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

So here’s the setting: the sun, the sea, a new perm, and—attention everybody—she’s off to the fruit market with a pack of admirers representing every breed. At the head of the pack parades a tall one in a heavy wool suit, despite the heat (we nickname him Number One). He is followed by a potbelly in a shapeless tank top; next comes, incongruously, a skinny youth with hippie locks; and the procession is finished by a runt in a tracksuit—he’s obviously there for a drink. Our Carmen laughs shrilly, but not as shrilly or loudly as one would expect—her laugh is not the war cry of some neighborhood whore who invites all and sundry to her table; this Carmen laughs softly. She doesn’t want to collect every male in sight—she’s already got plenty; any more, and things could get out of hand. The tall one, in the meantime, maintains his position at the head of the pack. He’s the hungriest and toughest in her entourage, the alpha male with the most serious intentions.

Seriousness rules the ball—soon, the other suitors vanish, and Carmen and Number One are now seen together. Number One has changed his winter suit for a pair of sober gray shorts, which she must have selected for him here at the resort. Carmen and Number One walk about with dignity: she’s curbed her laughing; he carries her purse. They follow the resort’s regimen of eating breakfast at the dining hall, then taking in the sun on the beach, then visiting the produce market for fresh fruit.

On the crowded bus to the market they stand as a single unit, the top of Carmen’s head barely reaching Number One’s chin, even with her in those atrocious heels. She keeps looking up, not meeting his eye—the sign of a serious crush, by the way. Number One gazes abstractly over everyone’s heads, looking out for his little lady—and suddenly anyone can see these two are in love, that they have separated from the crowd. And so the crowd shuns them, spits them out. In this sweaty pell-mell they are marked, singled out, doomed.

Yes, it’s happened to them, the biggest misery of all—a doomed love. Both look sad, on the verge of tears.

In the elapsed days Carmen has mellowed and acquired a golden sheen. Her ridiculous curls have loosened up and lightened in the sun. Blond and delicate, no worse than any movie star, she seems lost, consumed by her doomed passion. Number One hasn’t changed, only darkened from the sun, like a workhorse in the summer that will lose its color in winter. But he, too, seems marked by the grief that shadows hopeless romance. He seems tense and steely, like someone facing the end point of his fall. What awaits them is worse than death. What awaits them is eternal separation.

Yet there they are, trying to dance, clutching each other to the beat of that summer’s pop anthem. Her purse is still bouncing on his arm. A few days remain. At the beach they walk away from the crowd, from cots and umbrellas sunk into the sand, and disappear in the sunlight.

The new season has begun. The beach is crowded with shapeless white bodies and smug new faces. Our golden couple has departed. The delicate Carmen and her faithful husband, Number One, are jetting through the frozen air away from each other, back to their children and spouses, back to the cold, and to hard, grim work.

She’ll wait for his long-distance call in a phone booth at the post office. For ten prepaid minutes they’ll become one soul again, as they did over the twenty-four prepaid days of their vacation. They’ll shout and cry across thousands of miles, deceived by the promise of eternal summer, seduced and abandoned.

A.A., a schoolteacher in a provincial town, decided to spend his summer vacation near a lake and woods, not far from where he lived. He rented a screened porch in a cabin (he couldn’t afford a whole cabin) and began to live there very quietly. He left in the morning with a backpack and returned late at night; he never asked for anything and refused offers of dinner leftovers, to the chagrin of his landlady, who had planned to charge him for food or, at least, for the use of a hot plate.

A.A.’s search for privacy and independence didn’t take into account a certain Aunt Alevtina, a resident of Moscow and his landlady’s distant relative. Alevtina visited the cabin every summer. She’d stay two weeks and leave in a van loaded with fresh preserves. She lived in a small room in the landlady’s shed, a room she had equipped with a small television and refrigerator. She paid the electric bill by a separate meter at the end of her stay. Again, the landlady was left without a profit, although, to be fair, her grandkids did stay with Aunt Alevtina in Moscow over Christmas holidays and got to see the Kremlin.

On the night of Alevtina’s arrival, the landlady was boiling a samovar on pinecones. She opened the conversation with complaints about her miserly tenant. “Stingy like you wouldn’t believe: first thing he tells me is he isn’t going to use any power! Unmarried, too.”

“Huh?”

“I said unmarried . Thirty-five years old. Not a crumb on his porch. What does he eat?”

“Maybe he catches the bus to town, goes to the cafeteria there.”

“Ha! The bus doesn’t stop here most of the time…. Well, so how about my black currant—will you buy any this year?”

“Only if the berries are large.”

“Large! After all the work, all the watering…”

And the irritated landlady went on to recite the virtues of her black currant, hungry for a deal. Alevtina, rumor had it, lived in Moscow in great comfort and even wealth. At the thought of Alevtina’s riches, the landlady wanted to boast; she mentioned two magnificent apartments she’d given to her daughters and their worthless husbands when her old house was demolished. One husband was a policeman, the other a fireman at a factory; he worked one day and slept two, but try to get him to fix the roof and he’s too busy watching soap operas. His brats are shipped to Grandma’s every summer, and she’s expected to provide all the meals, and so forth.

At this moment, A.A. slipped through the gate and climbed onto his porch. He reappeared with two buckets, filled them with water from the well, and began washing himself down to the waist. The two Penelopes watched him over their teacups.

“Alexeich,” the landlady called out with dignity, although a bit uncertainly. “I say, help yourself to what fruit’s on the ground.”

“Excuse me?” The teacher quickly retreated and disappeared.

Alevtina giggled, but the landlady, undaunted by the teacher’s clever escape, pressed her point loudly.

“Thirty-five, like I said, and nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“Well, you know, a waste… of goods.”

“What goods?” pretended Alevtina. In fact, from the moment the landlady mentioned A.A. she’d been poring over all those women she knew in Moscow who were withering from drudgery and loneliness, while right here was a healthy specimen with four limbs who didn’t stammer and was mentally stable (with some luck).

“You don’t think he has a lady friend in Komarovka, eh?” Alevtina asked.

“How would I know?” the landlady croaked, and then stood up to go to bed early because, she explained importantly, she was allergic to the sun and got up to pee at four. She relieved herself under the berry bushes, “for fertilizer,” and shuffled inside.

Little stars sprinkled across the darkening sky. Alevtina sighed deeply in the direction of the porch. Nina, that’s who he needs. Thirty-seven years old, a pharmacist, mother died recently, lives in a studio on the outskirts. Her few admirers had been shooed off by the old witch, who had been correct: where would the newlyweds sleep—under mama’s bed? (Nina’s mom was a distant relative of Alevtina’s husband.) Well, well, hummed Alevtina. She held her breath and waited. The unborn child also waited in the dark. Nothing stirred. Black silhouettes of the apple trees loomed in the twilight. The warm air smelled of phloxes.