“Cute!” Nora said approvingly. She nudged the carriage into the lift. “You go on ahead. I’ll take the stairs.”
“What’s so cute about her? Spit and image of the father. Look at that nose! It’s Armenian!” And, propping the door open with a hand, she added, “The baby’s got the whole family wrapped around its little finger. That’s Armenians for you.”
Nora went up the stairs to the fourth floor. By the time she reached her apartment, she knew for certain that she was going to set her life to rights, and that it would be more interesting than she could ever have imagined before.
The door to the apartment had two locks, and both were locked. Her mother must have been here: Nora usually only locked the lower one. Mama and her husband, Andrei Ivanovich, rarely came to Moscow. There was a note on the kitchen table: “Nora, you got calls from Anastasia Ilyinichna, Perchikhina, and Chipa. Call me. We’ll be here on Friday evening and leave again on Saturday. Hugs, Mama.”
The only thing she couldn’t figure out was which Friday she meant—last Friday, or the Friday before that. The days of the week, and the dates, had all run together for her.
Without even stopping in her room, she went to take a bath. She soaked for a long time, even drifted off for a bit. Tengiz kept trying to break into her semi-sleep, to let her know he was still there, but Nora chased him away. Then he sent Anton Chekhov, with his sepia sisters—and that was his mistake, because the three sisters, doleful and unhappy, pushed her toward life, with all its harshness, without sentiment, life with its problems and solutions. She hurried to get out of the water, which was cooling off quickly, and to turn on a steaming-hot shower.
I have a new project, she told herself. She sprang from the bathtub and wrapped herself in a terry cloth robe, because she had forgotten to bring in a clean towel. She suddenly felt famished.
It can’t possibly be Friday. It must be Wednesday. I’m going to run down to The Gut (a nearby grocery store by the Nikitsky Gates that had a long hall lined with food counters) to get some food, and then I’ll call Vitya. Good old Vitya. A joke of a husband she had not lived with for a single day. And it would have been impossible, anyway. He was a genius—autistic and crazy. They had married right after high school. And there was no love in it—only calculation. To take revenge. But on whom, and why? Nikita Tregubsky. She had run into him five years later, in a café, the Blue Bird. He had walked up to her, swinging his shoulders nonchalantly, with a rangy, athletic gait, as though they had just parted ways yesterday, as though nothing at all had happened. My God, what an idiot! A plastic mannequin! Was this the person she had been in love with? What a fool she was! But she couldn’t seem to change her ways: Tengiz also looked like a superhero! Just a different one. Damn hormones. A new project! Vitya!
She called him. Varvara Vasilievna picked up and handed the phone directly to Vitya, without bothering to talk to her. Nora’s mother-in-law hated her with blunt intensity. They were both quite mad—mother and son. Just in different ways.
“Could you come over, Vitya? This evening?”
“Okay.”
Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea? But I married him for something, didn’t I? I’ll give it a shot. It is the right thing to do; maybe my baby will be a genius. And it will redeem that childhood mistake.
The rain grew stronger toward evening. Nora put on a jacket with a hood and ran to The Gut to buy frankfurters. For her husband.
* * *
More than a year had passed since Tengiz had left. Nora had changed everything in her life, turning it upside down and setting it right again. She didn’t want a trace of the past to remain. She didn’t want any more conflagrations, or floods, or earthquakes, because she had to live. She had to survive, and Tengiz was always going away, going away for good, with his unshaven face, his sculptural hands that resembled the hands of Michelangelo’s David, with his overbite, his smell of cheap country tobacco, with his narrow hips and his lanky, doglike legs. Tengiz was gone; and their own magnificent smash-hit show for two would never be performed again …
They were not in the habit of writing letters to each other. There were just one-way phone calls from time to time—from Tengiz to Nora. This could have been because he wanted to protect his Tbilisi life from her, or because their long-term relations were put on hold, bracketed off, like something especially valuable that wouldn’t mix with the quotidian flow of Tengiz’s Tbilisi life, which Nora didn’t know, the life in which he had women, and family ties with some big-shot criminal who sometimes rescued him when he was in trouble … The only letter that Nora had received from Tengiz came a year and a half after he had left her, after his monthlong stay in Poland at the Laboratory Theatre of Jerzy Grotowski. The letter was clumsily written on what seemed to be a piece of wrapping paper, brownish and old-looking. He informed her that he had converted, changed religions, that everything from the past was shattered, and that the shards were better than the original whole had been … “We need to talk,” he had scrawled across the bottom. But it would be two whole years before she would see him again.
Yurik was already walking, tottering around, and falling down on his little bottom.
6
Classmates
(1955–1963)
They were supposed to beat up Vitya Chebotarev. It wasn’t a choice; it was an obligation. But he was lucky—they beat up Grisha Lieber instead. And they didn’t mess him up too much—just enough to display their contempt for the wunderkind Jew. They were both wunderkinder, in fact, but Grisha was a half-pint Jewish kid, chubby and pink, whereas Vitya was a strapping lad who disarmed people by his obliviousness to society’s dissatisfaction with him. Vitya’s upper lip protruded slightly, the consequence of too many tightly packed teeth, and this gave him a good-natured expression. He was somewhat autistic—“a bit odd,” as his mother, Varvara Vasilievna, described him. She was from the country, unpretentious but smart. She had worked her way up the ladder from housekeeper to administrator in the Housing Maintenance Committee.
Even before he started school, she sought advice about her little Vitya from an elderly professor, an acquaintance from her former housekeeping days, who told her that the boy was in no sense a moron, more likely even a genius, but one with peculiarities. Such children were what you might call rarities, and must be handled with care. With proper nurturing, children like this could grow up to become great scientists; otherwise, they could end up on the margins of society. Varvara received this news with delight, and she never so much as laid a hand on him, but protected him and expected great things of him. She was someone who had raised herself high above the place where she had begun in life. Working for good employers, she was able to graduate from primary school, then trade school for housing-maintenance workers, and finally to get assigned a private room for herself. Afterward, when she was already working at the HMC, she became eligible for a separate apartment in the city center—albeit on the ground floor, as they deferentially called the cellar of the building, located in close proximity to Gogol’s last apartment.
Such was the career of Varvara Vasilievna; it was as though she had made the transition from plumber to academician in a single leap. Thus, she had high hopes for her son, born of a not entirely successful union. And her maternal hopes were not disappointed. Varvara stoically endured the first years of Vitya’s education, when the teacher complained about his inattentiveness, his absentmindedness and inability to blend in with the other children and take part in their activities. But in the fifth grade, when simple arithmetic was replaced by algebra and geometry, Vitya blossomed. The math teacher immediately singled him out from the other students, and began sending him to the Math Olympiad, where he excelled and enjoyed his first faint glimmers of fame.
The elderly professor had been right. Vitya was inattentive to what didn’t interest him, but when something engaged his mental capacities, he was quick, sharp, and hungry for knowledge. Despite his unusual memory and his innate abilities in logical thought, he was emotiona
lly rather backward, and had not an iota of a sense of humor. There seemed to be some sort of short circuit in his head that allowed him to exist happily in the most abstract realms of mathematics, whereas any literary text, from “Little Red Riding Hood” to King Lear, which he read as an adolescent, filled him with indignation at the lack of logic, the contrivances, and the flouting of causal connections and motives in the behavior of both characters and authors.
His classmates, with their soccer and their paper airplanes, did not interest him; only Grisha Lieber proved to be a satisfactory interlocutor. They made a funny pair: little Grisha, who was much shorter than his classmates but far exceeded most of them in weight, rolled around the rangy, lanky Vitya like a ball, constantly trying to prove a point to him. Vitya would listen silently, nodding and scratching his prominent forehead. He received a great deal of interesting information from Grisha, whose father was a physicist and discussed such matters with his son. Grisha was by nature sociable and talkative, so they were an odd couple—a garrulous little ball and a taciturn beanpole. When the classmates had to read Don Quixote, they started calling Grisha Sancho Panza. And he did indeed play the same role. Thanks to Grisha, Vitya finally even got to know some of their other classmates, who up until then had been so unimportant to him he didn’t even know many of them by name.
In the fifth grade, the boys’ and girls’ schools joined together, but even this momentous event went practically unnoticed by Vitya. The girls paid no attention to him, either, it must be said. The only girl he sometimes talked to was Nora, and their relations were not spontaneous, but thanks to the promptings of the literature teacher and class adviser, Vera Alexeyevna. She appointed Nora (a book lover with an innate grasp of grammar) to help Vitya bring up his grades in that subject. During their sessions, they didn’t become friends, but they did at least get to know each other. And Nora helped him pull up his grades until the ninth grade. He intrigued Nora with his critical reading of any work put in front of him, which he analyzed with unwavering precision, pointing out the glaring inadequacy of any metaphor taken on its own merits, and the fundamental logical inconsistency and lack of rigor of the humanities as a whole. His grades never rose above a C in Russian language and literature, but the teachers were quick to pardon this star of the Math Olympiad for many years running.
Vitya was not popular with his classmates, and the girls dismissed him because they thought he was a smarty-pants who imagined himself to be more intelligent than everyone else. In fact, he imagined no such thing, since his imagination was restricted to very specific tasks and orders of knowledge where girls rarely ventured, so there was barely a whiff of them around him.
In the seventh grade, they were laid low by an epidemic, something akin to chicken pox: everyone fell in love. The girls quarreled and wept, the boys got into fights more often than usual, and a weak electric charge hovered in the air. Vitya himself never fought. Nor did he express any interest in girls.
A cloud of tension grew thick around Nina Knyazeva, a budding beauty, and Masha Nersesyan, who had developed early and was already in full bloom at fourteen. There were a few other pretty girls who turned the boys’ heads, but not as dramatically. Nora was not one of them. She did have one admirer, however—funny, sweet Grisha. Nora ignored Grisha entirely. Though she had been independent and idiosyncratic from an early age, this time she traveled the general route.
Nikita Tregubsky was the embodiment of all the girls’ notions of masculine perfection. He moved confidently, had a nice smile, and was affectionate and impudent, both at once. He had virtually no rivals. The other boys had not achieved enough manliness to meet with any kind of success. At the very sight of Nikita, half the girls in the class went into preservation-of-the-species mode. Nora was not spared this fate. She fell desperately in love with Nikita in the sixth grade, and in the eighth, she fearlessly, without shame, offered him her love in the most literal sense. Nora was taken by surprise at the wondrous world that awaited her between the sheets, and she happily explored it at every opportunity over the course of several months. Later, Nikita would stay overnight at Nora’s, to the silent consternation of Amalia.
The young lovers kept their secret to themselves for a whole year. At the beginning of the ninth grade, rumors began circulating. Most likely, Nikita had boasted of his conquest to the other boys, and it had finally reached the staff room. Vera Alexeyevna, the class adviser, undertook to have a heart-to-heart pedagogical talk with Nora, with the noble purpose of nipping the brewing scandal in the bud.
Scratching her head nervously, Vera Alexeyevna, who was deeply agitated, broached the ticklish subject by referring to moral principles. Nora didn’t even allow her to finish. She informed her coldly that she had no intention of discussing her personal life, that her relations with men—that’s what she said, “with men” (and here Vera Alexeyevna started scratching her head with redoubled energy)—were no one’s business but her own and one other person’s, whose existence she was not going to broadcast. In short, mind your own business!
Vera Alexeyevna was offended and kicked up a fuss. The Party organizer of the school, Elena Azizovna, suggested convening a PTA meeting after school devoted exclusively to the crimes of ninth-grade minors. The criminals’ parents were invited. Romeo made a poor performance, publicly repenting his love affair and offering a version of events whereby he was not the initiator but, rather, the victim of her machinations. Dark with fury, the father of the “victim,” a hockey coach the size of a double-door refrigerator, made a testimony denouncing Amalia Alexandrovna. He seemed to be well informed about the family life of the mother of the juvenile delinquent. At that time, Amalia Alexandrovna was still not married to Andrei Ivanovich—that is, she was in a relationship with a married man, which Tregubsky père announced to a rapt audience. When Nora glanced at her mother, who was sitting in a corner of the classroom looking crushed, she was suddenly filled with a rage that surpassed anything she would ever again experience. How dare this old goat insult her mother! She saw a dark-crimson mist before her eyes, and suddenly she exploded. Later, she couldn’t remember the content of her retort to old Tregubsky and the PTA members, but most of the words she used could not be found in a standard dictionary. Taking her mother by the hand, she left the room, slamming the door behind her. She was immediately expelled from school, without further deliberation.
The next day Nora, her eyes red and swollen from weeping, as composed and collected as a parachutist before a jump, went to school and collected her records. Then she wept for three days straight. Amalia Alexandrovna tried to comfort her, but Nora rejected any involvement of her mother in the unpleasantness that had befallen her. Poor Amalia was no less traumatized than her daughter by the public execution. Nora was offended more on her mother’s behalf than her own, and resented Andrei Ivanovich with renewed vigor for putting his beloved in such a compromising position. She hated Nikita with a passion, and at the same time wanted to engage in criminal action with him again as soon as possible, which would go a long way toward mitigating the state-sponsored unpleasantness.
These events brought with them important lessons in life. First, she decided that she would never in her life have an affair with a married man, as her mother had. Second, she understood that love made a person defenseless and vulnerable, and that sex had to be kept separate from human emotions and relationships for reasons of personal safety. And, third, as she told herself: I don’t want anyone to pity me. Nor will I ever pity myself.
On the day when the announcement of Nora’s expulsion from school was pinned on the official notice board, and rumors about the scandalous PTA meeting were making the rounds among the upperclassmen, a fight—or, more accurately, a skirmish—broke out at the entrance to the school. Grisha Lieber stopped Tregubsky, who was running late, as usual, and uttered, with grim solemnity, these words: “You, Tregubsky, are scum.”
Grisha had planned to give him an aristocratic slap in the face, but, though he swung his arm out, th
e theatrical gesture fell flat. Nikita forestalled the blow, and punched Grisha’s soft little face with his hard fist. The duel never got off the ground. Grisha slumped down, hitting his face on the iron door handle, and, without breaking stride, Nikita rushed in through the wide-open door and up to the third floor. He lived almost next door to the school and was the only one who always arrived without a hat or coat in any kind of weather. The school nurse took the bloodied Grisha to the nearest emergency room, where they gave him stitches over his cheekbone. He explained what had happened by saying he had tripped and fallen, knocking his cheek against the door. This scar—in a faint V-shape, like a checkmark in a box—stayed with him his entire life, a memory of his first, secret love for Nora.
A week later, Vitya learned that Nora had been expelled, from Nora herself. He had come over to her house and sat down; without saying anything about it or asking any questions, he just pulled out his literature notebook. They were studying Goncharov.
“Here’s Oblomov,” he said.
“You want me to study with you? Don’t you know they kicked me out of school?”
Somehow he had managed to remain oblivious to the event, which had been hotly debated in the men’s, not to mention the women’s, bathrooms. At this point, Nora finally had to laugh. She told him what had happened between her and Tregubsky. Vitya stayed for about fifteen minutes. They didn’t feel like discussing Oblomov and the Oblomov syndrome, but there wasn’t anything else they could talk about. He drank a cup of tea, which he took with five spoonfuls of sugar; ate all the food that was set before him, emptying out the refrigerator completely; and headed for the door. Walking right behind him, Nora, who had cheered up considerably after this unexpected visit, invited him to drop by any time he needed to write an essay. One reason his visit was nice was that he was the only one of all her classmates who had visited her. In fact, she was not really friends with anyone in the class. There was Chipa, Marina Chipkovskaya, though they hadn’t met in school, but in the art studio she had started attending that year.
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