There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In Read Online Free PDF

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his mother had shamelessly taken two boxes of Christmas ornaments, leaving us with only three. No one had invited us over; we stayed home as always. In the evening we went to the Christmas tree vendor to collect branches off the floor for a bouquet, which we decorated with handmade garlands. Luckily my daughter had missed the box with the Christmas lights and Tima’s favorite ornament: a little glass house with a glittering roof and two windows. I turned on the lights, the glass house sparkled, and Tima and I, plus the blue monster, walked a slow circle dance around our bouquet as I wiped away tears.
    We exchanged presents. Tima had wrapped a drawing in an old newspaper, and I had made a rag doll for his puppet theater, his fourth. These dolls are very difficult to make. I always have trouble with faces, especially noses, and in the end just paint a comma. But I can’t always be knitting, gluing, and drawing something for him. He wants to make things himself, he tries, but he’s too clumsy and impatient; after a few minutes everything is a tangled mess. But I’m busy! I need to work! In response his mouth twitches nervously.
    I tried to give Andrey a present, too—a pamphlet on decorum with underlined passages. He rejected it rudely and demanded his usual price. And again he threatened to jump. He made this threat not to me but to his wife—she must have insulted him again. He has jumped before, without a warning, from their second-floor window—heavily intoxicated, it turned out. He broke both legs and damaged—permanently, it appears—a nerve in his heel. The pain is unbearable, his wife tells me, although on the surface there is nothing, not even a scratch. He is incapable of any work that requires standing, which rules out pretty much everything except night watchman. It was five years ago that it happened. A tragedy.
    I’m afraid of both of them, husband and wife. On the phone she tells me everything’s fine—last night Andrey ripped a sleeve off her robe again. She’s a nurse—hard, hard work, but she gives Andrey shots for his heel, and massages. And he’s still so young! They both are—Alena and Andrey. On her last visit I told Alena, You’ve got to take care of yourself! Look what you’ve turned into! She looked away, slowly welling up with tears and hatred, then got up without a word and rolled out the heavy carriage with her new fat bastard. Dragged it down four floors—absence of elevator is our curse.
    This jealousy toward Andrey—she had it as a child, but later it passed. As teenagers they grew closer and talked in the kitchen late at night. How much I wanted to be a part of their youth, their dialogue, but the kitchen door was closed to me, as were their hearts. When Andrey went to prison, she sent him letters; I’ll talk about them later. Yes, she did write for a while, until she brought home that bum of hers, Shura of the Southern Provinces, who ate every scrap of food, completely oblivious. Every morning for thirty minutes he massaged himself with an electric razor—his idea of meditation. Tima screaming in a wet diaper; Alena trying to use the toilet; Andrey, fresh from prison, barred from both bathroom and toilet, boiling in the kitchen, where he slept. He jumped a year later, but that was at his wife’s, not our overcrowded home.
    The day he got out, I waited at the gate—wrong gate. He walked out still in his garb; I had his clothes with me. I ran home, and there he was, dressed in all gray, the prison cap in front of him on the table. Spring, warm weather, streets full of people—everyone must have stared. Pale and thin, chapped mouth—gorgeous beyond words. I knelt before him, unlaced his shoes. And who is this? he asked quietly. I wouldn’t have come if I’d known, he said, after I told him just what I thought of his brother-in-law and what it had cost me to marry him to Alena. At that moment Provinces scrambled past the kitchen