A Russian Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

got fifty dollars for contributing to a conference, a laughable fee in international terms, the two of them were able to live decently for a month. When the money brought back from abroad paid for things you couldn’t have earned enough to buy if it killed you. Alternatively, you could keep the money you brought back stashed away and you would know that even if they didn’t pay you for the next six months you wouldn’t die of starvation. Then something would turn up. Well, millions of fellow-citizens had no access to those conferences, those trips abroad or even to those buffets, but in those days of hyper-inflation and long-term debts incurred on the strength of his salary he felt himself far better off than in the days of boring Soviet stability. Lada occasionally went to France, he went to America. They would take off from gleaming overseas airports and land at filthy, godforsaken Boryspol, kiss on their reunion and travel into Kyiv in the darkness of night in dodgy cars, embrace on the back seat, quietly chuckling as they felt for the intimate places where the imported greenbacks were concealed.
    And everything was great until Lada got pregnant. He had not expected that this event would make her so angry. She shouted, she sobbed and she uttered unmentionable words. He had already seen Lada in such a rage once before. It was the day before they decided to live together. He had a serious encounter that day with Lada and another girl as well, the one he hugged in the metro when they were singing the future national anthem in chorus. That girl was called Halya. He was slightly confused as to which girl he liked better; actually, there was also a certain charm in the idea of living with the two of them simultaneously. But he had already begun to talk with both of them about the idea that they should move in together for now and see how things went, and that put paid to the charm. Lada had an apartment on Pushkin Street, while Halya rented a studio flat in Vynohradar and would have been happy to share the payments with the young man. He was already staying overnight at both places and at both of them he had a toothbrush on the bathroom shelf.
    Then one morning Lada, unable to reach him by phone at his home at Vitryani Hory, did not hesitate to go to Vynohradar and force her way into the flat rented by Halya, who was her friend as well as a classmate on a women’s studies course. A fight broke out and the girls were rolling about on the floor, where blood-stains and tufts of hair soon appeared. He did his best to separate the ferocious girls, but they both pushed him away, telling him to mind his own business. Several days after this colourful brawl he moved in with Lada. And not long after that Halya went off to America.
    When Lada became pregnant her aggressiveness was directed towards him. She scratched his face and tried to grab him by the hair. It was all he could do to restrain her.
    “Well, after all you are twenty eight, so why not?” he said, all docile.
    “What about you going round with the bulge instead of me!”
    “But that’s impossible! I’ll be the breadwinner!”
    “Clever, aren’t you, you men! I suppose you’ll go to a building site or get hold of some goods to sell! You’ll earn money doing what you enjoy. You’ll write your articles, speak at conferences, organise summer schools. While I go around with the bulge! Then I’ll be in labour! Then I’ll have to shove out my tits for it!”
    “But it’s just one child… you have to have it sometime…you said so yourself…”
    “And just when I have the chance of a great women’s studies placement! Any cow can give birth. But you just try writing a project that gets you selected out of a hundred applicants!”
    “Not only have I tried it, but I’ve done it! And I’m told I have a good chance of getting a scholarship to spend a year in the States!”
    “And you would be off there without me?”
    “If we finally got married, you could