There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

in person because he wouldn’t answer his phone.) She was planning to surprise her beloved in their love nest with a romantic dinner. But upon reaching the front door, she discovered that the key to his apartment was missing from her key ring.
    Dasha stared wildly at Alyosha’s windows. His balcony was directly above the first-floor balcony, which was protected by iron bars. She and Alyosha used to wonder why anyone would want to live imprisoned behind those ugly bars. They had decided that potential burglars could climb up them to get to
their
balcony, which meant they, too, should install bars, and so should the people above them, and so forth. That’s how they would joke, these carefree owners of nothing, who had no property in the city or anywhere near it except for Dasha’s crumbling country shack. The shack, it was true, was in an upscale area. Here we must point out that this Dasha wasn’t exactly broke; we are not talking about a penniless divorcée with a child—not at all. Dasha was making more money in her job than her cuckolded husband or even this Alyosha, her most recent passion. She only appeared to be a charity case; in fact, ground had been broken on the site of her new mansion.
    But now this successful Dasha felt she must enter her lover’s house. Who knew when he’d be back? She couldn’t just sit and wait, this impulsive nymph, could she? She scrambled up the bars of the first-floor balcony and hopped up to the second. Alyosha’s balcony door was unlocked.
    Dasha stepped into the hall with delicious anticipation. She was going to get a drink of water from the kitchen when something caught her eye: a semi-unpacked suitcase in the bedroom, a purse by the bed, and the bed itself, which looked like the site of a recent sexual conquest—Dasha noticed fresh milky spots on a rumpled towel.
    So, Alyosha had just slept with another woman. From the kitchen came sounds of cooking—the slut was obviously making use of Dasha’s new porcelain chopping board—and also of an intimate conversation between the slut and Alyosha. The slut was making herself at home here—and not for the first time, that was clear.
    Dasha was hysterical. She stumbled into the kitchen, choking on her snot and tears, appealing to her “husband” for reassurance, the very husband who had just screwed another woman. She screamed at the terrified hag, who held a chopping knife in midair. Looking through her tears, Dasha stretched out her arms toward the blurry figure, the pale, frightened Alyosha, who could be heard muttering something.
    Her performance that day was the cry of a betrayed, rebellious soul. Never again did she produce a monologue of such force. She gave one final moan, spun around, and flew out of the apartment. Once outside, she ran blindly through the traffic to the highway, and there she halted to flag down a car with a shaking hand. This was where her impulse let go of her, finally, and she was overtaken by Alyosha, who got into the car with her and rode out to her shack—for good.
    It was his wife, he told her. She had arrived without warning.
    So the wife had arrived, the phone had been disconnected, and the door to the apartment had been locked with a special safety button to trap burglars inside—only Dasha and Alyosha knew about it. On her way out, Dasha had unlocked this clever button without thinking. The wife, however, couldn’t have known about it; it must have been Alyosha who locked it against Dasha’s arrival. Also, what could have happened to her key? How could it have disappeared from the ring?
    In all their life together she didn’t ask her husband these questions, not once.

Hallelujah, Family!
    T his, in short, is what happened.
    1.A young girl worked as a secretary during the day and took classes at night. She came from a respectable family, although her mother had a certain history:
    2.She was the illegitimate child of two mothers and one father. Yousee,
    3.there were two sisters: one was