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

Young Berries

A mother brought her girl to a sanatorium for sickly children and then left. I was that girl.

The sanatorium overlooked a large pond encircled by an autumnal park, with meadows and paths. The tall trees seemed ablaze with gold and copper; the scent of their falling leaves made the girl dizzy, after the city’s stench. Once upon a time, the sanatorium was a gentleman’s stately manor, with classical pillars, arched ceilings, and upper galleries. The girls’ dormitory, called a dortoir, was once a drawing room with a grand piano.

The revolution had repurposed the estate into a sanatorium and school for proletarian children with tuberculosis. By the time the girl reached fifth grade, of course, all Soviet citizens were proletarians. They lived in crowded, communal apartments, traveled in streetcars packed with commuters, waited in lines for seats in public cafeterias, and so on. (They waited also for bread, potatoes, shoes, and, on rare occasions, a luxury like a winter coat; in communal apartments, workers stood in line to use the bathroom.) A well-regulated line represented fairness. One had only to wait long enough for one’s portion, as, indeed, the girl had waited for her spot at the Forest School—that was the name of the sanatorium.

I cannot describe the girl’s appearance. Appearances cannot reveal inner life, and the girl, who was twelve at the time, carried on a continuous inner monologue, deciding every second—what to say, where to sit, how to answer—with the single purpose of behaving exactly like the other children, to avoid being kicked and shunned. But the girl wasn’t strong enough to control her every step, to be at all times a model of neatness and moderation. She wasn’t strong enough, so she would run through the rainy autumnal park in torn stockings, her mouth flapping open in an excited yelp, simply because, you see, they were playing hide-and-seek. Between classes she’d stampede the hallways, snot-nosed, hair undone, fighting and cawing, what a sight.

The sanatorium expected all students to keep track of their basic belongings. One week into the school term, no one, including the girl, could locate his or her own pens, pencils, erasers. But the girl lost her handkerchief, too, followed by her right mitten, her scarf, and one of her two stockings. (One lies there by the bed; the other, God knows where.) Plus, she was missing one of her rubber boots! Without her boots, she could neither walk through the park’s muddy puddles nor enter the dining hall. In an old boot from her teacher, she dragged herself like a pariah behind everyone in class.

Such was my condition at the very moment I needed to look no worse than the others. There was this boy, Tolik. We were the same age, but he was six inches shorter, and unspeakably beautiful: a chiseled nose surrounded by freckles, thick lashes over starry eyes, his mouth poised for a coy smirk. The girl was too tall for him, but this young god radiated his charm evenly and meaninglessly a hundred yards around like a little nuclear reactor. When he entered the dining hall, the space around his table lit up, and the girl felt a surge of merriment—Tolik’s here!—and Tolik’s eyes would grow larger, as though under a magnifying glass, as he surveyed his kingdom. Heads turned toward him like sunflowers to the sun. The girl felt stabbed in her heart. There was a swelling right above it, the size of a young berry.

In a commune, no one is entitled to private meals; that’s considered hoarding. Everything, even poor biscuits from home, must be shared. A commune also dislikes nonconforming behavior, such as arriving late or wearing mismatched boots. The girl, inevitably, became an outcast in her class. She began to straggle behind on purpose to avoid scornful looks. One October night, at the end of her second week, she fell so far behind the other girls that she found herself alone among the boys. Dark shadows fell across the path, cutting her off from the girls and their teacher up ahead. The boys, like a pack of wolves encircling its prey, surrounded her.

The girl stood there on the edge of the park. The other girls, protected and safe, she could barely see.

I screamed after them. I bellowed like a tuba, like a siren.

The boys nearest to me grinned stupidly. (Later, in my grown life, I could always recognize that dumb smirk, a companion to base, dirty deeds.) Their arms opened wide, ready to grab me. Their fingers danced, and their berries probably hardened. I stood still, screaming toward the girls. A few glanced back, but they all continued to walk away, even faster. I screamed louder.

What would they do to me?

They’d have to tear me to pieces and bury my remains, but before that, they would do everything that could be done to a person who becomes their property.

For now, they just wanted me to shut up.

When they were only five feet away, something made them pause. I hurled myself through their ring and ran wildly across the meadow, losing my oversize boot in the mud. At the door, I overtook the last of the girls. She heard me thumping and looked around: on her face I saw the same dirty, complicit smirk. I tumbled inside, red and swollen from crying. But nobody asked a single question as to what caused all that yelling in the park. Those girls knew instinctively. Maybe they’d shared a past in the caves where their female ancestors had been chased down and raped. (How quickly children can regress and accept such hard, primitive truths! Fire and women to be used in common; collective meals shared equally—where the strong get more, the weak get less or nothing at all; sleep together on a filthy floor; grab food from the pile; dress in identical rags.)

That night the girls seemed quiet in a strange, contented way, as if their hunger for primitive justice had been stoked and sated. They didn’t know I had escaped! They assumed I had come back alive but broken, soiled.

Excreted was the word for such children. The girl herself had known excreted kids in her schoolyard. The excreted were outside the commune, up for grabs—anyone could abuse them in any way. The thing to do was to stalk them, then to slam them into a wall in plain view. The excreted wore the look of dumb cattle; two or three stalkers tailed them. Nothing less than constant adult supervision could protect them, but one can’t expect an adult presence on every path, or around each corner.

The next day began like any other. I fished my boot out of the mud. The boys greeted me as usual (slugging me on the neck, shoving me into a puddle) while the girls watched me like hawks. But no one hollered, no one pointed fingers—eventually it became clear that nothing truly awful had happened to me. I must have escaped. Life returned to normal.

One person at the sanatorium, Tolik, sensed that something had happened. Tolik, a prime chaser, possessed the sharpest hunter’s instincts in the pack. He began stalking me. In dark corners, his starry eyes searched my body while his cohort guarded the perimeter glumly—this chase wasn’t theirs. It wasn’t a courtship, exactly; it was something else, something the girls couldn’t find a name for. They shrugged their shoulders. I alone understood that Tolik was drawn to the whiff of shame that clung to me.

The girl was left alone. She’d won her place in the sun, with her powerful lungs and her refusal to cave in. It turned out she was blessed with an exceptionally strong voice (she could bellow as low as a hippo and screech as high as a drunken cat), and this talent could kick in at a moment’s danger. In addition, she’d pushed herself academically, and this, too, mattered at Forest School, which wasn’t just any public summer camp where a child was measured by her ability to wake up on time. Good grades were considered an honest achievement here—you couldn’t get an A by punching noses—so if a teacher read your composition in front of the class, then that was hard to sneer at.

I’d spent my childhood in lines at public cafeterias and in the kitchen of our communal apartment, where academic excellence didn’t matter to my survival. Now, pitted against this hostile tribe, I applied myself feverishly to writing a composition about autumn. My final draft piled azure skies upon turquoise dusk, bronze upon gold, and crystals upon corals, and the astonished teacher—a consumptive beauty in an orthopedic corset—passed my opus around to the other teachers and then read it aloud to the entire class—the same class that had nearly destroyed me.

I followed up with some verse for a special edition, in honor of Constitution Day, of the school’s newspaper. It wasn’t real poetry, the kind that spills out of a dying person like blood and becomes the butt of ruthless jokes. No, my creation was beyond mockery; it could bring only respect. The Soviet people are the strongest in the world, I wrote, and they want peace for every nation—six lines in all. “Your own work?” the beautiful teacher asked as her corset squeaked.

A new pair of rubber boots arrived from home. At night, in the electric light of the girls’ latrine, I memorized spelling rules. My powerful new voice was now part of the school choir, and I was chosen to dance, too, in a swift Moldavian circle dance—the school was preparing the New Year’s program. After this, we would all go home.

That meant I would never again see my tormentor, my Tolik—your name like sweet, warm milk; your face shining over me like the sun; your eyes alive with indolence and lust.

In dark corners, Tolik showered me with obscenities. Six inches shorter but straight and unwavering as an arrow, he was a high-strung, consumptive boy keen on his target. Everyone at school grew used to the sight of the tall girl pushed against the wall, trapped between Tolik’s arms. Every night I dreamed of his face.

The girl pulled on her new boots and trudged through the snowy park to meet her mother—her time in paradise was up; she was going home. At the winter palace, among crystals and corals of frozen trees, Tolik was living the final hours of his reign.

At the New Year’s concert I performed solo in front of the choir, then swirled in a wild Moldavian dance. (For you alone, my Tolik.) Tolik performed, too (it turned out he possessed a beautifully clear soprano), singing of Soviet Motherland and her brave sons, the aviators, to the accompaniment of a grand piano. He was visibly nervous. The absence of his cynical smirk so struck his classmates that they clapped uncertainly, surprised at their king’s need for their approval.

After the concert there was a dinner, followed by a formal dance. In the early 1950s, children still were taught the orderly dances of the aristocratic finishing schools—polonaise, pas de quatre, pas d’Espagne—and so a slow minuet was announced, ladies ask gentlemen. Tolik, recovered from his stage fright, was exchanging smirks with his entourage. I walked over to him. Our icy fingers entwined. We curtsied and bowed woodenly across the floor. Tolik, discomfited to see me sniffling in public, didn’t crack jokes. Instead, after the dance, he respectfully walked me over to my nook behind a pillar. I retired to the dortoir and wept there until the girls returned. There were no more heady interrogations in dark corners. Tolik didn’t know what to do with me anymore.

I was picked up last, as always. We walked along the white highway, under dark skies, dragging my poor suitcase. The dortoir windows were throwing farewell lights on the snowy road.

I never saw Tolik again, but I heard his silvery voice over the phone. He called me at home, in Moscow.

My grandfather’s daughter from his second marriage occupied the next room in our communal apartment. She yelled for me to come to the phone. “For you,” she announced with her usual bug-eyed look. “Some guy.”

“What guy? There’s no guy…. Hello?”

“It’s Tolik, remember?” the high voice sang out.

“Oh, it’s you, Lena,” I greeted Tolik, with a significant glance at my aunt and my mother, who’d also come into the hall. “It’s Lena Mitiaieva from school, Mom.”

The unmarried Uncle Misha, a radiologist at the KGB clinic, decided to join the party. He stood in his blue army long johns between the black draperies of his doorway. The apartment’s entire population now stood in the hall (minus the Kalinovskys, minus my grandfather’s second wife, minus the grandfather who was smoking shag tobacco in bed, minus the janitor, Aunt Katya). The conceit was that everyone was waiting to use the phone after me.

“It’s me, Tolik,” continued the voice.

“No, Lena, I can’t tonight—they are going to the movies, Mom,” an aside to my mother.

“What movies? It’s late,” my mother answered quickly, while Uncle Misha and my aunt seemed to be waiting for more.

My love, my holiest secret, was calling me! And I had to speak to him in front of everyone!

“No, Lena, why?” I kept repeating vaguely, because Tolik was inviting me to join him right away at the Grand Illusion for a movie. Swooning, I kept mumbling nonsense for my listeners’ benefit. The listeners guessed the truth. They wanted to see me squirm.

Azure skies, turquoise dusk, minuet, my tears, his icy fingers all vanished, and remained in paradise. Here was another story—here I was a fifth-grader with a chronic cold and torn brown stockings. The world of crystals and corals, of miraculous deliveries, of undying love—that world couldn’t coexist with the communal apartment and my grandfather’s room in particular, full of books and bedbugs, where my mother and I (officially homeless) were allowed to sleep in a corner under his desk. My Tolik, my little prince, my dauphin, couldn’t possibly be standing in a dark stinking phone booth near the grimy Grand Illusion.

I didn’t believe Tolik, and rightly so, for I could hear coarse voices in the background and hoots of laughter. Again, the tightening circle of dirty smirks. But this time I was far away.

“Neighbors want the phone,” I concluded indifferently (choking back tears). “Bye, Lena.”

Tolik called again after that, inviting me to go skating or to see a movie. “No, Lena, why?” I mumbled. “What do you mean, ‘Why?’” giggled the shameless Tolik.

Tolik, that prime chaser, had figured out how to use my unhappy love for his dark purposes. But—the circle of animal faces had never crushed the girl; the terror remained among the tall trees of the park, in the enchanted kingdom of young berries.

The Adventures of Vera

Vera turned sixteen, and nothing but scenes followed, one after the next. Her father begged her to have some self-respect, not to fall to pieces over every stranger. He even threatened to send her to a juvenile facility but, in the end, didn’t act soon enough. When Vera was twelve, her teachers observed that her mental development lagged behind her extraordinary physical maturity; one of them, who respected Vera’s father, told him she couldn’t imagine what would happen to Vera when she turned fourteen. But Vera did turn fourteen, and fifteen. At sixteen she quit school, without asking anyone, and apprenticed herself as a junior salesgirl at a department store. Vera’s coworkers haloed her with gentle understanding and slightly patronizing friendship, agreeing that she wasn’t all there.

Often they said to her, “Greetings from Ivan the Fool!” They were referring, of course, to love, for what else could girls of eighteen talk about? They discussed other things, naturally: books, weather, terrible accidents in the city, injustice and deceit, their childhoods, the constant ache in their feet, and problems at work. But mostly they spoke about friendship and love, tried to analyze their feelings, applied intuition or simply closed their eyes to everything and cried their hearts out, and gradually, in the course of those conversations, acquired a protective layer of hardness that sealed their mouths and left them to fight their grown-up battles alone, wordlessly.

Vera’s father didn’t understand the benefits of such friendship, considering it unhealthy for Vera. When Vera announced that she was ready to leave the store, he agreed, despite misgivings, to arrange a position for her at his institute. The father was understandably afraid that after four years behind a sales counter, in a corrupting atmosphere of intimate women’s talk, Vera might go a little cuckoo from the institute’s abundance of men, might be willing to bestow her trust on any man—any man, of course, other than him.

Barely a month after Vera started at the institute, her father was informed that Vera’s coworkers found her behavior odd to the point of indecency. She carried on long conversations over the office phone, wore too much makeup, giggled loudly, and, in general, behaved as if she were at a party rather than a place of work. The first thing she did, her father was informed, was type a personal letter, on the office typewriter, to a certain Mr. Drach. Vera thanked Mr. Drach for returning five rubles and apologized for not agreeing to disclose her friend Tatiana’s address without her permission. Vera’s father considered the dates in question and decided, with no small relief, that the letter to Mr. Drach must have referred to details about Vera’s recent vacation at a country resort, and did not represent a new crisis.

Soon enough, however, he learned that Vera was pursuing an employee in her department, a married man who had invited her for a car ride one night but the next day avoided her and then had to ask a coworker to tell her quietly, “Now’s not the time.” Yet Vera continued to follow him around, demanding an explanation! She moped over this aborted romance, as she thought of it, for weeks. She couldn’t have known that the man’s wife, a former ballerina, had found out about their little excursion and made a horrible scene. No one told Vera anything, including her father, who felt determined to have a little talk with her but, as before, couldn’t work up the nerve.

While he hesitated, another employee, a rising star in Vera’s department, asked Vera to stay late to take dictation. About this young man, it was known he had recently filed for divorce, on the grounds of childlessness, and that he lived alone, without his parents, in a condo in the suburbs. The next morning Vera returned to the office convinced she had experienced a life-changing romantic event—she had found the love of her life, a future husband. She cast mysterious looks around the office, and trembled with anticipation. This employee, however, behaved exactly like the first one, as if Vera reminded him of something unpleasant that he wanted to forget. When one of his colleagues, a woman, mentioned to him that Vera was crying and was ready to quit the institute, he told her (the exact quote was reported to Vera’s father), “Let Vera bring me a doctor’s note saying she’s healthy; then I’ll do it.” He said this in front of everyone. They all laughed. Again, poor Vera didn’t have a clue. Imagining that someone had informed him of her unfortunate car ride, she hung out in the corridors and halls, looking for a chance to reassure him—nothing had happened that night in the car, none of it was her fault, nothing was ever her fault, and so on. Vera would have dumped her entire biography on the poor fellow—or anyone else, if they had cared to listen.

Her father was absolutely determined to open Vera’s eyes to the reality of the situation, to clarify the circumstances and motives. But he was afraid of Vera’s reaction, and besides, none of his past explanations had done much good. For a long time after her disappointment, Vera performed her duties automatically, ate very little, went to bed early, and read a lot of poetry. To her friends she admitted she had lost interest in living. She felt like an old woman.

Between this disaster and the final, decisive romance from that period of Vera’s life, there was a brief friendship with another one of her coworkers, a man of very short stature who always winked and smiled at Vera, and called her Miss, and tried to steal a kiss when no one was looking. This man, who was known in their department for his prim manners, entertained Vera with sexual anecdotes and once brought her an illustrated volume on the subject. Sitting on top of her desk in her little nook, he relaxed, cursing out everyone in the department and making personal phone calls that made Vera blush. All this, too, ended on an odd note, but not before Vera became fond of his visits and learned to think of him as a close friend.

When the man asked Vera to help him buy a warm coat (it was impossible to get one off the rack in his size), Vera raised a flurry of activity among her friends in retail, and arranged for him to pick up a fine, imported coat in a certain store, at a certain time. On the day of the appointment, the little employee didn’t come to work. Vera called his office number all day at regular intervals, announcing in the same flat, official voice that it was Ms. Vera calling about the coat. At first her calls were answered with muffled laughter, then simply ignored. The next day the little employee read Vera a forceful lecture on the subject of appropriate behavior in the workplace, after which he stopped what he called Vera’s “education”—the jokes, sitting on her desk, and so on.

This insignificant episode shook Vera to her core. She felt she’d been abandoned by a fiancé, whom she had come to like and even find attractive, despite his obvious shortcomings. Her father received a full description of the incident: how the little employee’s officemates doubled up with laughter during Vera’s calls; how the next day they all congratulated him on becoming the latest victim of Vera’s prowess; and how, on hearing about this, the married employee with the car talked about Vera with disgust and almost malice, while the department’s rising star also made ironic comments, although not as harsh, restraining himself out of respect for his female colleagues. Nothing the little employee could say about his real need for a coat stopped the giggling; finally, he gave up and, when no women were present, made a remark so dirty that his audience choked with laughter.

Vera fell in love with the head of her department when he returned from an overseas business trip and asked her to type up his report. All through the dictation he interspersed amusing little comments about the trip and its participants, as if only Vera with her superior taste and understanding deserved to know the real facts. Vera was smitten. Never before had she been addressed by a superior with such complete trust, as an equal. She didn’t consider, of course, that her boss simply wanted to deploy his charm on a new employee, or that, like most men in his position, he needed from time to time to feel the spontaneous adulation of the lowest ranks. Isolated in her nook, barred from general staff meetings, Vera wasn’t aware of the atmosphere of jealousy and of love for the boss (absolutely platonic) that permeated the entire department; nor was she familiar with his notorious habit of alternating charm with outbursts of the deepest cynicism in his personal relationships with his employees. During the next dictation, the boss grew even more relaxed and had a playful argument with Vera about some movie whose name they couldn’t remember. The loser had to fulfill a wish; Vera lost. With a mix of anxiety, regret, and bubbling joy, she prepared to give all of herself to the man she loved. But the boss didn’t ask for anything like that. Instead, he quickly wrapped up his report, grabbed his briefcase from his office, and practically ran home.

Over the next few weeks, Vera waited for a phone call or a note. After another sleepless night she called his office from a pay phone and asked for an appointment. This in itself was a strange request—employees at Vera’s department dropped in on their boss at any time, without formalities. The boss agreed, however. He told Vera to come by at the end of the day and to knock slowly on his door three times. Vera showed up at the appointed time and stayed for more than an hour, talking and talking about herself, as if a dam had burst. The boss listened with interest, saying now and again, “Fascinating” and “I’m going to study you.” At the end of her monologue, he agreed to meet her for a date later that night, adding that they must leave the building separately, in case someone might see them and think God knows what.

As her father might have warned her, Vera waited for ninety minutes at some tram stop, in the cold, in a remote blue-collar neighborhood where her boss must have spent his factory youth. Luckily, she had another date planned for later that night, and also luckily, that young man waited patiently for her. Vera’s evening wasn’t entirely wasted.

Eros’s Way

At work her nickname was Pulcheria, after the meek and faithful wife in Gogol’s famous story. Pulcheria was a model spouse by nature, but that hadn’t stopped her husband from making a certain acquaintance at a vacation resort, after which came anonymous phone calls and threats that the lady would “take gas.” The closing act was the appearance of a mutilated photograph of Pulcheria outside her door. In the epilogue Pulcheria was left alone, raising two daughters.

When her younger daughter married, Pulcheria aged rapidly, almost willingly, her lovely eyes and innocent soul withdrawing beneath heavy flesh, seemingly forever. Her soul still flickered on occasion—at work, for instance, where she cared deeply about her little subject. She fell ill when a new boss swooped into their division like an evil genius, threatening to ruin years of painstaking research. That was when Pulcheria and her colleague, Olga, formed a strategic alliance and became friends.

This Olga, for whom work was her life, hated their new boss with a special intensity. At home, people said, Olga had a sick husband who was hospitalized routinely, and, they added, her only son had married an older woman, had a baby with her, and now demanded one-third of the parental apartment. Olga fought ferociously. In the end the young family settled into a tiny room in the woman’s parents’ house. Olga lost her rosy complexion but remained in her palace, with her sick husband.

One evening Pulcheria stayed late at the office—earlier in the day she had been invited unexpectedly to Olga’s house for a birthday party. She called her daughter (who lived with Pulcheria) to give her instructions for the night but continued to worry about her and the baby; in retrospect this seems almost funny because only a day later she would barely remember their faces or anything else from her previous life. Everything happened so fast; she seemed to have gone to sleep, or else to have lost her mind from shock, as her colleagues (Olga among them) believed. When she left the office, she began following in Eros’s way—of which she hadn’t the slightest awareness.

At the party Pulcheria wound her way into a dark corner and sat there quietly, while the hostess and her coiffed girlfriends set the table in the dining room (Pulcheria couldn’t even count the rooms in that fabulous apartment). She understood Olga’s motives for inviting her—she always understood people’s true motives, to her discomfort. Olga simply wanted to crush Pulcheria with the glamour of her party, then oust their hateful new boss with Pulcheria’s help (there were only three people in their division), and, finally, get herself appointed in the boss’s place.

Pulcheria was angry with herself for wasting her whole evening on this party where everyone and everything felt alien and uninteresting to her. But she was angrier with their boss, who intended to turn their archives into a profit-making tabloid featuring personal letters and who-slept-with-whom exposés. The employees nicknamed the boss Tsarina and quickly figured out that she intended to write her doctoral thesis from their research. They also discovered that she’d been installed there by her husband, the deputy director at a sister research institute, who, in turn, found a position for their own director’s nephew, an equally useless careerist. Knowing all this made them want to cry from shame and hopelessness—but what could they do?

That’s why Pulcheria observed the surrounding luxury with indifference, using the party as simply a chance to take a break from the daily drudgery she suffered behind her perfect image of a plump, almost ancient grandmother—though Pulcheria was no more than two months older than youthful-looking Olga. Pulcheria recklessly played at old age at a time when quite a few women picked themselves up and stayed in shape for a long time. Olga, for instance, recently had made herself look even younger with the help of cosmetic surgery. Pulcheria felt a little scared of Olga’s taut face and avoided looking directly at it, a habit Olga interpreted as an admission of inferiority. One could see through Olga at a glance, while Pulcheria was shielded by an ironic guardian angel who understood everything about everyone—which was why Pulcheria just sighed when their third colleague, the genuinely young Camilla, made some wisecracks about Olga’s surgery. Incidentally, Camilla had not been invited to Olga’s party. Olga had probably decided that in her war with the boss, Pulcheria was a safer bet than the rebellious Camilla, who, by the way, would not have wanted to waste an evening with old hags. She had other plans, dreams to pursue, so let’s not worry about this Camilla—she didn’t come to the institute from the street, either; she, too, had relatives in the right places.

After whiling away in her corner, Pulcheria joined the other guests at the dinner table and continued her inconspicuous existence. She nibbled and drank a little until she realized the guest on her right was asking her name. She told him, and they began to talk about a certain scholar whose life happened to be Pulcheria’s special subject. The scholar had been exposed and denounced; these days his name was mentioned only pejoratively, but Pulcheria knew and loved him as an etymologist might love a bug she’s discovered, even if it’s harmful. In a quiet, reserved voice, Pulcheria firmly dismissed the pejorative note in her neighbor’s tone. Her neighbor brought up some familiar arguments, but Pulcheria didn’t want to debate a layman and just sighed. Only once did she bother to correct him, and her correction was so elegant and to the point that the guest looked at her intently as if seeing her for the first time. Pulcheria, too, focused her tired eyes and through her exhaustion saw a missing front tooth and blinking pale eyes; but what she really saw was an innocent, dreamy young boy.

The guest kept looking at Pulcheria and smiling. There are people who smile at everything and everyone, and one shouldn’t take their smiles personally, but this man smiled with a purpose. He smiled in admiration of Pulcheria’s intelligence, of her brilliant conversation, and as a result Pulcheria fell in love—a pitying, tender love.

She blossomed, her angelic soul delivering a ray of kindness, and thus the matter was settled. Quietly but firmly Pulcheria described her scholarly pursuits, but the subject of their conversation was of no importance; only the essence mattered, and the essence was that these two people had found each other at a noisy dinner table, while their hostess flew to the kitchen and back, beaming with purple blush on her new cheeks—although on one of her trips she did stop to whisper something loudly in the guest’s ear. A loud whisper of this kind usually carries an insult for the person nearby, but Pulcheria understood nothing of what was said. When Olga left, their conversation resumed, and when Pulcheria got up to leave, the guest followed her to the door, changed out of his house slippers and into winter boots, and walked out with her. They walked to the metro station in the crisp, cold air, and somehow Pulcheria wasn’t embarrassed by her coat with its hanging threads or her balding fur hat, which she’d been wearing since college. Her face shone; her eyes opened up; her guardian angel worked his way to the surface through the layers of aged flesh.

They walked down the steps to the train. He rode with her to her station, and then they walked again, for a long time, all the way to her door. There he kissed her hand, then left. They didn’t exchange phone numbers. Pulcheria didn’t even ask his name. She disappeared into the dark entrance, thinking of nothing, but later that night she woke up in despair, realizing she couldn’t ask Olga anything about him, not even his name.

The next day Olga got into another scrape with their boss, who asked her to fetch a folder from the file cabinet, even though they were in the same room. A hissing exchange ensued, an exchange that Pulcheria, absorbed in her dreams about the Stranger, missed entirely. Olga seemed to avoid Pulcheria and didn’t invite her to lunch, either sensing Pulcheria’s new indifference or feeling indifferent herself. Nonetheless, Pulcheria brought her tray to Olga’s table. In spite of her decision not to ask any questions, she immediately asked, “So how did it end?”

“What do you mean, how?”

“Well, I did leave early….”

“Ah, who cares about washing dishes? But what do you think of her? Treating me like her secretary! And who is she? Just the wife of our idiot director’s friend. And she thinks she can boss us around!”

Olga then made a short speech about her own connections, which she had, it turned out, at the highest level; and speaking of husbands, her own husband was still very much respected as a mathematician, despite his illness.

“What’s wrong with him?” Pulcheria asked indifferently, still hoping to shift the conversation back to the party, to the Stranger.

“The worst,” Olga announced. “Schizophrenia.”

Pulcheria felt she had to say something comforting.

“I don’t trust such diagnoses,” she said calmly.

“He’s had it for a long time, it turns out. He complained about his stomach, lost a lot of weight, quarreled at work, and then they didn’t pass his thesis….”

“But what’s so crazy about it?” Pulcheria asked. “Dissertations don’t make it through committees all the time!”

“At the hospital he was smashing his fist into the wall. They thought it was from some sort of pain, but then they asked me, and I told them everything. He was calling for you, they told me, for Anya.”

“Anya?” Now Pulcheria was really listening: it was as though Olga were trying to tell her something. She didn’t yet know that her entire future was outlined in this conversation.

“That’s right—Anya. As if anyone ever wanted him except me. At least he doesn’t have my office number; at my previous job he called ten times a day. A jealous nut.”

“So how are you coping?” Pulcheria asked weakly.

“How? At least he’s still okay in bed or else I’d hang myself, that’s how. Did you notice the men at my party? My lovers—all of them. And their wives are my friends. So what shall we do about this bitch?”

Olga’s story confronted Pulcheria with the shadowy, murky aspect of life where photographs get mutilated and then dropped on family doorsteps. These disturbing thoughts alternated with waves of misery. On the outside Pulcheria appeared to be processing the same old letter over and over. Later that evening, approaching her house with heavy grocery bags, she saw at the darkened entrance his uncovered gray head. Casually and simply he appeared before her. They walked to her apartment. The young family’s room was dark and quiet; either they were walking the baby, or all three were resting before the sleepless night, because the baby often cried between three and five in the morning. The kitchen was strewn with drying diapers. Pulcheria invited the guest into her neat little room, which was furnished with shabby but genuine antiques: her grandmother’s little round table, and two bookcases with old books. The guest began looking through the books. Pulcheria brought some tea and fried potatoes; they ate in silence. The guest was absorbed in a book. He read a little longer, then got up to leave. They didn’t touch. After he left, Pulcheria took the book from the table and pressed it to her breast.

Every night after work she flew home, skipping groceries. She cleaned, cooked, and scrubbed, barely understanding what she was doing. She couldn’t eat, and lost a lot of weight. He came every night, always bringing the same pastry. They had tea, then he read to her or scribbled formulas. Her daughter and son-in-law quickly got used to the visitor and greeted him politely but didn’t linger with conversation, so purposeful did he look, as did Pulcheria when she arrived home to greet him.

At work Pulcheria kept her nose to her desk. Olga lost interest in her. In a reverse move, Olga joined forces with Tsarina against young Camilla, who was always late or on sick leave but otherwise got her work done and indeed recently submitted a substantial article. Eventually it became clear that Camilla was expecting a baby and needed to keep her job until her maternity leave. Tsarina and Olga started a search for Camilla’s replacement and interviewed candidates right in Camilla’s presence. Poor Camilla tried to protest but continued to swell and barely dragged her feet. Clearly Olga and Tsarina needed a constant target for their warfare, and at least it was Camilla for now, but Pulcheria knew her turn would come eventually. A rumor spread through the institute that Pulcheria wasn’t all there because she was late with her reports, never came to the cafeteria, and spent her lunch breaks buying groceries. But how could she write her reports if he sat in her room every night like a rock? She worked at night, and in the morning she dragged herself to work, where she scribbled meaninglessly on her index cards, barely awake.

After eight weeks of this, her mystery guest vanished. Three horrible days later Pulcheria forced herself to go to the cafeteria and to join Olga and Tsarina at their table. They were glad to see her and advised her to get a consultation with a good shrink (Olga offered her contacts). Tsarina praised Pulcheria’s article, which was finally finished; Olga praised her thinness; and then the two resumed a conversation that almost made Pulcheria faint.

“So I won’t be here till lunch,” Olga announced meaningfully.

Tsarina replied that she could do as she wanted.

“Because, you see, he is in the ward for the violent, where he can easily be killed—the orderlies can do it. He needs to be transferred to the second floor, where they know him. Where he is now they’ll make him a vegetable or an impotent.”

Tsarina smacked her lips in sympathy.

“When I called the ambulance, he wouldn’t go peacefully and screamed for help—that’s why they put him with the violent.”

Here Pulcheria asked whom they were talking about.

“My husband,” Olga said. Her cheeks were ashy. “And guess what he yelled? That I was his enemy! He tried to push the window out with his head, cut himself, and then our cat ran in and began licking his blood like a cannibal….”

“How did it all begin?” Pulcheria asked, barely breathing.

“The usual way: he started to disappear from home, then come back a day or two later, dirty and hungry….”

She’s lying, Pulcheria thought.

“What else. . . ?” Olga continued. “Couldn’t sleep, didn’t talk to anyone, went to work once a week; but you know what they think of him—a genius! He submits an article once a year, and the whole pack write their dissertations based on it. I went to talk to his boss, who promised to send him to a health spa…. Then he tried to jump….” Tears were streaming down Olga’s unlined face.

Now Pulcheria knew. She just needed to find out where they were keeping him.

“He’ll be out,” she promised. “My brother was at Kashchenko Asylum, and they let him out.”

“Well, we haven’t been to Kashchenko yet,” Olga replied wistfully. “We go to the clinic that took him the very first time, when he was calling for Anya. He almost smashed a brick wall there with his fist.”

Tsarina remarked that everything would be fine—they’d let him out, and things would resume their normal course.

“Maybe, maybe…. Still, how much can one take? Listen to this….” And Olga related that “the bitch”—that is, her son’s wife—wanted to sue Olga and her husband for housing—again!

“I keep telling that son of mine, ‘Whatever you get through the courts will eventually be hers; she’ll divorce you as soon as you have a place of your own!’”

It was the righteous rage of a person who fought a long and dirty battle to be alone in a huge apartment.

Pulcheria, petrified, listened attentively.

“The funny thing,” Olga observed, returning to her husband, “is that he always finds some slut to look after him. They visit him at the hospital, bring him chicken soup. Thank God they don’t let anyone in now because of the flu epidemic. Only letters. He refuses to eat anyway.”

“Just like my brother,” Pulcheria said. “But he was a political dissident, so they fed him through a tube.”

“I don’t know about dissidents,” Olga replied irritably. “This one wouldn’t eat because of schizophrenia; it’s a form of self-cure—that’s what the doctor said. On the floor for the violent, they don’t fuck around, you know. The moment you stop eating they electroshock you: it feels like an electric chair, they say, only you get many jolts.”

Pulcheria held herself together with her last reserves of strength; she knew Olga was waiting for her to squirm like a lab mouse. Finally the lunch ended, and Pulcheria could crawl back to her desk. Her suffering had ended and his begun, on the floor for the sick animals. From a woman rejected by her lover, Pulcheria had transformed into a woman forcefully separated from him—an enormous difference. She even felt some small sympathy for Olga. She was thinking calmly, resting after the horror of the last three days. Waves of love rocked her over the unwashed floor of her office, over dusty letters, and she whispered words of affection, sending him strength and support. Someday his suffering would end, she told herself, but she must act with the utmost caution, calculate every step until the final victory, his freedom—although, as she knew from her brother’s experience, things were not so simple; and getting the person out wasn’t the end of it. The issue of violated human rights was the easy, formal aspect of the problem; the real problem was forcing the person off his perch, his customary place in life, even when the place was such as his. One must never force anyone; people must do everything themselves. Think of all those who tried to help him before, all those women with their chicken soup—where are they now? They all vanished into oblivion, but she, Pulcheria, must stay in his life, remain his loyal, humble wife. She must wait. Victory would come. What had been done to him was too fragrantly unlawful—his son would get him out. Victory would come, but without her. Oh pain of pains—not to know anything! Not to see him!

“Would you like to come to the hospital with me?” she heard Olga’s voice over her shoulder. “After all, you were sitting next to him at the party; you talked to him all night, forgot about the rest of us.”

“So that was your husband?” Pulcheria asked in an even tone.

“Of course it was. He took you home, didn’t he? I asked him to.”

“He walked me to the bus stop, that’s all. How was I supposed to know he was ill? I’m afraid of mental patients; I don’t even write to my brother in the U.S.”

“Still, I wonder,” Olga announced, staring at the dirty wallpaper above Pulcheria’s desk. “I wonder where all these sluts come from—the ones who chase after sick people.”

“Well, I haven’t chased after anyone,” Pulcheria objected coldly. “He invited himself. We only walked to the bus stop. I had no idea he was sick.”

“Come with me, then. Tsarina will let us both go.”

“I have a little grandson at home.”

“But this is during work hours!”

“Why would I go there? I’m no one to him, a stranger.”

“He won’t yell at me so much in your presence.”

“I’m afraid,” Pulcheria said, and pulled out the next package of old letters.

“You didn’t happen to see where he went after he took you to the bus stop? Because all this time he’s been living with someone; he hasn’t slept with me, that much I know.”

“Not my fault,” Pulcheria responded coldly. “You should have heard what he said about my old man.” Pulcheria pointed at the portrait of her scholar, the one in which he had a mustache like Hitler’s and pince-nez like Beria’s. “He said I’m wasting my time on the old bastard.”

“Yes, that he does well: humiliate and devalue; that’s his defining trait. He is the only genius; the rest of us are retards. He thinks the apartment belongs to him alone, but they gave it to all of us! He actually wanted to exchange it for a one-bedroom for our son, a studio for himself, and the dregs for me. How he screamed, that son of ours! I’ve got to get him to a psychiatrist, too. He claims my husband has signed all the papers, but that means nothing. I’ll declare him legally insane and become his guardian! They want housing? He, and especially she, will get nothing!” Here Olga added a few invectives.

Suddenly Pulcheria blushed, but Olga didn’t notice—she herself was purple in the face and kept on cursing and threatening, but all in vain.

“You should take Tsarina with you,” Pulcheria calmly advised.

“Forget it,” said Olga, deflated. “I’ll go by myself—it’s not the first time.” And with that she left Pulcheria alone.

Pulcheria, having passed Olga’s exam, continued to sweat over her letters in her tiny windowless office. She worked in a great misery. It was almost March. She knew she had to wait patiently. One thing was certain: it wouldn’t cost Olga anything to set Pulcheria’s house on fire or to bribe the orderlies to get rid of him quietly. She also knew that he, her formerly mysterious guest, could have forgotten her already. Love likes secrecy and playfulness; it flees too much devotion and heavy emotional debt. It was possible that under the present circumstances he didn’t care for love games anymore. It was even possible that he blamed ridiculous old Pulcheria for his troubles.

Pulcheria waited. The only change she accomplished was a quiet transfer to another division. Along the way she lost more weight, and almost fainted from weakness. It was the end of June when, coming home late from the library, she saw his gray suit and disheveled hair. Her guest stood up and opened the door. She stumbled shamefully. He supported her by the elbow and led her to the elevator.

A Happy Ending

Polina’s life reached its final, happy phase when her aunt died and left Polina an inheritance. Polina had seen that aunt only once in her entire life, right before the end, when the doctor told Polina there was nothing she could do: the aunt was raving and didn’t recognize anyone. Soon the hospital called to ask if Polina was planning to bury the body. Polina, who lived on a state pension, told the hospital she wasn’t sure; she’d try to raise the money.

The next day Polina rose early and took a train to the small town where her aunt had lived. Naturally she wanted to look into whether her aunt had left an inheritance, for it was one thing not to have money for a funeral and quite another to let family possessions go to waste.

Polina didn’t consider her aunt as family. As far as she was concerned, her only family was her son, but sometimes she didn’t speak to even him for months. As for her husband, Semyon, Polina had hated him ever since his stay at a health resort years ago, after which he gave Polina gonorrhea and told everyone at the clinic that she had given it to him. Her only son had married and moved in with his wife; he did try to come back, but where was he going to stay? There were two rooms, and their son was pushing forty—he couldn’t sleep with Papa or Mama, could he? Shame and tears—that was Polina’s family life.

Polina loved only her grandson, Nikola, who visited them on holidays and occasionally stayed the night. He slept on a little folding bed and played chess with Grandpa and cards with Grandma. Polina adored her little angel until one day the entire family—the son, his fat wife, and the boy—moved in with her because of a burst pipe. The poor son returned to his flooded home to dry it out and paint and fix everything, while his family slept on camping beds borrowed from Polina’s neighbors. One night Polina asked Nikola to bring her a glass of water to wash down a pill, and her angel asked indifferently, “What’s wrong with your legs?” Polina didn’t cry; no, she got up and walked to the kitchen on her poor, swollen feet while her grandson and his mama continued to watch a soap opera.

In time Polina began to think about ways to get away, to escape her circumstances, especially after her husband retired and stopped leaving the house. He lost the ability to converse in a normal voice and bellowed at her all day; in return Polina called him Clapper (her nickname for him since the gonorrhea episode), to which he responded with a string of obscenities, and so on. To an outsider their daily exchanges sounded like the blackest of comedies, but the spouses didn’t laugh. After each screaming match they would crawl into their respective lairs, shaking with unspent tears, to pop heart pills; Polina would also call her college friend Marina to complain about Semyon and in exchange listen, bored to death, to Marina’s complaints about her middle-aged daughter.

Polina—and this was her main problem—was tired of people. There was a time when she’d been capable of friendship; when she attended anniversaries and birthday parties, went swimming with her girlfriends, relished phone conversations about her friends’ private lives. But all that ended when she became infected. She started to hate all gatherings, including family holidays, which she spent at the stove cooking while her son and his wife gobbled down all the food and then left to carouse with friends. She used to have hopes and dreams—to sew a new dress, to travel—but now she tossed and turned all night, captive to her thoughts, looking for but not finding a way out. She had heard of a mother who lost her child and then lay down in the snow, in an empty potato field, and fell asleep—they found her only in the spring. Should she do the same? By the time Polina got the call from the hospital, her last remaining love—for her only grandson—was essentially over.

When the call came, Polina considered what to do. She wanted to keep her plans secret from her husband, her son, and especially his wife, Alla, who would gladly poison both Polina and Semyon to get her hands on their apartment. On this subject the spouses understood each other perfectly—for the first time in ten years. One night at the dinner table, their son began mumbling about the advantages of a legal gift over a will “if something happens.” “If what happens?” Semyon yelled back, and Polina echoed that it was beyond tactless to sit and wait for that to happen—look, your father’s blood pressure is up; come, Senya, I’ll check your pressure. With gentle care they checked each other’s pressure, swallowed some pills, and retired to their respective rooms without saying good-bye to their son.

For a few days things were quiet in the house, but then their refrigerator broke down. Semyon accused Polina of leaving it open all night and refused to pay his share of the electric bill—things were back to normal.

Since the gonorrhea incident, this was Semyon’s first major victory on the family front. Polina had always made more money than he did: she was an expert in military telephone equipment, while he (who had a PhD, by the way) lazed about in his underfunded research institute. After Semyon’s STD, Polina began to eat separately, and Semyon, in his humiliation, would steal her food, saying, “So what did our hag cook for herself?” Still, if Polina was sick, then Semyon would drag himself to the pharmacy and even sweep the hall before the doctor’s visit. He considered Polina’s illnesses a result of her own folly; she should expose herself to cold, he lectured—a sick person must stay cold and hungry, like in a TB clinic! Polina had to crawl to the bathroom in a winter coat. She would call Marina, crying and swearing (while Semyon eavesdropped on the other line), and in return had to listen to the latest installment in the saga of Marina’s daughter, who had picked up an illegal out-of-towner who didn’t have a place to stay and who spent one night a week in the daughter’s bed while Marina tried to sleep in her walk-through room (poor daughter, Polina thought). How could she reveal her secret to them—to Marina and Semyon?

And so she traveled to that faraway provincial town (an hour by train, an hour by bus, another hour by foot) all by herself. She found out the cost of a proper funeral and realized that even if she sold her earrings she couldn’t afford to bury her aunt, who was going to be wrapped in plastic and thrown in some nameless hole. What could she do? Her son was again without work, Semyon was useless, and she herself would probably end up like Aunt Galya. She also found out that she could claim her aunt’s apartment if she gathered the necessary papers.

On the train back Polina wept out loud. Her aunt’s apartment was her only hope of escape. Also, this was the first time she was doing something just for herself; until now, everything she had done was for him, for Clapper—all the cooking, the cleaning, even her haircuts. She was a good-looking woman, but here she was, her charms wasted on one man, her only love, and he’d had to go and get a disease.

Back in Moscow, Polina flew around gathering paperwork, ignoring her husband’s screams, which now sounded more like pleas—yes, Semyon suspected something. Two months later she lawfully entered Aunt Galya’s apartment. She was met with the familiar smell of heart medicine and old clothes; saw peeling wallpaper and locked chiffoniers, which she easily pried open with a penknife. Inside she found pressed layers of ancient dresses that used to clothe generations of her family, all those women who had been buried in a coffin or without one, like poor Aunt Galya. For the past thirty years her aunt had lived alone in that squalid apartment without ever asking her, Polina, for assistance, although she had Polina’s number and kept it in a visible spot on the wall. She also kept a shroud, slippers, and a cross—her funeral outfit—in a little bundle next to the bed; it was as though her aunt were asking her, Polina, for a last favor. Next to the bundle was a checkbook with some savings, to pay for the funeral, but the money was now worthless. Polina tossed the bundle with the other trash and kept only a family album and an ancient record player with some records wrapped in cloth sacks. Polina took these treasures home, thinking she’d impress her grateful family.

She arrived home late at night, and listened to Semyon’s screams that he wasn’t going to let a venereal slut use a shared bathroom; that first she must bring a note from the clinic, et cetera. Polina said nothing: she suddenly felt a surge of joy at the thought that soon she would escape this nightmare—that she had a way out. So that Semyon wouldn’t lose his last marbles when she disappeared, Polina told him about an old aunt who was completely paralyzed and whom Polina wanted to bring home, to Moscow, because the aunt’s children refused to take care of her. On hearing this Semyon yelled that he refused to clean up after some old hag, spat at Polina’s family pictures and records, and disappeared into his room—his dungeon, as Polina called it, where the window was always open and the lights didn’t work.

The next Saturday Polina celebrated her birthday. She cooked a meal, her trio of a family arrived, and after they stuffed themselves the shining Polina offered to play some old records and show family photographs (she slyly had added the best pictures of her young self to the album). She hoped that Nikola, the heir, would express an interest in family history, but he looked indifferently at the faded snapshots and shifted his attention to the TV to watch soccer. Polina’s son and daughter-in-law again brought up the housing question: now they wanted Polina and Semyon to register Nikola as a resident of their apartment. “The fuck I will,” yelled educated Semyon. “So that five years from now you could kick us both out? Ain’t gonna happen! The Liapins,” he continued, “registered their son at his grandmother’s. The next day he announced he was going to have the place renovated, and he moved his grandmother to her sister’s for three days; in the meantime he sold the apartment and left the country with the money!”

“And we know a certain babushka who lost her marbles and married some old idiot and registered him! Her daughter almost lost her mind! She’d been waiting for the old witch’s apartment for decades!”

“Great idea, thanks,” Semyon replied brightly. “I’ll get married, too. Better than getting old with this venereal hag!”

“As you wish, but remember: I did your son a favor by registering him at my apartment, where nothing belongs to him, and now I’m getting punished for my kindness!” fat Alla concluded glumly, and went to get her coat.

They stomped out, forgetting the photographs. Polina cried a little over the dirty dishes and in the morning departed for her new home. At this point we could conclude our story, but life continued, and soon came the spring. Polina dug a tiny vegetable patch outside her new window and planted a few simple things like carrots and calendula. Every day she woke up and went to bed with a sense of quiet happiness. She tended her plants, walked to the village for goat milk, and gathered herbs in the fields, but after two months of this simple life she ran out of money and had to go to Moscow to collect her pension. She had forgotten the scandals, the constant humiliation, even Clapper—for good, she hoped. Nonetheless, after collecting her pension Polina forced herself to visit her former nest: she needed dry goods like flour and sugar, and also pickling jars. Without taking off her rubber boots she stomped into her old apartment and immediately saw Semyon sitting on her sofa in her room in filthy pajamas, smiling like a baby. His hair was completely white, he was unshaved, his chin was trembling, and the phone was lying disconnected on the floor. “Why is the phone disconnected?” Polina asked calmly. “I couldn’t get through.” Semyon nodded meekly and tried to fit the cord into the phone. His hands were shaking. Polina reconnected the phone, and immediately it rang; their son was calling from out of town, worried because his father hadn’t answered the phone in three days. “I’ll be back in a week!” the son said, and hung up.

Polina toured the apartment. In Semyon’s dungeon she pulled off the stinking sheets and threw them into the tub; in the blackened kitchen she swept up the shards and trash and placed the dirty kettle on the stove. When Semyon, clean and shaved, was lying in a fresh bed and Polina was spoon-feeding him cereal, he stopped moving his toothless jaws, looked at her slowly, and whispered, “You must be hungry. Have a bite yourself.”