Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  Vitya visited Nora after that on a regular basis, albeit not very frequently. He would appear at her door, but for the life of her she couldn’t figure out what drew him to her—certainly it wasn’t for a cup of tea. He himself couldn’t have explained it. Most likely, it was just out of inertia, a conditioned reflex he had developed: literature, Nora, essay … He visited Nora now and then in this manner until the end of the school year. In the summer, the visits stopped, which was only natural—classes were over.

  During the summer, Nora breezed through the entrance exams for the Theater Arts Institute, and when the new school year began, she rode the “B” trolleybus to Sretenka Street every day to attend classes. She found everything interesting, from the trolley ride to the subjects she was studying there. Her most important new acquisition, however, was her teacher, Anastasia Ilyinichna Pustyntseva—or Tusya, as she was called—a true theater artist and set designer, teacher, and the embodiment, according to Nora’s notions, of the ideal modern woman. Studying to become a set designer and theater artist was interesting, and Nora was glad that she had been kicked out of school; otherwise, she would have had to languish in the back row for two more years.

  The only thing that cast a shadow over her life was her own appearance, which had never satisfied her, and now even less so. But the theater offered her a new approach to life. Nora began to experiment, searching for a new image. She used a lot of makeup, cut off almost all her hair, lost weight—inadvertently, it must be said, but she liked it. Plump cheeks made her look like a little pink doll, but with hollows under her cheekbones she felt very sharp and stylish. She began to watch her weight seriously, forbidding herself to eat sweets—a ban she held herself to for the rest of her life, having once told herself, I don’t like sweet things. And it seemed she really did not. She picked up smoking—heavily, without deriving any pleasure from it whatsoever. Amalia could hardly keep from crying as she threw out the butts from the ashtray: “Nora, even drinking is better than smoking. It goes without saying that it’s bad for you, but the smell is also disgusting! Chekhov said that kissing a woman who smokes is like licking an ashtray!” Nora dismissed her with a wave of the hand and said, laughing, “Mama, Chekhov and I will never have to kiss anyway.”

  But she really did want to kiss someone, she needed some small love conquest—or, better yet, several. She coldly examined the horizon of possibility and discovered that the most attractive young man was in the third year, from the design department. His name was Zhora Beginsky, and although his appearance was nothing like Nikita Tregubsky’s, there was something in his manner that did remind her of him. No, no! Please, no! She didn’t need that again. She had no intention of ever falling in love again. Not now, not ever. Especially with another superhero. Subjects of average quality, or of no quality at all, among the future stagehands, lighting designers, and sound operators were a dime a dozen. Fairly soon thereafter, Nora had won her first minor victories. They had not cost her much, and she understood perfectly well that at this period in her life she was interested only in the technical aspects of love; she practiced her new skills on every possible occasion, with every more or less suitable partner. With each new victory, her womanly self-respect increased.

  Vitya became unwitting prey in this long line of victims, and as prey he was grateful. He fell into Nora’s clutches somewhere in the vicinity of an essay on And Quiet Flows the Don. For him it was completely unexpected that there could be something in the world that afforded so much pleasure unrelated to calculus. He was prepared to lose a portion of his valuable mathematical time for the sake of these new joys, even though he was in the tenth grade, and entrance exams to the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering of the university were on the horizon—a challenge even for him, winner of the Math Olympiad year after year. They began to meet again, reviving their old custom but dramatically altering the content.

  Vitya didn’t have an ounce of playfulness in his nature. Honesty, earnestness, and conscientiousness were present in everything he undertook. The question of whether she was pretty or not ceased to worry Nora when she was around him. He simply didn’t notice any of her experiments in search of beauty, style, and success. He noticed only that the way she cut her hair was different from the way other women did.

  The presence in Nora’s life of the solid and dependable Vitya in some sense freed her from concern with her appearance. Even the question of whether men liked her or not lost its poignancy. Both of them were busy like never before with their studies. They met at Nora’s whenever there was a gap in their schedules; the time they spent together was light and carefree, and things always went without a hitch. There was nothing to talk about, but, then, that was not why they were meeting.

  Toward the end of the school year, Nora began thinking about how funny it would be, after her scandalous expulsion from school, to show up at the graduation party in a white dress and a veil, as Vitya’s bride. It would be very, very funny! Let the old bags chew on that, let Nikita eat his heart out, while I look on! And she proposed to Vitya, suggesting they get married for a laugh. He did not consider the idea to be particularly funny, but marriage would not pose a threat to his plans in life. Moreover, his notions about society in general had their genesis in his mother’s perpetual dissatisfaction and suspicion of others, and through her he had formed a conviction that intimacy outside marriage was virtually criminal, or, at the least, very wrong.

  They went to the municipal marriage registry, not telling anyone, and submitted their application for an appointment to tie the knot.

  Their application was accepted, though not automatically. Nora, hanging her head solemnly and folding her hands over her belly, whispered to the woman official that she had reason to want to hurry things up. The woman smiled—it wasn’t the first time she had seen this in her line of work. She took the bait, and, full of tenderhearted patience, explained the process to them. Soon, through Nora’s efforts, all the bureaucratic obstacles facing the underage newlyweds were removed—with the active participation of one of the senior students from the arts college, who earned his living by preparing falsified certificates, IDs, transport passes, and other fairly simple documents—and at the beginning of June, both their internal passports were adorned with the necessary stamps attesting to their union.

  Nora later ditched the idea of the white dress, realizing that there would be a lot of girls dressed in bridelike white at the graduation festivities. Instead, she conceived of something that was far more theatrical and extravagant.

  Nora turned up at the school graduation with Vitya in tow and, as they entered, announced to the whole school that they had gotten married. She was dressed in a devil-may-care manner—that is, with extreme impropriety. In the midst of the girls in their white finery, she looked like a crow in the snow: she wore ragged black shorts and a black, completely transparent blouse, on top of which she wore a white satin whalebone corset that she had borrowed from the Stanislavsky Theater costume department. Her getup had the desired effect. The teachers, who keenly remembered the scandal from two years before, startled to life: Should we ask her to leave? Or let her kick up her heels at the event that she had deprived herself of the right to celebrate? Nora’s reputation as a libertine and hooligan was solidified.

  This dramatic performance—the wedding and Nora’s appearance at the graduation—made a very strong impression on Grisha. He never even suspected that the quiet Vitya had been so successful in the romance department. Grisha’s crush on Nora had long since evaporated, leaving only the scar on his cheek. What impressed him far more was the way Vitya had kept secret from him, his only friend, his relationship with Nora. Not to mention the marriage.

  Vitya, whom the teachers viewed as Nora’s next victim, didn’t even notice Nora’s outrageous attire. He was only waiting for one thing—for the official ceremony to end, so he and Nora could go home to her house, close the door, and engage in that fascinating activity that he sometimes found even more interesti
ng than solving mathematical equations.

  Nora never even glanced at Nikita Tregubsky. He was so dumbfounded that he couldn’t bring himself to approach her. He hovered at a respectable distance from her and blinked his ramlike eyes, adorned with thick eyelashes. The whole marriage charade was for Nikita’s benefit, and yet Nora derived no pleasure from it.

  Both Nora and Vitya quickly forgot about this one-off graduation performance. The parents of the young couple didn’t find out about the strange marriage—which was neither exactly fictitious nor conventional—until two years later. Varvara Vasilievna was beside herself when she discovered this prank, and fumed in indignation for a long time afterward. Then that passed, replaced by a real hatred of the daughter-in-law, whom she had never yet laid eyes on. When they finally met, by chance, she didn’t like Nora one bit, and, it seemed, never would. Amalia, when she found out about her daughter’s secret marriage, threw up her hands and said, “Well, Nora, it’s impossible to know what you’ve got up your sleeve.”

  Vitya called Nora now and then. They did see each other, but she forgot all about him between one visit and the next. A few times, she brought out her marriage license to show one of her girlfriends, more for a good laugh than anything else; and her marital status freed her from the anxiety of unmarried girls that reigned all around her.

  In her third year of marriage, Nora embarked on a feverish romance that lasted for a full two weeks. This was her first affair with someone other than a fellow student her own age. He was a grown-up man, a theater director, who had dropped by Tusya’s studio to wish her a (belated) happy birthday. On the first evening, the director tried feebly to fend her off, but Nora all but turned somersaults around him. Used to women’s advances, he gave in through sheer laziness. He had always been attracted to fleshy women with large breasts, hair, and legs. Young girls with delicate, slender legs, transparent ears on an almost bald head, and eager lips frightened him. Recently, many girls of that description had appeared in actors’ circles, and up until then he had managed to steer clear of them. But on this particular evening, he was tired and not as vigilant as usual. He’d had a bit to drink, felt soft and mellow from conversation, and surrendered without resistance. A Moscow romance in no way fit into his plans, but the girl wouldn’t let him out of her clutches; for two weeks, they were inseparable. Then he left, taking with him a heightened respect for himself and gratitude toward Nora, who, with her fierce love, had awakened in him hidden powers that he intended to use, of course, for something else altogether.

  Nora remained in Moscow, bereft, trying to stop up a hole that felt bigger than she was herself. It turned out that the affair with Nikita Tregubsky, which she thought had left her older and wiser, had not taught her anything. She had fallen in love again. By now, she already understood that you have to fight fire with fire—she mobilized all her admirers, and tumbled around with them in various positions and situations—but the memory of this infernal Tengiz would not fade. At that time, she still hoped that she could get along without him. Neither he nor she could have supposed that what they had begun would last a lifetime.

  That year, Nora hardly saw Vitya at all. Just by accident, near the metro station, they ran into each other, and their relationship flared up again for a while. It was during this time that Andrei Ivanovich finally managed to get divorced, Amalia resigned from the design bureau where she had worked as a draftsman for twenty years, and they went to live in the country, at Prioksko-Terrasny Nature Reserve. At first, they would travel back and forth to Moscow, but then they renovated a house, adding almost all the modern conveniences, took in pets, and came back to the city less and less often.

  Vitya again started coming over to see Nora now and then, and sometimes stayed the night. Varvara Vasilievna’s hatred for her invisible daughter-in-law grew more and more intense, but Nora was oblivious to it, a cause for more annoyance to Varvara Vasilievna: What kind of an attitude was this? She was just waiting for the chance to give Nora a piece of her mind, and to quarrel to her heart’s content; but the chance eluded her. It eluded her for a long, long time. In fact, Nora never did give her mother-in-law the opportunity to air her grievances on the subject once and for all for the rest of her life.

  7

  From the Willow Chest

  The Diary of Jacob Ossetsky

  (1911)

  JANUARY 1

  I woke up this morning fairly early, suddenly recalling with vivid clarity a memory from early childhood. Thirteen years ago. I’m not yet seven. Mama helps me with my lessons. Every day I write two pages to practice my penmanship. I sit in the dining room of our tiny little house (our “own home”) in Rtishchevo. It’s evening already. I have copied out a whole story, and there are still two pages left. I write on them: “Jacob Ossetsky, January 1, 1898.” Mama says that there are two hours to go, it’s still December. I answer, “But I’m already going to bed.”

  And in the morning a manservant came over, and another man, a peasant who was a stranger to me. And they wished us a Happy New Year, and showered us with rye and barley. The newspaper Life and Art was extra fat, with pictures in it. Then Genrikh, my older brother, came—what joy! I felt such love for him! He is still the most interesting and well-read person in the family. His mother died in childbirth, and he was taken in by his aunt; she also had an infant, so she nursed both of them at once. And he stayed in that family to live. When Father remarried, to Mama, they wanted to take him back, but his aunt wouldn’t agree to it. I missed him terribly when I was little. I still do when I don’t see him for a long time. It’s been a whole year and a half since he went to Germany to study in Göttingen. His adopted family is wealthy, but Father doesn’t have the means to send me to Germany. I’m sure that in time I will earn enough myself to pay for my studies and go to Germany, like Genrikh. To Göttingen or Marburg.

  It means so much to have an elder half-brother, even though I rarely see him. The little ones are another matter altogether. They are wonderful, but I love Eva most of all, and feel the most for her. And I mean the most to her. It will be this way our whole life—an eternal bond. She’s no longer a child, but a young lady. She has developed a womanly figure, real breasts, and she has started feeling embarrassed about it. She’s a charming creature. It’s strange to me to think that some man will love her, that the carnal world will claim its due, and there will be children. For some reason, it’s unpleasant for me to think about. In three weeks I’ll be twenty, and I still can’t figure it out—am I already grown up, or still an adolescent? When I study music or mathematics, or read a serious book, I always think I’m completely grown up; but as soon as I’m around my younger siblings, I seem to shed five or six years. Yesterday we were horsing around and playing, and I was galloping around like a madman, until Rayechka fell and bumped her nose. Is it possible that I’ll have kids, a lot of them? First, though, a wife. It’s hard for me to envision her. I think I’ll recognize her, though. But it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.

  JANUARY 10

  Yesterday Yura told me that Rachmaninoff was coming to Kiev. Two concerts! January 21 and 27. The main thing now is to get hold of tickets. They haven’t gone on sale yet, but I’ll run over to see Radetsky today and ask him to ask his aunt, who has been secretary of the Kiev Musical Society for many years, to get a ticket for me. I’ll go down on my knees and beg—only I don’t know whom to kneel before, Radetsky or his aunt!

  JANUARY 22

  Yesterday I didn’t have the strength to write. I don’t know about today, either. But I always feel that if I don’t write down everything that happens to me, from the first to the last, it will all disappear. I have never experienced such a storm of emotion, and the main thing is that I feel I never really lived before yesterday—up until now, it was all practice, just études of some sort. Scales, nothing but scales!

  First—Rachmaninoff. In the first half of the concert he conducted the orchestra. The Second Symphony. I had never heard it before. Modern genius. But I will hav
e to listen to it a lot; there is much in it that is new for me. He didn’t wear a tuxedo, as is customary, but a frock coat. His hair is cropped short, and he looks more like an aviator or a scientist, a chemist, than an artist. And he looks so powerful that from the first moment you lay eyes on him you know he’s a colossus, a giant! For the entire first half of the concert, I had no idea where I was—in paradise? I could have been anywhere, except on earth. Still, it was not a divine realm, but a human one—an exalted human realm. The melodic principle is very strong in it. It takes another direction altogether from Scriabin’s, and it is more in keeping with my nature. I even had the feeling that all the organs inside me, each individually—heart, lungs, liver—were rejoicing at these sounds. My ticket, moreover, was for a seat in the orchestra, not for a cheap upper-balcony seat. Father gave me ten rubles for my birthday. Eva probably told him that I was longing to be able to attend this concert. I would have been happy even to stand on the stairs, but I was in the orchestra. And this had important consequences. At the end of the first half of the concert, the audience gave a standing ovation, for ten minutes. I have never seen such a successful performance in my life. During the intermission, I went out to the lobby. Everyone was enthralled; the atmosphere was electric, and rapturous exclamations filled the air. Then I saw her. Standing by a column was a slender girl, pale, her delicate neck rising from a large white collar, like a white stem growing from it. I saw her from the side, and recognized her immediately. It was her! The very same girl! With the blue tie under the white collar. I hardly saw her face—I simply rushed up to her and said: “What luck! I knew I was sure to meet you again! And at a concert like this, a concert like this!” She looked at me calmly and said, surprised, “I beg your pardon, there must be some mistake. We aren’t acquainted.” “No, no, of course we’re not! But I saw you at a performance of Khovanshchina. You were with two students. Very unpleasant ones!” That just burst out of me, and I was horrified that it had slipped off my tongue so easily. And she looked at me with enormous surprise, then laughed such a wonderful, girlish laugh, like Eva.