Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  After dinner, Martha took Nora to the station. Nora smiled all the way to New York, as though something very good had happened. She had been in this ridiculous platonic marriage for twenty-six years, and it was unclear why she hadn’t divorced him earlier. It hadn’t meant anything at all. They were already at Penn Station when she realized that she had forgotten the records Martha had bought, which Yurik had ordered from his father.

  The next day, sitting in the plane waiting for takeoff, Nora said to Tengiz, “I think I have just given my husband away in marriage.”

  Tengiz lowered his glasses down to the end of his nose and stared at her over the rims. “Is that a threat?”

  “Take it easy, Tengiz. You’re not in any danger.”

  As for Viy, it never made it to Broadway.

  28

  The Left Hand

  (1988–1989)

  Nora, who had chosen the profession of theater set designer and artist at the age of fifteen, was aware that she could have done other things—directing, perhaps scriptwriting, she could even have acted or become a teacher—but never could she have become a doctor or an engineer or a mathematician. Tengiz? Tengiz could have been anything—a winemaker, a psychologist, even a hawker at the market. Anything at all, except for a profession that demanded strict discipline—a soldier, for example, or an electric-locomotive driver. Vitya could never have been anything but a mathematician. With Yurik, however, from early childhood, it was unclear. He could do anything at all, as long as he was inspired to do it, but as soon as the inspiration left him, he abandoned the pursuit. It was impossible to make him do anything he didn’t want to. Something had to occupy him fully, heart and soul. The interest had to consume him completely. As mathematics consumed Vitya.

  By the time Yurik was twelve years old, such an all-consuming interest had taken root in him. It was music. Not music in general, but a particular kind—the music of the Beatles. He learned how to play song after song by ear, and Nora was exhausted by his maniacal commitment. She made several attempts to pull Yurik out of his Beatlemania—she tried to enroll him in a regular music school, where scales, Goedicke’s études, ear training, and choir practice reigned, but nothing came of it. Each time he started taking lessons, he dropped them soon after for a variety of reasons: either the teacher was mean, or he didn’t like the instrument anymore, or he objected so strongly to the other pupils that he refused to attend the class.

  Several years passed, but he didn’t advance beyond the Beatles. On the other hand, he knew their music by heart, each of them separately and all of them together. Yet, the further music was from that of his idols, the less interesting it was to Yurik. Every one of their records, every recording that came his way, was a major event in his life. They became his only teachers, and over the course of several years, he wouldn’t accept any other kind of music but this universal language of youth, to which Nora was by then nearly allergic. She tried introducing him to some other kind of music: she took him to the conservatory, to the opera, she acquainted him with Arsenal. Alexei Kozlov, Arsenal’s band leader, himself a devoted Beatles fan, made some impression on Yurik. All the musical vibrations that reached his ears fell into two categories: “them” or “not them.” Tengiz, who dropped in from time to time, was a good interlocutor, because he also loved the Liverpool four, and always brought Yurik some “new old” record.

  “You can’t make a profession of Beatlemania!” Nora objected. But Tengiz just winked at Yurik, shrugging his shoulders. Then he shook his head and replied: “Why not? You can drive a taxi, can’t you? Become a plumber? Or a policeman? But not a Beatlemaniac? Why, Nora? Why can’t the boy be a Beatlemaniac?” He continued: “Nora, it’s very amusing, but, for Lennon, Elvis Presley was a god. Rock and roll was his universe. It was as though nothing existed before Elvis. Culture is by its very nature a mass of citations; we have many of them at our disposal, but for him the world was born out of a single quotation.” Then he laughed and said, “We know too much.”

  Yurik had no interest in school whatsoever. His grades were low, and he got by from grade to grade only with Nora’s prodding and assistance. But this didn’t bother him in the least. He didn’t find it especially irksome to have to sit in lessons all day, since he could drift off into his musical dreamworld during geometry or chemistry classes. Though he had no close friends and was completely indifferent to his classmates personally, or to what they thought of him, he was almost popular in school—with both boys and girls alike. Even the teachers, who considered him to be a lazy underachiever, were kindly disposed toward him. He was good-natured, open and unassuming, and physically appealing, with his bright face, curly hair, and average height. Even his slightly protruding incisors were attractive, giving him the expression of a cute, furry little animal.

  From the moment the guitar came into his life, almost all his innocently wise questions and riddles, which had once thrilled Nora, ceased. When he was eight years old, he had told Nora, his spoon frozen in midair between plate and mouth, “Mama, life is like a chink between the skin and the spirit.” Another time, brushing his teeth, his mouth still full of both toothbrush and toothpaste, he had said, “Nora! I know! Life is the space between hell and heaven.” Nora would swell with pride, but she didn’t let it show, saying instead, “Great. Now if only you could learn to wipe your own bottom…” To which he answered, “Mama, you can see yourself where my bottom is. It’s hard to reach back there.” Eventually, however, he did learn to cope with the task.

  Only a few years had passed, but now music seemed to have unburdened him of existential angst about eternity, time, freedom, God, and other abstract conundrums. He “played them out” on the guitar, with the help of the Beatles. He played with abandon, and rather awkwardly, with a vaguely beatific smile on his face, the corners of his mouth drawn slightly upward. Nora saw all of this and despaired: yet another artistically inclined person in the family, without an iota of talent. And the boy had reached the age when he should be deciding on a direction in life.

  Nora recalled Vitya at that age—his complete absorption in mathematics, and a corresponding absence of interest in anything else. She was glad that Yurik got along with his classmates. His Beatle-inspired strumming made him a center of gravity for all the adolescent cliques and groups, and his less-than-stellar academic record didn’t jeopardize his reputation at all. In the general ambience at school, A students were not exactly sought after: an athlete, a musician, or a hooligan was far more attractive. This reverse stigmatization of social outcasts meant that being one of the good students carried less prestige than passing as a hooligan.

  The times when Yurik read voraciously, and went to the theater and to museums with Nora, had ended on the day when Tengiz brought the guitar over. The guitar steadily increased his popularity among the school marginals, and from that moment on he abandoned the company of “well-brought-up children” for many years to come. Nora understood this perfectly. She couldn’t object, either: during her school years, she, too, had been drawn away from the “good girls.”

  In the beginning of December, at the birthday party of Sergei the Cyclops, one of Yurik’s “hooligan” classmates, he received an unexpected party favor—an army firecracker in a cardboard sheath. Sergei, who had flunked a year, had been very solicitous toward Yurik, even protective, warning him that although the firecracker was only for training purposes, it could explode like the best of them.

  The firecracker lay in the desk drawer for several days, and Yurik’s hands were itching to set it off. On the first evening he was alone at home, he took the firecracker out of the drawer and to the kitchen. Then he lit the end of the tantalizing, twisted fuse, about six inches long, which dangled from the cardboard tube. It caught fire eagerly, then burned with a cheerful confidence, showing no intention of going out. When only about an inch of the fuse remained before it reached the smoldering kernel inside the capsule, Yurik began to feel uneasy, and decided to end his experiment. He turned on the faucet an
d tried to douse the burning string with a gush of water. It turned out that the fire was of some unique kind that water couldn’t extinguish. He rushed around the kitchen, and wanted to throw it out the window, but the old window was stuck fast and wouldn’t open. Now the fuse was very short, and Yurik made a dash for the bathroom, where he planned to throw it down the toilet. But he never made it. The firecracker exploded with such force that the whole kitchen shook, and the glass pane in the window, standing its ground till the bitter end, blew out. The bang was glorious.

  My hand blew off, Yurik thought mournfully, his eyes shut, and froze, for some reason expecting another explosion. But there wasn’t one. He opened his eyes. It was dark and smoky; it stank of war. His hand was right where it was supposed to be; but in the triangle between his thumb and his index finger a fiery wound gaped, a piece of flesh indistinguishable from the meat sold in stores: red, streaked with white …

  “No, not the left hand!” Yurik shrieked. “Not the left hand!”

  Goodbye, guitar! It was not at all painful, but it would have been better to have his head blown off. He howled and raced around the apartment, waving his bloody hand and spattering the walls, the floor, even the ceiling, with fresh bright-red droplets.

  He ran around in circles, deafened and crazed, unable to hear the wild knocking on the door—the neighbors from across the landing. But he rushed over to the door of his own accord, goaded by fear for this unfortunate left hand, without which what kind of guitarist could he be? When he unlocked the door, he saw three neighbor ladies and an old man. Yurik kept crying, “My left hand, my left hand!” and they gaped at him silently, moving their mouths and not making any sounds. There was a whistling in his ears, and a metallic taste in his mouth. He was experiencing a post-concussion syndrome. The most adroit of the neighbors ran to call the ambulance, but the most intelligent wrapped his hand in a towel, looking for his hat, and at the same time commanding her husband to run downstairs on the double to start the car. Then they drove to the hospital.

  It was already after one in the morning when Nora got home. Coming into the lobby, she noticed spattered blood by the entryway, and then in the elevator. She froze, anticipating disaster. The traces of blood led directly to the door of their apartment.

  A note was hanging on the door: “Nora, drop by apartment 18.” Nora had a ticket to fly to Warsaw the next day, where she was supposed to meet Tengiz at a theater festival. They were performing a play by Alexander Gelman, a production-worker drama with a human face …

  Yurik was operated on that very night. The signs and symptoms were such that sweet Dr. Medvedev insisted that the boy be transferred from the post-op to the neurology ward. When he examined the damage from the concussion, he determined that the trauma was mostly psychological. Yurik’s hearing began to return on the third day, but the young man wept without ceasing, and to all questions he replied: “Left. Why the left? If only it had been the right!” And he shook his bandaged hand in despair.

  Tengiz called from Poland the following night. “Why didn’t you come? It’s a success!” Nora told him about the accident. Astonishingly, Tengiz cried out, “No, not the left one?!”

  Dr. Medvedev called in a psychiatrist for consultation. The psychiatrist prescribed pills. Nora was shaken by this turn of events. Damn heredity!

  Ten days later, the bandages were removed. His fingers looked like sausages. Yurik’s thumb was numb for several months. It was painful for him to play, but he managed. On his first day at home, he began exercising his hand so he could recover his guitar-playing skills and former agility.

  “When does he turn seventeen?” Doctor Medvedev asked Nora when Yurik was being discharged.

  “He’ll turn fifteen in a month. There are still two years,” Nora said, catching his drift immediately.

  “I suggest you take care of his military service. He should be exempt from the draft. Guard this discharge paper carefully: it says ‘moderately severe concussion with partial loss of hearing.’ It may come in handy.”

  The war in Afghanistan was already over by this time, but the fear of military conscription ran deep. Nora already knew that she would do everything in her power to prevent Yurik from having to serve in the army, and that trying to extricate him from the clutches of compulsory military service would be an ordeal. The draft board made a living from such pacifist parents, and Nora was prepared to offer all manner of bribes in a subtle, impeccably artistic manner. Suddenly the indispensable piece of paper seemed to fall from the heavens. The prospect of a legitimate exemption from military service beckoned.

  Yurik had just been let out of the hospital when Tengiz showed up again.

  “How’s the boy?” he asked from the doorway.

  “He’s home.”

  “Congratulations!”

  From Yurik’s room, they heard the soft strumming of guitar strings. Tengiz hugged Nora. Then he hung his sheepskin coat on the coatrack. He had a present for Yurik in his duffel bag—the Beatles album Let It Be. After the album came out in 1970, Paul McCartney left, and the group ceased to exist. But Yurik continued to live in their world, and had no intention of leaving it.

  29

  The Birth of Genrikh

  (1916)

  In the spring of 1914, Marusya finished out the Moscow theater season and returned to Kiev. Living in Moscow had been difficult for her. Jacob did everything within his power to overtake time, trying to finish his work at the Institute a year ahead of schedule by taking early exams, but it was already clear that he would still be bound to the Institute in the coming year. He implored his wife to come back to Kiev.

  War broke out in the summer, and the prospect of being parted was frightening. Marusya quickly found herself a job, though only part-time. The Froebel Institute opened up its arms to her. They gave her a class in dance movement for workers’ children, and she began teaching rhythm and movement in a theater studio not far from home. The work was poorly paid, but during wartime it wouldn’t do to set one’s sights too high.

  They lived in Jacob’s room. Having their own lodgings was unthinkable, for a number of reasons: overcrowding in the city because of the war, the high cost of living, the difficulty of arranging an independent domestic life and household, which would have told on Marusya’s weak health. Yet, in the prosperous home of Jacob’s parents, in spite of the burdens imposed by the war, the level of comfort remained undiminished. In the bathroom, which appealed more to Marusya than all the other bourgeois niceties, there was still running water.

  All conversations revolved around the war, its incompetent management, and the base ruses of the Allies. By this time, the losses of the Russian army were already so great that many families had suffered the loss of loved ones. The Ossetskys, too, were in mourning. Jacob’s elder brother, Genrikh, a student at Heidelberg University and his father’s pride and joy, was captured while trying to return to his homeland. He was interned by the authorities in a concentration camp for displaced persons in the village of Talerhof near Graz, where he died of dysentery in January of 1915.

  A good friend of Genrikh’s sent his family news of his death, along with a murky photograph of an unattractive young man with large ears. For Jacob, it was a devastating loss. He had idolized his brother as a child, and when he was older, trusted Genrikh’s judgment, his opinions, and his views unquestioningly. Genrikh played the role of the older friend Jacob had dreamed of having in his youth.

  In 1915, the situation on the front deteriorated day by day. There were fierce battles on the Western front, and on the Eastern front it was not much better: Russian troops were pulling out of Galicia, Poland. Just then, at this most inconvenient time, Marusya got pregnant. The first weeks of her pregnancy were very difficult. She was overcome with nausea and could hardly eat, and, in addition to this, was terribly fearful about the future. She had complicated feelings about being a mother of a newborn, whom she would have wished instantly to be five years old—a charming little girl or a handsome lad. Mixed in
with these feelings was irritation that, even before the baby was born, it was already destroying many of her plans. She had to give up teaching and her classes in the studio. She couldn’t continue with her German classes, which she had begun at Jacob’s urging, because she felt so unwell all the time. He insisted that even now, during the war, Germans had the highest technological and scientific potential; and in the field of pedagogy and psychology, German was indispensable. And, generally speaking, a person had to strive continually to raise her level of cultural proficiency; otherwise, degeneracy would set in. But the future child demanded sacrifices, and she offered them.

  Jacob spent all his free time with his wife. He didn’t have much of it, however: he had finished his coursework and was writing his thesis, and had been promised a position as a teaching assistant immediately upon completing it.

  Marusya was made ill by her pregnancy, as though protecting herself from being overcome by a more general sense of grief. The Ossetsky family treated her with gentle reverence as her belly grew visible. Sofia Semyonovna smiled to herself at this kid-glove treatment. She was one of seventeen children, the last child of her prematurely old mother, and had herself given birth eight times, of which only five children had survived to grow up; and she had lost track of the number of miscarriages she had suffered. She didn’t know about Marusya’s miscarriage two years before, and was surprised by Jacob’s anxiousness; he seemed to consider Marusya’s pregnancy to be some sort of dangerous illness.

  Marusya’s parents didn’t often visit their daughter, and preferred that she herself visit them at home. Jacob’s family really was very wealthy, and to Pinchas Kerns, a struggling master craftsman, the Ossetsky patriarch appeared haughty and overbearing. As for Marusya’s mother, she was shy by nature, and visiting the grand apartment where her daughter lived was a trial.