There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby (15 page)

Annoyed, Lina watched the people who lived here hovering in their circle dance over the river to the monotonous music of the harps (a silly activity, by the way). She observed their silent sessions at the long common tables in the restaurant, before glasses of the lovely local wine.

Lina very much wanted to tell her girlfriends back home and her mom what she thought of all this, to at least drop them a line to say that everything was all right, that her treatment was going well, that the stores have everything but you can’t buy it—first of all because it’s very expensive, and second because no one dresses that way here—that the food is
strange but she can’t eat too much yet anyway. And so on. That she wants to send Seryozha a package but so far no one is going back there, and there seems to be no postal service between their two countries. Lina dragged herself down the streets, holding onto whatever she could, and wrote letters home in her head.

Eventually, though, Lina began to see that there would be no letters. Vasya definitively promised that her mom and Seryozha would visit eventually, especially her mom. But her mom without Seryozha? Or Seryozha without his grandmother? “In time,” said the bearded Vasya. “In time.”

Lina wanted to start buying things in preparation for her mother’s visit, but Vasya made it clear that by then everything would be taken care of.

In fact, no one here worried about the future—everyone was too busy—but nonetheless things were organized perfectly, comfortably, cleanly. Vasya worked at a bookstore that he’d inherited from an aunt, but never brought home any books since Lina could not read the language, and the store had nothing in Russian. It turned out Vasya could not even write in Russian.

Then the time finally came when Lina learned to move in the flying way of the natives. It turned out to be very simple. You just got up on a step above the ground and then took a big wide stride into the air. The next stride, too, came from the force of the initial push, and every stride thereafter was freer and lighter, as in a dream. Bearded Vasya didn’t say anything, but at the appointed time he disappeared forever, probably across the river into the wealthy city. Lina was left
on her own, although fully provided for. At first she thought, without fear or tears, that soon they would chase her out of their spacecraft—the food couldn’t always be in the refrigerator! But the refrigerator kept filling up, as if through a dumb-waiter, though Lina didn’t eat anything, just drank juice and stayed healthy.

And then the day finally came when, after much lonely and sad contemplation, she tore herself from her front steps and with wide strides raced to the bank of the river to the circle dance and, stepping between two dancers, who momentarily separated their hands, entered the stream and began to fly around the circle. She understood, she knew, that something was wrong, and she no longer wanted to have her mother here, or her son. She didn’t even want to run into that army regiment again, and in fact she didn’t want to see anyone again, or if she did see someone she didn’t want to know who it was, hoped she’d be unable to distinguish between the young, pale, calm faces in the circle dance, flying free like her—and hoping not to meet anyone at all anymore, in this kingdom of the dead, and hoping never to learn just how much they grieved in that other kingdom, of the living.

THERE IS CLEARLY SOMEONE IN THE HOUSE. WALK INTO THE bedroom: something falls in the living room. Look for the cat: it’s sitting on the little table in the front hall, its ears pricked up; it clearly heard something, too. Walk into the living room: a scrap of paper has fallen, all by itself, from the piano, with someone’s phone number on it, you can’t tell whose. It just flew off the piano soundlessly and lies on the carpet, white and alone.

Someone isn’t being careful, thinks the woman who lives here. Someone isn’t even trying to hide anymore.

A person can be afraid of rodents, insects, little ants in the bath, even a lonely cockroach that’s stumbled into your apartment in a drugged state, fleeing the disinfection campaign at the neighbors’—which is to say, he’s just standing naked and defenseless, in plain view. But a person can be afraid of anything when she’s alone with her cat and everyone has departed, all her old family, leaving this little human roach completely by herself, unprotected.

On weekends, especially, it appears that things are falling
and Someone is secretly, soundlessly creeping from room to room. That’s how it seems.

The woman doesn’t tell anyone about her poltergeist: It’s still hiding, not knocking, not causing mischief, not setting anything on fire. The refrigerator isn’t hopping around the apartment; the poltergeist isn’t chasing her into a corner. Really there’s nothing to complain about.

But Something has definitely moved in, some kind of living emptiness, small of stature but energetic and pushy, sneaking and slithering along the floor—that’s how it seems. No wonder the cat’s ears pricked up.

“Come now,” the woman says to her cat. It’s a strange and quiet cat, as all cats are. It won’t let itself be petted, won’t lie on its mistress’s knee when beckoned, but will suddenly jump up by itself at an inopportune time. “What are you afraid of, little one?” says the woman cheerfully. “Calm down; there’s nothing there.”

The cat twists away and leaves the room.

The woman watches television until she falls asleep. She watches intently, her face pressed to the screen. She immerses herself in its bluish rays, floats off to foreign worlds, becomes frightened, intrigued, heartbroken—in short, she
lives
. This is her place, on the couch. And then—
crash
! Something just fell in the bedroom.

This time there was an awful racket. It really collapsed, whatever it was. The sound is still echoing through the apartment.

The woman runs into the room and stands there in shock. The shelf with all her records has collapsed. They’ve scattered all over, spread out in a fanlike formation on the unmade sofa bed and on the floor. If someone—you get three guesses who—had been sleeping there, she’d have gotten the sharp corner of the shelf right in the skull. But it didn’t happen. Now the wall features two gaping wounds: the nails, driven into the wall by someone we’d rather not bring to mind right now, have fallen out. Of course they weren’t nails exactly—they have some other name. It was a major production at the time, she remembers. It could almost have passed for love. He’d had to use a drill.

But these nails, or not-nails, whatever, had in the end been inserted, and in the end they’d given way.

The shelf now lies on the piano—that’s why it made such a terrible racket, with echoes like in the mountains.

The piano—that, too, was an adventure. A little girl tried to learn to play it. Her mother insisted, forced her to sit there and practice. Nothing came of it; stubbornness won out in the end, the stubbornness that protects us from the will of others, that defends our right to live our life the way we want. Even if it means life will turn out worse than anyone planned, will turn into a poor life—but it’ll be one’s own, however it is, even without music, even without talent. Without concerts for the family, maybe—but also without needless worries that someone else plays the piano better. The mother always worried that other children were more talented than her daughter. The daughter heard this enough times and had
her revenge by becoming a total nonentity, a fact that both mother and daughter freely acknowledged.

Then it all dissolved, all those family dramas straight out of Turgenev; now all that remained was the piano and the old records that crashed into it. The mother had collected classical music, once. The mother had spent hours discussing her daughter over the phone, spilling her child’s secrets as if they didn’t cost a thing. Now there was no mother, no daughter, no shelf for the records. Just a woman standing in a doorway, awestruck by the scene of destruction that was her bedroom. There could be no more sleeping on that bed—everything was ruined, soaked through with dust. She had to change the sheets. She had to wash, clean, find a new place for everything—but where? There was no room.

The woman retreats to the living room, closing the door to the bedroom as if for the last time.

If she could just catch the Creature by its ugly invisible tail. But then what? She’d just die of fright and disgust. You couldn’t kill It, after all. You couldn’t crush It with your heel. So there wasn’t any point to catching It, really.

It clearly wants something, this Creature, It’s trying to get at something. Like the mother was trying to get at something with her daughter. Now if she could just figure out what It wants, she could—she’s done this before—defeat Its design. She could seize the initiative. That’s a classic maneuver—meet your enemy halfway. Like when they light
a fire to battle another fire in the forest—if they intersect in the right spot, they’ll both go out for lack of oxygen.

Once upon a time, for example, the mother had owned an expensive set of German china, an investment for a rainy day, and she guarded this china with her life in case they’d have to sell it to pay for a funeral (hers)—and one time, when, in a fit, the daughter had hurled one of the cups to the floor, the mother cold-bloodedly began smashing the rest of the set (“
slut!”
went the noise it made, “
slut!”
), piece by piece by piece, nearly driving her daughter insane, and declaring, to top it off, “I’m going to die, all right, but you’ll be left with nothing.”

Yet here’s the question: Does the Creature want her total annihilation, or just to drive her into the street?

Well, she can’t leave the house. There’s nowhere to go. And maybe a certain someone will want to come back (thinks the mother-daughter). So she has to stay. If It’s wreaking havoc, she’ll have to fight It. The way Kutuzov fought Napoleon—by making his position
uncomfortable
. This is very wise, thinks the woman. The Creature will be defeated.

The decision came painfully at first, but then it grew easier. She went into the kitchen and smashed all the plates and cups. She flung the fragments through the apartment. With great difficulty, but triumphantly at last, she pulled down the kitchen cabinet and let it drop on top of the broken dishes. Having done this she noticed that the cabinet had in fact been hanging just barely on its screws. One section simply
fell off the wall when she pulled it down, like a fish leaving a pond—which is to say easily, very easily. And the cabinet itself, it turned out, was falling apart, the back panel having come undone in the corner. So in fact this cabinet had been poised to fall and destroy all the dishes anyway! Not to mention anyone who happened to be standing underneath it at the time.

Now the mother-daughter gained courage. What intuition she’d had, it turned out! She’d made this first step in her defense and immediately uncovered a plot! It was a battle of wills, clearly—and it had been joined!

She spent the night on the couch in the living room, then lay in wait for a day, plotting.