Their family was somewhat artistic. He was an elegant young man, with a thin moustache. He came to ask for Zabel’s hand. Everything turned out to be casual and rather absurd. First Manvel had fallen in love with her older sister, the neighbor’s widow. She rejected his dogged overtures, saying: “You’re wasting your time. Why don’t you ask my sister? She’s a nice girl.”
Why not? Zabel was blonde, freckled, had just turned seventeen, and was more attractive. They had a modest wedding.
“She was still playing with toys when I married her off,” her father said. He was referring to her naiveté rather than immaturity.
When he married this big-breasted, large-mouthed girl, Manvel did not make many changes in his behaviour, such as desisting from his independent life style; flirtation was in his blood. Zabel was getting used to everyday domestic drudgery: washing, ironing, cooking, and running to the bathroom to vomit. Her first pregnancy was quite difficult, and so was the second. Her husband was also demanding: criticizing his wife for not ironing his trousers properly, insulting and admonishing her for not moving quietly, etc., etc. And the young wife, of course, cried after each reprimand and outrage.
Zabel had a bitter ordeal to cope with. She discovered that Manvel was unfaithful to her. Her in-laws started bickering; her sister-in-law revealed scandalous liaisons, disguising her voice on the telephone. What then? How would that help? The kids had grown up amid regular brawls, and Lilit was to start school that year.
One Sunday, during a casual conversation, her sister suddenly accidentally learned that Zabel did not enjoy the “obscene” relations between a man and a woman, which she considered an obligation, with emotional inducements. Nervously rattling the plates and clattering the cups, she confessed that she had hated the act from the very beginning, and that lately it had become quite unendurable.
“Oh, dear, oh dear,” said the sister, as in the good old days, “Perhaps you don’t come?”
“How, you mean … the thing … that he …” Zabel responded casually, “that thing, that he …”
“Right!” said the sister, “pull yourself together for a minute. Tell me what’s going on.”
She told her all about her shivers and shocks, her throbbing pains and her difficulty in falling asleep.
“So that’s what it is! The son of a bitch! that good-for-nothing has been abusing our little girl all these years! Dreadful! The bastard! Just take a good look at him!”
As for Manvel, he had spent a nice day celebrating a birthday in the country, on the bank of a parched lagoon. The wide-open spaces, the faraway line of the horizon had cleansed his soul, and he was now in harmony with nature and mankind.
Zabel informed him of her transformation with the fervour of a legitimate creditor. The husband was stunned, and the roof caved in on him. She had spoiled everything in a flash. Her distorted face was the most repulsive he had ever seen in his life.
“Who told you? That crow? Well, I’ll show you! Fucking old hags!” For the first time, he swore in the presence of his wife. They were meaningless words, but the slap that accompanied then was unspeakably vicious and left his handprint on her face. His wife became hysterical. And this was the beginning; it opened the way to beating, and swearing became an everyday routine occurrence. Words such as impotent, whore, and many others enriched their vocabulary. Manvel wanted them to make up. He tried, but wishing was not enough; there was misunderstanding.
Whenever she found the opportunity, the older sister ran to the medical clinic; Zabel worked in the records department. They would hide behind the cardboard filing cases and prattle for hours.
“He said … I said … He said … I can’t anymore. Believe me; I just can’t! I don’t want him to touch me … to come near me. Nothing comes of it … Do you know what happens? I’m so upset, the bed shakes under me.” Zabel would take out her white handkerchief and wipe away her tears.
“There, there.” Her older sister tried to calm her down as Zabel moved to the window, at a loss for words. “All things considered, he’s doing what he can. You can’t expect more …”
For two days the sister pondered and compared, before she found the most likely candidate and talked to him … It was a delicate conversation!
“Listen!” her sister’s voice seemed far away-the humanitarians were talking in the corridor-Zabel had the receiver to her ear. “I’ll be waiting for you at four, by my office building. Wear that black blouse, the one with the atlas trimming, do you hear? And your sexiest bra. Choose the skirt yourself. At four sharp. There’s someone who wants to meet you. Then we’ll see.”
At four o’clock sharp she was standing, her legs exposed under a miniskirt, looking and feeling somewhat humiliated, with her bag pressed against her breast. Perspiration poured down her until her sister came down, and they went.
“Zabelocka,” smiled the bald, kind-hearted head of the archives. “Make yourself at home.
Her sister had already left, after exchanging a few token pleasantries.
The house was different, messy, covered with dust.
“Tell me,” the man said, taking Zabel’s rough hand in his and looking at her with a sweet smile.
“Tell you what?” Zabel did not understand. About her husband’s betrayal? About the haughtiness of her sister-in-law? About stinginess? Or about her daughter’s bad marks? Has she come here to tell him all that? She examined him out of the corner of her eye: his thin wrists and fingers; his large, square nails; his somewhat clumsy appearance; and his shoes … at most size forty…
She stayed for only an hour. Then she was wild, furious; she was full of resentment. She had thought that everything could be done in a flash, a therapeutic treatment, quick and easy, like a rape test.
“Why should I simper and feign reluctance until this asshole makes up his mind whether he wants it or not? He asked me if I want to live in the country! … Have you seen his hands? No, really, have you? I won’t let him touch me, not even with a finger! Never!”
The sister regretted that she had tried to help “the ungrateful …,” and she did not meddle anymore. But…
Zabel called the man once or twice after that. She didn’t break it off at once. When she was on duty and there was nobody around, she would settle on the oil-cloth-covered couch, arrange her tunic, and dial the telephone. She wanted to talk: “If I don’t call you, you won’t call me; you never call first. What were you doing?” And so on.
The man would take off his glasses, put them on the open page, rub his eyes, and ask himself: “What does this woman want from me, eh?”
The smouldering woman remained unsatisfied, disgruntled, unloved, misunderstood … Alone, with the fire burning inside her, for years and years, always agitated and nervous, with headaches, heartaches, and a constant pain in her side. The demon of the frustration known as non-orgasm grew day by day, separating itself from its sources and turning into neurosis, repression, and cardiac insufficiency. Which one to cure or what to cure, when maybe the cause is incurable? Now Zabel had already been convinced that she had always, from the very beginning, hated men; she had never needed them-quite the contrary: she had suffered because of them. What she had seen was jealousy, humiliation, and neglect on the part of her husband, mother-in-law, and sisters-in-law, indifference on the part of her own parents and everybody else. “Enough!” she raged, and became more and more furious. She felt she could break everything to pieces, destroy it all, including herself. People had to cope with this neurotic woman, and she took revenge on them for her immense disappointment.
First, with aggressive flippancy and instinctive venery, she made a shambles of her husband. Manvel used to cherish a hope that he might divorce her and marry a sophisticated, elegant, special woman, who would not have any blemishes or anything. There was a time when he could have been an eligible, prime candidate, but now, because of his age, he found he was unable to hope against destiny. Were his heydays over? Had they evaporated with the years? All he wanted now was peace of mind. He tried to evade any discord. “Darling, aren’t we going to eat?” Then to the kids: “Listen to your mother.”
Their son, a poor boy, just wearing trousers. “I wish he was a girl!” And, like the spitting image of his sly paternal grandfather, he was despised as a coward. Then he found a quiet, insignificant girl who was just like him, and he wanted to marry her. The short little miss with the pimples on her forehead tried to win everyone’s love; for the time being, she succeeded with the men of the family. Her torso, or the profile of her torso, was her only impressive feature: men doted on it.
Zabel blamed her future daughter-in-law for having tempted Manvel and her brother-in-law, and almost threw her out. “Do whatever you do, fucking or sucking, but wait until I croak; as long as I’m still around …”
She also alienated all the neighbors and relatives who opposed her. Only her sister was left. Zabel still had a chip on her shoulder when it came to her sister; she felt humiliated and disgraced whenever she recalled how she had dragged her to meet that mean old man.
One evening, reminiscing on the old therapy (she liked to open old wounds), the sister said, “Oh well, if Manvel was a man, perhaps I could have tried?”
“Maybe you have tried?” Zabel asked casually, and then became serious. “I know you could have done it.”
“Look here, you whore, I surely could have if I had wanted to; he loved me, not you!”
“I knew it, by God! I knew it!” Zabel said, laughing out loud, and she sent her sister away.
Still, she did not calm down. Now her target was her son-in-law; the one who thought he was free, more or less, to kid his mother-in-law; that lazy, gluttonous bull was now getting on her nerves. She could no longer stand the way he laughed, showing his gums; his frail stature; his stinking feet. Bit by bit, she transferred her hatred of him to her daughter, who put up as little resistance as a pussy cat. Then the mother fiercely tore that family apart, despite the fact that there was a child. Angrily, she went back and forth to the in-laws, made another mess there, forced her daughter to divorce, and took her home. The son-in-law, for a while, felt he was still a husband and a father, turned up and spent nights on the stairs to the house, hoping for reconciliation, but he was kicked out.
“So he still loves me,” the wife said.
“Love? What’s love? If love exists, it’s not here, it’s somewhere else, beyond the ocean; what we have here is shit, shit, shit …” Zabel switched on the television. The same early-morning soap opera. Mother and daughter sat down to watch it. It was very moving, especially when the dancer asked, “But do you really know about my past?” And the man looked at her and nodded, forgiving everything.
Translated by Samvel Mkrtchyan
