There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby (3 page)

Raya made no attempt to console her neighbor, and life in the apartment came to a standstill. Raya watched television alone while Zina went to work nights and then slept during the day. She seemed to have gone mad from grief and hung photos of her little daughter everywhere. The inflammation in Raya’s joints grew worse. She couldn’t raise her arms or even walk, and the shots the doctors gave her no longer helped. In the end, Raya couldn’t even make herself dinner or put water on to boil. When Zina was home she’d feed Raya herself, but she was home less and less, explaining that it was too painful for her to be there, where her daughter had died. Raya could no longer sleep because of the pain in her shoulders. When she learned that Zina was working at a hospital, she asked her for a strong painkiller, morphine if possible. Zina said she couldn’t do it. “I don’t smuggle drugs,” she said.

“Then I need to take more of these pills,” Raya said. “Give me thirty.”

“No. I’m not helping you die.”

“But I can’t do it myself,” Raya pleaded.

“You won’t get off so easily,” Zina said.

So with a superhuman effort, the sick woman lifted the bottle of pills with her mouth, removed the cap, and spilled its entire contents down her throat. Zina sat by the bed. Raya took her time dying. When the sun came up, Zina finally said: “Now you listen to me. I lied to you. My little girl is alive and well. She lives at a preschool, and I work there as a cleaning lady. The stuff you spilled under the door wasn’t bleach—it was baking soda. I switched the cans. The blood on the floor was from Lena bumping her nose when she fell out of bed. So it’s not your fault. Nothing is your fault.

“But neither is anything my fault. We’re even.”

And here, on the face of the dying woman, she saw a smile slowly dawn.

EARLY IN THE WAR IN MOSCOW THERE LIVED A WOMAN named Lida. Her husband was a pilot, and she didn’t love him very much, but they got along well enough. When the war began he was assigned to a base near Moscow, and Lida would visit him there. One time she arrived and was told that his plane had been shot down not far from the airfield, and that the funeral was the next day.

Lida attended the funeral, where she saw three closed coffins, and then returned to her room to find a draft notice for a brigade digging antitank ditches outside the city, and off she went to dig. It was autumn before she finally returned, and she began to notice that she was being followed by a strange young man, very malnourished and pale. Lida would see him on the street and in the store where she bought potatoes with her ration card. One night her doorbell rang and there he was. “Lida, don’t you recognize me?” said the man. “I’m your husband.” He hadn’t been buried at all, it turned out. They had buried some dirt instead of him, whereas his fall from the plane had been broken by the trees in the forest
at Sokolniki, and after he’d disentangled himself, he decided not to go back to fighting.

Lida didn’t ask how he’d survived these past two and a half months alone in the woods—he told her he found some civilian clothes in an abandoned building—and they began living together again. Lida was nervous the neighbors might notice, but almost everyone had already been evacuated out of Moscow, and so no one did.

Then one day her husband told her that winter was coming soon and they should go right away and bury the flight suit he’d left in the forest.

Lida borrowed a small shovel from the superintendent, and off they went to the forest. They had to take a tram to the Sokolniki station, then follow a brook deep into the woods. No one stopped them, and finally toward evening they reached a wide clearing, and at the edge of it a large pit. It was growing dark. Lida’s husband told her that he was too weak to help but that it was important they cover up the pit, since he remembered now that he’d thrown his suit down there.

Lida looked into the pit and saw that, yes, something resembling a flight suit lay at the bottom. She began throwing dirt on top of it, while her husband kept hurrying her along, saying it was getting dark. She shoveled dirt into the pit for three hours, and then, looking up, saw that her husband was gone.

Lida was frightened. She searched for him, running around, then almost fell into the pit and saw that, at the bottom, the flight suit was moving. It was completely dark now,
yet somehow Lida made it out of the forest, emerging at her tram stop as the sun was coming up. She rode home, and once she finally got there she fell asleep.

And in her dream her husband came to her and said, “Thank you, Lida, for burying me.”

THERE ONCE LIVED A YOUNG MAN NAMED OLEG WHO WAS left an orphan when his mother died. All he had left was his older sister, for though his father was still alive, that man turned out not to be his real father. Oleg’s real father, as he learned when he was going through his mother’s papers after her funeral so he could know her better, was some man his mother had met when she was married. In the papers he found a letter from this man saying he already had a family and had no right to abandon his two children for the sake of some future child he wasn’t even sure was his. The letter had a date on it. Shortly before Oleg was born, in other words, his mother tried to leave her husband and marry this other man, meaning that things really were as Oleg’s sister had once hinted, cruelly and vengefully, in the middle of an argument.

Oleg kept going through the papers and soon found a black folder filled with photographs of his mother in various stages of undress, including completely nude. They were staged photos, as if his mother was performing, and even when nude she wore a long scarf. All of this came as a
great blow to Oleg. He’d heard from relatives that as a young woman his mother had been known for her beauty, but the photographs showed a woman already in her mid-thirties, in good shape but not very pretty, merely well-preserved.

After this Oleg, who was sixteen, dropped out of school, dropped out of everything, and for two years, until the day he went off to the army, did nothing, listened to no one, ate what was in the refrigerator, left whenever his father and sister came home, and returned when they were asleep. In the end he collapsed mentally and physically, and his father used his influence to set up an appointment with a medical commission that would declare the boy a schizophrenic and put him on government subsidies and, most important, keep him out of the army. But just before Oleg was to appear before the commission, his father died in his sleep, and everything fell apart. Oleg’s sister quickly traded her share of the apartment for an apartment of her own, and left Oleg in his room by himself.

Soon he was drafted.

In the army, Oleg was involved in an incident. He had been placed as a lookout on a mountain path that an escaped prisoner was supposed to be crossing. This man had been on the loose for a month and had already managed to kill five people, including a young woman, and was now about to travel over the only part of the mountain that led away from the prison zone and into the European part of Russia. He wasn’t supposed to pass this way for some time, but the ambush
was set up in advance, three days in advance, because who knew what kind of transport the prisoner might get his hands on, and maybe he’d get there faster? The ambush consisted of Oleg, a sergeant, and three other soldiers. They sat on a large rock, their machine guns beside them, and took turns at the watch.

It was during Oleg’s watch that a man appeared on the trail. He looked like the man whose photograph they’d been shown. Oleg shot him, but it turned out to be the wrong man. He had also been a prisoner once but had served his time and was now going back—although, it’s true, he didn’t have a permit to move around from place to place. As for the wanted man, he was soon caught on a nearby trail.

Oleg was treated well by the army. They declared him temporarily insane, placed him in a hospital, then discharged him altogether as unfit to serve—and this turned out to be a good deal, since the wife of the man he’d shot kept trying to find the soldier who’d killed her husband when all he’d done was attempt to leave the area without a permit, the poor wretch.

Oleg returned home. He was almost completely bald now, his teeth had fallen out one after the other, he had nothing to eat, nothing to do, and no education to help him find a job. But then out of nowhere his sister appeared, took everything under her control, got Oleg into a vocational program, cleaned up his room, and provided him with groceries and money, even though she wasn’t his real sister and had never betrayed any affection for him before.

One night as she was getting ready to go she said offhandedly to Oleg: “You shouldn’t believe what I said that time about our mother, you know. Our father was a very suspicious man, that was all. He was a very difficult person and could have driven anyone insane.”

Then she left.

As soon as she was gone Oleg took out the suitcase with his mother’s papers. This time all he found was an envelope with photos of her funeral. The folder where the nude photos had been now contained a single sheet of crumpled old black paper, which dissolved into dust as soon as he tried to touch it.

Oleg began rifling through the papers. Everywhere he looked were letters from his mother to his father, the father he’d grown up with, speaking of love, of faithfulness, of Oleg’s resemblance to him. Oleg cried all night, and the next morning he got up to wait for his sister to tell her how he’d lost his mind when he was sixteen, and imagined some terrible things, and even killed a man because of it—for the man he’d shot didn’t look at all like the photograph of the real criminal.

But his sister never came. She must have forgotten about him, and that was all right because he soon forgot about her, too—he was busy with his new life. He finished the vocational program, went to college, got married, had children.

And what was funny was that both he and his wife had dark eyes and dark hair, but their two sons were blue-eyed and blond, just like their grandmother, Oleg’s dead mother.

One time his wife suggested they visit his mother’s grave. It took a long time to find it: the cemetery was old and the
gravestones crowded together, and also, on his mother’s grave, right in the middle, there stood another, smaller head-stone.

“That must be my father,” said Oleg, who had not attended his father’s funeral.

“No, look,” said his wife, “it’s your sister.”

Oleg was horrified—how could he have neglected his sister like this?—and he bent down to read the inscription. It really was his sister.

“Except the dates are wrong,” he said. “My sister came to visit me much later than that, after I came home from the army. Remember I told you how she got me back on my feet? She literally saved my life. I was young, and small things were always sending me over the edge.”

“That can’t be,” his wife said. “They never get the dates wrong. When did you come back from the army?”

And they began to argue, standing there at the foot of his mother’s unkempt grave. The wild grass, which had grown considerably over the summer months, reached to their knees until, at long last, they bent down and started clearing it.

ONE TIME THE DOORBELL RANG AT THE APARTMENT OF the R. family, and the little girl ran to answer it. A young man stood before her. In the hallway light he appeared to be ill, with extremely delicate, pink, shiny skin. He said he’d come to warn the family of an immediate danger: There was an epidemic in the town, an illness that killed in three days. People turned red, they swelled up, and then, mostly, they died. The chief symptom was the appearance of blisters, or bumps. There was some hope of surviving if you observed strict personal hygiene, stayed inside the apartment, and made sure there were no mice around—since mice, as always, were the main carriers of the disease.

The girl’s grandparents listened to the young man, as did her father and the girl herself. Her mother was in the bath.