Snow in May: Stories (11 page)

To pay off some debt, old and new, and to buy food and other necessities, Olya and Alek had no choice but to borrow money from Vasily Petrovich and the same officers Alek had lost to. Begging was below his rank, Alek said, so Olya put on her strawberry lipstick, whipped her hair into a coif, and went knocking on doors. She couldn’t bear the looks of the young soldiers when they brought water and wood to the apartment. The old army doctor seemed completely indifferent as he opened his wallet; her domestic drama was nothing compared to what he’d seen on the battlefield. A marriage, she had discovered, was a deep trench inside which festered a hundred previously concealed details about the person in whose company you had enlisted. She wanted to caution her sisters, but before that, she would have to admit her own defeat.

Olya remembered how Zoya had once organized a charity concert to raise money for the families of veterans, how she convinced every music ensemble and dance group in town to perform on Victory Day in the park. She had several schools put on short plays, pantomimes, and gymnastics routines and persuaded shy poets to declaim their patriotic works on stage. Olya had insisted that, though she had nothing against the veterans, of course, no one would come to see a concert without a single professional performer. Zoya took Dasha and went knocking on doors to invite half the town personally. The show was a huge success. Thousands came.

Only now Olya began to appreciate the magnitude of Zoya’s power. If Zoya was able to subjugate that many people to her will, how easy it would be for her to tackle just one husband.

*   *   *

I was tired of sitting home,
Olya wrote,
so I now work as a second-shift cashier at the Bread and Bread Products counter at the grocery store on the base. Like you said, it’s good to have your own money, just in case. Count only on yourself. A very nice lady from our building watches Marina in the evenings. Marina is getting big and has a loud voice, maybe strong enough to become an opera singer.

The full horror of reality ambushed Olya at home, in two variations. The first featured a mise-en-scène of Alek and his officer friends at a card game engulfed in cigarette smoke. A vodka bottle stood on the table. Marina sat in her crib, covered with tears and snot. In this scenario, Olya went to the kitchen to pick up a frying pan and chased everyone out, disregarding the differences in height, weight, and rank.
A young wife cries till the morning dew, a sister—till the golden ring, a mother—till the end of times
.

In the second variation, Olya returned from work to an empty room. This meant Alek was playing at one of his friends’ and Marina was with the babysitting babushka. The dinner she’d made earlier would be gone, and Alek would sometimes leave a humorous cartoon to explain the mess in the kitchen—for example, a cat with its tongue out sitting by a bowl of dumplings, sketched on a piece of paper he would leave next to a sinkful of dirty dishes.

In both cases, Olya was shocked and mortified anew as she crossed the threshold of her room, as though she kept accidentally walking into the neighboring apartment, the neighboring life, to catch its inhabitants at something shameful. She yearned for a break, for a summer vacation at the Black Sea or, at least, back in Stavropol. But Alek told her that he was allowed free tickets to the continent only every three years, so they must be patient and wait.

That November, when Marina was seven months old, an earthquake much stronger than what Olya had become accustomed to shook the town in the middle of the night. While Alek snored drunkenly on the couch, Olya rushed outside with Marina wrapped in a thin blanket, the first thing she could grab. Marina caught a chill, and it developed into pneumonia. Olya spent weeks with her at the hospital. As she wrapped the legs of Marina’s crib with rags soaked in roach repellent, she cursed the earthquakes and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, she cursed Kostya, Alek, and her marriage, she cursed Zoya’s proverbs. Marina coughed for months and months afterward, and with each wet heave Olya imagined someone scraping a layer of tissue off her baby’s lungs, tender like the inside of her chipmunk cheeks.

On the rare occasions when Alek won, he still brought home presents for Olya, but she only yelled at him for wasting money on nonessentials instead of paying their Hydra-like debts. He had stopped pushing Olya into bed, and at least for this she was thankful. She was still puzzled, however—in a sociological kind of way—how Alek could continue doing something that was so destructive to the family. Even without love, they still constituted an economic cell of the Soviet society. Shouldn’t that mean something to an officer?

More and more Olya thought about home and her childhood. Sitting in a field as a toddler, when the grass was as tall as she, and watching a bee circle a flower bush round and round.
Bzzzzz—bzzzzz
was the only sound in the world, the happiest sound, and in that moment nothing else existed or needed to exist. That must have been one of her first memories. Bathing with Dasha in the fountain across from Lenin Square on hot summer days. Twirling with Zoya on a tiny patch of ice in front of their father’s Anti-Plague Institute, imagining themselves world champions in figure skating. Speaking a made-up nonsense language with Dasha and pretending to be foreigners, until their mother categorically forbade it. And then there was the time when she, Dasha, and Zoya had walked twenty kilometers on the train tracks by themselves at night in Turkmenistan. Dasha must’ve been no more than four then. Olya remembered standing on a hill and Zoya pointing south: “That’s Iran over there.” And the time Olya and Zoya decided to heat up paraffin for a hot compress to cure Dasha of her cough, and it exploded in the kitchen. The whole ceiling was black, and they were charged with whitewashing it. And when Olya went with Dasha and Zoya to a Malenitsa fair in Stavropol and ran into a boy she had a crush on in seventh grade. He asked her where she was going, and she replied, too mortified to think straight, “Looking for pancakes.” She was still a chubby girl back then. Zoya laughed about this for three days straight, and one night, when Zoya was sleeping, Olya cut off a thick chunk of her hair. In revenge, Zoya threw Olya’s most treasured possession, her grandmother’s gold locket, into the hole in the outhouse. The locket was retrieved grudgingly by their poor stepfather. How many hours she’d spent weeding those stubborn vegetable plots with her sisters and walking, walking everywhere, and whispering in bed. And all that time of just staring at the snow. It all seemed so important now.

*   *   *

One evening the following spring, when Marina was almost a year old and looked like a copy of her father, Alek stumbled home after another gambling loss. His coat was open, his cap fixed on his head at an inadvertently jaunty angle. His features swam, now forming an idiotic smile, now an unsure frown.

When she saw his condition, Olya jumped at him with a book she’d finally just found a moment for and welted him tiredly in the stomach, chest, shoulders. Marina began to holler. The chronic phlegm slurped in her sinuses with that awful heartbreaking sound.

“You’re killing us,” Olya yelled. Her voice had been pitched to a high roof months ago and refused to come down. If only she could beat him hard enough that he would stop ruining her life.

Alek twisted the book out of her hands and carefully set it on the floor. Then he rose, holding on to the bureau, and slapped Olya in the face. In her shock, a proverb Zoya had yet to mention popped into her mind:
If he beats you, he loves you.
He hit her skinny upper arm, at first tentatively, as though measuring resistance of the muscle, then harder. He looked surprised and vacant, as if his arm were a separate object from him, something for which he wasn’t responsible. His expression scared Olya more than the beating. He could kill her and not notice.

He struck her back as she broke free, then lurched after her and pummeled her backside with particular viciousness—perhaps for all the times she didn’t let him touch it. She ran into the bathroom, hoping that Vasily Petrovich wouldn’t hear them. Alek barged through the flimsy door and pushed her to the floor. He kept beating her, then throwing fists at her. Then just hands. His eyelids drooped unevenly. Abruptly he turned and staggered back to their room.

After a few minutes Marina’s wailing registered again, and Olya ran back to the room. Alek was passed out on the floor by the couch. Underneath his unbuttoned coat his fatigue-green officer’s shirt was soaked with sweat. She picked up her daughter and carried her in a small circle as though in a dream. She took many, many steps. A new kind of ache seized her arms cell by cell.

Eventually Marina drifted off to sleep. Olya sat down with her on the bed. She should get up and turn off the light, she thought, but the baby was so warm and heavy on her lap. A soft anchor. She closed her eyes for a minute.

Olya woke from a sudden movement of the bed. Not another earthquake!

Alek had revived and was kissing Marina’s forehead.

“Don’t touch her!” Olya screamed.

He jumped away from her. “What’s wrong with her?”

“You beat me.”

He squinted in playful disbelief. Olya knew that look well.

“Don’t you dare make this into a joke.” His mustache and the dimple on his chin repulsed her. And those pathetic Belomorkanal cigarettes. For what kind of person was that enough to be happy?

Shaking from anger, Olya carefully transferred Marina off her knees and onto the bed. The girl curled up into a ball, bracing herself, even in sleep, for yet another skirmish between her parents. Olya showed Alek her arms. They were covered in bruises, blots of dark water under thin ice. Then she pulled up her housecoat and showed him what he’d done to her backside.

He looked at his hands. His face drew back to reveal a panicked rawness. His features reconstituted immediately into a sleepy, drunken grimace, but Olya had already seen that he, too, was terrified of himself, more terrified than she was. Marina woke up and strained her face in preparation for a wail.

“This is what you did,” Olya said and began to cry. “Like a drunken peasant.”

Alek stared at the floor without moving.

A bad husband’s wife is always an idiot
.

He hobbled to the kitchen. There was a violent banging of drawers, then silence. In a few moments he returned with a knife. He placed a chair in the middle of the room, sat down, and slashed both of his wrists. As he bent forward to put the knife on the floor, blood began to spout out of the cuts. It was a surprisingly bright hue of red.

Olya turned away. Everything settled within her and retreated. She picked up whimpering Marina and rocked her, staring at the dark window. A few more months and her daughter would no longer be a baby. She wondered whether anyone was still awake, curled up with a book or huddled in the kitchen over tea and secrets. Marina kept sobbing. If Olya fell asleep now, she would sleep through this noise, too, and the ambulance sirens. She would happily sleep through the rest of her life, she thought.

A heavy sigh blew like a ghost from the chair. Alek sat slumped, with his eyes closed. His hands hung at his sides, lifeless as oars. The blood flowed steadily. Olya rocked her baby from side to side. They were out of milk. She would have to go first thing in the morning. Marina liked her semolina porridge thin, with lots of milk. Lots of milk and sugar.

By the time Vasily Petrovich burst into their room—he’d had a premonition about the silence that followed half a night of fighting—there was a puddle of blood next to the chair.

“Why are you sitting there like a statue? Waiting for him to bleed out?” the old doctor yelled. He rummaged through their room. “Nothing. What kind of wife are you? Prepared for nothing.”

“And what kind of doctor are you?” Olya said.

Vasily Petrovich grabbed a pillow off the bed and tore the case into strips. Cursing and groaning, he tied Alek’s wrists. Alek didn’t shift, but he didn’t fall either.

Olya still hadn’t moved from the bed when the ambulance came and took Alek to the hospital. Marina had at last tired herself out and dropped off to sleep. Soon Marina would get hungry and start up again. This thought didn’t bring on the usual desperation in Olya. Her daughter was solely hers now. Every problem and burden hers alone. Relief was spreading warmly through her body.

A few hours later Marina woke up and Olya fed her. Then she put her daughter into the crib and began wiping up the puddle of blood, the edges of which had already congealed into a maroon jam.

*   *   *

The following day Olya went to the base to see about the plane tickets home and was surprised to learn that Alek had paid leave and free tickets available for himself and his family every year. “The defender of the Motherland must have quality rest to maintain the highest degree of combat readiness,” said the friendly lieutenant at the transportation department. So Alek had kept her prisoner in their smoky room because he couldn’t return home broke. Because it would be shameful for an officer.

She divided their meager marital possessions into honest halves, assigning herself the last unpaired pillowcase, since its mate had been sacrificed in Alek’s botched suicide. There was no time for a painstakingly calibrated letter, so she went to the post office to call home. Zoya picked up the receiver; no one else was around.

“Marina and I are coming.”

“For a vacation?” Zoya said.

Olya detected underwater mines in her tone. “Yes.”

“Well, it’s about time we all met your little chipmunk.”

“Zoya, already for a while I wanted to ask you. Why did you write those proverbs in the letters? If you wanted to tell me something, you could have just written that. I’m used to your lectures.”

“I never lectured you, Olya. It’s the voices in your head.” Zoya laughed, not maliciously. “It was for a joke, from Dasha’s library book. I thought you of all people could tell. You teased me about Komsomol, so I thought I’d tease you back. At a safe distance.”

“I never teased you about anything,” Olya said. She’d been afraid to.