And by the way, that’s not how it’s going to go. Anton and Alissa can’t be there. Especially not Anton. Once is enough. I’ll tell Vadim that the kids are on their way home and will be right there. That he should have a seat so I can bring him a cup of tea.
His kids. That’s what they used to be. Now they’re mine.
Shooting him would also work. But I have to be realistic. The chances of me getting hold of a gun are slim. Though it would be appropriate. Vadim had a pistol for years. Anna says guns are just a way to compensate for a small cock. It’s the best line I’ve ever heard come out of her mouth.
Back in the army, a hundred years ago, Vadim was supposed to have been a pretty good shot. He loved to talk about it whenever he couldn’t understand something he got in the mail from the authorities, or when he couldn’t find any clean socks, or when my mother went out at night without him, ignoring his tantrum. At those moments he would talk about the army and his face would get all pensive. “Back in the army,” he would say, “we skewered the bastards on the bayonets of our AK-47s.”
Anton shivered and didn’t ask what Vadim meant by that.
In the final stretch, before Vadim moved out, Anton often shook with fear in his presence. And never opened his mouth. Sometimes I thought he had completely lost the ability to speak. It didn’t surprise me at all that his teacher kept asking our mother to come in for parent-teacher conferences to discuss the fact that Anton “refused to participate”—as she put it in the letters she sent home — in class discussions.
If he hadn’t continued to show “good effort” in his written work — even “very good” sometimes — the teacher would probably have just tolerated a student who sat pale and silently in the back row, barely distinguishable from the wall. But she was a young teacher, and still cared about her students. She wanted to find out why when this kid in her class was spoken to he would just clamp his mouth shut and refuse eye contact as adamantly as he refused to speak. So she tormented Anton with unusually determined efforts to engage with him, and my mother with invitations to come in to talk about the problem.
The first one was actually a parents-teacher conference. Both of Anton’s parents went. Vadim let my mother tie his tie for him, but he kept swatting her hands away impatiently. My mother wasn’t as good at tying a tie as Anton was at his written school work.
A steady stream of comments came from Vadim, too. Like, “I keep asking myself if maybe they switched the arms and legs when they were putting you together.” And, “Quit yanking me all around, you idiot.” And, “Why can’t you just tie the fucking thing?” And, “You are the most useless woman I’ve ever met.” And, “Get it done — how many years am I supposed to wait around while you figure it out?”
Through all of this I was doing my homework at the kitchen table. Actually I wasn’t doing my homework because I was sitting there in a helpless rage, my fist clenched around my pen. I wasn’t upset at Vadim but at my mother — a situation I found myself in a lot back then.
If someone did that to me, I’d pull the stupid tie until his throat started to rattle. Then I’d go into the kitchen and put the kettle on. And before he had a chance to loosen the noose and catch his breath, I’d go back in and pour boiling water over his head. That’s the bare minimum someone who talked to me that way could reckon with.
And what do you do, I thought, scrawling angry, jagged lines across my binder. You don’t say a thing. You let yourself get pushed away and smile, lost in your own thoughts. You go back to helping him if he asks you to, and you even keep helping him when he viciously insults you. With the patience of an angel, you let yourself get walked all over — you, of all people. You, a person who takes such pride in being courteous to everyone around you.
It pains me that you almost always remain civil. And I know it’s not because you’re afraid of him. You don’t even see him anymore, you don’t hear him. You couldn’t care less about him — and for that you feel bad. Despite what he’s like.
You don’t take him seriously at all. You let him rage and scream at you and tell you you’re not allowed to do things — things you’ll obviously do anyway. You let him blather on about things he doesn’t have a clue about, which is pretty much everything except his glory days back in the army and the exact mechanical workings of our toilet.
You don’t react when he spews his hateful tirades about the fucking Germans, who can’t manage their own country, the fucking Americans, who try to worm their way into everything like members of the biggest cult in the world, the fucking Italians, who talk so damn fast. About the Russian mobsters who turn their backs on their own country and about the Russian morons who don’t. About the fucking job placement office, which is never able to find the right job for such a world-class professional like Vadim. And about his piece-of-shit boss who dared to make a stupid comment — just too stupid for Vadim to take, too stupid for him to be able to stay on the job, making that piece of shit the only boss he’s ever had here, and for only a short time at that.
And first and foremost, over and over, about fucking women. About the German women, who wear the ugliest clothes on earth, don’t shave their legs, and have the gall to earn more in a month than Vadim has in his entire life. And French women, sluts every one — even the way they talk sounds slutty, as if they all just want to be laid down and nailed. Turkish women, so disgustingly fat beneath the tents they wear, pumping out a new baby every year, drinking tea with their husbands’ other wives, and speaking German worse than Vadim himself.
And about the Russian women, stupid and ugly, with vulgar taste in clothing, who think they can talk and laugh around Vadim with their backs to him, as if he weren’t even there. Of all people, they are best equipped to understand and appreciate Vadim’s unique qualities but — damn them! — they simply refuse to do so.
And then there’s this one here, the one he took pity on and married despite the fact that she had an insufferable, illegitimate freak of a daughter on her hip. The one he generously gave two more kids — kids who didn’t fucking appreciate him nearly enough. Instead of listening to him ramble on for hours, they pored through pointless books by moronic writers. Instead of polishing Vadim’s shoes, the girls teach his son how to play chess. Instead of cooking, they cackle on the telephone with their friends. Whenever Vadim’s on his deathbed with the flu, they make tea with lemon for him, sure, but they sing as they do. As if it’s all fun and games.
She acts in plays and gets applause. Her picture appears in the paper. People approach her on the street. The phone is constantly ringing. Always for her, only her. Nobody ever wants to talk to Vadim. And if they do, it’s only about one thing: “your wife this,” “your Marina that.”
She shouldn’t think as a result that she’s somehow better than him. Under no circumstances should she ever be permitted to think she married an old, useless sack of shit, which is how he sometimes feels about himself as he sits in front of the television morning, noon, and night, watching all those idiots who just waste Vadim’s valuable time — and get paid to do it.
To make sure she never thinks that way, she can’t be told often enough who she really is: a useless wife who can’t run the household or make decent money running around at what she calls a job but that doesn’t seem fit to be called work at all.