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

used to give us. That evening my father took Anisya into the basement, where he’d built our third refuge, and she lay down and rested and the next day began actively scouring the forest
for mushrooms. I’d go through the mushrooms she brought back, so she wouldn’t poison herself. We’d dry some of them, and some we’d throw out. One time, coming home from the woods, we found all our refugees together on the porch. Anisya was rocking Nayden in her arms and telling Lena, choking on her words: “They went through everything, took everything . . . They didn’t even look in on Marfutka, but they took everything of mine. They dragged the goat away by her rope.” Anisya remained useful for a long time to come, took our goats out for walks, sat with Nayden and Lena until the frosts came. Then one day she lay down with the kids in the warmest place in the house, on the bunk above the stove, and from then on got up only to use the outhouse.
    The winter came and covered up all the paths that might have led to us. We had mushrooms, berries (dried and boiled), potatoes from my father’s plot, a whole attic filled with hay, pickled apples from abandoned gardens in the forest, even a few cans of pickled cucumbers and tomatoes. On the little field, under the snow, grew our winter crop of bread. We had our goats. We had a boy and a girl, for the continuation of the race, and a cat, who brought us mice from the forest, and a dog, Red, who didn’t want to eat these mice, but whom my father would soon count on for hunting rabbits. My father was afraid to hunt with his rifle. He was even afraid to chop wood because someone might hear us. He chopped wood only during the howling snowstorms. We had a grandmother—the storehouse of the people’s wisdom and knowledge.
    Cold desolate space spread out around us on all sides.

    One time my father turned on the radio and tried for a while to hear what was out there. Everything was silent. Either the batteries had died, or we really were the last ones left. My father’s eyes shone: He’d escaped again!
    If in fact we’re not alone, then they’ll come for us. That much is clear. But, first of all, my father has a rifle, and we have skis and a smart dog. Second of all, they won’t come for a while yet. We’re living and waiting, and out there, we know, someone is also living, and waiting, until our grain grows and our bread grows, and our potatoes, and our new goats—and that’s when they’ll come. And take everything, including me. Until then they’re being fed by our plot, and Anisya’s plot, and Tanya’s household. Tanya is long gone, but Marfutka is still there. When we’re like Marfutka, they won’t touch us either.
    But there’s a long way to go until then. And in the meantime, of course, we’re not just sitting here. My father and I have commenced work on our next refuge.

The Miracle
    THERE ONCE LIVED A WOMAN WHOSE SON HANGED HIMSELF.
    Which is to say, when she returned home from the night shift one morning, her boy was lying on the floor next to an overturned stool underneath a length of thin synthetic rope.
    He was unconscious, but his heart still beat faintly, and so the paramedic who came with the ambulance suggested that the son wasn’t really trying to hang himself.
    Even though there was a note on the table: “Mom, I’m sorry. I love you.”
    And it was only when she’d returned home from the hospital, having held her son’s hand as they rode in the ambulance, and then with him into the hospital as he lay on a stretcher, right up to the doors of the intensive care unit, where she finally had to let him go—only upon returning home did she discover that the wool sock in which she kept her savings was empty.
    She kept the sock at the bottom of an old suitcase. It had contained two wedding rings, all her money, and her gold earrings set with rubies.

    The poor woman then saw that the tape player—the one valuable thing she’d ever bought, because it was the