There Once Lived A Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In - Plot & Excerpts
Bring your children to a playground, sit yourself down on a bench next to other sunflower-seed-crunching moms, and in ten minutes you’ll know whose husband drinks, whose younger sister got pregnant by an unknown party, and who was insulted, again, by her mother-in-law, because they all live together, and so on. But some stories a stranger won’t hear. Shameful stories—shameful by Russian standards; stories that mix violence, insanity, and jail. What they call extremal in Russian—stories too extreme for casual tale-swapping, suitable only for furtive whispering.For example, a family of five, say, is living in a three-room apartment in Moscow in the mideighties. They have just enough. Mother and father work, the roof doesn’t leak, there are staples in the cupboards, an occasional delicacy in the fridge. There are even two crystal vases on the shelves. One day, while the grandmother and the children are out at a New Year’s pageant, the mother tries to kill the father with an ax.
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