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

Give Her to Me

This Christmas story has a sad beginning and a happy ending. It begins in March with a certain Misha, a struggling composer from the provinces. He’d written a dozen children’s songs and two symphonies, Fifth and Tenth, so named as a joke. Misha survived by moonlighting at clubs with various bands. Onstage he wore a lace blouse and a fake bust, like Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot. That spring he was hired to write a score for a senior show at a drama school, an assigment for which he got paid by the hour, next to nothing. He wrote in his kitchen, at night, while his wife’s family, who unanimously despised Misha, slept nearby.

Now enters our second character, an extremely thin and unattractive senior at the drama school. Karpenko (her last name) was one of those unfortunate creatures forced to compensate for their appearance with a pleasant disposition and a carefree attitude. She was accepted to the school for her undeniable talent, but a successful actress needs other qualities—no one quite knows exactly what: feminine charm, perhaps, or steely ambition. Karpenko was as humble as a beggar. While her classmates rode off with their admirers in expensive cars, she inspired interest solely from her graying professors of voice and dance. Although she practiced at the barre every day, her froglike appearance condemned her to roles of servants and old ladies who neither sing nor dance.

Luckily Karpenko was assigned the part of a horse, with a little dancing, in the senior show Getting Matches, which was based on a Finnish novel. Her voice professor insisted that Karpenko perform one short song. As there were no songs in the play, Karpenko and Misha met in an empty auditorium to write one. Misha composed a catchy tune, and Karpenko assembled some lyrics. Misha, impressed, batted his eyes and shook his head in disbelief.

Karpenko, blind with happiness, flew to her dorm. No one had ever looked at her with such admiration. She’d grown up in the Far North, in a family of political exiles. Her ancestors owned country estates and danced in their own ballrooms, but now the family counted as many as four children, the mother worked as a nurse, and they all lived off their vegetable patch. The Karpenko women were known for their reticence and regal beauty, but the little froggy took after her father, a bush pilot who left his family when he retired. A little later Karpenko departed for the capital to become an actress, and her mother seemed to forget her. They didn’t meet for five years. To get from the capital to her village, one had to ride the train for seven days, then a bus for thirty-six hours, then another bus, which sometimes didn’t run, for seven more. Froggy’s letters went unanswered for three, four months.

Misha and Karpenko had a fruitful collaboration, and at the end of March the play was performed before the faculty and students. The maestro praised the part of the horse, especially her tap dance, and the voice professor bored everyone with a lecture on how to teach singing to students with insufficient talent. The audience loved the horse and yelled “Bravo!” Misha and Karpenko, both exhausted, took a long time packing their music and texts. By the time they finished, the subway was no longer running. They climbed up to the attic, and there, on an old mattress, Misha betrayed his wife for the first time, and Karpenko became a woman. That summer their play was performed at a student festival in Finland, where Karpenko was named the best supporting actress. Her certificate, written in Finnish, was displayed in the department.

The maestro selected a new professional company. Municipal authorities allowed them to use a warehouse on the city outskirts. The maestro’s old friend Mr. Osip Tartiuk became the company’s general manager. He proceeded to cast about for a new play, as Finnish-singing horses couldn’t be expected to attract much interest in that blue-collar neighborhood or among the theater’s municipal benefactors. Karpenko didn’t win the job. Tartiuk liked his women fat; on every heavy derriere he commented, “What a centaur!” At the banquets, after the third glass, he liked to confess he was interested in only a large butt.

The unemployed Karpenko tried this and that, and finally got hired to sell vegetables two days a week at a big outdoor food market. Her situation was dire—she was four months pregnant.

She rented a cot in the kitchen of an alcoholic couple who were themselves children and grandchildren of alcoholics. Pasha was the husband’s name. His enormous wife was called Elephant. Their two sons were in jail. In the summer the couple paraded in shorts and lavender panamas donated by some international aid organization, and hunted promising spots for cans and bottles like experienced mushroom pickers. In the winter Pasha and Elephant impersonated blind beggars. They stashed their equipment—dark glasses, two canes, and for some reason a dog’s leash—under Karpenko’s cot, behind her suitcase.

Luckily Elephant never cooked; she visited the kitchen where Karpenko lived only by mistake, when she wandered the apartment on the verge of delirium tremens. At night the couple relaxed in the company of select neighbors. Their room filled up with the local elite—prominent alcoholics and their girlfriends in various stages of decline. The excluded spent the night banging on their broken-down door. These soirees invariably ended in fights that were occasionally interrupted by sleepy patrolmen.

Every day, Karpenko scrubbed the toilet and the tub; she replaced the broken glass in the kitchen door with thick plywood. At night she stuffed her ears with soft wax, like Odysseus on his ship when he sailed past the sirens.

Once, she dropped by the new theater dorms and left some fruit for the girls. Just in case, she also left her new address. Misha soon came to see her. She had nothing for him to eat beyond some potatoes and carrots, which she was allowed to bring home from the market where she worked. Misha stayed the night, but he couldn’t sleep because of the drunken screaming and banging; in the morning he scrambled away as soon as the subway started up. Karpenko, who hadn’t mentioned her pregnancy, didn’t expect him back.

Three days later Misha reappeared with a keyboard: he had written a score to a musical. While he performed his score for Karpenko, the landlords and their visitors gathered outside the kitchen door and treated themselves to an impromptu dance party, obviously approving of Misha’s music. Karpenko, inspired, pulled out her most precious possession, an old typewriter, and wrote a play.

At that time theaters were interested only in plays translated from Italian. Misha and Karpenko invented an author, “Alidada Nektolai, as translated from the Italian by U. Karpui.” Their cast included a philandering lawyer and his skinny wife; the wife’s girlfriend, who slept with the lawyer and was married to the mayor; the mayor and his mafia friends, named Kafka, Lorca, and Petrarch; and so on. The heroine was a beautiful aspiring singer named Gallina Bianca. Misha observed that Karpenko would never get the lead, and so they created a character for her, a television executive named Julietta Mamasina who spoke entirely in Elephant’s morning monologues.

One day Elephant returned home covered in bruises and carrying a box of powdered milk that she’d discovered in an expensive supermarket’s Dumpster—the scene of many a fight over discarded goods. Pasha and Elephant sent a few packages to the market with Karpenko, but it seemed no one wanted to buy expired milk, and Elephant lost interest in the box. (Her guests did try to mix the powder with vodka, but the combination made them itchy.) The milk was left for the undernourished Karpenko, who added to her diet of raw carrots and beets, cottage cheese, and one boiled egg a serving of oatmeal cooked with milk.

The play was retyped, the songs recorded, and the arrangement copyrighted. Misha went to see the theater’s general manager, Mr. Osip Tartiuk, who received the play with indifference. Three days later, however, Tartiuk invited Misha to a staff meeting, where he sang and played his heart out. The play was accepted on the spot. Everyone was excited, until Misha announced that Alidada Nektolai demanded four thousand dollars for his play. Osip nearly lost his voice.

“We are young! We are poor!” he squeaked.

“Nektolai says that every company tells him they are young and poor. You want the play, pay up. Otherwise, there’s a long line.”

Osip cautiously inquired if there were other options.

“Another option would be to pay the translator directly, half that amount.”

“But I know her! She’s a regular centaur!” Here Osip gestured with his hands. “An ass like hers… she’ll give us a discount!”

“I seriously doubt it. Theaters like yours are a dime a dozen, and they all want her.”

“We’ll offer her a thousand dollars! A whole thousand!”

“If she gets a thousand, then so do I, as the author of the score.”

“Who needs your score? We’ll put some soundtrack together!” Osip glared at Misha’s poor little keyboard.

“Translator Karpui insists her lyrics and my music stay together,” Misha piped up nervously. “It’s a musical—don’t you get it? Every theater in Moscow makes money on musicals except you in your dump!”

Osip looked deflated. He promised Misha an appropriate solution and pulled him into his office.

After a lengthy discussion Misha was promised $1,500 and, for Karpenko, a room in the theater dorm, a part in the play, and a permanent position with the company.

“What’s going on between you and this Karpenko, young man? Has your wife been informed?” Osip asked suspiciously.

“We are getting a divorce,” Misha blurted out, surprising himself.

“And do you actually know this Karpui?”

“Karpui is Karpenko—she wrote the play herself. We hold copyright to both the play and the music.”

“You can shut up now! This Karpenko and her play are worth maybe a hundred dollars on a good day. If you want, I’ll make her a janitor; we need one in the theater.”

“Great! We’ll sell the play to the best theater in Moscow for my price!”

“Two hundred?”

At this moment the maestro walked in, beaming, and announced he’d never seen such enthusiasm among the actors about a new play. “I can see it onstage! And you”—here the maestro called Misha several names—“are in my way with your music!”

Enraged, normally meek Misha lost his composure and demanded a thousand each—immediately and in dollars, not rubles.

“Immediately? I can’t,” Osip replied peevishly.

“The translator and I will come in on Monday.”

“On Monday I can’t, either. Mmm… make it Wednesday.”

“So on Wednesday you’ll meet my conditions, right?”

“Look, Misha!” Osip started yelling again. “I need a janitor! Renovations are almost over; who’s going to clean up this mess?”

A pause.

“By the way,” Osip announced to the confused maestro, “your former student Karpenko has just returned from Finland, where she’s been working in television.”

“From Finland? That’s where she was! Suddenly my student disappears…. So she’ll play Gallina Bianca; she’ll be perfect! In the first act she’s a skinny little thing; in the second she’ll have big boobs and high heels—”

“Actually, she wanted to play Julietta Mamasina,” interrupted Misha.

“Who cares what she wants!” screamed Osip. “Fine, let her play already,” he finished quietly.

At the dorm, Karpenko moved into a room belonging to two girls who had been forced to move into a double, which now became a triple. The aggravation intensified as new parts were assigned. Oh theater, the snake pit of snake pits! The question suddenly arose as to why Misha was living in the dorm without any registration, while the rest of them had to pay extra for gas and electricity. Also, did Misha’s wife know what was happening? Somebody should inform her. The wife and their ten-year-old son once came to see Misha, waiting for him until the last train. God knows how Osip found out, but he warned Misha, and he and Karpenko hid at the Domodedovo airport.

The new season opened with previews. Karpenko made sure her costume provided room for her growing belly. Fake bust, miniskirt, red wig, high boots on flat soles—comic in the extreme. The premiere was a great success. Julietta sang off-key and danced like an elephant, a model for future starlets. In the dorm everyone knew about Karpenko’s pregnancy and positioned themselves to take over her part.

A few weeks later Osip Tartiuk stopped by Karpenko’s room. Karpenko was lying on the bed. Misha, wearing headphones, was bent over his keyboard.

“So what are we going to do?” Osip inquired. “When are you due? We need time to replace you!”

“December 31.”

“So what do we do? We have two weeks left.”

“Let Misha do it. He knows the part. You don’t have any actresses who can play it.”

Tartiuk looked stunned.

“Misha!” Karpenko shook him by the shoulder. Misha took off his headphones. Karpenko ordered him to change into Julietta’s costume. Twisting his arms like a flamenco dancer, Misha squeezed into it. He looked beyond funny: a miniskirt, enormous breasts, a butt like two watermelons, and, under red curls, an unshaved sallow mug with a huge schnobel.

“A regular centaur…. Well, well. Have a safe delivery. Ciao!” Osip left. Karpenko lay in bed, swallowed by her belly. Misha saw nothing notable in her swollen body. He was used to large women—his previous wife was the biggest centaur in the pack. A week later he took over Karpenko’s role.

On December 31 the show ended at nine thirty. Misha called Karpenko’s phone, but no one answered. He tried the dorm; the line was hopelessly busy. He changed, threw flowers into a cab, and arrived at the dorm ahead of everyone else. The phone’s receiver was lying on the floor. Their door was open. The floor was wet. Everything in the room was turned upside down. What had happened here? Where could she have gone in such a condition? She had talked about doing some tests… He checked under the bed. There, by the wall, he found her purse. A passport, mobile phone, her medical history… Okay, let’s see: Nadezhda A. Karpenko, pregnant, due December 31. Pregnant? He dialed the medical emergency number. An hour later he found out that Nadezhda Karpenko hadn’t been admitted to any hospital, including any maternity wards. Misha collapsed on the floor. Suddenly he heard explosions in the street. New Year’s fireworks.

Karpenko had dragged herself to a nearby maternity ward. She knocked for a long time. Finally a tipsy nurse admitted her. “I’m not feeling well,” Karpenko whispered. The nurse, who didn’t look too good either, announced, “Lisssssssten… ,” sounding exactly like Elephant, but she couldn’t finish the sentence and stumbled off. Karpenko lay down on the bench and closed her eyes. A fiery canon ball was rolling in her belly, trying to make more room. A young woman in white loomed over her. Karpenko managed to recite her lines: “Couldn’t find my papers, somebody took my purse, everything was there—my phone, my passport, my medical history…. Had some cash in my coat but couldn’t get a cab…. My father flew away…. No one wants us, no one….” Someone kept asking her name and date of birth. “I’m an actress,” was all she could manage before passing out.

She awoke in a large room with tiled walls that looked like a swimming pool. People in white masks stood over her.

“Hey, you! Open your eyes,” she heard. “There you go. Are you planning to push or what? What’s your name?”

“Karp…”

“Lovely name. Hey, don’t you die on us—don’t ruin our New Year!”

The pain came. Her body was turning inside out. Inhuman torture began.

“Push, push! Okay, stop for now!”

She felt them stab her with a knife and then twist it. They’ll cut the baby!

“Don’t, don’t stab me!” she screamed in her stage voice.

“Calm down. It’s the baby, not us. The baby’s pulling you apart. There, I can see the crown!”

Suddenly she heard a low sound like a train whistle.

“Mom, look up! It’s a girl! A real beauty! Somebody, give her salts. What’s your last name?”

“Karpenko. Nadezhda Alexandrovna Karpenko.”

“Finally! Now take a good look: it’s a girl—see for yourself; we don’t want any complaints afterward!”

Eyes over white gauze masks. Laughing. One of them was holding a little baby doll, tiny, unwashed. All crinkled up, crying. She’s cold! Never before had Karpenko felt such heart-wrenching pity.

“Rejoice, Mom! Such a big, beautiful gal! A happy New Year!”

“Just give her to me…. Give her to me, please…. Just give her to me….”

Milgrom

A girl is sewing herself a dress for the first time. She has bought three yards of cheap gingham (barely more than a ruble per yard), but it’s surprisingly pretty, black with bright circles, like a nighttime carnival.

This girl is a penniless college student. She has broken out of her schoolgirl shell, literally so—she managed to make a new skirt out of her old school uniform. The skirt came out messy, crooked, and off-center, but that’s the end of the uniform, anyway.

Nor did the skirt turn out to be fit for spring. It’s May, the hottest spring in memory, and still there’s nothing to wear.

So the girl, following the “Sewing Ourselves” page from a women’s magazine spread out before her (chest measurements, front panels), tries to make the dress herself and fails utterly.

The dress is lost, as are three rubles’ worth of fabric. Her monthly stipend at the college is only twenty-three rubles.

Here the mom intervenes. Her whole life, Mom relied on a seamstress, but then difficult times befell her; her girl turned eighteen, and she stopped receiving child support.

The seamstress is out, and Mom considers what to do, except here’s the problem: there’s no money.

There’s no money, the girl is eighteen, it’s a hot May (the kind you feel maybe once every hundred years), and there are exams to take. But her daughter can’t go outside. She’s lying behind the wardrobe—that’s where her cot is—weeping and moaning like a puppy.

So Mom calls her wise older friend, Regina, a Polish Jewess from the clan of the Moscow wives (that is to say, the new wives) of the Third International. In the thirties this whole communist contingent left the countries where it lived underground, came to the USSR via mountains and seas, remarried in Moscow, and then went up to heaven from their labor camps. Regina had served her time in Karaganda, was rehabilitated after the war, got back her old apartment on Gorky Street. The girl’s mother, who’d also seen some things in her time, latched onto her to learn about life. Regina was a good friend of the girl’s mother’s mother, who has also been serving her time and is expected to return this spring.

Regina always dresses with Warsaw chic. She’s sixty now and still has suitors, and she listens with sympathy to the confused mother of the girl.

Regina has a houseworker named Riva Milgrom. Regina is a European lady; she has soft white hands like an empress, and her house is always in order, as Milgrom makes sure.

That’s what she’s called: Milgrom—her last name, according to the old Party habit. Milgrom has a Singer sewing machine. The girl walks with the bundle of material through the May heat in her brown wool skirt. We know where the skirt came from—the mother had a dress she wore down until the underarms had sweat stains in the form of half-moons, at which point the dress was bequeathed to the girl, who wore it to school but could never raise her hand in class, her elbows clinging to her sides like a soldier’s; it was hell. Finally the top with the sweat stains was cut off, and though the mother protested that it could still become a nice vest, the girl ran out of the apartment and threw it down the trash chute. Still the crooked skirt remained, and that’s the skirt she’s wearing as she walks clumsily through the heat of May.

Over the skirt, to cover the tear, which was hemmed crookedly with the wrong thread—the hands sewing them were the wrong hands—the girl wears her mother’s blouse, which also has sweat stains at the pits, so, again, elbows at her sides like a soldier’s.

The girl walks like a draftee, head down, watching her green winter shoes with their thick soles, her elbows at her sides. She passes by Patriarch Ponds; there’s a gentle May smell in the air; young men are marching by, observing proud young girls in their new summer dresses.

Milgrom meets her little customer in her room, which is high up, right beneath the scorching Moscow sky—it’s practically the attic—and here is quiet Milgrom with her big moist eyes, very white skin, and total absence of teeth. Milgrom looks like an old lady—her nose almost touches her sharp chin.

She opens up her sewing machine, produces a tape measure, and as she records the girl’s measurements Milgrom launches into a saga about her darling son, the beautiful Sasha.

Sasha was so beautiful, people on the street would stop and stare; once his picture appeared on a box of chocolates.

The girl looks at the photograph on the wall that Milgrom points out to her: nothing special—a little boy in a sailor’s outfit, big black eyes, a thin, elegant nose. The upper lip protrudes like a visor over the lower one. A cute kid with curls, but nothing more. The lips are too thin for an angel’s—he has the Milgrom mouth.

At this point in her life the girl not only has no thoughts of children herself, but she also doesn’t have an admirer even, not a single suitor, despite all her eighteen years.

For her it’s all work, exams, library, cafeteria, shapeless green shoes, and a horrible brown dress with her mother’s pit stains.

The girl looks indifferently at the wall and notices another portrait, an enlarged passport photo of a scrawny young officer in an enormous military cap.

That’s the same Sasha; now he’s all grown-up. While they were measuring her waist and noting it all down and ruefully examining the cut-up fabric, Sasha got married and produced a granddaughter, Asya Milgrom.

Old Milgrom pauses to console the girl and tells her she’s not the only one who’s clumsy, that she herself couldn’t do anything when she was young—boil an egg or hem a diaper—and then she learned. Life taught her.

At some point during the long and bragging tale of Sasha it’s time to go, but the dress stays; it will be finished tomorrow.

Three days later the girl—who wouldn’t leave the house in her awful outfit, but who doesn’t know how to wash, or iron, or sew anything; all she can do is read through tears in her corner behind the wardrobe—finally pulls herself together and says to her mother, “I’m going to Milgrom’s.”

“That poor thing,” her mother says. “What a miserable life she’s had. Her husband dumped her, literally kicked her out of the house, and took away her child, a little boy. First he took Milgrom out of her Lithuanian village—she was a rare beauty, sixteen years old, but she didn’t speak any Russian, just Yiddish and Polish—and then he divorced her; you could do that then—with total freedom, he went and divorced her. And he brought another woman to live with him, and told Milgrom to leave. So she left. She was eighteen years old. She nearly went crazy; she spent all her days and nights on the street across from her old window so she could see her child. Regina found her half-dead, lying on the street—Regina being the protector of all the oppressed, of course. She put her in a hospital, and took her in as her maid—Milgrom used to sleep in the hall. When Regina was arrested, Milgrom apprenticed at a garment factory, earning herself a small pension and a room.”

The girl listens to this absentmindedly, then goes to Milgrom’s without really understanding what she’s been told, and she sees the same little room just under the roof, where the smell of old woolen clothing chokes you in the heat.

Everything melts in the light of the setting sun as Milgrom produces some cups and a teakettle from the kitchen. They drink tea with black salted crackers, the luxury of the poor.

Milgrom once again brags about her son, Sasha, her shining face turned to the photographs on the wall, although the girl thinks, if her mother is telling the truth, where did she get those photographs?

Grown-up Sasha looks back from the wall with a cold, closed-off stare, his cap sticking up like a saddle over his big black eyes. Now he really looks like his mother.

With what tears, with what pleas did Milgrom get those photos from him?

Milgrom sighs contentedly underneath her wailing wall and then announces that little Asya has just lost her first tooth. All the things that everyone else has, Milgrom has them, too.

The girl puts on her dress; looks in the mirror; escapes from that sweet-musty smell, out into the street, the sunset; and walks by countless doors and windows, behind each of which, she thinks, live only Milgroms, Milgroms, Milgroms. She walks in her cool new black dress, and she is seized with happiness, filled with joy. It fills Milgrom, too, who is joyful for her Sasha.

The girl is at the very beginning of her journey. She’s walking in a new dress, young men are already looking, and so on. In five years a boy will appear at her door with a bunch of roses he pulled out from a rose bush somewhere during the night. Milgrom is obviously at the end of her journey, but there might come a time when the girl will flash by at the end of Little Bronnaya Street, in a whole new form, carrying in her purse the photographs of her grown-up son, and bragging about him while sitting on a bench by the Patriarch Ponds—but she doesn’t dare call him an extra time, and as for him, he’s too busy to call.

The black dress shimmies down Little Bronnaya, which is wide and still filled with light, underneath the setting sun, and that’s it now, the day is burning its last, and Milgrom, eternal Milgrom, sits in her little pensioner’s room like a guard at the museum of her own life, where there is nothing at all but a timid love.

The Story of Clarissa

Until Clarissa turned seventeen not a single soul admired or noticed her—in that respect she was not unlike Cinderella or the Ugly Duckling. At an age when most girls are sensitive to beauty and look for it everywhere, Clarissa was a primitive, absentminded creature who stared openmouthed at trivial things, like the teacher wiping off the blackboard, and God knows what thoughts ran through her head. In her last year at school, she was involved in a fight. It was provoked by an insult Clarissa believed had been directed at her. In fact, the word wasn’t directed at Clarissa or anyone in particular (very few words had been said about her), but instead of explaining this, the boy simply slapped her back. During that time Clarissa imagined herself as a young heroine alone in a hostile world. Apparently she believed that every situation had something to do with her, although very few did.

This tendency of Clarissa’s might have developed further under different circumstances, but it so happened that only six months after she finished school, her life changed. During Christmas vacation in a provincial town, she met and married a local resident, and returned home in the role of a wife with an absentee husband. One cannot testify to her emotional transformation during this time; externally, however, she changed from a young person under attack from a hostile world into a silly young female who gives no thought to her circumstances and just goes along blindly. Physically, she changed too. The clumsy girl with glasses became a curvy beauty with golden hair and exquisite hands. As should have been expected, this soft and feminine Clarissa grew tired of her long-distance marriage with its numerous obligations, and when asked about her husband she would say she had no idea and felt tired of it all.

The next marriage followed quickly—to an ambulance doctor, a large man with thick arms. Soon after the birth of their child, Clarissa’s husband began to drink, to see other women, and to beat her. Clarissa seemed unable to stop arguing with him, even when he wasn’t around. At the office or when visiting a friend, she carried on her monologue in the same ringing note of protest, punctuated by sobs. Her husband’s indifference and contempt caught her off guard: she didn’t have a chance to regroup, to get used to her new role and think calmly about the best solution to her predicament. Even the youthful approach of dealing slaps for insults (remember the fight with her classmate) had abandoned her. One could say that during this period Clarissa moved like an amoeba, without direction, her goal simply to dodge the blows of her husband, who didn’t restrain himself in anything and continued to behave like a rowdy animal in the same room with Clarissa and their baby.

The heaviest blow came when the husband left Clarissa and took the child to live with his parents. Clarissa threw herself again and again at the locked door of his parents’ apartment—uselessly, it turned out, because they had rented a dacha somewhere in the country and had gone there with the boy, or so the neighbor informed Clarissa.

Clarissa’s subsequent behavior could be described only as illogical and pointless. Every weekend she took the commuter rail in a random direction and roamed the countryside trying to spot her son’s yellow hat. She called her husband’s friends and colleagues, busy people with serious jobs, to ask them to help her kidnap her son. The only outcome of these actions was a visit from a doctor and a nurse who wanted to know how she slept and whether she was followed by secret enemies, and who mentioned the possibility of a free stay in a wonderful sanatorium where she’d be allowed to sleep as late as she wanted—for a whole week! Clarissa pointed out that no one would give her sick leave just to sleep, but the doctor assured her it would be easy and she didn’t have to worry. “I see,” said Clarissa. “He sent you. I understand.” The doctor and nurse again tried to convince Clarissa to come with them, but Clarissa wasn’t listening. She was sitting at the kitchen table deep in thought, with burning cheeks.

After this Clarissa disappeared from sight, and no one knows just how she resurfaced six months later in yet another role of divorced mother with child support for her small son and the perennial problem of child care.

In this role Clarissa proved to be no better or worse than thousands of other women, but she did exhibit a certain practical intelligence. For example, she didn’t plan her future life with the boy. Any such plan was futile because the boy was extremely attached to his father and grandparents, who lavished him with care and comfort that Clarissa alone couldn’t provide. So she focused on the pressing problems that encroached from every side. She calculated, to the second, the time it took to travel from her son’s kindergarten to her work, spent her lunch break shopping for groceries, and treated her work duties as secondary, which was understandable for someone in her position.

After a year of this drudgery, she took a vacation by the Black Sea. She was there alone, her son at a summer camp with his kindergarten. For the first two weeks Clarissa couldn’t let go of her motherly worries, and she ignored the sea, the sun, and the abundant southern fruit, thinking only of her son, whom she’d left in the rainy north. She spent hours at the post office, waiting to place a long-distance call to the kindergarten to find out if her boy was well and if he was still there. But eventually the sea, the sun, and the fruit worked their magic, and Clarissa experienced a second metamorphosis. A ripe woman of twenty-five, looking meek and detached behind her glasses, she was noticed (and deeply admired) by a certain airline pilot, Valery, who was spending a few hours at the beach between flights. That day he didn’t dare approach Clarissa, because he was wearing underwear instead of swimming trunks. Instead he watched from a respectful distance while she rummaged nearsightedly through her purse, finally pulling out a touchingly small handkerchief to wipe her glasses with. Two days later Valery was again at the beach, this time properly attired. He positioned himself closer to Clarissa, but she was so frightened and repulsed by his attentions that she fled the beach hours before her usual time. The next day things improved a little, and Clarissa was able to squeeze out a few sentences. Afterward, she felt an enormous guilt and spent an entire day waiting at the post office to call her son’s kindergarten. The boy was well; it hadn’t rained.

Three months later Clarissa moved into Valery’s spacious apartment. In time her son went to school, a girl was born, and one could say that life had finally stabilized for Clarissa and even begun to flow toward a peaceful, healthy maturity with its rotation of summer vacations, children’s illnesses, and major purchases. On the days when Valery was on duty, Clarissa would call the airport dispatcher, demanding again and again Valery’s flight information, and upon his return Valery would be forced to listen to reprimands for his wife’s inappropriate behavior. Other than that, nothing clouded Clarissa and Valery’s horizons.

Tamara’s Baby

He never came by invitation—he never received one. He simply announced himself (often with a lengthy insult) through the door, then pleaded his way inside. At the dinner table he yelled and pontificated, spat out his food and bared his only tooth, wishing both to stuff himself and to have his say. He spoke in non sequiturs, always in a terrible hurry, never explaining anything. He must have believed it was the prerogative of an erudite man like himself to speak any way he wanted; didn’t he spend all his unfilled and unpaid days in reading rooms, working on some obscure bibliography or biography? Just wait till it’s done, he predicted to his poor hosts and their guests; he’d throw in some dirty laundry, some famous names, and voilà—we’d have a bestseller on our hands. But first he needed to finish this magnum opus with the help, he said, of foreign grants and lecture fees that never materialized. In the meantime, he lectured gratis in the smoking rooms of public libraries, where he showed up empty-handed, with no tobacco or matches of his own. Hence, the awkward giggling and convoluted openings—“God has nothing to do with religion” or “All politicians want is to be reelected; may I bother you for a smoke?”

The people who knew him feared he might ask to stay the night; women of the house shared the expression, “I could sense he was on the verge of staying over.” Besides, he was old. (That didn’t stop him from announcing into someone’s intercom, “Let me in; it’s up!”) When he stayed, everything needed to be washed, aired, and dry-cleaned. Officially he was not homeless: after the divorce he was assigned an attic room with a ruined ceiling and exposed plumbing—imagine the smell. All he could do after the divorce was read, so he found refuge in public libraries, where he drank tap water and cadged leftovers from the cafeteria. Abandoned by his wife and children, he longed for hot food. On pension days his biggest splurge was a hot dog and sometimes one or even two hamburgers. Also on those days he’d call on his acquaintances, under the pretext of paying back a debt—thereby giving them reason to have him stay for dinner. The next day he’d be broke again and would go back to the same houses for another loan, or wait outside people’s offices, ambushing them with requests for money to buy medicine.

That’s how he lived for a long time, but things do change for someone like A.A., too. A fellow demagogue from the smoking room advised him about free health resort packages for the poor, and even helped him fill out an application at the office of social aid. That was over a year ago. Finally A.A. overheard someone bragging about going to a health resort for free. Ready to fight for his rights, he rushed to the social aid office and was informed that his request had been granted and that he had been expected at the resort two days ago. The woman at the counter blinked cleverly. He understood they were sending him in the off-season, in the worst weather, when no paying customer would go. He screamed and stomped his feet, but once outside he reconsidered. October wasn’t so bad. Pushkin liked October. And if you think about it, what is a health resort? Three meals a day, plus he could take extra bread to keep him full at night. At the thought of all that food, he began to salivate uncontrollably. He ran back to the library cafeteria to look for a leftover piece of bread.

First stop: his old flophouse, the scene of many battles. He spent the night there. In the morning he exchanged his smelly rags for some decent secondhand clothing. Then he raided local Dumpsters for a discarded suitcase and found one, in imitation leather. He already owned a hat—a knit beret. He tricked the attendant at the library cloakroom for a scarf. “I must have left it here and then forgot…. You see, I don’t have a woman to look after me, so things get lost….” The woman picked out a green rag that someone must have left ages ago and held it out with disgust. “This one yours? Was about to throw it out.” A.A. accepted the rag gratefully and scurried around the corner to try it on. The green scarf went nicely with his new dark jacket and black beret. Then the shoes: his smoking room buddies suggested he look through the Dumpsters near big department stores, as a lot of people tossed their old shoes there after buying new ones. A.A. found a decent-looking pair, a little too big, but that was even better. In the evening he packed his notes and a pen (cadged from the post office) into the suitcase. There were eight days remaining at the health resort and two weeks before his pension.

At dawn A.A. left his vile room and boarded the train without a ticket. For the entire trip he stood next to the exit, shaking from fear and cold. Arriving at the resort, he found everything still closed. He dozed in the lobby, sitting up, like a gentleman, until the cafeteria opened for breakfast. Once it did, he stuffed himself with kasha and bread, swallowed three cups of sweet tea, and then stormed the little library. Straight as a rod, with his pen and writing paper in hand and his green scarf draped over one shoulder, he began by loudly demanding works by Spengler and Kierkegaard from the cute librarian. She shrugged her plump shoulders and sent him to the mystery section. A.A. yelled louder: The library needed more books, and he happened to know a certain warehouse where publishers dumped unsold copies. Just give him a truck and he’ll bring back hundreds of books! The librarian seemed indifferent to the news: she didn’t have a truck, and besides, people on vacation wanted light reading, like mysteries and detective stories.

At this point an elderly lady interfered. She overheard A.A. bragging and asked to take down the address of that mythical warehouse. As for the library, she agreed: they needed more serious books for the patrons like Professor (meaning him) and a PhD like herself. Well, almost—her thesis was finished, it was waiting in her desk, and she needed only to defend it. “Me too,” A.A. agreed eagerly. “Mine’s also on my desk”—even though he had no desk. The cute librarian was forgotten; the educated pair was loudly discussing matters of cultural importance. Leaving the library, A.A. held the door for the lady, sweeping her off her feet with such chivalry.

They walked into the park, inhaling the smell of damp leaves and wood smoke, and sat down on a bench under an ancient tree. “To walk the blessed path,” A.A. pontificated, “one must give up his possessions—only then can one reach the sacred door; but what happens if one doesn’t own anything? Will the door open for him?” She listened to his blabbering, taking it in gratefully. They almost missed lunch. Again he gobbled down his portion and all the bread on the table; he asked the server if he could move to Tamara Leonardovna’s table, but apparently there was no room. Ready for another walk, he waited impatiently for her to finish, but the lady excused herself—she needed rest. A.A. went to his room, too, and stretched out on the clean sheets, almost crying with joy.

After dinner A.A. stuffed his pockets with bread, and together they walked over to the stream. Again she listened meekly; this time he expanded on Francis of Assisi, who had walked the blessed path and considered every insult God’s gift. Back in his room he made a mess of his squashed bread slices, to his roommate’s displeasure. A.A. headed off the impending confrontation by running out into the hall, where people were watching television. He flopped on a couch and proceeded to watch one program after the next, annoying everyone with vitriolic comments and wild laughter.

Unforgettable days rolled by. The happy couple took walks in plain view, ignoring giggles. A.A. successfully campaigned for a transfer to Tamara Leonardovna’s table—he simply moved there, and one of the enraged ladies switched tables in protest. What really bothered the others was Tamara’s age (which they found out from the director’s secretary). She was seventy-five—fourteen years older than he was! It was practically statutory rape, the resort ladies decided. Eventually public opinion ruled that this A.A. was simply looking for a perch, for someone—anyone—to take him in; for what kind of prince charming was he—without hair, teeth, or a roof over his head? Somehow they knew everything about him. A.A. couldn’t keep his voice down to save his life. But Tamara didn’t want to know. When, a week after they left the resort, one of the ladies called to check in on Tamara at home, A.A. picked up the phone. Like small children they were unable to part.

Now they are living together in Tamara’s little apartment, away from prying eyes. A.A. eats regularly, before and after visiting the library. Tamara keeps house, looks after him, complains often but receives no sympathy; the blessed path is thorny. A.A. now owns two writing pads, which Tamara has purchased for him. She wants to have his pension recalculated and to make sure he receives benefits like a free subway pass—he used to beg and fake injuries to be let in.

Tamara’s whole family is up in arms about this cohabitation, especially her nephews, who are terrified that the old fools may marry. They cannot deny, though, that Tamara looks fresher, or that she is full of plans and new energy. For example, she has located that mythical book warehouse and now takes books to nursing homes and hospitals, where people cannot afford them.

At night they squawk to each other about their day. Tamara complains and recites her grievances, and A.A. doles out advice and admonitions like an austere paterfamilias. Then they go to their beds and read, exchanging notes; in the morning they resume their squawking and arguing. Who knows why this A.A. screams so much—he may be scared of losing her, of finding himself back in the flooded attic.

She refuses to marry him, although she did once kiss his hand when he was prostrate with illness. At night A.A. cries and howls with grief, but in the morning he plays boss again, and Tamara, barely awake, hurries with his eggs. He continues to show up uninvited at people’s houses, but now he holds himself more assertively and makes frequent allusions to his wife, “so-called Tamara,” and her undefended thesis on Charles Dickens.

Eggs is the luxury that graces their breakfast table the first three days after pension, but A.A. is shaved and dressed in everything clean, and Tamara walks around in practically new winter boots that A.A. fished out from a Dumpster. A.A. often criticizes her appearance: “So-called Tamara, go fix your hair!” Tamara crawls around her little apartment, always thinking about the next meal for this parasite. Where did he come from, helpless like all parasites and parasitic like all helpless people? And yet he criticizes and instructs, while she has no strength left to look after him. At the end of the day she drags herself to the food market to pick up from the floor squashed veggies and fruit for his dinner. She feels ashamed in the presence of some imaginary friends and nemeses, but she does have a justification: a certain old photo, the holiest of her secrets.

In the evening he comes home, gobbles down her vegetable stew in a second, and starts flailing his arms again, this time thrashing the very personage whose bibliography or biography he’s been putting together for ten years. The man was a fraud, it turns out, and Tamara says, “I told you so,” and they squawk some more and then watch television, exchanging acerbic comments.

That night he cannot stay asleep. He wakes up in tears. Tamara Leonardovna tucks him in and blows on his bald forehead, as she would have done for her baby if he had lived. And now for Tamara’s secret: she never believed the baby had died at birth! No, you see, here was her son, with an altered date of birth; he was back to sleep. There is a photo of him, the baby’s father, that she once thought she’d destroyed. It turned up mysteriously in the folder with her yellowing thesis. It’s the same face as A.A.’s, only younger.

She holds out the photo with a trembling hand, but he pushes it away: “What does that have to do with me? What’s wrong with you? Look at the date: I wasn’t even born yet.” He goes back to watching their tiny old television, and she puts away the photo, wanting to say to him, “My little one.”