There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby Read Online Free PDF Page B

and big,” said the girl happily. The cat, in the girl’s arms, was trying to free herself.
    “Hold her tight!” yelled the grandfather. “Go to your room now, girl, go on. Take the kitty. You’ve really done it now, haven’t you?” His voice was growing louder. “You little tramp! You brat! You’ve played your games with your kitty, haven’t you?”
    “Don’t yell,” said the girl. She ran quickly to her room.
    The grandfather followed, spraying her path with cologne. He secured the door behind her with a chair, then called in Nikolai, who was resting after a sleepless night outside. Elena was sleeping with him. They woke up reluctantly; everything was discussed and settled. Elena began crying and tearing out her hair. From the child’s room they could hear knocking.
    “Let me out, open up, I need to go to the bathroom!”
    “Listen to me!” yelled Nikolai. “Stop yelling!”
    “You’re yelling!” cried the girl. “Let me out, please let me out!”
    Nikolai and the others went into the kitchen. They were forced to keep Elena in the bathroom. She was beating on her door, too.

    By evening the girl had calmed down. Nikolai asked her if she’d managed to pee. With difficulty the girl answered that,
yes, she’d gone in her underwear. She asked for something to drink.
    There was a child-sized bed in the girl’s room, a rug, a locked wardrobe with all the family’s clothing, and some bookshelves. It had been a cozy room for a little girl; now it was a quarantine chamber. Nikolai managed to hack an opening high up in the door. He lowered a bottle filled with soup and bread crumbs through the hole. The girl was told to eat this for dinner and then to urinate in the bottle and pour it out the window. But the window was locked at the top, and the girl couldn’t reach, and the bottle turned out to be too narrow for her to aim into. Excrement should have been easy enough: she was to take a few pages from one of the books and go on those, and then throw this all out the window. Nikolai had fashioned a slingshot and after three attempts had managed to put a fairly large hole in the window.
    But the girl soon showed the signs of her spoiled upbringing. She was unable to defecate onto the pages as she was supposed to. She couldn’t keep track of her own needs. Elena would ask her twenty times a day whether she needed to go poo; the girl would say no, she didn’t; and five minutes later she’d soil herself .
    Meanwhile, the girl’s food situation was becoming impossible: There were a finite number of bottles, and the girl was unable to retie the ones she had used to the rope. There were already nine bottles scattered on the floor when the girl stopped coming to the door or answering questions. The cat must have been sitting on her, though it hadn’t appeared in
their line of vision in a while, ever since Nikolai started trying to shoot it with the slingshot. The girl had been feeding the cat half of every ration—she’d simply pour it out on the floor for her. Now the girl no longer answered questions, and her little bed stood by the wall, outside their line of vision.
    They’d spent three days innovating, struggling to arrange things for the girl, attempting to teach her how to wipe herself (until now Elena had done this for her), getting water to her so she could somehow wash herself—and pleading interminably for her to come to the door to receive her bottle of food. One time Nikolai decided to wash the girl by pouring a bucket of hot water on her, instead of lowering the food, and after that the girl was afraid to come to the door. All this had so exhausted the inhabitants of the apartment that when the girl finally stopped answering them, they all lay down and slept for a long, long time.

    Then everything ended very quickly. Waking up, the grandparents discovered the cat in their bed with that same bloody mouth—apparently the cat had started eating the girl, but had climbed out the makeshift