The death of an unknown woman

I probably ran into her a few times in the courtyard. My windows face the playground, so I could have heard her daughter’s voice. In summertime the girls ride around on their scooters, calling out: « Catch me! Catch me! » I moved here in January; I must have seen her coming home from work while I was out walking my dogs. In small towns you’re supposed to say hello to everyone you meet by your building. Maybe she was the woman sitting on the curb that day, smoking and eating a supermarket croissant. My dogs were excited to see her and trotted over, and she petted them. Maybe she was the woman raising the gray lid of the tobacco display at the SPAR when I asked if they had Vogue menthols — I often see women from nearby buildings working as clerks in the neighborhood shops. Maybe she was the woman throwing her scraps on the street for the strays, while I swore to myself as I went around picking up chicken bones — that’s really dangerous for dogs, eating bones could kill them. 

Imagining the life of the Unknown Woman is beyond my powers. I know that she existed and that she had a seven-year-old daughter. And I know the circumstances of her death. Because in small towns people say hello to their neighbors. And if you have a dog, or even two, as I do, your arrival won’t go unnoticed. The pensioner stationed outside will strike up a conversation, and if you respond respectfully, in the future this relationship will provide you with everything you need to know about the residents of your own building and the apartment blocks nearby. 

The dogs were howling on the night she died. 

Usually my dogs sleep through the night. There are lots of memes about people who let their dogs sleep with them, and they’re all basically true. Filyusha makes a little burrow for herself — she stands on the edge of my blanket and pulls it toward her, forming a cozy fold in which she curls up and snores. Bubenchik, on the other hand, likes to lie down in the center or stretch out across the couch. When I wake up in the middle of the night to drink some water or use the toilet, the dogs grunt with irritation — I’ve disturbed their sleep. 

But that night my dogs howled. Roused by the sound, I sat up in bed and listened, without taking out my earplugs. Filyusha and Bubenchik were howling, and their howls joined the general pandemonium of other howling animals, house dogs and strays. Our two courtyard curs, Rizhiy and Seriy, took the leading parts. Responding to them from beyond the metal fence was the colony of industrial-zone dogs. The low baying of the bread-factory mutts carried from the harbor. And the whole canine chorus was occasionally interrupted by human screams. What a mess, I thought indignantly, shushed my dogs, and shut the window. 

After you wake up, the night’s disturbances don’t come back to you right away. There’s brain fog, headache, aimless wandering from room to room. Walking my dogs that evening, I followed my usual path, down the lane to the neighboring courtyard. A lovely, lilac twilight, everything in its right place — the gossiping old women on a bench by the sandbox, fresh piles of shit deposited by the neighbors’ German shepherds, rotten mackerel tossed underneath the cherry plum. I raised my hand in greeting, and the pensioners waved back in response and asked if I’d slept well last night. The question struck me as unexpected, even intimate. I responded that I’d slept normally, but then immediately remembered the howling dogs and felt a belated annoyance. I added: The dogs bothered me. 

No wonder, a woman threw herself out of a window last night. First she threw her kid out, then took a dive herself. 

I looked back at my building. From which floor? 

The fourth floor. 

I knew this kind of agitation — the smooth surface of routine had been broken by tragedy. There’s no appropriate remove from which to speak about the misfortunes of your neighbors, the grief of people you’ve never met. Show fervent interest and get outed as a busybody; respond coolly and appear heartless. I oscillated between these two extremes, then stopped my frantic search for the correct frequency and settled finally on polite concern. 

How awful, I said, shaking my head. I hope everyone survived? 

Not everyone, a pensioner confirmed with satisfaction. She’s dead, and the child’s an invalid. 

How awful, I repeated. And you knew her? 

No, she wasn’t from around here, she rented her place. 

I see. Well. Have a nice evening! 

You too, the woman nodded, and I walked my dogs back home, past the part of the building from which, according to the pensioners, the Unknown Woman had taken a dive. 

I looked carefully at the strip of grass where Rizhiy and Seriy usually slept. The dogs weren’t there, probably off on their daily hunt, or marking the borders of their territory, as is customary. On their plot were the usual pair of enamel bowls and some gnawed bones. No trace of blood anywhere. The well-tended little courtyard gardens stood undisturbed: hedges neatly trimmed, daffodil shoots swaying above old-tire flowerbeds, fence unbroken. 

Movies and podcasts have taught me to reconstruct events in which I’ve played no part. Synthetic zippered housecoat, bare knees, a little girl asleep on the sofa, an open window. The woman’s head is half-turned, she barely blinks, the claw-clip no longer holds her hair, just dangles from a stray lock. Or maybe the little girl is awake? She doesn’t understand what’s happening and sniffles quietly. In my mind I rearrange the props and the timeline of the night’s events. I light the scene, frame the shot, return to the beginning. 

Today I’m looking at the date — exactly a year since the night the Unknown Woman took her dive from the fourth floor. All this time, every day I walked beneath her apartment, I would look up and try to identify the window in question. Then I’d scrutinize the front gardens and the dogs’ section of lawn. The pull of the story hasn’t subsided, and I keep looking for its traces. Normal human interest in other people’s lives, their monotony and grief. 

I used to feel embarrassed about peering into ground-floor windows, staring at commuters sitting across from me on the subway, moving intentionally slowly as I pulled off my sneakers, giving myself more time to eavesdrop on locker room conversations at the gym. But eventually my shame subsided, my fear of being found out disappeared. Sometimes I even want to be caught — to lock eyes with the old man in the window, the one I’ve been watching, to be chastised, like: « I know you’re listening to us! » I imagine myself discovered and think of ways to respond. Once I thought I’d try to play innocent, mumble excuses. But now I think I wouldn’t bother hiding my desire to know. When I was a child and watched people rather obviously, my mother would pull me sharply aside, saying that staring at strangers was rude. But she herself snuck looks at them from beneath her lashes, and at home would inevitably report on the torn pantyhose of « that girl in the red dress » and the extramarital affair of her colleague at the factory. 

A week after the Unknown Woman’s death I entered the key terms into the search bar. A few news items on local sites: on such-and-such a date, a thirty-year-old woman and her seven-year-old daughter fell from a window. Earlier that evening, the woman had called the police; when the squad arrived at her apartment, no one answered the door, so the cops brought in Fire and Rescue. The Rescue team broke down the door, but the place turned out to be empty, because the woman and her daughter had gone out the window. 

There are many stories of women with babies and young children who choose to take a dive. Postpartum depression can have terrible consequences: illness, husbands leaving, isolation, poverty. But this was the first time I’d heard of a woman jumping out of a window with a seven-year-old child. I compulsively parsed the possible reasons for her suicide: she was in debt, had an incurable disease, couldn’t handle yet another panic attack (itself a possible consequence of debt, illness, social isolation).

My thoughts kept returning to the Unknown Woman’s call to the police. I doubted that she had called the cops on herself. If she was asking for protection, then there was somebody who wanted to do her harm. There’s no need for somebody to be a real, flesh-and-blood person. From my earliest childhood until I was twenty-eight, I was plagued by the obsessive thought that somebody was watching me. During acute episodes I woke up terrified, convinced that somebody was about to break in through the window and strangle me. These episodes could last anywhere from a few days to a month, and then all was quiet again. But the relative peace didn’t mean somebody had gone away; it only meant somebody was now immersed in a meditative observation of my life. At every waking moment I felt somebody’s gaze upon me, felt his desire to destroy me. When I first went to see a psychiatrist, she heard me out, wrote a prescription for antipsychotics, and remarked that if anyone were watching me, it was me alone. In response to my questioning glance, she patiently explained the theory of the divided consciousness, one symptom of which is this kind of fear of surveillance. 

I still remember that fear: the world falls away, light and air vanish, and all that remains is somebody and your inability to resist. Whatever the temperature in the apartment, you feel naked and cold. Your sense of exposure only fans the flames of your panic, like a crosswind. Terror swells in your chest, throat, head — any second your lungs will explode and you’ll puke them up, but meanwhile you keep running around like a headless chicken. You’re a wreck; you’re liable to do anything. That’s how I imagine the Unknown Woman’s attack: she gasps for air as she dashes through the apartment, but there’s nowhere to hide. She has to save her daughter and herself. 

 It’s spring, the snowdrops have faded. A brief bout of warmth has prised the dandelions from the ground, and in the courtyard garden there’s a lone daffodil. I open the window, listen to the children’s voices and the rumble of freight trains, think about the worn metaphor of water that stands in for time. The Unknown Woman jumped out of the window, and a few minutes after her fall the world closed up around her like the surface of water over a stone. 

Curiosity brings to me the obvious question in the case of Unknown Woman. Can a jump from the fourth floor really kill you? I think back to the accidents of people I’ve known: M. fell from the third story, got up, brushed herself off, returned to the party; K. was running from a rapist and jumped from the second floor, breaking both legs; I, thanks to my own clumsiness, sprained my ankle jumping from the first. The number four seems low, insufficient, but I multiply it by the height of the ceilings, add the centimeters of the dividers, get about ten meters — that’s something. I write to a friend who works as a medical examiner, asking whether someone could die from falling from the fourth floor. She responds that four floors is more than enough. 

I feel a sense of disappointment. It’s similar to the disappointment felt when reading a book in which the author withholds the source of the heroine’s suffering. You imagine horrific incest, but in the end, it turns out that her life was ruined by a slap to the face. And what if it finally is revealed that the heroine suffered from PTSD after she was raped by her own father? I suppose in that case you’d say to yourself: I knew it, that bastard! But I think there would still be a shadow of disappointment, because the point isn’t the violence or the form it takes. The point is anticipating the revelation of some horrible secret. And events only seem horrible if all you know about them is that they occurred. 

To contend with the chaos of the real, people invent stories. Some are drawn to melodrama, others endow a series of coincidences with a mystical character. I’m not interested in crimes of passion or the supernatural, so in my own mind I write slice-of-life tragedies and low-budget horror.

A year after the death of the Unknown Woman I try the key words again. The news items about her are farther down, now, in the hits. They’ve been displaced by more recent tragedies. A young woman fell from a fifth-floor balcony — her neighbor heard a scream, looked out, saw the woman sprawled on the awning over the door. Elsewhere, a man threw a young woman out of a window. I type in: man threw woman from window. I get: in Moscow, the Moscow area, Perm, Izhevsk, Togliatti, Tula, St. Petersburg, a man threw a woman, a young woman, an underage girl, her child, her dog, out of a seventh-floor, eighth-floor, twelfth-floor, sixteenth-floor window. 

I return to the death of the Unknown Woman. I scroll to the second page of results and find a post. The text concurs with the articles I’ve already read but also contains details that weren’t mentioned on the news sites: medics found signs of intravenous injections on the arms of the Unknown Woman, and the police reported disorder inside the apartment. Naturally, no sources are cited for this information. There are over a hundred comments, all saying what you’d expect: condemnations of drug users; complaints about child wellness services; rare, awkward attempts at sympathy; calls to take an objective view. Finally, among all these identical sentiments I find what I came for. A woman of about thirty writes that the Unknown Woman was her neighbor. 

Beneath the Unknown Woman’s neighbor’s comment are requests to describe what she looked like. Dark, long-haired, thin? Yes, that’s her. I saw her last night, they came to the café where I work. They being the Unknown Woman, her daughter, and a man. They had a loud argument, the man left almost immediately, the commenter had felt sorry for the Unknown Woman with her tear-stained face and called a taxi to send her home with her kid. 

Someone drops a link to the Unknown Woman’s page, but I’m in no hurry to go there. Moreover, I assume the page has been taken down. There are three reasons I want this to be true. 

First, I don’t want to see the Unknown Woman’s face — is that because the artifacts of her life will disappoint me? That’s probably it. This story has been a puzzle, a way for me to contemplate impulses that are supposed to be shameful. I don’t want to see the woman at whose expense I’ve been engaging in these musings on the courtyard panopticon. I don’t want to encounter a woman in whose place I could easily have found myself. 

Second, probably like a lot of other people, I’ve been anticipating a voyeuristic pleasure. I know that in the case of pictures on the internet, it’s not the actual looking but the anticipation that provides the thrill.

Third, I didn’t want to trawl her page in search of something that foreshadows a tragic death. If her profile turns out to be empty, if her avatar is not a picture of her but rather a field of flowers on a sunny day, then the workings of interpretation would produce the following reading: the Unknown Woman wished to take up as little space as possible in this world, until finally she erased herself. But I’m annoyed by the tendency to make up stories and then find details to confirm one’s own version of events. 

The Unknown Woman’s page was up. Now I’ve seen everything she wanted to show strangers and friends. I have no desire at all to describe her selfies and posted quotes, to comment on her playlist or her apps and subscriptions. 

The Unknown Woman’s daughter remains outside of my reflection. Some will say that I should’ve thought of her first and foremost. A child doesn’t choose to get thrown out of a window. She’s the victim of a crime, an attempted murder. Most of the comments on the post about the tragedy of the Unknown Woman are criticisms of her as a mother. Of course — the first thing that comes to mind when you hear a story like that is: the poor child. The ensuing haphazard, blundering attempt to comprehend the Unknown Woman’s actions leads back to ancient history and its bloody myths. 

It’s evening, the bats are awake. While the sky is still light, I can see them flickering past my windows. I’m wary of them, my old fear of rabies crowding out any attempts at rational thought. And lately I’ve noticed that I’m prone to fearing everything I haven’t known since childhood. I’m disturbed by the bats, the local mistletoe, the snowdrops and the turtledoves. Looking at all these things, it’s as if I don’t quite believe in their reality, like what I’m seeing are only holograms. 

I was five when my parents dropped me from a motorcycle. My father had a red IZh. He scoffed at traffic laws, and since he understood driving as his vocation, he could imagine an eventual death by drowning or fire, but in an accident — never. He rode his motorcycle without a helmet, he rode drunk, he had no sidecar. My mother sat me between the two of them and pulled her jacket over me when we went past the cops. 

I wasn’t afraid of falling from the motorcycle, and I wasn’t afraid of crashing. I was five, and what scared me was my mother’s fear. For a ride on the IZh, my mother put on her denim jacket and a sweater. My father wore leather. I can clearly remember the warmth of my parents’ bodies and the smell of burnt benzene, my mother holding me with one arm and hanging on to my father’s jacket with the other. Her denim billows in the wind, the motor revs. The sounds, the smells, and the pink twilight run into one another and rock me to sleep. The rosy light is lost in the darkness of dream. 

I was woken by my mother’s anxious voice, opening my eyes to see her face very close to mine. She was begging me not to cry, because if I did the cops would come; my father had broken every conceivable law. Don’t you dare start crying, she was saying insistently, or Papa will go to jail. My father stood some distance away, smoking and looking ahead. He had sobered up. My mother shook me by the shirt and begged — Just don’t cry! And I started sobbing. 

Medea didn’t want to harm her children. Procne didn’t hate her own son. Both of them were taking revenge on their husbands, nothing sentimental about it — the murder of a child ensures the destruction of a bloodline. Nobody kills a child out of hatred for the child. Hatred is a hot, sweet feeling, and the one who hates wouldn’t dare lose the object of her hatred. Medea didn’t kill Jason, Procne never touched Tereus. The one you hate must simply suffer, must be immobilized by fear. 

Whenever I had to live or spend the night on the ground floor, my feeling of being watched grew more intense. I tried to keep the window in view, never to turn my back to it, so I’d see when somebody was about to pounce. I was waiting for it, I was ready. Ready for what? I knew that somebody was bigger and stronger, that I would be defeated. But I still wanted, as somebody approached, to finally see his face. 

My mother would say: Stay here, he won’t touch you. She would quickly get dressed and leave, because she knew that as soon the cops learned his last name, they would let him out, and he’d come right back here, to continue slowly killing her. Whenever he came around and started trying to get in, I’d go to the door and say through it that Mama had gone out. He didn’t believe me, of course. He needed to see for himself. The fits of angry pounding stopped, and silence fell. I knew what would happen next, so I would sit myself in the armchair and waited for the boards of the railings to groan beneath his weight as he climbed the balconies to the third floor. I sat and waited, because I hoped that this time would be different. How old was I then? Probably about ten. 

Once he made his way up to our balcony, he’d knock again, threatening to break the glass. And I would open the door for him, because if he were to break in, who would sweep up the shattered glass and fix the door, later? I let him in, asking him to take off his shoes, but he didn’t bother, going into my room, the kitchen, looking inside the wardrobes, beneath the bed, searching for my mother. His soles left scuff marks on the floor, and I was offended on my mother’s behalf; she’d spent all morning cleaning. 

Twenty-five years later, I try and am unable to understand my mother’s logic. Why didn’t she take me with her? I call A., ask her what she thinks about all this. A. says with mournful irony that leaving me in the apartment was one of my mother’s many ambiguous choices. We laugh.

Twenty-five years later, I am trying to remember why I didn’t run away, even though I knew what was coming. I say as much to A., and she suggests that at night a child may judge the apartment to be safer than the street. She adds: Even with a monster trying to get in. That may be, but I remember those moments and know for certain that it never even occurred to me to run away. My mother had told me to stay, and I, immobilized by her command, sat in the armchair and waited for him to appear on the other side of the balcony door, wearing his phony smile. 

The blue turtledoves have returned; they’re building nests and thickly cooing. A few days ago, I was in the courtyard fussing with Filyusha’s leash, and as I untangled the twisted strap I heard a dull thud behind me. I turned and saw a turtledove at my feet. Bubenchik dove toward the bird, but I managed to wedge a foot in her way. The turtledove was dead, and the color of the blood coming from its beak reminded me of Nurofen capsules. Above, in trees hung with tangles of mistletoe, crows clustered and cackled, and spooked pigeons were settling down on a rain pipe underneath the roof. There was no sign of the other turtledove, its mate. Where was it? And is it really true that a turtledove that loses its mate will die of sorrow?

I enter the key terms into the search bar and Wikipedia tells me nothing about the mourning rituals of birds. The next result is commentary on a verse from the second chapter of Luke, in which a pair of young turtledoves is sacrificed after Christ’s circumcision. Church Father Athanasius the Great writes: the turtledove is a symbol of chastity and silence…if a male or female turtledove dies, the remaining one does not take another mate. 

That sounds quite a bit like something people would make up, I reason, and write to R., a scientist who works on pigeons. She confirms my hunch. People mistake the cooing of mourning doves for crying over their lost other halves. These birds do usually keep the same mate throughout their entire lives, but a dove whose mate has died will find another mate the following year. If it survives, of course. After all, in nature they have only about three years to live.