Читать книгу Lonely Place America. Novel-in-Stories - Ирина Борисова - Страница 3

When Anna was twenty, she had a Swedish boyfriend, a student working on the construction of a new St. Petersburg hotel in summer. That young man was in love with her and asked her to marry him and leave for Sweden – but Anna also studied at the medical Academy at that time and promised to come to him in a year after her graduation. But an awful misfortune happened to her family that summer. Her sister’s two month old son fell sick in the country where her parents usually spent summers in their small cottage. Anna’s parents and sister drove to the city to buy medicine and be back soon, they left the baby with Anna. The accident happened on their way. Their car collided with a truck, and everybody was killed at once. Anna lost both parents and her sister, the baby lost his mother, Anna’s brother-in-law lost his wife. He remained alone with a baby in his arms and Anna could not leave a desperate man without any help.

They settled in his apartment together looking after the baby in turn. That year was very hard for both of them. All the hardships made them closer, and when Anna graduated her brother-in-law asked her to marry him.

Anna loved her Swedish fiancee who continued to write her regular letters full of love and melancholy. But she also had become very attached to her little nephew and felt sorry to leave him. Her brother-in-law insisted, and her Swedish fiancee had to leave for work to America. Anna had to decide something, but the Swedish man could not come and take her and the child who already started to call her Mom. Besides, when he cried at nights, he smiled when she held him. She gave up and married his father.

Having married, she immediately understood what a mistake she had made. She could not make herself love her husband. She thought that habit would substitute for love but it did not happen. Her husband was a successful journalist with a legal communist newspaper. He worked much, often went on business trips, and seldom was at home. He spent a lot of time in the society of party functionaries, attending their parties, often returning home drunken. He usually was occupied by his own affairs, did not pay much attention to Anna’s mood, and wondered why she was so tired and irritated coming from work.

She was a dentist. Her husband did not know that her patients considered her dentist chair to be «magical»; nobody it seems felt either pain or stress there as Anna was not the kind of doctor asking only «to open/shut your mouth». She always listened to people, cheered them, trying to take upon herself all their pains and fears. She started to carry out a scientific program, but two events did not allow her to get her scientific degree: perestroyka and her own son’s birth.

Perestroyka also ruined the political career of her husband. He could not believe that party values would be destroyed so fast. He gambled wrong, and when he tried to change his political orientation it was already too late. His habit of drinking increased, and very soon he found himself without good work, without money, always drunken.

Anna had to provide for the two boys and non working husband. She was lucky to have a profession by which she could earn something for living even in the new hard times. But she had to work too much. Her elder boy was independent and industrious, helped her a lot looking after his little brother till she came from work. He did not know Anna was not his real mother, despised his always drunken father and when Anna divorced her husband he stayed with her.

Anna was already thirty five when she came to my agency. She was too tired of twelve hours work every day and of living with her ex-husband since they all still had to live in the same apartment: Anna and the children in one room, the ex-husband in the other. She was tired of his drunkenness, awful scandals with broken windows and the visits of police.

Filling in her application form, she indicated only one son, laughing that in five or ten years when I maybe at last manage to give her in marriage her elder fifteen year old boy will be already an adult. «And I do have only one own son!» she smiled, leaving.

But she was lucky much sooner. A respectable Finnish gentleman had great interest in her, visiting St. Petersburg several times to meet with her and at last inviting her to visit his house in Finland.

Anna could leave her work only for a short time, but it was enough for the gentleman to understand she was just the right woman. Anna happily accepted his proposal, but there was one more problem – to explain to her fiancee that she had been flippant to indicate only one boy in her application form and that though her elder son was really her nephew she could not leave Russia without him. The gentleman became very upset. He told Anna that he himself sometimes felt overcrowded in his fifteen room house, that it was quite impossible to accommodate there even two boys, especially since the second boy was not really Anna’s son but had his own father in Russia. The gentleman reproached Anna that she should not be so frivolous: if she mentioned two children from the very beginning this would surely have alienated him at once and would not have brought so many sufferings and troubles.

Anna asked to think but already knew her decision. She returned to St. Petersburg and when her smiling elder son asked her at the station: «So do we go to Finland?» she replied: «No». And she stayed in Russia. Life is a little bit easier for her now since her former husband died from vodka and she does not need to call to the police every day as she did before. She still works constantly, and her application form is still kept in my marriage agency. But not only her elder boy is indicated there now but also their dog and cat – pets without which, as Anna said, she would not go anywhere.

«Let them take me with all my children and animals!» Anna says laughing. «I don’t care if they don’t want to, I will survive myself!» and she cheerfully leans to me, sitting in her «magical’ dentist chair in which patients never feel either fear or pain.