My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (7 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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Baba Anya’s tattered fence was filled with gaps, and you could see the house clearly from here. Now there were no curtains in the windows! Olga felt an ice-like fear, the dark fear of a healthy person before insanity—the sort of insanity that can tear all the curtains from the four windows in seven or eight minutes.
Still, Baba Anya needed to be fed or at least given something to drink. She’d call the doctors, lock the house, find Marina somehow, or Svetlana, or Dmitry Fedosev. As for who should live here—the homeless Sveta, the heir, who’ll drink away the house in the blink of an eye, or poor homeless Marina—wasn’t for us to decide. Or she’d take Marina herself! That’s what she’d do, now that she was involved in this business. You wanted to leave your life, well, now you’ve left it and ended up in someone else’s. No place in the world is free of lonely souls in need of help. Seryozha and Nastya will be against it; Seryozha won’t say anything; Nastya will say, That’s interesting, Mom, as if we didn’t know already you were koo-koo. And her mother will of course cause a terrific scandal over the phone.
Olga stood there thinking all this over, with difficulty, knowing that she should keep going, but her legs had filled with lead, they refused to take orders, didn’t want to carry three liters of ice-cold water to the pillaged house of the crazy old woman, didn’t want to experience more hardship in this life. The sharp wind howled up the hill where Olga stood, frozen, a mother and wife, standing there like a homeless woman, like a pauper, with her only worldly possession at her feet in the form of a three-liter tin can filled with water. The sharp wind blew, the black skeletons of the trees screeched, and the fresh watermelon smell of winter appeared. It was cold, bitter, it was getting dark quickly, and she immediately wanted to transport herself home, to her warm, slightly drunken Seryozha, her living Nastya, who must have woken up by now, must be lying there in her nightshirt and robe, watching television, eating chips, drinking Coca-Cola and calling up her friends. Seryozha will be going to visit his old school friend now. They’ll have some drinks. It was the usual Sunday program, so let it be. In a clean, warm, ordinary house. Without any problems.
Olga took the can in both hands and carried it down to Baba Anya, but slipped and fell on the clay, spilling half the water on herself. Oh, God! Her legs were hurting now for real.
But Baba Anya’s door was locked, and no one opened even though she kicked at the door with her sick legs and yelled like a woman possessed.
Someone above her noted, very clearly, very quickly: “She’s yelling.”
But Olga knew another way into the house, through the ladder into the attic, and there through the chute, along the steps in the wall, you could make your way down to the terrace—they’d climbed into the house that way more than once, she and Seryozha, late at night, when they couldn’t find the keys.
Olga left the can at the door.
Baba Anya was sitting inside that house, insane, without water, and there’s no way she’d be able to take the food out of the fastened backpack, not in the mindless state she was in. How quickly it can happen to you, when you lose everything, and the intelligent, kind, wonderful human turns into a wary silly little animal . . .
With some difficulty Olga got the ladder out from under the house, placed it against the wall, climbed up the rickety rungs, the third one gave way and she fell, hurting her legs again (were they broken?). Moaning, she kept climbing, got up on the roof after all, managed to injure her hands, too, and her side was now in pain, and her head, and once again, for a moment, this great white space opened before her, but that was nothing, it disappeared right away, and then she barely dragged herself along the dusty attic, made it down to the terrace—the tortuous unbearable journey. And then the door from the terrace turned out to be locked, too. Apparently Baba Anya had thought of this, and put it on a hook, for fear of thieves.
All right.
Olga broke into tears and began banging on the door with her fists, yelling: “Anna Sergeevna! Hello! It’s me, Olga! Let me in!”
She stood and listened for a moment—there was nothing—just a distant sound like some earth trickling down in a little stream.
“All right,” Olga said finally. “I’m leaving. The water is in a can next to the door. There is bread and cheese in the big pocket of the backpack, at the front. The salami is there, too.”
The way back up the wall was even harder than the way down, her hands wouldn’t listen to her at all as she took hold of the notches, and Olga descended the ladder already in a state of half-madness, somehow avoiding the broken third rung. The white light shone in places through the twilight, the white light of unconsciousness.
When she made it to the station, she sat down on an ice-cold bench. It was so cold, her legs were frozen and ached terribly as if they’d been crushed. The train was a long time in coming. Olga curled up on the icy bench. Trains kept passing by the station, she was the only one on the platform. Now it had gotten dark for real.
And then Olga woke up on some kind of bed. Once again there opened before her (there it is!) that endless white space, as if she were surrounded by snow. Olga moaned and turned her gaze to the horizon. There she saw a window, half obstructed by a blue curtain. Outside the window it was night, and lights shone far away. Olga lay in a vast dark room with white walls; her covers were weighing her down like rubble. She couldn’t raise her right arm, it was pressed down by some kind of weight. She raised her left hand and began examining it; it was so pale as to be almost transparent. There was a large dark scratch on her pointing finger—from where she’d picked up the brick at Baba Anya’s house. But the wound was almost healed.
“Where am I?” Olga asked loudly. “Hey! Hello! Baba Anya!”
She tried to raise herself up—without any success. Her legs hurt fiercely, that much was certain. And a pain was cutting into her lower abdomen.
There was no one around.
Finally she managed to raise herself up, leaning on her right arm, and look around.
She was lying on a bed; a semitransparent tube was protruding from this bed.
A catheter! They’d put a catheter into her! Like they’d put one into her dying grandmother long ago, in the hospital. And this was a hospital. Nearby there was another bed with an inert mass of white in it.
“Hello! Oy! Help!” Olga called out. “Help Baba Anya! And Marina Fedoseva! Help them!”
The mass of white in the next bed started moving.
A nurse who’d just woken up walked into the room in her white robe.
“What are you yelling for?” she said. “Quiet. You’ll wake everyone.”
“Where am I?” Olga cried. “Let me up! Marina Fedoseva, you need to find her. Let me up!”
“And you will be up and about, you will. Now that you’ve . . . returned.” She left and came back with a big needle. While she received her shot, Olga was trying to remember, painfully.
“What’s wrong with me, nurse? Tell me.”
“What’s wrong is that your legs are broken, and your arm, and your pelvic bone. Lie still. Your husband will come tomorrow, and your mother, they’ll tell you everything. Also a concussion. It’s good you woke up. They’ve been coming here, waiting, and nothing. Can you feel your legs?”
“They hurt.”
“That’s good.”
“But where, where? What happened?”
“You got hit by a car, don’t you remember? Sleep now, sleep. You were hit by a car.”
Olga was amazed, she gasped, and once again she was knocking at Baba Anya’s door, trying to bring her water. It was a dark October evening, the windows in the cottage rattled from the wind, her tired legs hurt and so did her broken arm, but Baba Anya didn’t want to let her in, apparently. And then on the other side of the window she saw the worn-out faces of her loved ones, covered in tears—her mother, Seryozha, Nastya. And Olga kept trying to tell them to look for Marina Fedoseva, Marina Dmitrievna, Baba Anya’s Marina, something like that. Look for her, Olga said, look for her. And don’t cry. I’m here.
—Translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers
At the beginning of many Russian fairy tales, the hero or heroine sets out on a quest to recover a beloved person or a precious object that has been lost or stolen. The quest takes them to a bizarre distant land where they encounter the old witch who lives in a wooden hut. The witch, in exchange for help, demands in tribute a magical object, such as the Water of Life, which the traveler obtains at great risk.
In “I’m Here,” the heroine is a middle-aged woman, overwhelmed by domestic drudgery. Her great loss is a wasted life. Her quest is a one-day trip to the country in search of advice and consolation; the witch in a hut is her former landlady who occupies a shabby summer cottage. The heroine’s tribute to the witch is a can of plain water from a nearby well. The bizarre distant land is, in fact, the realm of the dead, to which the heroine travels in a moment of unconsciousness. Instead of lost treasure the heroine brings back information, true or not, that may save a child’s life.
Petrushevskaya disguises conventional plot elements with realistic detail and personal portraits: the impoverished Russian countryside; a desolate autumnal landscape; an alcoholic single mother and her wretched child. Petrushevskaya leaves it to the reader to decide whether the heroine’s entire quest was a hallucination—and which of the two worlds in the story is more real.
This story emerges from several traditional Slavic folktales—but especially the motifs of any tale with Ivan Tsarevich, or John the Prince, in it. The tsar’s third and youngest son, he appears in many Russian tales brought back to life from the dead. As a specter in the story, of course, we also have the figure of Baba Iaga, the witch whose house stands on chicken feet at the edge of the forest, and who likes to eat little children though she is perpetually thin.
—AS
ALISSA NUTTING
The Brother and the Bird
MARLENE’S MOTHER CLEANED CONSTANTLY, BLEARY-EYED IN MULTIPLE hairnets, on her vigilant search for the impure; as she walked she so often rolled an antiquated upright vacuum alongside her that it grew to seem like an exterior organ, an intravenous device that performed dialysis or another lifesaving function. Marlene had no memory of Mother’s bare hands, for they were always beneath thick, yellow kitchen gloves and had begun, as the years passed, to seem prosthetic. Fearful that dust might see her coming and scatter, Mother crept from one chore to another, hunched over, skulking around on the tips of her toes and raising each knee skyward with every step. What horrible shadows this cast upon the wall! Young Marlene would often shiver in bed and watch a ghastly outline bend steadily larger as Mother advanced down the hallway, the rubber gloves taking on the shape of oversized claws. Marlene’s fright and anticipation usually became so intense that she’d let out an audible gasp when Mother finally appeared in front of the bedroom door. Mother would stop, sniff. “Good girls are asleep by now,” she’d whisper, quiet enough to make Marlene wonder whether Mother even meant for this to be heard.
Father was friendlier, bear-like and aloof. When Marlene and Brother were little, they had delighted in running their fingers through the thick black curls on Father’s chest and back and riding him like an animal. He’d obligingly take to all fours and crawl around the yard, giving in to their wishes for a spirit of manufactured danger. “I’m going to eat you!” he’d eventually growl, and their cheeks would glow pink as pigs.

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