Ludmilla Petrushevskaya - There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself

18. Alla politely greeted Victor’s mother, Nina Petrovna, whom she’d always liked. (It’s not uncommon for estranged daughters to look for mother figures in older women.) Nina, too, was well disposed to Alla: she was the only girl Victor brought to the apartment openly.

19. In his tiny shoebox of a room, Victor entered Alla like she was his old home. Everything was familiar—the smell, the skin; only the body itself was different, and Victor couldn’t get enough of it. You just don’t age, he kept telling her in the dark. Finally they went out into the living room. Victor made some tea, and that’s when Alla announced

20. that things had changed. Victor was sure Alla’s transformation was attributable to a new affair, and he chewed his cookie regretfully.

21. That’s right, Alla said. I’ve met someone, and I love him as much as I love you.

22. Ah, well, Victor sighed, and kept on chewing.

23. We are going to have a baby.

24. What? Another baby? Victor felt sleepy and confused. He just wanted to be left alone.

25. Then it occurred to him that perhaps Alla knew how to determine pregnancy right after the act—girls these days knew all kinds of things. When did you get knocked up? he croaked.

26. In September!

27. In September? I see….

28. She explained what had happened at the hospital, but he refused to believe her. Two weeks later he proposed to the daughter of a nice family that lived in a house with clean floors and polished furniture. The girl resembled Marguerite from Faust : blond hair, blue eyes, endless braid.

29. However, some friends informed Nina Petrovna that Alla was pregnant by her son, and so she boycotted the wedding, which was held a month later.

30. Victor must have sensed some danger from the beautiful Alla, from her full breasts, her moist mouth, silky hair—he must have sensed that this gorgeous body was meant to seduce him, as Alla’s fifteen-year-old grandmother, consciously or unconsciously, had seduced her brother-in-law, who thereby became the husband of two sisters and so quickly dispatched himself.

31. Victor wanted to find refuge in his ideal Marguerite, but Alla’s belly grew remorselessly, and on his birthday Alla presented it to him, like a gift.

32. To cheat fate, Victor signed a three-year contract at a big industrial site two thousand miles away. He reckoned that in three years they’d all forget about him, including Alla, who’d find herself a husband. It was like a temporary suicide, he thought, a thing that everyone desires at some point—to step out for a while, then come back to see what happened.

33. Victor partied all night before his departure, and Alla was there, too, at his mother’s invitation, ballooned like a drowned corpse, with cracked black lips. By the morning he had second thoughts about his impending three-year death and lost some of his nerve—but what could he do? Life in his hometown with swollen Alla appeared no less terrible, for only teenagers are drawn to everything that reminds them of their earliest days. Besides, Victor was in love again, with a superbly skinny and lithe contortionist named Zhanna, whose amateur act he’d caught in a nearby town where he’d gone to escape his amiable but unyielding mother. After the performance Victor slipped out and waited for Zhanna by the back entrance. He walked her to the bus, took down her address, and the next day met her in Moscow at her dorm. They took a walk through a park where trees were beginning to turn, and Victor’s only reward was a kiss on her bony little hand.

34. With Zhanna’s address in his wallet, and shedding bitter tears, Victor was dragged by one of his buddies to the train station.

35. At the industrial site, Victor shared a single room with a young married couple. They arrived a day after he did and were embarrassed to find him lying on a bed in their assigned room. But it wasn’t a mistake: housing was tight, and with this couple Victor witnessed the entire cycle of child-making, up to the day the young mother returned from the hospital with her baby. The baby was covered with a septic rash—his whole little head felt like a cactus due to the tiny bumps. His parents bowed before this new catastrophe and tended to him day and night until he got better. Victor did what he could, didn’t sleep either, and ran around to various offices trying to get them alternate accommodations. Then one day he stopped by their place to pick up the couple’s paperwork, and the young mother, who was trying to nurse, looked at him with such intense hatred that he thought, What am I doing? If this is death, there is no room for me here.

36. He’d accumulated several notes from Zhanna as well as a number of letters from Alla with pictures of little Nadya, who was a replica of Victor plus dimples and curls. His mother also wrote—that Alla’s life with her mentally ill mother (2–5) was becoming unbearable, that the crazy woman had put washing detergent in Nadya’s cereal and wouldn’t let Nina Petrovna see her own granddaughter.

37. On receiving this news Victor felt uneasy, almost scared, for until now the fact that he could return home anytime made his life at the industrial site a little more bearable. Now, he realized his mother would probably move little Nadya to their apartment, and also Alla, so there wouldn’t be anywhere for him to go.

38. Then he caught his wretched roommate looking at him as though she wished him dead, and suddenly he understood why these wretched people were so indifferent to his attempts to find them a separate room: all they wanted was for him to disappear, to let them be; a separate room he needed really for himself, so he could bring there Tanya, Galya, and Liuba.

39. Zhanna had stopped writing and wouldn’t answer his calls. Victor spent half the night at the post office in the nearest town trying to reach her, and in the end fell asleep on a chair inside the phone booth. The first bus back to the industiral site was at four in the morning. On his way through the dark he upset a basin full of water for the child who woke with a wail; his parents crawled out of bed, blind with exhaustion; Victor tried to collect the water; the baby kept wailing….

40. In the morning Victor went to the personnel office and handed in his resignation on the grounds that in eleven months he hadn’t received housing. Zhanna was seducing him with her silence.

41. I guess I’ll marry her, he decided with tears in his eyes. Nina Petrovna had sent him a telegram that romantic Marguerite had divorced him in absentia.

42. Free at last! he thought happily, and pictured Zhanna’s face.

43. Although it was a bit strange, he considered, that Nina Petrovna had reported the news so openly in a telegram.

44. Two weeks later Zhanna was scheduled to meet him at the station. In fact, the whole gang was there.

45. It was August, and the small train platforms outside Moscow were filled with brightly dressed vacationers. Victor was peering through a dusty coach window, trying to make out Zhanna’s silhouette, but instead he saw two women and a stroller with a rather big baby, and one of the women was crying, covering her face. Nina Petrovna wasn’t crying—she lifted the baby and held it in front of her like a shield.

This Christmas story has a sad beginning and a happy ending. It begins in March with a certain Misha, a struggling composer from the provinces. He’d written a dozen children’s songs and two symphonies, Fifth and Tenth, so named as a joke. Misha survived by moonlighting at clubs with various bands. Onstage he wore a lace blouse and a fake bust, like Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot . That spring he was hired to write a score for a senior show at a drama school, an assigment for which he got paid by the hour, next to nothing. He wrote in his kitchen, at night, while his wife’s family, who unanimously despised Misha, slept nearby.