An uncaring mother who doesn’t iron her kids’ T-shirts, who has nothing against her kids making a mess doing arts and crafts or playing, who doesn’t care whether their hair is neatly cut — especially the one who is supposed to be a man. I should pull your hair right out myself; I’m sure everyone makes fun of you at school.
A chaotic woman whose bureau is always messy and who can’t manage to have meals ready on time. No wonder the children are so directionless. They think they’re allowed to do whatever they want. Like yelling and screaming inside the apartment when Vadim is trying to watch TV.
And a whore who can get herself off with a vibrator as if it were the real deal. Who goes out to the movies at night without her husband, who dyes her hair and wears it down. Who dresses as if she had a nice figure — maybe the Turks are onto something after all with their full-body curtains.
You let him say all of this, you let him show all his disgust, I think bitterly, and the most you ever do is shrug your shoulders. Your most extreme facial expression is nothing more than a look of bottomless sorrow. Instead of thinking how to save yourself, you think about how to save him before he goes over the edge. You’re worried he’ll start to drink. You just don’t understand that his survival instinct is stronger than yours.
You raise your voice only when he turns from you to the children. That’s his biggest weapon. He knows that’s the only way he can really hurt you. And that’s the only time you will strike back. When he’s shouting at Anton, he knows your broken-voiced threat to divorce him is serious. So usually he does that only at home. Anton is about as capable of defending himself as the little lemon tree on the windowsill. And he makes just as frail an impression as it does.
I’m not sure the extent of the daily hell Anton experiences — Vadim holds back when I’m around and Anton never talks about it. The most common word I use around Vadim is “police.” And even though he always laughs, I can see the fear and doubt in his eyes.
But he also knows I don’t want to hurt you. It’s a perennial woman’s mistake: I don’t want to cause you pain, so I allow you to be killed. I never do go to the police — in part because Vadim always pulls himself together around me, but mostly because I know you would never approve of it except in the most dire situation.
You hope everything will somehow work out. One time you tell me you dream of him leaving on his own after he falls in love with someone new. Otherwise, you feel like you’d be kicking someone when he’s down. If somebody is on the ground, you can’t kick them. Just another one of the many noble but hollow rules you live by. When you tell me this, I have to laugh, long and sinister, until I start to cry. I’ll never forget the look on your face at that moment.
You’ll never know why for years I left my room only once I was fully clothed, never in pajamas or a bathrobe. Or why I locked the door to my room at night, and why only now can I wear short sleeves or anything else remotely revealing. You always called me “buttoned up,” even “prudish.” You accepted it as my own peculiarity, and I never let on that there was something else behind it. I thought it would hurt you, that you wouldn’t be able to take it, that you would snap from the guilt and horror.
Which means I enabled you to remain blind to him.
Among the happiest moments of my life with Vadim were the victories I scored on the battlefield, little personal victories that affected only me. The look on his face when I kicked him — I could see the debate raging in his hate-filled eyes as he weighed whether to keep it up or to hit me back. Because that might leave clues I might not stay quiet about. I could see his fear as I sat at the kitchen table slowly turning the bread knife in my fingers and staring at him. And I could feel him slowly pull his knee away from mine under the table.
But maybe I’m lying to myself, and the victory was really his. His triumph that I never left my laundry or any personal items in the bathroom and that I kept everything locked in my room. That I steered clear of him, meaning I spent almost all of my time at home in my room. And that I never said a word about any of it to my mother.
I feel so horribly guilty thinking that maybe my silence was the railroad switch that sent the train onto the wrong track, headed for death.
He who shoots gets shot, I think. How simple and just.
It warms my heart.
I still have a lot to read, I think. Read and study and think. He mustn’t stand a chance. No way to defend himself and no way to live through it.
These are nice thoughts, but they’re taxing. I should spend some time on the other plan.
I sit down that same night at the computer. I sit there for a long time, at least an hour. It’s harder than I thought it would be. It’ll probably be easier to strangle Vadim.
All the scenes I want to write down seem to have vanished. Every syllable I try to capture seems banal. Warm hands and lullabies and dirty jokes and coffee by the liter — none of it hits the mark. All I can see is her face in my mind, and I begin to type just to avoid staring like Anton.
“Red hair,” I write. “Dyed with henna as long as I can remember. What color was her hair before that? Probably some shade of brown. She once told me she found her first gray hair early. By the time she was thirty she had skeins of gray hair. She had the type of life that makes people prematurely gray. With the henna, her gray hair became streaks of light orange. Her eyes were light brown and big. Her mouth was big, too, and, like her eyes, was usually wide open. She talked and laughed a lot. Even when she read, she talked. She would always show up in front of me with a book in her hand and say, ‘Should I read a passage to you? Here’s an incredible paragraph.’ I would answer, ‘I’m doing my homework,’ or, ‘I’m trying to read something of my own.’ She read the passage anyway, and I never understood what was so great about it. I never really listened because it annoyed me and I was happier lost in my own thoughts.”
I read through it again. I don’t cry.
I go to bed early.
In the morning I put on my sneakers with my eyes still closed. Maria is snoring loudly in her bed, and when I go to close her door so she doesn’t wake up the children, I see little Alissa next to her, half buried by Maria’s overflowing hips. Alissa’s in a hand-made floral nightgown. Memories of a pink sweater shoot through my head and I decide I need to do something about organizing the clothes.
Maria listens to me.
I run three times around the Emerald and then head off. I’m dragging. I haven’t run in a long time and wouldn’t have today if I hadn’t woken up with a sick, tense feeling. I try to run away from this feeling but just end up with stitches in my sides. So I shove my hands under my ribs and stand there wheezing in front of the newsstand.
I’ve had a subscription to the local paper for the past year. I need to. If the Emerald were being torn down, for instance, Maria would probably only realize when they carried her out of the apartment in her chair. And anyway, reading the paper often pays off for school.
I look at the headlines of the dailies, more out of a sense of duty than out of real interest.
I wonder to myself who in this area buys these. Sometimes I feel like the only literate person in the entire Emerald. The rest of them carry half-empty bottles around in the pockets of their track pants, wrap smoked fish in bright-colored papers with headlines like “Who does the severed head belong to?” or “Government covers up evidence of another UFO landing,” and look suspiciously at anyone who uses German to speak to them. “Can’t he speak normal?” they ask.
On this morning, my heart suddenly freezes — just for a second — then it kicks on again and jumps into my throat and flutters there like a bird in distress. I gasp for breath and try to swallow in order to get my heart back down where it belongs.