Short Stories in Russian by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Beast

Зверь

Ludmila Ulitskaya

Translated by Brian James Baer

Within a single year Nina was left by her mother and her husband; there was now no one to cook for, no one to live for. Like Eve in her banishment, she looked toward her past, and everything there seemed wonderful and all the insults and humiliations were erased. She even contrived a way to forget the battle position she’d occupied throughout the entire eleven years of her marriage, standing in the crossfire of the mutual hatred of the two people she loved. With the passage of time all these memories—the disgraceful picking, the indecent mutual jabs, the irritation that would boil over, and the furious quarrels that took place every time Nina managed to bring them together at the table with the white tablecloth in the foolhardy hope that she might reconcile the irreconcilable—seemed now more like a drama of complicated personalities. Nina’s life had never been a paradise, except perhaps in her youth when she was still studying in the conservatory, before she knew Seryozha and before she’d experienced her first misfortune. And now everyone was dead; her life seemed to be locked in a circle, and her past, now illuminated with the cinematic light of happiness, was greedily devouring both her empty present and her future, which had been deprived of any kind of meaning.

She was now, in all her thoughts and feelings, exclusively attached to the deceased, who looked out at her from the walls. Mother with a harp, mother in a hat, mother with a monkey in her arms. Seryozha—a boy with a wooden horse; Seryozha—a schoolboy with a thin forelock; Seryozha—a yachtsman with rock-hard shoulders; the penultimate Seryozha—with his cheeks now settled on his neck, abusive, dangerous; and the last Seryozha—the gaunt face, the sunken temples, and the eyes that held either doubt or conjecture. Or a ripening thought that was never voiced. And there was Grandma Mziya, who died before Nina was born, with an old-fashioned, stern face in a round girlish hat under a dark veil, a famous singer of now-forgotten songs . . . Almost two years had passed since her mother died, eleven months since Seryozha’s death, but it didn’t get any easier; it only got worse. She was tormented by dreams. Not nightmares, but limp and faded images that appeared gray against a brown background, so worn out you couldn’t call them dreams. In these weak dreams Nina used to say to herself, “Wake up, wake up,” but this drab web of shadows wouldn’t let her go, and when Nina was finally able to break free, she would carry with her into the light of day an indescribable anguish, nasty as a toothache.

Like a pressure cooker, Nina would boil these nocturnal anxieties inside herself until, completely exhausted, she would complain to her friends. She had two friends: the older, Susanna Borisovna, was highly educated with a mystical bent—she was even a member of the Anthroposophical Society. The younger, Tomochka, was unassuming and shy,

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