Grudova is the author of Children of Paradise and The Doll’s Alphabet, known for her surreal and unsettling fiction. In this original story for Port, we follow Milda, a woman released from prison to marry a stranger as part of a state effort to boost the birth rate. But her new husband has his own agenda – he wants her to join his underground political cell, offering to help find the child she lost when she was imprisoned for murder. Together, they must navigate a society where family is both a performance and a form of control
Milda was put in prison for killing her sweetheart, a foreign diplomat, after seeing him take another woman to the ballet. She met him working at a restaurant popular with diplomats and bureaucrats which served tiny fish sandwiches, thin chicken broths and champagne. It also sold French and Cuban cigarettes, electronic plug converters and thin mittens from behind a counter.
Milda had a baby while in prison, which was taken away and put in a nursery she did not know the name of. The state, realising the population was dramatically falling, put Milda in a scheme where men of the public could write romantic letters to her and other healthy young women, and if they proposed marriage, the women would be released early in order to have children.
Benji had various part-time jobs. He worked in a grocery store specialising in dented and damaged goods, and in a local museum which had a small-scale model of a volcano and a vast collection of human brains kept in glass, once belonging to famous intellectuals, revolutionaries and scientists from the local area. He wrote to Milda that someone broke into the museum when it was closed, and – along with the small selection of dry biscuits in the shop advertised as food eaten by astronauts in space – stole all the brains. There were bits of brain among slobber and broken glass on the floor. Whoever stole them had taken bites on the spot.
Where were the brains now? He asked Milda. Perhaps in stews, casseroles, puddings she replied. The prison food was plain buckwheat porridge, soy sausages, pale juice.
Milda wrote him descriptions of her daily prison life: how they made men’s shoes for a foreign market – hideous long ones in red and purple snakeskin – and some older women there were so lonely they hid love letters in the toes of the shoes. Though Milda thought only cads would wear snakeskin shoes and wouldn’t care for love letters at all.
She didn’t tell him about her son, which she had named Teo before he was taken away, or how she stole an enamelled vase from the restaurant where she had worked. The diplomat was furious at seeing it in her bedroom and said she ought to be sacked, and that he would write to the restaurant. It resembled a tattooed chicken: squat with little wings and legs, embossed illustrations of trees and people on it. She didn’t know why she stole it, perhaps to feel a little power or impress the diplomat – which it didn’t at all.
She had also stolen tepid champagne, putting the dregs of glasses into a big old plastic water bottle, and drank it at home to relax before the diplomat came over to make love to her. He made fun of her for wanting to attend Swan Lake, performed by a small touring provincial ballet company which didn’t have a live orchestra but a gramophone only. A gramophone looks like a golden swan said Milda, but he was not convinced. He took another woman, who was also a foreign diplomat from a different country than himself, to see a ballet based off a Tennessee Williams play. It had all the dialogue removed, Milda read in the paper reviews. It was just music and dance. Milda made herself angrier and angrier watching a bootlegged copy of A Streetcar Named Desire with Marlon Brando on silent with no subtitles, until she killed the diplomat. She went into the diplomat’s apartment uninvited because the doorman knew her already, and the diplomat hadn’t told the doorman he had a new woman now. She used a mallet she had bought to fix her bed because it was old and the metal was bent out of shape. It was only in prison Milda discovered the pregnancy and she supposed the rages of bodily change must have caused her to become a murderess because she had never thought of becoming one before.
Benji proposed to her, sending a cheap ring with a ladybird on it in the post, which secured her release.
Benji picked her up from the prison and gave her a large jumper to wear because it was cold. He was unpleasantly thin, and wore a belted grey coat and a ushanka, which he put on her head. His hair was blonde, cropped and full of dandruff. His ears were enormous, with blackheads along the lobe, and in one a tiny gold safety pin.
Milda was given a bag of her things when exiting the prison: the vase, a large stuffed toy shaped like a cricket she had spent a lot of money on – and had meant to give to the diplomat because he had once mentioned finding insects fascinating, but thought now, she could give it to her son – a translated P. G. Wodehouse book and a few flimsy floral dresses missing buttons or with holes in them. The restaurant had taken back her uniform, someone else was wearing it now.
When they were out of sight of the prison, Benji said, I apologise those love letters didn’t mean anything, it just had to look convincing to get you out. I admire what you did enormously, killing that diplomat involved in our government’s corruption and the foreign arms trade.
I killed him for romantic reasons, not political reasons, Milda replied.
I admire it all the same, he said, and I think you will be useful to my underground political movement, Alpha.
I have a son in a state nursery and that’s all I care about, said Milda.
Benji lived in a rundown apartment building called Cecil Court. He made her dumplings from a big frozen bag when they arrived. They ate them with spicy red pepper sauce and sliced-up radishes while he told her about Alpha.
Milda agreed to help with the activities of Alpha if Benji helped her find her child.
The other two members of Alpha lived in a hole off a metro tunnel because they were wanted by the state and Benji didn’t have time enough to bring them supplies.
Milda brought them roasted barley tea in large metal containers, tinned fish in sunflower oil, tinned apricots in syrup and chopped raw beef sandwiches on rye bread, along with all the newspapers she could, which she found abandoned on metro seats. They gave Milda articles they wrote in the dark, to be published in underground anarchist magazines. Both of the Alpha members in the metro wore spectacles, though they had no light in their tunnel besides a child’s flashlight.
Milda had to jump onto the tracks between trains and run into the tunnel where the hole was. She could never get back up on the platform herself and was aided by passengers who thought she was suicidal. She went at a different hour every day so she wouldn’t be seen by the same commuters again and again, which annoyed the two bored and hungry Alpha members who said routine, rather than spontaneity, suited them better in their distressed condition.
Milda and Benji were married with the ladybug ring and drank a bottle of Georgian wine to celebrate. They slept together when they were drunk, and Milda examined his thin, blue body in comparison with the diplomat’s who had been like a comfortable and hairy slug, well fed on ham and milk in his home country. This gave her a sensation she thought might be somewhat political.
Milda and Benji attended cultural events to spy on bureaucrats and politicians. Benji bought her theatre-going clothes from a by-the-pound second-hand shop – a pair of black loafers with gold braid on them, a fur coat, a white lace dress, stockings that went up to her knees but always fell down. When they did, Benji crouched down and quickly pulled them up, gently patting her ankle.
They went to see a theatrical adaptation of Anna Karenina. Benji brought them tiny opera binoculars to spy on the audience. Milda kept thinking she saw her diplomat, but he was dead. There were many diplomats like him drinking glasses of red wine, and kissing younger women in booths in a disgusting, lustful and shameless manner.
The actors wore thick plastic glasses out of place with cheap-looking 19th-century costumes made mainly of satin. Still, she was captivated and refused to look at the diplomats any longer as it made her too irate.
Milda asked Benji to take her out to dinner after, but he said he couldn’t because of his political reputation and going to the theatre was strictly work, a cover for spying. He hadn’t caught a line of Anna Karenina.
Through his political connections, Benji found the name of the nursery where children of bureaucrats and diplomats were kept. It was called Ducklings Nursery. Milda went and stood across the street and watched when the children were taken outside. Her son wore the sailor outfit of the nursery, and a long old fashioned-looking coat with a flared bottom that was too big for him and dragged in the dirt. He had longish black curls from his father, that’s how she could tell it was her son, though she found she could peel off these repulsive resemblances to the diplomat and throw them away, laying bare a hard sweet love. When she rang the bell of the nursery it played a strange tune for a very long time, but no one answered.
She wrote the nursery a letter to try and reclaim her son and they told her she would have to apply via the state family board. Milda wondered if she had any more children if they would take them away at the hospital and ask her to reclaim them too. She bought all sorts of birth control on the black market, jellies, diaphragms and pills, but her and Benji did not sleep together again, though they shyly fondled each other at night.
She sent presents to the nursery, and comforted herself with the mental image of the little children enjoying them: the stuffed cricket, Chinese white rabbit candies, paper doll kits, plastic bags of chunky costume jewellery.
She and Benji had to fill out many forms multiple times and take them to the state family board, detailing Benji’s employment. They recommended Milda find a job too. They also had to move to relocate the two Alpha members in the train tunnel with them. Benji found an old warehouse on the edge of the city, with big windows which let in plenty of bright light the other Alpha members were not used to. They had to wear sunglasses all day. They told Milda they couldn’t tell her their names, even though they trusted her. One’s face was covered in prominent, pale brown moles, like nipples, and the other had a pimple on his nostril which he prodded and examined but didn’t squeeze. They smelled from living in a hole and Milda bought them carbolic soap, but they wouldn’t bathe as they said they were too busy.
Milda wasn’t allowed to work anywhere with too many foreigners or the public because of her jail time but got a job feeding monkeys in a lab. The monkeys had microchips in their heads or were going to be put into orbit, and Milda cried to and from the lab every day thinking of their frightened red faces and how here she could hear their screams, but there was no one in orbit who would. She gave them candy and radishes to cheer them up but it only gave them diarrhoea. Once she had a few payslips she took them to the state family board and they added them to the file. They told her they would have to do a home visit. The spectacled Alphas agreed to leave the warehouse for the day. They packed a frugal picnic to take with them. Milda and Benji cleaned, and tore pictures from a children’s book and taped them all over the walls – tigers and bears in scout hats – and bought a cheap space heater so they wouldn’t think it too miserable or cold for a child. As Milda was showing the social workers from the state family board around the warehouse, she noticed her vase was gone, she had thought it might impress the social workers, an old, possibly expensive thing it was. They drank barley tea with relief after the social workers left. It had gone well. Benji made dinner just for them – radishes, soy meat and a spicy broth. He said the other alpha members would not return, and that they would be leaving the country that night, in fact, after carrying out something they had been planning for a while. It would be easier, just her Benji and the child, said Milda, but did they take my vase?
Yes, he said, it was the perfect container for a bomb, I’m sorry I didn’t ask beforehand. Milda replied, it was ugly anyway.
It was the only thing she had left that had been in the same room as her and the diplomat at the same time. It had that mystical power and now it was shattered somewhere among ruins, but she supposed that was a good thing for her to move on.
She didn’t hear from the state family about the results of the visit, and tried calling the nursery over and over again but the phone had the same annoying piece of music as the nursery doorbell. She told Benji she couldn’t get through to them, and he said, No, I shouldn’t expect you would.
Illustration by Alec Doherty
This article is taken from Port issue 36. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe head here
