There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby (20 page)

And he became very annoyed that every evening Marilena would disappear for two hours and come back looking like a horse run ragged, and refuse to talk with anyone and turn off the phone.

He’d taken over Marilena’s whole life, and he couldn’t understand where these two unpaid hours were going, and he’d throw loud tantrums about it.

Marilena loved him and gave him an enormous salary, and even hired his sister Nelly. But for some reason she was too shy to tell him about those two hours.

One day, Nelly, the sister, announced that Vladimir had set up a vast ad campaign about dieting for Marilena. It was for two companies that specialized in diets and cosmetic operations.

And they’d be paying her an enormous sum of money!

They couldn’t let this opportunity pass them by, Nelly insisted. Vladimir was off on a business trip, to both South and North America, and would return just in time to see his new, young, thin bride.

“I’ll be able to dance,” said Marilena—forgetting that if she became too thin the two souls inside her would die of hunger.

Nelly answered by saying that she was also going into the same clinic for some plastic surgery—she, too, would be getting younger and changing a few things about her face, she
said. “So you won’t suffer alone,” joked Nelly, who was usually very grim.

So Marilena was taken to the clinic, where experienced surgeons photographed her from all sides, then hid these photographs for later (when they’d cause a sensation), and then led Marilena down the corridors of the clinic, farther and farther down, and finally locked her in a room—a very nice room, except it had no windows in it.

Marilena couldn’t understand what was happening. She wanted to call someone, but there was no telephone. She knocked on the door, but no one came.

She started knocking harder, then simply banging on the door—and don’t forget, Marilena worked as a strongwoman at the circus—but still it was in vain.

Having bloodied her hands with all her knocking, Marilena collapsed on the floor. But suddenly she heard some distant strains of music, as she always did before the dancing began, and then she saw her thin little sister, and she herself became Maria again, and together they danced.

Apparently it was time for their evening dance, and, cursing everything in the world, the two twins danced with their bloody hands.

They told each other what they’d long suspected—that this was the beginning of the end, that Vladimir had decided to get rid of Marilena and take all the money for himself, and that the clinic was a trap.

But their performance was barely over when fat Marilena devoured the dinner that had somehow appeared outside the door.

After her dinner, Marilena felt terribly sleepy and had just enough time to realize she’d been poisoned before she collapsed right where she was, next to the wardrobe.

When the prisoner awoke, she decided to fight for her life and not eat anything—she’d just drink water from the tap. But you know how fat people are—they can’t go an hour without eating something—and sure enough Marilena soon had to eat what was left for her outside the door—a pot of thick meat-and-cabbage soup with the bone still in it.

After eating this she literally crashed onto the bed and lay there unconscious until she was stirred awake by the soft strains of music that announced her evening dances.

Now Maria and Lena danced together with difficulty. It was a slow, clumsy waltz, a farewell waltz, because by now it was clear: someone had decided to poison big Marilena.

For much of the time the sisters talked about their imminent death, prayed and wept without tears, bid farewell to each other, remembered their childhood, their father, who left them so early, and their mother, who died soon after.

And where their parents’ souls had gone, so the sisters were now destined to go.

The next day, big Marilena didn’t even have the strength to get out of bed and drink some water from the tap.

She lay there under her own enormous weight, and talked quietly to herself in her two voices—one of which was whiny and petulant, while the other was soft and kind.

“If you’d agreed to marry that wizard, none of this would have happened to us,” said one voice.

“Right, and now you’d be a teakettle,” said the other.

“No, we’d have convinced him not to do that! And anyway, I’d rather be living as a teakettle than dying like this.”

“Don’t worry,” said the first soft and kind voice, “soon the angels will bring us to Mother and Father.”

“We don’t need anything!” wailed Marilena. “No money, no Vladimir—just let us go live somewhere on the islands of Fuji-Wuji!”

“If only,” Marilena answered herself curtly.

And then a miracle occurred: with a soft rustle one of the walls slid aside, and Marilena felt the night’s dampness against her skin, though she couldn’t believe it.

The room slowly filled with an evening fog and the smell of jasmine and hyacinths.

The head of Marilena’s bed now pushed against a wild rose bush, and its simple pink flowers hung over her pillow.

With great difficulty Marilena picked herself up, crawled into the garden, and collapsed into some stinging weeds, and a whole rain of dew fell upon her.

With her dry tongue, the thirsty Marilena licked the moisture from the grass and from her wet hands. Then she jumped up—the quiet music was already playing—and began to perform some kind of dance among the bushes, either a cricket dance, or a mosquito dance, with hops and jumps.

“Don’t you see?” Maria cried out happily. “We’re in heaven!”

“Oh no, already?” Lena sobbed without tears. “What about my life? Is it over?”

Just then the two ballerinas were grabbed by two sets of strong paws, and as it happens they belonged to people without any wings or white robes—just regular security guards with guns and sweaty shirts.

And the moment Lena squeaked out something like “I don’t think this is heaven,” they grabbed the ballerinas and dragged them along roughly, even though they didn’t resist in the least bit.

The guards apparently dragged their prisoners through the wild rose bushes, because pretty soon their hands and shoulders were scratched and even bleeding, so that by the time the girls were dragged into the porter’s room, they looked like a pair of wild bums.

Right away the guards wrote up a protocol about the violation of a secure zone, and then they began interrogating the sisters as harshly as they could, especially on the subject of whether the prisoners could immediately pay a fine of three million rubles. If so, they’d be released.

“Where would we get that kind of money?” the blonde Maria asked them. “We don’t even know anyone here; we’re just passing through. We’re dancers from the ballet.”

“Are you out of your minds?” the brunette Lena yelled at them. “Just grabbing people for no reason! We’ll file a complaint!”

“All right—if you have no money, you’re going to get a prison sentence of life without parole!” the guard said cruelly. “You don’t maybe have two million? We’re not greedy.”

But here something strange happened. Another guard ran into the room and barked: “Who’s this? This isn’t her! You let her escape! What are you two doing here? Nelly’s yelling like a madwoman! There’s supposed to be one fat one—and you’ve got two ragged clothes hangers! You’ll answer for this yourselves, then. She’s coming now.”

And sure enough, a woman all bundled up in bandages ran into the porter’s room, accompanied by a suite of doctors in their robes. With all her bandages, you could recognize her only by her low, mean voice.

“What’s this? Where is she? What? You want to go to back to prison? Why were you hired, huh? As soon as she escaped from her room, you kill her in self-defense! Who’s this you’re showing me?”

“They were just, just standing right where the wall opens,” the guard defended himself. “These two rag dolls. There was no one else there.”

“What, what—you crook! You dead man! Why, I’ll send you to Fuji-Wuji for this! Did you forget what your sentence was? Vladimir did everything for you! He saved you from death row, and now this? What are you waiting for? Get out there and comb that garden! And put these two in separate rooms and interrogate them. Maybe they know something.”

With that, Nelly and her suite of doctors left the room.

The only one left was the head guard, the one who had asked for the three million.

With a sweet smile he said: “Oh, you’ll tell me everything! I have such methods—such nice methods! Oh, you’ll talk, you’ll confess that you killed the fat girl yourselves and
ate her. And raw, at that. There’s no other way. And you’ll be executed! Whereas we’ll be paid three million for our hard work. Marilena was supposed to be killed accidentally, anyway. Do you hear? And anyway that big fatso was all filled up with narcotics. And she was supposed to kill one of us here, by the way. That one, she looked in, she doesn’t know, naturally. Telling everyone what to do. Too bad it didn’t work out. But this is even easier. Oh, I have such terrible methods of torture! You’ll be amazed, I guarantee you. You’d be better off confessing now, so as not to suffer too much before your execution. Because you ate her, didn’t you?”

But here the two hours of dancing apparently came to an end, because Maria began to be drawn inexorably toward Lena, and Lena toward Maria, and the guard found himself in between them.

“Hey!” he yelled. “What are you doing? What’s gotten into you two? I’ll shoot! Stay where you are!”

Maria and Lena were already melding into each other around him.

Here the desperate guard reached behind his belt for a knife and began blindly chopping the air with it.

And right after the first blow, when he divided Maria’s arm from Lena’s arm, the sisters felt that they no longer needed to join together.

The bloodied, scratched-up ballerinas found themselves standing there, just staring at each other. The guard was gone.

“You know what happened?” cried the incredulous Lena. “It’s just as the wizard predicted. Whoever tries to divide us will turn into a little dysentery germ!”

“Eww,” said Maria, “let’s get out of here! We’ve had enough trouble without picking up dysentery.”

Shocked and staring at the floor—where, according to their calculations, right now a fat, hairy dysentery microbe should have been crawling—the sisters ran out of the room.

Sometimes one evil defeats another, and two minuses make a plus!

No one stopped them.

They ran out into the garden and stumbled around for a long time in the wet bushes until they found a gate and a guard on the lookout.

“Hurry, there’s a fat woman with a knife in there! She threatened to stab us!”

“A fat one?” The guard became excited and hurled himself toward the telephone.

Lena and Maria jumped out the gate. They were free. They ran away from that cursed place as fast as they could, ran and ran, until they reached the train station, familiar from long ago.

Where else is a homeless person to go?

They washed up, first in a puddle behind some bushes (apparently it had rained in the city that night, while they were escaping) and then in the bathroom.

The few scratches on their foreheads and hands were nothing—all sorts of things can happen to wandering poor people.

At the train station, Lena and Maria looked through some newspapers that were lying around and learned that
tomorrow would see the long-awaited triumphant return of big Marilena, the star of the circus, who now weighed fifty kilograms instead of one hundred.

Next to this announcement was a photo of the new Marilena (quite obviously the secretary Nelly, but with big teeth and widened eyelids, which made her look a little cross-eyed, like a bulldog—but what can you do) and an ad for a remarkable clinic where in three days a person can get a new body and also adopt a new healthy diet through the use of miraculous herbs.