Read Online There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya - Free Book Online

wasn’t sleeping; she had also heard the child’s cries and was very worried. She said that the first refugees had already arrived in Tarutino, and that soon they’d be coming to our village too, so we should expect more guests from here on out. The infant was squealing shrilly and without interruption; he had a hard, puffed-out stomach. We invited Tanya over in the morning to have a look, and without even touching him she said he wasn’t going to survive—he had the infant’s disease. The child suffered, yelled, and we didn’t even have a nipple for the bottle, much less any food for him. My mother dripped some water into his dried-out mouth, and he nearly choked on it. He looked like he was about four months old. My mother ran at a good clip to Tarutino, traded a precious
bit of salt for a nipple, and returned full of energy, and the child drank a little bit of water from the bottle. My mother induced stool with some softening chamomile brew, and we all, including my father, darted around as fast as we could, heating the water, giving the child a warm compress. It was clear to everyone that we needed to leave the house, the plot, our whole functioning household, or else we’d be destroyed. But leaving the plot meant starving to death. At the family conference my father announced that we’d be moving to the house in the woods and that he’d stay behind for now with a rifle and the dog in the shack next door.
    That night we set off with the first installment of things. The boy, whose name was now Nayden, rode atop the cart. To everyone’s surprise he’d recovered, then began sucking on the goat’s milk, and now rode wrapped in a sheepskin. Lena walked alongside the cart, holding onto the ropes.
    At dawn we reached our new home, at which point my father immediately made a second run and then a third. He was like a cat carrying more and more of his litter in his teeth, which is to say all the many possessions he’d acquired, and now the little hut was smothered in things. That day, when all of us collapsed from exhaustion, my father set off for guard duty. At night, on his wheelbarrow, he brought back some early vegetables from the garden—potatoes, carrots, beets, and little onions. We laid this all out in the underground storage he’d created. The same night he set off again, but limped back almost immediately with an empty wheelbarrow. Gloomily he announced: “That’s it!” He’d brought a can of milk for the boy. It turned out our house had been claimed
by some kind of squad. They’d already posted a guard at the plot, and taken Anisya’s goat. Anisya had lain in wait for my father on his escape path with that can of milk. My father was sad, but also he was pleased, since he’d once again managed to escape, and to escape with his whole family.
    Now our only hope lay in my father’s little plot and in the mushrooms we could find in the forest. Lena stayed in the house with the boy—we didn’t take her with us to the forest now but locked her in the house to keep her out of the way. Strangely enough she sat quietly with the boy and didn’t beat her fists against the door. Nayden greedily drank the potato broth, while my mother and I scoured the woods with our bags and backpacks. We no longer pickled the mushrooms but just dried them—there was hardly any salt left now. My father began digging a well, as the nearest stream was very far.
    On the fifth day of our immigration we were joined by Baba Anisya. She came to us with empty hands, with just a cat on her shoulder. Her eyes looked strange. She sat for a while on the porch, holding the frightened cat on her lap, then gathered herself and went off into the woods. The cat hid under the porch. Soon Anisya came back with a whole apron’s worth of mushrooms, though among them was a bright-red poisonous one. She remained sitting on the porch and didn’t go into the house; we brought her out a portion of our poor mushroom soup in a can from the milk she