There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

to buy a baby goat. We walked ten kilometers to the village of Tarutino, but we did it as if we were tourists, as if it were old times. We wore backpacks, and sang as we walked, and when we got to the village we asked where we could drink some goat’s milk, and when we bought a glass of milk from a peasant woman for a bread roll, we made a show of our affection for the little goats. I started whispering to my mother, as if I wanted a goat for myself. The peasant woman became very excited, sensing a customer, but my mother whispered back no, at which point the woman began speaking very sweetly to me, saying she loved the little goats like her own children and because of this she’d give them both
to me. To which I quickly replied, “No, I only need one!” We agreed on a price right away; the woman clearly didn’t know the state of the ruble and took very little, and even threw in a handful of salt crystals for the road. She obviously thought she’d made a good deal, and, in truth, the little goat did begin to fade away pretty quickly after the long walk home. It was Anisya again who got us out of it. She gave the baby goat to her own big goat, but first she covered it with some mud from her yard, and the goat took it as one of her own, didn’t kill it. Anisya beamed with pride.
    We now had all the essentials, but my indomitable father, despite his slight limp, started going out into the forest, and every day he went farther and farther. He would take his ax, and some nails, and a saw, and a wheelbarrow—he’d leave with the sunrise and come back with the night. My mother and I waded around the garden, somehow or other kept up my father’s work of collecting window panes, doors, and glass, and then of course we made the food, cleaned up, lugged the water for laundry, sewed, and mended. We’d collect old, forgotten sheepskin coats in the abandoned houses and then sew something like fur ponchos for the winter, and also we made mittens and some fur mattresses for the beds. My father, when he noticed such a mattress one night on his bed, immediately rolled up all three and carted them away the next morning. It looked like he was preparing another refuge for us, except this one would be deep in the forest, and later on it came in very handy. But it also turned out that no amount of labor and no amount of foresight can save you, no one and nothing can save you except luck.

    In the meantime we lived through the hungriest month, June, which is when the supplies in a village usually run out. We shoved chopped dandelions into our mouths, made soup out of weeds, but for the most part we just gathered grass, pulled handfuls of it, and carried it, carried it, carried it home in sacks. We didn’t know how to mow it, and anyway it hadn’t really risen high enough for mowing yet. Finally Anisya gave us a scythe (in exchange for ten sackfuls of grass, which is not nothing), and Mom and I took turns mowing. I should repeat: We were far from the world, I missed my friends and girlfriends, and nothing reached us anymore. My father turned on the radio sometimes, but only rarely, because he wanted to conserve the batteries. The radio was full of lies and falsehoods anyway, and we just mowed and mowed, and our little goat Raya was growing and we needed to find her a boy goat. We trod over to the next village again, but the peasant woman was unfriendly to us now—by this point everyone knew all about us, but they didn’t know we had a goat, since Anisya was raising it, so the woman thought we’d lost Raya, and to hell with us. She wouldn’t give us the other goat, and we didn’t have any bread now—there wasn’t any flour, so there wasn’t any bread—and anyway her little goat had grown, too, and she knew three kilos of fresh meat would mean a lot of money in this hungry time. We finally got her to agree to sell the goat for a kilo of salt and ten bars of soap. But for us this meant future milk, and we ran home to get our