31

My mother’s life journey had never been just as tortuous as mine, even though she would complain about the hard time she had had with her siblings when she was a child and how hard she had found it working while studying and fighting for a place under the sun in the big city. Telling me such things she stressed that I was very lucky to be born the only child not having to compete with feisty siblings, and living in Moscow, in the horn of plenty. Back in my childhood, as she had noticed in me some markings of a clever, gifted person, she would say that I had every opportunity to achieve whatever I wanted provided I wasn’t that lazy and passive. But, maybe, precisely because I was born “an only child living in the horn of plenty” I turned out to be totally passive. And, you know that if one lacks activity and one’s biggest flaw is laziness - being smart and gifted doesn’t really matter.

But, maybe, my laziness was no more than the weakness of a groundhog wanting to stay in his warm hole. Maybe it was just my fear and insecurity. Lack of confidence. For, to feel secure and confident one needs to have a source which I didn’t have.

Whatever it was, in the horn of plenty or not, life beat me down worse than my mom. At least, when young I experienced a lot more traumas than she did. She lived quite a good, successful life: she finished school, graduated from a university, got a job, married my father, got an apartment in Moscow. Everything in her life was as it should be - smooth sailing. When she was young she had no idea how it feels when real s**t happens - for example, when you get rejected or betrayed every now and then. Or when you get broken and defrauded. Or just dumped by your significant other.

Now you’ll say she hadn’t had that experience simply because she’d had no time to dwell on rubbish - her studies, work, family and daily routine would consume almost all her life. She had never known love and heartbreaks. My father had never cheated on her or stolen from her (because she’d had nothing much to steal), and he had honestly lived with her for all those eighteen years. And just like all happy women in the world she was deaf and blind to other people’s sorrows and troubles: it’s truly said that happiness makes people selfish. When her old parents used to call her with complaints about their poor health, low pension and s****y youngest daughter - she would cut them off:

“Oh come on, give me a break! It’s not my problem!”

When I tried to bare my soul to her - she would find all sorts of excuses to escape the conversation. She was not interested in hearing out my stories about some Shurik or Roma - and she would run away from me to the bathroom or somewhere else. I resented her and I secretly hoped that someday she would find herself in my shoes and finally learn the hard way.

So, there she was, abandoned by her husband at forty five years old. The self-centered, arrogant woman judging scornfully miserable “losers”, “cuckolds”, “misfits” had finally joined the club. She deserved it, though, didn’t she…

But it’s one thing to be broke at fifteen or twenty, when you have your whole life ahead of you and plenty of chances to fix it. Another thing is to get so shocked for the first time after forty, when you least expect that.

Mother was totally unprepared for such a turn of events. For all the eighteen years of living with my father it had never occurred to her that he may have disappeared all of a sudden. Like all selfish, too self-confident people she would ignore even most obvious things; and the summer before he left, when not just I, but also the ladies in the neighborhood had intimated to her that she should have been keeping a better eye on her husband - she would laugh this off:

“Stuff and nonsense! That’s ridiculous!”

Needless to say how big a shock it was to her when my father had left the family out of the blue.

At first mother couldn’t believe it. It was quite hard for her to realize that my father had really broken up with her. For the first three days she was waiting for him to cool down and come back home. But he never returned back. Neither in three days, nor in a month, nor in a year. She kept calling him all the time - he would hang up on her or tell her abruptly to leave him alone and that he was not coming back.

She went from grief to drink. There was a big jerry can of homemade plum wine in our bathroom, and mother would knock it down glass after glass. Having gotten drunk she went into hysterics and began playing the blame game. And the only one available to blame was me, of course.

“Write a letter to your father!” she nagged at me, “Write to him, get down on your knees and beg him to come back!”

“I’m not doing that!” I muttered.

“What? You were the one who caused this whole thing, and now you’re not doing that, eh? You broke our family! You ruined my whole life! You ruin and destroy everything you touch, just everything!”

It’s very nice for a sixteen-year-old girl to hear out such things from her mother, isn’t it…

Other times she would wake me up in the middle of the night and say:

“If you don’t write a letter to your father to bring him back, I’ll kill myself.”

Of course, now I realise that it was just a bluff. Mother would have never really done it - it was completely inconsistent with her character. But she knew how to manipulate me. And then I, having gotten really scared, promised her that ok, I would write that goddamn letter…

But, as we say, “promising doesn’t mean marrying”. I would have rather stepped into a fire than written a letter to that man asking him to come back - for I can’t make myself call him “dad”. I dragged my feet over it as long as I could, I lied, dodged it, said that the letter was in the process, that I had already sent it…

“Why is he not coming?” mother would inquire with a childish voice, like a little girl about to cry.

I averted my eyes in silence.