Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  My English studies are proceeding apace. Today I finished “The Happy Prince” by Oscar Wilde. I liked it extremely well. I’m no enemy of apropos moral maxims. I highly recommend the story to you. It’s quite suitable for children’s classes. I’m sending along two stories for you (“The Beast Tree [The Tibetan Statuette]” by Remizov and “The Unforgiven Tree” by Teffi), for the following reason. In order to compose stories yourself, you must familiarize yourself with the folktale elements and features, turns of phrase, examples, stereotypes, allegories, and conventions that are universal for all folk or fairy tales. Ideas, plots might vary, but the core elements remain the same. In these stories, one comes across some new features. The features of Oriental tales, as well as those of exotic peoples such as Negroes, Chinese, or the Hindus, are particularly interesting. But for the most part, stories can embody their own unique laws of existence, which the author creates out of combinations of these familiar conventions.

  Write me and tell me what you manage to do with these stories. (The Tibetan one can be used in its entirety, I think.)

  I kiss you, my dear one!

  DECEMBER 31

  Hello, Marusya! The soldiers may have holidays every day now, but for us it’s double the work. But it’s pleasant work, watching, observing everything, letting my eyes wander where they will. And occasionally I see something amusing. Dmitrenko’s The Good Miller, or Satan in a Barrel. A comedy with dancing, song, and vodka. Vodka is prohibited here, but there’s still dancing and singing. And our band accompanies the singing. I enjoyed myself immensely during the rehearsals. I felt like an actor in an opera house. The barracks has a fully equipped stage. We were arranged in front of the footlights before instrument stands, as is the practice. In the center was the conductor, to his right the flautist and clarinetist, and to the left, the brass. And, as is the practice, the bandmaster signaled to the choir and the actors. And, as one might expect, they sang mercilessly out of tune, and their timing was off. Besides the performance of The Miller, a ballerina will dance for these sweet soldier boys. Today there was a tryout. There were two ballerinas, one of them rather plump, and the other with dyed hair, a sealskin coat, a sharp nose—overall, rather catlike. They dance well, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. The mazurka, the lezginka, Russian dances. The officers onstage flocked around them as men will flock around women upon whom the magic glow of the footlights casts a spell of enchantment mixed with the promise of accessibility.

  The soldiers stared at them like they were seeing the Crystal Palace, like something lovely and completely distant from them, almost unearthly. The actors and actresses from The Miller huddled around the corners of the stage. The bandmaster looked on with an expression of irony, as though he had seen it all before.

  Yesterday the celebration of the Eighth Company took place. I felt very happy with it. And extremely surprised by it. It was a celebration in the true sense of that word—carried out in a foreign, not Russian, way. I was happy with the way it was organized. Everywhere I looked, I noticed an attention to detail. Everything had been anticipated and well planned. It was all very clean and orderly. The beds in their barracks had been shoved into one corner and covered with a green cloth. For the guests, there was a coat check, with hangers, numbers, and a rope barrier. There was a platform constructed of dining tables pushed together and draped with green kerchiefs around the edges. Everything was spacious, comfortable; different people were assigned to take care of every eventuality. It was evident that they had rehearsed their roles. When the concert was over, people appeared with tools in hand. Within two minutes, the platform was silently dismantled, someone rushed to wipe down the tables, someone else felt the edges of the tabletops to make sure there were no stray nails sticking out—and the concert hall turned into a buffet.

  We played until four in the morning. Tonight we’re going to play the whole night again. I’m just a bit tired. Tomorrow is the last holiday. All of this carries an aura of madness that no one seems to notice. Yesterday I read the papers for the last three months in the library. There are no reliable statistics, but as far as I can tell, the war has already cost at least five million lives; and it’s impossible to even estimate how many wounded there are. At least twice that number, I should think. Despite this, the Entente refused the German offer of peace. Our life, the only life we have, which promises so much to us, is unfolding against a background of unrelenting global madness …

  Your Jacob

  33

  Kiev–Moscow

  (1917–1925)

  Jacob, who got caught up in political activity during the first months after the February Revolution, became a member of the Kharkov Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, but always felt somewhat out of place. The majority of the people around him were so backward and unenlightened, many of them illiterate, that he saw his primary task as one of education. Although he could have a conversation with each one of these people individually, when they came together in a crowd they turned into a raging, terrifying force of nature. His oratorical experiments quickly led him to the conclusion that, in this powerful revolutionary process, Jews provoked only irritation. His innate industriousness and energy constantly agitated people, and his desire to prove useful to his country in this hour of need, to rebuild its industry and reorganize its principles of management, inspired suspicion. Jacob tried to find a place for himself in all of this that corresponded to his ideals and his skills, but could not.

  Ukraine reeled, shaken to its very foundations. The government in Kiev had changed seventeen times in the space of two years, and the inhabitants wanted something permanent, something that would remain once and for all. And something did. By December 1919, Soviet power was finally established.

  Marusya, who was an enthusiastic supporter of the new dispensation, celebrated the victory over the bourgeois world. As early as 1917, when the Soviet authorities conquered power in Kiev for the first time, Marusya joined a group of politically engaged actors who were staging a Symbolist play called Revolutionary Movements under the direction of a young man from Galicia named Les Kurbas.

  Immediately following this grandiose staging, which met with great success before large gatherings of people in the city squares, Marusya quarreled with Les Kurbas. She spoke Ukrainian fluently, but she reproached him for his excessive Ukrainian nationalism. She was certain that complete internationalism would reign in the new government, and that small national cultures would give way to a new, universal proletarian culture. This ended her career in the “Young Theater” that Kurbas directed. Who could have predicted that in 1937 Kurbas would be executed in the Solovki labor camp for his nationalist deviationism? Not to mention that, half a century later, culture really would achieve a certain degree of universalism—although its proletarian character would be forgotten, as though it had never been, because of the complete exhaustion of the Marxist notion of the vanguard role of the working classes. But Jacob was not with Marusya at that moment, and could not bring his conciliatory corrections to bear in the dispute. Indeed, Jacob himself, with his highly organized mind, was not given to such historical prognoses. He may have been ahead of his time, but not so far ahead as that.

  When Jacob returned to Kiev, he dived headfirst into professional activity. Big changes were under way at the Commercial Institute. The professor who had insisted on his being appointed as assistant in the department left with the Germans. The docent Kalashnikov, who was scared to death, assumed his vacated position. A curious situation developed in which, in the eyes of the senior professors, Jacob appeared to be a revolutionary, and the people who were appointed by the authorities to run the Institute were astonishingly ill-informed professionally.

  The authorities assigned the economists tasks that were formidable: nationalization of the economy, the halting of trade and cutting monetary ties, the introduction of a surplus appropriation system,… “military communism.” Jacob despaired. Building some sort of new economy was out of the question.
r />   The new way of life, organized along the lines of fairness and justice, dealt a direct blow to Jacob’s family: the milling manufacture and transport along the Dnieper, which his father had built up at the turn of the century, was nationalized. The mill, which had worked punctiliously for nearly twenty years, was shut down. Jacob abandoned his budding career in the Commercial Institute and took a job in the Department of Statistics at the Ukrainian People’s Commissariat of Labor. In the country’s current situation, the only real task he could envision for himself was to document honestly the economic process as it unfolded. His energies now contracted to discussions within his immediate family, and his primary interlocutor was still Marusya, who was committed to the idea of building the grand future.

  Little Genrikh shuttled between his grandmothers, each of them vying with the other for his attention. He didn’t see much of his parents. They both worked with ardor and enthusiasm, and Marusya, as was her custom, found some courses for increasing the qualifications of her tattered education, and from time to time took part in theater and dance groups. The provinciality of Kiev was dispiriting to her, and she longed for Moscow, where her brother Mikhail had permanently settled. By that time, he had married and was engrossed in family life. Her brother Mark, along with his entire law firm, had relocated to Riga in 1913. Joseph, who had disappeared after his arrest in 1905, turned up in America, and wrote them the occasional confused missive. He had been a fiery revolutionary as early as 1905, but after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, he never returned to Russia. From his infrequent letters, his relatives were able to make out that he felt he was more useful to the cause of world revolution in America.

  In 1923, Marusya’s dream came true. Jacob received an appointment in the Central Statistics Directorate of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars, and the small Ossetsky family moved to Moscow. They were given a large room in a communal apartment on Povarskaya Street, which was soon to lose its original name and be renamed after a Soviet diplomat, Vatslav Vorovsky. It would keep that name for several decades. They created a little space for Jacob’s office. A desk was pushed right up against a window; a divan, which a carpenter hammered together any which way, was placed in the corner; and they bought a children’s bed. The room also accommodated a dining table and a buffet, and bookshelves. A week later, Jacob dragged home an absurd but very useful object: a folding screen. The room was a large one—about 215 square feet. Luxury.

  They enrolled Genrikh in school, and after school he went to a playgroup on Nikitsky Boulevard with an older German woman they found through an advertisement. His future wife Amalia also took walks on that very same boulevard. A Moscow childhood had begun.

  Marusya again took up her studies in education and self-education. In her spare time, she taught Genrikh to read, to do gymnastics exercises, and to make things with clay. All this she did according to the Froebel system, which, though it had not been completely forgotten, had already gone out of fashion. The boy began spending more time with his mother, and the grandmas and grandpas from his former life in Kiev quickly faded from memory. He was a difficult child for his parents—he ate poorly, was disobedient and naughty, and on occasion stamped his feet or had tantrums and threw himself on the floor.

  Jacob finished writing the book he had been planning to write in Kiev, called The Logic of Management. In it he elaborated an idea he had long held about the general laws of management, which are equally valid for the organization of capitalist or socialist systems of production. Marusya, meanwhile, tried to find a teaching position; but in the new system there was no demand for schools of movement and dance. Other people now occupied the places where she might formerly have been able to make use of her skills. The breadth of her interests came to her rescue, however. A friend of hers from the Froebel Courses, Vladislava Korzhevskaya, with whom she had worked in the kindergarten for domestic workers’ children at the beginning of her career, introduced her to Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife.

  They talked for a long time, discussing the organization of kindergartens of a new kind. A Moscow architect, Armen Papazian, was engaged to develop the idea. The principles of preschool education, according to the thinking of Nadezhda Krupskaya, should be the same as those in the Young Pioneers organization—“like the Boy Scouts in form, but communist in content.” Krupskaya was roundly criticized for taking the Boy Scouts as her inspiration when she was creating the Young Pioneers; but, though she publicly acknowledged her mistake, in her heart of hearts she held on to the idea stubbornly.

  The conversation between Marusya and Nadezhda Krupskaya lasted more than two hours, and was replete with warmth and mutual understanding. They parted as kindred spirits, and Marusya was given the task of designing new toys for proletarian children’s education, with the assistance of the ingenious Armen Papazian. The new designs would be implemented in one of the Moscow-area wood-processing plants.

  Armen turned out to be a jolly Armenian fellow, not much taller than a child, but with a thick head of hair and a copious beard. He was an artist, a bona-fide artist. Within two weeks, the room on Povarskaya, to Genrikh’s delight, was filled with construction sets, from which you could put together a hammer, a sickle, an automobile, and an airplane. The seven-year-old Genrikh was completely absorbed in building and taking apart wooden and metal pieces, and there was nothing sweeter to him. His parents, observing his single-minded concentration, were encouraged by this early awakening of his engineering abilities. It was hard to drag him away from his activities. He cried and resisted, and even insisted on going to bed clutching some sort of metal connector that Marusya was afraid would poke into him and injure him while he slept.

  On Sundays, his parents tried to expose Genrikh to cultural influences—they took him to museums and theaters. He was absolutely indifferent to visual art. In the theater, he fidgeted and demanded to be taken to the bathroom or to the buffet. Only when he saw The Blue Bird was he interested enough to forget about the refreshment buffet. But when the play was over, he dragged Marusya up to the stage: he wanted to find out whether the bird had really been colored blue with electricity, as he surmised. The only museum that he always wanted to visit, rain or shine, was the Polytechnic Museum. The trip to the museum on Sundays was ample reward for all the years when the boy was not allowed to walk through the city alone …

  Jacob, who didn’t have much faith in the abilities of the German nanny, tried to give German-language lessons to Genrikh, but his son was bored. The father sat him down at the piano, but it was a torment for both of them. One of the boy’s unique character traits was his ability to fall sick on the occasion of any externally enforced homework. His stomach really did start to hurt each time Jacob insisted that he do a chore or task. He also complained of stomach upsets every time he didn’t want to go to school.

  Genrikh adored his mother and avoided his father. Whenever Jacob tried to force him to do something, he took refuge with his mother.

  Marusya became overworked. She started losing weight again, suffered from insomnia, and coughed at night. The doctors diagnosed it as “nerves.” When Genrikh finished second grade, Jacob sent his family to recuperate in the Crimea for almost two months.

  34

  Yurik in America

  (1991–2000)

  The surface of life had changed dramatically. At home in Moscow, Yurik had hardly noticed the way the days passed. They went by evenly, and movement through them was mechanical, automatic. He woke up, washed, had breakfast, went to school, came home from school, grabbed his guitar; and then life was all about music: everyday discoveries; intense, endless enjoyment. But here in America, there was a new home, full of small alien sounds, clean rain pattering outside the window; Martha, with her eternal smile plastered on her face; the silent Vitya; and English, which he knew almost solely from Beatles songs. The world of old habits collapsed, and new ones—the defense of the psyche against unfamiliar agitations—had not yet been formed.

  Yurik’s first days on Long Isl
and coincided with the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Martha had planned to take Yurik to see the sights in the city, but she fell ill and had to cancel it. When Yurik tried to pick up his guitar and play, he couldn’t concentrate—something stopped him. Vitya spent these Christmas holidays in the university lab. At the end of December, the university purchased a NeXT computer, the recent brainchild of Steve Jobs; he had been fired by that time from Apple and had started a new company that produced these new NeXTs with a new operating system, which laid the foundation for the future Mac OS X. Vitya couldn’t tear himself away from this new toy. He invited Yurik to have a look. It was the first computer that Yurik had ever seen “in person.” Vitya stroked the case and praised the black cube the way a dog lover praises the points of his favorite canine. He admired its power, its memory capacity, and the high-resolution graphics.

  Yurik asked questions, and Vitya answered. When Vitya answered, Yurik asked him to repeat what he had said. And he grasped it. Four hours passed like a single minute. As they sat talking in the empty laboratory, Yurik began to understand that music wasn’t the only interesting thing in life. They would have sat there all night, but Martha called to say that she was expecting them home for dinner. They went home under a fine rain when it was already dark, silent, each of them lost in his own thoughts. Vitya was thinking about the wonderful possibilities for modeling cell processes that the new computer offered, Yurik about how great it would be to unite music with this remarkable machine. He wasn’t the first one this idea had occurred to, but he didn’t realize it yet. Yurik had no idea that in a few years the computer would become an indispensable part of any musical process, from studying to recording to performing.