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

In the east they’d wrap us in three layers and paint our hands and feet with henna.
    I give my reading; the kids have quieted down. Tima is with me on the stage, as always, playing loudly with the water pitcher, slurping poisonous tap water—not his worst behavior. The teachers are poised behind the brats like overseers, oozing displeasure. In the end the art wins out, and I get my share of applause; Tima and I go to the wings to await our dinner. I want to send him down to the audience, to watch Xenia’s performance—I need to collect my thoughts. But he climbs on my lap, jealous and demanding, and so we watch Xenia from behind. She pokes a large potato with a fork, arranges a bit of coarse fiber for hair, adds a ladle and thongs, and to my surprise performs a very original little skit. Even in our ancient bodies some intellect glimmers. Remember my great almost-namesake.
    After the performance we celebrate in the dining hall. The children come over to look at the puppets, and I deftly drop into my briefcase three huge slices of buttered bread, plus some candy, for the evening feast at home. And then, with maximum flattery, I extract from Xenia a large potato, clearly bought at a private market—in order, I lie, to repeat the tale to Tima, but in fact for our second course. Alas.
    Homeward. Morning awaits me, the morning of the final decision. The pension, the pension. But there is the smell to consider. Like in a zoo. Mama didn’t make it to the bathroom, neither did her ward mates, and oh, how it stank in that ward. They were terribly ashamed, those grannies, and would pull up their covers, smearing themselves on the chin. In my presence a nurse pulled down the covers of Mama’s neighbor, Krasnova, screaming at her, Look at yourself, you such and such, up to your neck, such and such. At that moment I saw in my mother’s dull little eyes a glimmer of triumph. How well I knew that glimmer! How often I observed it through her ostensible pique—pique on my behalf—when she was defending me from my poor husband. The glimmer signified the triumph of her righteousness, of her right over my wrong. I honestly think that her few acts of kindness were performed out of spite—for me. Kindnesses are often performed in protest; the little one will befriend his so-called mother, my daughter, simply to protest against me and my righteousness, and whether for better or for worse I’m not sure.
    Our bellies full (macaroni with ground beef, sweet tea, three slices of bread with butter—the children in our country have it good), we crawl home. Tima used to go to a day care, too. They would feed him, while I would catch up on sleep, go to the library, visit Burkin, and even concoct a very decent skirt out of scraps. But Tima was constantly sick. Every week of freedom cost me two months of his illness, when he would stay at home, pitiful and thin, and torment us both. What do they do to these children that they come home exhausted and full of aggression, and get sick as a result? Or is it the children who torment the other children? We lost our spot; there is a long waitlist to get in.
    All night I churned on my sofa like on a hot plate, trying to decide. Then I glanced at the window and shuddered: something ugly and white clung to the glass, and I realized it was dawn. My judgment day had arrived. If my mother lived here with me, if I could endure that hell—the constant screaming, the insults—then I’d also have to deal with her paranoia about ambulances and policemen. We tried at first, idiots that we were, to convince her that the cop outside the supermarket was simply standing there (Andrey would work himself to a froth coming home from interrogations), and I begged her to believe me that the ambulance hadn’t arrived for her, but then, of course, it did.
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    That’s how matters stood. Alena wept herself into prostration every night; then she went into an eating frenzy, which drove Andrey mad. He