But Alyosha never accepted this new father. He was shocked by the speed with which his mother had experienced a change of heart. It seemed like a betrayal-she still wore the same slippers she wore while his father lived, and now she’d flung herself into another marriage. Alyosha refused to go to America with them. But his mother, looking younger than herself by twenty years, blossoming, golden-haired, blue-eyed, in love, flew off with her new husband to the place where her first husband’s soul now lived-and no one ever did explain it to either of them.

The New Robinson Crusoes

A Chronicle of the End of the Twentieth Century

SO MY PARENTS DECIDED THEY WOULD OUTSMART EVERYONE. When it began they piled me and a load of canned food into a truck and took us to the country, the far-off and forgotten country, somewhere beyond the Mur River. We’d bought a cabin there for cheap a few years before, and mostly it just stood there. We’d go at the end of June to pick wild strawberries (for my health), and then once more in August in time for stray apples and plums and black cranberries in the abandoned orchards, and for raspberries and mushrooms in the woods. The cabin was falling apart when we bought it, and we never fixed anything. Then one fine day late in the spring, after the mud had hardened a little, my father arranged things with a man with a truck, and off we went with our groceries, just like the new Robinson Crusoes, with all kinds of yard tools and a rifle and a bloodhound called Red-who could, theoretically, hunt rabbits.

Now my father began his feverish activity. Over in the garden he plowed the earth-plowing the neighbors’ earth in the process, so that he pulled out our fence posts and planted them in the next yard. We dug up the vegetable patch, planted three sacks of potatoes, groomed the apple trees. My father went into the woods and brought back some turf for the winter. And suddenly too we had a wheelbarrow. In general my father was very active in the storerooms of our neighbors’ boarded-up houses, picking up whatever might come in handy: nails, old boards, shingles, pieces of tin, buckets, benches, door handles, windowpanes, and all sorts of useful old things, like well buckets, yarn spinners, grandfather clocks, and then not-so-useful old things, like old iron teakettles, iron oven parts, stove tops, and so on.

Three old women were the village’s sole inhabitants: Baba Anisya; Marfutka, who had reverted to semi-savagery; and the red-headed Tanya, the only one with a family: her kids would come around and bring things, and take other things away-which is to say they’d bring canned food from the city, cheese, butter, and cookies, and take away pickled cucumbers, cabbage, potatoes. Tanya had a rich basement pantry and a good, enclosed front yard, and one of her grand-children, a permanently ailing boy named Valera, often stayed with her. His ears were always hurting, or else he was covered with eczema. Tanya herself was a nurse by training, which training she received in a labor camp in Kolyma, where she’d been sent at the age of seventeen for stealing a suckling pig at her collective farm. She was popular, and she kept her stove warm-the shepherdess Vera would come from the next village over and call out (I could hear her in the distance), “Tanya, put the tea on! Tanya, put the tea on!” Baba Anisya, the only human being in the village-Marfutka didn’t count, and Tanya was a criminal-said that Tanya used to be the head of the health clinic here, practically the most important person around. Anisya worked for her for five years, for doing which she lost her pension because it meant she didn’t complete the full twenty-five years at the collective farm, and then five years sweeping up at the clinic don’t count, especially with a boss like Tanya. My mom made a trip once with Anisya to the regional Party headquarters in Priozersk, but the headquarters had been boarded up long ago, everything was boarded up, and my mother walked the twenty-five kilometers home with a frightened Baba Anisya, who immediately began digging in her garden with renewed vigor, and chopping wood, and carrying firewood and twigs into her house-she was fending off a hungry death, which is what she’d face if she did nothing, like Marfutka, who was eighty-five and no longer lit her stove, and even the few potatoes she’d managed to drag into her house had frozen during the winter. They simply lay there in a wet, rotten pile. Marfutka had nibbled out of that pile all winter and now refused to part with these riches, her only ones, when one time my mother sent me over with a shovel to clean them out. Marfutka refused to open the door, looking out through the window that was draped in rags and seeing that I was carrying a garden spade. Either she ate the potatoes raw, despite her lack of teeth, or she made a fire for them when no one was looking-it was impossible to tell. She had no firewood. In the spring Marfutka, wrapped in layers of greasy shawls, rags, and blankets, showed up at Anisya’s warm home and sat there like a mummy, not breathing a word. Anisya didn’t even try to talk to her, and Marfutka just sat there. I looked once at her face, which is to say what was visible of her face under the rags, and saw that it was small and dark, and that her eyes were like wet holes.

Marfutka survived another winter but no longer went into the yard-she’d decided, apparently, to die of hunger. Anisya said simply that, last year, Marfutka still had some life left in her, but this year she’s done for, her feet don’t look straight ahead but at each other, the wrong way. One day my mother took me along, and we planted half a bucket of potatoes in Marfutka’s yard, but Marfutka just looked at us and worried, it was clear, that we were taking over her plot, though she didn’t have the energy to walk over to us. My mother just went over to her and handed her some potatoes, but Marfutka, thinking her plot was being bought from her for half a bucket of potatoes, grew very frightened, and refused.

That evening we all went over to Anisya’s for some goat milk. Marfutka was there. Anisya said she’d seen us on Marfutka’s plot. My mother answered that we’d decided to help Baba Marfa. Anisya didn’t like it. Marfutka was going to the next world, she said, she didn’t need help, she’d find her way. It should be added that we were paying Anisya for the milk in canned food and soup packets. This couldn’t go on forever, since the goat made more milk every day, whereas the canned food was dwindling. We needed to establish a more stable equivalent, and so directly after the discussion about Marfutka, my mother said that our canned foods were running out, we didn’t have anything to eat ourselves, so we wouldn’t be buying any more milk that day. Clever Anisya grasped the point at once and answered that she’d bring us a can of milk the next day and we could talk about it-if we still had potatoes, that is. She was angry, apparently, that we were wasting our potatoes on Marfutka instead of paying her. She didn’t know how many potatoes we’d invested in Marfutka’s plot during the hungry spring. Her imagination was working like a little engine. She must have been calculating that Marfutka didn’t have long to go and that she’d gather her harvest in the fall, and was angry in advance that we were the rightful owners of those planted potatoes. Everything becomes complicated when it’s a matter of surviving in times like these, especially for an old, not particularly strong person in the face of a strong young family-my parents were both forty-two then, and I was eighteen.

That night we received a visit from Tanya, who wore a city coat and yellow rubber boots, and carried a new bag in her hands. She brought us a little piglet smothered by its mother, wrapped in a clean rag. Then she wondered if we were officially registered to live in the village. She pointed out that many of the houses here had owners, and that the owners might want to come out and see for themselves what was happening, say if someone were to write them, and that all that we beheld was not just riches lying by the roadside. In conclusion, Tanya reminded us that we’d encroached on the plot of our neighbor, and that Marfutka was still alive. As for the piglet, she offered to sell it to us for money, that is for paper rubles, and that night my father chopped and pickled the little pig, which in the rag looked like a little baby. It had lashes above its eyes and everything.