Read Online There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya - Free Book Online Page B

kitchen where Karpenko lived only by mistake, when she wandered the apartment on the verge of delirium tremens. At night the couple relaxed in the company of select neighbors. Their room filled up with the local elite—prominent alcoholics and their girlfriends in various stages of decline. The excluded spent the night banging on their broken-down door. These soirees invariably ended in fights that were occasionally interrupted by sleepy patrolmen.
    Every day, Karpenko scrubbed the toilet and the tub; she replaced the broken glass in the kitchen door with thick plywood. At night she stuffed her ears with soft wax, like Odysseus on his ship when he sailed past the sirens.
    Once, she dropped by the new theater dorms and left some fruit for the girls. Just in case, she also left her new address. Misha soon came to see her. She had nothing for him to eat beyond some potatoes and carrots, which she was allowed to bring home from the market where she worked. Misha stayed the night, but he couldn’t sleep because of the drunken screaming and banging; in the morning he scrambled away as soon as the subway started up. Karpenko, who hadn’t mentioned her pregnancy, didn’t expect him back.
    Three days later Misha reappeared with a keyboard: he had written a score to a musical. While he performed his score for Karpenko, the landlords and their visitors gathered outside the kitchen door and treated themselves to an impromptu dance party, obviously approving of Misha’s music. Karpenko, inspired, pulled out her most precious possession, an old typewriter, and wrote a play.
    At that time theaters were interested only in plays translated from Italian. Misha and Karpenko invented an author, “Alidada Nektolai, as translated from the Italian by U. Karpui.” Their cast included a philandering lawyer and his skinny wife; the wife’s girlfriend, who slept with the lawyer and was married to the mayor; the mayor and his mafia friends, named Kafka, Lorca, and Petrarch; and so on. The heroine was a beautiful aspiring singer named Gallina Bianca. Misha observed that Karpenko would never get the lead, and so they created a character for her, a television executive named Julietta Mamasina who spoke entirely in Elephant’s morning monologues.
    One day Elephant returned home covered in bruises and carrying a box of powdered milk that she’d discovered in an expensive supermarket’s Dumpster—the scene of many a fight over discarded goods. Pasha and Elephant sent a few packages to the market with Karpenko, but it seemed no one wanted to buy expired milk, and Elephant lost interest in the box. (Her guests did try to mix the powder with vodka, but the combination made them itchy.) The milk was left for the undernourished Karpenko, who added to her diet of raw carrots and beets, cottage cheese, and one boiled egg a serving of oatmeal cooked with milk.
    The play was retyped, the songs recorded, and the arrangement copyrighted. Misha went to see the theater’s general manager, Mr. Osip Tartiuk, who received the play with indifference. Three days later, however, Tartiuk invited Misha to a staff meeting, where he sang and played his heart out. The play was accepted on the spot. Everyone was excited, until Misha announced that Alidada Nektolai demanded four thousand dollars for his play. Osip nearly lost his voice.
    “We are young! We are poor!” he squeaked.
    “Nektolai says that every company tells him they are young and poor. You want the play, pay up. Otherwise, there’s a long line.”
    Osip cautiously inquired if there were other options.
    “Another option would be to pay the translator directly, half that amount.”
    “But I know her! She’s a regular centaur!” Here Osip gestured with his hands. “An ass like hers . . . she’ll give us a discount!”
    “I seriously doubt it. Theaters like yours are a dime a dozen, and they all wanther.”
    “We’ll offer her a thousand dollars! A whole thousand!”
    “If she gets a thousand,