave in a van loaded with fresh preserves. She lived in a small room in the landlady’s shed, a room she had equipped with a small television and refrigerator. She paid the electric bill by a separate meter at the end of her stay. Again, the landlady was left without a profit, although, to be fair, her grandkids did stay with Aunt Alevtina in Moscow over Christmas holidays and got to see the Kremlin.

On the night of Alevtina’s arrival, the landlady was boiling a samovar on pinecones. She opened the conversation with complaints about her miserly tenant. “Stingy like you wouldn’t believe: first thing he tells me is he isn’t going to use any power! Unmarried, too.”

“Huh?”

“I said unmarried. Thirty-five years old. Not a crumb on his porch. What does he eat?”

“Maybe he catches the bus to town, goes to the cafeteria there.”

“Ha! The bus doesn’t stop here most of the time…. Well, so how about my black currant—will you buy any this year?”

“Only if the berries are large.”

“Large! After all the work, all the watering…”

And the irritated landlady went on to recite the virtues of her black currant, hungry for a deal. Alevtina, rumor had it, lived in Moscow in great comfort and even wealth. At the thought of Alevtina’s riches, the landlady wanted to boast; she mentioned two magnificent apartments she’d given to her daughters and their worthless husbands when her old house was demolished. One husband was a policeman, the other a fireman at a factory; he worked one day and slept two, but try to get him to fix the roof and he’s too busy watching soap operas. His brats are shipped to Grandma’s every summer, and she’s expected to provide all the meals, and so forth.

At this moment, A.A. slipped through the gate and climbed onto his porch. He reappeared with two buckets, filled them with water from the well, and began washing himself down to the waist. The two Penelopes watched him over their teacups.

“Alexeich,” the landlady called out with dignity, although a bit uncertainly. “I say, help yourself to what fruit’s on the ground.”

“Excuse me?” The teacher quickly retreated and disappeared.

Alevtina giggled, but the landlady, undaunted by the teacher’s clever escape, pressed her point loudly.

“Thirty-five, like I said, and nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“Well, you know, a waste… of goods.”

“What goods?” pretended Alevtina. In fact, from the moment the landlady mentioned A.A. she’d been poring over all those women she knew in Moscow who were withering from drudgery and loneliness, while right here was a healthy specimen with four limbs who didn’t stammer and was mentally stable (with some luck).

“You don’t think he has a lady friend in Komarovka, eh?” Alevtina asked.

“How would I know?” the landlady croaked, and then stood up to go to bed early because, she explained importantly, she was allergic to the sun and got up to pee at four. She relieved herself under the berry bushes, “for fertilizer,” and shuffled inside.

Little stars sprinkled across the darkening sky. Alevtina sighed deeply in the direction of the porch. Nina, that’s who he needs. Thirty-seven years old, a pharmacist, mother died recently, lives in a studio on the outskirts. Her few admirers had been shooed off by the old witch, who had been correct: where would the newlyweds sleep—under mama’s bed? (Nina’s mom was a distant relative of Alevtina’s husband.) Well, well, hummed Alevtina. She held her breath and waited. The unborn child also waited in the dark. Nothing stirred. Black silhouettes of the apple trees loomed in the twilight. The warm air smelled of phloxes.

A.A.’s shadow cut through the orchard in the direction of the outhouse. Alevtina liked his deftness. A few minutes later A.A. emerged and exhaled the foul air. Alevtina pounced.

“Good evening, sir. How can you explain yourself?”

“Excuse me?” A.A.’s foot froze in midair.

“I don’t need your excuses. How much do you owe?”

“Who, me?” A.A. thought for a second that the woman mistook him for someone else, and instead of fleeing to his porch and hiding under the blanket, he took the first step toward the samovar.

“I’m not going to yell at the top of my lungs—there are people sleeping,” Alevtina remarked drily.

A.A. approached her gingerly. In the twilight, heavy Alevtina resembled a bust of a Roman emperor. She addressed A.A. imperiously.

“So, how are we going to solve this problem?”

All of a sudden A.A. began to babble something about the well, saying it wasn’t his fault the well was empty by the end of the day, he took five gallons and used his own buckets, others took fifty to water their vegetables, and so on.

“I see. Well, we’ll find a solution somehow. Remind me your name again?”

“Excuse me?” That was one of A.A.’s favorite evasion techniques, perfected on his pupils.

“It’s Andrey, correct?”

“Could be.”

“So how about a cup of tea? I have all this hot water left. What do you say, Andrey Alexandrovich?”

“No, thanks. Actually, I’m Andrey Alexeevich….”

It was the height of summer, the blessed time when fruit and berries ripen and fall. Alevtina hired a van and loaded it with jars of preserves. A.A. did all the loading, while the driver, a local resident, watched him idly. (Tormented by rumors about fabulous Moscow wages, local men had stopped working altogether and were swiftly turning into full-time alcoholics.) The landlady, too, watched Alevtina’s evacuation without offering to help. But suddenly she jumped: the teacher grabbed two huge canvas bags off his porch, threw them into the van, waved her good-bye, and left with Alevtina! The landlady had been right in the middle of a fantasy in which she got rid of the useless fireman and married her younger daughter to her tenant.

In the van, Alevtina, too, was thinking that A.A. was the husband she’d want for her daughter if only she had one, but instead there was a son and a leech of a daughter-in-law, and an only grandson, the light of her life. The boy was fourteen; he spent most of his time examining his pimples, and he refused to speak to his grandmother even on the phone. For him Alevtina had spent her vacation sweating over the stove, boiling and pickling—the boy loved her cooking. Her own son ate hardly anything—he preferred homemade liqueurs to food—but her daughter-in-law shoveled it in by the pound. (She also smoked and cursed like a plumber, and frequently suggested they discuss “future arrangements” concerning Alevtina’s property.)

At the end of this golden summer day, the van wheeled into the beautifully maintained yard in front of Alevtina’s building. They loaded all the jars into the elevator and then carried everything into Alevtina’s spacious one-bedroom apartment, which was decorated with rugs and a crystal chandelier. On the train back, A.A. fantasized about an apartment just like that, in the same neighborhood, and also a sweet wife, and a boy of his own whom he could teach everything he knew. He’d quit his wretched public school where kids munched on sunflower seeds and wore headphones to class. All this came to pass some years later.

He met Nina at Alevtina’s birthday party (Alevtina had wired him money for the train). By that point Alevtina must have broken off with her daughter-in-law, because none of her family showed up. Nina didn’t impress A.A. She was heavy, very shy, with large pale eyes. But he did notice her casual, almost indifferent manner when she was examining some old prescriptions of Alevtina’s—the manner of a true expert. The next time he saw Nina was at the hospital. He had come to see his dear Alevtina at his own expense, significant for his small salary. Alevtina spoke in a clear voice, though with some effort, and gave him a considerable sum—“for books.” She managed not to add “to remember me by.” Although A.A. didn’t cry, he must have looked pretty miserable, because Nina’s eyes filled with such sympathy and kindness that he had to turn away. Only after they were married did he find out that Nina alone had looked after Alevtina, feeding her pureed soups and fresh juices and staying with her every night after work.

It was Nina who sent him the final telegram. His train was late, and A.A. had to run through the subway. He then took the wrong exit and got lost; for directions to the morgue he asked the only person who was out in that terrible neighborhood, a woman with a dog, and she told him precisely—she must have known the place from personal experience. At the morgue he was asking small groups of people where they were burying such and such, but then he saw Nina and throughout the ordeal stood next to her. Everyone else in the party stared at him wildly, but later, at the crematorium, they asked him to help carry the coffin, as if accepting his presence. Nina didn’t cry, just trembled. Alevtina looked serene and very young; she had lost a lot of weight. They closed the coffin and hammered down the lid.

The crematorium bus took them back to the city and dropped them off in the middle of an unfamiliar street. Tipsy relatives crowded the sidewalk. Finally one of the cousins announced that close friends and relatives were invited to the wake. He avoided looking at A.A.; they all avoided him. Suddenly a drunk woman, a cousin, pointed at him and inquired loudly, “And who is he? What’s he doing here?”

“This one’s looking for a drink,” explained the grandmother.

Alevtina’s fat son, Victor, sidled up to Nina.

“So how are things? Married yet? Come to the wake, get something to eat, to drink. You should come to all our get-togethers, you know. Where else will you go? And who is he?”

“A friend,” Nina said after a pause.

“Right. Look, you’d better make me your heir—you never know what to expect with out-of-towners.”

“What do you mean, my heir? Don’t I have sisters?” Nina seemed shocked.

“Idiot! If you marry him, he’ll inherit your apartment! He can kill you just to get it!”

Here A.A. spoke up in his teacher’s voice, “Nina! It’s getting late.” And Nina simply turned her back on Victor and walked away. She walked slowly, with the put-on dignity of a freshly insulted person. A.A. tore after her: at the very least he had to find out how to get to the subway, and he guessed she was headed there. He was too cowardly to ask his future wife for directions and just trudged behind her. He was leaving for home on a night train.

Suddenly a small truck drove up onto the sidewalk in front of A.A. and began unloading. A.A. wanted to walk around it, but a wave of pedestrians forced him back. By the time he made it to the other side, Nina had disappeared. He didn’t know her last name, and there was no one to ask. Alevtina used to speak so much about Nina, about her wretched life with a difficult, ailing mother whom Nina had endured to the end after her two sisters couldn’t take it anymore and left the old woman. A.A. used to listen to these stories with an inward smile: he understood perfectly well what was behind them, and he also knew why Alevtina had called for him at the hospital. He’d always resisted Alevtina’s scheming—he had been resisting Nina silently for a long time—but now that Nina had disappeared, there was no one to resist, and his life lost its meaning.

Ten hours remained before his train. He stood in front of the subway station in the freezing wind, cold and hungry, aching from unrelieved tears. Then he turned around and walked back to the truck where he had last seen Nina. From there he returned to the subway station. He shuffled back and forth between the truck and the subway, and then he saw her: she was running in his direction, crying, her enormous eyes searching for his. They fell into each other’s arms. He scolded her for running off like that—he’d almost lost her! Then he begged her to calm down, to stop crying—everything was fine, they’d found each other—and he took the heavy bag from her unfeeling hand, like all husbands do, and they walked off together.

Like Penélope

There once lived a girl who was beloved by her mother but no one else. The girl was used to it and didn’t get too upset. Her name was Oksana—a glamorous, fashionable name—but our heroine wished for something plainer: Tanya or Lena or even Xenia. She was a serious-minded young lady, tall but not very graceful.

Oksana studied forestry in a third-tier college—the only one she could attend for free. Upon graduating she could expect to get a clerical job in a state agency tallying birches and firs on paper. She and her mother shared a two-room apartment in a standard concrete building. In one respect their housing situation stood out: right below them, on the third floor, lived an incredibly noisy family of violent alcoholics. Every night the floor shook with screams, banging, and knocking; the lady of the house regularly interrupted her partying to stumble outside and yell “Murder!” and “Help!” Oksana tiptoed past their ravaged door; outside she dressed in dark clothing and wore her hat low over her face.

This was because she came home late, when it was already dark: she had the precious opportunity to take an affordable evening English class her school had introduced. Her mother told her about a certain Vladimir Lenin, who had learned a new language by translating a page of text into Russian and then back into the language, and Oksana adopted Lenin’s method, translating texts about logging, rafting, and skidding—clearly her college expected its students to haul timber on the Thames. The students protested, insisting that England didn’t need Russian loggers with college degrees, and begged to be taught normal spoken English.

At that time, Oksana’s mother was unemployed. She had set aside her hopes of being hired as an editor and tried to pick up at least some copyediting. She called publishers and received “test assignments”: a novel in two volumes, an action thriller of five hundred pages, a pharmacology textbook. Two weeks per project. At first Nina Sergeevna laughed at these assignments and their illiterate language and quoted the best lines to Oksana: “a passerby passed by” or “he was sitting on a seat.” Driven by professional pride, she stayed up all night rewriting these miserable tomes down to the last comma. But when she tried to reach her so-called employers, she always ended up speaking to their secretaries, who told her that, alas, she hadn’t passed the test. Oksana rightly suspected that these so-called publishers took advantage of her mother’s free labor. To make ends meet, Nina Sergeevna worked as an attendant at a day care center, where she shared a tiny unheated booth with an overfed mongrel, a kind of guard dog who never left her quilted blanket and responded with nervous barking to the voice of the teacher behind the thin wall.

Soon this existence, already meager and not very happy, changed for the worse. One night there was a long-distance call: it was Klava, the mother of Nina Sergeevna’s first husband, who had died very young, calling from Poltava in Ukraine. This Klava visited Nina even after she remarried and had Oksana; she used to bring bags of boys’ clothes that had belonged to her grandson, Misha. Before long Klava lost her younger son, too. Misha’s mother remarried and moved to Israel, but Misha refused to leave his school and friends and moved in with Klava. For years Oksana had to wear Misha’s hand-me-downs, including an emerald tuxedo with padded shoulders that made her cry. Oksana had never met Misha, but she couldn’t stand him. And there you have the background to the midnight call.

The former mother-in-law informed Nina Sergeevna in an expressionless, metallic voice that Misha had lost everything; people whom he owed money had taken over his company, and Klava had had to sell her apartment and move into a summer shack. The shack is made of plywood, Klava droned, the water and power are turned off after the summer, and someone has filled her well with trash. The firewood has run out; she tried to burn tree branches, but they wouldn’t burn. The cold has been incredible this winter—already it’s started snowing. She went to the city to collect her pension but steered clear of her former building: Misha told her she may be taken hostage if someone recognizes her. A happy New Year to you all, Klava concluded her monologue.

Nina Sergeevna used the pause to invite Klava to come stay with them, then hung up the phone and stared with her big eyes at her tall daughter, who stared back. “Here we go again,” concluded Oksana with a sigh. She was used to her mother’s almost daily acts of irrational charity. The most recent one happened just the day before at the Belorussky Station. Nina Sergeevna was crossing the bridge, sadly contemplating her editorial career that ended in a guard’s booth, when in front of her she noticed a tall woman with ramrod-straight posture who walked woodenly and carried a pile of snow on her head like a Pushkin monument. Nina Sergeevna bypassed the strange creature and hurried toward the warm metro station. But the woman caught up with her and asked if she was going to Minsk—because she was; that is, she wanted to, but she had no money—she’d been cheated. She came from Belarus, she said, having brought with her some cosmetics for sale, but the buyer didn’t show up, and she wasn’t paid. The woman produced a Belarusian passport. Nina Sergeevna told her to come inside the metro station, it was too cold to talk in the street, but the woman looked at her in terror: “Are you going to give me away to the cops?” Ah, of course! The poor thing didn’t have a Moscow registration and could be arrested at the entrance to the subway! Nina Sergeevna asked how much she needed to get home. The poor woman tried to calculate: five hundred thousand, no, three hundred thousand, no, three hundred rubles! Nina Sergeevna gave her the money and also a baguette she’d been carrying home. Three hundred rubles was exactly one third of what remained of her pension after paying the rent. Thank God the monument hadn’t asked for five hundred or a thousand—Nina Sergeevna would have satisfied any request for help; often she didn’t wait for people to ask and just gave away what she had.

Two days later they picked up Baba Klava at the station. Baba Klava had some luggage with her: the familiar backpack with summer work clothes from her dacha, two paper icons, and a sack of apples. Misha the grandson had forbidden her to go back to the apartment, and as a result Klava had not a stitch of winter clothing and was wearing a summer shirt in December.

At Nina Sergeevna’s, Klava installed her paper icons behind the glass front of the bookcase. She prayed to them constantly yet, she believed, discreetly. Her apples were left to rot under the kitchen table: Klava expected them to ripen by New Year’s Eve. She shared Nina Sergeevna’s sofa bed in the walk-through room but couldn’t sleep—she did her best to lie still between Nina Sergeevna and the wall. Meanwhile, the tired mother and daughter slept dreamlessly, treasuring every moment of rest.

Nina Sergeevna got back in touch with a half-forgotten friend who dabbled in philanthropy. That friend helped her get an appointment at a decent secondhand store, and Nina brought home a warm jacket and two quilted house robes for Klava, and also a length of light, gold-toned material—a former curtain. Oksana asked her mother sharply what the rag was for—they had plenty of rags as it was. “They offered; I took it,” explained Nina Sergeevna innocently. “Looks like silk, almost.”

Later, Klava reluctantly recounted the tragic events that had led to her homelessness. Misha the grandson had had a small publishing business that printed calendars. He’d wanted to expand, and so he put out an expensive monograph by a Moscow artist (who had convinced Misha that he was the artist of the moment). The book didn’t sell, and Misha owed money all around. The meter was ticking, and finally his creditor sent “shakers”—thugs who shake out money.

By then Oksana was taking classes part-time, in the evenings, and had found work at a landscape design company. Graduation was postponed by two years. She was paid very little but did impeccable work for both the owner and her bookkeeper. What Oksana missed most was her English class. She always carried in her purse the same book, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and tried to read it on the train but immediately would doze off.

In her free time Nina Sergeevna worked on getting poor Baba Klava recognized as a Russian citizen or at least a legal resident, so she could see a doctor. Moscow’s plutocracy treated Klava as a foreign spy, simply because she was Ukrainian, and denied her all rights. After talking to fellow sufferers in endless lines, Nina decided she needed to go to Poltava to get a piece of paper from the local archive saying Klava had been born in Stavropol and was therefore a Russian citizen. Klava froze up. She was terrified the shakers would find out her address in Moscow. When the exhausted Nina returned with the necessary paper in hand, Klava asked in a fearful whisper whether Nina had visited her house. “Of course not!” Nina told her lightly. “I only stopped by the city hall and came right back. You will now receive your citizenship and a pension!”

When Klava went to watch television, Nina explained to Oksana that she had visited Klava’s courtyard and chatted with some neighbors, that was all; told them she was a Muscovite wanting to move to Poltava—were there any apartments for sale in that building? Nothing, they told her. But, she said, apartment ten had just been sold, she’d heard. No comment. When she was leaving, one of the women caught up with her and took her phone number. Oksana almost fainted. “When will you learn to think? Why did you give that woman our number?”

“You know how I can read people!”

“That’s right, you read that monument from Belarus the other day real well.”

“This woman, Valentina, mentioned Klava: she remembered Misha as well as his mother, who had immigrated, and his dead father, Klava’s son. She used to work as a pediatric nurse and treated Misha as a child. I spoke to her, true, but I knew what I was doing!”

“Oh, Mama. I bet we’ll have visitors soon.” And Oksana was right.

Late at night on December 28, the phone rang out with long-distance calls. “Oksana, get Klava, quick!”

Klava’s body formed a little bump under a heavy blanket. The bump was trembling. “Who is it, shakers?”

“No, no, it’s Misha’s mom calling from Jerusalem!”

As soon as Klava said hello in her metallic voice, the connection broke. “Couldn’t bear to speak to me. Finally remembered Misha. Too late—he’s probably gone,” Klava said, and marched off to the bathroom.

The next day Oksana brought home from her office a small potted juniper—a Christmas tree. “Oh, juniper,” Klava whispered solemnly. “Just like the one on our family gravesite. My two sons are there, and my dear husband. Thank you, Oksanochka.” Klava’s mood was solemn these days. She loved watching TV police dramas in which justice temporarily triumphed. They calmed her down but didn’t make her any more optimistic.

Nina Sergeevna was busily working on the piece of almost-silk from the secondhand store. The prerevolutionary Singer filled the little apartment with knocking. Klava was in the kitchen making a holiday pie with the rescued dacha apples. Oksana was trying to study in her little room when Nina Sergeevna emerged with a pile of golden fabric.

“Our New Year’s present to you, honey,” she tentatively addressed her stern daughter. “To wear when you go out!”

“Mama! Stop imagining things! I’m not going out, and I’m not wearing this!”

“But, honey, Klava worked on it, too! She used to be a professional tailor. Remember the green tuxedo? She made it herself!”

“Tuxedo? Mama! I have finals in two weeks! My boss wouldn’t give me any time off! She says she can’t afford to give me time off—she’s supporting a husband. She yelled at me for an hour. Now think, Mama: Do you really believe I can be interested in your secondhand garments?”

Klava walked into the room, saw the heap of silk, pursed her lips, and whispered, “Sorry, Oksanochka, I used to sew well, but my hands are not what they used to be. Nina, I told you she wouldn’t wear it!” She turned back to the walk-through room and loudly began to pray.

Oksana glanced at the clock: an hour before New Year’s. She took a bath, then sat down with wet hair at her old computer. Nina Sergeevna stroked her shoulder. “Please, baby. Klavochka is terribly upset that you won’t even try it on. What will it cost you? She is eighty years old!”

From Klava’s room came loud mumbling. Oksana gave in. In the bathroom, in front of the little mirror, she changed into the new dress. It was a very open evening gown with a slip and a weightless scarf to cover her bare shoulders. The scarf’s edges were embroidered by Nina Sergeevna. For goodness’ sake, thought Oksana, why did she waste her time on this embroidery? Who’s going to see it? Who’s going to see me? Her future of endless toil, without romance or happiness, flashed before her eyes. A messy office with bookkeeper Dina, an aging beauty from the provinces whose daughter refused to speak to her; her boss Olga, an emaciated workhorse with bags under her eyes, darting from client to client in a broken-down car. And the clients, wives of the new Russians, with their dreams of garden gnomes and potted junipers as seen in soap operas and their contempt of simple Russian trees. Suddenly Oksana reached for her never-used cosmetics purse and brushed her lashes thickly with mascara, shook out her damp hair to create a wave, applied her mother’s blush to her cheekbones, painted her lips generously. Why she was doing all this, for whom, Oksana didn’t know. New Year’s Eve. New dress. Black hair down to her waist. Big, rosy mouth.

Oksana stepped into the hall. The usual bangs and screams could be heard from the apartment downstairs. Oksana opened the door to her mother’s room. Nina’s eyes widened. “Klavochka!” she yelled in the direction of the kitchen. “Come here! Our princess has put on your dress.”

Klava pursed her lips into a tight smile and announced, “Like Penélope like Cruz.” The Moscow like had become Klava’s default expression of strong emotion.

Nina Sergeevna laughed with delight. “Once, at the dacha, years ago,” she said, “we all decided to go mushroom picking, and our neighbor Vera—she was at least eighty at the time—dashed over to the mirror and started painting her lips. My mother said to her, ‘Aunt Vera, we are going to the woods; who’s the lipstick for?’ And Vera replied—I’ll never forget it—‘Who knows? Maybe that’s where it will happen!’”

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

They 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.