There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby (7 page)

Marfutka survived another winter but no longer went into the yard—she’d decided, apparently, to die of hunger. Anisya said simply that, last year, Marfutka still had some life left in her, but this year she’s done for, her feet don’t look straight ahead but at each other, the wrong way. One day my mother took me along, and we planted half a bucket of potatoes in Marfutka’s yard, but Marfutka just looked at us and worried, it was clear, that we were taking over her plot, though she didn’t have the energy to walk over to us. My mother just went over to her and handed her some potatoes, but Marfutka, thinking her plot was being bought from her for half a bucket of potatoes, grew very frightened, and refused.

That evening we all went over to Anisya’s for some goat milk. Marfutka was there. Anisya said she’d seen us on Marfutka’s plot. My mother answered that we’d decided to help Baba Marfa. Anisya didn’t like it. Marfutka was going to the next world, she said, she didn’t need help, she’d find her way. It should be added that we were paying Anisya for the milk in canned food and soup packets. This couldn’t go on forever, since the goat made more milk every day, whereas the canned food was dwindling. We needed to establish a more stable equivalent, and so directly after the discussion about Marfutka, my mother said that our canned foods were running out, we didn’t have anything to eat ourselves, so we wouldn’t be buying any more milk that day. Clever Anisya grasped the
point at once and answered that she’d bring us a can of milk the next day and we could talk about it—if we still had potatoes, that is. She was angry, apparently, that we were wasting our potatoes on Marfutka instead of paying her. She didn’t know how many potatoes we’d invested in Marfutka’s plot during the hungry spring. Her imagination was working like a little engine. She must have been calculating that Marfutka didn’t have long to go and that she’d gather her harvest in the fall, and was angry in advance that we were the rightful owners of those planted potatoes. Everything becomes complicated when it’s a matter of surviving in times like these, especially for an old, not particularly strong person in the face of a strong young family—my parents were both forty-two then, and I was eighteen.

That night we received a visit from Tanya, who wore a city coat and yellow rubber boots, and carried a new bag in her hands. She brought us a little piglet smothered by its mother, wrapped in a clean rag. Then she wondered if we were officially registered to live in the village. She pointed out that many of the houses here had owners, and that the owners might want to come out and see for themselves what was happening, say if someone were to write them, and that all that we beheld was not just riches lying by the roadside. In conclusion, Tanya reminded us that we’d encroached on the plot of our neighbor, and that Marfutka was still alive. As for the piglet, she offered to sell it to us for money, that is for paper rubles, and that night my father chopped and pickled the little pig, which in the rag looked like a little baby. It had lashes above its eyes and everything.

After Tanya left, Anisya came by with a can of goat’s milk, and over tea we quickly negotiated a new price—one can of food for three days of milk. With hatred in her voice Anisya asked why Tanya had come by, and she approved of our decision to help Marfutka, though she said of her with a laugh that she smelled bad.

The milk and the piglet were supposed to protect us from scurvy, and what’s more Anisya was raising a little goat, and we’d decided to buy it for ten cans of food—but only a little later, after it had grown some more, since Anisya knew better how to raise a goat. We never discussed this with Anisya, though, and one day she came over, full of insane jealousy at her old boss Tanya, and proudly showed us that she’d killed her little goat and wrapped it up for us. Two cans of fish were the answer she received, and my mom burst into tears. We tried to eat the meat—we broiled it—but it was inedible, and my father ended up pickling it again.

My mom and I did manage to buy a baby goat. We walked ten kilometers to the village of Tarutino, but we did it as if we were tourists, as if it were old times. We wore backpacks, and sang as we walked, and when we got to the village we asked where we could drink some goat’s milk, and when we bought a glass of milk from a peasant woman for a bread roll, we made a show of our affection for the little goats. I started whispering to my mother, as if I wanted a goat for myself. The peasant woman became very excited, sensing a customer, but my mother whispered back no, at which point the woman began speaking very sweetly to me, saying she loved the little goats like her own children and because of this she’d give them both
to me. To which I quickly replied, “No, I only need one!” We agreed on a price right away; the woman clearly didn’t know the state of the ruble and took very little, and even threw in a handful of salt crystals for the road. She obviously thought she’d made a good deal, and, in truth, the little goat did begin to fade away pretty quickly after the long walk home. It was Anisya again who got us out of it. She gave the baby goat to her own big goat, but first she covered it with some mud from her yard, and the goat took it as one of her own, didn’t kill it. Anisya beamed with pride.

We now had all the essentials, but my indomitable father, despite his slight limp, started going out into the forest, and every day he went farther and farther. He would take his ax, and some nails, and a saw, and a wheelbarrow—he’d leave with the sunrise and come back with the night. My mother and I waded around the garden, somehow or other kept up my father’s work of collecting window panes, doors, and glass, and then of course we made the food, cleaned up, lugged the water for laundry, sewed, and mended. We’d collect old, forgotten sheepskin coats in the abandoned houses and then sew something like fur ponchos for the winter, and also we made mittens and some fur mattresses for the beds. My father, when he noticed such a mattress one night on his bed, immediately rolled up all three and carted them away the next morning. It looked like he was preparing another refuge for us, except this one would be deep in the forest, and later on it came in very handy. But it also turned out that no amount of labor and no amount of foresight can save you, no one and nothing can save you except luck.

In the meantime we lived through the hungriest month, June, which is when the supplies in a village usually run out. We shoved chopped dandelions into our mouths, made soup out of weeds, but for the most part we just gathered grass, pulled handfuls of it, and carried it, carried it, carried it home in sacks. We didn’t know how to mow it, and anyway it hadn’t really risen high enough for mowing yet. Finally Anisya gave us a scythe (in exchange for ten sackfuls of grass, which is not nothing), and Mom and I took turns mowing. I should repeat: We were far from the world, I missed my friends and girlfriends, and nothing reached us anymore. My father turned on the radio sometimes, but only rarely, because he wanted to conserve the batteries. The radio was full of lies and falsehoods anyway, and we just mowed and mowed, and our little goat Raya was growing and we needed to find her a boy goat. We trod over to the next village again, but the peasant woman was unfriendly to us now—by this point everyone knew all about us, but they didn’t know we had a goat, since Anisya was raising it, so the woman thought we’d lost Raya, and to hell with us. She wouldn’t give us the other goat, and we didn’t have any bread now—there wasn’t any flour, so there wasn’t any bread—and anyway her little goat had grown, too, and she knew three kilos of fresh meat would mean a lot of money in this hungry time. We finally got her to agree to sell the goat for a kilo of salt and ten bars of soap. But for us this meant future milk, and we ran home to get our payment, telling the woman we wanted the goat alive. “Don’t worry,” she answered, “I’m not bloodying my hands for you.” That evening we brought the little goat home,
and then began the tough summer days: mowing the grass, weeding the plot, grooming the potato plants, and all of this at the same pace as experienced Anisya—we’d arranged with her that we’d take half the goats’ manure, and somehow or other we fertilized the plot, but our vegetables still grew poorly and mostly produced weeds. Baba Anisya, freed from mowing grass, would tie up the big goat and its little kindergarten in a place where we could see them, and then scramble off into the woods for mushrooms and berries, after which she’d come by our plot and examine the fruits of our labor. We had to replant the dill, which we’d planted too deeply; we needed it for pickling cucumbers. The potatoes flourished mostly above ground level. My mother and I read
The Guide to Planting and Sowing,
and my father finally finished his work in the forest, and we went to look at his new home. It turned out to be someone’s hut, which my father had refurbished by putting in window frames, glass, and doors, and covering the roof with tar. The house was empty. From then on at night we carried tables and benches and crates and buckets and iron pots and pans and our remaining supplies, and hid everything. My father was digging a basement there, almost an underground home with a stove, our third. There were already some young vegetables peeking out of the earth in his garden.

My mother and I over the summer had become rough peasants. Our fingers were hard, with tough thick nails, permanently blackened with earth, and most interesting of all was that at the base of our nails we’d developed some sort of calluses. I noticed that Anisya had the same thing on her
fingers, as did Marfutka, who didn’t do anything, and even Tanya, our lady of leisure, a former nurse, had them too. Speaking of which, at this point Tanya’s most frequent visitor, Vera, the shepherdess, hung herself in the forest. She wasn’t actually a shepherdess anymore—all the sheep had been eaten long ago—and also she had a secret, which Anisya, who was very angry with Tanya, now told us: Vera always called for tea when she was coming into the village, but what Tanya gave Vera was some kind of medicine, which she couldn’t live without, and that’s why she hung herself: she had no money anymore for medicine. Vera left behind a little daughter. Anisya, who had contact with Tarutino, the neighboring village, told us that the girl was living with her grandmother, but then it emerged that the grandmother was another Marfutka, only with a drinking problem, and so the little girl, already half insane, was brought home the next day by our mother in an old baby stroller.

My mother always needed more than the rest of us, and my father was angry because the girl wet her bed and never said a word, licked her snot, didn’t understand anything, and cried at night for hours. Pretty soon none of us could live or sleep for these nighttime screams, and my father went off to live in the woods. There wasn’t much for it but to go and give the girl back to her failed grandmother, but just then this same grandmother, Faina, appeared and, swaying on her feet, began demanding money for the girl and the stroller. In reply my mother went inside and brought out Lena, combed, showered, barefoot but in a clean dress. At this point Lena suddenly threw herself at my mother’s feet, without a word, but like a
grown-up, curling herself up in a ball and putting her arms around my mother’s bare ankles. Her grandmother began to cry and left without Lena and without the baby stroller—apparently, to die. She swayed on her feet as she walked and wiped her tears away with her fist—but she swayed not from drink but from hunger, as I later figured out. She didn’t have any supplies—after all her daughter Vera hadn’t earned anything for a long time. We ourselves mostly ate stewed grass in different forms, with plain mushroom soup being the most common.

Our little goats had been living for a while now with my father—it was safer there—and the trail to his house had almost disappeared, especially as my father never took the same path twice with his wheelbarrow, as a precaution, plotting for the future. Lena stayed with us. We would pour her off some milk, feed her berries and our mushroom soups. Everything became a lot more frightening when we thought of the coming winter. We had no flour and not a single grain of wheat; none of the farms in the area was operating—there hadn’t been any gasoline or spare parts in ages, and the horses had been eaten even earlier. My father walked through the abandoned fields, picked up some grain, but others had been by before him, and he found just a little, enough for a very small sack. He thought he’d figure out how to grow wheat under the snow on the little field near his house in the woods. He asked Anisya when he should plant and sow, and she promised to tell him. She said shovels were no good, and as there weren’t any plugs to be found anywhere, my father asked her to draw him a plug on a piece of paper and began,
just like Robinson Crusoe, to bang together some kind of contraption. Anisya herself didn’t remember exactly how it worked, even though she’d had to walk behind a cow with a plug a few times, in the old days, but my father was all aflame with his new engineering ideas and sat down to reinvent this particular wheel. He was happy with his new fate and never pined for the life of the city, where he’d left behind a great many enemies, including his parents, my grandmother and grandfather, whom I’d seen only when I was very little and who’d since been buried under the rubble of the arguments over my mom and my grandfather’s apartment, may it rot, with its high ceilings and private bathroom and kitchen. We weren’t fated ever to live there, and now my grandparents were probably dead. We didn’t say anything to anyone when we left the city, though my father had been planning his escape for a long time. That’s how we managed to have so many sacks and boxes to take with us, because all of this stuff was cheap and, once upon a time, not subject to rationing, and over the course of several years my father, a farseeing man, collected it all. My father was a former athlete, a mountain climber, and a geologist. He’d hurt his hip in an accident, and he’d long ago dreamed of escape, and here the circumstances presented themselves, and so we did, we left, while the skies were still clear. “It’s a clear day in all of Spain,” my father would joke, literally every morning that it was sunny out.