BELGRADE, THURSDAY

A BELORUSSIAN WIFE is facing charges after apparently nagging her husband to death.

Maria (83) (last name withheld to protect juvenile family members) is said to have asked first her husband Fedor (85) to clean the gutters around their house in Minsk in 1973. He said he would but failed to do so.

“Fedor was a lazy bum,” says a relative. “It was the Soviet Union then and half the men in Minsk were lazy bums. Socialism sucks the marrow from the bones of initiative. It breeds greed and squeezes hope. Which is ironic because it is designed to do the exact opposite. All Maria wanted was a clean house. All Fedor wanted was what he could get.

“Every year she would ask him to clean the gutters. Every year he would promise to do it. But he didn’t. Even after Chernobyl blew up and the gutter was full of leaves that glowed in the dark, he didn’t do it.

“Maria, Maria, please stop,” he would say to her, his hands over his ears. “I can’t take this. I will do the gutters. You will have the cleanest house in Minsk.”

“Eventually she began to clean the gutters herself. Only every time she did it, she still asked Fedor to do it, and he would stand there ordering her not to do it, insisting that he would do it. But he didn’t do it.

“She went to a priest she knew, and asked him if it was a sin to ask her husband to clean the gutters. The priest, wondering if she was a secret police spy, told her that such deeds were founded in bourgeois reactionary politics, and that she should put her faith in Marx and Lenin.

“Will they clean my gutters?” asked Maria.

“At this point the priest directed her to a Communist Party official, who had her arrested and sent to prison for a year.

“When the Soviet Union went away, she continued to ask Fedor to clean the gutters, and he kept promising, and still he never did it.

“Earlier this year, she was up on her ladder, cleaning her gutters, asking Fedor to clean them. He stood below her, bottle in hand, counting her requests, yelling at her to stop. ‘Maria, you have asked me to clean those gutters half a million times, do you know that?’ he said, taking a drink from his bottle. ‘I have recorded every one. And they’re still full of leaves. And if you ask me another half million times, they will still fill with leaves.’ Then he shook his head, keeled over and died.”

Maria says alcohol and fatalism killed him. She continues to clean her gutters.