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

down again, turned his back to her, and said it was the wrong model. It wasn’t what he needed at all.
    The next morning they crawled together to the cheap little kiosk to exchange the tape recorder for a better one. They had to pay a ton of money, again, for the upgrade—and clearly the people at the kiosk tricked them, seeing the condition the mother was in, that she was ready for anything.
    After that he truly went out of control. He listened to the tape recorder day and night without a break, dubbed cassettes
(which also cost money), and then soon there was the problem of a new leather jacket, designer jeans, and American sneakers.
    Here the mother finally said no. After all, where would it end?
    Since you’re not going to school anymore, she told him, why don’t you go to work like me? I’m ready for any kind of work for your sake.
    He replied that he would never slave for pennies the way she did.
    He refused to do what other boys in his situation did—sell newspapers or wash windshields at traffic lights. Maybe he was afraid of getting beaten up again—his mother, too, was afraid of everything, and maybe he’d grown up that way also, not having a father to set an example.
    But things soon got to the point where he refused to go out in his shapeless pants and jacket, became depressed, didn’t do his homework, rendering his attendance at school senseless—why show up just to be embarrassed by his teachers? He hated being lectured, couldn’t stand it.
    He spent more and more of his time with the neighborhood kids, his protectors, and they—thought the mother, sitting before her violated suitcase—must have drank, and smoked, and he alongside them, at their expense.
    And now the time must have come when they’d reminded him of this, of their long-standing hospitality, and decided it was time to get their money back.
    That must have been why he wanted to throw a going-away party, for his induction into the army. And she kept putting
it off, saying there were still two months to go, they’d have time, it was early.
    Of course all children know the secret places in the house where their parents hide the money.
    Whereas the mother might forget. There was even a time when this Nadya, the mother, couldn’t find her money sock, when she needed to buy her Vova new shoes. He was eight years old, and he pointed beneath the wardrobe—that’s where she’d hidden her sock. Now he was seventeen.

    The mother sat there, in shock, before this bankruptcy, this humiliation—someone had also scrawled obscenities on the bathroom walls, and the jars in the kitchen had been emptied of all their grains, as if the partiers were searching for something—she sat there and thought that this was the end, and there was nothing else she could do.
    In the calm of the waiting room, the doctor had told her that her boy was alive and well, that they were putting him in intensive care only as a formality, but that soon he’d be transferred to the psychiatric ward.
    If the psych ward declared him clinically insane, that would be his worst nightmare—because he’d secretly hoped he would someday get a car, but you can’t get a license with a record of mental illness.
    And in that case, too, the army wouldn’t have him, and he’d continue living off of her and just tumbling further and further into the abyss.

    On the other hand, if they didn’t declare him insane—also quite likely, since he would fight against the diagnosis and insist he was just trying to scare his mother—then he’d be drafted, and that would be the end of him. He’d told her himself: I won’t accept humiliations. You’ll have me back in a casket soon enough. Please bury me next to Dad.
    There was nothing else she could do. Nadya got through the evening, night, and morning, and then staggered over to the hospital. There she was met by the head of the psychiatric ward, a cheerful woman who told her the boy had only pretended to commit suicide, his friends