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

and into the bathroom like a frightened bunny and began banging on the rusted latch, trying to lock it.
    •   •   •
    Tima was born in June. Sixteen days later Andrey came home. Oh, what a mess it was. I’d just managed to marry Alena and Provinces, barely, with the help of their classmates who worked with them at the farm. In the end, college authorities threatened him with expulsion and immediate draft if he refused to marry. Such were the sad facts. But finally he arrived. He flopped at our kitchen table without even a glance in my direction. Alena was there, eight months pregnant, with greasy hair and bags under her eyes. “Alena,” I said, “what’s the matter? Haven’t you been pregnant before? Go wash your hair! I didn’t look like a scarecrow when I carried you!” (It’s true: I’d never let myself go like that—clean hair always and a fresh complexion whenever possible.) “Honey,” she informed him, “remember: Mommy’s nuts.” Her intended drooped a little and took cover in our only bedroom, where he proceeded to polish off all the food in the house—Alena didn’t get a crumb. “The kid sure has a healthy appetite. Eat mine, then,” I told her quietly. She glared at me, tears welling, and sobbed that she hated me, hated, hated!
    “Why, what did I say? Provinces came to the capital undernourished, I understand, but you are carrying a little one. He must pay his way—or is he planning to live off me? I’m a poet; I don’t make much, as you know.”
    “A goddamn graphomaniac is what you are.”
    I didn’t know then—how could I?—that she was carrying him , my Tima, Timothy, named after someone in Provinces’ family. I’d wait on her hand and foot, if she’d let me, but the thought of Andrey was tearing me to pieces, and I simply couldn’t provide for them all: her and her baby, plus that husband of hers, that coward who married her only to avoid the draft and expulsion. (He feared army rape, but think of what my poor son must have gone through in jail! Who’s going to pay for his suffering?)
    So they got married. I set out a spread in the bedroom: salad, pasta, and a pie with dried fruit. Their two witnesses were present—not the ones from the potato field; our husband had turned these down. Next morning my dear daughter was in the kitchen bright and early, scrambling our last three eggs for her beloved, standing over him with a napkin like a footman. I told her later, “Look, waitress, I had three eggs for the two of us, for pancakes. Now there’s nothing left to eat. Let him pay something, anything, or did he marry you for room and board? Make some oatmeal for yourself, at least. How are you going to feed the baby? Look at your breasts!” I wanted to hug her and have a cry together, but she pushed me away.
    And that’s how it went, our life together. Alena used all her strength to please her beloved, as she called him. Her beloved! I stopped leaving my room, and I turned off the fridge: first, to save energy, and second, what was I expected to do, her abandoned and insulted mother, when after a day waiting in food lines and then lugging home two heavy bags of groceries I return from a library the next day into a complete wasteland? A wasteland left behind by their endless guests, who visited the impoverished young couple in hordes, she proudly feeding them their sausage, cooked with their butter, filling our little apartment with gut-wrenching aromas. They even snatched my teakettle! I subsisted on boiled water with plain bread, the same food my son lived on in his cell, and my daughter explained away my passing to and from the kitchen with pots of boiled water with “Mom’s off her rocker.”
    But my hatred for Provinces, it turned out, was the glue that kept their family together. To be honest, all I wanted was for them to disappear, to vanish somewhere and leave the room to Andrey. But where would they go? I told them that I wouldn’t allow Provinces to be