Oswald's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page A

difficult for her to stay any longer with her stepfather, and asked if she could come to live with them.
    Such a request was not too welcome for Valya. She was tired of her relatives. She didn’t show it, but for all these years somebody in Ilya’s family had always been living with them. Tatiana even died in their home. In her last ten months, Valya had taken care of her so well that before she went, she said to Valya, “I have survived only because of you, Valya.” Ilya was in effect the father of his family, and that was fine, except that Valya felt he could give time to his wife only when they went to bed.
    Still, when Marina arrived at the train station, Valya saw that she had only one suitcase, and pitied her. The girl seemed so happy to be able to move to Minsk. She was shy and, for a while, very obedient. Just a sweet eighteen-year-old. Marina had a natural color to her lips and never used lipstick. She was attractive even if she was afraid to smile—one of her front teeth was a little in front of the other. It would all have been nice if Valya didn’t have to share her life with one more relative again.
    Of course, Marina didn’t know much about housework. If Valya asked her to do something, Marina would try it, but she couldn’t cook. She did wash her own clothes, and hardly knew how to do that properly. Then, when Marina got a place in a hospital pharmacy, for which kind of work she’d been trained in Leningrad, she was usually tired when she came back from her job, so she didn’t really have house duties. She was free to go to movies, to parties, to plays. Valya, after all, did not go out to work, so she was responsible for the apartment. Sometimes Marina washed floors, and sometimes she washed dishes, and certainly when she was eating alone, she never left dirty plates for Valya. And she had her job. People were needed in pharmacy work, and Marina liked her occupation. She told Valya and Ilya, “I’ll cure you,” because at that time she had access to medicine.
    The only trouble Valya could foresee might yet be with dates, although Marina was usually critical of them. If a boy said something wrong or bought something cheap, that was goodbye! She told Valya that she stopped seeing a man she had dated in Leningrad because he bought her cheap sweets. Of course, being that critical was an unusual matter for someone in her position. Girls like Marina, with no more than a vocational education, were not considered to be as outstanding as girls who went to an Institute or to Universities. So girls like Marina were not usually dated for serious relationships by the best young men in the best schools. But Marina only liked people who were educated.
    Valya never saw her go out with an average man. She had lots of boyfriends, students at an Institute or at the University of Minsk, and she went to their parties with her best friend, Larissa, and spent all her earnings for clothes. After all, Ilya and Valya were not going to take a part of her salary for food. Sometimes, if Marina wanted money for theatre or movies, she would make her own clothes.
    She was very industrious. She liked to sew, do embroidery, and she cut up Valya’s old fur coats to make hats for herself.
    She also read a lot, particularly Theodore Dreiser. Marina loved Dreiser, who was very popular at this time, but then, there were hundreds of books in their apartment, because Ilya had purchased complete sets of works by famous Russian authors, and Valya would read Chekhov and Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov. Marina, however, chose Dreiser. Writers like Chekhov she was always having to get through in school.
    Taken on the whole, it was all right having Marina there. Valya never minded that she did not contribute to their living, because Marina had been so poor when she arrived that she didn’t even have underwear, and her salary was small. She needed everything—shoes, stockings, clothes from her head to her