There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby

Hygiene

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.

“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.

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.

A New Soul

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.

The father has missed the plane. Nor are there any seats on the morning flight.

He gets a partial refund for his plane ticket and hurls himself into the late bus, which takes him to the train station, where he somehow manages, tearfully, to say something to the conductor, a few simple words about his son, so that she steps aside and allows him on the train-which is already moving-and even, after hearing his few simple words, puts him into her own compartment, which is overheated, and where, on the top bunk, the father lies in torment until the morning. As soon as the train arrives he races to the apartment, but it is already empty: things are scattered on the floor; the phone is off the hook, beeping; his son’s unmade bed gapes like the bed of a condemned man on the day of his execution.

The father quickly finds his bearings, learns the address of the draft board from a neighbor in the next entryway, where his son’s classmate lives-the boy was in fact his son’s tormentor, but who cares about that now. That boy’s grandmother tells the father where to run; her own family has gone to see off their child after a night of partying.

The father makes it in time. He sees his son a crowd of pale, hungover, moronic, defeated boys.

The father takes hold of his son’s sleeve, begins to scream, and wakes up in the United States, in the form of an unhappy immigrant named Grisha, who’s been abandoned by his hardworking wife six months after they arrived in the States. She went to work as a cleaning lady at the mall and then married a professor, an old childhood friend, whom she’d accidentally met there. A happy coincidence! And she cast Grisha away like an old rag.

At the moment we’re describing, Grisha has just been released from the mental hospital, where, not knowing the language, he’d spent all his time in front of the television, though without participating in the vicious arguments about which channel to put on. He’d landed in the mental ward after his third unsuccessful suicide attempt.

Somehow or other, one day he began to talk in an impoverished television language with a crazy black man, who was always yelling-nonstop-about how he was going to kill all the white people, that filth, how he’d killed ten of them already and he wanted to kill an eleventh, he was willing to go to the electric chair for it, to become a martyr for his beliefs. He was the first one Grisha understood, and he answered him in his own way, in the voice of a television anchorman. Kill me, said Grisha. Go ahead, pleeze-strangle me, if you’d like, or some other way, I don’t care, said Grisha, utterly surprised by his ability to form English words, and unaware that the soul of that unhappy father was already knocking about inside him and that it knew many things (including five languages). The weeping Grisha was taken to his room and tranquilized.

The black man, Jim, was stopped short, knocked from his imaginary universe of righteous racial vengeance by this actual white person who was asking for his own death. Jim began wondering whether he could do it-commit this act for, he claimed to himself, the eleventh time, and immediately he went to find out what had happened to this piece of filth, who had turned out in fact to be a dirty Russian, which on the table of ranks in Jim’s head placed him below just about everyone. Jim was, after all, a full-fledged citizen of the United States.

And he began to defend the rights of this dirty Russian. He taught him to recognize the main enemies of democracy on television-the senators and presidents and newspeople who spread their lies. Jim taught Grisha a great many things, nodding his wise old head and spinning his thin fingers, and Grisha just kept crying.

He didn’t know he was crying for his wife and son, whom he’d left that day in the Moscow street outside the draft board, weeping on their knees next to his body. He didn’t know that the boy hadn’t been taken into the army after all, that his wife had managed to hide him even while herself wailing terribly. That is to say she wept loudly next to the body of her collapsed husband but in the meantime whispered to the boy, “Hide out at your Aunt Valya’s in the country,” and off he’d gone even before the ambulance arrived.

Grisha wandered around, weeping, unable to reach himself. He discovered a little hole below his neck, like an extra eye, from which tears poured out. He saw strange dreams-in which a cloudless joy and love surrounded him, sang lullabies to him, calmed him.

The shots they gave him made him dizzy, high, and caused him to stop crying, but the little eye below his neck kept pouring out tears.

With time the shock subsided, and Grisha was released while Jim was transferred to another building, where he found himself a protégé in the form of a little black-and-white kitten, from whom he never parted, as it too was a member of an oppressed race- America had no room in its heart for a homeless kitten. But he’d come from somewhere, and Jim had found him, and when visiting Grisha to say good-bye he showed him the little treasure in his hands.

And Grisha eventually returned to his cave. He rented a basement room from a Russian woman-it had a toilet but no bath.

Not long after his release from the hospital, Grisha’s landlady had a visitor-her cousin, a sad-looking gray-haired widow with a son back in Moscow. Grisha caught just a glimpse of her while going down to his basement; she was sitting on the porch drinking tea. She was stirring and stirring the tea with a spoon, and a speck of reflected light danced upon her face. Her face was tearful, dead.

The woman stirred the spoon in her tea listlessly, and the little point of light bouncing off the surface of the tea blinked on her little red nose and in her blue eye. The blue eye especially was lit up in a very poetic way-it flashed like some living precious jewel.

It was a genuine double recognition: two souls met and didn’t know it.

Five minutes later, Grisha was up the stairs and sitting across from this old woman, this widow. His landlady, her cousin, had gone off to the college where she taught. This old woman never did get around to drinking any of her tea or lifting her gaze. Grisha fell in love with her with all his broken heart, married her, and came to Moscow to meet her melancholy, pale, blond and curly-haired son.

When he shook hands with this son, this Alyosha, a tear rolled from the third, unseen eye below Grisha’s neck-a bitter, tiny tear from the dead father. Alyosha avoided the draft in the end: his father had died, as Grisha’s new wife explained it, and so the son became the lone provider for a pensioner (his mother), and by law such a person is exempt from army service. At the draft board that day they kept yelling and insisting that he should start serving now, they’d release him later (they needed to fill a quota, apparently, and without him they’d be one short). So the mother had to run around and gather the necessary papers while Alyosha was hiding-the police would come to the apartment at night looking for him-and meanwhile the funeral had to be arranged! Grisha listened to all these tales and wept every time, no matter how often he heard them.

But Alyosha never accepted this new father. He was shocked by the speed with which his mother had experienced a change of heart. It seemed like a betrayal-she still wore the same slippers she wore while his father lived, and now she’d flung herself into another marriage. Alyosha refused to go to America with them. But his mother, looking younger than herself by twenty years, blossoming, golden-haired, blue-eyed, in love, flew off with her new husband to the place where her first husband’s soul now lived-and no one ever did explain it to either of them.

The New Robinson Crusoes

A Chronicle of the End of the Twentieth Century

SO MY PARENTS DECIDED THEY WOULD OUTSMART EVERYONE. When it began they piled me and a load of canned food into a truck and took us to the country, the far-off and forgotten country, somewhere beyond the Mur River. We’d bought a cabin there for cheap a few years before, and mostly it just stood there. We’d go at the end of June to pick wild strawberries (for my health), and then once more in August in time for stray apples and plums and black cranberries in the abandoned orchards, and for raspberries and mushrooms in the woods. The cabin was falling apart when we bought it, and we never fixed anything. Then one fine day late in the spring, after the mud had hardened a little, my father arranged things with a man with a truck, and off we went with our groceries, just like the new Robinson Crusoes, with all kinds of yard tools and a rifle and a bloodhound called Red-who could, theoretically, hunt rabbits.

Now my father began his feverish activity. Over in the garden he plowed the earth-plowing the neighbors’ earth in the process, so that he pulled out our fence posts and planted them in the next yard. We dug up the vegetable patch, planted three sacks of potatoes, groomed the apple trees. My father went into the woods and brought back some turf for the winter. And suddenly too we had a wheelbarrow. In general my father was very active in the storerooms of our neighbors’ boarded-up houses, picking up whatever might come in handy: nails, old boards, shingles, pieces of tin, buckets, benches, door handles, windowpanes, and all sorts of useful old things, like well buckets, yarn spinners, grandfather clocks, and then not-so-useful old things, like old iron teakettles, iron oven parts, stove tops, and so on.

Three old women were the village’s sole inhabitants: Baba Anisya; Marfutka, who had reverted to semi-savagery; and the red-headed Tanya, the only one with a family: her kids would come around and bring things, and take other things away-which is to say they’d bring canned food from the city, cheese, butter, and cookies, and take away pickled cucumbers, cabbage, potatoes. Tanya had a rich basement pantry and a good, enclosed front yard, and one of her grand-children, a permanently ailing boy named Valera, often stayed with her. His ears were always hurting, or else he was covered with eczema. Tanya herself was a nurse by training, which training she received in a labor camp in Kolyma, where she’d been sent at the age of seventeen for stealing a suckling pig at her collective farm. She was popular, and she kept her stove warm-the shepherdess Vera would come from the next village over and call out (I could hear her in the distance), “Tanya, put the tea on! Tanya, put the tea on!” Baba Anisya, the only human being in the village-Marfutka didn’t count, and Tanya was a criminal-said that Tanya used to be the head of the health clinic here, practically the most important person around. Anisya worked for her for five years, for doing which she lost her pension because it meant she didn’t complete the full twenty-five years at the collective farm, and then five years sweeping up at the clinic don’t count, especially with a boss like Tanya. My mom made a trip once with Anisya to the regional Party headquarters in Priozersk, but the headquarters had been boarded up long ago, everything was boarded up, and my mother walked the twenty-five kilometers home with a frightened Baba Anisya, who immediately began digging in her garden with renewed vigor, and chopping wood, and carrying firewood and twigs into her house-she was fending off a hungry death, which is what she’d face if she did nothing, like Marfutka, who was eighty-five and no longer lit her stove, and even the few potatoes she’d managed to drag into her house had frozen during the winter. They simply lay there in a wet, rotten pile. Marfutka had nibbled out of that pile all winter and now refused to part with these riches, her only ones, when one time my mother sent me over with a shovel to clean them out. Marfutka refused to open the door, looking out through the window that was draped in rags and seeing that I was carrying a garden spade. Either she ate the potatoes raw, despite her lack of teeth, or she made a fire for them when no one was looking-it was impossible to tell. She had no firewood. In the spring Marfutka, wrapped in layers of greasy shawls, rags, and blankets, showed up at Anisya’s warm home and sat there like a mummy, not breathing a word. Anisya didn’t even try to talk to her, and Marfutka just sat there. I looked once at her face, which is to say what was visible of her face under the rags, and saw that it was small and dark, and that her eyes were like wet holes.

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.

The summer was beautiful. Everything was blossoming, flowering. Our Lena began to talk. She’d run after us into the forest, not to pick mushrooms but to follow my mother like she was tied to her, as if it were the main task of her young life. I taught her how to recognize edible mushrooms and berries, but it was useless-a little creature in that situation can’t possibly tear herself away from grown-ups. She is saving her skin every minute of the day, and so she ran after my mother everywhere, on her short little legs, with her puffed-out stomach. She called my mother “Nanny”-where she picked up that word we had no idea; we’d never taught it to her-and she called me that, too, which was very clever, actually.

One night we heard a noise outside our door like a cat meowing and went outside to find a newborn baby wrapped in an old, greasy coat. My father, who’d grown used to Lena and sometimes even came during the day to help around the house, now simply deflated. My mother didn’t like it either and immediately went over to Anisya to demand who could have done this-with the child, at night, accompanied by the quiet Lena, we marched over to Anisya’s. Anisya wasn’t sleeping; she had also heard the child’s cries and was very worried. She said that the first refugees had already arrived in Tarutino, and that soon they’d be coming to our village too, so we should expect more guests from here on out. The infant was squealing shrilly and without interruption; he had a hard, puffed-out stomach. We invited Tanya over in the morning to have a look, and without even touching him she said he wasn’t going to survive-he had the infant’s disease. The child suffered, yelled, and we didn’t even have a nipple for the bottle, much less any food for him. My mother dripped some water into his dried-out mouth, and he nearly choked on it. He looked like he was about four months old. My mother ran at a good clip to Tarutino, traded a precious bit of salt for a nipple, and returned full of energy, and the child drank a little bit of water from the bottle. My mother induced stool with some softening chamomile brew, and we all, including my father, darted around as fast as we could, heating the water, giving the child a warm compress. It was clear to everyone that we needed to leave the house, the plot, our whole functioning household, or else we’d be destroyed. But leaving the plot meant starving to death. At the family conference my father announced that we’d be moving to the house in the woods and that he’d stay behind for now with a rifle and the dog in the shack next door.

That night we set off with the first installment of things. The boy, whose name was now Nayden, rode atop the cart. To everyone’s surprise he’d recovered, then began sucking on the goat’s milk, and now rode wrapped in a sheepskin. Lena walked alongside the cart, holding onto the ropes.

At dawn we reached our new home, at which point my father immediately made a second run and then a third. He was like a cat carrying more and more of his litter in his teeth, which is to say all the many possessions he’d acquired, and now the little hut was smothered in things. That day, when all of us collapsed from exhaustion, my father set off for guard duty. At night, on his wheelbarrow, he brought back some early vegetables from the garden-potatoes, carrots, beets, and little onions. We laid this all out in the underground storage he’d created. The same night he set off again, but limped back almost immediately with an empty wheelbarrow. Gloomily he announced: “That’s it!” He’d brought a can of milk for the boy. It turned out our house had been claimed by some kind of squad. They’d already posted a guard at the plot, and taken Anisya’s goat. Anisya had lain in wait for my father on his escape path with that can of milk. My father was sad, but also he was pleased, since he’d once again managed to escape, and to escape with his whole family.

Now our only hope lay in my father’s little plot and in the mushrooms we could find in the forest. Lena stayed in the house with the boy-we didn’t take her with us to the forest now but locked her in the house to keep her out of the way. Strangely enough she sat quietly with the boy and didn’t beat her fists against the door. Nayden greedily drank the potato broth, while my mother and I scoured the woods with our bags and backpacks. We no longer pickled the mushrooms but just dried them-there was hardly any salt left now. My father began digging a well, as the nearest stream was very far.

On the fifth day of our immigration we were joined by Baba Anisya. She came to us with empty hands, with just a cat on her shoulder. Her eyes looked strange. She sat for a while on the porch, holding the frightened cat on her lap, then gathered herself and went off into the woods. The cat hid under the porch. Soon Anisya came back with a whole apron’s worth of mushrooms, though among them was a bright-red poisonous one. She remained sitting on the porch and didn’t go into the house; we brought her out a portion of our poor mushroom soup in a can from the milk she used to give us. That evening my father took Anisya into the basement, where he’d built our third refuge, and she lay down and rested and the next day began actively scouring the forest for mushrooms. I’d go through the mushrooms she brought back, so she wouldn’t poison herself. We’d dry some of them, and some we’d throw out. One time, coming home from the woods, we found all our refugees together on the porch. Anisya was rocking Nayden in her arms and telling Lena, choking on her words: “They went through everything, took everything… They didn’t even look in on Marfutka, but they took everything of mine. They dragged the goat away by her rope.” Anisya remained useful for a long time to come, took our goats out for walks, sat with Nayden and Lena until the frosts came. Then one day she lay down with the kids in the warmest place in the house, on the bunk above the stove, and from then on got up only to use the outhouse.

The winter came and covered up all the paths that might have led to us. We had mushrooms, berries (dried and boiled), potatoes from my father’s plot, a whole attic filled with hay, pickled apples from abandoned gardens in the forest, even a few cans of pickled cucumbers and tomatoes. On the little field, under the snow, grew our winter crop of bread. We had our goats. We had a boy and a girl, for the continuation of the race, and a cat, who brought us mice from the forest, and a dog, Red, who didn’t want to eat these mice, but whom my father would soon count on for hunting rabbits. My father was afraid to hunt with his rifle. He was even afraid to chop wood because someone might hear us. He chopped wood only during the howling snowstorms. We had a grandmother-the storehouse of the people’s wisdom and knowledge.

Cold desolate space spread out around us on all sides.

One time my father turned on the radio and tried for a while to hear what was out there. Everything was silent. Either the batteries had died, or we really were the last ones left. My father’s eyes shone: He’d escaped again!

If in fact we’re not alone, then they’ll come for us. That much is clear. But, first of all, my father has a rifle, and we have skis and a smart dog. Second of all, they won’t come for a while yet. We’re living and waiting, and out there, we know, someone is also living, and waiting, until our grain grows and our bread grows, and our potatoes, and our new goats-and that’s when they’ll come. And take everything, including me. Until then they’re being fed by our plot, and Anisya’s plot, and Tanya’s household. Tanya is long gone, but Marfutka is still there. When we’re like Marfutka, they won’t touch us either.

But there’s a long way to go until then. And in the meantime, of course, we’re not just sitting here. My father and I have commenced work on our next refuge.

The Miracle

THERE ONCE LIVED A WOMAN WHOSE SON HANGED HIMSELF.

Which is to say, when she returned home from the night shift one morning, her boy was lying on the floor next to an overturned stool underneath a length of thin synthetic rope.

He was unconscious, but his heart still beat faintly, and so the paramedic who came with the ambulance suggested that the son wasn’t really trying to hang himself.

Even though there was a note on the table: “Mom, I’m sorry. I love you.”

And it was only when she’d returned home from the hospital, having held her son’s hand as they rode in the ambulance, and then with him into the hospital as he lay on a stretcher, right up to the doors of the intensive care unit, where she finally had to let him go-only upon returning home did she discover that the wool sock in which she kept her savings was empty.

She kept the sock at the bottom of an old suitcase. It had contained two wedding rings, all her money, and her gold earrings set with rubies.

The poor woman then saw that the tape player-the one valuable thing she’d ever bought, because it was the only way she could get her son to return to school-was also gone.

Looking around some more, she found a number of empty bottles under the bed and in the kitchen, a mound of dirty plates in the sink, and traces of vomit in the filthy bathroom.

She knew the minute she walked in the door that there had been a party-her son was being drafted into the army and had wanted to invite his friends over, but the mother kept objecting.

And yet when she stood at the entrance to their studio apartment that morning and took in the crooked lamp, the table that had been moved, the overturned stool, and, above all, the rope and the body on the floor, all her angry thoughts left her.

Only now did she move the fallen chair aside and pull the old suitcase from underneath her bed.

It wasn’t locked properly; one of the two small locks was broken.

That loose lock told her a great deal, and she opened the suitcase hopelessly, with unfeeling hands.

The wool sock was in its place, under all the clothing, but it was empty.

That sock was her last hope. She had made all sorts of plans, whether to buy a television, or to bribe someone to allow her son to take his high school exams (he’d dropped out in the middle of his senior year).

Other times she dreamed of moving to a bigger apartment, with two rooms. She’d have to scrimp and save, but she could do it, and her boy could have his own room. It wasn’t easy living with him, it was true, but he was her only remaining family. The others had died, all her relatives-her parents, aunts, uncles, and husband had died young; an evil fate seemed to trail them all.

And now her boy wanted to leave her, too.

In truth he’d been talking about this for a long time. His army service was approaching inexorably, and he’d always been a quiet, gentle boy. He didn’t like fighting-he always said he couldn’t hurt another human being, and because of this he was often beaten up at school. There were three boys in particular who liked to pick on him. They’d laugh and say he never fought back, and they’d take everything he had in his pockets, right down to his handkerchief.

Which, incidentally, didn’t mean he was above threatening his own mother when he was drunk. In fact he’d changed a great deal since he’d started hanging out with some older kids who lived in their building.

They’d taken him under their protection. He told his mother so himself, he came home one day and said, That’s it, no one’s going to bother me anymore. And from then on he would walk around strangely exhilarated.

That was a few years ago, when he was fourteen. That’s when he began asking his mother for a tape player. The other boys would give him tapes to copy, and he couldn’t admit to them that he didn’t have a tape recorder of his own, so he just sat there miserably, staring at the tapes.

He’d bragged to his friends-apparently-about his tape player and now couldn’t take it back. He knew his mother had some money-she was always working several jobs, saving, scrimping-but she told him pocket money would spoil him, he might even, she said, start drinking and smoking, as if they didn’t already have enough problems.

He did in fact start drinking and smoking-the older kids must have paid. He also knew his mother’s hiding places and would steal from her a little at a time. She was disorganized and never remembered exactly how much money she had in her stash.

One time he wouldn’t stop screaming about how much he needed a tape recorder. He kept at it until he actually became ill-he had a fever, and he refused medication. He said he wanted to die.

His fever grew worse, he refused all food, and finally his mother broke down-she went out and bought him a tape recorder, the cheapest one, though it still cost a fortune.

Her son woke up right away, and he looked wide-eyed at the tape recorder. The mother was crying tears of joy, seeing how shocked he was, but then just as suddenly he lay down again, turned his back to her, and said it was the wrong model. It wasn’t what he needed at all.

The next morning they crawled together to the cheap little kiosk to exchange the tape recorder for a better one. They had to pay a ton of money, again, for the upgrade-and clearly the people at the kiosk tricked them, seeing the condition the mother was in, that she was ready for anything.

After that he truly went out of control. He listened to the tape recorder day and night without a break, dubbed cassettes (which also cost money), and then soon there was the problem of a new leather jacket, designer jeans, and American sneakers.

Here the mother finally said no. After all, where would it end?

Since you’re not going to school anymore, she told him, why don’t you go to work like me? I’m ready for any kind of work for your sake.

He replied that he would never slave for pennies the way she did.

He refused to do what other boys in his situation did-sell newspapers or wash windshields at traffic lights. Maybe he was afraid of getting beaten up again-his mother, too, was afraid of everything, and maybe he’d grown up that way also, not having a father to set an example.

But things soon got to the point where he refused to go out in his shapeless pants and jacket, became depressed, didn’t do his homework, rendering his attendance at school senseless-why show up just to be embarrassed by his teachers? He hated being lectured, couldn’t stand it.

He spent more and more of his time with the neighborhood kids, his protectors, and they-thought the mother, sitting before her violated suitcase-must have drank, and smoked, and he alongside them, at their expense.

And now the time must have come when they’d reminded him of this, of their long-standing hospitality, and decided it was time to get their money back.

That must have been why he wanted to throw a going-away party, for his induction into the army. And she kept putting it off, saying there were still two months to go, they’d have time, it was early.

Of course all children know the secret places in the house where their parents hide the money.

Whereas the mother might forget. There was even a time when this Nadya, the mother, couldn’t find her money sock, when she needed to buy her Vova new shoes. He was eight years old, and he pointed beneath the wardrobe-that’s where she’d hidden her sock. Now he was seventeen.

The mother sat there, in shock, before this bankruptcy, this humiliation-someone had also scrawled obscenities on the bathroom walls, and the jars in the kitchen had been emptied of all their grains, as if the partiers were searching for something-she sat there and thought that this was the end, and there was nothing else she could do.

In the calm of the waiting room, the doctor had told her that her boy was alive and well, that they were putting him in intensive care only as a formality, but that soon he’d be transferred to the psychiatric ward.

If the psych ward declared him clinically insane, that would be his worst nightmare-because he’d secretly hoped he would someday get a car, but you can’t get a license with a record of mental illness.

And in that case, too, the army wouldn’t have him, and he’d continue living off of her and just tumbling further and further into the abyss.

On the other hand, if they didn’t declare him insane-also quite likely, since he would fight against the diagnosis and insist he was just trying to scare his mother-then he’d be drafted, and that would be the end of him. He’d told her himself: I won’t accept humiliations. You’ll have me back in a casket soon enough. Please bury me next to Dad.

There was nothing else she could do. Nadya got through the evening, night, and morning, and then staggered over to the hospital. There she was met by the head of the psychiatric ward, a cheerful woman who told her the boy had only pretended to commit suicide, his friends were in on it too, he’d told the doctor so himself.

“But there are marks on his neck!” Nadya cried out.

“It was a very flimsy rope,” answered the doctor. “He did that on purpose. He said if he’d wanted to kill himself he’d have used a thicker rope, a cord-he said you have one in the house. He remembered everything you said to the paramedics and what they looked like. He was just pretending to be unconscious.”

“And the bloody foam on his mouth?” Nadya protested, but the doctor was no longer listening. She said the boy was still very upset and didn’t want to face his mother after the joke he’d pulled.

“But he robbed me,” Nadya wanted to say, but instead just began weeping right there in the waiting room.

“You should also seek some help,” the doctor suggested in parting.

After that Nadya wandered back home again and began calling all her friends for advice.

Then she went down to the yard, where the old ladies convened on the benches, and sought their advice, too.

Somehow she couldn’t help talking about what had happened, just couldn’t stop her racing tongue. She stopped people on the street, people she barely knew, and insisted on telling them everything, as if she were at confession.

People had begun looking at her in a funny way, agreeing with everything she said, prompting her with questions.

She finally got help from an old woman who used to live in their building but now lived far away with her sister. She had been diagnosed (she told Nadya) with a fatal disease and had only two weeks to live, which is why she’d stayed away for a while. Before the old woman moved Nadya had occasionally brought her groceries, and the woman would tell her everything-how she’d transferred ownership of her apartment to her beloved grandson so that she could live out the last years of her life without worries about his future, and that the grandson had immediately decided to remodel the place, pulled up the floors, changed the parquet, and in the meantime moved his grandmother out to her sister’s place, so as not to bother her with all the repairs. Then the grandson disappeared, and the apartment was occupied by a family no one knew, who had bought it from the grandson fair and square. So it went. Everyone in their building knew the story.

The poor exiled old woman used to go around to all the neighbors and cry about what had happened, but now she seemed to have calmed down. She didn’t even mention it, said she was living well (“With your sister?” asked Nadya, but the old woman answered, “No, without my sister now,” and Nadya was afraid to ask further, for fear that the sister had died), she was growing all sorts of flowers (“On your balcony?” Nadya asked, and the old woman said, “No, over my head,” which seemed like a strange answer, and Nadya did not ask anything more), and in any case Nadya had to tell her own story, too, so she did.

The old woman said, “You need to find Uncle Kornil.”

And that was it. She immediately began to walk away and then disappeared around the corner of her old building before Nadya could ask her anything else.

Amazed, Nadya raced around the corner and then the next corner, but the woman was gone.

There was nothing else to do. Once again Nadya called all her friends and acquaintances and anyone else she could find, to ask them about Uncle Kornil, and finally, when she was waiting in line at the post office, a woman told her that Kornil slept in the boiler room of the hospital near the metro.

Uncle Kornil was near death, the woman added, and couldn’t be allowed to drink.

But the local bums who also lived in the basement wouldn’t let you in to see him unless you brought them a bottle of vodka.

Nor would Kornil tell you anything unless he got a bottle, too.

What you needed to do was put down a fresh towel for a tablecloth, and shot glasses, serve the vodka, something to eat, and so on in that vein.

The woman explained in great detail where to go and what to do. She herself didn’t look very well: she was pale, as if she’d just come from the hospital, and dressed all in black, with a black kerchief, but she had lovely, kind eyes.

Without even thinking, Nadya bought the vodka bottles, prepared the towel, packed everything neatly into a bag, and went off.

When she was near the hospital somebody directed her to the boiler room, the gathering spot for all local drunks. It looked like every bum in the neighborhood hung out there.

Two or three loitered near the basement door, either waiting for someone or just passing the time.

Worried they’d steal her vodka, Nadya made for the door like a tank, sweeping the drunks from the way and knocking loudly on the door. It opened just a sliver, then welcomed her fully when Nadya flashed one of her bottles from the bag. The drunks outside tried to get in behind her, and there was some commotion as she entered the basement.

She was immediately relieved of one of the bottles; the person who did so informed Nadya that Uncle Kornil was very ill and mustn’t be allowed to drink under any circumstances.

He pointed her to a corner where a man lay next to an old wardrobe with its doors missing. He looked like he’d just been picked out of the trash. He lay with his arms outstretched. This was Kornil.

Nadya did as the woman at the post office had directed-she put down a fresh towel, placed a bottle of vodka atop it, cut up some bread and pickles, and also put down a little money to help Kornil with his future hangover.

Kornil lay there like a corpse, his mouth open, his forehead covered in tiny scratches, though there was a particularly large one, like a wound, right in the middle.

There were open sores on his hands.

Nadya sat there and waited, then opened the bottle and poured a large shot into the glass.

Uncle Kornil stirred, opened his eyes, crossed himself (so did Nadya), and whispered, “Nadya”-she shivered-“do you have his photograph?”

Nadya did not have a photograph of her son with her. She could have died of grief right then and there.

“Do you have anything of his?”

Nadya started rummaging through her bag. She took out a little purse, a packet of milk, and a used handkerchief. That was it.

She’d used that handkerchief to wipe away her tears on her walk home from the hospital the first time.

Nadya brought the full glass to Uncle Kornil’s lips.

Uncle Kornil raised himself on an elbow, drank off the glass, chewed a pickle, and fell back down again, saying, “Give me your handkerchief.”

Then, holding the handkerchief (there was a large leaking sore on his wrist), he said, “If I drink another glass, that’ll be the end of me.”

Growing frightened, Nadya nodded.

She was kneeling by his side, on her knees, waiting for him to speak. Her dried tears were on that handkerchief, the traces of her suffering, and in a way those were also the traces of her son-so she hoped.

“Sinner,” Uncle Kornil managed, “what do you want?”

Nadya answered right away, beginning to cry: “How am I a sinner? I have no sins on my conscience.”

Behind her, at the table, she heard an explosion of laughter-one of the drunks must have told a joke.

“Your grandfather killed one hundred and seven people,” croaked Uncle Kornil. “And now you’re about to kill me.”

Nadya nodded again, wiping away tears.

Uncle Kornil went quiet.

He lay there silently; meanwhile, time was growing short.

He needed more to drink, apparently, before he would continue.

Nadya hardly knew anything about her paternal grandfather-he’d disappeared at some point. And as if there hadn’t been enough wars in which people killed one another, involuntarily, without anger.

They gave you an order-and either you killed, or they killed you for disobeying the order.

“So my grandfather was a soldier,” said Nadya, wounded. “But what does that have to do with the boy? What did he do? Maybe I should suffer, but why should he? Everybody killed back then-so what?”

Uncle Kornil didn’t say anything; he lay there like a corpse. A drop of blood began to run down his forehead. “Oh, no,” said Nadya, blanching.

She didn’t have anything to wipe it away with. He was holding the handkerchief, and she couldn’t very well use her skirt-she’d be walking around town in a bloody skirt.

And without the handkerchief, he wouldn’t be able to say anything.

The handkerchief held the traces of her suffering and her son’s suffering.

Once again laughter exploded behind her.

She turned and saw the drunks sitting around the table, laughing. They were paying no attention to her at all.

“I have nothing to hope for!” she suddenly blurted out. “You know that, Uncle Kornil.”

Time passed.

The stream of blood dried on the forehead of the man on the floor.

He was unshaven, filthy, skinny; a bad smell wafted up from him; he probably hadn’t stood up in days.

Empty bottles piled up in the wardrobe next to him.

Apparently this Kornil had already helped a number of people today by drinking vodka he couldn’t refuse.

He was waiting for her to pour him more.

The woman had warned that without a drink he wouldn’t say a thing.

Nadya poured out another glass of vodka.

Holding it up, she said: “You asked what I wanted: I want my son to be happy. That’s all I want.”

She stopped, imagining how this twisted Kornil would grant her wish-because happiness for her son consisted of leeching off her, drinking, partying, motorcycling.

“I want him to study. I want him to go back to school and study,” she said.

She stopped again, thinking he still had two years of school left, and in the meantime she’d have to slave away at three separate jobs to feed him. And she was tired.

“He should help me,” said Nadya. “He should get a job, earn some money, learn how to work hard.”

But then she remembered they were going to take him into the army soon, and he’d come back very quickly in a coffin, as he’d promised.

“Let him go to college,” Nadya concluded firmly. “And stay out of the army.”

Then she imagined six more years (one of school, five of college) of constant torment and sleepless nights before exams. She remembered how she got whenever Vova was late from school, how she cried and yelled at him when she got summoned to school when he failed his classes or lost his textbooks or got in a fight.

“All right,” Nadya said finally. “I want him to study, and work hard, and do what I say, and come home on time, and… no more of these friends of his! Especially the girls. And the drinking and partying. It’ll end in jail, that’s what. So he gets up early, leaves for work, comes back on time, cleans the house, helps me out…”

Then poor Nadya realized it would be best if her son were alive, healthy, a diligent student, a good worker, and never, ever at home.

When he was home it meant a racket, loud music, his stuff flung all over, phone conversations late into the night, eating standing up like a horse, accusations, demands for money followed by tears…

She thought of how much she’d had to endure from her one and only son, and said bitterly: “You call me a sinner, but when did I get a chance to sin? When? I don’t live for myself. I live only for him… only for him. All I think about is how to feed and clothe him. I saved every penny, and now there’s nothing left-he stole it all. Oh, and I’d like for him not to steal anymore, Uncle Kornil. No one in our family ever stole before. And I don’t want him drinking. His health is bad; he has allergies, chronic bronchitis. He should go to college. After that, he should get married to a nice girl. And live with her. God bless them. It’s bad enough with just him, but to have them both running around the house? And then a child? I’m tired; I’ve no strength left. The psychiatrist at the hospital said I should get treatment myself! But I’ll help them. As for me, as for me-when can I live my life? I think only of him. I cry myself to sleep every night. What kind of sinner can I be?”

She sat back down with the glass of vodka still full in her hand. So many tears streamed from her eyes that she couldn’t see anything around her.

“Work a miracle, Uncle Kornil,” she begged him. “I’m not a sinner. I have no sins on my soul. Help me. Do something. I don’t even know what anymore. I’m all confused.”

Uncle Kornil lay motionless; he was hardly breathing. Nadya raised the glass, gingerly, to his half-open mouth, figuring how best to pour it so she wouldn’t lose a single drop.

She’d have to lift his head a little-then it would work.

And it did, just as she’d planned it. With one hand she held up Uncle Kornil’s head, and with the other she began carefully moving the glass to his thin, desiccated lips.

All the while she was crying and pleading that her wishes be fulfilled, though it wasn’t clear anymore what they were.

“Now, now,” she said soothingly. “We’ll just drink this and everything will be fine.”

At that moment his eyes shot open, like a dead man’s-Nadya knew the look well, the one that stared hard into a dark corner as if all the truth of the world were there.

Nadya could see that her wishes were not coming true, that Kornil was going to die at any moment, without having done a thing.

The vodka was her last hope.

If she could just pour this last glass into him, maybe he would come alive for a moment. Then he could die if he wanted. He’d said himself that one more glass and he was done for.

But that glass: she hadn’t got it in yet!

How could this be? Uncle Kornil had promised!

He’d helped everyone else, but not her. Look at all those empty bottles in the wardrobe from all the people he’d helped.

At this point she heard the men behind her start speaking all at once.

“Ah, here’s Andreevna, Andreevna’s here. Open up for Andreevna! Kornil, look, your mom’s here. She sensed there was a bottle open, oh, she sensed it!” And they laughed.

A female profile flitted past the window outside.

Nadya froze in confusion, the glass still in her hand.

She had to finish this quickly, before Uncle Kornil’s mom appeared.

“It’s always like that,” thought Nadya bitterly. “Everyone else manages, but I can’t.”

She was still holding the heavy hand of the dying man, whose wide-open eyes continued to stare at the ceiling.

“Uncle Kornil!” Nadya called to him. “Uncle Kornil, here, drink this!”

His mouth was wide open now, his jaw hanging down loosely.

Someone was knocking at the door, and someone was already moving to open it.

“I just have to keep from spilling it,” Nadya thought hysterically, “otherwise it’s all over for me.”

She was convinced that if she could keep from spilling the vodka, all her wishes would come true. This life of torture would end. She raised Kornil’s head to a better angle.

“That’s good now,” she was saying, again bringing the glass to Kornil’s lips. “Now let’s drink. Yum.”

Just the way she’d fed her son milk when he was little.

This was in the countryside, where they’d lived when Vova was a baby, and her husband would come out on weekends.

Vovochka was always opening his mouth, with his two little teeth, so awkwardly, and the milk would spill.

Here the door slammed, and a loud drunk female voice called out, “What’re you drinking, my low-life friends?”

“It’s his mother,” Nadya thought in terror. “I didn’t make it. I’m too late.”

The glass trembled in her hand.

The mother was going to come over and put an end to this.

“Andreevna, you better start collecting for a coffin,” someone said. “Your Kornil is being fed his last one over there.”

“What’s he need a coffin for?” the woman answered heartily. “We’ll sell his body to the med school. First round’s on him!”

She was met with a roar of approving laughter.

“You, over there-Nadya, right?” said the woman without looking over. “Keep working on that bastard. Go ahead. He’ll die, oh he’ll die all right. Just open his trap and shove that last one down.”

“How does she know my name?” thought Nadya, terrified.

“Give it a good push,” the woman went on. “Finish him off. He knew you’d come, he did. He’s had enough of it here. Everyone loves him; they all bring him something to drink. He can’t refuse-there would be hurt feelings, and he just can’t hurt anyone’s feelings. He’s like that.”

The men all brayed happily. Nadya was afraid to turn around. From what she could tell, the woman had sat down at the table, and they were pouring her a glass. “He was just waiting for her,” someone said. “ ‘My cup will runneth over,’ he said.”

Nadya was no longer thinking. Both her hands shook.

“Go ahead, ask him-he’ll do everything!” yelled the mother. “He did everything for everyone. He worked miracles. He gave sight to the blind. He healed the lame. He even brought this one Jew, Lazar Moiseivich, back from the dead. This Lazar’s family had already started suing one another over the inheritance-that’s how dead he was! He was resurrected, and they all got mad at Kornil. ‘Who asked you?’ they said. Actually, it was his second wife who asked him to do it. She’d lived with him after his first wife died, raised his children. When he died, the children sued her right away for the apartment, said she should get out or pay them off-there were two of them. So this wife found Kornil, put two bottles before him. Lazar was resurrected; he didn’t know what hit him.

“Then Kornil raised a legless man. His mother came here, said she didn’t know what to do, her son was rotting away before her eyes. So Kornil gives him legs, and what does the son do? He starts drinking just like before, chasing his mother around the apartment with a knife in his hand. She runs back here and says: Put him down again!”

The men all laughed terribly at that one.

The mother took a shot of vodka, coughed, and went on.

“Whatever you wish for, that’s what will happen, Nadya-believe me. Give him the drink-that’s what you’re here for. He chose you to do it. Remember the woman at the post office? That was me. He told me: Nadya is ready for anything. She has what it takes. She needs to resolve the Vova situation once and for all. Now, don’t you worry, Nadya. You have a tough time with your son-well, my son has a tough time, too. He really shouldn’t have come down this time-he really shouldn’t. And now he’s waiting for someone to see him off. He can’t just go back himself-that’s not allowed. He needs someone to help him.”

Nadya wasn’t listening. She looked at Uncle Kornil, whose head still lay on her arm, and nodded, carefully setting the glass of vodka down on the towel.

“No offense,” she said finally, “but we’ll manage on our own. Your son here is very sick-you should get him to a hospital. And not give him anything more to drink. Really, what’s the matter with you? You’re his mother, after all. He’s dying as we speak. My husband died on my arm-I know what I’m talking about.” And, to punctuate this speech, she gave the glass a little poke, and it tottered and fell. The vodka spilled out on the floor, and everything was suddenly enshrouded in fog.

Nadya found herself on the street, walking home. She felt a little lightheaded. Her mind was clear and free of all burdens.

She walked lightly and happily, not crying, not thinking about the future, not worrying about anything.

As though she’d passed the hardest test of her life.