There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby (5 page)

Eventually this led to a horrifying scene. The grandparents were sitting in the kitchen when the girl appeared with the cat in her arms. Both their mouths were smeared with something.

“That’s my girl,” said the girl to the cat—and kissed it, probably not for the first time, on its filthy mouth.

“What are you doing?” the grandmother cried.

“She caught a mouse,” said the girl. “She ate it.” And once again the girl kissed the cat on the mouth.

“What mouse?” asked the grandfather. He and his wife sat still with shock.

“A gray one.”

“A puffy one? A fat one?”

“Yes, it was fat and big,” said the girl happily. The cat, in the girl’s arms, was trying to free herself.

“Hold her tight!” yelled the grandfather. “Go to your room now, girl, go on. Take the kitty. You’ve really done it now, haven’t you?” His voice was growing louder. “You little tramp! You brat! You’ve played your games with your kitty, haven’t you?”

“Don’t yell,” said the girl. She ran quickly to her room.

The grandfather followed, spraying her path with cologne. He secured the door behind her with a chair, then called in Nikolai, who was resting after a sleepless night outside. Elena was sleeping with him. They woke up reluctantly; everything was discussed and settled. Elena began crying and tearing out her hair. From the child’s room they could hear knocking.

“Let me out, open up, I need to go to the bathroom!”

“Listen to me!” yelled Nikolai. “Stop yelling!”

“You’re yelling!” cried the girl. “Let me out, please let me out!”

Nikolai and the others went into the kitchen. They were forced to keep Elena in the bathroom. She was beating on her door, too.

By evening the girl had calmed down. Nikolai asked her if she’d managed to pee. With difficulty the girl answered that,
yes, she’d gone in her underwear. She asked for something to drink.

There was a child-sized bed in the girl’s room, a rug, a locked wardrobe with all the family’s clothing, and some bookshelves. It had been a cozy room for a little girl; now it was a quarantine chamber. Nikolai managed to hack an opening high up in the door. He lowered a bottle filled with soup and bread crumbs through the hole. The girl was told to eat this for dinner and then to urinate in the bottle and pour it out the window. But the window was locked at the top, and the girl couldn’t reach, and the bottle turned out to be too narrow for her to aim into. Excrement should have been easy enough: she was to take a few pages from one of the books and go on those, and then throw this all out the window. Nikolai had fashioned a slingshot and after three attempts had managed to put a fairly large hole in the window.

But the girl soon showed the signs of her spoiled upbringing. She was unable to defecate onto the pages as she was supposed to. She couldn’t keep track of her own needs. Elena would ask her twenty times a day whether she needed to go poo; the girl would say no, she didn’t; and five minutes later she’d soil herself .

Meanwhile, the girl’s food situation was becoming impossible: There were a finite number of bottles, and the girl was unable to retie the ones she had used to the rope. There were already nine bottles scattered on the floor when the girl stopped coming to the door or answering questions. The cat must have been sitting on her, though it hadn’t appeared in
their line of vision in a while, ever since Nikolai started trying to shoot it with the slingshot. The girl had been feeding the cat half of every ration—she’d simply pour it out on the floor for her. Now the girl no longer answered questions, and her little bed stood by the wall, outside their line of vision.

They’d spent three days innovating, struggling to arrange things for the girl, attempting to teach her how to wipe herself (until now Elena had done this for her), getting water to her so she could somehow wash herself—and pleading interminably for her to come to the door to receive her bottle of food. One time Nikolai decided to wash the girl by pouring a bucket of hot water on her, instead of lowering the food, and after that the girl was afraid to come to the door. All this had so exhausted the inhabitants of the apartment that when the girl finally stopped answering them, they all lay down and slept for a long, long time.

Then everything ended very quickly. Waking up, the grandparents discovered the cat in their bed with that same bloody mouth—apparently the cat had started eating the girl, but had climbed out the makeshift window, possibly to get a drink. Nikolai appeared in the doorway, and after hearing what had happened slammed the door shut and began to move things around on the other side, locking them in with a chair. The door remained closed. Nikolai did not want to cut an opening; he put this off. Elena yelled and screamed and tried to remove the chair, but Nikolai once again locked her in the bathroom.

Then Nikolai lay down on the bed for a moment, and began to swell up, until his skin had distended horribly. The night before, he’d killed a woman for her backpack, and then, right on the street, he’d eaten a can of buckwheat concentrate. He just wanted to try it, but ended up eating the whole thing, he couldn’t help himself. Now he was sick.

Nikolai figured out quickly that he was sick, but it was too late—he was already swelling up. The entire apartment shook with all the knocks on all the doors. The cat was crying, and the apartment above them had also reached the knocking phase, but Nikolai just kept pushing, as if in labor, until finally the blood started coming out of his eyes, and he died, not thinking of anything, just pushing and hoping to get free of it soon.

And no one opened the door onto the landing, which was too bad, because the young man was making his rounds, carrying bread with him. All the knocking in the apartment of the R. family had died down, with only Elena still scratching at her door a little, not seeing anything, as blood came out of her eyes. What was there to see, anyway, in a dark bathroom, while lying on the floor?

Why was the young man so late? He had many apartments under his care, spread across four enormous buildings. He reached their entryway for the second time only on the night of the sixth day—three days after the girl had stopped answering, one full day after Nikolai succumbed, twenty hours after Elena’s parents passed away, and five minutes after Elena herself.

But the cat kept meowing, like in that famous story where the man kills his wife and buries her behind a brick wall in his basement, and when the police come they hear the meowing behind the wall and figure out what happened, because along with the wife’s body the husband has entombed her favorite cat, which has stayed alive by eating her flesh.

The cat meowed and meowed, and the young man, hearing this lone living sound in the entire entryway, where all the knocking and screaming had by now gone silent, decided to fight at least for this one life. He found a metal rod lying in the yard, covered in blood, and with it he broke down the door.

What did he see there? A familiar black mound in the bathroom, a black mound in the living room, two black mounds behind a door held shut with a chair. That’s where the cat slipped out. It nimbly jumped through a primitive makeshift window in another door, and behind that door the young man heard a human voice. He removed a chair blocking the way and entered a room filled with broken glass, rubbish, excrement, pages torn out of books, strewn bottles, and headless mice. A little girl with a bright-red bald scalp, just like the young man’s, only redder, lay on the bed. She stared at the young man, and the cat sat beside her on her pillow, also staring attentively at him, with big, round eyes.

YOU CAN RECOGNIZE THEM, BUT ONLY IF YOU YOURSELF ARE one of them. There are signs, and each sign happens twice. Those who see the signs don’t ever understand what they’re seeing. The heart flutters for a second, that’s all. A tear clouds the eye, but the memory remains out of reach. Twin souls have passed one another in space.

It’s also called love at first sight (and you may never have that sight again).

The double sign, the light from the proper direction, a house lit up by it—then the person will recognize the place. But everything that came before, and after, and why this place, and why this light, this house, this wind—the exiled soul won’t ever understand it. The soul will never return to that former time, that other life. It needs to drag along in this current one, unfortunately.

Because it’s the former life that’s always dearest to us.
That
’s the life colored by sadness, by love—that’s where we left everything connected to what we call our feelings. Now everything is different; life just carries on, without joy, without tears.

But this is all a prologue. The fact is a man is rushing home from a business trip. He’s late for his flight, he’s caught a cab, they raced to the airport, but the cab got pulled over, the driver had to pay a fine, that took up precious minutes, and arriving finally at the gate the man finds nothing: the plane is gone.

He was rushing, this man, because the next morning his son is being drafted into the army—suddenly, without any warning, they’re taking him right out of college. The man learned about it this evening: he’d finally gotten a chance to call home from the post office to say that everything was fine, he was catching a flight in the morning, to which his wife barked back—“It’ll be too late!”—before telling him the news. So off he went—to say good-bye! Their beloved, only child was leaving for two years; their clumsy little boy, unprepared for the difficulties, and cruelties, for the ways of the army—their gentle little boy, loving, domestic, kind. He was always getting beaten up in the yard when he was little; in school there’d also been problems and sadists; now he was at the university, all that was behind them. He’d found friends like himself, well-mannered, thoughtful boys and girls—and suddenly there you go, they’re taking him in the morning.

This man, the father, was no longer young, and the mother also was no longer very young. They’d met when neither of them was very young, and gave birth, miraculously, to this joy, this angel, whose peers, the parents believed, didn’t appreciate him, as a tribe never appreciates its first prophet.

The father already had a daughter—his elderly daughter, as he liked to say, which was true, actually. She was the product
of an early marriage, and what’s more the girl’s mother was older than the father by eleven years. Their marriage collapsed when he was forty-two and she fifty-three—how do you like that? A desperate age for husband and wife both. And then suddenly the husband met the love of his life. She too was not young, but was full of tenderness, with a cloud of hair around her golden head and blue eyes—she had just joined his firm. Everything was settled for them, and then they gave birth to this miracle, a fragile, golden-haired angel of a son. They lived together for eighteen years and a smidgeon, clinging to each other, living what seemed like an extra, bonus life, but always worrying about their little boy.

And finally the payment had come due—the tears and threats of the first wife, her curse had come to pass: may everything that you put me through return to you in spades.