There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby (21 page)

It also said that Marilena was leaving the circus to pursue a new life, since she can no longer lift heavy things or eat whole lambs, and is no longer in fact the world’s strongest woman nor the champion of the islands of Fuji-Wuji.

But now she’s bought herself a dieting clinic and an institute for herbal remedies and appointed her husband, Vladimir, as director—they’d been married long ago, according to the paper, but kept it secret, because a great artist can’t belong to just one person; she belongs to everyone.

Moreover, the new Marilena has opened a museum of the old, fat Marilena, where the fat strongwoman’s old things will be displayed, including her underwear and photos of her with her husband, Vladimir.

The newspaper also printed photos of the gradual transformation of the old fat Marilena into the new Marilena, although this was obviously a fake and a cheat, as both Maria and Lena well knew. But what can’t you do with photos these days!

Here, too, there was an interview with Vladimir in the
family car, a Rolls-Royce, King-Sized (the king size was made special for the old Marilena, but they couldn’t just throw away a perfectly good car, could they?), in front of a new palace and in front of the very clinic the sisters had escaped from that night.

“He set everything up so well,” Maria said.

“It’s good we never told him about the dances!” Lena said. “That’s thanks to you—you were afraid of what he’d do if he found out he had two fiancées.”

They were quiet for a moment, standing in the dark train station.

“So what do we do now?” asked Lena.

“We dance,” said Maria.

“Of course! Remember the old rule? In any predicament, one must dance!”

They assumed the first position and, quietly invoking the magic phrase, “one-two-three, one-two-three-four,” began to perform their steps.

Immediately around them formed a small circle of bums, station workers, and sleepy late-departing passengers with their suitcases and children. Everyone clapped in delight and threw some very small coins to show their appreciation (rich people don’t sit in train stations at night).

The ballerinas gathered the money quickly, knowing that wherever there’s a crowd there will soon be policemen with their nightsticks, and departed from their temporary stage. They bought tickets for the next train and left this terrible town where they’d had so many adventures because of their talent and beauty.

A year later, the LenMary sisters were famous in the next town over for their wonderful dance performances in the most expensive theater, and now they were accompanied everywhere by their own bodyguard, a frail old man in a general’s uniform (generals are more feared, for some reason), and they had a house on the sea and contracts to visit all the countries of the world, including the obscure islands of Fuji-Wuji.

Among their audience, incidentally, you can quite often meet the wizard, who sends them flowers, emerald crowns, and fans made from peacock feathers—he has strange tastes. He’s also afraid of the sisters and their unseen protector, the Fairy Butterbread, since she was able to defeat his own powerful spell.

Now he enjoys loving from afar, in secret and out of harm’s way.

Especially as the unknown and fearsome Butterbread might still punish him for his little tricks of long ago.

Strangely enough, the sisters also often receive love letters from a man named Vladimir.

He writes to say that he’s loved Maria and Lena ever since he first saw them, and he doesn’t even know how to choose one over the other, and so is willing to marry each of them in turn.

In the meantime, he writes, he has found himself in some financial difficulties, having been robbed by his cruel wife Marilena, who somehow put all of their shared property in
her own name and then ran off to who knows where. Meanwhile the clinic that he, Vladimir, headed has been infected by dysentery, and the government forced him to burn the whole thing down! So for the time being Vladimir asks for a temporary loan of just thirty million, with a payback period of forty-nine years.

These letters are always accompanied by photos of Vladimir in his swimsuit, in a tuxedo at a fancy ball, in a turtleneck reading a book, and in a leather coat and hat next to the smoking ruins of his clinic, with a rueful smile on his pale face.

The sisters, it’s true, never read these letters. They are read in his free time—and with great interest—by the old general, who then files them into a folder, affixes a number, and places it on a shelf, hoping that someday he will be able to retire and in his retirement write a novel, with photographs, about the surprising power of the love of one young man, V.
The Sorrows of Young V.,
it will be called.

THERE ONCE LIVED AN OLD MONK WHO CLIMBED UP TO HIS mountain monastery with a small box of donations.

Things were not going well at the monastery, which was far away from all the roads. The monks had to fetch their water from a stream deep in the canyon, and their meals consisted of scraps of bread and dried pancakes, which they collected as donations in the godless villages nearby. The monks gathered wild fruits and nuts in the forest, as well as berries and roots, and they also looked for honey and mushrooms—they ate those, too.

It was useless, in those parts, for the monks to try to keep a vegetable garden: during harvesttime someone would come along at night with a shovel and make off with everything. Those were the ways of the area, unfortunately.

Because of this, the peasants in the nearby towns were extremely unkind to strangers and beggars. They guarded their little plots with rifles in hand, the entire family taking shifts. They buried extra vegetables underground in the basement.

The impoverished monastery, on the other hand, stood unguarded in the forest. It was a popular target for local kids who needed money for vodka. Eventually the monks learned to do with the absolute bare minimum—tin cans for boiling water in, some straw to sleep on, old sacks for blankets. As for the honey and berries, which could after all be stolen, they hid them in the forest, in the hollows of trees, like squirrels.

They used kindling for heat, since even their ax and saw had been stolen from them.

Then again, that was the monks’ vow, wasn’t it—to work only with what God had given them, to work only for Him, and to make do with the same food as rabbits and squirrels.

They ate neither fish nor fowl, and each day of this existence they blessed.

But they did sometimes need a little bit of money to buy candles, and oil for their homemade tin burners, and to fix the roof, for example, or to help really and truly poor people buy some medicine.

Their icons had all been stolen, so the monks painted the walls of the monastery themselves—in fact they did this so beautifully that people tried to get in and cut these paintings out of the walls. But that didn’t work. You needed real museum training to extract a painting from a wall, and since when did thieves work hard and master a craft?

During winter, the monastery was freezing. There wasn’t enough kindling to heat the space, and the monks refused to break branches off living trees. But cold and hunger are hardly problems for a monk—in fact they’re blessings, and, what’s more, during the winter months the monastery got a break
from being robbed. Who’s going to drag himself through the hills and snow to break into a frozen monastery—even though every morning the monks rang, not a bell, because the bell had been stolen and sold for its metal, but an iron crossbeam.

It was an ancient crossbeam—the old bell had hung from it—and the hardworking local thieves, try as they might, weren’t able to bring it down.

The monks rang their crossbeam with a secret metal crowbar they had. It was the only defense they kept on hand to fend off wild animals, say, or to break through the ice for water when their stream froze, or to beat a path through the forest.

And it’s not like the local thieves really cared that much about this piece of secret scrap metal—who’d want to drag it through the forest, for one thing, and for another it wouldn’t fetch more than a few kopeks at the market anyway.

And so every morning the people in the surrounding villages could hear the melancholy sound of the metal crowbar against the old crossbeam. Of course no one was so stupid as to heed the call and come there for prayer.

Who calls a doctor to heal a healthy person? Who fixes what isn’t broken? Why run off to pray to God when everything is fine?

Baptisms and burials—those were sacred, sure. But no one was about to knock their foreheads against the cold floor and wave their arms about—with the exception of a dozen deaf old ladies and a few God-fearing women who apparently had nothing better to do. Once in a while the monastery
would also receive visitors who were in mourning—but mourning is something that passes; one day you look and the person is fine again.

But the monks themselves prayed. They prayed for the entire population of the surrounding villages, prayed that they be forgiven for their sins.

The monks lived peacefully and happily, in silence, and the head monk, old Trifon, was sad only that his days were coming to an end and that there was no one to replace him. None of the other monks really wanted to be in charge—they all considered themselves unworthy, and in fact condemned the very thought of having authority over others.

Old Trifon talked to God constantly, without interruption; there was no one to distract him from this task, except during holidays.

The local population adored holidays. They’d all get together, bring wine and snacks, and come to the forest for a big party. The monks always spent a long time afterward cleaning up.

Weddings and funerals and baptisms were also traditionally held at the monastery.

But no one liked dragging themselves all the way out there, so for a long time now everyone had been talking about opening a branch of the monastery in the central village, so they could hold their wakes and marriages and baptisms at a more convenient location. They could just build a chapel, really, and that would be that.

Unfortunately, such an undertaking would require money, and spending money, especially collectively, was something the local people didn’t especially like. Whenever money was collected for such projects, it would be stolen before it could be spent. So sometimes they called old Trifon into town, and he would bury someone, and baptize someone else, and then go around the village to raise a little money for the monastery.

People gave money to the old monk grudgingly, suspecting him of trying to grow rich off the work of others, as they themselves would try.

It couldn’t be said that the people of the valley were doing badly. There hadn’t been any wars recently, or fires, or floods, droughts, famines. The livestock multiplied, their little plots gave plentiful harvests, and their wine barrels were never empty. You might even say that prosperity had reached the valley.

On the other hand, it couldn’t be said that all was well with the ways of the people. For example, they didn’t like the sick, and considered them parasites. This was especially the case if the sick person was not one of their own—if it was a neighbor, say, or a distant cousin.

If the sick person was part of the family, he’d be tolerated. But medicine cost money, and the doctor also wanted to be paid . . . so for the most part they treated the sick with the ancient folk methods, drawing some blood, then off to the steam room for a good steaming. Either that or they’d just take them into the forest and leave them there. It was thought that whoever died in the forest would go straight to heaven.

The monks would visit these dying people in the forest and bring them back to the monastery if they could. But what could the monks do for them there? They’d give them some hot water with dried berries and a teaspoon of honey.

The people down below, in the villages, didn’t approve of this. It was difficult for a healthy peasant to imagine that someday he too would have to lie down on the moss in the woods and wait for death.