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

Sobered and grim, mother and father looked back on their few minutes of half-naked passion on the cramped kitchen sofa, that sinful, impure moment when their child was conceived. What will become of him? the poor parents asked themselves as they disciplined little Egor, who always smiled and gave away his possessions and longed for friendship and kisses and hugs. After punishments he often cried in his little room and then threw himself on the necks of his only family, his only loved ones, his two grave deities—Papa and Mama. He’d weep and forgive, while they froze in a grim foreboding.

Where do you live, light-footed Tanya? In what little apartment with white curtains have you built a nest for yourself and your little ones? Quick and resourceful, you find time for everything, and fear of tomorrow never disturbs your sleep.

In what pits of misery this miracle of efficiency grew, this oldest girl in a family of many daughters and a single boy, whom Tanya’s mother carried at her breast to the final days of her marriage when she would run after her husband almost every morning to prevent him from escaping to his so-called job? Tanya’s mother was filled with despair; again he was escaping her clutches. She gathered her last reserves of strength and chased him with the baby in her arms just to knock the cap off his head with her free hand—all this in view of the neighbors, other military families, who had witnessed dozens of such scenes.

The mother was sick with hatred for her husband, for that scoundrel who betrayed the family daily. Every night he returned home to rock the youngest child, but even this innocent gesture she interpreted as an admission of guilt, a sham confirmation of his fatherhood to which, she felt, he had no right. They almost tore the baby in half. The children seemed little more than material evidence of her suffering and inhuman labor, which her husband daily trampled into dirt. During her ravings he shook with fear that the neighbors would hear, but the neighbors in that small military town had long been aware. She had told them everything, and how the wives pitied her, called her intimately Petrovna and advised her to go to his Party supervisor since things were so bad.

Still the father stayed, came home every night with peaceful intentions and a blithe expression on his face, always at eleven sharp, never earlier; he had never in his life come home earlier—it was his ironclad rule. And every night he found the same tableau: none of the children was asleep; his tearful wife was sitting up in bed, the youngest at her breast. If the father attempted to put the kids to bed in his gentle way, Tanya’s mother pulled them away, screaming that no one was going to sleep, since that was what he wanted. Let everyone admire their so-called father—fresh from somebody’s bed where he was kissing God knows what with his filthy mouth, and now he wanted to kiss his innocent daughters and jump into their beds, and so on.

The squalor of that household was beyond description, because the mother did her housework sloppily, saving her energy for the high point of her day: for eleven at night, which bled into midnight and later, so the children got no sleep and couldn’t get up in the morning for school. The mother went further in her sacred rage, appearing at the officers’ mess with the little one and kicking her husband as he walked out the door, as if to disprove the conventional wisdom that such methods never brought anyone’s husband back (quite the opposite). Leaving behind her children unfed, she’d chase her husband through town, screaming the most horrible things—that, say, she had found bloody rags tucked in a hole in the wall and that Tanya had had a miscarriage by her father.

No one understood what Tanya’s mother was hoping to achieve with these displays; possibly all she really wanted was to shatter the illusion her husband had been trying to create for the children’s sake, with his nonchalance and conciliatory manner. Of course the mother knew that people had sympathy for her husband and wanted to protect him from her. Once, someone warned him that she was on her way to the store, where she knew he would be buying small presents for her and the girls (it was Women’s Day, when even little girls expected at least a flower from their fathers), and he managed to escape through the back door.

Despite all this ugliness, a baby was born almost every year, and the last one, the only boy, was born just six months before the father finally left. What inspired their conjugal embraces, how and when father and mother became one, was a mystery to everyone—even to the smartest in the family, Tanya, who watched her parents closely.

The mother wouldn’t give up her attempts to humiliate her husband, and she sank deeper and deeper into shame while he maintained some semblance of family cohesion at all costs and refused to be kicked out on her terms. Eventually the least determined combatant stopped caring about the outcome of this endless rout and walked away, exhausted. Tanya’s father was transferred to another garrison, with damage, it was whispered, to his career. So he had every reason not to show his face to his long-suffering family. He settled in a new place with some woman who was said to be much more common than Petrovna.

Tanya stayed at home one more year, until she turned seventeen. Then she was noticed by Victor, an electrician in town on a temporary contract, who saw right away what treasure had fallen into his hands. The first night, on the way back from the dance hall, she agreed to move away with him, and the following morning they left, even though the mother had told her she couldn’t cope without Tanya and that the children would suffer. “Enough,” Tanya (reportedly) said. “I’ve had enough.” And she set off with her older (twenty-four-year-old) electrician and never once looked back.

Everything that happened to her afterward—homelessness, then a landlady who drank nothing but kefir and tried to hang herself every March but was rescued by her son—all this adversity she considered happiness, and not a shadow of doubt or despair ever touched her.

What terrible fits she threw, this proud fighter for love! It’s incredible what she went through. Take, for example, her departing husband’s good-bye punch that knocked one of her front teeth inward (they managed to pull it back out). Take her children: the daughter would hang up after ten seconds of Dasha’s sobbing; the son, well, he had to stay with her, with his mother—there was nowhere to go. They survived in her moldy shack outside the city, the mother and her young son. The boy went to the village school; they bought their groceries at the understocked local store: potato chips, ice cream, and frozen pizza, on occasion bread and butter—there was nothing more on offer. That’s where she and her son stayed year-round except for the time she chased her lover, the light of her life, who happened to be a most ordinary man—stingy and not particularly young. She shaved her head from all the stress, but everything looked becoming on her: her permanent fatigue and near emaciation, her cracked lips, shaved head, dilated eyes.

Until recently Alyosha’s life had been well and good. He had a wife, who was a foreign national, a son in college, a pleasant apartment in a comfortable European country, a summerhouse in Lithuania, and, in addition to all that, any number of quick liaisons during business trips. (His fling with Dasha began with a quick roll on a hotel bed during one such trip.) Then, the following summer, his company sent him to Moscow on a long assignment and rented him an apartment. That was where Dasha visited him, leaving her young son alone in the shack. During Dasha’s absences the boy subsisted on ice cream and frozen pizza, which he and his village friends would try to heat up on his father’s old grill. Dasha didn’t mind; on the contrary, she was proud of her son’s resourcefulness. (Here are some potatoes for you, Son; try to cook them as well!) On each of her passionate visits, however, Dasha had to roll out of bed in time to catch the last train back to the shack. How the two lovers howled and wept at those partings!