There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

care they’d perish within hours, but I was a nuisance. Paradosk , as my subliterate neighbor Niura likes to say.
    Andrey played soccer and hockey; by ninth grade he had more scars than a feral cat. Other boys would carry him home—unconscious, because local ladies had decided to dig up the lawn and plant carrots, and then fenced off their orchard with invisible wire right at the height of a child’s throat. Another time some little angels decided it would be fun to throw a handmade knife, and they threw it right into Andrey’s foot. This was after my husband had disappeared in the direction of Krasnodar, and I had a friend over—A.Y., a very attractive man, although a married alcoholic, whose wife regarded me in only one sense—as all wives always. So this A.Y., on seeing Andrey spouting blood all over the stairs (I later washed it off, with my tears), asked him, “What’s that, old man, a battle wound?” When, six years later, Andrey didn’t come home until two in the morning, and my mother screamed, “Go back where you came from!” and whacked him with a chair, something happened to my heart, I couldn’t breathe. In the morning I called A.Y., to ask for advice. “To be on a safe side, call the ambulance, Andrianovna,” he told me in the cheerful voice he always used between binges. “But remember, women rarely have heart attacks.” This only proved that while recovering from his own heart attack A.Y. never looked into the women’s ward. Then he asked Andrey’s age. “So you expect him to jump up from a woman’s bed screaming, ‘Mommy expects me at ten’? I was going to become a father at fifteen, and this one is already sixteen!”
    •   •   •
    The time is night.
    My squawking angel is finally asleep, arms akimbo on the pillow. I’m alone with my scraps of paper and a pencil—pens are beyond my means. Everything is beyond my means now, thanks to Andrey, who has taken me for everything this time. This time wasn’t like his previous robberies, when he tried to break down my door and in the end set my mailbox on fire. He was demanding a huge amount, twenty-five rubles, for what he considered his room, and calling me horrible names, the most obscene in the Russian language. I huddled over trembling Tima, covering his ears. Luckily Andrey is a coward, and he left when I yelled that I was calling the police.
    My poor son, he can’t believe I’m capable of calling the cops on him. He has never recovered after the prison, never come back as a human being. Instead he lives off his so-called friends, those boys he saved with his sentence. Some time ago I received a call from the completely crazy mom of one of the eight friends, Andrey’s potential codefendants.
    “Is this the apartment of such and such? Hello? Does Andrey such and such live here?”
    “Nope. Who’s asking?”
    “Doesn’t matter.”
    Good-bye, then. But no.
    “Where can I find him? Hello? I’ve tried calling the building where he works.”
    Persistent hag!
    “He now works at a ministry.” Let her call human resources at every ministry in town.
    “Can I have the number?”
    “It’s classified.”
    “This is the mother of his comrade Ivan. When I was out, Andrey stole Ivan’s new leather jacket! Hello?”
    “I’d advise you to search your son’s room. By the way, how come he’s not in jail? I’ve heard Alesha K.’s case is being retried.” This Ivan of hers is still wearing the sweater I bought for Andrey’s birthday with the last of my money. “By the way,” I added, “could Ivan compensate me for the things he stole from me?”
    Click.
    To grovel, to pray
    At the feet of a son
    Who returned from the dead:
    May he stay. May he stay.
    Back from prison that day, Andrey was in our kitchen eating my herring, my potatoes, my bread, himself made with my blood and marrow, yellow and emaciated, terribly tired. I said nothing. “Go take a shower” was hanging on my lips. (Since childhood it has made him feel