There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby (4 page)

“I survived the disease,” the young man said simply, and removed his hat to reveal a bald scalp covered with the thinnest layer of pink skin, like the foam atop boiling milk. “I survived,” he went on, “and because of this I’m now immune. I’m going door to door to deliver bread and other supplies to
people who need them. Do you need anything? If you give me the money, I’ll go to the store—and a bag, too, if you have one. Or a shopping cart. There are long lines now in front of the stores, but I’m immune to the disease.”

“Thank you,” said the grandfather, “but we’re fine.”

“If your family gets sick, please leave your doors open. I’ve picked out four buildings—that’s all I can handle. If any of you should survive, as I did, you can help me rescue others, and lower corpses out.”

“What do you mean, lower corpses out?” asked the grandfather.

“I’ve worked out a system for evacuating the bodies. We’ll throw them out into the street. But we’ll need large plastic bags; I don’t know where to get those. The factories make double-layered plastic sheets, which we could use, although I don’t have the money. You could cut those sheets with a hot knife, and the material will seal back together automatically to form a bag. All you really need is a hot knife and double-layered plastic.”

“Thank you, but we’re fine,” repeated the grandfather.

So the young man went along the hall to the other apartments like a beggar, asking for money. As the R. family closed the door behind him, he was already ringing their neighbors’ bell. The door opened a little, on its chain, leaving just a crack, so the young man was forced to lift his hat and tell his story to the crack. The R. family heard the neighbor reply abruptly, but apparently the young man didn’t leave, for there were no footsteps. Another door opened slightly: someone else wanted to hear his story. Finally a laughing voice said: “If
you have some money already, run and get me ten bottles of vodka. I’ll pay you back.”

They heard footsteps, and then it was quiet.

“When he comes back,” said the grandmother, “he should bring us some bread and condensed milk, and some eggs. And soon we’ll need more cabbage and potatoes.”

“He’s a charlatan,” said the grandfather. “But those aren’t burns; they look like something else.”

Finally the father snapped to attention and led the girl away from the door. These were his wife’s parents, not his, and he rarely agreed with them about anything. Nor did they exactly ask his opinion. Something really was happening, he felt: it couldn’t help but happen. He’d been sensing it for a long time now, and waiting. For the moment he was experiencing a temporary stupor. He walked the little girl out of the foyer—there was no need for her to stand there until the mysterious stranger knocked again. The father needed to have a serious talk with the stranger, man to man, about treatment options, escape routes, and the overall circumstances on the ground.

The grandparents stayed at the door, because they could hear that the elevator hadn’t been called up. The young man would still be on their floor. He was probably asking for all the money and shopping bags at once so that he wouldn’t have to run back and forth. Or else he really was a charlatan and a crook and was collecting the money only for himself, something the grandmother knew a little about since the time a woman knocked at their door and said she lived in the next entryway and that an old lady, Baba Nura, had died there. She was sixty-nine. The woman was collecting money for the
funeral, and she held out a list of people who’d donated, their signatures, and the sums they’d given: thirty kopeks, a ruble, even two rubles. The grandmother gave the woman a ruble, though she couldn’t actually recall anyone named Nura—and no wonder, because five minutes later one of their nice neighbors rang the doorbell and said that they should be careful, some woman no one knew, a crook, was soliciting money under false pretences. She had two men waiting on the second floor, and they took off with the money, dropping the list of names and sums to the floor.

The grandparents were still at the door, listening. Nikolai joined them; he didn’t want to miss anything. His wife, Elena, came out of the shower at last and started asking loudly what was going on, but they hushed her up.

Yet they heard no more doorbells. The elevator kept going up and down, and people got out on the sixth floor and made noise with their keys and their door slamming. This meant it could not have been the young man: he didn’t have any keys. He’d have had to ring the doorbell.

Finally Nikolai turned on the television, and they had supper. Nikolai ate a great deal. He ate so much the grandfather felt compelled to make a remark. Elena came to her husband’s defense, and then the little girl asked why everyone was arguing, and family life went on its way.

That night, on the street, someone shattered what sounded like a very large window.

“It’s the bakery,” said the grandfather, looking down from the balcony. “Run, Kolya, get us some supplies.”

They began to collect equipment for Nikolai to go out. A police car drove up, arrested someone, and drove off, leaving a police officer posted at the bakery door. Nikolai went downstairs with a backpack and a knife. By then a whole crowd had gathered outside. They surrounded the policeman, knocked him down, and then people began jumping in and out of the bakery. A woman was mugged for a suitcase filled with bread. They put a hand over her mouth and dragged her away. The crowd kept growing.

Nikolai returned with a very full backpack—thirty kilos of pretzels and ten loaves of bread. Still standing on the landing, he removed all his clothes and threw them down the trash chute. He soaked cotton balls in eau-de-cologne, wiped down his body, and threw them down the chute as well. The grandfather, very pleased with the new developments, restricted himself to just one remark—the R. family would have to budget their eau-de-cologne.

In the morning, Nikolai ate a kilo of pretzels all by himself. The grandfather wore dentures and dipped the hard pretzels lugubriously into his tea. The grandmother seemed depressed and didn’t say anything, while Elena tried to force her little daughter to eat more pretzels. Finally the grandmother broke down and insisted that they ration the food. They couldn’t go out robbing every night, she said, and look,
the bakery was all boarded up—everything had already been taken away!

So the R. family’s supplies were counted up and divided. During lunch Elena gave her portion to her daughter. Nikolai was as gloomy as a thundercloud, and after lunch he ate a whole loaf of black bread by himself.

They had supplies enough for a week.

Nikolai and Elena both called into work, but no one answered. They called some friends: everyone was sitting home, waiting. The television stopped working, its screen blank and flickering. The next day the phone stopped working. Out on the street, people walked along with shopping bags and backpacks. Someone had sawed down a young tree and was dragging it home through the empty yard.

It was time to figure out what to do with the cat, which hadn’t eaten in two days and was meowing terribly on the balcony.

“We need to let her in and feed her,” said the grandfather. “Cats are a valuable source of fresh, vitamin-rich meat.”

Nikolai let the cat in, and they fed it some soup—not very much, no need to overfeed it after its fast. The little girl wouldn’t leave the cat’s side; while it had been on the balcony, the girl kept throwing herself at the balcony door to try and touch her. Now she could feed the little creature to her heart’s content, though eventually even her mother couldn’t take it. “You’re feeding her what I tear out of my mouth to give to you!” she cried. There were now enough supplies for five days.

Everyone waited for something to happen, some sort of mobilization to be announced. On the third night they heard the roar of motors outside. It was the army leaving town.

“They’ll reach the outskirts and set up a quarantine,” said the grandfather. “No one gets in, no one gets out. The scariest part is that it all turned out to be true, what the young man said. We’ll have to go into town for food.”

“If you give me your cologne, I’ll go,” said Nikolai. “I’m almost out.”

“Everything will be yours soon enough,” the grandfather said meaningfully. He’d lost a lot of weight. “It’s a miracle the plumbing still works.”

“Don’t jinx it!” snapped his wife.

Nikolai left that night for the store. He took the shopping bags and the backpack, as well as a knife and a flashlight. He came back while it was still dark, undressed on the stairs, threw the clothes into the trash chute, and, naked, wiped himself down with the cologne. Wiping one foot, he stepped into the apartment; only then did he wipe the other foot. He crushed the cotton balls together and threw them out the door, then dipped the backpack in a pot of boiling water, and also the canvas shopping bags. He hadn’t gotten much: soap, matches, salt, some oatmeal, jelly, and decaffeinated coffee. The grandfather was extremely pleased, however—he was positively beaming. Nikolai held the knife over a burner on the stove.

“Blood,” the grandfather noted approvingly before going to bed, “that’s the most infectious thing of all.”

They had enough food now for ten days, according to their calculations, if they subsisted on jelly and oatmeal, and all ate very little.

Nikolai started going out every night, and now there was the question of his clothing. He would fold it into a cellophane bag while he was still on the stairs, and each time he came in he would disinfect the knife over a burner. He still ate plenty, though without any remarks, now, from his father-in-law.

The cat grew skinnier by the hour. Her fur was hanging loose on her, and meals were torturous, for the girl kept trying to throw bits of food onto the floor for the cat as Elena rapped the girl on the knuckles. They were all yelling, now, all the time. They’d throw the cat out of the kitchen and close the door, and then the cat would begin hurling itself against the door to get back in.