The familiar way of life. Dating story no. 32

For some reason, when people talk about a life like a fairy tale, what they picture straight away are idyllic, well-fed scenes of comfort and plenty. And yet take any fairy tale you like and it is all about suffering, misfortune and hardship. The heroes endure and overcome, and all of it for the sake of some static, ephemeral happiness in the future that the tale mentions almost in passing, as a formality. Yuna, for instance, used to compare her life to the tales of "Morozko" and "Cinderella".

The thing is that she, too, had a stepmother — a spiteful woman who hated her fiercely and made her work until nightfall: scrubbing the bathroom and the toilet, cleaning the carpets, doing the laundry, tidying up, running errands with heavy bags of shopping and so on. The stepmother quite literally fed Yuna on scraps fit only for stray dogs, and on top of that she threatened that if Yuna ever complained to her father, she would divorce him and his career would be ruined because of it. And Yuna believed her, silently doing everything that was demanded of her.

Yuna never knew her own mother — she died when Yuna was one year old. All through her childhood she dreamt of finally having a real mother, and when the stepmother appeared the girl tried her hardest to please her, to earn her love. Alas, her attempts to call the stepmother “mum” provoked nothing but anger and hatred. By about the age of 14 she had stopped hoping that her stepmother would ever accept her and love her. She came to terms with not being wanted in her own home and began to dream of leaving it as soon as she could. Few people still believe in Father Frost at fourteen — but fine young princes are there in abundance. So Yuna set out to find a prince of her own. She looked at school, and at the teacher-training college she went on to — not that teaching was her dream profession; she simply believed, quite sincerely, that nowhere else would take her. And then one day, as if in a fairy tale, she heard the most divine piano playing. Following the sound, she saw him, that very prince — and of course she fell in love.

Another feature of Russian folk tales is that, for some reason, the ones who suffer in them are almost always unmarried girls. If men suffer at all, it is after the wedding and the honeymoon. And so it was with Stas: for all his deeply wary attitude to life, things were on the whole going rather well for him. He grew up loved and looked after; his mother tried to anticipate his every wish, watching jealously for the direction in which he might want to develop. The village music school was standard fare for most children, but when one of the family's acquaintances pronounced “expertly” that “the boy has talent”, that was the start of it! Every ounce of effort and money went into his musical career: meetings with distinguished professors, auditions, concerts at home… In the end Stas failed the conservatory entrance exams spectacularly and, by default, ended up at the teacher-training college. And although the spectre of concerts to come no longer clouded his carefree existence, so jealously guarded by his mother, he did still play now and then, purely for himself, when the mood took him. As on the day when he felt so oddly sad that Chopin came to mind. And he plunged headlong into the music.

To Yuna it felt as though the music were carrying her off to some unknown land where there was neither hardship nor sorrow. The music was simply beautiful, and the young man playing it was simply divine. That very prince from the fairy tale, who would take her in his arms and carry her away from every trouble and every storm. And she set about chasing him with all her might: she came to every performance of his, tried to sit as close as she could, invited him out for walks, listened spellbound to his musings… She was genuinely astonished by his mind, his potential, his ability to get to the bottom of things and unravel any tangle. Beside him she forgot her own self-doubt and felt strong, irresistible.

And what about Stas? He clearly enjoyed having Yuna chase after him. Plenty of people chased after him, and he was used to it. He watched all this running about in a lordly, detached way, with a touch of irony, but without getting involved. He had no particular need for a relationship, and no particular wish to hand his life over to anybody either. He understood very clearly that people are far too unreliable creatures, and so he simply enjoyed whatever was on offer today. Besides, he was flattered by the delight in Yuna's eyes, by the way she hung on his every word. It drew him in, it buoyed him up and inspired him — but he had absolutely no plans to change anything in his life.

And yet the homeostasis, of a kind, could not be preserved. Somehow, imperceptibly, he was talking to Yuna almost every day. Their fellow students joked that the two of them were bride and groom, Yuna looked at him full of hope, and his mother — with her maddening habit of dropping by the college after work — grew curious about the nice girl who kept appearing at his side, and even hurried to invite Yuna to their home. In short, the cards were falling in such a way that he urgently needed to slip out of it. Alas, he realised that too late.

Yuna, meanwhile, was in seventh heaven. Her world had split into two entirely unlike halves: on one side the grim, unwelcoming house of her father, where she was weighed down by the feeling of not being good enough, by the fear that she was about to be thrown out on her ear, that nobody in the world would want her however hard she tried. And on the other side was the bright world of being in love, where she was the princess of her own romantic fairy tale, the most charming, the very best, with the most wonderful man in the world. When Lyudmila Ivanovna, Stas's mother, invited her out to their place in the suburbs, it was the best possible confirmation that Yuna's dream was closer than ever to coming true. Stas's parents turned out to be wonderful people: Lyudmila Ivanovna was incredibly attentive and caring, and at the same time bold and decisive — the real Mother Yuna had always dreamt of. And Sergei Viktorovich was a remarkably calm and wise man who did everything properly and unhurriedly and, above all, had an incredible sense of humour. The clouds gathered later, when Yuna introduced Stas to her father.

— “He is no match for you,” said Alexei Semyonovich once they were alone.

— “But I love him!” exclaimed Yuna.

— “Look at you, and look at him. Not the best idea. Finish your degree, we'll push you up through the Party, and in seven years, maybe ten, we'll make you a head teacher; you'll be a respected person…”

— “A head teacher?” Yuna protested. “Just because I'm your daughter?!”

— “Yes, that's why.”

— “But that's wrong! You can't do that!!”

— “In this country that's the only way anything gets done.”

— “I'll achieve everything myself! And anyway, we were talking about Stas…”

— “About Stas I have said all I have to say.”

— “So you're forbidding me?”

— “Well, how could I forbid you anything? You're a grown woman, you can decide for yourself. Yes, I think he is no match for you, but the decision is yours.”

— “Then tell me what to do.”

— “It's your decision. You will make it and you alone will answer for it. And don't come telling me afterwards that it was my fault!” — and the familiar sly glint appeared in her father's eyes, the one that meant the serious conversation had run its course.

— “Then I choose Stas,” said Yuna stubbornly. Her father gave a resigned sigh.

At about the same time Lyudmila Ivanovna was holding a family council of her own. For her everything was clear and beyond doubt.

— “Stasik, you do like Yuna, don't you?”

— “She's all right…”

— “And she loves you. And she will take care of you…”

— “Mum, not now…”

— “Stasik, do think about it! She has a city residence permit, her father holds a post, she's a beautiful, clever girl, and I'll stop worrying that you'll fall into the wrong hands…”

— “Mum, calm down, I'll be fine…”

— “Stasik, I will worry, and besides, I want grandchildren! Don't fret, I'll help you with the grandchildren, I'll even take them in myself — but be honest, marry her!”

Unlike Alexei Semyonovich, Lyudmila Ivanovna did not stop at a single conversation. She was fired up by the idea of marrying her son off to such a promising bride, and she went after her goal, sweeping every obstacle aside. The main obstacle, of course, was her own flesh and blood's particular passivity, his detachment and his obvious unwillingness to do anything at all — but that did not frighten Lyudmila Ivanovna in the least; it was hardly the first time she had steered her foolish child onto the true path. He would understand later that she was right; he simply could not see the whole picture, and everything she did was for his sake, as though for herself.

Stas understood perfectly well that once his mother had got something into her head, there was nothing to be done. He was used to it. He knew arguing was pointless — it only fired her up further. He could try to sit it out until she burned herself out, but this time his mother had caught fire in earnest and for the long haul. So all that was left was to negotiate the best terms for himself. It was too late to run and hide.

The wedding was modest but merry: they strolled along the embankment, drank Soviet champagne, laughed and made merry. At last Yuna felt like the heroine of her own novel, her own fairy tale: after so many years of torment and trials she had a wonderful husband and a life of her own. There would be no more wicked stepmother, no more dreary existence on other people's leftovers, no more mockery of her looks and of the way she did things… A bright future had never seemed so real, and Yuna had no intention of giving it up to anyone. This simply had to become that “happily ever after” that all the fairy tales write about — and never mind that not a single storyteller, apart from the makers of Disney sequels that nobody in the Soviet Union had even heard of at the time, ever described what that happily ever after actually consists of.

And it consisted of a hard domestic grind, which, to be fair, was nothing new to Yuna: looking after her husband, sharing a kitchen with her new “mum” — something Lyudmila Ivanovna herself was the least prepared for — and also of fruitless attempts to get pregnant. Although she had had no mother of her own, Yuna sincerely dreamt of becoming one. Alas, the doctors ruthlessly declared that she could not have children.

That diagnosis suited Stas. He had not particularly wanted to marry in the first place; he had simply taken the path of least resistance so that his mother would settle down. When friends asked how he liked married life, he shrugged and said he could not see much difference. And indeed there was not much difference. He still went to the college, still flirted with the students in exactly the same way, and just as before there was a warm dinner waiting for him at home, his shirts were ironed and his shoes polished. He half-heard his mother starting to divide up the territory with his wife, but he counted that as women's business and preferred not to get involved. The main thing was that everything was running along its familiar rails. In that respect the fact that children were not even possible pleased him greatly — they would have disrupted the familiar way of life that he had so far managed to preserve.

Alas, his wife turned out to be no less restless than his mother. It showed itself far more gently, in a more feminine and self-sacrificing way, but all the same, once Yuna had got something into her head there was no talking her out of it: she could go on for as long as you liked with her guilty, drooping eyebrows, mumbling incoherently that “but she had so wanted it”, playing the victim — theatrically, in Stas's view — and agreeing with his point of view with tears in her eyes… only to rush off afterwards, as though they had never spoken at all, to pour her heart out to new people and new acquaintances, in the mad hope that a good fairy would appear and suddenly grant her the chance to have children. And the fairy, damn her, did appear, and even gave Yuna some advice. Neither Stas nor the doctors believed in it. Yuna was told it was cancer and that she needed an operation as soon as possible. Lyudmila Ivanovna chimed in that the sooner the better. And only Yuna, stubbornly frowning, begged the doctors to wait one more month. And she won. The diagnosis of cancer was replaced by a diagnosis of pregnancy, and once again Stas was in the minority. Yuna rejoiced and so did Lyudmila Ivanovna, and neither of them, it seemed, cared in the slightest about Stas's feelings. All he wanted was to be left in peace — but peace was in short supply…

The pregnancy added to Yuna's worries. Spring flew by under the sign of appalling morning sickness: at home, in lectures, on public transport. And then summer arrived unnoticed, and Yuna's father was promoted and prepared to move to Moscow, deciding to leave his splendid two-storey flat in a new block to his daughter as a present on the occasion of the wedding and the pregnancy. Her father did not know — most likely did not want to know — about all the stepmother's cruelty, but he evidently felt partly to blame. Keeping the flat meant a good deal of running from one office to another, but Yuna, beside herself with joy at the prospect of moving into a home of their own, was busy planning how she and her husband would sort it all out. Stas understood how important the flat was and was even willing to sit in the queues to make things easier for Yuna. Alas, Lyudmila Ivanovna refused to understand that.

— “Stasik needs a rest! What kind of wife are you if you care so little about your husband!” her mother-in-law fumed.

— “Of course I care! I love him very much! It's just that the pregnancy is already very hard on me, and my stomach hurts…”

— “Don't talk nonsense, there's nothing there to hurt!”

— “And Stas promised to help me…”

— “What nonsense, he's going on holiday!”

— “We have no money for a holiday just now,” Yuna said meekly.

She and Stas had agreed in advance to say that, hoping Lyudmila Ivanovna would settle down — but no such luck. Gathering up what was left of her gold jewellery, Lyudmila Ivanovna went off somewhere at nightfall, and in the morning a wad of money for a package holiday and for pocket expenses lay in front of Stas. In the end Yuna ran around alone collecting the paperwork and sitting out the queues while Lyudmila Ivanovna bought her son a holiday by the sea and put him on the train.

Now Lyudmila Ivanovna watched carefully to make sure her son never, heaven forbid, had to do too much around the house — he was studying as it was, and later working as it was… Yuna was always in the wrong, always either not quick enough or not clever enough. Yuna was told off for spending too long doing her make-up in front of the mirror (her job was to look after her husband) and for spending money on herself instead of on Stasik. Of course, when Yuna gave birth her mother-in-law was indispensable, immediately taking leave and helping Yuna, teaching her all sorts of tricks and secrets of handling a baby. It seemed that here at last was the mother Yuna had always dreamt of… except that it kept turning out that Yuna still did everything wrong and thought far too much about herself.

Meanwhile a terrible time had come, when the world was turned upside down. A tank fired on the White House in Moscow, prices rose overnight so steeply that what you earned yesterday would buy you nothing today, gangsters brought in the police to settle their scores and nobody knew what tomorrow would bring. Yuna left her teaching job because she had a family to feed. By day she worked as a secretary in one of the freshly hatched firms with handsome European offices and a director who drove a Mercedes with bodyguards. In the evenings she washed the floors in the library near their home, and the stairwells of her own building into the bargain. Her director already knew how principled she was and valued Yuna for her diligence and reliability, but his partners kept making passes at her, offering to keep her in comfort and genuinely failing to understand why she clung so hard to her family. But the very thought of selling herself disgusted her; besides, she still loved Stas sincerely.

Stas had it easier. Through his college contacts he got a job “outside his field” at a firm that arranged trips abroad for Soviet officials and also brought in groups to see Leningrad. The firm adapted fairly easily to the coup and the new realities, and Stas went on drawing a very decent salary by the standards of the day. He managed to keep everything free of unnecessary change and stress: he drank coffee in fashionable, expensive cafés, made eyes at girls in bright imported blouses, went to expensive restaurants and bought himself one of the first pairs of Ray-Bans to go on sale. The price of keeping things normal was lying: lying to his mother and to his wife alike. They had no idea how much he really earned. With their enthusiasm and all their fussing over the child he would have been obliged to hand it all over, his life would have changed radically and he would no longer have been able to enjoy it the way he did now. Besides, his wife and his mother were managing. Yuna earned enough to feed the child and Lyudmila Ivanovna, who had been made redundant, and even to pay Lyudmila Ivanovna for the time she spent minding her granddaughter.

But women, those eternally restless creatures forever rushing off somewhere! Why can they never sit still, what are they all striving for, why can they not simply leave him in peace, simply not touch him?

First Yuna's father, like so many at the time, plunged headlong into business and offered Stas a job: prestigious, well paid and responsible — and not just anywhere, but in Switzerland itself. On the back of news like that Yuna went completely out of her mind, and talked of nothing else, and so infectiously that even his mother was won over. All the more so since Stas's own aunt had emigrated there with her husband not long before. Stas did not want to go: a foreign country, foreign ways, having to adjust, to change, to throw himself into activity — and these days you never know, you might be swindled, cheated, shot or worse. Yuna, for her part, could not imagine how anyone could possibly not want such a thing. Stas mumbled, made excuses, sat things out in cafés and restaurants… until the day of the all-important interview arrived. Yuna went to bed later than usual, because she was steaming Stas's trousers, mending his jacket, ironing his shirt and getting everything ready so that Stas would make a good impression — and all this after a full day of work, playing with the child, cooking and doing a heap of other important things. At some point she simply passed out from exhaustion, and in the morning she did not react at all to the beeping alarm clock. It's fate, thought Stas, pressed the button and settled down more comfortably beside his wife to go on sleeping. A couple of hours later there was a storm, but little by little Yuna calmed down and forgave him.

Then Yuna took it into her head to buy a dacha in one of the outlying districts. The dacha really was going for a song, but it would then have needed doing up. Taught by bitter experience, Stas did not wait for Yuna to talk Lyudmila Ivanovna round and set about a bit of educational work of his own. In the end it was his mother who was the first to call Yuna a heartless capitalist and forbid any talk of buying a new dacha at all. All the same, the longer they lived together, the harder and more categorical his wife became, demanding outright that he do something for the family. And so Stas began to disappear “at work” for longer and longer, and before long found himself a mistress who demanded nothing of him. Each time he had to make more and more effort to keep everything as it was, to avoid change and aggravation — and now, it seemed, everything had settled down. Until one of their friends told Yuna about his second family.

It seemed to Yuna that her world had suddenly shattered into a thousand pieces. She had seen it in films: someone punches a hole in the wall of a spaceship, and out through it into the boundless dark flies everything she had ever held dear and, first of all, the oxygen she needed to live. After everything she had done, after all the effort she had put in, after all her care and all her attention — such a betrayal… She would have flown out herself, to freeze there forever within minutes, but she was held safely among the living by the tether of her child. Who else would want her daughter, if not her? She clung to that thought and suddenly saw her life in an entirely different light: a husband who wanted nothing, a mother-in-law who would never become her mother, her own attempts to please people who only used her… It had all been for nothing, and it could not go on like this. And Yuna filed for divorce.

The judge took her side. And it was the judge who talked Yuna into claiming maintenance, which she had wanted to refuse outright. That was when Yuna found out how much her husband had actually been earning: had he brought it all home, she would not have had to work three jobs at once. And it was those very thoughts that kept her from calling it all off, undoing it, staying with Stas — because who else, after all, would want her.

Turning points like that never pass without consequences. No sooner had she divorced than her father — who had held that until the divorce the responsibility for Yuna's well-being lay with the man she had chosen — offered her a job abroad, in an offshore company. Yuna agreed, and this time she really did manage to reach a new level of development. And Stas… he decided nothing at all, and went back to his calm, controlled existence. He carried on sipping coffee in expensive cafés, making eyes at passing girls and avoiding any excess stress. In place of a wife, his mother looked after him once again.

— “And quite right too that you split up, she never appreciated you at all! I did everything for her, and she, the little bourgeoise, ran off to the West… Never mind, at least I have a wonderful granddaughter,” she would say over tea in the evenings.