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

Pulcheria was angry with herself for wasting her whole evening on this party where everyone and everything felt alien and uninteresting to her. But she was angrier with their boss, who intended to turn their archives into a profit-making tabloid featuring personal letters and who-slept-with-whom exposés. The employees nicknamed the boss Tsarina and quickly figured out that she intended to write her doctoral thesis from their research. They also discovered that she’d been installed there by her husband, the deputy director at a sister research institute, who, in turn, found a position for their own director’s nephew, an equally useless careerist. Knowing all this made them want to cry from shame and hopelessness—but what could they do?

That’s why Pulcheria observed the surrounding luxury with indifference, using the party as simply a chance to take a break from the daily drudgery she suffered behind her perfect image of a plump, almost ancient grandmother—though Pulcheria was no more than two months older than youthful-looking Olga. Pulcheria recklessly played at old age at a time when quite a few women picked themselves up and stayed in shape for a long time. Olga, for instance, recently had made herself look even younger with the help of cosmetic surgery. Pulcheria felt a little scared of Olga’s taut face and avoided looking directly at it, a habit Olga interpreted as an admission of inferiority. One could see through Olga at a glance, while Pulcheria was shielded by an ironic guardian angel who understood everything about everyone—which was why Pulcheria just sighed when their third colleague, the genuinely young Camilla, made some wisecracks about Olga’s surgery. Incidentally, Camilla had not been invited to Olga’s party. Olga had probably decided that in her war with the boss, Pulcheria was a safer bet than the rebellious Camilla, who, by the way, would not have wanted to waste an evening with old hags. She had other plans, dreams to pursue, so let’s not worry about this Camilla—she didn’t come to the institute from the street, either; she, too, had relatives in the right places.

After whiling away in her corner, Pulcheria joined the other guests at the dinner table and continued her inconspicuous existence. She nibbled and drank a little until she realized the guest on her right was asking her name. She told him, and they began to talk about a certain scholar whose life happened to be Pulcheria’s special subject. The scholar had been exposed and denounced; these days his name was mentioned only pejoratively, but Pulcheria knew and loved him as an etymologist might love a bug she’s discovered, even if it’s harmful. In a quiet, reserved voice, Pulcheria firmly dismissed the pejorative note in her neighbor’s tone. Her neighbor brought up some familiar arguments, but Pulcheria didn’t want to debate a layman and just sighed. Only once did she bother to correct him, and her correction was so elegant and to the point that the guest looked at her intently as if seeing her for the first time. Pulcheria, too, focused her tired eyes and through her exhaustion saw a missing front tooth and blinking pale eyes; but what she really saw was an innocent, dreamy young boy.

The guest kept looking at Pulcheria and smiling. There are people who smile at everything and everyone, and one shouldn’t take their smiles personally, but this man smiled with a purpose. He smiled in admiration of Pulcheria’s intelligence, of her brilliant conversation, and as a result Pulcheria fell in love—a pitying, tender love.

She blossomed, her angelic soul delivering a ray of kindness, and thus the matter was settled. Quietly but firmly Pulcheria described her scholarly pursuits, but the subject of their conversation was of no importance; only the essence mattered, and the essence was that these two people had found each other at a noisy dinner table, while their hostess flew to the kitchen and back, beaming with purple blush on her new cheeks—although on one of her trips she did stop to whisper something loudly in the guest’s ear. A loud whisper of this kind usually carries an insult for the person nearby, but Pulcheria understood nothing of what was said. When Olga left, their conversation resumed, and when Pulcheria got up to leave, the guest followed her to the door, changed out of his house slippers and into winter boots, and walked out with her. They walked to the metro station in the crisp, cold air, and somehow Pulcheria wasn’t embarrassed by her coat with its hanging threads or her balding fur hat, which she’d been wearing since college. Her face shone; her eyes opened up; her guardian angel worked his way to the surface through the layers of aged flesh.

They walked down the steps to the train. He rode with her to her station, and then they walked again, for a long time, all the way to her door. There he kissed her hand, then left. They didn’t exchange phone numbers. Pulcheria didn’t even ask his name. She disappeared into the dark entrance, thinking of nothing, but later that night she woke up in despair, realizing she couldn’t ask Olga anything about him, not even his name.

The next day Olga got into another scrape with their boss, who asked her to fetch a folder from the file cabinet, even though they were in the same room. A hissing exchange ensued, an exchange that Pulcheria, absorbed in her dreams about the Stranger, missed entirely. Olga seemed to avoid Pulcheria and didn’t invite her to lunch, either sensing Pulcheria’s new indifference or feeling indifferent herself. Nonetheless, Pulcheria brought her tray to Olga’s table. In spite of her decision not to ask any questions, she immediately asked, “So how did it end?”

“What do you mean, how?”

“Well, I did leave early….”

“Ah, who cares about washing dishes? But what do you think of her? Treating me like her secretary! And who is she? Just the wife of our idiot director’s friend. And she thinks she can boss us around!”

Olga then made a short speech about her own connections, which she had, it turned out, at the highest level; and speaking of husbands, her own husband was still very much respected as a mathematician, despite his illness.

“What’s wrong with him?” Pulcheria asked indifferently, still hoping to shift the conversation back to the party, to the Stranger.

“The worst,” Olga announced. “Schizophrenia.”

Pulcheria felt she had to say something comforting.

“I don’t trust such diagnoses,” she said calmly.

“He’s had it for a long time, it turns out. He complained about his stomach, lost a lot of weight, quarreled at work, and then they didn’t pass his thesis….”

“But what’s so crazy about it?” Pulcheria asked. “Dissertations don’t make it through committees all the time!”

“At the hospital he was smashing his fist into the wall. They thought it was from some sort of pain, but then they asked me, and I told them everything. He was calling for you, they told me, for Anya.”

“Anya?” Now Pulcheria was really listening: it was as though Olga were trying to tell her something. She didn’t yet know that her entire future was outlined in this conversation.

“That’s right—Anya. As if anyone ever wanted him except me. At least he doesn’t have my office number; at my previous job he called ten times a day. A jealous nut.”

“So how are you coping?” Pulcheria asked weakly.

“How? At least he’s still okay in bed or else I’d hang myself, that’s how. Did you notice the men at my party? My lovers—all of them. And their wives are my friends. So what shall we do about this bitch?”

Olga’s story confronted Pulcheria with the shadowy, murky aspect of life where photographs get mutilated and then dropped on family doorsteps. These disturbing thoughts alternated with waves of misery. On the outside Pulcheria appeared to be processing the same old letter over and over. Later that evening, approaching her house with heavy grocery bags, she saw at the darkened entrance his uncovered gray head. Casually and simply he appeared before her. They walked to her apartment. The young family’s room was dark and quiet; either they were walking the baby, or all three were resting before the sleepless night, because the baby often cried between three and five in the morning. The kitchen was strewn with drying diapers. Pulcheria invited the guest into her neat little room, which was furnished with shabby but genuine antiques: her grandmother’s little round table, and two bookcases with old books. The guest began looking through the books. Pulcheria brought some tea and fried potatoes; they ate in silence. The guest was absorbed in a book. He read a little longer, then got up to leave. They didn’t touch. After he left, Pulcheria took the book from the table and pressed it to her breast.