There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In (6 page)

So my two darlings were having a reunion in our filthy kitchen, and I wasn’t a part of it.

“Andrey,” I said, “I object to his registration here. And she, in return, objects to
your
registration.”

Oh, the power of words. The reunion was over.

Andrey was shocked. “You do? How can you?”

“Don’t worry, it’s just a form of protest against her. You know how we live here, like bulls in the ring.”

The young parents drooped like wilted flowers and slinked into their room. Andrey resumed eating. I perched opposite him.

“Andrey!”

“Mama!”

“Two minutes, Andrey. It’s serious. She wants to register him in our apartment. If she does, he can get a room later, through the courts. That’s all he wants, that bastard. She’s just a springboard for him, nothing more.”

“He’s got his looks going for him.” (Strange laughter.)

“That he does. He could have anyone—and he will! If it were not for my witnesses . . . But never mind. He’ll get something off her—a Moscow registration, at least—and then he’ll leave her!”

I was speaking loudly, for I was right. Everything happened exactly as I predicted. But to prove it! To prove it took a lot of effort. For he became attached to Tima, took pride in him, took him for walks, showed him off to their hungry so-called guests. How complicated everything was.

And me? I was left with nothing.

“Keep it in mind,” I said to Alena one night, “your husband has the makings of a pedophile. He loves the boy.”

Her jaw dropped.

“He loves the boy, not you,” I explained. “It’s unnatural.”

She laughed with relief, even though a moment ago she was crying—it was eleven, and the dud wasn’t home yet. She grabbed the phone and dragged it to her room, leaving the door half open. I was the favorite subject of her conversations, endless like winter evenings.

But how old was I then? I was only fifty. Andrey was twenty, Alena nineteen. I had two of them in two years. I had just been fired from the paper for having an affair with a married poet, the father of three children, whom I had every intention of raising myself, stupid idiot. Naturally the wife went to the editor in chief to complain, and almost immediately they received a long-promised three-room apartment. Until then they had all lived in a single room, including his mother-in-law, and he would work in my room, while my own mother loudly berated him for taking advantage of me. . . . So I resigned and joined a remote archaeological dig, just to get away, and the result was Andrey and Alena. We lived four of us in my room, with my mother behind the wall, while a divorce drama unfolded in my husband’s hometown. Then his wife decided to pay us a visit. The doorbell rang; I opened the door, heavily pregnant; and there they were, the wife and his teenage son. Next, the wife smashed the window, slashed her wrists with a shard, my husband tried to grab her, the son squealed, “Don’t touch my mama.” My mother rushed over with some gauze, then took them to her room to revive them with tea. . . . It was actually a stroke of luck, the wife’s visit. Between us things were deteriorating rapidly: he missed his son, worried about finding work in Moscow, chafed under alimony and child support, and plus there was my swelling belly. But then she shook everything up. Women like her, with an instinct for destruction, they create a lot in the end. I’m one of them, alas.

•   •   •

It all seems like yesterday. I look back on my life—men are like road signs; children mark chronology. Not very attractive, I know, but what is, if you look closely? To Alena, I know, my habits, my verbal expressions are deeply distasteful. Especially the question “Is he good looking?” which I used on the rare occasions when she’d open up about her best friend Lenka’s admirers; that was back when she was in eighth grade. All I meant was who in their right mind would approach that Lenka of hers, who at fourteen smelled like army barracks, wore size-ten shoes, and sported a mustache? My Alena (all girls born that year were Elenas in different variations; this year they are all Katyas) was head over heels for that girl, and strained as our relationship was, I was occasionally treated to a breathless rendition of Lenka’s adventures. Until, that is, my inevitable question: Is he good looking?

“Mama! What does that have to do with anything?”

“Well, I just mean that he should, at least, be good looking.”

“Huh?”

“Well, it would be a miracle if he was, for who’d want to look twice at an elephant like her?”

“Mama! It’s me no one ever looks at.”

The classic abandoned-wife complex, common to girls from fatherless families.

“It’s true, Mama! Last summer, at the beach, all the Georgians courted her and thought she was eighteen!”

“You’re kidding. Eighteen, not thirty?”

“Mama, you make everything sound so vulgar!”

“That’s why I’m asking. Lenka’s admirer—
he
isn’t a Georgian, is he?”

“Just leave me alone,” she pleaded, almost crying.

The reason for all this talk was that it was as clear as day that horrible Lenka wasn’t worth my daughter’s little finger. My little beauty, my warm little nest, who was my consolation when Andrey was wreaking havoc as a teenager. She was nine when her father left; my mother did him in with her nagging. On another dig, he picked up someone else in the same way he picked me up, only this time both children were with him. When they came back Alena confided that everyone loved them so much there, so very much; one woman, Lera, literally cried the last night when they were leaving!

After a month of tense, pimple-producing, long-distance negotiations, my husband left for Krasnodar, and for Lera the crier, in whose studio apartment he is currently living with a stepson plus a blind mother-in-law, so my children don’t get invited. As for archaeology, he now travels to digs in Rwanda and Burundi, but Africa is full of AIDS, and there is every reason not to romanticize these trips. As for my mother, she considered our papa a conniving hanger-on and a leech, among other things. How she celebrated when he came for the last time to get his things! How she never passed up the opportunity to remind me that she had told me so! How sweet she was with me, this toothless cobra, who now cries on her pillow and gulps down her food.

I began receiving child support—all of forty rubles. I worked: they let me help out in the poetry department, reading and responding to submissions—a certain Burkin threw me a crumb, a kindly man with permanently shaky hands and cheeks swollen so badly I suspected double inflammation of the gums. A ruble a letter—sometimes I sent off as many as sixty letters a month; plus two of my poems would be published—that was another eighteen rubles.

And this is the consolation my daughter offered when the door closed for the last time behind my husband, and I stood with a burning face and dry eyes, contemplating jumping out the window to greet him outside with my corpse. Mommy, she asked, do I love you? Yes, I told her, you do.

•   •   •

My princess, whose every toe I’d washed and kissed. I adored her curls, her enormous blue eyes—where did her looks go?—which exuded such kindness, such affection, such innocence—all for me, for me alone. All this, all this tenderness was taken from me and thrown at the feet of the horrendous Lenka. Day and night she thought only of Lenka and her demands. Andrey and Alena pummeled each other because Andrey needed to make a call while Alena was waiting for that brat to call—hoping, that is, that she’d call, to tell her if anything was happening, if they were going anywhere, if they had been invited to anyone’s birthday party.

My children fought each other tooth and nail—another cute detail of our family life. Only at night could I experience the joy of motherhood. I’d creep over to their beds and listen to their breathing, inhale their scent, adore them in silence.

My darlings, my soft ones:

Rest awhile, don’t stir.

Your mother is with you,

You are always with her.

They didn’t need my love. Without my care they’d perish within hours, but I was a nuisance.
Paradosk
, as my subliterate neighbor Niura likes to say.

Andrey played soccer and hockey; by ninth grade he had more scars than a feral cat. Other boys would carry him home—unconscious, because local ladies had decided to dig up the lawn and plant carrots, and then fenced off their orchard with invisible wire right at the height of a child’s throat. Another time some little angels decided it would be fun to throw a handmade knife, and they threw it right into Andrey’s foot. This was after my husband had disappeared in the direction of Krasnodar, and I had a friend over—A.Y., a very attractive man, although a married alcoholic, whose wife regarded me in only one sense—as all wives always. So this A.Y., on seeing Andrey spouting blood all over the stairs (I later washed it off, with my tears), asked him, “What’s that, old man, a battle wound?” When, six years later, Andrey didn’t come home until two in the morning, and my mother screamed, “Go back where you came from!” and whacked him with a chair, something happened to my heart, I couldn’t breathe. In the morning I called A.Y., to ask for advice. “To be on a safe side, call the ambulance, Andrianovna,” he told me in the cheerful voice he always used between binges. “But remember, women rarely have heart attacks.” This only proved that while recovering from his own heart attack A.Y. never looked into the women’s ward. Then he asked Andrey’s age. “So you expect him to jump up from a woman’s bed screaming, ‘Mommy expects me at ten’? I was going to become a father at fifteen, and this one is already sixteen!”

•   •   •

The time is night.

My squawking angel is finally asleep, arms akimbo on the pillow. I’m alone with my scraps of paper and a pencil—pens are beyond my means. Everything is beyond my means now, thanks to Andrey, who has taken me for everything this time. This time wasn’t like his previous robberies, when he tried to break down my door and in the end set my mailbox on fire. He was demanding a huge amount, twenty-five rubles, for what he considered his room, and calling me horrible names, the most obscene in the Russian language. I huddled over trembling Tima, covering his ears. Luckily Andrey is a coward, and he left when I yelled that I was calling the police.

My poor son, he can’t believe I’m capable of calling the cops on him. He has never recovered after the prison, never come back as a human being. Instead he lives off his so-called friends, those boys he saved with his sentence. Some time ago I received a call from the completely crazy mom of one of the eight friends, Andrey’s potential codefendants.

“Is this the apartment of such and such? Hello? Does Andrey such and such live here?”

“Nope. Who’s asking?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

Good-bye, then. But no.

“Where can I find him? Hello? I’ve tried calling the building where he works.”

Persistent hag!

“He now works at a ministry.” Let her call human resources at every ministry in town.

“Can I have the number?”

“It’s classified.”

“This is the mother of his comrade Ivan. When I was out, Andrey stole Ivan’s new leather jacket! Hello?”

“I’d advise you to search your son’s room. By the way, how come he’s not in jail? I’ve heard Alesha K.’s case is being retried.” This Ivan of hers is still wearing the sweater I bought for Andrey’s birthday with the last of my money. “By the way,” I added, “could Ivan compensate me for the things he stole from me?”

Click.

To grovel, to pray

At the feet of a son

Who returned from the dead:

May he stay. May he stay.

Back from prison that day, Andrey was in our kitchen eating my herring, my potatoes, my bread, himself made with my blood and marrow, yellow and emaciated, terribly tired. I said nothing. “Go take a shower” was hanging on my lips. (Since childhood it has made him feel disgust and humiliation—for what was he worth, dirty and sweaty, compared to me, always clean, who showered twice a day, thank God for the free hot water?)

“I need money.”

“What money? I’m feeding three people! And I’m the fourth!”

(Behind a floor molding in my room I had stashed my mother’s insurance plus an honorarium for five translations from unknown languages, work that came my way after I dumped my tragic story—son coming out from jail, daughter pregnant, unmarried—on every editor in town.)

“Why don’t you take a shower? Want me to run you a bath?”

He stared at my collarbones.

“I bought you some jeans, Soviet made, don’t laugh—and a pair of canvas shoes. Go change, but first take a shower.”

“I’m fine like this. Just give me money.”

“And how much do you need?”

“Fifty. For now.”

“Are you off your rocker? Look! All I have is five rubles.”

“Then I’ll go and kill someone.”

“Andrey.” My beautiful daughter stood in the doorway. “Come. Shura received his stipend yesterday. This one will choke first.” Andrey stomped away with the fifty rubles and didn’t come back for two days. When he was gone, our patrolman came asking for him and warned us not to register him. Alena and I panicked and agreed to register both Andrey and her Provinces. Swapped prisoners, so to say.

When Andrey returned he was dressed in a new denim suit and accompanied by two young ladies of such appearance that I gasped for air. Alena took one look at them and quickly retreated into her sweet-smelling nest. The three visitors marched into my room, locked the door, and stayed there for an hour. I knocked and pleaded that I needed my things; all I could think about was my stash behind the molding. When the door finally opened, I met Andrey with my hand outstretched. “Fifty rubles, please.”

“What the . . .”

“I reimbursed them.”

He was going through the contents of my wardrobe. The sluts were waiting.

“I’ve packed your things. The suitcase is over there.”

Where did you go, my silky baby boy who smelled of phlox and wild chamomile?