Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  Nora sat next to Andrei Ivanovich, feeling empty, completely empty, then gradually filling with tenderness and a sense of guilt and repose that it was over, this sad suffering of Amalia’s parting from the world—her world, which consisted almost entirely of her love for this balding old man. Andrei Ivanovich held Amalia’s dead hands in his own. She had broad palms; short, triangular fingernails; strong, confident fingers. How self-assured and precise, even elegant, the movements of her hands were when she sat at the drafting table, Nora thought, recalling a memory from childhood. She was the one who taught me to hold a pencil. And wasn’t able to teach Yurik.

  How is it I never realized this before? My hands, which resemble Marusya’s so much outwardly, are actually Mama’s, in their grip, in their feeling for pencil and line, in their innate confidence of movement.

  Genrikh came to the requiem in the church with a bunch of red carnations, and stood at a distance from the others. There weren’t a lot of mourners: a few former friends and colleagues, neighbors from Nikitsky Boulevard, and one or two from Prioksko. Next to Nora stood Andrei Ivanovich and Yurik, with his guitar, and Nora, glancing at Genrikh, sensed the kind of abandonment and loneliness he must have been feeling.

  When the service ended, she went up to him and asked whether he would go to the cemetery with them. He hemmed and hawed, and mumbled something along the lines of “I don’t know if she would have wanted it … if he would like it.” But he got into the funeral bus with everyone else and went to Vagankovo Cemetery, where Amalia’s parents, Zinaida Filippovna and Alexander Ignatievich Kotenko, were buried under an enormous wooden cross erected by the Church of St. Pimen in 1924 for its former precentor. Then Genrikh came to the funeral repast in the house where he had once lived with Amalia, sat at the same table with Andrei Ivanovich, and kept looking at him, wondering why Amalia had left him, a fine fellow, for this scraggly, balding man who looked so simple and ordinary. Andrei Ivanovich didn’t even notice that he was there.

  That evening, Nora could never have imagined that her respite from misfortune would be so brief. Three months later, it was Genrikh’s turn. He was diagnosed with cancer, too. Lung cancer. He needed an operation. Genrikh’s wife came to see Nora—the fat Irina, in her fat boots, shedding fat tears as Nora poured her some tea. While Genrikh was in the hospital, undergoing his examinations and tests, Irina’s daughter gave birth to her second child, and now her daughter, her daughter’s two children, and her husband had all moved in, and were staying in Irina’s living room.

  “What was I to do? I couldn’t chase my own daughter out!” It was impossible for Irina and Genrikh to occupy the tiny bedroom together, because of the cancer, because he smoked, because the children cried. “You take him, Norka. They’ve promised my son-in-law an apartment, and as soon as he gets it, they’ll move out. It will definitely happen this year—they promised him. Then I can take Genrikh back.”

  This will be the end of me, Nora thought. She was filled not with pity but with rage. And complete helplessness. Not because Genrikh had paid for their apartment, and this banishment would be a severe blow. She felt she just didn’t have the strength to bear up under another illness when she had just traveled that road. There were no two ways about it, she had loved her mother; but her father? To be honest, absolutely honest, she didn’t love him. She didn’t like him. She knew, she understood, but it was still hard to love him. She wouldn’t say it out loud, of course. Not to this cow, in any case. Nora was allergic to him. And she didn’t want to do it. Out loud she said, “When should I pick him up?”

  Irina cheered up, not expecting such an easy victory. “Oh, Norka, Norka!”

  At this point, Nora lost her composure. “Don’t call me Norka; I’m Nora! You know, Ibsen has a play called A Doll’s House. Nora is the main character. Nora Helmer. And my highly cultured grandmother Marusya named me after her.”

  “Yes, that’s what I said, Norka. Nora, I mean!” Irina said, correcting herself.

  Nora decided not to move the boat bed. She changed the curtains, replacing the dark-green linen curtains with a piece of unbleached canvas she had taken from the theater. She dragged Yurik’s larger bookcase into the room, and put the desk in Yurik’s room. Irina had left the negotiations about the move to Nora: “It will be easier for you.”

  Nora visited her father in the hospital. He was in a good academic hospital, and was rather proud of his privileged situation. When Nora came, he was walking down the corridor with a squat, rotund man wearing silk pajamas and a ski cap. Her father introduced him to her. “This is my daughter, Nora, a theater set designer and artist. Nora, this is Boris Grigorievich, a well-known physicist, winner of the Stalin Prize,” and the ski cap rolled away down the corridor.

  “Do you know who that is?” Genrikh whispered to her conspiratorially.

  Nora had been preparing herself for this meeting with her father the whole way—cancer, cancer, not certain how far it had gone, control yourself, the situation is hopeless, he’s vain, garrulous, but he’s a good man, he’s good, and so certain that everyone will like him, that everyone loves him … He’s not to blame, it’s not his fault, I know that, I know that … Nevertheless, she could hardly restrain her irritation with him.

  “Who, then?”

  “The director of an academic research institute, the big boss! An inveterate bastard, they say,” he told her in a cheerful voice, and she laughed. Still, there was something charming about him, the old blabbermouth.

  “Well, how are you?”

  “Wonderful, dear, wonderful! The food is good. Well, Irina does her bit, too—yesterday she brought over a whole bucket of borscht. There’s a fridge in the ward. Would you like some? There’s even a kitchen here for the patients. And the staff is simply exceptional. Oh, the nurses!” And he clicked with his tongue, as though he intended to enjoy their charms without delay. Nora was very sensitive to nuance and intonation, and his response made her shudder. It’s horrible, how distasteful he is to me. Still, I can’t do anything about it.

  “Do you want to go for a walk?” Nora suggested.

  “Gladly. I took a walk the day before yesterday, too.”

  Nora helped him get dressed—it was hard for him to move his left arm. His left lung had been removed. The doctors didn’t tell him what they had told his wife and daughter: with lung cancer, you had about five years to live, at most. Judging by the X-rays, four of those years had already elapsed. “You can have an operation, or you can choose not to. Makes no difference,” a famous surgeon had told them. “The operation is difficult for the patient, and rather pointless, since the second lung has already been affected. But miracles do happen. The disease does sometimes stop on its own.”

  Irina took the decision upon herself: operate. She didn’t consult Nora about it.

  Now they walked around the hospital grounds. He had been here five weeks already, and already knew half the hospital. He greeted everyone.

  Sociable, Nora thought, wincing inwardly. Then she steeled herself and said, “Dad, I have a suggestion. You know that Ninka and her children have moved in with you for a while.”

  “Yes, yes. Ninka’s a great girl; I can’t see any problem. Let them stay until they have an apartment of their own. They promised to give it to them soon.”

  “Right, but you know yourself … A small baby will cry at night. And after your operation … Why don’t you move in with me for a while? Until the apartment issue gets sorted out.”

  And then something she never could have imagined happened. Genrikh’s mouth twisted, his face crumpled, and he began to cry.

  “Daughter, my dear daughter … I didn’t expect … Do you mean it? For this … For this it was worth getting ill. My good daughter … I … I don’t deserve it.” He wiped his eyes with a soiled handkerchief, and Nora looked at him, looked at him for a long time, then kissed his forehead.

  My God, she thought, but he’s really very unhappy, and all the cheerful camaraderie, the jokes and funny stories, his clow
ning, are a front. They’re the mask of an unhappy man. My God, how could I not have seen it? I’m such an idiot.

  Four days later, Nora moved Genrikh to Nikitsky Boulevard, and prepared to take up her sorrowful duty for a second time.

  Several days before he died, his exhausting cough disappeared. He stopped talking about how they would all go to the Crimea in the spring. He couldn’t smoke anymore, but from time to time he took a cigarette between his yellowed fingers, rolled it back and forth gently, then set it aside. Just before he slipped into unconsciousness, he asked Nora to bury him with Mama. He spoke so softly she had to ask him to repeat himself, just to make sure.

  “With your mother,” he said, very clearly. “With Amalia.”

  Nora was unable to carry out his wishes because of Andrei Ivanovich, who rushed to the cemetery nearly every weekend to sit with her by her grave. But Nora didn’t say anything.

  After he was cremated, Nora placed the urn with her father’s ashes in the columbarium niche reserved for the ashes of his parents, Jacob Ossetsky and Marusya Kerns. While the attendant removed the marble slab in front of the boxlike niche in order to squeeze the new urn into the narrow space, Nora recalled Marusya’s wish, which she had expressed to Genrikh not long before her death: “You can bury me anywhere, as long as it’s not with Jacob.” Genrikh hadn’t wished to remain for all time in intimate physical proximity with his parents after his death, either. What complex, confused feelings and relations they had …

  Not long before Genrikh’s death, when he only had a few weeks to live, Nora asked him to write down the family tree and to describe what he remembered from his Kiev childhood and relatives. Resting his elbows on the desk, his muffled cough coming and going, he wrote something down for her.

  When Nora opened the desk drawer after his death, she found a single sheet of paper covered with her father’s right-leaning handwriting. It read:

  I, Genrikh Ossetsky, was born on March 11, 1916, in Kiev. I moved to Moscow in 1923 with my parents. I graduated from the eighth grade at the United Labor School No. 110. I worked as a tunneler in the Metro Construction Project. In 1933, I entered the instrument-making technical school. I graduated in 1936. In 1938, I entered the Machine Tool Institute, from which I graduated in 1944. In 1945, I became a member of the Party (crossed out). In 1948, I defended my Candidate’s Degree thesis and became head of a laboratory at the same Institute.

  Here the report ended. Nora read it with sadness. He was just the candidate any personnel department was seeking—but why hadn’t he recorded a single true memory about his own family? What had happened that prevented him from recalling anyone? It was an enigma. A mystery.

  Now they would have to tolerate one another in death till the end of time … or love one another.

  31

  A Boat to the Other Shore

  (1988–1991)

  The war in Afghanistan, which lasted for years and then burned itself out, hardly touched the lives of Muscovites who were not involved in politics, in particular artists and nonconformists, who had their own reasons not to see eye to eye with the government. The radio droned on and on about the duty to internationalism and the dangers of American imperialism. After a short stint in a training unit, eighteen-year-old conscripts were sent to Afghanistan, where they fought; and then came back—though not all of them. Some of those who did come back were badly crippled. But all of these soldier-internationalists without exception were knocked off balance, traumatized; they carried monstrous memories inside them, which they would have to outgrow in order to return to a normal life.

  Yurik’s friend Fedya couldn’t cope. He was unrecognizable when he got out of the army. Yurik rushed over to the Vlasovs’ during the first week after Fedya was demobilized. He wanted to invite Fedya to a New Year’s Eve party where he had been asked to play, but Fedya refused to get up off the divan. He answered Yurik’s questions with inarticulate mumbling, and Yurik left feeling angry and hurt, thinking that Fedya no longer wanted to spend time with him. But Fedya didn’t want to spend time with anyone, even his parents. He lay on the divan for two and a half months without speaking, his face turned to the wall. Suddenly, while his parents were temporizing, wondering whether it was time to consult a psychiatrist or a psychologist, he disappeared. Without saying a single coherent word … They found him a week later in the attic of their dacha. He had hanged himself.

  This happened during that same “lethal” year when Nora buried her parents and discovered that, with their deaths, the wall separating her from her own demise had collapsed. She had to grow accustomed to a new sense of her own personal chronology—I’m next in line. The fact that this chronological order could be broken, and that children could die first, Nora realized only now.

  All the friends of the Vlasovs knew Fedya. From the time he was a young child, his parents had taken him everywhere with them, beginning with the Bulldozer Exhibition* during the Khrushchev era, where he was probably the youngest witness of the infamous battle between tractors and paintings; the Izmailovo exhibit; and all the exhibits in private apartments and in the basements of the Municipal Committee for Graphics on Malaya Gruzinskaya. Sweet-natured Fedya, emotionally attached to his parents, charming, rather sickly and physically stunted, and not yet matured into manhood. The war in Afghanistan destroyed him from within. For Yurik, who had just been forced to accept the deaths of his grandparents and become reconciled to the idea that old people ultimately die, the death of Fedya, his friend and nearly his peer, was unbearable. Moreover, it was suicide, which left all those who had been close to him with a sense of guilt.

  The funeral was attended by a large crowd of people, and was particularly gloomy. The entire Moscow underground art scene, and other friends and acquaintances of the Vlasovs, gathered at the Khovanskoye Cemetery, which was forlorn and desolate, like all the new cemeteries surrounding the city.

  Tengiz, who had arrived in Moscow at just this time with indefinite plans, would not let Nora go to the cemetery alone; he accompanied her. Yurik didn’t go to the funeral. He stayed in his room, weeping. He was badly shaken. Nora didn’t try to persuade him to change his mind. She saw terrible confusion and despair in his eyes.

  Tengiz stood by the grave, behind Nora, with his hand on her shoulder. His brow was furrowed. It was painful to look at the Vlasovs—they looked like two black shadows. Natasha’s head was shaking … and in the past few days Lyonchik had aged visibly, and was so bent over that he looked older than his own father, who was holding him by the arm.

  On the way home, Tengiz drove. They were silent the whole way. When they were approaching their house, he said, “The boy was murdered.”

  Two days later, Tengiz flew back to Tbilisi.

  Nora couldn’t stop thinking about Fedya Vlasov.

  Yurik was already fifteen. His grades were poor. Getting into college, which would exempt him from the draft, was out of the question. It was very unlikely he would even be accepted at the conservatory, since he didn’t have a certificate of completion from an ordinary music school. In any case, a music college wouldn’t disqualify him from military service. The concussion that was described in his medical records provided no guarantee of exemption, either.

  It was strange, but the recent deaths of her parents were less devastating to Nora than Fedya’s. She lived in a state of quiet, unrelenting, veiled horror. The image of his closed coffin haunted her during the daytime, and she dreamed about it at night. She looked at Yurik, and she saw Fedya, as she remembered him long before his death, when he was probably fourteen—a stooping posture, with a sweet, pimply face and a side part in his sleek hair.

  She had to get Yurik away, before he got snatched by the army. One war had ended, but they could easily start another one.

  There were two possibilities. One, the less realistic, was Israel. But what would she do, a half-blood, in a foreign country, with a son who didn’t even know he was one-fourth Jewish? The other one, more reliable but even less acceptable to Nora, was
to send Yurik to America to live with his father. At this point, Nora fell into a stupor, paralyzed with indecision.

  There were still two more years, but she needed to sort the problem out now. She couldn’t stop thinking about it. Soon she took the first step: she wrote a long letter to Vitya, expressing her worries about Yurik’s future. A reply came two months later. And it was written not by Vitya but by Martha, in English. This rather absurd woman—or so she had seemed to Nora, after their only meeting—was thrilled about the idea of Yurik’s coming to live with them. She wrote: “We will be happy … We will do everything we can for him … We await Yurik’s arrival, today or any day.”

  Huge, shapeless, wearing a jogging suit and sneakers, with a pink face and unrefined features, and a smile that stretched from ear to ear … She moved as though she were carved out of wood—not a log, however, but a huge trunk of soft linden. And her squeaky voice, like that of a cartoon character … And madly in love with Vitya. Martha seemed to see merits and qualities in him that were invisible to Nora. Nora pondered the matter.

  Vitya’s life was evidently undergoing a profound shift. Now it was not Varvara Vasilievna who governed his behavior, but Martha. Whether Vitya himself had changed, whether he was ready to take on day-to-day decisions, whether any emotional movement was under way in his heart, was unclear from the letter. What was clear, however, was that there was a good woman at his side. She loved him. From the moment Nora received the letter from Martha, her soul felt less heavy. Her plan to send Yurik to live with his father had taken on weight and definition. Nora answered the letter. They struck up a correspondence. Martha had clear handwriting and a straightforward style.