* * *
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.