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

I was picked up last, as always. We walked along the white highway, under dark skies, dragging my poor suitcase. The dortoir windows were throwing farewell lights on the snowy road.

I never saw Tolik again, but I heard his silvery voice over the phone. He called me at home, in Moscow.

My grandfather’s daughter from his second marriage occupied the next room in our communal apartment. She yelled for me to come to the phone. “For you,” she announced with her usual bug-eyed look. “Some guy.”

“What guy? There’s no guy…. Hello?”

“It’s Tolik, remember?” the high voice sang out.

“Oh, it’s you, Lena,” I greeted Tolik, with a significant glance at my aunt and my mother, who’d also come into the hall. “It’s Lena Mitiaieva from school, Mom.”

The unmarried Uncle Misha, a radiologist at the KGB clinic, decided to join the party. He stood in his blue army long johns between the black draperies of his doorway. The apartment’s entire population now stood in the hall (minus the Kalinovskys, minus my grandfather’s second wife, minus the grandfather who was smoking shag tobacco in bed, minus the janitor, Aunt Katya). The conceit was that everyone was waiting to use the phone after me.

“It’s me, Tolik,” continued the voice.

“No, Lena, I can’t tonight—they are going to the movies, Mom,” an aside to my mother.

“What movies? It’s late,” my mother answered quickly, while Uncle Misha and my aunt seemed to be waiting for more.

My love, my holiest secret, was calling me! And I had to speak to him in front of everyone!

“No, Lena, why?” I kept repeating vaguely, because Tolik was inviting me to join him right away at the Grand Illusion for a movie . Swooning, I kept mumbling nonsense for my listeners’ benefit. The listeners guessed the truth. They wanted to see me squirm.

Azure skies, turquoise dusk, minuet, my tears, his icy fingers all vanished, and remained in paradise. Here was another story—here I was a fifth-grader with a chronic cold and torn brown stockings. The world of crystals and corals, of miraculous deliveries, of undying love—that world couldn’t coexist with the communal apartment and my grandfather’s room in particular, full of books and bedbugs, where my mother and I (officially homeless) were allowed to sleep in a corner under his desk. My Tolik, my little prince, my dauphin, couldn’t possibly be standing in a dark stinking phone booth near the grimy Grand Illusion.

I didn’t believe Tolik, and rightly so, for I could hear coarse voices in the background and hoots of laughter. Again, the tightening circle of dirty smirks. But this time I was far away.

“Neighbors want the phone,” I concluded indifferently (choking back tears). “Bye, Lena.”

Tolik called again after that, inviting me to go skating or to see a movie. “No, Lena, why?” I mumbled. “What do you mean, ‘Why?’” giggled the shameless Tolik.

Tolik, that prime chaser, had figured out how to use my unhappy love for his dark purposes. But—the circle of animal faces had never crushed the girl; the terror remained among the tall trees of the park, in the enchanted kingdom of young berries.

Vera turned sixteen, and nothing but scenes followed, one after the next. Her father begged her to have some self-respect, not to fall to pieces over every stranger. He even threatened to send her to a juvenile facility but, in the end, didn’t act soon enough. When Vera was twelve, her teachers observed that her mental development lagged behind her extraordinary physical maturity; one of them, who respected Vera’s father, told him she couldn’t imagine what would happen to Vera when she turned fourteen. But Vera did turn fourteen, and fifteen. At sixteen she quit school, without asking anyone, and apprenticed herself as a junior salesgirl at a department store. Vera’s coworkers haloed her with gentle understanding and slightly patronizing friendship, agreeing that she wasn’t all there.

Often they said to her, “Greetings from Ivan the Fool!” They were referring, of course, to love, for what else could girls of eighteen talk about? They discussed other things, naturally: books, weather, terrible accidents in the city, injustice and deceit, their childhoods, the constant ache in their feet, and problems at work. But mostly they spoke about friendship and love, tried to analyze their feelings, applied intuition or simply closed their eyes to everything and cried their hearts out, and gradually, in the course of those conversations, acquired a protective layer of hardness that sealed their mouths and left them to fight their grown-up battles alone, wordlessly.

Vera’s father didn’t understand the benefits of such friendship, considering it unhealthy for Vera. When Vera announced that she was ready to leave the store, he agreed, despite misgivings, to arrange a position for her at his institute. The father was understandably afraid that after four years behind a sales counter, in a corrupting atmosphere of intimate women’s talk, Vera might go a little cuckoo from the institute’s abundance of men, might be willing to bestow her trust on any man—any man, of course, other than him.

Barely a month after Vera started at the institute, her father was informed that Vera’s coworkers found her behavior odd to the point of indecency. She carried on long conversations over the office phone, wore too much makeup, giggled loudly, and, in general, behaved as if she were at a party rather than a place of work. The first thing she did, her father was informed, was type a personal letter, on the office typewriter, to a certain Mr. Drach. Vera thanked Mr. Drach for returning five rubles and apologized for not agreeing to disclose her friend Tatiana’s address without her permission. Vera’s father considered the dates in question and decided, with no small relief, that the letter to Mr. Drach must have referred to details about Vera’s recent vacation at a country resort, and did not represent a new crisis.

Soon enough, however, he learned that Vera was pursuing an employee in her department, a married man who had invited her for a car ride one night but the next day avoided her and then had to ask a coworker to tell her quietly, “Now’s not the time.” Yet Vera continued to follow him around, demanding an explanation! She moped over this aborted romance, as she thought of it, for weeks. She couldn’t have known that the man’s wife, a former ballerina, had found out about their little excursion and made a horrible scene. No one told Vera anything, including her father, who felt determined to have a little talk with her but, as before, couldn’t work up the nerve.

While he hesitated, another employee, a rising star in Vera’s department, asked Vera to stay late to take dictation. About this young man, it was known he had recently filed for divorce, on the grounds of childlessness, and that he lived alone, without his parents, in a condo in the suburbs. The next morning Vera returned to the office convinced she had experienced a life-changing romantic event—she had found the love of her life, a future husband. She cast mysterious looks around the office, and trembled with anticipation. This employee, however, behaved exactly like the first one, as if Vera reminded him of something unpleasant that he wanted to forget. When one of his colleagues, a woman, mentioned to him that Vera was crying and was ready to quit the institute, he told her (the exact quote was reported to Vera’s father), “Let Vera bring me a doctor’s note saying she’s healthy; then I’ll do it.” He said this in front of everyone. They all laughed. Again, poor Vera didn’t have a clue. Imagining that someone had informed him of her unfortunate car ride, she hung out in the corridors and halls, looking for a chance to reassure him—nothing had happened that night in the car, none of it was her fault, nothing was ever her fault, and so on. Vera would have dumped her entire biography on the poor fellow—or anyone else, if they had cared to listen.