Anna Natalia Malachowskaja is a well-known Soviet and Russian author, feminist, and dissident. In 1979, together with Tatiana Goricheva, Tatiana Mamonova, and Julia Voznesenskaya, she wrote and edited a feminist samizdat publication Женщина и Россия [Woman and Russia] and later Maria. These publications were deemed anti-Soviet; the women were questioned by the KGB and forced to emigrate. Having settled in Austria, Malachowskaja completed her Ph.D. at the University of Salzburg. She turned her research into the Russian folklore character of Baba Yaga into a series of published books where she argues that the fairy tale character is a marginalization and amalgamation of three goddesses of the ancient world. In addition to her scholarship, Malachowskaja is the author of novels, collections of stories, and poems. Malachowskaja’s fiction is frequently accompanied by art. As an artist, she has exhibited her work in St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Salzburg.
We’re deeply honored to publish Anastasia Savenko-Moore’s translation of Malachowskaja’s story “Ugrinovich and the Sex Giant.” This is a fictionalized version of the events that took place in the early 1970s. Written in the 2000s, it was published in a collection of stories Перекличка в тумане времён: Невыдуманные рассказы [A Conversation Across Time: True Fictions], by Aletрeia Press (St. Petersburg, 2010).
Ugrinovich and the Sex Giant by Anna Natalia Malachowskaja, translated by Anastasia Savenko-Moore
The clock was showing five minutes to 2 am. Next to the fir decorated for the New Year celebration, dirty dishes crowded the table as if wondering whether they would get washed tonight or would have to wait until morning. Valya stared at them knowing that eventually she would have to collect and carry them to the kitchen; she would have to leave this room and walk down the eerie hallway of the communal apartment. She would have to move in the dark, groping the walls to find her way, and then light the gas to heat up the water…
Suddenly the hallway door swung open. On the threshold stood Vitaly Ugrinovich—the most handsome of her neighbors. This tall young man was always well-dressed and groomed. He wore satin vests and was so demonstratively polite as if he’d landed here from some other planet, although he, in fact, had just returned from army service.
“Give back my hat!” a hoarse voice barked from behind his shoulder. His buddy, Valya’s husband, squeezed forward from the dimly lit hallway. His blond close-cropped hair shimmered in the futile light. Ugrinovich entered the room with the familiarity of the owner and demanded wine.
“No more wine! It’s all gone,” the embarrassed hostess replied. Some, on the sly, called her Valentina the Beautiful; she was all of twenty years of age. Ugrinovich grabbed a bottle of lemonade from the table, poured himself a drink, sipped it, and spat.
“Fetch us more wine! Understood? Bitch!” he shouted. “Ugh, cheapskates! Make me beg for wine on New Year’s!”
A baby began to cry in his crib, so Valya took him in her arms. Valya’s husband, who nicknamed himself the Sex Giant, turned to his drinking buddy and said: “Let’s go!”
They went out into the hallway to talk man-to-man. Valya sat down clutching her son to her chest. The baby quieted as if listening to the conversation outside the room. The voices were shifting more and more to the right, towards Ugrinovich’s room. Hopefully, the men will somehow sort it out among themselves and find more alcohol to drink somewhere… Valya put the baby down and began to rock the crib back and forth, back and forth. This family… This house… Everyone still so foreign. How did she get here, how did it all happen? As if sitting between two chairs, she found herself between the bygone year and the new year, which already crawled under her feet. She felt that the previous year had not gone completely: it seemed within the reach of her hand. Only three hours ago it was still here when she was in the kitchen peeling potatoes for the salad! This kitchen looked as it was supposed to look in a communal apartment: the ceiling was pressing down the dirty walls with dark smudges and hanging over the wobbly tables. Everything here made Valya feel uncomfortable and anxious. After all, she grew up in her own apartment, small, but cozy. In it, there was no smell of horror and underground darkness, which filled this communal apartment and terrified Valya. She was ashamed of her fear, pushing it deep inside and trying not to listen to its messages.
“Oh, such a beautiful girl—and peeling potatoes, ruining your hands!” Ugrinovich had been telling her while hanging around in the kitchen. “You should be acting in the cinema, not peeling potatoes!” These words—about the cinema—hit Valya like a sharp knife in the heart. She only sighed briefly and began to peel the potatoes even faster.
The plates were already arranged on the table under the New Year fir in Valya’s room, and that very potato salad was positioned as a centerpiece in an elegant bowl. The overhead light was off, only the red candles on the table and the lights on the tree glimmered. Now the room resembled a bear’s lair. The lancet shadows of the fir branches were leading somewhere—as if into a real forest, into the deep homeland, where the most genuine treasure was hidden and safely kept.
And why did he bring up the cinema? These words reminded Valya of applying to the Theater Institute. Her father had still been alive then. She was learning by heart an excerpt from Alexander Grin’s novel Scarlet Sails. Pacing around her own room with a flushed face, she was happy in advance, and for some reason confident that this institute would accept her.
Valya had a soft chestnut braid and blue eyes, about which her dad sometimes said that their color resembled cornflowers. Valya hardly remembered her mother, who passed away when she was only a little girl of five years. She got used to the fact that she lived alone with her father and the housekeeping duties fell on her. When her schoolmates called her out to play, she responded with a profound expression, deftly wielding a broom:
“Behold! I’ll come when I’m done cleaning!”
There weren’t many books in her home. She discovered them on her own, she was consumed with reading and found for herself her favorite author—Alexander Grin.
She remembered that spring—when a white prom dress was sewn for her, and the anticipation of a new life was already approaching her, ringing with all its colorful bells. It happened at the beginning of May. She was walking home, and from a distance, she saw an ambulance in front of the entrance. She knew right away that it came for her dad and got frightened to the point that the whole universe fell out of her soul. Her father died in the hospital on the same day. She was not even allowed to say goodbye to him. Since then, she has been living under a black wall, on the other side of the world. She tried not to think about the crematorium and what had happened to her father’s body there. Yet, this fine dry black dust and this smoke that comes out of the chimney of the crematorium obscured the light in her life.
Dad—everything but his body, everything that she remembered about him, his personality, his habits—remained with her. She sensed his presence somewhat sharper and fuller than during his lifetime—although this apparition did not comfort her. Like water, it would stay still, filling the hallway and rooms of her house, or it would follow her on her heels to the store and to school. She could not forget him; she did not want to refuse his power. Her application to the Theater Institute now seemed simply impossible, as she wouldn’t be able to squeeze a word out of her mouth. Spright, fervent life was flowing around Valya, but she was separated from it by a wall of black pearl dust.
One day Valya was returning from work by bus, and it was there that she got eyed by our “poor” Sex Giant. He was a student of chemistry, already in his fourth year at the institute. This young man was stocky, broad-shouldered, and of small stature. Therefore, a “Giant” and, moreover, a sexual one, was rather in his own imagination. He proclaimed himself such after some occasional exploits in this particular field. He was standing in the middle of the bus, throwing comments back and forth with his comrade Volod’ka. The latter was an unrestrained drunkard who drowned the following year, out in a motorboat on the stormy Neva river. He was yet unaware of this fate. He couldn’t even suspect that one day he would want to ride that, to tell the truth, crappy boat! The boat would capsize on one surging wave and plunge him into the dampness of the very cold water. Then he would begin choking and suddenly realize that he was about to die. All this would feel to him completely out of place because by then he would be done with his final exams anticipating an exciting beginning of a new life!
Oh, well… While chatting with this candidate for a preterm death, our Sex Giant happened to glance into the depths of the bus. On the left side, by the window, he noticed a young woman, almost a girl, with a fluffy braid. Her gaze was fixed on the window, on the darkness of the approaching night, although there was nothing to see out there. Valya was looking out the window and imagining talking to her father on the sly, not about something important but about all sorts of little things.
“Daddy, you see, it’s raining,” she spoke to him in her mind, pointing out the window with her eyes.
“Yes, my darling, it’s raining,” he seemed to answer. “Hopefully, you haven’t forgotten your umbrella.” She reached for her bag and felt for the folded umbrella.
Sex Giant was not touched by the sadness and beauty of Valya’s face; something else moved him. Valya glanced at him for a moment and immediately averted her eyes as if showing that there was nothing to talk about with this man. Fuff! No matter how! The Giant wiggled closer to her and initiated a conversation. She responded reluctantly, her eyes drawn back to the space outside the window. At last, he sat down by her side looking pompous, like a peacock with a spread-out tail. Boasting about himself, he almost sensed these feathers. He was showing them off and demonstrating from all sides how they were lighting up, and flickering, like ornaments on the New Year tree. Oh, he liked himself very much at such moments: as if bunches of sparkling beams were dispersing in the hushed air around him. But Valya did not react to his charms.
“Daddy, drive him away,” she begged without moving her lips.
“Just look at him, daughter,” her imaginary father replied. Valya did look but saw nothing worthy: an ordinary male type, like everyone else, babbling something incoherent. She lowered her head and continued staring through the glass. Black tree trunks were streaking on and off. The rain was crossing them out with neat strokes. Alas, her father’s reflection wasn’t appearing among them anymore.
Sex Giant was not drawn by the loveliness of women’s faces; instead, he was attracted to completely different parts of the female body, for instance, legs. Therefore, he himself got confused by what had been happening on this night bus. If it was not beauty, then it must’ve been something else. What could it be? It seemed to him that he had already met this girl somewhere. This girl, almost a child with long braided hair, for a moment reminded him of his grandmother’s childhood photograph: in the picture, she was decorously seated beside her mother. Without further thinking, the Giant clutched at this banal idea to initiate acquaintanceship:
“It seems to me that we have already met somewhere!” In a moment of déjà vu, he felt the fatal boundary—as if they had already stood on it once before, in some other world. There, she was looking into his eyes, and he was looking back at her without effrontery and without shame.
Possible or not—whatever might’ve occurred in some other life was not happening in reality, because this girl on the night bus did not want to look at him.
That’s how the first meeting went, but the same situation developed further. Autumn gave way to winter; Valya refused to notice him, would not see him point-blank. March was approaching with all its slush and sticky rubbish pouring from the roofs and slipping under the feet of passers-by. The Sex Giant’s horizons narrowed greatly. He had already forgotten that he had once been a “Giant,” and even more so a sexual one.
One day the former Giant was walking along the pavement, plunging into the slush up to his ankles, and heading to visit his grandmother. He resorted to her during periods when things were going really badly. In his family, this grandmother was considered a saint because once she pulled her husband out of an ice hole. She saved his life without considering how he had been abusing and mocking her. The miraculously rescued grandfather did not stop torturing his wife, making everyone wonder why the poor woman pulled such a monster out of the water, instead of simply letting him drown in peace. This grandfather owned two shops in Gostiny dvor in Petersburg, but after the revolution, of course, there was nothing left of his wealth. The man passed away not having lived long enough to face either execution or exile.
Grandfather and grandmother had a son, Alexander. This Alexander was a peculiar person. He may not have beaten his wife, but he didn’t inherit his mother’s holiness either. He drank away not only personal possessions but also the belongings of those unfortunate neighbors who happened to leave their coats and galoshes in the hallway of the communal apartment. Not once a neighbor would come out of his room into the hallway and realize that all his things disappeared: no coat, nothing to wear to work in the morning. Meanwhile, drunk to smithereens, Alexander would be lying in the middle of the hallway.
Alexander got married because he was in need of housing. Earlier in life, he was studying to be an engineer, but he had nowhere to live. Thus, a bride with a room as a dowry was picked for him. This marriage hardly had a day without a scandal. One winter, during one such scandal, his wife ran out into the street with a baby in her arms. The woman was wandering outside for several hours in the icy wind. Her three-month-old baby girl couldn’t withstand the bitter frost; she fell ill with pneumonia and died. She was the Giant’s sister whom he never saw because he was born a few years after this tragic event.
And then happened the following: there were elections, and Stalin was “chosen,” as always. The polling station located in the school building was covered all over with red banners. Alexander was walking along the roadway, swaying a little, cursing and shouting out something not entirely clear, mixing up words for “Party organs” and “genitals” and other words in the same vein. When he reached the school and saw the red posters, he finally said something intelligible:
“Stalin is a bastard!”
He was immediately tied up. Thus, the Giant was left without a father. They used to say that in prison his father was beaten on the head so hard that he lost all his mental faculties. A while later, when somebody had remembered what a wonderful engineer he used to be, Alexander was called to supervise the construction of a new plant. However, he could no longer do anything—he could not think. Waist-deep in icy water, he had to work on the construction of a bridge across the Volga river, and eventually, died of lung cancer.
The word “bastard” turned out to be fatal for the Giant’s family. His mother, unable to bear the program about a doctor in a prison hospital, once threw the TV set out of the window with the words “this TV is a bastard.” She was immediately incarcerated, though not in a prison, but in a psychiatric hospital. Thus, the Giant grew up without a father and a mother, in the arms of his saintly grandmother. He clung to his grandmother as certain flimsy plants cling to the trunk of a mighty tree. Not in vain was Grandma the merchant’s wife and Baptist, not for nothing she barely had time to cover her face from her husband’s blows—she was an educated woman. Not that she specially studied anywhere, but on her own, she read the books of philosophers and was especially fond of Schopenhauer. She told her beloved grandson about everything she had read. The Giant reminisced about how Grandma would sit in the ray of morning sun by a wide window and share her stories. When he felt really bad, he cried at her feet, burying his face in her knees.
Alas, his grandmother’s lifetime was approaching its end. Any thought of this threw the Giant into a panic. He had no family besides her, except for his aunt, his grandmother’s daughter. Apparently, this aunt inherited from her father a strong character and a terrible manner of dealing with people close to her. She would not kick anyone in the face only because it was not handy, and her legs hurt, but in everything else, she took after her father. Someone should’ve inherited the beautiful soul of the grandmother with such a fabulous name—Marya Ivanovna! Alas, her grandson couldn’t notice in himself even a hint of such a soul. He would love to be like his grandmother and sit at the wide window looking at the world with blue eyes. Except, his eyes were of some incomprehensibly unclear coloring, and no matter what he looked at, his thoughts always fell in the same direction—sex. He understood that it was somehow not good to be fixated on intercourse. He hoped that his grandmother was unaware of this elemental, irrepressible dream. It receded only in his grandmother’s presence, turning him into a different person; she loved him anyway. Being by her side, he did not need a spectacular multi-colored tail: without a tail, without good grades in school—she forgave him in advance for all his sins, like the “good God” whom Grandma had told him about, would do. However, his aunt’s God was not like that at all: He had pursed lips and sharp unapproachable eyes, but the Giant did not believe in his aunt’s God.
Grandma was reclining on the couch in the big room. Her eyes were sunken and misty. She had cancer and everyone knew it. The Giant sat beside his grandmother. Light came out of the window—a weakened ray of the sun. His grandmother knew that she would soon die. She had forgiven everyone a long time ago and now she was just glad that she saw her beloved grandson. And this beloved grandson really wanted to ask his grandmother what her thoughts were about suicide, but he did not know how to approach this conversation.
“She doesn’t love me,” he said softly to his grandmother. The chair next to the bed looked hurt, and the tablecloth hanging from the table also radiated pain. His grandmother turned her head and looked at him with deep, shadowy eyes.
“I will pray for you,” she said. “The Lord will help you. He will not leave you!”
After seeing his grandmother, the Giant went straight to the chemical laboratory of his faculty—there he had been studying chemistry for the fifth year and understood it well.
It was late at night: Valya was sleeping when the phone suddenly rang in the room. Someone shouted incomprehensible curses and threats into the phone. Someone ran up to her door and began breaking in. A disheveled elderly woman stood on the threshold—the Giant’s aunt. She dragged Valya to the hospital. They waited a long time to be admitted to see the patient. The Giant lay in the hospital chamber all alone. His cramped, convulsed face was pale as a pillow. No one knew why he did not succeed in this self-poisoning attempt, either by accident or by a deliberately calculated dose of chemicals. The Giant’s aunt buzzed Valya’s ears with her orders and hints:
“Ah, you sinner! On your soul is the life of this man! You are a killer!”
Gradually, Valya herself began to feel that she, perhaps, was a little bit of a murderer. And by the beginning of May, she gave her consent—and became the wife of an incomprehensible person who also on and off was very unpleasant to her.
All that was written in books about love became for her as blurry as a distant dream. All those lofty words from the Scarlet Sails, which she once learned by heart, now seemed to her far-fetched and vain—not for her. Whom should she love—the Giant, or whom? Yes, by the way, he forbade her to think about the Theater Institute. And after a while, their son was born, and it began to seem to her that some kind of family life was setting up—with irons and beds, pots in the kitchen, and tea drinking in the evenings.
In the communal apartment where they lived, there were only four households. There was the room where the Giant’s family lived, situated on the right by the entrance. Further to the left along the hallway lived a lonely old woman. Although to herself she thought that she was not quite an old woman yet, and such self-perception made her look even more frightening. She resembled a walking scarecrow in reddish rags that hung from her chest, and she dyed her hair red. They say that once she was a beauty, and she had a friend, an officer, and she lived richly. Nowadays she always felt hungry and was stealing empty bottles from Valya.
Behind this woman’s room lived a family of three people: wife, husband, and the wife’s mother. The latter was a thin old woman with small, timid eyes. She ran around the apartment working on all the housekeeping tasks: to make sure her son-in-law would be pleased, would not take offence. Her daughter was an “important lady”; she wore trendy crimped dresses and often fried lard in the kitchen. The lady’s husband was an arrogant man with an emotionless face: he seemed to be forever calcified by self-worship.
In the very last room, near the kitchen, lived another old woman—Aunt Shura. She worked all her life at a chemical plant. She witnessed how women, her coworkers, fell into acid baths at the plant and died terrible deaths. More than anything in the world she was afraid to stumble and fall into acid. For this hard work, she was given a pension—40 rubles a month. She ate nothing but potatoes, bread, and sauerkraut, and looked like a ghost in a darned dress. Since she couldn’t pay for the electricity, she would never turn on the light in the bathroom or kitchen and did everything there in the darkness. In her room, she lived by candlelight. Despite her miseries and hunger, she wouldn’t steal bottles, wouldn’t pour nails into neighbors’ pots, and wouldn’t take letters out of neighbors’ mailboxes. In Aunt Shura’s room, there were many icons and paper flowers. To the right of the entrance above the sofa hung a large portrait: a very young girl, with pretty and slightly asymmetrical features, in a dress cut in 1920s style, looked out from this portrait with bewilderment and even anxiety. It seemed that she was wondering about her future, not understanding: what would her companions be doing in baths with seething acid or what would she herself be doing in this little den with murky, languid light through the tulle curtains?
Valya was very afraid of this communal apartment. She was afraid to walk down the dark hallway, into the lavatory, or to the kitchen. It seemed to her that there, in the kitchen with the back entrance, the door would suddenly open—and on the threshold would appear a bandit in a yellow overcoat, with a bared muzzle, ax raised. That was why she, having finished all her kitchen chores, always rushed down the hallway back to her room, as if someone was chasing her.
One day, a very elegant young man by the name of Vitaly Ugrinovich moved into this communal apartment. He was the grandson of the timid old woman and the son of the “important lady.” His stepfather disliked him enough to move out to another dwelling together with his wife and mother-in-law. Thus, Vitaly was left alone in the room, but not for long. After a couple of weeks, a sweet girl, Natasha, settled with him. Vitaly proudly called her “my common-law wife.” Valya and Natasha immediately became friends, Vitaly loved to play with Valya’s son, and it seemed that harmony was established. Natasha moved her things into Vitaly’s room. Her wall lamp in the form of a fan, like a peacock’s tail, was covering the lightbulb, creating a mysterious twilight. It was not like the half-darkness that Aunt Shura had in her room. On the contrary, Natasha’s lampshade with multi-colored and cheerful fluttering wings was spreading into the corners, hinting that life, perhaps, had not completely gone to hell, as the Giant would put it.
What old women could not understand, the young ones would catch at a glance. Natasha and Valya guessed each other’s thoughts in an instant and encouraged one another with smiles. Even that old woman who looked like a scarecrow became somehow uncomfortable misbehaving in the kitchen; she stopped quarreling and stealing from neighbors. At most, she would only steal and eat a potato forgotten in another’s frying pan.
Then came that New Year…
Heavy steady beats were coming from outside Valya’s room. She looked out into the hallway, but it was empty. She crept up to Ugrinovich’s room and peered through the half-open door. Ugrinovich was breaking the window with her husband’s body. She darted towards the wall. And when she looked at the door again, her husband was sitting on the sofa, and Ugrinovich was fighting by the window with his other friend. Valya snuck in, grabbed her husband by the hand, dragged him out into the hallway, and pushed him through the door to Aunt Shura’s room. She put her feet into Aunt Shura’s rubber boots and threw on her shabby coat—she was afraid to pass the open door of Ugrinovich’s room to get her own overcoat. Then she rushed outside through the back door to the street telephone. In a few moments she was screaming into the handset:
“Help! A man is being murdered!” The police asked for the address and promised to come. Valya ran back to her room and locked the door. Her son was crying, so she took him in her arms. The door began to break and crackle under the blows.
“Open, you bitch, you dirtbag! I’ll smash the door to hell! I’ll smear your kid’s brains over the floor!”
Valya was whispering to her son that the police were about to arrive. But the police never showed up. And when the next morning Valya and her husband came to the police station themselves and asked why no one had come to them at night, they were told: “You were not alone in celebrating the New Year! You weren’t killed, were you? If they kill you, then come.”
By the spring, Ugrinovich had crippled six of his mistresses: the first one he smashed head forward into his closet, the second one he had beaten with a chair, and others were hurt in other ways. One day his buddy was found in the kitchen in front of the sink with a knife in his back. The old woman, the one who was stealing bottles, had to wipe up after him a pool of blood on the floor.
In the fall, Ugrinovich was tried in court. At the trial, Aunt Shura was trying to assure everybody that Ugrinovich was not to blame for anything—that it was his buddy who did all the damage, who maimed, cut, and broke doors.
“Well, and he just stood by like an angel, folding his hands?” asked the judge with stumps instead of hands. Ugrinovich mocked everyone present in court, including the judge, who finally turned white with anger. Aunt Shura was pacing along the hallway in front of the door of the courtroom and whispering prayers—atoning for her sin of lying under oath. She was friends with Ugrinovich’s grandmother, and therefore took this sin on her soul. Ugrinovich had been sentenced to four and a half years—for hooliganism with particular viciousness. However, they softened the sentence and lowered it—to three years—allegedly for sincere repentance.
“Good for us,” the neighbors said. “We’ll have three years of peace!”
Two months passed and during this time the apartment was as quiet as heaven.
Once, when Valya was walking along the hallway, the door on the right flung open: Ugrinovich was standing on the threshold of his room.
“You must be shot immediately from two barrels!” he said with emphasis.
“Ah—what gives? How are you here?” mumbled the Giant who appeared from behind Valya’s shoulder.
“You know,” answered Ugrinovich, “it’s good to have friends in the ministry.”
Back in their room, Valya said to her husband that she would no longer live in this communal apartment. Until now, she’d been renting out her own apartment, left to her by her father, the three of them subsisting on the income. After all these events, they moved into Valya’s apartment and began to rent out the Giant’s room in the communal apartment.
There came a quiet, quiet life—no scandals at all. The familiar walls looked with surprise at the aged Valya, whom they remembered as a child: a little girl with a mom and dad, and then a young woman dreaming of entering the Theater Institute and memorizing lines from Grin’s novel. Valya plunged into their kind presence, into the bright world of these familiar walls, like a fish into water.
One day she got sick. The doctor diagnosed her with pneumonia and was persuading her to go to the hospital. With whom to leave her son? Her husband was at work, so she decided to stay and recover at home. Lying in bed, she took her temperature. The thermometer showed over forty degrees Celsius. When her husband came home from work, he entered the room in muddy boots and an overcoat.
“Where’s my dinner?” he yelled. Valya dropped the thermometer to the floor.
“Where is dinner, I asked you?!”
Valya bent down from the bed to pick up the thermometer.
“I work, I earn money, but you, bitch, could not cook dinner for me?” shouted her husband, and with a swing and cruel pleasure, he hit her in the face with his boot.
Anastasia Savenko-Moore received an MA in Art History from St. Petersburg State University and, after moving to the United States, an MA in Russian Literature from the University of Oregon, where she wrote a thesis on the Orphic mythologemes in Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry. She has translated work in multiple genres, including fiction, poetry, and drama. She teaches art to children at the Little Owl School of Arts in Eugene and has worked as a costume designer for the University of Oregon Russian Theater.
Punctured Lines 