Fiction – Alisa Lyudmila Ulitskaya

By the time life was brought to perfection, old age had arrived. The last costly touch was a small bathtub, installed after a lot of reflection and searching.

- Ilustration by Golden Cosmos

Some recommended that she get a stall shower, but Alisa resolutely rejected having a vertical bath with a door: what good is water raining down on your head? It’s so much better to lie in warm water with a rubber pillow under your head, your softened feet rolling two pleasantly prickly plastic balls. . . .

Alisa belonged to the rare breed of people who know with perfect certainty what they want and what they don’t want under any circumstances.

By an early age, the mixed blood— half Baltic, half Polish—she inherited from her mother had cooled off all Alisa’s passionate impulses, and the fear of falling into another person’s power was stronger than all the other fears proper to women: of solitude, of childlessness, of poverty. Her mother, Martha, who had married an Army general before the war, a marriage that resulted in Alisa, had to bury her general when she was still young. For the rest of her life, she was always passionately in love and suffered spectacularly, to the point of the psych wards. She was always ready to bring to her new lover’s feet everything she owned, including the apartment her general had left her.

After breaking up with her latest lover, Martha committed suicide in an indecently literary manner: having gone to the hairdresser and the manicurist, she threw herself under a train. In Alisa, her mother’s insane behavior totally paralyzed any possibility of a futile and fruitless self-sacrifice.