Her Name Was Tonya
‘Her thick pubic hair glared at me in reproach.’
The entrance to my grandparents’ apartment in Moscow had a small foyer we shared with our neighbour. It was an anteroom the size of a matchbox where two families kept their shoes and coats. It’s also where I stored the sleigh I used to ride down man-made hills atop car garages during the winter.
Through this anteroom, an army of cockroaches would crawl out from under our neighbour’s door and into our apartment.
The first time my little mother saw one in the mid-1980s, she screamed. She was home alone, watching TV in the living room when a roach the size of a small rat or a large mouse entered without knocking. Its long antenna-like whiskers moved slightly as it took in the scenery. My grandmother’s prized chandelier, the Soviet rug, the TV showing black-and-white movies about WWII.
My little mother didn’t take long to remove her slipper and slap the uninvited bastard as hard as she could. The slipper did the job, and the roach lay still underneath it. Afraid to check whether it was still alive, my mother ran to the kitchen, unable to bring herself to reenter the living room where a potential corpse lay, and made herself tea, assessing her next move.
More than the roach, she feared her mother, my babushka. My grandmother Tanya is a strict woman, always has been. She kept the apartment spotlessly clean, and finding a stain—let alone a roach!—was unthinkable. Even though my mother had nothing to do with it, she knew she would suffer the blame. If not for the roach’s appearance, then at the very least, for its untimely death on my babushka’s favourite Soviet rug. After all, when my uncle, my mother’s brother, had accidentally crashed her favourite vase, my grandmother beat him with a skipping rope.
Mustering all the courage she had at age six, my little mother left the apartment and walked half a step toward the neighbour’s door across the anteroom.
She managed to knock just once before the door opened. It was as if whoever was on the inside had been waiting there all along.
A woman stood with her arms on her hips. Her face was distorted in a grimace my mother couldn’t comprehend. Her eyes seemed artificial, plastic. In the background, a TV was playing. It suddenly smelled of rotten food.
“Now, what the hell do you want?” the woman screamed in a high-pitched voice at my six-year-old mother.
Her name was Tonya.
Tonya was more than just a same-floor neighbour. The residents on the opposite side of our floor—the Ptushkiny, as my grandmother knowingly called them, a typical Soviet couple of a school teacher and an ex-colonel—those were the same-floor neighbours. On the other hand, Tonya was a symbol of the building, a local attraction. She was a secondary character in a TV show you unexpectedly grow to love, the kind that might earn a prequel when the series ends. She was like a family member, the one you promise yourself never to invite to family events, and yet, feeling guilty, can’t help but do.
The thing is, Tonya was crazy. And not your run-of-the-mill, harmless crazy, either. She was naked-on-the-street crazy. Cursing-you-in-broad-daylight crazy. Showing-your-five-year-old-kid-the-finger crazy. Sticking-her-tongue-out-and-peeing-on-the-floor crazy.
I was six years old when we moved into my grandmother’s apartment. My father had big plans to reinvent himself, start a business, and move to America. My mother wanted me to attend a better school than the two available back in the crime-and-drug-addict-filled town of Podolsk, where my father grew up.
One winter day, as my mother and I approached my grandparents’ building, we saw Tonya blocking the door, completely naked.
Her sagging breasts were unaffected by late January's -15°C cold. Her thick pubic hair seemed to glare at me in reproach. No matter how much I brushed it off, that image would haunt me in my dreams all the way through puberty.
“Bitch,” Tonya said, staring directly at my mother as if this was the first time she’d seen her and not lived right next to her and her parents for the better part of three decades.
My mother, a fragile, short-haired woman who, even at 27, looked 15, sighed and squeezed my hand. The gesture seemed to say, It’s okay. Don’t be scared. It’s just Tonya.
“Bitch. Bitch. Bitch, bitch, bitch,” Tonya repeated, louder each time.
“Tonya, can I please come through?” my mother asked, her voice tight and forcefully calm.
“NOO!!!” Tonya screamed and suddenly lunged toward us.
My mother and I flinched, taking a step back. Inches before reaching us, Tonya veered sharply to the side, taking a seat on the icy, beer-stained bench outside the entrance. When it got dark, that bench was typically occupied by alcoholics, sipping on cheap vodka. In broad daylight, it was typically empty. Now Tonya sat there, her naked ass on the icy wood, crossing her legs, squinting into the distance as though she were waiting for a cab.
“Bitch,” she muttered one last time to nobody in particular, in a tone you use when you want to say that it began raining.
My mother and I exchanged glances and silently walked inside, careful enough not to draw attention.
As we pressed the cracked, grimy button for the elevator, I asked, “Is she ill?”
“Yes, she is,” my mother replied softly.
The elevator arrived with a loud clunk, its metallic doors scraping open. The interior smelled of something sharp and acidic. I pinched my nose theatrically and looked at my mother.
“It stinks,” I said, giggling. “Is it her?”
“It just might,” my mother replied, with a smile and a hint of a forced frown, as if she was too ashamed to smile outright.
Tonya had moments of unprompted kindness that followed no discernible pattern.
One day, when I came home from an admissions test at elementary school (during which a witch who called herself a teacher asked me whether I knew what a mosquito was), she rang our doorbell, holding a plastic bag with what looked like a box of candy inside.
She was fully dressed, which was already an achievement.
“Oh, thanks, Tonya,” my grandmother said, accepting the bag with polite hesitation. “That’s very kind of you.”
“You’re very welcome! Say hello to your husband, your daughter, and those beautiful grandchildren. This is for them, by the way!”
“Thanks, Tonya,” my grandmother said again, nodding.
There was a moment of awkwardness as I stood behind my grandmother, my eye level barely exceeding her sizeable bottom, concealed underneath her long sleeveless sarafan.
My grandmother was the same age as Tonya and remembered her from a time before Tonya became… whatever it is that she became. Still, Tonya somehow seemed older. Her eyes darted about as if seeing everything and nothing all at once. Her black hair resembled a beehive, with strands of what looked like floss tangled inside. She wore a dirty black T-shirt that might have been bought by her Bolshevik forefathers, stained with cooking oil marks. She smelled of cat piss and, for some reason, paint.
I inched closer to my grandmother, gripped by a nameless terror.
“Alright, then,” my grandmother said forcefully, watching Tonya’s every move as you would if you encountered a wild animal in a savanna.
Tonya turned 180 degrees and, without a word, returned to her apartment, slamming the door with a bang.
I immediately darted toward the bag.
“Don’t touch that,” my mother, who had just come to the front door and heard everything from the living room, said, slapping my hand away.
“Why not?” I asked.
“It might be rotten.”
Until that moment, I didn’t know gifts from adults could be bad, let alone rotten. I examined the Soviet Alenka chocolate Tonya had given me. It looked fine to me.
“Yep, expired three years ago,” my mother said, tapping the wrapper with her long fingernail. “This goes in the trash.”
I watched as the chocolate, full of promise moments before, fell into the garbage. A part of me felt bad for Tonya. Sure, she seemed weird, but at least, I thought—at six years old—she tried.
Every Marvel hero has a story of how they gained their superpowers. Spider-Man was bitten by a radioactive spider. Doctor Banner became Hulk after he was blasted with gamma rays. Dr. Strange had a car accident so severe it ended his career as a surgeon and sent him to Tibet, where a bald Tilda Swinton taught him sorcery.
Tonya’s origin story, as my uncle told it, was that on his sixteenth birthday, her raging alcoholic husband hanged himself.
With a tie.
On a doorknob.
Right in the tiny anteroom, where we kept our shoes, coats, and the sleigh I used in winter to slide down man-made hills from the tops of car garages. I was two years old at the time.
“Can you imagine? On my birthday, of all days!” my uncle said, rolling his eyes, as if the alcoholic neighbour had inconvenienced him by not choosing a more suitable day to kill himself.
It’s easy to doubt the validity of the story. Can someone really hang themselves on a doorknob? And with a tie, no less? But origin stories don’t need to be true—they just need to stick.
So—whether or not it really happened, this story became part of how we understood Tonya. It seemed to explain her madness. Once I heard it, when I was a teenager, I stopped fearing her. Instead, I felt sorry for her.
“Oh,” I’d think, at sixteen, as I passed her sitting naked yet again on the icy bench outside the pod’ezd—an entrance to my grandparents’ apartment building. “Poor woman. Her husband died. He hanged himself with a tie on a doorknob. That explains everything.”
I wasn’t living in my grandmother’s apartment anymore—we’d switched apartments at least eight times by then. But every time I visited and saw Tonya, I waved, wanting to say, You’re welcome to sit naked in front of my apartment building. Anytime.
As I got older, though, I started to question things. What makes a man want to hang himself—one of the most demonstrative forms of suicide—and not just anywhere, but at the entrance of his own apartment? Maybe, I thought, her husband’s death didn’t cause Tonya’s craziness.
Maybe it was the other way around.
For as long as anyone remembered, Tonya had no friends—surprise!—and her husband had been the only person able—or willing—to care for her.
Tonya could snatch her door open when she heard someone come inside the foyer and begin yelling profanities, kids or no kids around. She could run naked around the neighbourhood, belting prison anthems.
Then, twice a year, her husband would send her to a mental asylum, which is a synonym for prison in Russia, where people get medication and learn to function “normal”. (A euphemism for being beaten or worse.)
Word quickly got around the neighbourhood that Tonya got taken away—that phrase always terrified me—though where exactly she went, nobody knew. But she always came back, to repeat the process all over again.
After the husband was gone, no one was left to take care of her, and things quickly spiralled out of control.
Nobody had seen inside Tonya’s apartment. She never let anyone peek inside. The roaches, though, crawling from under her door—they were the ones who told the story.
Freed from their prison, they marched into our apartment through the anteroom like tiny explorers. The closest "new land" was my mother’s childhood apartment, just half a step away.
That morning in the mid-1980s, when my mother spotted a cockroach and too scared to be blamed, called Tonya for help, Tonya entered barefoot.
She walked into the living room, grabbed the roach by its whiskers, carried it to the trash chute on the stairwell, and left without a word.
The calm, efficient way she disposed of it made you wonder if she did this every day.
When I was twenty, my mother called me.
“Tonya died,” she said.
I had just woken up in an apartment I shared with my then-girlfriend. It took me a moment to remember who she was talking about. “Oh. Right. Well…”
And that well seemed to say everything. What more was there to say? How else could her story have ended?
Back in the Soviet days, my grandfather, Vasilich, received an apartment for free for his contribution to the state and his work for the KGB. All he needed to do was wait in a “queue” for several years, and the apartment was his.
Not long after Tonya’s death, my grandparents moved out of that apartment. Freed from her past, my grandmother separated from my grandfather after 50 years of marriage and started a new life in a different flat with a boyfriend twenty years younger than her. She bought a new car, got two flower-shaped tattoos on her back, adopted a bald dog, and rented my childhood apartment to immigrants from Central Asia who smoked pot and broke the ceiling. My grandfather died a few years later.
I haven’t been to Russia in years, but it’s hard to imagine visiting my grandmother’s old building and not seeing Tonya. She was part of the scenery, a piece of the neighbourhood, and in her own twisted, chaotic way she mattered.
Tonya’s passing was more than the end of her story—it was the end of an era.
I only knew her as the crazy, ugly, naked woman everyone avoided. Sometimes, though not often, I wonder what Tonya could have been like if life had been kinder to her.
Surely, once, she was a little girl—someone who had friends, played with dolls, and dreamed of a knight on a white horse. Or maybe, in her version, it was a white Volga and not a knight but a KGB officer with an apartment overlooking the Moskva River and a free pass to countries of the capitalist bloc.
Something must have happened to make Tonya the way she was. One terrible event, a wrong turn, a decision that rippled across the years and pushed her over the edge. Until she found herself sitting naked on icy benches in -15°C, calling her neighbours “bitch.”
Or perhaps what happened to Tonya is what happens to every one of us.
The slow erosion of hope, the quiet accumulation of disappointments, until one day, something breaks inside you so deeply and irreparably that it can’t be fixed.
In a word, life.
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