Read There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In for Free Online

registered at our address; this way maybe they’d get a room in a dorm for married couples—or had he married her for a Moscow registration? That caused a storm of tears, followed by a counterthreat: she’d stop Andrey from registering here, too. Later she came into my room, tears still falling. I was pretending to work. “Do you want me to die? Is that it?” she asked me. “Go on,” I said. “Go on living, you and your future fatherless brat. But let me ask: Is it worth it for your so-called family to exist at the expense of homeless Andrey and your granny hospitalized?”
    She cried so easily back then. Tears streamed from her bright eyes, my sweet darling’s eyes. I tried to hug her, and this time she let me. “Fine,” she said. “I know you don’t want us here, me and my baby; all you ever wanted was that criminal son of yours; you just wish I’d vanish, cease to exist. But that won’t happen, you understand? And if anything happens to my precious, your Andrey will go away for much longer.” So that’s how she spoke of Andrey, who alone shielded eight friends with his sentence; for whom she used to shed tears every night; her suffering brother, to whom she wrote those lovely, funny letters. (She wouldn’t let me see them, but I read them anyway, admiring her talent; I quoted her once as a joke, and oh, what a scene she threw, accusing me of spying and God knows what else—what a terrible, terrible scene.) True, she did cry over Andrey the first two months; the rest of the time she had every reason to cry over herself. And now we were all expecting an amnesty, in honor of Victory Day.
    With the last of my money I bought a lock for my room and invited a friendly plumber to install it. He charged me one ruble and joked that he was looking for a wife. What a dear, simple soul! He didn’t realize that I was quite old and almost a grandmother! The next day he showed up, fortified with drink, with a bag of candy in an outstretched hand, and was greeted by Alena’s loud phooey. My suitor vanished for good—he even resigned from our building. Well, declared my daughter when the door closed on him, what we just witnessed was a perfect example of a man on the hunt for a Moscow registration. I should be careful not to contract genital lice or some venereal disease, she continued, or she’d bar me from the bathroom and especially from her child—my own Tima!—until, that is, I produced proof of my moral and physical fitness. Because, you see, she had been warned at the maternity clinic about various forms of syphilis that were found, apparently, even in public soda fountains. Thus spoke a (finally) wedded wife who attended classes at the clinic and generally followed the path of virtue.
    I left the scene of the battle and locked my door. For a long time I shed bitter tears. I was only fifty years old! My joints were only beginning to ache, my blood pressure was almost normal, I still had my health, my life! And yet—my life began to melt, to ebb away, but let’s have mercy, let’s leave that part in darkness. . . . You poor old folks, I cry for you. But how I failed to appreciate my relative youth, considering myself an ancient hag! At night, it’s true, I couldn’t sleep even then, but I didn’t give up, not yet. I’d comb the stores for scraps of fabric, hoping to stitch together a skirt or a dress, and I even nursed plans to crochet a blouse from some cheap yarn. Can you imagine? Me, thinking of crocheting, living as I was on a volcano, only moments away from welcoming to our disaster area two beloved beings, Tima and Andrey? I now save those scraps for Tima, for a shirt or something else, but a shirt’s too difficult for me, and Masha occasionally gives me her boy’s hand-me-downs. Not the nice stuff, but still. And I already have a school uniform stashed away—that’s right. I save and save.
    Masha, for all her faults, is all I have left from my old life. It’s no use talking about it now,