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

Her father was absolutely determined to open Vera’s eyes to the reality of the situation, to clarify the circumstances and motives. But he was afraid of Vera’s reaction, and besides, none of his past explanations had done much good. For a long time after her disappointment, Vera performed her duties automatically, ate very little, went to bed early, and read a lot of poetry. To her friends she admitted she had lost interest in living. She felt like an old woman.

Between this disaster and the final, decisive romance from that period of Vera’s life, there was a brief friendship with another one of her coworkers, a man of very short stature who always winked and smiled at Vera, and called her Miss, and tried to steal a kiss when no one was looking. This man, who was known in their department for his prim manners, entertained Vera with sexual anecdotes and once brought her an illustrated volume on the subject. Sitting on top of her desk in her little nook, he relaxed, cursing out everyone in the department and making personal phone calls that made Vera blush. All this, too, ended on an odd note, but not before Vera became fond of his visits and learned to think of him as a close friend.

When the man asked Vera to help him buy a warm coat (it was impossible to get one off the rack in his size), Vera raised a flurry of activity among her friends in retail, and arranged for him to pick up a fine, imported coat in a certain store, at a certain time. On the day of the appointment, the little employee didn’t come to work. Vera called his office number all day at regular intervals, announcing in the same flat, official voice that it was Ms. Vera calling about the coat. At first her calls were answered with muffled laughter, then simply ignored. The next day the little employee read Vera a forceful lecture on the subject of appropriate behavior in the workplace, after which he stopped what he called Vera’s “education”—the jokes, sitting on her desk, and so on.

This insignificant episode shook Vera to her core. She felt she’d been abandoned by a fiancé, whom she had come to like and even find attractive, despite his obvious shortcomings. Her father received a full description of the incident: how the little employee’s officemates doubled up with laughter during Vera’s calls; how the next day they all congratulated him on becoming the latest victim of Vera’s prowess; and how, on hearing about this, the married employee with the car talked about Vera with disgust and almost malice, while the department’s rising star also made ironic comments, although not as harsh, restraining himself out of respect for his female colleagues. Nothing the little employee could say about his real need for a coat stopped the giggling; finally, he gave up and, when no women were present, made a remark so dirty that his audience choked with laughter.

Vera fell in love with the head of her department when he returned from an overseas business trip and asked her to type up his report. All through the dictation he interspersed amusing little comments about the trip and its participants, as if only Vera with her superior taste and understanding deserved to know the real facts. Vera was smitten. Never before had she been addressed by a superior with such complete trust, as an equal. She didn’t consider, of course, that her boss simply wanted to deploy his charm on a new employee, or that, like most men in his position, he needed from time to time to feel the spontaneous adulation of the lowest ranks. Isolated in her nook, barred from general staff meetings, Vera wasn’t aware of the atmosphere of jealousy and of love for the boss (absolutely platonic) that permeated the entire department; nor was she familiar with his notorious habit of alternating charm with outbursts of the deepest cynicism in his personal relationships with his employees. During the next dictation, the boss grew even more relaxed and had a playful argument with Vera about some movie whose name they couldn’t remember. The loser had to fulfill a wish; Vera lost. With a mix of anxiety, regret, and bubbling joy, she prepared to give all of herself to the man she loved. But the boss didn’t ask for anything like that. Instead, he quickly wrapped up his report, grabbed his briefcase from his office, and practically ran home.

Over the next few weeks, Vera waited for a phone call or a note. After another sleepless night she called his office from a pay phone and asked for an appointment. This in itself was a strange request—employees at Vera’s department dropped in on their boss at any time, without formalities. The boss agreed, however. He told Vera to come by at the end of the day and to knock slowly on his door three times. Vera showed up at the appointed time and stayed for more than an hour, talking and talking about herself, as if a dam had burst. The boss listened with interest, saying now and again, “Fascinating” and “I’m going to study you.” At the end of her monologue, he agreed to meet her for a date later that night, adding that they must leave the building separately, in case someone might see them and think God knows what.

As her father might have warned her, Vera waited for ninety minutes at some tram stop, in the cold, in a remote blue-collar neighborhood where her boss must have spent his factory youth. Luckily, she had another date planned for later that night, and also luckily, that young man waited patiently for her. Vera’s evening wasn’t entirely wasted.

At work her nickname was Pulcheria, after the meek and faithful wife in Gogol’s famous story. Pulcheria was a model spouse by nature, but that hadn’t stopped her husband from making a certain acquaintance at a vacation resort, after which came anonymous phone calls and threats that the lady would “take gas.” The closing act was the appearance of a mutilated photograph of Pulcheria outside her door. In the epilogue Pulcheria was left alone, raising two daughters.

When her younger daughter married, Pulcheria aged rapidly, almost willingly, her lovely eyes and innocent soul withdrawing beneath heavy flesh, seemingly forever. Her soul still flickered on occasion—at work, for instance, where she cared deeply about her little subject. She fell ill when a new boss swooped into their division like an evil genius, threatening to ruin years of painstaking research. That was when Pulcheria and her colleague, Olga, formed a strategic alliance and became friends.

This Olga, for whom work was her life, hated their new boss with a special intensity. At home, people said, Olga had a sick husband who was hospitalized routinely, and, they added, her only son had married an older woman, had a baby with her, and now demanded one-third of the parental apartment. Olga fought ferociously. In the end the young family settled into a tiny room in the woman’s parents’ house. Olga lost her rosy complexion but remained in her palace, with her sick husband.

One evening Pulcheria stayed late at the office—earlier in the day she had been invited unexpectedly to Olga’s house for a birthday party. She called her daughter (who lived with Pulcheria) to give her instructions for the night but continued to worry about her and the baby; in retrospect this seems almost funny because only a day later she would barely remember their faces or anything else from her previous life. Everything happened so fast; she seemed to have gone to sleep, or else to have lost her mind from shock, as her colleagues (Olga among them) believed. When she left the office, she began following in Eros’s way—of which she hadn’t the slightest awareness.

At the party Pulcheria wound her way into a dark corner and sat there quietly, while the hostess and her coiffed girlfriends set the table in the dining room (Pulcheria couldn’t even count the rooms in that fabulous apartment). She understood Olga’s motives for inviting her—she always understood people’s true motives, to her discomfort. Olga simply wanted to crush Pulcheria with the glamour of her party, then oust their hateful new boss with Pulcheria’s help (there were only three people in their division), and, finally, get herself appointed in the boss’s place.