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

The God Poseidon

ONE TIME WHILE VACATIONING BY THE SEA I RAN INTO MY friend Nina, a single mother in middle age. Nina invited me to her house, and there I saw strange things. The entrance, for example, had cathedral ceilings and a marble stairwell. Then the apartment itself-dominated by dark wood and vermilion tapestries, its floor covered with a plush gray carpet. It looked magnificent, like something you’d see photographed in the magazine L’Art de Decoration, and the bath especially was impressive, the floor carpeted in gray, with mirrors and a light blue china wash basin-it was simply a dream! I could hardly believe my eyes. Meanwhile, Nina, who had kept her look of eternal suffering and passivity, led me into the bedroom with its three open doors, a little dark but still very elegant, with a surprising number of unmade beds. “Did you get married? ” I asked Nina, but she just walked out one of the doors with a look of concern, like a busy housewife but somehow not touching anything. The bedroom was glorious-like in a hotel-with enormous closets, twelve feet long, filled with gowns. How did all these riches fall on poor Nina, who’d never even had decent underwear, who had one ancient coat for every season and three dresses, all told? She got married-but here? This wild place where no one lives, where people just wait in the seaside emptiness for summer, when they can let their rooms to strangers? But how could she rent this house with its stairwells, corridors, arches… and what’s more, I happened to open a wrong door and found myself in a white-marble courtyard, where a teacher was leading schoolkids on a field trip.

All right, so she got married, but it turned out she’d also traded her small one-room apartment in Moscow, where she’d been getting by with her teenage son, for this glorious apartment, with all the furniture and even bedsheets! Which is to say, the owners didn’t touch anything-they just left-except in fact they hadn’t left at all, which is why Nina looked so glum, I think. The extra beds in the room were for the landlady and her son, a quiet young fisherman with puffy cheeks. The landlady still bustled around the house, and in fact we sat down to dinner under her patronage. She behaved exactly as if she were a quiet and docile mother-in-law and Nina her honored daughter, for whom she bent and toiled in the house, all the while maintaining her position as the head of the household and not allowing Nina close to anything, in fact.

It turned out the woman had exchanged apartments with Nina, and Nina had left her job at the newspaper and moved here, planning to write about this new place, about the sea, which she’d always loved-she’d always had a weakness for anything to do with it-but in the meantime she was just moping around this new place, which the owner hadn’t yet left. Formally everything was in order-Nina had all the papers, and she and her son owned the house and lived there-but the old landlady had stayed there all winter, with her son, and they hadn’t mentioned leaving. Nina had always been a disorganized person who let things go; thus her leave from the newspaper to go “freelance” and the apparent total unraveling of her life. Nina accepted things here as she found them. She ate, drank, walked out to the sea; her son attended the local school, which was quite good; and they didn’t need any money, since every day the young fisherman would bring the fruits of the sea home to them.

“Who is he?” I asked, and Nina, without any hesitation, answered that he was the son of Poseidon, god of the sea, that he could live and breathe underwater, that he brought home literally everything from there, that he walked sometimes on the floor of the ocean to other countries, and brought home shells and jewels, and everything else for the house and the family.

Meanwhile Poseidon’s old wife, who had for some reason taken poor Nina under her wing, sat at the head of the table, underneath the tall window, and kept feeding and feeding us, and as I ate I kept thinking of that gorgeous hotel-like bedroom with its four beds and their sheets as white as sea foam-and I was thinking Nina was right: you should let things take their course, not fight the current, just lay down your oars and you will breathe underwater, and the god of the sea will take you in and set you up in a lovely apartment. Because, returning home to Moscow, I learned that Nina hadn’t moved anywhere, in fact, but had drowned with her teenage son in a well-known ferry accident not far from the spot where I had just been, not suspecting anything.

My Love

GIVEN TIME HIS DREAMS MIGHT HAVE COME TRUE, AND HE might have found himself with the woman he loved, but the road was too long and it brought him nowhere. All he had with him that barren time was a page from a magazine, with a photograph of the woman he loved, and in fact only a few people from work knew it was her. It was just a pair of legs, that was all, a little chubby at that, bare, in heels; she herself had immediately recognized it-by her purse, and the hem of her dress. How was she to know that just her lower half was being photographed?-the photographer had rushed out into the street and taken a few quick snapshots, but they published only the hem and the legs. He-this man-kept the photograph tacked up over his desk at home, and his wife never brought it up with him, though she was a strict woman and ran the entire household, including her mother, and her children, and even her distant relatives and students. On the other hand, she was also a kind, generous, hospitable woman-she just didn’t give any slack to the children, and also her meek mother lived with them, lay on the cot, read aloud to her little grandkids while she still could, and enjoyed the warmth, peace, the television, and then afterward she spent a long time dying, also meekly, barely alive now, and went without much fuss in the end.

As for him, having buried his mother-in-law, he began waiting patiently for his wife to die as well. For some reason he knew that she would go first and set him free, and he began to prepare for this event very actively: he was healthy and athletic, went running in the mornings, even toyed with weights, kept a strict diet, and in the meantime managed to work like a bull, was promoted to the head of his department, traveled abroad-and waited. His chosen one, the pretty plump little blonde, every man’s dream (she looked like Marilyn Monroe), worked in the same place as he did and sometimes came along on business trips-and that’s when their real lives would begin. Restaurants, hotels, strolling and shopping, tours and talks. How lonely he felt on those nights when he had to descend from heaven back into his hell, into the warm, poor nest where his graceless, cramped home life slowly bubbled, where his children got sick, went crazy, ran around like maniacs, not allowing him to concentrate, so he had to quiet them down, and sometimes this meant strapping them with his belt, after which he felt even more insulted and humiliated. His wife screamed at the kids too-she had no time for anything, she could barely turn around in that apartment, in which, as in any decent household, they also had a dog and a cat, and the cat would howl all through the night when she was in heat, and the little dog would bark every time the elevator reached their floor. The nights were the worst: he would lie in his bed and fall into cheerless dreaming of the warmth, calm, and beauty that emanated from his forbidden friend on their trips abroad. When they weren’t together, she too was hounded by life: her husband and her mother-in-law literally hung on her neck, her mother-in-law forcing her to scrub the apartment every Saturday, to the point where she was scrubbing the tiles in the bath with ammonium! Her husband would get drunk and forbid her to go to office parties, birthdays, or to anything else, always made trouble before her business trips, suspected her of everything-together he and the mother-in-law were crushing her like Scylla and Charybdis, and what is more they fought each other, the husband and his mother. The mother-in-law was always demanding to know of the pretty blonde why her husband drank so much and ate so little-even that was her fault! The girl would complain about it at work, but only obliquely; she was discreet and never threw it all up in his face the way his wife would. Sometimes you find a woman like that, the lonely husband would think as he tossed in his bed, while on the other side of the wall his children cried and whimpered in their sleep, and his wife snored heavily because of her heart problem, growing older and more loving with each day. Now here was something the mind could never grasp: how she, a dried-up old woman past forty, so loved and took such care of him! It seemed as though she could never quite believe that this elegant man, with his handsomely graying whiskers, could be her husband; in fact she was too shy to accompany him anywhere. She tailored her uniformly plain dresses herself, long and baggy, the better to hide her girth and the runs in her panty hose-there was never enough money to buy new ones. This was known as “dressing modestly and tastefully” by the many guests and relatives who came crowding in during all the holidays, devouring her pies, cakes, and salads-they were all her guests, not his, her classmates, her colleagues, her relatives-they remembered her young, pretty, with cute dimples and a long thick braid, and they didn’t even notice that she was already someone else, that she had dimmed.

In fact she’d long since disposed of her braid and her dimples, and instead toiled for her husband and her mother, raised the children, loyally ran for him, her lord and master, to the fresh food market, didn’t have time for anything, and yet miraculously was always everywhere on time (she tried so hard to be organized)-and naturally at night, having put everyone to bed, she’d sit in the kitchen with her books, or work for extra cash, or else prepare her classes. Coming home from work she’d tell stories about her students, and once in a while she’d cook a whole bucketful of meatballs and a bucketful of kasha, and her students would come, they’d bring flowers and even make a bit of noise; shyly, they’d eat up everything and then entertain her with their clumsy singing. But this was only if the man of the house was away; otherwise, it was out of the question.

When the kids were born, a boy and a girl, even then her first thought had been of her husband: making sure he had breakfast before work, and a warm dinner after work, and that she was available to listen to everything he wanted to tell her. There was only one interruption, when her mother started dying, and then continued to die for three years: then everything was cast aside and just kind of hobbled along, it wasn’t clear how, and the man of the house was reduced to self-service in the kitchen, to eating breakfast alone, whatever had been left out for him, and eating supper by himself, and then withdrawing into his room as gloomy as a storm cloud, but still he was there to carry the coffin, and was indistinguishable in his genuine grief from everyone else. After the funeral the grandmother’s room remained empty, closed-no one had the strength to do anything about it. And in fact the wife quietly resisted doing anything, slept in the big room with the kids, or rather sat as always in the kitchen; sleep had abandoned her.

For the husband this was a difficult time, too: his love began complaining, demanding a real, independent, family life; she refused to accompany him anymore to friends’ empty apartments during lunch, and she went even further: she started flirting with the men in adjacent offices and in the cafeteria. And the men, sensing that she’d “let down her guard,” as they put it, beat a path to her door, and her telephone rang off the hook, and someone came to pick her up in a car, and so on. Our husband endured the torments of hell-love and duty tore him apart. He took a hard line with his girlfriend (though he did, occasionally, find solace in crying on her shoulder). What could he do? The wife, for all her desperation and grief, nonetheless noticed that her husband had somehow dried up, that his eyes had gone dangerously blank and that he was just drifting away. She roused herself, quickly fixed up her mother’s room and moved in there with the kids, and the main room again became a meeting place for guests, and talks, and little parties, and the husband would greet the guests as the father of beautiful children and the head of a household (and not as an abandoned homeless dog), and as a beloved, worshipped husband (not just as anyone). Now he received his breakfast before everyone else, and suddenly a few new dresses were sewn from cheap cotton, and on Sundays the wife began taking the kids away for long excursions-to the park, the circus, the planetarium. But in the husband’s room the photograph still hung, with its skirt, its bare chubby legs, and the heels: he wasn’t giving up.

Finally thunder shook them all. The husband of the blonde-“our husband,” as the illicit couple called him-came apart at the seams, completely lost it, chased the blonde around the apartment with an ax. She locked herself in the bathroom until evening, then somehow slipped out of the house, called our hero from a pay phone, and he ran to meet her and didn’t come back until it was almost morning. A few hours later he was again awoken by a terrible-as all news is that comes at dawn-phone call: the husband’s mother had found him hanging in the doorway from a rope. Of course the new widow spent the next month with some caring friends who took pity on her, and meanwhile our husband couldn’t bring himself to invite her over, and eventually the friends who had taken her in had to terminate the blonde’s stay, she was just too pretty, pale and in mourning, so that the husband of the house had begun to experience toward the blonde certain feelings of Platonic Friendship and Sympathy, which are much more dangerous than our plain human filth, in and out, in and out, and it’s over. The man’s wife kicked her out.

It took a while, but eventually things settled down. The blonde was given her own apartment, and someone decided he wanted to buy the old run-down place where the mother-in-law still lived. He convinced the mother-in-law to trade it for a smaller place, closer to her niece, and the blonde got a place farther out and less attractive but still her own, and here our husband, our hero, finally had to choose once and for all, yes or no, and start remodeling the place, and find furniture, fix the wiring, winterize the windows, etc., in his girlfriend’s new apartment. Instead, he began setting up his own household with renewed vigor, wallpapered the main room with the help of the kids, once again started exercising, pouring cold water on himself in the mornings, running, and he began looking after the kids, drilling them, because they’d grown up and were getting in the way, was the thing. With the blonde he remained in the role of counselor and visitor. She took care of everything herself-that occupied her time. She asked for advice, showed him floor plans, and already there was someone else coming around-he had a car, he brought her hard-to-get tiles for the bathroom and even harder-to-get kitchen furniture. The blonde assessed the situation correctly and kept everyone in sight, faced with the prospect of loneliness.

The photo still hung above his desk, and he already had an assigned day for visiting the blonde-he had, incidentally, left the institute where they’d worked, his relations with it having soured when she, the blonde, was supposed to be promoted and get a raise but was turned down because the others complained. He left in protest and promised to bring her with him eventually, whereas his wife didn’t understand anything and just shone with relief, and there was a party in the house, and they baked pies, because the husband had finally left Her, though the photo still hung in its place.

He did well at his new job, and the little kids grew up, athletic and tall, well-mannered, the way kids can be when they’re in a family that worships its father, strengthened by the love and servitude of its self-effacing mother. The word of the father was law, and that’s how they walked, in order: the father first, then the children shoulder to shoulder, and then behind them, a bundle of a mother, directing the family from a distance, as with a remote control. It was a joy to see them, though the photo of the legs was still there.

The mother of the house waited until the boy, the younger one, entered college, and then surrendered entirely, just as her mother had done. Standing in the kitchen one evening, she collapsed in front of everyone, began to choke and continued choking for three nights in the hospital. The family, disciplined and hardworking, instantly regrouped, set up a watch in shifts, and old friends and relatives came to help, as well as her long-ago and still loyal students. And from the other side, from inevitable death and oblivion, the husband rescued his wife. By the time they brought her home she was already a shriveled old lady. The only thing she could move was her right hand, and only a little. She would make sounds with her lips that no one could understand, and often, often, a tear would come running out of her eye. It was as though she were apologizing with her whole being for this state of things, apologizing for her entire former life, for not being able to create anything for her demigod, and in the end making herself a cripple. In time the members of the household grew used to their heavy burden, though sometimes they’d grow frustrated and yell at one another-all those bedpans, and daily baths, and bed sores, and then thoughts, involuntary thoughts, about how long this might go on, how many years, this animal or even vegetable state-they suffered these thoughts. But the husband seemed to calm down suddenly: his soul became anchored, and all his movements around his wife were soft, patient, his voice gentle. The kids still sometimes screamed at each other and at their mother. They had their own uncertainties-they were losing her, their foundation and their pillar-and they became weak, unsteady parents to her. They felt that something was wrong, that they didn’t have a future, or rather that they did, but that it was awful. The kids blamed each other, said everything to each other, and, oh God, in front of their mother! But their devotion did not diminish. Their mother lay there clean and fresh, and they put a little radio transmitter next to her pillow and sometimes they’d read aloud to her, but still she often cried, for no reason at all, it seemed, and would try to say something with just vowel sounds, without using her tongue.

On the night she died and they took her away, her husband collapsed, and in his sleep he heard her-she was there, and she lay her head down on the pillow next to him and said, “My love.” And after that he slept happily, and at the funeral he was calm and dignified, though he’d lost a great deal of weight, and was honest and upright, and at the wake, when everyone had gathered at his apartment, he told them all that she had come to him and called him “My love.” And everyone froze, because they knew what he said was true-and the photograph no longer hung over his desk. It had disappeared from his life. It had all evaporated-just ceased to be interesting at some point-and suddenly, while still at the table, the husband began showing everyone the pale little family photos of his wife and kids-of all those excursions they’d taken without him, all their fatherless entertainments that were so poor but so happy, in the parks and the planetariums to which she’d brought the children when she tried to make a life for them on the tiny island, the only one still left her, where she shielded the children with herself, while towering over everything was that photo from the magazine. But the photo was gone now, everything was fine, and she’d managed to say to him, “My love”-without words, already dead, but she had done it.

The Fountain House

THERE ONCE LIVED A GIRL WHO WAS KILLED, THEN BROUGHT back to life. That is, her parents were told that the girl was dead, but they couldn’t have the body (they had all been riding the bus together; the girl was standing up front at the time of the explosion, and her parents were sitting behind her). The girl was just fifteen, and she was thrown back by the blast.

While they waited for the ambulance, and while the dead were separated from the wounded, the father held his daughter in his arms, though it was clear by then that she was dead; the doctor on the scene confirmed this. But they still had to take the girl away, and the parents climbed into the ambulance with their girl and rode with her to the morgue.

She seemed to be alive, as she lay on the stretcher, but she had no pulse, nor was she breathing. Her parents were told to go home, but they wouldn’t-they wanted to wait for the body, though there were still some necessary procedures to be done, namely the autopsy and determination of the cause of death.

But the father, who was mad with grief, and who was also a deeply religious man, decided to steal his little daughter. He took his wife, who was barely conscious, home, endured a conversation with his mother-in-law, woke up their neighbor, who was a nurse, and borrowed a white hospital robe. Then he took all the money they had in the house and went to the nearest hospital, where he hired an empty ambulance (it was two in the morning), and with a stretcher and a young paramedic, whom he bribed, drove to the hospital where they were keeping his daughter, walked past the guard down the stairs to the basement corridor, and entered the morgue. There was no one there. Quickly he found his daughter and together with the paramedic put her on their stretcher, called down the service elevator, and took her to the third floor, to the intensive care unit. The father had studied the layout of the hospital earlier, while they waited for the body.

He let the paramedic go. After a brief negotiation with the doctor on duty, money changed hands, and the doctor admitted the girl to the intensive care unit.

Since the girl was not accompanied by a medical history, the doctor probably decided that the parents had hired an ambulance on their own and brought the girl to the nearest hospital. The doctor could see perfectly well that the girl was dead, but he badly needed the money: his wife had just given birth (also to a daughter), and all his nerves were on edge. His mother hated his wife, and they took turns crying, and the child also cried, and now on top of all this he had of late been assigned exclusively night shifts. He desperately needed money for an apartment. The sum that this (clearly insane) father had offered him to revive his dead princess was enough for half a year’s rent.

This is why the doctor began to work on the girl as if she were still alive, but he did request that the father change into hospital clothing and lie down on the cot next to his daughter, since this apparently sick man was determined not to leave her side.

The girl lay there as white as marble; she was beautiful. The father, sitting on his cot, stared at her like a madman. One of his eyes seemed out of focus, and it was only with difficulty in fact that he was able to open his eyes at all.

The doctor, having observed this for a while, asked the nurse to administer a cardiogram, and then quickly gave his new patient a shot of tranquilizer. The father fell asleep. The girl continued to lie there like Sleeping Beauty, hooked up to her various machines. The doctor fussed around her, doing all he could, though there was no longer anyone watching him with that crazy unfocused eye. In truth, this young doctor was himself a fanatic of his profession-there was nothing more important to him than a difficult case, than a sick person, no matter who it was, on the brink of death.

The father slept, and in his dream he met his daughter-he went to visit her, as he used to visit her at summer camp. He prepared some food, just one sandwich, and that was all. He got on the bus-again it was a bus-on a fine summer evening, somewhere near the Sokol metro station, and rode it to the paradisial spot where his daughter was staying. In the fields, among soft green hills, he found an enormous gray house with arches reaching to the sky, and when he walked past these giant gates into the garden, there, in an emerald clearing, he saw a fountain, as tall as the house, with one tight stream that cascaded at the top into a glistening crown. The sun was setting slowly in the distance, and the father walked happily across the lawn to the entrance to the right of the gate, and took the stairs up to a high floor. His daughter seemed a little embarrassed when she greeted him, as if he’d interrupted her. She stood there, looking away from him-as if she had her own, private life here that had nothing to do with him anymore, a life that was none of his business.

The place was enormous, with high ceilings and wide windows, and it faced south, into the shade and the fountain, which was illuminated by the setting sun. The fountain’s stream rose even higher than the windows.

“I brought you a sandwich, the kind you like,” said the father.

He went over to the table by the window, put his little package down, paused for a moment, and then unwrapped it. There lay his sandwich, with its two pieces of cheap black bread. He wanted to show his daughter that there was a patty inside, and so he moved the bread pieces apart. But inside he saw-and right away he knew what it was-a raw human heart. The father was terrified that the heart had not been cooked, that the sandwich was inedible, and quickly wrapped the sandwich back up. Turning to his daughter he said awkwardly: “I mixed up the sandwiches. I’ll bring you another.”

But his daughter now came over and began looking at the sandwich with a strange expression on her face. The father tried to hide the little bag in his pocket and press his hands over it, so his daughter couldn’t take it.

She stood next to him, with her head down, and reached out her hand: “Give me the sandwich, Papa. I’m really hungry.”

“You can’t eat this filth.”

“Give it to me,” she said ponderously.

She was reaching her hand toward his pocket-her arm was amazingly long all of a sudden-and the father understood that if his daughter ate this sandwich, she would die.

Turning away, he took out the sandwich and quickly ate the raw heart himself. Immediately his mouth filled with blood. He ate the black bread with the blood.

“And now I will die,” he thought. “I’m glad at least that I will go first.”

“Can you hear me? Open your eyes!” someone said.

The father opened his eyes with difficulty and saw, as through a fog, the doctor’s blurry face.

“I can hear you,” he said.

“What’s your blood type?”

“The same as my daughter’s.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

They carted him away, tied off his left arm, and stuck a needle in it.

“How is she?” asked the father.

“In what sense?” said the doctor, concentrating on his work.

“Is she alive?”

“What d’you think?” the doctor grumbled.

“She’s alive?”

“Lie down, lie down,” the wonderful doctor insisted.

The father lay there-nearby he could hear someone’s heavy breathing-and began to cry.

Then they were working on him, and he was carted off again, and again he was surrounded by green trees, but this time he was woken by a noise: his daughter, on the cot next to him, was breathing in a terribly screechy way, as if she couldn’t get enough air. Her father watched her. Her face was white, her mouth open. A tube carried blood from his arm to hers. He felt relieved, and tried to hurry the flow of blood-he wanted all of it to pour into his child. He wanted to die so that she could live.

Once again he found himself inside the apartment in the enormous gray house. His daughter wasn’t there. Quietly he went to look for her, and searched in all the corners of the dazzling apartment with its many windows, but he could find no living being. He sat on the sofa, then lay down on it. He felt quietly content, as if his daughter were already off living somewhere on her own, in comfort and joy, and he could afford to take a break. He began (in his dream) to fall asleep, and here his daughter suddenly appeared. She stepped like a whirlwind into the room, and soon turned into a spinning column, a tornado, howling, shaking everything around her, and then sunk her nails into the bend in his right arm, under the skin. He felt a sharp pain, yelled out in terror, and opened his eyes. The doctor had just given him a shot to his right arm.

His girl lay next to him, breathing heavily, but no longer making that awful screeching noise. The father raised himself up on an elbow, saw that his left arm was already free of the tourniquet, and bandaged, and turned to the doctor.

“Doctor, I need to make a phone call.”

“What phone call?” the doctor answered. “It’s too early for phone calls. You stay still, or else I’m going to start losing you, too…”

But before leaving he gave the father his cell phone, and the father called home. No one answered. His wife and mother-in-law must have woken up early and gone to the morgue and now must be running around, confused, not knowing where their daughter’s body had gone.

The girl was already better, though she had not yet regained consciousness. The father tried to stay near her in intensive care, pretending that he was himself dying. The night doctor had left already, and the poor father had no money anymore, but they gave him a cardiogram and kept him in intensive care-apparently the night doctor had managed to speak with someone. Either that or there really was something wrong with his heart.

The father considered what to do. He couldn’t go downstairs. They wouldn’t let him call. Everyone was a stranger, and they were all busy. He thought about what his two women must be going through now, his “girls,” as he called them- his wife and mother-in-law. His heart was in great pain. They had put him on a drip, just like his daughter.

He fell asleep, and when he awoke, his daughter was no longer there.

“Nurse, where is the girl who was here before?” he said.

“What’s it to you?”

“I’m her father, that’s what. Where is she?”

“They took her into the operating room. Don’t worry, and don’t get up. You can’t yet.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Dear nurse, please call the doctor!”

“They’re all busy.”

An old man was moaning nearby. Next door a resident was putting an old lady through some procedures, all the while addressing her loudly and jocularly, like a village idiot: “Well, grandma, how about some soup?” Pause. “What kind of soup do we like?”

“Mm,” the old woman groaned in a nonhuman, metallic voice.

“How about some mushroom soup?” Pause. “With some mushrooms, eh? Have you tried the mushroom soup?”

Suddenly the old woman answered in her deep metallic bass: “Mushrooms-with macaroni.”

“There you go!” the resident cried out.

The father lay there, thinking they were operating on his daughter. Somewhere his wife was waiting, half-mad with grief, his mother-in-law next to her, fretting… A young doctor checked in on him, gave him another shot, and he fell asleep again.

In the evening he got up and, barefoot, just as he was, in his hospital gown, walked out. He reached the stairs unnoticed and began descending the cold stone steps. He went down to the basement hallway and followed the arrows to the morgue. Here some person in a white robe called out to him:

“What are you doing here, patient?”

“I’m from the morgue,” replied the father. “I got lost.”

“What do you mean, from the morgue?”

“I left, but my documents are still there. I want to go back, but I can’t find it.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re saying,” said the white robe, taking him by the arm and escorting him down the corridor. And then finally he asked: “You what? You got up?”

“I came to life, and there was no one around, so I started walking, and then I decided I should come back, so they could note that I was leaving.”

“Wonderful!” said his escort.

They reached the morgue, but there they were greeted by the curses of the morgue attendant on duty. The father heard him out and said: “My daughter is here, too. She was supposed to come here after her operation.” He told the man his name.

“I tell you she’s not here, she’s not here! They’re all driving me crazy! They were looking for her this morning! She’s not here! They’re driving everyone nuts! And this one’s a mental patient! Did you run off from a nuthouse, eh? Where’d he come from?”

“He was wandering around the hallway,” the white robe answered.

“We should call the guard in,” said the attendant and started cursing again.

“Let me call home,” said the father. “I just remembered-I was in intensive care on the third floor. My memory is all confused; I came here after the explosion on Tverskaya.”

Here the white robes went quiet. The explosion on the bus on Tverskaya had happened the day before. They took him, shivering and barefoot, to a desk with a telephone.

His wife picked up and immediately burst into tears.

“You! You! Where have you been! They took her body, we don’t know where! And you’re running around! There’s no money in the house! We don’t even have enough for a taxi! Did you take all the money?”

“I was-I was unconscious. I ended up in the hospital, in intensive care.”

“Which one, where?”

“The same one where she was.”

“Where is she? Where?” His wife howled.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m all undressed-bring me my things. I’m standing here in the morgue, I’m barefoot. Which hospital is this?” he asked the white robe.

“How’d you end up there? I don’t understand,” his wife said, still weeping.

He handed the phone to the white robe, who calmly spoke the address into it, as if nothing at all strange was happening, and then hung up.

The morgue attendant brought him a robe and some old, ragged slippers-he took pity finally on this rare living person to enter his department-and directed him to the guard post at the hospital entrance.

His wife and mother-in-law arrived there with identically puffed-up, aged faces. They dressed the father, put shoes on him, hugged him, and finally heard him out, crying happily, and then all together they sat in the waiting room, because they were told that the girl had made it through her operation and was recovering, and that her condition was no longer critical.

Two weeks later she was up again walking. The father walked with her through the hospital corridors, repeating the whole time that she’d been alive after the explosion, she was just in shock, just in shock. No one noticed, but he knew right away.

He kept quiet about the raw human heart he’d had to eat. It was in a dream, though, that it happened, and dreams don’t count.

The Shadow Life

SHE’S A TALL, GROWN-UP, MARRIED WOMAN NOW, BUT SHE was once an orphan living with her grandmother, who had taken her in when the girl’s mother disappeared. That happens sometimes-a person will just disappear. Her father had disappeared earlier, when the girl was just five. She hadn’t been allowed to go to the funeral, and so she thought he’d simply vanished, and worried very much that the same would happen to her mother. The girl clung to her mother whenever she tried to go out at night, though she never cried-her mother didn’t spoil her. She was a quiet, well-behaved girl, and she remained that way until one day her mother really did vanish, just as the girl had feared, and, only nine years old, the girl spent the night alone, using her mother’s bathrobe for a blanket. In the morning she washed up and went to school just as she was, in the same dress as the day before. The neighbors noticed something wrong on the third day, when the girl stopped going to school. Strange sounds came from her apartment, like someone laughing, and no cooking smells came from the kitchen, and no one-not the girl, not the girl’s mom-came in or out. One of the neighbors got the girl-her name was Zhenya-to admit that she hadn’t eaten in two days and that her mother was gone. The neighbors sprang into action, composed a telegraph to the girl’s grandmother, and so in the middle of winter the grandmother came to their little town on the River Oka and took her granddaughter away to the quiet seaside town where she lived.

The road was familiar-Zhenya had come to visit her grandmother during all her school vacations-but there was no vacation now. They couldn’t find out anything about her mother-not a single trace. The girl’s grandmother told her that her mother had always fought for truth, had never stolen, even while everyone around her was stealing. She worked in a kindergarten, and the grandmother thought she’d gone to Moscow to seek justice-she had just been fired from her job-and had probably been locked up in a mental hospital. That happened sometimes, according to the grandmother.

Zhenya grew up a quiet and good-looking girl, and even began attending a teachers’ college in a nearby town. She studied hard and was known and liked throughout her dorm for the fact that whenever she received a package from her grandmother, with vegetables, bacon, and dried fruits, she’d put it out on the table and share it with everyone. Afterward they’d go hungry again, but all together. Zhenya had never been spoiled by her mother and grandmother, and so she didn’t complain about life in the dorm.

She soon found a boyfriend, a construction worker-a foreman, even-named Sasha who would take her on the train out to the countryside during the spring and read her his homemade poems-though unfortunately, as it turned out, he was married.

The wife learned about Zhenya and sought her out in the dorm, took her outside, and told her that she was married to Sasha, and that they had two children, though at the moment they lived apart because Sasha had a sexually transmitted disease and was being treated for it. The wife was being treated for it too, though where Sasha had picked up this disease was the question, said the wife, and then looked at Zhenya with hatred. They were sitting in the little park outside Zhenya’s dorm. “As for you,” the wife concluded, “you should be shot like a sick dog, the way you’re spreading that disease.”

The penniless student had no one to ask for advice. She was afraid to go to the university clinic (everyone would find out!), but, luckily, while wandering around the market one day she saw a sign for VENEREAL DISEASE TREATMENT. An old woman doctor met her inside, but Zhenya had no money, and without money the old doctor wouldn’t even hear her out. So Zhenya removed her earrings, the only possession she still had from her mother. The doctor took the earrings, examined Zhenya, and announced that they’d have to run some tests. The tests came back negative. Zhenya had managed to avoid being infected; either that or Sasha’s wife had been lying. But Sasha no longer came by, and Zhenya began to see that things weren’t so simple among people, that there existed a whole other secret, stubbornly flourishing animal side of life, where revolting, horrible things collected, and maybe her mother had been killed, thought the now grown-up (eighteen-year-old) Zhenya: after all, her mother had been young still and might have fallen into that shadow life, from which so many people never return.

Also that summer, back home, something bad happened to Zhenya. The week before, two bodies had been found at the town dump. They were women, and they had been slashed and mutilated, their arms twisted behind them like dried rags, their heads cut off. The town was abuzz, though the women must have been tourists, since none of the locals was missing.

One night-not too late-Zhenya was walking home from a friend’s house when, not far from home, she was suddenly grabbed from both sides. Her attackers were three teenagers, around sixteen or seventeen, and dark-skinned-that is, migrants from the South. Zhenya didn’t know them, and they didn’t know Zhenya; they’d have grown up while she was away at school. They gagged her and led her away, twisting her arms behind her back, as if they had done it before, and Zhenya hobbled along bent over, and was pushed and shoved, a knife pricking her back. They addressed each other in their tongue; Zhenya understood some of it-though they called themselves Greeks in the town, they were not Greeks. Zhenya could tell they were arguing about who should go first, since one of them supposedly had a bad disease. They yelled in the darkness of the night, arguing (partly in Russian), dragging Zhenya with them, when suddenly everything became bright. It was as if someone had turned on a projector. The three man-boys stopped, momentarily letting go of Zhenya, and, seeing a construction site lit up before her, and an old man and a woman standing there among the broken rocks, she rushed toward them as fast as she could, taking the rag out of her mouth and yelling, “Kill me! Kill me!” She stopped beside the old man, reaching out her swollen arms to him and begging: “Kill me! Just don’t let them have me!”

The three boys started arguing indignantly that she was a whore, that she owed them, they’d paid! They yelled this in Russian.

The old man dismissed them with a single wave of his hand, saying, in their language, “Leave.” And the three turned around like soldiers and disappeared back into the night, having received an order in their own tongue.

The old man told Zhenya that he would walk her home. The woman stayed at the construction site; she held her head down, and Zhenya caught only a brief glimpse of her but was struck by her resemblance to her mother. Zhenya was afraid to leave, but the old man started off, and she had to follow. The old man brought her to a strange house. Zhenya couldn’t see anything in the dark, and entering a room that looked like a cupboard, she heard the old man lock the door behind her and walk away. Zhenya sat down on the floor, felt with her hands for the rough, uneven wall, then leaned against it and fell asleep.

In the morning she awoke outside. She was sitting with her back against the rough trunk of a poplar tree in the middle of an overgrown empty lot. Zhenya began to run, not knowing in which direction, until finally she found the road back to town and her grandmother’s and went to sleep in a little shack outside the house. It was early morning when she finally got home. She told her grandmother that she’d slept over at a friend’s house since she was afraid to walk at night. Zhenya also said that she wanted to return to school right away.

Her grandmother probably understood everything-Zhenya’s arms were badly swollen and covered with bruises, her face was puffy, and the corner of her mouth was torn.

The grandmother said she hadn’t slept all night and had instead gone through the chest with all their old things and found her daughter’s earrings and an icon. She wanted to give them to Zhenya.

Zhenya put on her mother’s earrings, which were exactly the same as the ones she’d recently used for payment, gathered her few things, including the icon, and set off for the train station. She decided to go by the construction site on the way, so as to see the old man and the woman who looked like her mother. But there was nothing there: no construction site, no empty lot. It was a sunny day, and all around were houses and gardens.

Walking alongside her, her grandmother kept silent about the fact that they weren’t heading toward the train station at all but rather in the opposite direction, toward the dump on the edge of town. Suddenly Zhenya said that she thought her mother’s grave might be nearby, and that they should look for it under a poplar log in an empty lot. The grandmother objected that her daughter had disappeared in an entirely different town, but Zhenya didn’t hear her. She simply kept looking for the log, and at the first one she found she sat down on the ground and burst into tears.

They both sat there like that for a long time, crying, and then Zhenya, in her winter dress with long sleeves, left that town for good. She no longer searched for her mother in mental hospitals and jails, though she kept wearing the earrings, and still does.

Two Kingdoms

IN THE BEGINNING THEY FLEW THROUGH A CELESTIAL PARADISE, through a glorious blue landscape and over thick curly clouds. You could tell the stewardess was from the place they were going to: she wore a wondrous linen suit with no buttons. The beverages she served had a foreign taste.

The passengers all dozed with fatigue. As Lina walked through the rows she was struck by how much everyone resembled everyone else, with their yellowish faces and black crew cuts. She even became frightened, thinking an army regiment was being transported with her to this new place. All the soldiers slept, reclining in the same exact way, their parched mouths half-open. But then again they might have been the embassy staff of some exotic southern country.

Then night fell. Lina had never flown so far and for so long, and she spent part of the night in the bathroom, looking out the little window. She saw stars above and around, as well as far below, where they could easily have been mistaken for dim village lights. Racing along through the black night, through the astral profusion, one’s soul felt elated, aware of itself at the center of the universe, in absolute and utter darkness among the large, furry, flickering stars. Alone among the stars!

Lina even began to cry. It was with difficulty now that she recalled the moments of parting from her family and everything she loved: it all seemed so enormous and confusing, and she could no longer remember what happened first and what happened next. The miraculous reappearance of Vasya with the tickets and the marriage license; the complex bureaucratic formalities; her mother’s tears when the women dressed Lina in white and wheeled her downstairs into the elevator, where Vasya took her in his arms and carried her to the car. Either she fainted or she was sick from the drive-everything was like a dream: the stupid music, the bewildered, terrified spectators on all sides, the mirrors showing Vasya with his beard, and then Lina, gray, emaciated, in white lace and with sunken eyes.

They must have done the operation they were planning before she left, but what happened after that, Lina was already unable to say. Her mother was howling for some reason, the sound muffled as if by a pillow, and her son was crying, frightened by the music, the flowers, and Lina’s face. He was crying the way frightened children always cry when they see their mother being beaten or taken from them: he shrieked loudly; it was heart-wrenching. He was too small-he had to stay with his grandmother because Lina needed another operation, in a foreign city, a foreign country, and with this new husband, this Vasya who had appeared out of nowhere with his beard.

He was really just a rumor, this Vasya. He would show up once a year, emerge from the crowd, kiss her hand, taking it in his big cold palm, and promise Lina fantastic treasures and a future for her son-not now, but soon. Later. Just then, at that particular moment, it was impossible. But later, later he would take them away, her and her son, and her honorable mom, too, to an earthly paradise far far away, somewhere on the shores of a warm sea, amid marble columns, where they had-was it little elves?-flying about. In short, she’d live like Thumbelina from the fairy tale.

And later, when Lina became seriously ill at all of thirty-seven, this Vasya appeared more often, bringing consolation. He visited after the first operation, walked right into the intensive care unit-it was very touching-when Lina was about to reunite with her Maker, lying with an IV and staring at her scrawny, disappearing arm. He came clad in white, like a doctor (actually, he always adored white things); the only problem was he walked barefoot. But no one noticed him. He wanted to take Lina away immediately when he saw the state she was in, and her stitches. Just then the nurse came running in, out of breath, shooed Vasya away, and gave Lina another shot, then called for the doctor, and Vasya disappeared for a long time.

The next time, though, he came straight to the hospital, told her that everything had been arranged, that her mother had said yes, that she and the boy could be brought over later, and that he’d leave them everything they needed.

But Lina had to be taken there right away-there was no time to lose. In his country they knew how to cure Lina’s illness. They had discovered a vaccine, and so on. By then Lina didn’t care either way. She was so tired this second time, she couldn’t resist anything-the sickness, death. They had her on very strong narcotics, and she was floating as through a fog.

She wasn’t even tormented this time by thoughts of her boy, her little Seryozha.

“And if I die in this hospital?” Lina had thought. “Would that be any better? This way I’ll live, and then I’ll bring him over to me.”

So Vasya arranged everything, although the doctors insisted on an operation, saying that without it the patient wouldn’t make it through another day. Vasya waited for them to finish the operation, meanwhile took care of all the formalities, and came to pick up Lina and take her again directly from intensive care. They drove her carefully, changed her attire-for some reason, because of her new outfit, she could no longer see or hear anything-and when she awoke she was already flying through the blue sky and the endless, deserted, fluffy field of clouds. Lina was surprised to find herself sitting next to Vasya, and, what is more, drinking some light sparkling wine from a glass. Later she even got up-Vasya was asleep, exhausted from all the preparations-and walked around the plane with a surprisingly light step. Nothing hurt-they must have given her some painkillers.

The plane passed very low over a magnificent city that unfolded underneath them like an architectural model, with a glistening river, bridges, and an enormous toy cathedral. It looked so much like Paris!

And then right away came the roar of the plane landing, and the plane, with its flat nose as wide as a hotel window, rattling and shaking like a wheelbarrrow, literally parked itself in a quiet garden. Lina’s big window had a door in it, and in the distance the river sparkled with its bridges and also some kind of triumphal arch.

“Place de Pigalle!” Lina said for some reason and pointed. “Look!”

Vasya went to open the door, which led out to the terrace, and a fairy tale life began.

Lina wasn’t allowed to go across the river just yet, though her treatment had started and was going well. Vasya would leave and then be gone all day. He never forbade Lina anything, but it was clear that the river and the cathedral were still very far off. In the meantime she began to go out little by little, wandering down the same tiny street, since she still wasn’t very strong.

Everyone here, she noticed, looked just like Vasya, like the hippies she’d seen in foreign films. Long hair, lovely thin arms, white clothes, beards for the men, even little wreaths. The stores, it was true, had everything you could imagine, but, first of all, Vasya never left Lina any money-it must have all gone to pay for her treatment, which was probably very expensive.

And second, it was impossible to send packages from here, or even letters. People in this country just didn’t write! There wasn’t a single sheet of paper anywhere, not a single pen. There was no connection-perhaps Lina had found herself in a kind of quarantine, a transitional place.

Across the river she saw the bubbling, real life of a foreign city.

They had everything here, too-restaurants, stores. But there was no connection. For now Lina moved by holding onto the wall with both hands, like an infant who has just learned to walk. When she complained to Vasya that she wanted to go shopping, he immediately brought her a pile of clothing, including some that had been worn-men’s, women’s, children’s, and what’s more of different sizes. He also brought a suitcase full of shoes, the way friends from abroad used to bring them to Russia. Among the clothing was a pair of gray men’s army-issue long underwear, which Lina found a little embarrassing. Who knew what those were, or whose! And what was she supposed to do with all this clothing? She had quickly begun to wear only Vasya’s things-a white chemise, and over that a thin white linen dress. She and Vasya were the same height, and Vasya’s build, though he was healthy, turned out to be the same as that of the emaciated Lina. She cried over the mountain of clothes, and in the evening told Vasya that she really wanted to send a package to her mother and little Seryozha, and pointed at the two small piles. Vasya frowned and didn’t say anything; the next morning all the clothes were gone.

Vasya worked, it turned out, on this side of the river, in this zone, and he didn’t have any desire to go across the river to the arches and cathedrals. Lina was forced to get used to his quiet, measured existence. She knew, of course, from her old life, that anything could happen: the youthful Vasya could fall in love with another woman and leave her. He didn’t really love her, this Vasya with his beard, though he protected her from all cares. Their food appeared all by itself, their clothes sparkled.

When did he find the time? Their room, which Lina in her feverish state still imagined to be part of a plane or a spacecraft, looked out on a white-columned terrace, but there was no joy there. Lina was brave, enduring her separation from little Seryozha, her mother, her girlfriends, and her college friend Lev. She understood now that her condition was incurable, and the best she could hope for was to keep to her current state-without pain, but also without strength. What talk could there be of bringing her loud little Seryozha here, with his wild tears and eyes all red from crying! And then her mother especially, with her insinuating hellos, and also tearful. There was no grief here and no tears. It was another country.

Annoyed, Lina watched the people who lived here hovering in their circle dance over the river to the monotonous music of the harps (a silly activity, by the way). She observed their silent sessions at the long common tables in the restaurant, before glasses of the lovely local wine.

Lina very much wanted to tell her girlfriends back home and her mom what she thought of all this, to at least drop them a line to say that everything was all right, that her treatment was going well, that the stores have everything but you can’t buy it-first of all because it’s very expensive, and second because no one dresses that way here-that the food is strange but she can’t eat too much yet anyway. And so on. That she wants to send Seryozha a package but so far no one is going back there, and there seems to be no postal service between their two countries. Lina dragged herself down the streets, holding onto whatever she could, and wrote letters home in her head.

Eventually, though, Lina began to see that there would be no letters. Vasya definitively promised that her mom and Seryozha would visit eventually, especially her mom. But her mom without Seryozha? Or Seryozha without his grandmother? “In time,” said the bearded Vasya. “In time.”

Lina wanted to start buying things in preparation for her mother’s visit, but Vasya made it clear that by then everything would be taken care of.

In fact, no one here worried about the future-everyone was too busy-but nonetheless things were organized perfectly, comfortably, cleanly. Vasya worked at a bookstore that he’d inherited from an aunt, but never brought home any books since Lina could not read the language, and the store had nothing in Russian. It turned out Vasya could not even write in Russian.

Then the time finally came when Lina learned to move in the flying way of the natives. It turned out to be very simple. You just got up on a step above the ground and then took a big wide stride into the air. The next stride, too, came from the force of the initial push, and every stride thereafter was freer and lighter, as in a dream. Bearded Vasya didn’t say anything, but at the appointed time he disappeared forever, probably across the river into the wealthy city. Lina was left on her own, although fully provided for. At first she thought, without fear or tears, that soon they would chase her out of their spacecraft-the food couldn’t always be in the refrigerator! But the refrigerator kept filling up, as if through a dumb-waiter, though Lina didn’t eat anything, just drank juice and stayed healthy.

And then the day finally came when, after much lonely and sad contemplation, she tore herself from her front steps and with wide strides raced to the bank of the river to the circle dance and, stepping between two dancers, who momentarily separated their hands, entered the stream and began to fly around the circle. She understood, she knew, that something was wrong, and she no longer wanted to have her mother here, or her son. She didn’t even want to run into that army regiment again, and in fact she didn’t want to see anyone again, or if she did see someone she didn’t want to know who it was, hoped she’d be unable to distinguish between the young, pale, calm faces in the circle dance, flying free like her-and hoping not to meet anyone at all anymore, in this kingdom of the dead, and hoping never to learn just how much they grieved in that other kingdom, of the living.

There’s Someone in the House

THERE IS CLEARLY SOMEONE IN THE HOUSE. WALK INTO THE bedroom: something falls in the living room. Look for the cat: it’s sitting on the little table in the front hall, its ears pricked up; it clearly heard something, too. Walk into the living room: a scrap of paper has fallen, all by itself, from the piano, with someone’s phone number on it, you can’t tell whose. It just flew off the piano soundlessly and lies on the carpet, white and alone.

Someone isn’t being careful, thinks the woman who lives here. Someone isn’t even trying to hide anymore.

A person can be afraid of rodents, insects, little ants in the bath, even a lonely cockroach that’s stumbled into your apartment in a drugged state, fleeing the disinfection campaign at the neighbors’-which is to say, he’s just standing naked and defenseless, in plain view. But a person can be afraid of anything when she’s alone with her cat and everyone has departed, all her old family, leaving this little human roach completely by herself, unprotected.

On weekends, especially, it appears that things are falling and Someone is secretly, soundlessly creeping from room to room. That’s how it seems.

The woman doesn’t tell anyone about her poltergeist: It’s still hiding, not knocking, not causing mischief, not setting anything on fire. The refrigerator isn’t hopping around the apartment; the poltergeist isn’t chasing her into a corner. Really there’s nothing to complain about.

But Something has definitely moved in, some kind of living emptiness, small of stature but energetic and pushy, sneaking and slithering along the floor-that’s how it seems. No wonder the cat’s ears pricked up.

“Come now,” the woman says to her cat. It’s a strange and quiet cat, as all cats are. It won’t let itself be petted, won’t lie on its mistress’s knee when beckoned, but will suddenly jump up by itself at an inopportune time. “What are you afraid of, little one?” says the woman cheerfully. “Calm down; there’s nothing there.”

The cat twists away and leaves the room.

The woman watches television until she falls asleep. She watches intently, her face pressed to the screen. She immerses herself in its bluish rays, floats off to foreign worlds, becomes frightened, intrigued, heartbroken-in short, she lives. This is her place, on the couch. And then-crash! Something just fell in the bedroom.

This time there was an awful racket. It really collapsed, whatever it was. The sound is still echoing through the apartment.

The woman runs into the room and stands there in shock. The shelf with all her records has collapsed. They’ve scattered all over, spread out in a fanlike formation on the unmade sofa bed and on the floor. If someone-you get three guesses who-had been sleeping there, she’d have gotten the sharp corner of the shelf right in the skull. But it didn’t happen. Now the wall features two gaping wounds: the nails, driven into the wall by someone we’d rather not bring to mind right now, have fallen out. Of course they weren’t nails exactly-they have some other name. It was a major production at the time, she remembers. It could almost have passed for love. He’d had to use a drill.

But these nails, or not-nails, whatever, had in the end been inserted, and in the end they’d given way.

The shelf now lies on the piano-that’s why it made such a terrible racket, with echoes like in the mountains.

The piano-that, too, was an adventure. A little girl tried to learn to play it. Her mother insisted, forced her to sit there and practice. Nothing came of it; stubbornness won out in the end, the stubbornness that protects us from the will of others, that defends our right to live our life the way we want. Even if it means life will turn out worse than anyone planned, will turn into a poor life-but it’ll be one’s own, however it is, even without music, even without talent. Without concerts for the family, maybe-but also without needless worries that someone else plays the piano better. The mother always worried that other children were more talented than her daughter. The daughter heard this enough times and had her revenge by becoming a total nonentity, a fact that both mother and daughter freely acknowledged.

Then it all dissolved, all those family dramas straight out of Turgenev; now all that remained was the piano and the old records that crashed into it. The mother had collected classical music, once. The mother had spent hours discussing her daughter over the phone, spilling her child’s secrets as if they didn’t cost a thing. Now there was no mother, no daughter, no shelf for the records. Just a woman standing in a doorway, awestruck by the scene of destruction that was her bedroom. There could be no more sleeping on that bed-everything was ruined, soaked through with dust. She had to change the sheets. She had to wash, clean, find a new place for everything-but where? There was no room.

The woman retreats to the living room, closing the door to the bedroom as if for the last time.

If she could just catch the Creature by its ugly invisible tail. But then what? She’d just die of fright and disgust. You couldn’t kill It, after all. You couldn’t crush It with your heel. So there wasn’t any point to catching It, really.

It clearly wants something, this Creature, It’s trying to get at something. Like the mother was trying to get at something with her daughter. Now if she could just figure out what It wants, she could-she’s done this before-defeat Its design. She could seize the initiative. That’s a classic maneuver-meet your enemy halfway. Like when they light a fire to battle another fire in the forest-if they intersect in the right spot, they’ll both go out for lack of oxygen.

Once upon a time, for example, the mother had owned an expensive set of German china, an investment for a rainy day, and she guarded this china with her life in case they’d have to sell it to pay for a funeral (hers)-and one time, when, in a fit, the daughter had hurled one of the cups to the floor, the mother cold-bloodedly began smashing the rest of the set (“slut!” went the noise it made, “slut!”), piece by piece by piece, nearly driving her daughter insane, and declaring, to top it off, “I’m going to die, all right, but you’ll be left with nothing.”

Yet here’s the question: Does the Creature want her total annihilation, or just to drive her into the street?

Well, she can’t leave the house. There’s nowhere to go. And maybe a certain someone will want to come back (thinks the mother-daughter). So she has to stay. If It’s wreaking havoc, she’ll have to fight It. The way Kutuzov fought Napoleon-by making his position uncomfortable. This is very wise, thinks the woman. The Creature will be defeated.

The decision came painfully at first, but then it grew easier. She went into the kitchen and smashed all the plates and cups. She flung the fragments through the apartment. With great difficulty, but triumphantly at last, she pulled down the kitchen cabinet and let it drop on top of the broken dishes. Having done this she noticed that the cabinet had in fact been hanging just barely on its screws. One section simply fell off the wall when she pulled it down, like a fish leaving a pond-which is to say easily, very easily. And the cabinet itself, it turned out, was falling apart, the back panel having come undone in the corner. So in fact this cabinet had been poised to fall and destroy all the dishes anyway! Not to mention anyone who happened to be standing underneath it at the time.

Now the mother-daughter gained courage. What intuition she’d had, it turned out! She’d made this first step in her defense and immediately uncovered a plot! It was a battle of wills, clearly-and it had been joined!

She spent the night on the couch in the living room, then lay in wait for a day, plotting.

Her patience was rewarded: There came a noise from the bedroom, now covered in dust, the records fanned out across it, the echoes from yesterday still hanging in the air. In she went. A plot was clearly underfoot. Her ancient sofa bed stood there, unfolded. In the mornings she used to remove the bedding and place it under the sofa, then fold the whole thing, but at some point she’d stopped-after all, what was the point? Now the m-d (mother-daughter) grabs a hammer and lifts the mattress, sliding the records all to one side. Then she starts pulling out every screw from the frame. She is bent over under the dusty mattress, working frantically in the darkness. And once again it turns out she was right! The screws come out so easily; clearly they were on their way out already. Another day or two and the whole thing would have collapsed on its own. Once again she’s anticipated a terrorist attack. Once again she’s outwitted It.

Now the fold-out sofa won’t fold at all-so be it. Covered with debris, with dust, with a pile of records and her crumpled-up sheets, that’s just how it will remain forever, like a sacred funeral ground that you must give a kilometer’s berth to. Like the memorial to a terrible earthquake.

And now she must stay ahead, refuse whatever comes easily, seek new avenues, find what is still whole and unbroken.

With one blow of the hammer she smashes the television set. The noise is moderate. It was an old television, but it still showed all the programs, though now only in black and white.

She couldn’t have thought of a better plan. If It had wanted to strike a truly terrible blow, It would have blown up the television first. She could well imagine the results: her face cut by glass shards (she always placed herself right in front of the screen when she watched) and her apartment on fire. Everything burned. Including of course you-know-who, carried from the apartment in a body bag. It was the sort of thing they regularly showed on that very television.

And it is the most painful blow because television was everything to the m-d. It was her support, her joy, the center of her little household. It was to the television that she hurried when she returned home from grocery shopping. It was for the sake of the television that she’d pick up the free advertising supplements containing the TV guide. Nor would she throw them away afterward, but would pore over them sometimes, remembering.

Still the roof over her head is more valuable than television.

So as not to dwell on this painful dilemma (i.e., to be or not to be), the m-d takes all her clothes out of the wardrobe and shoves them into a big potato sack she finds under the pile of old rags in the cupboard. She’s been meaning to throw away that pile forever, but now it’ll have to wait-it is filled with worn-out jackets and skirts and rubber boots, all in case she decides to take a trip to the countryside, or, alternatively, if a war (or famine) breaks out and she has to evacuate. She also keeps her old curtains and blankets in there, including children’s blankets, in case the heat is shut off during the winter the way it was during the Siege. The cupboard is a monument to generations of poverty, whereas the wardrobe contains her current life. And so it is the clothes from the wardrobe that go straight into the potato sack.

It is dark already, on this second day of her counteroffensive, and she drags her sack of clothing-potatoes to the open window and pushes it out into the empty space beyond. In the sack are her blouses, dresses, a jacket, her winter coat. Her underwear, scarves, gloves, hats, berets, belts, kerchiefs. A good pair of winter hose. Pants. Three sweaters. Two full skirts and one midi-length skirt. And then her sheets-clean sheets, smelling of freshness and soap. All her towels. Her pillowcases and sheets, and duvets, one with embroidery. Oh, God. But at least they hadn’t been lost in the fire.

In the wake of her potato sack she launches a painting in a gold frame and three chairs, one after the other.

From down below she hears someone yelling, some curses, a hollow male cry.

She quickly closes the window. Phew.

There is nothing to wear now, just her bathrobe over her nightshirt and her last pair of underwear.

She lies down on the cot, on top of the old TV guides. The blanket and pillows remain in the bedroom, victims of the earthquake. She covers herself up with a fresh advertising supplement and goes to sleep.

In the morning, after a good night’s sleep, the m-d looks around and thinks that now she really fears nothing, absolutely nothing, and that now in fact she isn’t even afraid to abandon her current life, her household, the roof above her head.

She begins a gradual retreat from the apartment. Carefully the m-d steps through the doorway, leaving her keys in a purse on the table. But first she has to let her cat out.

She thinks about this for a while. Theoretically she could leave the cat inside the apartment, but the cat isn’t a strategically valuable object (supposedly) and isn’t worth sending into the Creature’s maw. That is, the sacrifice of a living thing was never part of her battle plan. The m-d wishes to be harder on herself than on her cat. The question is, whom will it be worse for, her or her cat, when m-d begins her new life, without anything, but still somehow hearing the fading sounds of the meowing, straining, locked-in Lulu. The m-d begins debating herself-it would still be worse for the cat, she decides. Who was Lulka that someone should take the trouble to starve her to death? Just an accidental animal, taken down, once, from a tree.

Trying not to think about it too hard, the m-d decides to kick the cat out of the apartment. But here an interesting thing happens. The m-d is prepared for life on the outside-but the cat is not. When the m-d picks her up and drapes her over her elbow, determined to carry her out with her, the cat begins to shake with tiny tremors, like a boiling kettle. Like the suburban train right before it sets off. Like a very sick child in the grip of fever. The cat is shaking-fearing, it seems, for its life.

“What is it?” the m-d asks soothingly. “What are we afraid of? Come on, kitty. You were always trying to run out. So run. Run for your life!”

It’s true-the cat was always rushing out to the stairs, or guarding the door, driving everyone crazy with her hoarse moans. She cried at night. But it was dangerous to let her out-what if she never returned? After all, the m-d loved animals. Even if, just now, she doesn’t.

Joyful, alive, she drops the cat to the floor on the landing outside the apartment and then slams the door behind them both-there!

In a robe and slippers, she stands at the precipice of her new fate. She is her own master: she’s defeated the Creature. It can romp and slither around all it wants, if it intends to follow her, in these huge wide-open spaces of the great outdoors.

The cat sits on its tail as if it’s been kicked. It huddles down pitifully and looks somehow… pensive. The woman descends half a flight of stairs and turns around: The cat sits frozen still and staring straight ahead, its eyes filmed over as if with cataracts, its pupils like little black seeds drowning in the green lakes that are its eyes. Its little face looks bony. Its skull suddenly emerges, it seems, and you can see its outline under the cat’s black fur. Death itself is on that stairwell, dressed up in a thin fur coat.

The woman nearly bursts into tears! The cat is preparing to die. The street awaits it, and wild dogs, and hunger. The cat can’t fight for its life-it doesn’t know how. Tonight they will kick her out of the entryway, plant a boot in her stomach as soon as she takes her first pee.

The m-d pauses on her triumphant march downstairs. She imagines the cat falling apart the way everything else has-the dishes, the chairs, the television, her clothes.

The Creature will celebrate a total victory.

“That’s a little much,” the m-d thinks to herself. “To give up everything to such a nothing. I think we’ll make it, after all.”

Lulu sits there like the scarecrow of a cat, her glassy, cloudy eyes popping out of her head. Her tail, usually so energetic, subtly expressing all her thoughts, now lies like a dusty dead little rope. All her fur is dusty, drab, and sick.

The woman immediately takes the kitty up in her arms, presses its stone-cold body to her own, rings the neighbor’s doorbell, quickly calls the super, and sits down on the chair she is offered to wait for someone to come up and force open the door.

She walks into her ruined apartment, sets Lulu down on the floor, and looks around her with the eyes of a new owner. It is as if everything were new, strange, and interesting.

There are still shoes in the hallway! In the kitchen, all her pots and pans have survived, as has a salad bowl and a coffee mug. Her forks and spoons! “What luxury,” thinks the woman, who’s been ready to graze downstairs, outside, near the trash containers, looking for a discarded can she could use for drinking water, and a moldy piece of bread to eat.

“Would I ever find this kind of luxury in the trash?” murmurs the woman as she opens the refrigerator and sees a saucer and a soup bowl, with the boiled (!) fruits of the earth, with beets and potatoes. And a little plate of fish for Lulka!

This apartment has everything. It is warm, and outside of the kitchen it is relatively clean; the water runs in the bath, there is soap, a telephone! And her bed! There is still a sheet and a duvet, luckily. There are lots of records on the couch and a record player in the corner, forgotten there; someone in this house used to like to listen to music-either the mother or the daughter, she can’t remember which.

The mother-daughter quickly cleans the shattered dishes in the kitchen-and so what: it isn’t the first time this has happened in this particular house. She makes a series of trips to the trash container outside; on the third trip, as she spills her shards into the container, two men in soiled, dirty clothing and sacks over their shoulders approach carefully, wait until she moves away, and immediately dive into the trash. They behave like shades of men-shy, unnoticeable, dark.

The m-d takes a look at the ground beneath her window. Naturally the contents of her potato sack have been picked off long ago. Well, someone else would have to walk around in her sweater and pants, while she, liberated, would walk around in nothing. That’s right. Returning to her clean, swept, washed apartment, m-d is surprised first of all by how timid she’d been-she failed to throw away her groceries, failed to smash the insides of the refrigerator, and kept all the lamps and bulbs intact.

Suddenly she remembers, and puts out the plate of fish for her Lulka.

But Lulka just sits there like a post, frozen in the middle of the front hall, and her eyes still look like grapes cleared of their skin, with a barely visible pit inside.

The breath of death must have frozen her frightened soul.

The woman doesn’t try to console her cat-her task now is to put everything in order as quickly as possible, and then the cat will also be all right.

And, as often happens when one member of a family is momentarily indecisive, afraid, or hysterical, the other takes heart and saves the situation. The woman begins moving faster-quickly placing the shelf atop the piano, gathering the records, removing the blanket and quickly washing it in the bath.

It turns out there are still some towels left-a little one on a hook in the kitchen and two drying on a radiator in the bath.

“It’s all right,” the woman tells Lulu. “We’ll make it.”

Not only that, she immediately finds a screwdriver and gathers the screws from the fold-out sofa and screws them back in tight, then folds it into its daytime position.

There!

It had been so easy to destroy everything, and it is so hard to fix, clean, and order it again. She has to bend, crawl into corners, gather shards, carry out trash, drive the screws back in! The television is the worst. She has to wait for dark and then throw it out the window with all her might, then pick it up downstairs-the woman lives in a walk-up-and carry the remains to the trash in her little grocery cart.

It is as if a war had ravaged the territory of the m-d’s peaceful apartment-a veritable war.

The living room looks empty without the television and the chairs.

But a person can make do without all sorts of things, so long as she’s still alive. There is nothing to watch, true, but all of a sudden in the darkness you could make out a shelf of the m-d’s favorite books. She puts on her once-favorite record-the tango!

Then, as the music plays, she begins to go through the backpacks and suitcases filled with her old clothes. Her whole life unspools before her, like a newsreel. The beloved apparitions rise up before her and around her, though none of the old things quite fit the m-d anymore-she must have grown fat sitting in front of the TV all day. All right. She has a few pieces of fabric, and there is a sewing machine in the corner of the closet, and she could probably put together a reasonable skirt to go with the several blouses that still more or less close on her.

And anyway for many years the m-d has worn only her old and ragged things, keeping her clean and nearly brand-new clothing for special occasions-which never arrived.

As she is working this out for herself, the m-d also gathers a big bag of old clothes and shoes, recalling the shades of men who’d greeted her last trash trip with such enthusiasm.

God, what a life now opens before the m-d! But the cat still sits in shock in the hallway, like someone who’s lived through too much, and stares ahead at the same spot with murky, unseeing eyes.

Then suddenly the cat pricks up her ears.

The woman laughs.

Obviously the building is settling, drying, aging, boards are cracking-that’s first of all. Moreover in all these apartments above, below, and to the sides, people are living, living people, and some of them are moving, something is breaking or being fixed, something is falling or cooking. “That’s life!” says the woman loudly, addressing herself, as always, to the cat.

As for Lulu, she stands up lightly and heads for the kitchen, raising her front paws slowly, like a heavy tigress, which is strange given her emaciated state. Then she deliberately sits herself at her place, her nose to the corner, leans over, and takes a piece of fish into her mouth, nodding her head. She’s decided to live.