Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  How glad I am that I have a boy, Nora thought with satisfaction. At the same time, however, she realized that this perpetuation of familial female hostility had to be stopped. It seems that I know a thing or two about what Freud was saying … Actually, I need to find out more about the Oedipus complex. She recalled that among her grandmother’s books rescued from Povarskaya Street were some well-worn copies of Freud’s work, with notations in the margins. She would have to read them. What had he written about Oedipus? Who wanted to kill whom, and for what? The boy struggles with his father, and the girl—with the mother? Was that it? No, no, it was a horrible idea.

  The practical result of these confused, inconclusive meditations was that Nora decided to invite Amalia and Andrei Ivanovich to share in her own narrow, cramped family life, in order to give Yurik the chance to develop emotionally. He was, beyond any doubt, emotionally immature. She would let him visit Prioksky. There were lots of animals and plants there, growing things, and other delights completely unknown to a city boy. Moreover, she imagined how wonderful Andrei Ivanovich would look in his sweatshirt, with an ax or a pitchfork in his hands, and how appealing that would be to a small boy. She already felt a bit jealous, scared that they might commandeer the boy and smother him to death with love.

  In the summer after Yurik had just turned five, he was “set free” for the first time. Andrei Ivanovich came to pick them up. Amalia had stayed behind in the country, and was waiting for them with freshly baked pies and goat’s milk; there were still no berries at the beginning of June. Nora spent a day and a night there, then left, feeling a bit sad that Yurik was happy, and that he would now long to go see his grandparents. She admitted to herself that her mother’s happiness annoyed her—that she displayed a kind of inappropriate childishness, as though she were twelve years old and not sixty-four, that there were too many pies, and too many puppies, of some rare Chinese breed, by means of which the happy couple were trying to earn extra income. And there was too much kissing—they lavished kisses on each other when they were only parting for an hour and a half, while Andrei Ivanovich drove Nora to the train station, where she would catch the commuter train.

  For half the journey back to Moscow, Nora contemplated her own intolerant temperament, her inability to forgive her mother her silly, girlish happiness. Then she opened a volume of Sukhovo-Kobylin.

  The play Tarelkin’s Death had intrigued her for a long time. The device of a sham death offered a wealth of possibility. Last year, she had been the stage designer for Sleeping Beauty in a provincial children’s theater. She had turned the plot over and over in her mind, trying it out this way and that, finally coming up with what seemed to her to be a nice twist—at the end of the play, the Prince wakes up, and Sleeping Beauty turns out to be a dream within a dream. But Tarelkin’s Death—she could really do something unprecedented with it. If only she could find a director to work with. She would direct it herself, if they gave her half a chance. Tengiz, Tengiz … An empty summer, a completely empty summer, stretched out before her. It was the first time she hadn’t rented a dacha, the first summer she would spend without Yurik. She arrived home late in the evening. When she opened the door, she heard the last trills of the telephone, before it went silent. She undressed and took a bath. Just as she was getting out of the bath, the phone started ringing again. This time, she was able to answer it.

  “Where on earth have you been, my dear? I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day.” A Georgian accent. Tengiz.

  15

  Unaccommodated Man

  (1980–1981)

  “Nora, today we’re starting a new life,” Tengiz said.

  “I know. I took Yurik to Mama’s, and I was thinking it the whole time. Today’s the day.”

  In fact, it was already night, and today was already yesterday. Tengiz was the same as always, and even better. Damn him. “Like antimony-washed iron,” to quote Pasternak. They hadn’t seen each other in two years. Not a single phone call. Nora knew from other sources that he had even been in Moscow, but hadn’t called her. She had a lump in her throat, which made it impossible for her to talk, so she swallowed hard and said nothing.

  “You and I are going to Poland to stage Lear.”

  Nora didn’t speak.

  Tengiz went on. “King Lear. It’s the apex. The highest you can reach. For a year and a half, I read and reread it. I taught myself English so I could read it. I know it by heart now—almost. You and I are going to stage it. Before, I never understood what it meant to be satisfied with staging just one thing. How is that possible? A single author, a single play, a single thought. But now I understand—you need to do just one single thing, one thing alone. It’s very powerful when it’s the only thing in the world that exists. I understood—you have to stage it so that the world ends when your play ends. That’s what theater is. One thought, but played out in such a way that there is nothing else left. Do you understand me?”

  Nora still couldn’t swallow the lump in her throat; moreover, there was nothing for her to say. The fire in her veins that had blazed up of its own accord had begun to go out. Deep sadness and perplexity: words, empty words. Were they on different wavelengths now? Were they so out of sync? She should probably have gone to bed with him first, and then let words follow. All the same, he touched her deeply, in some wild inner place. He was so … There was more talent in him than intellect. Yes, as though he were made of iron … scorching … hot. Was it all gone now?

  “No, listen to me. You’re not really hearing me, are you? Lear has been staged a hundred times, a thousand times! But we’re going to stage it for the last time! We’ll do it so that there isn’t any point in staging it again. It will be about freedom, about happiness, about taking leave of the world, the world of the elements, passions, the flesh, about the transfiguration of the flesh—that’s what it will be. And I know how. Gordon Craig! You’ll see! Well, Nora? What? You still don’t hear what I’m saying?”

  Nora heard every word. Everything Tengiz was telling her now she already knew. Certainly about Gordon Craig. Grandmother Marusya had managed to tell her quite a bit. And everything with a light touch, in a few powerful strokes. Marusya had adored Ella Rabenek, Isadora Duncan’s pupil, and Rabenek had told Marusya many things about her—about the terrible car accident in which Isadora’s two children perished. The older, a girl, was Gordon Craig’s daughter, and it was this particular detail, passed down by word of mouth, that had long ago made Gordon Craig almost a distant relative of the larger theater family, in which there was undoubtedly a system of transference of sacred knowledge. And Nora, recalling all Marusya’s rapturous stories about her youth, when she had first studied rhythm and movement, and then taught and practiced some new kind of pedagogy (which was later officially disavowed by the authorities, like genetics and cybernetics), felt that she was an active participant in world culture. And Tengiz was a provincial—that’s what he was. Reinventing the wheel. But I’m urbane, cosmopolitan. I already know about the wheel.

  She swallowed the lump in her throat and said, “You know, it’s your business how you regard Gordon Craig’s theories, and what you do with them. But, as for Shakespeare, I won’t take him on. I personally don’t have the guts.”

  Tengiz blinked at her like an A student who has just gotten a D.

  “Nora! What’s happened to you? You would never have talked like that before. You can manage Chekhov? Goldoni? Swift? And what about Aeschylus? The important things that happen before death—that’s what’s at stake here. You can’t refuse, Nora. Lear! King Lear! It’s about the transfiguration of the flesh; that’s the question it poses. About metamorphosis! Just listen to me. Look here. What are you looking at? Yes, that’s a bicycle for Yurik; it’s first-rate,” he said, gesturing toward the big box by the door.

  He had indeed come in carrying a big box, which he left in the entrance hall. Nora hadn’t thought to ask him about it. She smiled—how funny! The bicycle had come to life, materialized out of the metaphor ab
out reinventing the wheel, as soon as it had occurred to her.

  “Look here.” Tengiz put his hands on his chest, showing her where to look—at him. “I can’t pull it off without you. Just listen. ‘Thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings!’”

  Nora even winced, but she suppressed a smile. She didn’t know English very well, but what Tengiz had managed to pronounce was some sort of linguistic parody which had nothing to do with English. Nora caught three words: “art,” “man,” and “poor.”

  “What is it in Russian?”

  “In Russian, it goes like this…”

  At that point, Nora covered her eyes with her hands. She knew these lines. She knew them perfectly well. But now the words “Off, off, you lendings,” seemed very significant to her. It always happened like this: you live, see, read something a hundred times, and suddenly, as though the scales have fallen from your eyes, you find right under your nose what you have been searching for all these years.

  “I can’t do it, Tengiz. I’m not ready. Find another set designer.”

  Tengiz struggled out of the deep armchair and rose to his full height, looking even taller than he really was.

  “Nora, half our lives we spend accumulating things, and the other half of our lives we spend casting them away. Every year is like a brick. By the time you’re fifty, the burden is so heavy you have no strength to carry it. I get it! It’s a crisis! You have to cast things off. I looked through everything, and threw away half my life, half the people I knew and loved—relatives, teachers, everyone who was superfluous, not absolutely essential. But you—you’re a part of me. Perhaps the best part of me.”

  The conversational prelude of the evening ended here, abruptly; only when it was near morning did they again pick up the conversation they had abandoned.

  “Give me two weeks to think about it.”

  Tengiz, as was his wont, disappeared. Nora didn’t waste a minute in her deliberations. She visited Tusya and laid out all her doubts. Tusya was her only older friend. Her virtues were many and varied, including the fact that she had been acquainted with Marusya even before Nora was born. Tusya was well aware of the story of Nora’s relations with Tengiz, and also of the history of stagings of Lear, in Russia and elsewhere.

  With a toss of her head, Tusya whisked her gray bangs aside like a horse. “You have to separate one thing from the other, for heaven’s sake. What are we talking about here? Your relationship with Tengiz or with Lear?”

  Nora pondered a bit. She wished she knew. Tusya went out to the kitchen and put the coffeepot on the burner. Neither of them spoke. Then Tusya took out two stained cups and poured the coffee. They drank, still not talking.

  “First, I don’t see any basis for such a surge of emotions. You have several very successful pieces of work under your belt. Several adequate ones. You aren’t a novice. Lear has been poorly staged many times. It’s easy not to stage it well. And it can be done adequately. But at GOSET, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, Mikhoels staged it with true genius. My father was a friend of Alexander Tischler’s—the set designer for Lear, among other things. And he knew Mikhoels, too. I thought I told you, I saw one of his last performances, in Moscow. I never told you? I thought I always regaled my students with this story. I was already working as a set designer, just starting out. I was twenty years old. Younger than you are. Mikhoels invited my father to the opening night at GOSET, on Malaya Bronnaya. My father was a lapsed Jew. He did everything in his power to distance himself from his Jewishness. He was a Soviet writer—and not completely without merit, or the basest of them.

  “The play was performed in Yiddish. He had grown up speaking Yiddish, though he wanted to forget it … I was the one who didn’t understand a word. But I couldn’t tear my eyes from the stage. It turned out that the script wasn’t important. That’s when I realized it. Well, I only realized it once and for all much later, but at that moment I saw that the power of theater doesn’t lie in the script; it’s in the actor who is charged by the power of the script. Gesture, movement, mimicry … Marusya knew this very well. Did you know that Gordon Craig was in Moscow for one of the performances of Lear and said that in England there was no real Shakespeare in the theater, because there was no actor of Mikhoels’s stature? Imagine that! Gordon Craig, who knew every word of that play by heart, made that remark after watching it performed in Yiddish! It was an actors’ theater. Tischler worked there, a marvelous set designer; Chagall worked at GOSET, too. He didn’t understand the nature of theater—instead, he created his own theater, on canvas.

  “It was Les Kurbas who was responsible for that play. He was a stellar director. A Ukrainian, but world-class … His theater had been forced to disband by that time. I think it was in 1933. And he rehearsed with Mikhoels for three months. During that production, Mikhoels had quarreled with Radlov, the official director. Mikhoels received his inspiration directly from Les Kurbas. It was Kurbas’s idea that Lear would become younger and younger onstage as the play progressed. And Mikhoels carried it off. But Kurbas wasn’t the director of the production, although I’m sure many of the ideas and decisions originated with him.

  “The actors were, of course, brilliant: Mikhoels himself, Zuskin, the wonderful Sara Rotbaum. But nowadays theater doesn’t rest on its actors. To a far lesser degree, anyway … Now the director and the production artist have to conceive the play so that the script doesn’t just take over. Who doesn’t know those words? They’re familiar to every school-age child. All the responsibility rests with them these days, with the director and the artist. The actor today is more a performer than a creator. There are a few geniuses—but you can count them on the fingers of one hand. The directorial decisions are paramount in any production of a classic these days. You managed with Chekhov; you passed the exam ascertaining your professional skills. Lear requires the same abilities. If you and Tengiz can figure out what your play is about—beyond the commonplaces of the script, of course—it makes sense to undertake it. But Kurbas’s idea about living an inverse trajectory from old age to youth—that could be a point of departure. He has been forgotten, completely forgotten. He was imprisoned in 1933, and they killed him not long after. It was the time of the famine in Ukraine, you see. He staged King Lear during the famine, a genocide. Tischler was good, but he was no match for Kurbas. Tischler had his own theater. To make up for not having enough interesting projects for the stage, he created theater in painting, in sculpture.

  “Something very funny happened to me with Tischler later on. I had known him since childhood; he was a friend of my father’s. Alexander Tischler was a wonderful, very unaffected, happy man. Everyone around him had been taken down, but by some miracle he remained alive. Very handsome, always wearing a cravat (which no one wore in those days). Once, at the beginning of the sixties, I visited him in his studio. I had some question to ask him; I can’t remember what it was. During those years, he liked to carve wood into sculptures—remarkable sculptures, it must be said. His entire small apartment was filled with them—figures of different dimensions, mainly of women. I guess that time I must have been visiting him at home, not far from his studio. The conversation was a long one, about everything—life, work, everything. Things weren’t going well for me at the time. My father had died; I had divorced my husband; my work was a failure, or so it seemed to me. I went to visit him, and he was so welcoming, so hospitable. His father was a joiner, a backwoods craftsman, and with these sculptures in wood he seemed to have returned home … The wood shavings, all the same smells … Well, he gave me one of the female figurines as a gift: a small figurine, about ten inches tall. I held it in my hands, warming my hands on it—it seemed to be a source of warmth.

  “I said goodbye, and went out to the entrance hall, clutching the figurine to my chest. And his wife came to see me out—a pretty lady, with large, plump hands. ‘Goodbye, all the best,’ she wished me, and snatched the present out of my h
ands, pushing me out the door with a supercilious smile on her face. I wasn’t able to say a word. Some story, hmm? But you—don’t suffer needlessly. Keep working, Nora. Romances are very useful for creative people. God forbid that they’re happy. I seem to remember that your grandmother Marusya worked with Kurbas in Kiev in 1918 … She didn’t tell you?”

  “She didn’t tell me everything. She only confided in me on occasion. I don’t remember hearing anything about Kurbas. I know that during the war she worked as a literary director in some Moscow theater. She spoke about some famous writer about whom she wrote some essay. I don’t remember the name.”

  “I think I know who he was. She may not have mentioned the name to you at all. He was executed in 1937.” Tusya waved, brushing away the bad memories. “I’ll tell you the rest of the story one of these days. Not now. Marusya was an extraordinarily vibrant and extraordinarily contradictory person.”

  Tusya was a treasure trove—she knew everything, she remembered everyone. All you had to do was ask. It was her calm equanimity, her deep commitment to her profession and to her students’ lives, in which she invested her unrealized maternal affection and instincts, that distinguished her from the common run of theater artists, who were already a breed apart. They were, it could be said, more humane, with more refined sensibilities, than their colleagues—easel painters, draftsmen, graphic artists.

  Were they freer? Nora wondered. Unlikely. The censor laid a heavy hand on all of them indiscriminately. The Khrushchev persecutions, particularly intolerable because of the boorish ignorance of the leader himself, had ended. The underground was stirring, coming to life, and Polish magazines were bringing news from the distant West. In the theater world people began searching for what had been lost long ago. But Tusya was someone who had never lost anything—she herself guaranteed the continuity and linkages of time. This was why her art-school students, past and present, continued to gravitate toward her and seek her out. And this Les Kurbas … Nora would have to find out more about him.