There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby (13 page)

He fell asleep, and when he awoke, his daughter was no longer there.

“Nurse, where is the girl who was here before?” he said.

“What’s it to you?”

“I’m her father, that’s what. Where is she?”

“They took her into the operating room. Don’t worry, and don’t get up. You can’t yet.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Dear nurse, please call the doctor!”

“They’re all busy.”

An old man was moaning nearby. Next door a resident was putting an old lady through some procedures, all the while addressing her loudly and jocularly, like a village idiot: “Well, grandma, how about some soup?” Pause. “What kind of soup do we like?”

“Mm,” the old woman groaned in a nonhuman, metallic voice.

“How about some mushroom soup?” Pause. “With some mushrooms, eh? Have you tried the mushroom soup?”

Suddenly the old woman answered in her deep metallic bass: “Mushrooms—with macaroni.”

“There you go!” the resident cried out.

The father lay there, thinking they were operating on his daughter. Somewhere his wife was waiting, half-mad with grief, his mother-in-law next to her, fretting . . . A young doctor
checked in on him, gave him another shot, and he fell asleep again.

In the evening he got up and, barefoot, just as he was, in his hospital gown, walked out. He reached the stairs unnoticed and began descending the cold stone steps. He went down to the basement hallway and followed the arrows to the morgue. Here some person in a white robe called out to him:

“What are you doing here, patient?”

“I’m from the morgue,” replied the father. “I got lost.”

“What do you mean, from the morgue?”

“I left, but my documents are still there. I want to go back, but I can’t find it.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re saying,” said the white robe, taking him by the arm and escorting him down the corridor. And then finally he asked: “You what? You got up?”

“I came to life, and there was no one around, so I started walking, and then I decided I should come back, so they could note that I was leaving.”

“Wonderful!” said his escort.

They reached the morgue, but there they were greeted by the curses of the morgue attendant on duty. The father heard him out and said: “My daughter is here, too. She was supposed to come here after her operation.” He told the man his name.

“I tell you she’s not here, she’s not here! They’re all driving me crazy! They were looking for her this morning! She’s not here! They’re driving everyone nuts! And this one’s a mental patient! Did you run off from a nuthouse, eh? Where’d he come from?”

“He was wandering around the hallway,” the white robe answered.

“We should call the guard in,” said the attendant and started cursing again.

“Let me call home,” said the father. “I just remembered—I was in intensive care on the third floor. My memory is all confused; I came here after the explosion on Tverskaya.”

Here the white robes went quiet. The explosion on the bus on Tverskaya had happened the day before. They took him, shivering and barefoot, to a desk with a telephone.

His wife picked up and immediately burst into tears.

“You!
You
! Where have you been! They took her body, we don’t know where! And you’re running around! There’s no money in the house! We don’t even have enough for a taxi! Did you take all the money?”

“I was—I was unconscious. I ended up in the hospital, in intensive care.”

“Which one, where?”

“The same one where she was.”

“Where is she?
Where
?” His wife howled.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m all undressed—bring me my things. I’m standing here in the morgue, I’m barefoot. Which hospital is this?” he asked the white robe.

“How’d you end up there? I don’t understand,” his wife said, still weeping.

He handed the phone to the white robe, who calmly spoke the address into it, as if nothing at all strange was happening, and then hung up.

The morgue attendant brought him a robe and some old, ragged slippers—he took pity finally on this rare living person to enter his department—and directed him to the guard post at the hospital entrance.

His wife and mother-in-law arrived there with identically puffed-up, aged faces. They dressed the father, put shoes on him, hugged him, and finally heard him out, crying happily, and then all together they sat in the waiting room, because they were told that the girl had made it through her operation and was recovering, and that her condition was no longer critical.

Two weeks later she was up again walking. The father walked with her through the hospital corridors, repeating the whole time that she’d been alive after the explosion, she was just in shock, just in shock. No one noticed, but he knew right away.

He kept quiet about the raw human heart he’d had to eat. It was in a dream, though, that it happened, and dreams don’t count.

SHE’S A TALL, GROWN-UP, MARRIED WOMAN NOW, BUT SHE was once an orphan living with her grandmother, who had taken her in when the girl’s mother disappeared. That happens sometimes—a person will just disappear. Her father had disappeared earlier, when the girl was just five. She hadn’t been allowed to go to the funeral, and so she thought he’d simply vanished, and worried very much that the same would happen to her mother. The girl clung to her mother whenever she tried to go out at night, though she never cried—her mother didn’t spoil her. She was a quiet, well-behaved girl, and she remained that way until one day her mother really did vanish, just as the girl had feared, and, only nine years old, the girl spent the night alone, using her mother’s bathrobe for a blanket. In the morning she washed up and went to school just as she was, in the same dress as the day before. The neighbors noticed something wrong on the third day, when the girl stopped going to school. Strange sounds came from her apartment, like someone laughing, and no cooking smells came from the kitchen, and no one—not the girl, not
the girl’s mom—came in or out. One of the neighbors got the girl—her name was Zhenya—to admit that she hadn’t eaten in two days and that her mother was gone. The neighbors sprang into action, composed a telegraph to the girl’s grandmother, and so in the middle of winter the grandmother came to their little town on the River Oka and took her granddaughter away to the quiet seaside town where she lived.

The road was familiar—Zhenya had come to visit her grandmother during all her school vacations—but there was no vacation now. They couldn’t find out anything about her mother—not a single trace. The girl’s grandmother told her that her mother had always fought for truth, had never stolen, even while everyone around her was stealing. She worked in a kindergarten, and the grandmother thought she’d gone to Moscow to seek justice—she had just been fired from her job—and had probably been locked up in a mental hospital. That happened sometimes, according to the grandmother.

Zhenya grew up a quiet and good-looking girl, and even began attending a teachers’ college in a nearby town. She studied hard and was known and liked throughout her dorm for the fact that whenever she received a package from her grandmother, with vegetables, bacon, and dried fruits, she’d put it out on the table and share it with everyone. Afterward they’d go hungry again, but all together. Zhenya had never been spoiled by her mother and grandmother, and so she didn’t complain about life in the dorm.

She soon found a boyfriend, a construction worker—a foreman, even—named Sasha who would take her on the train out to the countryside during the spring and read her his homemade poems—though unfortunately, as it turned out, he was married.

The wife learned about Zhenya and sought her out in the dorm, took her outside, and told her that she was married to Sasha, and that they had two children, though at the moment they lived apart because Sasha had a sexually transmitted disease and was being treated for it. The wife was being treated for it too, though
where
Sasha had picked up this disease was the question, said the wife, and then looked at Zhenya with hatred. They were sitting in the little park outside Zhenya’s dorm. “As for you,” the wife concluded, “you should be shot like a sick dog, the way you’re spreading that disease.”

The penniless student had no one to ask for advice. She was afraid to go to the university clinic (everyone would find out!), but, luckily, while wandering around the market one day she saw a sign for VENEREAL DISEASE TREATMENT. An old woman doctor met her inside, but Zhenya had no money, and without money the old doctor wouldn’t even hear her out. So Zhenya removed her earrings, the only possession she still had from her mother. The doctor took the earrings, examined Zhenya, and announced that they’d have to run some tests. The tests came back negative. Zhenya had managed to avoid being infected; either that or Sasha’s wife had been lying. But Sasha no longer came by, and Zhenya began to see that things weren’t so simple among people, that there existed a whole other secret, stubbornly flourishing animal side of life, where
revolting, horrible things collected, and maybe her mother had been killed, thought the now grown-up (eighteen-year-old) Zhenya: after all, her mother had been young still and might have fallen into that shadow life, from which so many people never return.

Also that summer, back home, something bad happened to Zhenya. The week before, two bodies had been found at the town dump. They were women, and they had been slashed and mutilated, their arms twisted behind them like dried rags, their heads cut off. The town was abuzz, though the women must have been tourists, since none of the locals was missing.

One night—not too late—Zhenya was walking home from a friend’s house when, not far from home, she was suddenly grabbed from both sides. Her attackers were three teenagers, around sixteen or seventeen, and dark-skinned—that is, migrants from the South. Zhenya didn’t know them, and they didn’t know Zhenya; they’d have grown up while she was away at school. They gagged her and led her away, twisting her arms behind her back, as if they had done it before, and Zhenya hobbled along bent over, and was pushed and shoved, a knife pricking her back. They addressed each other in their tongue; Zhenya understood some of it—though they called themselves Greeks in the town, they were not Greeks. Zhenya could tell they were arguing about who should go first, since one of them supposedly had a bad disease. They yelled in the darkness of the night, arguing (partly in Russian), dragging
Zhenya with them, when suddenly everything became bright. It was as if someone had turned on a projector. The three man-boys stopped, momentarily letting go of Zhenya, and, seeing a construction site lit up before her, and an old man and a woman standing there among the broken rocks, she rushed toward them as fast as she could, taking the rag out of her mouth and yelling, “Kill me! Kill me!” She stopped beside the old man, reaching out her swollen arms to him and begging: “Kill me! Just don’t let them have me!”