There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya Read Free Book Online Page B

was, I was occasionally treated to a breathless rendition of Lenka’s adventures. Until, that is, my inevitable question: Is he good looking?
    “Mama! What does that have to do with anything?”
    “Well, I just mean that he should, at least, be good looking.”
    “Huh?”
    “Well, it would be a miracle if he was, for who’d want to look twice at an elephant like her?”
    “Mama! It’s me no one ever looks at.”
    The classic abandoned-wife complex, common to girls from fatherless families.
    “It’s true, Mama! Last summer, at the beach, all the Georgians courted her and thought she was eighteen!”
    “You’re kidding. Eighteen, not thirty?”
    “Mama, you make everything sound so vulgar!”
    “That’s why I’m asking. Lenka’s admirer— he isn’t a Georgian, is he?”
    “Just leave me alone,” she pleaded, almost crying.
    The reason for all this talk was that it was as clear as day that horrible Lenka wasn’t worth my daughter’s little finger. My little beauty, my warm little nest, who was my consolation when Andrey was wreaking havoc as a teenager. She was nine when her father left; my mother did him in with her nagging. On another dig, he picked up someone else in the same way he picked me up, only this time both children were with him. When they came back Alena confided that everyone loved them so much there, so very much; one woman, Lera, literally cried the last night when they were leaving!
    After a month of tense, pimple-producing, long-distance negotiations, my husband left for Krasnodar, and for Lera the crier, in whose studio apartment he is currently living with a stepson plus a blind mother-in-law, so my children don’t get invited. As for archaeology, he now travels to digs in Rwanda and Burundi, but Africa is full of AIDS, and there is every reason not to romanticize these trips. As for my mother, she considered our papa a conniving hanger-on and a leech, among other things. How she celebrated when he came for the last time to get his things! How she never passed up the opportunity to remind me that she had told me so! How sweet she was with me, this toothless cobra, who now cries on her pillow and gulps down her food.
    I began receiving child support—all of forty rubles. I worked: they let me help out in the poetry department, reading and responding to submissions—a certain Burkin threw me a crumb, a kindly man with permanently shaky hands and cheeks swollen so badly I suspected double inflammation of the gums. A ruble a letter—sometimes I sent off as many as sixty letters a month; plus two of my poems would be published—that was another eighteen rubles.
    And this is the consolation my daughter offered when the door closed for the last time behind my husband, and I stood with a burning face and dry eyes, contemplating jumping out the window to greet him outside with my corpse. Mommy, she asked, do I love you? Yes, I told her, you do.
    •   •   •
    My princess, whose every toe I’d washed and kissed. I adored her curls, her enormous blue eyes—where did her looks go?—which exuded such kindness, such affection, such innocence—all for me, for me alone. All this, all this tenderness was taken from me and thrown at the feet of the horrendous Lenka. Day and night she thought only of Lenka and her demands. Andrey and Alena pummeled each other because Andrey needed to make a call while Alena was waiting for that brat to call—hoping, that is, that she’d call, to tell her if anything was happening, if they were going anywhere, if they had been invited to anyone’s birthday party.
    My children fought each other tooth and nail—another cute detail of our family life. Only at night could I experience the joy of motherhood. I’d creep over to their beds and listen to their breathing, inhale their scent, adore them in silence.
    My darlings, my soft ones:
    Rest awhile, don’t stir.
    Your mother is with you,
    You are always with her.
    They didn’t need my love. Without my