Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  Never mind. I’ll be patient. “But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.” The end will come soon. And what a brilliant ending it will be! Just released from prison to Bogoslovsky Lane, fourth floor, just below the heavens—is heavenly bliss not in store? I will arrive in paradise soon. And you will be my wife!

  KIEV–MOSCOW JACOB TO MARUSYA

  NOVEMBER 21, 1913

  Well, Marusya, I have something to tell you that I think will interest you. Prick up your little ears (which I kiss in passing). Yesterday Papa was taking his usual postprandial walk through the living room. The twilight was approaching, Mama was sitting in the rocking chair, her sewing in hand. I enter, take Papa by the arm, and start walking in step with him.

  “I need to speak with you, Papa.”

  “Proceed.”

  I launched into a long conversation about you, about me, about our future. By the way, he said, “With a wife like that, life is not a daunting prospect. If you are in straitened circumstances, she will bear up under them and help you do the same.” You see? I was surprised and glad that he didn’t insist we live in Kiev. He said, “In May, you will pass the qualifying exams, and in August, you can finish the state examinations. Then you can move to Moscow permanently. I have some connections there who may be able to help you find a position. At the same time, I am willing to send you money for living expenses for the first year, which should help you out. You don’t need to live in luxury at first—a single room is probably sufficient.”

  I’m hurrying now, because Papa made an appointment for us at the tailor’s. We’re ordering two new suits (one for him and one for me) and two overcoats.

  DECEMBER 31, 1913. EVENING.

  The year is ending, my very best year—the happiest, most promising year. 1913. This will set the standard for the rest of my life. I have learned to understand myself. And I have understood you, and decided how to live my life. I can’t put it into words, but there seems to be a solid grounding under me now, something to take root in.

  I’m not a seeker of truth, not a fighter, a poet, a scientist. But I will try to be more sincere, to live justly, always to study and learn, and to respond if someone near me is crying out in pain. And I will also always be strong and love my wife and companion.

  It’s almost midnight. Are you in a noisy crowd, having fun? May all the gods conspire to send you heaps of joy and mountains of flowers today.

  It doesn’t matter that I’m alone. As soon as I shut the door, there are already two of us, until morning.

  I’m going out for a walk now. Have fun there, my Marusya!

  MOSCOW–KIEV MARUSYA TO JACOB

  JANUARY 5, 1914

  As I write you, I’m surrounded by deep silence. Everyone is asleep. I am very tired, and want to sleep, too. There are constant matinees and evening performances. The holiday season is the busiest time for an actor. But I don’t mind it. Work is not a burden for me. Except that today I injured my leg during a performance. It’s painful and swollen.

  I want to be strong and healthy, to be beautiful. I want fine clothes. And to be free of the studio and the theater for a few days. Free from all obligations. I think when you come I’ll feign illness for three days or so. Yesterday I was at a party with Beata. Today someone called me on the telephone and told me, “Yesterday you were not only interesting, you were beautiful. Your eyes were sparkling, your cheeks were rosy, etc.”

  I have a new hat that truly becomes me. New shoes. One new blouse, and new pantalettes made of tricot. Very warm and pretty, with elegant black ribbons that lace up the sides. But they won’t be new anymore by the time you arrive! It’s too bad.

  You must come. Leave on either the 25th or the 27th. No, I don’t want you to arrive on the 27th. Let it be the 28th! It’s silly, but I’m terribly superstitious. I can’t help it. Seven has always been an unlucky number for me. And if you come a bit later, it might turn out better: from the 20th to the 22nd, I’ll probably be ill, but by the 26th–28th, I’ll be right as rain.

  Jacob! My love of loves, best beloved … mine! I’m getting ready for your arrival. A bride should be dressed in all new things on her wedding day. Everything I wear will be brand-new. And there will be flowers.

  I have become so silly. It’ll be just us. No friends or parental advice (a mother always has something to say to her daughter), just me and you. Only the two of us at our own wedding. It’s frightening, and it’s good, and my head is spinning and spinning. I’m already thinking like you, exactly like you … that we should have many children, and the first one will be Genrikh, as you suggested, or Elga, as I would want her to be called, if it’s a girl. Does that make you happy? You’ll have a silly, completely silly, wife. That won’t stop you, will it?

  27

  Nora in America

  Visiting Vitya and Martha

  (1987)

  Nora and Tengiz were very successful in their collaborative work. Working separately brought good results, too, sometimes—but when they worked together, the air around them grew brighter, lighter, the actors surpassed themselves, the music rang out more clearly, everything played and shimmered, and luck was always with them. That is, if you left out of consideration the fact that their relationships with theater higher-ups did not always run smoothly, and that fine productions were shut down on occasion the day after the premier. Such was the case with Chekhov, and with Saltykov-Shchedrin. The audience and the critics were often ecstatic about their work, especially Western audiences. They were invited to perform in Yugoslavia and in Poland, and once Tengiz even took part in the Edinburgh Theatre Festival, albeit without Nora.

  This time, they had brought down the house in Moscow. Gogol ensured their success. They staged Viy. Nora wrote the adaptation herself, with great confidence—after Carmen, she had gained sufficient courage and daring to tackle it. She was both the scriptwriter and the set designer. The play ended up being more comical than frightening. They inserted a subplot into the action—an unspoken rivalry for the “philosopher” between Pannochka the Witch, and a more youthful Khveska in a walk-on part. Which of the rivals wins in the end remained deliberately vague. Tengiz was satisfied with the finale: On the last night, Khoma, protected by a circle of magic, reads out a prayer over the dangerous female corpse. They lift up the Viy’s eyelids, which droop all the way down to the ground, and a deafening chorus strikes up a wild din. With the first rays of the sun, the rooster crows, the icons plunge to the ground, and in the empty eye sockets of the iconostasis, devils and evil spirits of all kinds, along with peasants who are nearly indistinguishable from the devils, struggle to break out. All of them are trying to get to the windows to escape before the rooster’s third crow; but Pannochka the Witch and Khveska continue to pull each other by the hair in their final skirmish. In short, a gothic novel.

  The music for the play was written by a young composer, and it ended up being a heady mixture of the avant-garde with ethnographic flourishes. Tengiz invited a choreographer from Perm, an elderly connoisseur of folk traditions and a master in tap dancing, a dance form that was only semi-legal. The dances he choreographed for the play were a sensation.

  One of their friends from the theater community brought along a visiting American, the Broadway producer Felix Cohen, to see the play. He waxed ecstatic about what he had seen.

  After the performance, the wrinkled old man with dyed hair and sporting crocodile shoes invited Tengiz and Nora out to a restaurant. They spent a pleasant evening with him, dining on borscht, dumplings, and vodka, and at the end of their late supper, he invited them to bring their “very Russian” production to the American stage.

  Tengiz and Nora forgot about the proposal as soon as they left the restaurant, but that wasn’t the end of it. A month and a half later, they received an official invitation from Felix Cohen, offering to pay their travel and living expenses for the duration of the trip.

  The multistage process of forging an agreement with the directorial board of the All-Russian
Theater Organization and acquiring a visa lasted about eight months. The arrangements did eventually fall into place, however, and Nora and Tengiz got ready to take their production to New York’s Broadway Theater District. Russia was again just coming into fashion, and a “Russian” play, as Cohen understood it, was very much in keeping with such Russian souvenirs as nesting dolls, military caps, wooden spoons, and floral headscarves.

  Tengiz and Nora were dumbfounded by the ironies of this new situation. It was clear to both of them that they belonged Off-Broadway—beyond the bounds of the world’s center for commercial, although high-quality, theater. Nevertheless, such offers come your way once in a lifetime, and for the first few days, Nora brainstormed about how to adapt the play to the reigning local fantasies. To start with, they thought up an English title for the play, The Philosopher Thomas Brutus, which Tengiz found very amusing. Let them rack their brains about who the philosopher was, whence this Thomas, and what Brutus had to do with anything, he thought. The fact that Ukrainian and Russian folk songs were not quite the same thing never occurred to anyone.

  Nora and Tengiz flew to New York. They checked into a hotel on Forty-second Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. The first evening they arrived, Marina Chipkovskaya, “Chipa,” who had been living for a long time in Upper Manhattan, rushed down to see them. For two days, some lower-ranking administrators showed them around the theater. Cohen himself appeared on the third day, apologizing that he had just flown in from Europe. The negotiations lasted for exactly one hour. Nora and Tengiz handed over the Russian version of the play so it could be translated, gave him a tape of the musical score, and took their leave. They were somewhat nonplussed by the meeting—the Americans had spent tons of money on their trip—but the unprofessional and awkward way they were handling things was their own problem. Cohen gave the impression of being a man beset by problems, whether in business or in his personal life.

  Three days later, they moved from the hotel to Chipa’s and continued their explorations of the city. It was the most alive city in the world, but also somewhat unreal. Even though Chipa adored New York, she was so busy these days with work, and with her twins, that she couldn’t take them around, showing them her favorite places. She gave them some tips instead.

  Together, Nora and Tengiz walked around the city, in which everything was in excess—the multihued people in an endless grid of streets, the stupefying plethora of colors, smells of unfamiliar food and powerful deodorants and disinfectants, the captivating sounds of street music—all of it strange and incomprehensible to them. In the evenings, Chipa offered her commentary on things, but her observations did not shed any light on American life; it remained a variegated, bustling mystery.

  One day before their departure, after leaving Tengiz in the Metropolitan Museum, Nora went to Penn Station to catch a train to visit Vitya on Long Island. She wanted to take a look at his American life. Besides, Yurik had requested that she be sure to see his father while they were in New York. He had asked Vitya to buy him a few records that were vital to his survival.

  When Vitya met her on the platform, he was not alone. Standing next to him was an enormous woman with a smile on her rosy face that stretched from ear to ear. This plump stranger exuded sympathetic warmth, and it was clear at first glance that Vitya was in good hands. Nora’s dry little hand was enveloped by a fleshy, freckled paw. “Welcome to Long Island, Nora!” the woman said in English.

  Vitya hadn’t changed one bit, though he was now suntanned and dressed American-style, in shorts and a baggy sweater. They all piled into a big old car and drove off. Martha was behind the wheel. Vitya sat next to her, with a look that seemed to say this was the only way he had ever gone around from place to place. Nora sat in the back seat. Vitya was silent. Martha spoke rather quickly, and not always very clearly. Nora made out from her words that Martha wanted to show her some “light house.” They drove for quite a long time, passing through the city, with its massive, tall buildings, and through towns and suburbs with their smaller (lighter?) houses, and everything sparkled and gleamed. The somewhat showy, somewhat tawdry beauty of America spread out before them, dropping off to the right and the left as they drove through the miles. Finally, they arrived at the ocean, and Nora understood at last what lighthouse Martha meant.

  “Do you want to go up to the top?” Vitya said. Martha again said something Nora didn’t quite catch.

  “Martha’s not going up; her legs hurt,” Vitya interpreted.

  Next to the lighthouse was a museum, but they didn’t go inside. There were very few people around. The tourist season was over, though it was still warm at the end of October. At the entrance to the lighthouse was an exhibit of lamps and lenses of some sort. They passed these antique technologies without investigating them, and instead started the long climb up the narrow stairway. The ascent was long and exhausting, and even Nora, agile and light on her feet, got winded. But when they reached the observation deck at the top, they were rewarded with a view worth any amount of strain and effort.

  “This is Montauk. They say it’s the oldest lighthouse in New York State,” Vitya told her. “I’ve been here before with Martha.”

  The ocean was enormous, and the edges curved in such a way that even the naked eye could see that the earth was round. Whether it was a disc or a sphere was another question. Most likely a sphere, judging by how the shore of Rhode Island sank away in the distance. And there was no perspective—linear, reverse, or curvilinear—that could depict this vision, because space organized itself by a law completely unknown to the human eye or reason. The wind at this height moved in circles, too. Nora felt she was standing on the top of the world, and it surrounded her, as if she were a kernel hidden in its fleshy fruit.

  “Nora,” Vitya said, touching her shoulder, “I need a divorce. Could you divorce me, you know, without me, so I won’t have to go to Moscow?”

  “What? What do you mean?” Nora didn’t understand immediately.

  “Martha doesn’t know I’m married. She knows I have a son, but she doesn’t know I’m married.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “That you were my classmate, a friend.”

  Nora forgot about the ocean all of a sudden. She forgot about the round world, in which she had just now been a tiny seed buried in the middle.

  “You lied, Vitya? You? Lied? The first time in your life?”

  Vitya smiled slowly. Vitya laughed. Then he bent down to Nora.

  “Nora, you know what Grisha Lieber says? He says that women force men to lie. He reads the Torah now, you know, what we call the Bible, and he tries to reconcile modern science and the God of the Old Testament. And he says that lies were invented by woman.”

  “And there I was, thinking my whole life you were openhearted and simple,” Nora said, with what was almost a moan.

  “You never knew Martha before. That’s who is openhearted and simple.”

  “Are you thinking of getting married?”

  Vitya didn’t say anything. He rubbed the railing with his finger. He scratched his ear. He sighed.

  “I think Martha wants it. You know how Catholics are. She’ll feel more comfortable. Well, and, frankly speaking, it wouldn’t get in my way, either.”

  Wouldn’t get in your way! Oh, Vitya, Nora thought. They were still standing on the observation deck, and Nora had already stopped noticing all the beauty around her, as though it had never been. Vitya, always a paragon of equanimity, a man without expectations, as upright as a column, as honest as wood … Or was I mistaken about him? Has he changed so much in the last year and a half?

  “All right, all right. I’ll send you the divorce papers. Only, you must tell Martha that I’m your wife, not a classmate.”

  “But you are a classmate,” he insisted.

  They descended a few more steps, and entered the glass room from which the light was beamed. A gigantic lens, about the size of a hefty watermelon, sent out its light nonstop. By the light of day it didn�
��t seem so powerful, however. The lighthouse had ceased to interest Nora, and they went out of the glass room and began the long descent down the steep staircase.

  “Will you tell her yourself, or do you want me to?” Nora said.

  “It’s all the same,” Vitya mumbled.

  Martha was waiting for them at the bottom. They went down to the ocean shore. Huge stone slabs were piled up around the lighthouse. A powerful surf washed over the pebbles on the shore.

  “You know, Martha, I was his first wife,” Nora said, poking Vitya with her finger.

  “I guessed.” Martha smiled and blushed, making her already red face even redder. “I’ve seen a picture of Yurik. He looks a lot like you.”

  “Looks like you’ve just proposed on my behalf,” Vitya said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, you said ‘first wife.’ She can count to two. She’ll be the second.”

  “You said yourself that it wouldn’t get in your way.”

  “You’re very decisive. I only started thinking about it.”

  “What’s there to think about? She’s a very good match for you.”

  They got in the car and drove to Vitya’s house. It was a little three-room rental, shabby and comfortable. Two bedrooms and a large dining room. In the dining room there was a portrait of James Joyce and some old mustached policeman, who turned out to be Martha’s grandfather. So she had already put down roots here some time ago. For dinner, Martha had made Irish stew, slippery pieces of overdone meat with potatoes and onion; it stuck in Nora’s throat.

  Martha and Vitya resembled each other—both of them large and rosy, and both of them with an appetite for fatty meat, washed down with sweet beer. Moreover, Martha never took her eyes off Vitya.

  “Well, come on, come on. Propose!” Nora urged, trying to hurry along Vitya’s still half-baked decision. “Right now, while I’m here. I’ll send the divorce papers as soon as I can.”