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

The girl listens to this absentmindedly, then goes to Milgrom’s without really understanding what she’s been told, and she sees the same little room just under the roof, where the smell of old woolen clothing chokes you in the heat.

Everything melts in the light of the setting sun as Milgrom produces some cups and a teakettle from the kitchen. They drink tea with black salted crackers, the luxury of the poor.

Milgrom once again brags about her son, Sasha, her shining face turned to the photographs on the wall, although the girl thinks, if her mother is telling the truth, where did she get those photographs?

Grown-up Sasha looks back from the wall with a cold, closed-off stare, his cap sticking up like a saddle over his big black eyes. Now he really looks like his mother.

With what tears, with what pleas did Milgrom get those photos from him?

Milgrom sighs contentedly underneath her wailing wall and then announces that little Asya has just lost her first tooth. All the things that everyone else has, Milgrom has them, too.

The girl puts on her dress; looks in the mirror; escapes from that sweet-musty smell, out into the street, the sunset; and walks by countless doors and windows, behind each of which, she thinks, live only Milgroms, Milgroms, Milgroms. She walks in her cool new black dress, and she is seized with happiness, filled with joy. It fills Milgrom, too, who is joyful for her Sasha.

The girl is at the very beginning of her journey. She’s walking in a new dress, young men are already looking, and so on. In five years a boy will appear at her door with a bunch of roses he pulled out from a rose bush somewhere during the night. Milgrom is obviously at the end of her journey, but there might come a time when the girl will flash by at the end of Little Bronnaya Street, in a whole new form, carrying in her purse the photographs of her grown-up son, and bragging about him while sitting on a bench by the Patriarch Ponds—but she doesn’t dare call him an extra time, and as for him, he’s too busy to call.

The black dress shimmies down Little Bronnaya, which is wide and still filled with light, underneath the setting sun, and that’s it now, the day is burning its last, and Milgrom, eternal Milgrom, sits in her little pensioner’s room like a guard at the museum of her own life, where there is nothing at all but a timid love.

Until Clarissa turned seventeen not a single soul admired or noticed her—in that respect she was not unlike Cinderella or the Ugly Duckling. At an age when most girls are sensitive to beauty and look for it everywhere, Clarissa was a primitive, absentminded creature who stared openmouthed at trivial things, like the teacher wiping off the blackboard, and God knows what thoughts ran through her head. In her last year at school, she was involved in a fight. It was provoked by an insult Clarissa believed had been directed at her. In fact, the word wasn’t directed at Clarissa or anyone in particular (very few words had been said about her), but instead of explaining this, the boy simply slapped her back. During that time Clarissa imagined herself as a young heroine alone in a hostile world. Apparently she believed that every situation had something to do with her, although very few did.

This tendency of Clarissa’s might have developed further under different circumstances, but it so happened that only six months after she finished school, her life changed. During Christmas vacation in a provincial town, she met and married a local resident, and returned home in the role of a wife with an absentee husband. One cannot testify to her emotional transformation during this time; externally, however, she changed from a young person under attack from a hostile world into a silly young female who gives no thought to her circumstances and just goes along blindly. Physically, she changed too. The clumsy girl with glasses became a curvy beauty with golden hair and exquisite hands. As should have been expected, this soft and feminine Clarissa grew tired of her long-distance marriage with its numerous obligations, and when asked about her husband she would say she had no idea and felt tired of it all.

The next marriage followed quickly—to an ambulance doctor, a large man with thick arms. Soon after the birth of their child, Clarissa’s husband began to drink, to see other women, and to beat her. Clarissa seemed unable to stop arguing with him, even when he wasn’t around. At the office or when visiting a friend, she carried on her monologue in the same ringing note of protest, punctuated by sobs. Her husband’s indifference and contempt caught her off guard: she didn’t have a chance to regroup, to get used to her new role and think calmly about the best solution to her predicament. Even the youthful approach of dealing slaps for insults (remember the fight with her classmate) had abandoned her. One could say that during this period Clarissa moved like an amoeba, without direction, her goal simply to dodge the blows of her husband, who didn’t restrain himself in anything and continued to behave like a rowdy animal in the same room with Clarissa and their baby.

The heaviest blow came when the husband left Clarissa and took the child to live with his parents. Clarissa threw herself again and again at the locked door of his parents’ apartment—uselessly, it turned out, because they had rented a dacha somewhere in the country and had gone there with the boy, or so the neighbor informed Clarissa.

Clarissa’s subsequent behavior could be described only as illogical and pointless. Every weekend she took the commuter rail in a random direction and roamed the countryside trying to spot her son’s yellow hat. She called her husband’s friends and colleagues, busy people with serious jobs, to ask them to help her kidnap her son. The only outcome of these actions was a visit from a doctor and a nurse who wanted to know how she slept and whether she was followed by secret enemies, and who mentioned the possibility of a free stay in a wonderful sanatorium where she’d be allowed to sleep as late as she wanted—for a whole week! Clarissa pointed out that no one would give her sick leave just to sleep, but the doctor assured her it would be easy and she didn’t have to worry. “I see,” said Clarissa. “He sent you. I understand.” The doctor and nurse again tried to convince Clarissa to come with them, but Clarissa wasn’t listening. She was sitting at the kitchen table deep in thought, with burning cheeks.

After this Clarissa disappeared from sight, and no one knows just how she resurfaced six months later in yet another role of divorced mother with child support for her small son and the perennial problem of child care.

In this role Clarissa proved to be no better or worse than thousands of other women, but she did exhibit a certain practical intelligence. For example, she didn’t plan her future life with the boy. Any such plan was futile because the boy was extremely attached to his father and grandparents, who lavished him with care and comfort that Clarissa alone couldn’t provide. So she focused on the pressing problems that encroached from every side. She calculated, to the second, the time it took to travel from her son’s kindergarten to her work, spent her lunch break shopping for groceries, and treated her work duties as secondary, which was understandable for someone in her position.

After a year of this drudgery, she took a vacation by the Black Sea. She was there alone, her son at a summer camp with his kindergarten. For the first two weeks Clarissa couldn’t let go of her motherly worries, and she ignored the sea, the sun, and the abundant southern fruit, thinking only of her son, whom she’d left in the rainy north. She spent hours at the post office, waiting to place a long-distance call to the kindergarten to find out if her boy was well and if he was still there. But eventually the sea, the sun, and the fruit worked their magic, and Clarissa experienced a second metamorphosis. A ripe woman of twenty-five, looking meek and detached behind her glasses, she was noticed (and deeply admired) by a certain airline pilot, Valery, who was spending a few hours at the beach between flights. That day he didn’t dare approach Clarissa, because he was wearing underwear instead of swimming trunks. Instead he watched from a respectful distance while she rummaged nearsightedly through her purse, finally pulling out a touchingly small handkerchief to wipe her glasses with. Two days later Valery was again at the beach, this time properly attired. He positioned himself closer to Clarissa, but she was so frightened and repulsed by his attentions that she fled the beach hours before her usual time. The next day things improved a little, and Clarissa was able to squeeze out a few sentences. Afterward, she felt an enormous guilt and spent an entire day waiting at the post office to call her son’s kindergarten. The boy was well; it hadn’t rained.