“And how can it not be allowed? They’re also killing themselves! And what do we do with them?” He pointed in the direction of the wall behind which the pitiful, sickly children slept, children their mother had not succeeded in getting rid of in time. “What would you have done with them?”
“I don’t know. I only know that you cannot kill them.” This was the first time her husband’s words had ever elicited in her a sense of disagreement, and he himself—a sense of protest and irritation.
“Think about the women!” Pavel Alekseevich shouted.
“Why should we think about them? They’re criminals, they kill their own children.” Elena pursed her lips.
Pavel Alekseevich’s face turned to stone, and Elena understood why his subordinates feared him. She had never seen him like this.
“You don’t have the right to a vote. You don’t have that organ. You’re not a woman. If you can’t get pregnant, then you can’t judge,” he said to her morosely.
Their family happiness—easy and unstrained, their chosenness and their closeness, their unlimited trust for each other, all of it came crashing down in an instant. But he seemed not to understand. Vasilisa directed her single eye at Pavel Alekseevich.
Elena got up. With a trembling hand she lowered her teacup into the sink. The cup was old, with a long crack running through it. Coming in contact with the bottom of the sink, it shattered. Leaving the shards, Elena left the kitchen. Slouching, Vasilisa scurried into her pantry.
Pavel Alekseevich was about to go after his wife, but he stopped in his tracks. No, so it was cruel. How could she pick up stray cats and not feel any compassion for unfortunate Lizaveta? Who was she to judge . . . ? Let her think . . .
Elena thought all night long. She cried, and thought, and cried again. Alongside her, in her husband’s usual place, lay warm little Tanya. Pavel Alekseevich went to his study.
Vasilisa Gavrilovna also did not sleep. She did not think. She prayed and cried. Now Pavel Alekseevich was the villain.
Pavel Alekseevich woke up several times, troubled by vaguely dark dreams. He tossed and turned, dragging the slippery sheet off the leather sofa.
Morning began very early. Vasilisa came out of her pantry as soon as she heard Pavel Alekseevich put on the teapot. She announced that she was leaving them. It was not the first time. It happened that Vasilisa would take offense at who knew what and ask for her separation pay. Usually, having stored up her discontent in her soul, she would disappear for several days, but return soon after.
“Do whatever you want,” Pavel Alekseevich blurted, not yet recovered from yesterday.
HE FELT MISERABLE AND EVEN OPENED THE CUPBOARD and looked inside. There was no bottle. He did not want to send Vasilisa and, besides, it was still too early. He poured a glass of tea and went to his study. Elena did not come out of the bedroom. Vasilisa gathered her things. In Tanya’s room Lizaveta’s children were waiting for breakfast and tussling over toys they had never seen before and that belonged to someone else. Toma was trying to get them to argue more quietly.
When Elena came out to the kitchen to cook morning porridge for the pack of children, Vasilisa Gavrilovna appeared at the stove dressed in a new sweater and new scarf and with a mournful and solemn look on her face.
“Elena, I’m leaving you.”
“What are you doing to me?” Elena gasped. “How can you leave me?”
They stood there, looking at each other, both tall, thin, and severe. One an old woman who looked older than she in fact was, the other close to forty, also getting up in age, but still looking twenty-eight.
“You do as you wish, but I’m not living with him anymore. I’m leaving,” the old woman snapped.
“What about me?” Elena implored.
“He’s your husband.” Vasilisa darkened.
“Husband . . . shmusband,” was all Elena said.
She could not imagine life without Vasilisa, especially in this unexpected situation, with someone else’s orphaned children in the house. Elena persuaded Vasilisa Gavrilovna to postpone her departure at least until the fate of the Polosukhin children was decided.
“All right,” Vasilisa said gloomily. “As soon as we bury Lizaveta, I’m leaving. Start looking for another housekeeper, Elena. I’m not living with him anymore.”
THE FUNERAL TOOK PLACE ONLY ON THE SIXTH DAY, after the autopsy had been completed and they had established scientifically what had been clear without it. The relatives showed up, nearly all of them women: her mother, two sisters, and several old women of various degrees of kinship from sister-in-law to godmother. The one crooked little man called himself a brother-in-law. When she and Toma once dropped in at the “partment,” Tanya marveled at these people and quietly asked Toma to explain who was related to whom.
The entire Polosukhin clan came from the region around Tver, but from different villages—the father’s village and the mother’s village. Toma’s birth father had perished during the war, her younger brothers were not his—no one knew whose they were—but had inherited his name for free, and his family did not look favorably upon Lizaveta.
You might even say that her relatives were feuding. These people quarreled noisily and concurrently, crying and accusing each other of some prewar insults and injuries, kept bringing up something mysterious called a “carucate” and a “half-carcass” . . . It all sounded like they were speaking another language. Tanya got the impression that they were playing some adult game, divvying up things for fun . . . But they were divvying for real . . .
ELENA PLANNED TO TAKE TANYA WITH HER TO THE CHURCH service and the burial, but Pavel Alekseevich would not allow it. Elena thought that Tanya should go because of Toma: “just to stand alongside her in this moment.” This disagreement further deepened their silent enmity. He insisted, he grumbled, he demanded that Tanya be left at home.
“She’s an impressionable child! Why are you dragging her into all this? It’s a profanation! I can see Vasilisa! But what’s Tanechka going to do there?”
“And what makes you think you have the right to a vote?” Although meek and not at all vindictive, she nonetheless delivered a shattering blow. She herself did not know how it came out. “You aren’t Tanya’s father, after all . . .”
It was mean revenge. The blow hit its target. It was one of those rare cases where both duelists lose. No one survived.
But Tanya did not go to the funeraclass="underline" she had a temperature and stayed in bed.
The day after the funeral Lizaveta’s elder sister Niura left, taking her two nephews with her. According to their agreement, Fenya, the younger sister, was supposed to take Toma. But something did not work out; Fenya had to swap some “furrings.” Tanya, to whom Toma related all this, pictured a flower-bedecked village dance with grown-up girls crowned with wreaths of cornflowers and daisies exchanging rings of fur. Tanya could not understand what sort of problem there could be with furrings. But soon Fenya herself showed up—a large, dark-haired woman who resembled her tiny fair sister only in her rare unattractiveness.
She sat for a long time in the kitchen with Vasilisa and Elena, first crying, then laughing at something, and drank two teapots of tea. They agreed that for the time being she would leave Toma here, in the city, and as soon as she was done with the furrings, she would come to fetch her. All through the conversation Toma stood hunched in the corridor with her bulging school satchel and her winter coat bunched in her arms, awaiting their decision.
Late in the evening, when everyone had dispersed, Toma crept into Vasilisa Gavrilovna’s pantry—she felt more at ease with the help than with the other members of the family, including Tanya. Toma looked Vasilisa in her one live eye and fingered her hem.
“Aunt Vas, I can wash floors and do laundry. And stoke the stove . . . I don’t want to live at Fenya’s: she’s got enough of her own . . .”