Foreign News: Bloody Angel

Her eyes were “like the clear summer sky,” her name was Serafima, which means “angel,” and she lived with her mother. What’s more, they had two whole rooms. So Factory Worker Udod paid Serafima 20,000 rubles, married her and moved in. In Moscow, where housing space was scarcer than Trotskyites in the Kremlin, a man could be proud of such a bargain.

Udod’s happiness was brief. Serafima made him sleep in a separate room. When the 20,000 rubles were spent, the girl’s mother began yearning for the days when there had been no man in the house. Serafima’s blue eyes gleamed; she could fix that easily enough. One morning when Udod was buckling his galoshes she bashed him over the head with a sharp piece of iron. Blood splashed on the walls. Serafima, a tidy girl, repainted the room.

She told neighbors that her husband had been a criminal and was hiding out. But Ivan Kudrin, a police inspector in the tradition of Dostoevsky’s Porfiry Petrovich, became suspicious. He learned that Udod had no criminal record, but that Serafima’s family had. The paint job, too, interested him. Kudrin dug around Serafima’s cellar and found Udod’s body.

Last week the Moscow evening daily, Vechernaya Moskva, told fascinated Muscovites (who get little crime news) the story of Serafima. The paper did not say what happened after her arrest, but keen readers noted that the stories always mentioned her in the past tense.