Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  Yurik now came straight home from school, not dawdling, and not getting distracted by the ways and habits of cats, which he used to follow for hours on end in their meanderings through the courtyards, over the roofs of sheds, and into basements. Nora was now teaching a children’s drawing class—her only source of regular income during that year—so twice a week she was unable to pick Yurik up from school. Taisia wasn’t always able to catch the boy at the school door. Sometimes Nora rushed home after her classes and found no sign of either Yurik or his book satchel. Then she would wander around the neighborhood for hours, looking for him. But after acquiring the guitar, Yurik no longer roamed the streets and courtyards, and when Nora got home she could already hear him strumming from the stairwell.

  Tengiz met the screenwriter every day to discuss the grandiose project Mosfilm had offered him—the film version of The Knight in the Panther’s Skin. They were trying to collaborate on the first draft. Nora read The Knight and tried to find something in it that spoke to her, to untangle the endlessly complicated story of the relationships between the sovereign, his knights, and their beloveds; it all seemed to her to be extremely ornate and fussy, mannered, and convoluted. When she tried to convey this to Tengiz, he brushed it off, saying it was only the preliminary material. The script they were writing would be very different from the original source. It would be about something different altogether.

  “Just read it, and then we’ll talk about it. When the script is finished, we’ll do our own thing with it.”

  Tengiz never doubted for a minute that he could arrange Nora’s confirmation as art director of the future film. But she had never worked in film before, and she understood that they had their own close-knit professional community, which would hardly welcome an outsider, with no experience in film, into their midst. This didn’t worry Tengiz in the least. “We’ll make you assistant director in that case,” he said. In the meantime, Nora drew sketches that had been commissioned from her in Tashkent for The Snow Queen, feeling amused by the likely disparity in temperatures between the auditorium and the scenes unfolding onstage. But, for the time being, they were leading a happy and unusual life, visiting friends almost every evening, often taking a delighted Yurik along with them, or inviting friends over to their place. Natasha Vlasov came most often, with her eccentric husband, Lyonchik, and sweet Fedya, their son, who was connected to his parents by two umbilical cords. Yurik latched on to Fedya; at Yurik’s age, an older friend was a valuable possession.

  The only thing that remained unchanged for Nora was the need to oversee Yurik’s daily homework. By this time (he was already in the fourth grade), it had become very clear that Yurik couldn’t manage it on his own. Actually, even under Nora’s supervision, he did it every which way. The main problem was his penmanship—a misnomer, since it was more like chicken scratch. Every time Nora sat him down to do his homework, the most agonizing task was getting him to do his lessons in Russian. He wrote as if he were seeing a pen for the first time in his life and his goal was to invent some new, nonstandard way of depicting familiar letters. He had a whole pile of unfinished notebooks, abandoned efforts to write legibly. It was seldom that Yurik managed to complete the third page of an assignment well enough to present it to the teacher, though the first and second were more or less acceptable. The teacher, Galina Semyonovna, was horrified by his handwriting, which she conveyed to Nora with inexhaustible zeal, hinting from time to time that Yurik belonged in a remedial school. Now Nora had a lever of influence: “You can play the guitar only after you do your homework.” But the results weren’t very impressive; though he started doing his homework more quickly, it was no better. Maybe this really was the best he could do?

  Tengiz, observing Nora’s frustration, shrugged and said, “Leave him alone. Can’t you see? He’s a wonderful boy.”

  Whether it was because Tengiz had been able to nudge awake the boy’s slumbering memory of their trip together to Altai, or because Yurik had simply decided to assign the role of father to Tengiz, Yurik stuck to him like a burr. Tengiz responded to the boy’s love with all his heart. Yurik discovered that Tengiz had a great many virtues. To Yurik’s ear, he played the guitar beautifully; he taught him new chords, new tunes, and introduced music into their home that Yurik never knew existed. Tengiz ate with his hands, dexterously and with graceful ease, as only people who grew up in the Caucasus Mountains knew how to do. In his presence, Taisia stopped making remarks about how Yurik should be holding his knife and fork. Tengiz knew how to whistle. Not only that, but Yurik played chess better than Tengiz. At least, when he played against Tengiz, Yurik finally got to know the sweet taste of victory. Vitya very rarely lost, but Tengiz conceded defeat cheerfully and easily, which only added to his merits.

  On Sundays, when Taisia gave in to her newfound urge for churchgoing and wasn’t there to restrain Yurik in the hallway by Nora’s bedroom door, Yurik burst into the room and crawled into their bed. Yelping like a puppy and poking them with his knobby knees and elbows, he dived under the covers and nestled his way between the still-sleeping Nora and Tengiz. Yurik, so sensitive to smell, didn’t seem to notice the mixture of sweat and lingering vapors and traces of love, which the lovers had had no time to wash away. At first, Nora tried to discourage her son from these Sunday incursions, and even wanted to put a lock, or at least a latch, on the door. But Tengiz wasn’t in the least shy or embarrassed. He hugged the boy to his chest and tickled him, laying his mouth against his belly and blowing noisily, which sent Yurik into gales of laughter. The game was, of course, an infantile one, but Yurik had evidently not outgrown the need for it.

  The punctuated romance between Nora and Tengiz had lasted for more than twenty years, but they had never been completely alone. There was always a third party between them: the play they were staging together. This time, they had no common project, only indefinite plans. Now the third party was Yurik. It was genuine family life, a new arrangement of power, in which, fairly often, Tengiz and Yurik stood together against Nora in deciding the small issues that arose from one day to another. These were mostly trivial matters—potatoes or pasta for dinner, where they would go on Sunday, what to give Taisia for her birthday. But it was life as a threesome, family life, something wonderful and new in their shared experience; and they were happy in it.

  Not long before the New Year, Genrikh came to visit. He had already met Tengiz, and liked him; and Genrikh wanted Tengiz to like him, too. From the first moment of their acquaintance, Genrikh had plied him with jokes and stories, laughing and slapping Tengiz on the back, very hail-fellow-well-met. He usually stayed a long time, and didn’t want to leave. This time, though, he was uncharacteristically despondent. Still standing in the doorway, he told them he had contracted some strange illness called narcolepsy. From time to time, he would just fall asleep, all of a sudden, without warning—during a conversation, at a meeting, even while driving. Twice he had nearly crashed, and now he had come to the decision to part with his favorite toy, his trusty blue Lada, polished and gleaming inside and out, his Valya. He was in the habit of giving names to all his automobiles—the previous one had been called Marusya. Genrikh had even made a graph to keep track of all his inadvertent sleeping spells—from the first incident, a year and a half before, when he fell asleep during a meeting of the Academic Council, during a talk by one of his graduate students, right up to the most recent, very dangerous spell, on the road to the dacha, with his wife’s daughter and grandson in the back seat. It was lucky he had ended up in the ditch, and not in the lane of oncoming traffic. In short, this time he was not full of jokes and fun. He looked defeated and doleful, and Nora pitied him.

  He’s still a kid—a kid, just like Yurik, Nora thought. Then Genrikh said, “If Yurik weren’t so young I’d give the car to him, rather than try to sell it.” Yurik, who had been preoccupied with fishing out the longest, juiciest strips of Taisia’s home-fried potatoes from the serving dish, suddenly said, without missing a beat, “You could give it to
Nora and she’d drive me around,” and went back to eating his favorite meal.

  “Now, that’s a thought!” Genrikh said, brightening up. “I’ll teach you to drive myself. I’ll use my own method, and you’ll become a pro in two weeks. All those driving instructors take the wrong approach, you know, like they’re teaching you to read, letter by letter, syllable by syllable. But driving is like swimming, much closer to swimming than reading. You have to feel the movement! When you understand that it’s about the movement of the car, or yourself in it, you’re already a driver. What do you say, Nora? You do want to learn to drive, right?”

  Now Genrikh, who had been so gloomy when he arrived, was beaming.

  He’s basically so kind, Nora thought. It wasn’t often that she thought good things about her father, but now he was making her feel happy. A kind sort—he really is. He’s showing off a bit, naturally, for Tengiz and Yurik. He wants them to like him. Actually, he wants everyone to like him … But he is a good man.

  “Of course I want to. I always did. But listen, Dad, are you sure about this? You won’t miss the car later?”

  Tengiz poured Genrikh some wine. They drank to Nora’s new automotive future. She hadn’t thought about cars at all before this, but after Genrikh’s suggestion, she suddenly realized that she wanted very, very much to shut the car door and step on the gas, to tear off down the road. And to steer! To steer!

  The following Sunday, Genrikh stopped by to pick up Nora and fairly quickly taught her the essentials of driving. Much faster than she would have learned in driving school.

  Two months later, Nora got her driver’s license, after passing the exam on her first try. Genrikh signed the car over to her as a gift, and it became official: she was the driver of her own car. And it came in very handy indeed.

  By spring, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin had ground to a halt. Tengiz had quarreled with the screenwriter; launching the film at the beginning of the following year was out of the question, so either the director or the screenwriter had to go. The film studio decided to get a new director. They invited someone else, also a Georgian, who lived in Moscow; but, as they later found out, that arrangement didn’t work out, either. Then the funding for the film was withdrawn, and it was never made.

  While both of them were trying to cope with the fallout from this fiasco, all their money suddenly dried up: both Tengiz’s advance and Nora’s small savings. Without telling Tengiz, Nora first borrowed twenty rubles from Tusya, who had played the role of older friend her whole life. Nora didn’t want to ask Amalia—although the puppy business was thriving, and the “dog money” was constant—because Amalia would start to worry, to pity Nora and Yurik, and to bemoan Nora’s unfortunate life-choices. As for Taisia, who understood the complications of the situation, not only did she turn down her pay, but she spent her whole pension on food and considered going back to work at the polyclinic part-time.

  Tengiz grew gloomier with every passing day. He had worked to support his family since childhood, had done all kinds of odd jobs in his college years … But he had forgotten, during this half a year of living with Nora, that a man is responsible for the upkeep of the family. He stayed in Nora’s home like a guest, bringing home food and drink, extras they didn’t really need, without thinking about providing sustenance day in and day out. Tengiz was already considering capitulation—going back to Tbilisi. Not only out of humiliating penury, but also out of fear, fear of losing his self-respect. Nora could understand this.

  They were driving home after visiting friends on the outskirts of Moscow late one evening when a nicely dressed older man with a briefcase hailed them on a street in the Belyaevo-Bogorodskoe neighborhood. He asked whether they could give him a lift to Razgulyai. Nora was just about to tell him it was out of their way, when Tengiz intervened; he told her to take the passenger’s seat next to him, and he himself got behind the wheel. The passenger got into the back seat. They drove to Razgulyai in silence. When they arrived, Tengiz took the five-ruble note the passenger proffered to him. The passenger got out.

  “Let me earn money this way, Nora. I used to moonlight using my uncle’s car when I was a kid. I can still do that, can’t I? Until some work comes our way.”

  That night, while Zinaida’s bed was still sailing over to dry land, Tengiz asked Nora: “What do I mean to you, Nora? Who are you to me?”

  “Do you really want me to put it into words, an exact description?” She was delighting in the protracted moment of blissful emptiness.

  “Yes, tell me.”

  Nora pondered for a minute, then said, “However shameful it is to admit, I’m prepared to be whatever you want me to be—an artist and set designer, a lover, a girlfriend, service personnel—even a floozy or a doormat, I guess. The fact is that you’re the largest and best part of my life.”

  “But that’s terrible. I have no way to repay you. There’s not enough of me for that.”

  “For the time being, what you are is enough,” Nora murmured. “Shh, shh…”

  She was terrified that she would scare away the happiness that swept her up and held her afloat. And the better it was, the more terrified she felt.

  The next day, Tengiz brought home a record that changed Yurik’s life. Tengiz called him over and turned on the record player in the living room. It was a single by the Beatles: “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” In those days, Beatles songs were still in the air, and although the group was already a thing of the past, Yurik was hearing their music for the first time. He sat with his eyes fixed to one spot, his fingers tightly clenched, swaying his head and shoulders back and forth like a Jew during prayer. Then Tengiz noticed that his feet were tapping out the rhythm. He said something, but Yurik didn’t seem to hear him. They listened to the song till the end.

  “Tengiz, what was that?”

  “The Beatles. You’ve never heard of the Beatles?”

  Yurik shook his head and put the record on again. It was impossible to drag him away from the record player until evening. When Nora took the record away, Yurik asked Tengiz whether he would buy him more Beatles.

  “It’s easier to get tapes. There are tons of them. The band doesn’t exist anymore, you know—John Lennon was killed some years ago.”

  “What? Someone killed him? That’s impossible!” Yurik wailed.

  “But the band broke up before his death. Some years before.”

  Yurik began to cry.

  “Why are you so upset? Only this morning, you didn’t even know this John Lennon existed.”

  “Did they really kill him?” he sobbed. “I didn’t know they killed him! And the drummer? Did they kill him, too?”

  “Come, now. The time for all those tears has passed. He managed to accomplish in his life what few people even dream of doing,” Tengiz said to Yurik, trying to comfort him. “But the drummer—his name is Ringo Starr—is alive and well, and plays with other people.”

  “With other people? How could he! What a bastard!”

  “Never mind, he wasn’t the best drummer in the world; they invited other musicians to take his place on their studio recordings.”

  Yurik banged his fist on the table, so hard that the record player jumped slightly, and ran into the other room, howling. In a single day, he had experienced, both at the same time, unbearable love and unbearable loss. Nora, who only caught the second part of this rather protracted scene, couldn’t understand what had happened. Yurik had shut himself up in his room. Tengiz couldn’t quite grasp what had happened to the child, either, why he had dissolved in grief.

  But for Yurik, it was all as clear as day: Someone killed John Lennon. It was a terrible misfortune, because now there was no one to write that sublime music, music he needed from the first moment he heard it, as he needed air to breathe; music he would need, it went without saying, for the rest of his life. But no one, no one, understood. Not even Tengiz.

  22

  From the Willow Chest

  Letters from and to the Urals

  (OC
TOBER 1912–MAY 1913)

  ZLATOUST–KIEV 23 KUZNECHNAYA STREET, KIEV JACOB TO HIS PARENTS

  OCTOBER 31, 1912

  I’m now in the barracks. The journey here was supposed to take four days, but we were delayed in Penza for eighteen hours. In Kuznetsk, where I sent you the telegram, we were delayed for twenty-two hours because of drifting snow. So, instead of four days, it took us six to get here.

  They assigned me to the barracks, and I won’t budge from here, since you aren’t allowed to live in an apartment. But this doesn’t pose any problem. In the training detachment I’ve been assigned to, the people seem to be nice enough, and everything will be fine. I’ll most likely have to spend very little money, and I’m extremely happy about that.

  Zlatoust is not a large city, but it’s extremely spread out. It’s situated on tree-covered mountains. We live near the train station, which is about six versts from town. For the time being, I have plenty of books. I am eager to study as much as time will allow.

  Now I’m sitting in the well-heated room of the sergeant major, and I have no idea where I’ll be sleeping tonight. Perhaps here, in the sergeant major’s room. Don’t laugh—it’s a great honor for a soldier.

  What I’m afraid of is that when you read my letter you’ll moan and groan from worry. Poor thing, what a life! etc. It’s not at all what you might think. There’s nothing squalid about it, it’s not a hard life. In all the places I’ve been so far—the adjutant’s regiment, the senior doctor’s, the junior doctor’s—I’ve been treated very well. They invited me to sit down—which is the greatest honor they can pay a soldier.

  My letters will surely take a long time to reach you. After I drop a letter in the regiment mailbox, it will not leave Zlatoust until the next day. And from the station, it will take at least five days to get to you. So there may be times when you won’t get a letter for six or seven days.