“I will stop, Olya, I promise. I promise this time,” he repeated until she told him not to talk to her for the rest of the day.
She cleaned up the dirt in the hallway while Alek heated up the water and splashed in the bathroom. She wished she could complain to someone. She knew that her mother, despite teaching her girls to count only on themselves, was relieved that Olya got married. One less mouth to feed, one less body to clothe. A village girl, she had married Olya’s father at sixteen and found out at the civil registry office on their wedding day that he was twenty-five years her senior, when she saw his passport for the first time. She had said nothing. She was grateful to him for pulling her out of the peasants and into the intelligentsia. Olya wished that they could have talked heart to heart about those early days of her mother’s marriage — and about everything. Her mother had worked around the clock when the girls were growing up and never had time for much more than a good thrashing or an occasional saying. One of her favorites was: Live with your husband for a century but never show your backside. But how could she not? Olya was at a loss. She wanted to be a good and honest wife.
She couldn’t disappoint Dasha, she couldn’t spoil her new romance with the engineer. As for Zoya: her voice with the proverbs was running through Olya’s head almost nonstop. A wife is not a gusli; you can’t hang her up on the wall after playing.
That day, in self-imposed penance, Alek washed the dishes and changed Marina’s diaper for the first time in Marina’s life.
* * *
Nothing changed. Alek kept playing and losing. He came home drunk; often he didn’t make it to the bed. He didn’t defend himself when Olya yelled. He didn’t complain or hit her back when she came at him first with her fists, then with pots and pans or anything else within her reach, and he no longer promised to quit. She was ashamed when Vasily Petrovich caught them fighting in the kitchen or in the bathroom. Zoya’s proverbs crawled, like roaches, out of the cracks in the walls, from the corners of the cupboards and the holes in their socks, from the cold bubbles in Olya’s dishwater, screeching their nonsense. Couldn’t anyone else hear them? The thread follows the needle. The thread follows the needle. The thread follows the needle.
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.