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

were in on it too, he’d told the doctor so himself.
    “But there are marks on his neck!” Nadya cried out.
    “It was a very flimsy rope,” answered the doctor. “He did that on purpose. He said if he’d wanted to kill himself he’d have used a thicker rope, a cord—he said you have one in the house. He remembered everything you said to the paramedics and what they looked like. He was just pretending to be unconscious.”
    “And the bloody foam on his mouth?” Nadya protested, but the doctor was no longer listening. She said the boy was still very upset and didn’t want to face his mother after the joke he’d pulled.
    “But he robbed me,” Nadya wanted to say, but instead just began weeping right there in the waiting room.
    “You should also seek some help,” the doctor suggested in parting.
    After that Nadya wandered back home again and began calling all her friends for advice.

    Then she went down to the yard, where the old ladies convened on the benches, and sought their advice, too.
    Somehow she couldn’t help talking about what had happened, just couldn’t stop her racing tongue. She stopped people on the street, people she barely knew, and insisted on telling them everything, as if she were at confession.
    People had begun looking at her in a funny way, agreeing with everything she said, prompting her with questions.
    She finally got help from an old woman who used to live in their building but now lived far away with her sister. She had been diagnosed (she told Nadya) with a fatal disease and had only two weeks to live, which is why she’d stayed away for a while. Before the old woman moved Nadya had occasionally brought her groceries, and the woman would tell her everything—how she’d transferred ownership of her apartment to her beloved grandson so that she could live out the last years of her life without worries about his future, and that the grandson had immediately decided to remodel the place, pulled up the floors, changed the parquet, and in the meantime moved his grandmother out to her sister’s place, so as not to bother her with all the repairs. Then the grandson disappeared, and the apartment was occupied by a family no one knew, who had bought it from the grandson fair and square. So it went. Everyone in their building knew the story.
    The poor exiled old woman used to go around to all the neighbors and cry about what had happened, but now she seemed to have calmed down. She didn’t even mention it, said she was living well (“With your sister?” asked Nadya, but the old woman answered, “No, without my sister now,”
and Nadya was afraid to ask further, for fear that the sister had died), she was growing all sorts of flowers (“On your balcony?” Nadya asked, and the old woman said, “No, over my head,” which seemed like a strange answer, and Nadya did not ask anything more), and in any case Nadya had to tell her own story, too, so she did.
    The old woman said, “You need to find Uncle Kornil.”
    And that was it. She immediately began to walk away and then disappeared around the corner of her old building before Nadya could ask her anything else.
    Amazed, Nadya raced around the corner and then the next corner, but the woman was gone.
    There was nothing else to do. Once again Nadya called all her friends and acquaintances and anyone else she could find, to ask them about Uncle Kornil, and finally, when she was waiting in line at the post office, a woman told her that Kornil slept in the boiler room of the hospital near the metro.
    Uncle Kornil was near death, the woman added, and couldn’t be allowed to drink.
    But the local bums who also lived in the basement wouldn’t let you in to see him unless you brought them a bottle of vodka.
    Nor would Kornil tell you anything unless he got a bottle, too.
    What you needed to do was put down a fresh towel for a tablecloth, and shot glasses, serve the vodka, something to eat, and so on in that vein.
    The woman explained in great