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

different, and Victor couldn’t get enough of it. You just don’t age, he kept telling her in the dark. Finally they went out into the living room. Victor made some tea, and that’s when Alla announced
    20.that things had changed. Victor was sure Alla’s transformation was attributable to a new affair, and he chewed his cookie regretfully.
    21.That’s right, Alla said. I’ve met someone, and I love him as much as I loveyou.
    22.Ah, well, Victor sighed, and kept on chewing.
    23.We are going to have a baby.
    24.What? Another baby? Victor felt sleepy and confused. He just wanted to be left alone.
    25.Then it occurred to him that perhaps Alla knew how to determine pregnancy right after the act—girls these days knew all kinds of things. When did you get knocked up? he croaked.
    26.In September!
    27.In September? I see. . . .
    28.She explained what had happened at the hospital, but he refused to believe her. Two weeks later he proposed to the daughter of a nice family that lived in a house with clean floors and polished furniture. The girl resembled Marguerite from
Faust
: blond hair, blue eyes, endless braid.
    29.However, some friends informed Nina Petrovna that Alla was pregnant by her son, and so she boycotted the wedding, which was held a month later.
    30.Victor must have sensed some danger from the beautiful Alla, from her full breasts, her moist mouth, silky hair—he must have sensed that this gorgeous body was meant to seduce him, as Alla’s fifteen-year-old grandmother, consciously or unconsciously, had seduced her brother-in-law, who thereby became the husband of two sisters and so quickly dispatched himself.
    31.Victor wanted to find refuge in his ideal Marguerite, but Alla’s belly grew remorselessly, and on his birthday Alla presented it to him, like a gift.
    32.To cheat fate, Victor signed a three-year contract at a big industrial site two thousand miles away. He reckoned that in three years they’d all forget about him, including Alla, who’d find herself a husband. It was like a temporary suicide, he thought, a thing that everyone desires at some point—to step out for a while, then come back to see what happened.
    33.Victor partied all night before his departure, and Alla was there, too, at his mother’s invitation, ballooned like a drowned corpse, with cracked black lips. By the morning he had second thoughts about his impending three-year death and lost some of his nerve—but what could he do? Life in his hometown with swollen Alla appeared no less terrible, for only teenagers are drawn to everything that reminds them of their earliest days. Besides, Victor was in love again, with a superbly skinny and lithe contortionist named Zhanna, whose amateur act he’d caught in a nearby town where he’d gone to escape his amiable but unyielding mother. After the performance Victor slipped out and waited for Zhanna by the back entrance. He walked her to the bus, took down her address, and the next day met her in Moscow at her dorm. They took a walk through a park where trees were beginning to turn, and Victor’s only reward was a kiss on her bony little hand.
    34.With Zhanna’s address in his wallet, and shedding bitter tears, Victor was dragged by one of his buddies to the train station.
    35.At the industrial site, Victor shared a single room with a young married couple. They arrived a day after he did and were embarrassed to find him lying on a bed in their assigned room. But it wasn’t a mistake: housing was tight, and with this couple Victor witnessed the entire cycle of child-making, up to the day the young mother returned from the hospital with her baby. The baby was covered with a septic rash—his whole little head felt like a cactus due to the tiny bumps. His parents bowed before this new catastrophe and tended to him day and night until he got better. Victor did what he could, didn’t sleep either, and ran around to various offices trying to get them alternate accommodations. Then one day