Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

“I’m not sure,” Nora said, musing on what Tengiz had said. It was the best thing he had ever told her. Actually, he never talked about anything related to the horizontal position. This was a very heady confession. There was nothing to add to it.

  Nora reached out to grab a pack of cigarettes, lying conveniently within reach.

  “I’m really not sure, Tengiz,” she said. “By the time I was fifteen, I was already adept at keeping sexual matters separate from anything one might call love. So as not to confuse what were inherently different things. This freed me from a lot of emotional unpleasantness. Only once did I mix those things up, and I have yet to extricate myself from the result. No, I’ve never felt deadly boredom; ordinary regret, to be sure. My sexual revolution happened back when I was still in high school.”

  “Good, let’s get back to love. To this, I mean.” And again he started whistling “Habañera.”

  “Oh, that,” Nora said, laughing. “But Mérimée actually didn’t write it at all. That somewhat vulgar and banal story—the libretto of the opera, I mean—was written by Meilhac and Halévi, a couple of French hack writers.”

  “You astonish me, Nora! You’re the most literate person I know. You know everything about everything.”

  “That’s a strange statement, coming from the friend of a philosopher like Merab Mamardashvili. I didn’t even graduate, Tengiz. The only education I got was in trade school. Well, it was a solidly respectable trade, of course. But you know my background. I even dropped out of the Moscow Art Theatre studio. That’s where my miserable regret has been spent … I simply have a good memory. I remember everything I read. And I read a lot. And my grandmother, of course, was pushing good books under my nose from early childhood.”

  “You’re lucky you had an educated grandmother. Mine was a peasant. Illiterate. She only knew how to sign her name.”

  Nora held an unlit cigarette in her hand. Tengiz reached for his jeans, lying in a heap on the floor. He took a lighter out of the pocket to light Nora’s cigarette.

  “Well?”

  “Mérimée was a genius,” she said. “He was the first person in Europe to appreciate Pushkin. Everyone ignores the last chapter of Carmen, believing it to have been tacked on gratuitously. They all rack their brains trying to figure out why he introduces such a scholarly discussion willy-nilly at the end of the book—but it’s very important.”

  Here Tengiz interrupted her. “Hold on. Do you know why I suddenly came back to life? I realized how lucky it was that The Knight in the Panther’s Skin fell through. I hate it, that’s what I realized. And Tariel and Avtandil, his minions, too. They can all go to hell, with their adoration of beautiful women and their subservience to authority. If we have to speak of love, let it be about your Carmen. Go on, tell me more about Mérimée! And let me read it, to see why it’s so brilliant.”

  Now, this was happiness. True happiness. They took it apart bit by bit, this unwieldy, hybrid admixture—a traveler’s notes, jottings of a fictional scholar, the literary games of an extraordinary writer. Tengiz’s enthusiasm grew, and hers was fired by his, as always happened when they worked together. She read the book out loud, and from time to time he would raise his finger in the air and say, “That’s exactly what I need.” After two days of slow and painstaking reading, Tengiz told Nora, “Now get some paper and start writing.”

  “Are you crazy? I do costumes, and I have the temerity to do set design and décor, too. One time I worked on a play with Sergei Barkhin himself; I did the costumes, and he just watched what I was doing—I learned everything from him. But writing a play? Even Tusya would never take that on. I know that for a fact. I’ve been learning from her my whole life. Barkhin doesn’t write plays, either. And his hand is present in everything I have done.”

  “Oh, and I was thinking it was my hand that was present in everything you have done.”

  “Pinocchio knows best who his Papa Geppetto is. I can’t argue, though—you honed me still further.”

  “Hmm, you’re starting to make me suspicious…”

  Nora immediately put him straight: “Stop right there!”

  But he understood that he had transgressed an unspoken rule. When they were together, occupying the small islands of life they claimed only for themselves, neither past nor future existed. Tengiz had reprimanded Nora harshly for her trip to Tbilisi—he considered their chance meeting to have been deliberately planned. Their open relationship would have been impossible to maintain if they didn’t observe these sacred boundaries. Tengiz had established these boundaries many years before. It was difficult and painful for Nora to accept them, but with time it seemed that the boundaries were symmetrically enforced, and just as necessary to her.

  “Write, Nora, write!” Tengiz said. “We’ve already hammered everything out. We just need to write the play.”

  “I’m not a writer,” Nora said.

  “How do you know? Have you ever tried it? A writer is someone who takes up a pencil and writes.”

  Nora took a pencil and Yurik’s cast-off notebook. After two pages of her son’s childlike scrawl, a new text started to emerge, written in Nora’s certain hand—perpendicular, occasionally left-leaning letters. She wrote down snatches of conversation, dialogues, repartees, conjectures.

  They agreed on the lines of demarcation. They’d forget about Bizet, forget about Shchedrin. No musical allusions whatsoever. They’d sound the death knell for the entire surface layer of the narrative, anchored firmly in the history of opera.

  “Well, first off, I’d put Mérimée on the stage, making him a character in the play. The author is of course present—the author himself, or the Englishman, or the traveler, but in any case a scholar, an observer. It creates so many possibilities.”

  “It’s crucial to decide on the point of departure, as well as the ending.”

  “The line of tension runs between Mérimée and Carmen, you understand? Not between Carmen and José.”

  They interrupted each other, and got rid of the ballast, and put on the table everything that was indispensable.

  “Right, but it’s Carmen who holds sway over the other characters. She makes the Cigarette Girls and the men, and all the others, dance to her tune.”

  “Exactly! Mérimée, the author and god of this story, holds the thread of life and death in his hands.”

  “No, Carmen is the one who’s in control of everything!”

  “But Carmen vanquishes Mérimée’s logic…”

  “I don’t know. She’s the one José kills, out in the bushes, or by the side of the road.”

  “No, she kills him!”

  “I would want there to be objects. Objects that play a role in themselves.”

  “You don’t have to look too far to find them; they’re right there for the taking. Gold watches, playing cards—no, cards are rubbish, a garrote is better.”

  “Yes, what does it look like, this strangulation wire? We’ll have to look it up. It can’t be just some plain old wire. It must have handles of some sort, right? Or an entire mechanism?”

  “I so love the cabbage she doesn’t want to plant! And if there are flowers and little nosegays, we have to think of how to make those work, too.”

  “Okay, the cabbage might come in handy. But I somehow don’t want to nod in that direction. I wouldn’t put a flower in her teeth, but a big gold coin.”

  “No, it should be a cigar.”

  “Hey, she could have gold teeth! Nowadays all Gypsies are supposed to have gold teeth; but back then?”

  “No actress is going to agree to come out onstage with gold teeth.”

  “What about Fellini? Remember the scene in Fellini when the Gypsy laughs, reading some lady’s palm?”

  “Oh, fortune-telling! Yes, of course. A fortune-teller! Obscure, portentous words. An old woman tells Carmen’s fortune: Beware of the soldier. ‘To fear a soldier—in our trade?… What nonsense!’ ‘The soldier will kill you! Beware of the soldier.’ And Carmen knows beforehand that he will kill her.
She makes him kill her! To fulfill the designs of fate.”

  “Dangerous, very dangerous. We’re straying into the domain of the opera again. And we have to strip away that layer of associations. So there is no trace of that perfumed surface.”

  “We could introduce Death as a character, too. We should! An affinity between Carmen and Death. The other side of her freedom is—Death.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You will, though.”

  “Our Carmencita isn’t really interested in love at all. She doesn’t even want to hear about it. For her, love is just the manifestation of her will—her willfulness, as it were. And an instrument.”

  “And what about him? Who is he?”

  “José? He’s nobody. A nobleman who has a fiancée in the village. He became a robber, a brigand, out of stupidity. He’s actually a stupid fellow. Well, not stupid—just a simpleton. There could even be a scene with his fiancée. A conversation between them about ‘our beloved village.’ A tête-à-tête between idiots. He’s a victim, of course, but ultimately his behavior is not too shabby. He just ended up in someone else’s story. When all is said and done, his fate is to plant cabbages; and Carmen glanced his way quite by chance.”

  “He would be difficult to love. Except for his ideals—a pure, clean life, white curtains that open onto a white garden—and, in fact, he dreams in white. But he ends up in a life of black-and-red.”

  “We’ll have to think about the toreador. Although I’m more interested in the bull, to be honest. The story here would be that whoever she looks at follows her obediently—resisting at first, of course, but ultimately giving in. And in this respect, all the men are the same: José, Matteo, the toreador—even the bull. Not to mention the Englishman. Like they’ve drunk a love potion.”

  While Nora was writing the play, trying to cleave to Mérimée and avoid falling into the gravitational field of the opera, Tengiz was negotiating the staging of Carmen in a theater nestled in one of Moscow’s old clubs, the beating heart of the city. Tengiz didn’t work very often in Moscow, but people knew him and held him in high esteem. Moreover, their names were now often yoked together.

  Carmen was written over the course of two weeks. Tengiz was responsible for much of how it came to life and cohered internally, but the finale was Nora’s handiwork: the author—Mérimée, that is—brings a cigar into the cell of the hero, José, and José is led off to be garroted with a cigar between his teeth. A long, slow procession follows behind him … The executioner, wrapped in a cloak and wearing the mask of Death, carries out the execution by strangling. The mask falls away. The executioner is Carmen.

  On the cover of the notebook, Nora wrote in large, plain script: “Mérimée. Carmen, José, and Death,” and prepared to place the notebook in the desk drawer “until further notice.” At that moment, Tengiz announced that he had already reached an agreement with the theater. The play was included in the repertoire for the following year.

  25

  The Diamond Door

  (1986)

  Years passed. His mother aged. His son was growing up. Summer replaced winter. Vitya ate bread and sausage for breakfast. His mother traveled by metro from the Molodezhnaya station, where they had been resettled, to the Arbat, to buy her son his favorite kind of sausage. Once a month, Vitya visited Yurik, and they played chess together. Political events happened in the world that Vitya didn’t so much as notice. He didn’t see any connection between the computer modeling of cells and the placement of mid-range missiles in Europe, meetings between Gorbachev and Reagan in Reykjavik, or negotiations in Geneva. The prospect of nuclear war had been temporarily suspended, but Vitya failed to notice even this. He was unable to comprehend the degree to which the fate of the scientific developments carried out in the lab, with its brilliant laboratory head and researchers passionately committed to science, as well as his own personal fate, depended on whether the Russians and Americans would come to an agreement.

  Vitya didn’t even notice something that was happening right under his nose, in his own apartment. Varvara Vasilievna had been carried away by cheap esoteric teachings and preachings. She visited various underground meetings of like-minded enthusiasts, groups of healers and magicians. She was determined to improve her karma, which she imagined as something hefty and substantial, like a piece of meat or a new armoire. This was accompanied, of course, by spiritually charged water and a burning interest in UFOs, mixed in with a fear of devils and all manner of unclean spirits.

  Varvara Vasilievna began her activities by cleansing Vitya’s karma remotely, which she prudently refrained from informing him about. At around the same time—the rapprochement of the Soviet Union and the United States, and Vitya’s karmic cleansing—the laboratory received an invitation to a conference in the United States on the modeling of biological processes. The invitation was for the head of the laboratory, Vitya, and one other assistant, who was Jewish. The head of the laboratory was banned from leaving the country, because he had been required to take part in some secret military scientific councils or other; the Jew fell under suspicion by definition; and so the only more or less unsullied person was Vitya Chebotarev. By this time, Grisha was no longer associated with the laboratory. He had emigrated as early as 1982 to Israel, and Vitya’s interactions with him were limited to reading articles he published in the world’s leading scientific journals.

  The invitation was examined in detail, and it was decided that Vitya Chebotarev should be sent to give a lengthy paper summarizing the work the laboratory had carried out during the past years.

  The year 1986 was the year of political thaw. Flights from Moscow to New York were packed, and Vitya was lost in the crowd of Jewish émigrés leaving the Soviet Union for good. Vitya received permission to leave for his ten-day business trip to deliver his lecture. Before he left, Yurik gave him a list of LPs without which his life was incomplete. Varvara Vasilievna accompanied her son to the airport, filled with conflicting emotions that tore her apart from within: pride and fear. She was afraid that in America her son would be the victim of some horrific psychotropic attack perpetrated by the imperialists, but at the same time she felt a vain satisfaction that he was going on a business trip, not to some musty, fusty Hungary or Poland, but to the one and only U.S. of A.

  Before they left home, she had put a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper into his suitcase. In the airport, she realized that the suitcase, along with the nourishment it contained, would be relinquished at the baggage check, and she began demanding that the suitcase be returned. Vitya couldn’t understand what she was so agitated about. Varvara sensed her profound impotence in the face of a world in which the suitcase was flying over the ocean with a sandwich inside it, and not a single one of the important problems in life was amenable to resolution, on either the material or the spiritual plane. She began to cry. Vitya comforted her vaguely.

  “You are so heartless,” she told him, wiping away bitter tears, as they parted.

  She still wasn’t sure whether her son was a genius or an ordinary guy down on his luck. True, a friend of hers who was a clairvoyant informed her that Vitya was now standing before three doors—one made of silver, one made of gold, and one made of diamonds—and that, whichever one he opened, it would all turn out well.

  The plane took off. Varvara Vasilievna watched the airfield and murmured a prayer to herself: May it be the diamond door …

  At Kennedy, Vitya was met by Grisha, who was wearing a brightly colored skullcap; Vitya didn’t recognize this as a yarmulke. They hadn’t seen each other in four years. Grisha had flown in from Israel two days earlier. By this time, he had begun working at the University of Haifa, doing research not only on cell membranes but also on the Bible. The meeting between the friends was the most cordial that Vitya was capable of.

  They sat in a cramped hotel room—Vitya, who was dead on his feet after the nearly ten-hour flight, and the exuberant, freshly groomed Grisha, hungry for conversation. The question that had been exe
rcising him for many years concerned what took precedence in the world—the idea of the living cell, or the computer?

  “Computers emerged first. Every living cell is a computer, a quantum computer,” he said.

  Vitya winced. Either his head had not completely shifted to American time, or Grisha was talking nonsense. “No, what you say is absurd. The molecular computer of the cell works with DNA. DNA programs its activity. What does a quantum computer have to do with it?”

  “It results from considerations of energy; the capacity of a molecular computer is insufficient. Not only that, but the quantum computer must be acoustic. Enormous texts. Divine Writ is enormous! And biological computers must be very, very powerful.”

  Vitya just shrugged and interrupted Grisha’s inspired religio-scientific pronouncements: “You’ve lost me. What divine texts? You want to read the entire process of evolution as a divine text? It’s unfalsifiable.”

  Grisha was upset. He felt a bitter taste in his mouth, and started to perspire, but was unable to draft Vitya into the cause of his faith. Finally, their differences of opinion went so far that Vitya announced that he personally had in all these years of work never needed the concept of the Creator and Divine Writ. One could easily get by without them.

  With the fervor characteristic of him, Grisha objected: “It’s self-evident that the original text is God-given, and that what we are in fact doing is decoding it in our research.”

  “No, no, no. I am carrying out a concrete task—I write computer programs, and these are fairly simple texts, and the biochemists examine the degree to which they correspond to actual synthesis in the cell. It is completely unrelated to the plan or design of your Creator. Okay, I’m going to sleep now,” Vitya said, and, leaning his head back on the armchair, was out for the count.

  The next two days were a whirl of activity. Vitya spoke English fairly fluently, but it was hard for him to understand his interlocutors, and Grisha was always by his side to assist. Even more now than during their school years, they resembled Cervantes’s heroes. Grisha was rosy and rotund, and Vitya was lanky and rather absurd-looking in his formal suit, its sleeves and trouser legs slightly too short: when she was shopping for the suit before his trip, Varvara Vasilievna couldn’t find the right size. The primitive shaving-bowl haircut had been replaced by a cap of shapeless curls that were also Varvara Vasilievna’s crude handiwork.