Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  Vitya was a lousy communicator. He offered his thoughts, but there were gaps and lacunae, and he left out the important details that he considered self-evident. Yurik understood him, though, and knew how to negotiate his way through the holes in the conversation. He immediately grasped that Vitya’s expertise lay in his ability to make the intelligent machine solve a problem that an ordinary person could also solve but would require far more time to do.

  This was the beginning of the nineties, and the first experiments in the fascinating interdependence of the human and the machine, formerly a subject of science fiction, were now becoming a part of daily life. Programmers foresaw that the artificial brains created by humans could surpass the intellects of their creators, that the speed of calculation could engender a new kind and quality of intelligence.

  Vitya had acquired a new audience for his ideas in Yurik; but Vitya did not become a new listener to Yurik’s music. Their relationship did evolve, however. From the age of five, Yurik had been connected to his father through chess. Now, some ten years later, chess had been replaced by the computer.

  On January 4, Martha took Yurik to enroll in the music department of a high school that specialized in the arts. Yurik had an interview about his knowledge of music. Since his English left something to be desired, they assigned him to an ESL class with a group of other foreign students. There were only four required courses: ESL (which, after two months, Yurik was calling “English for Slow-Wits,” and he was transferred to the regular class), mathematics, the U.S. Constitution, and a vague catchall subject they called “science.”

  Of the many music courses on offer, Yurik chose four: music theory, classical and jazz guitar, and the foundation course in piano. There was also a course called Choir, which was mandatory for everyone who studied music.

  The first day of school made a deep impression on Yurik. The four morning hours were devoted to analyzing a recent Christmas performance. The general choir of the school had sung a part of Händel’s Messiah, and now the choir director, dissatisfied with the performance that the audience had raved about, was voicing his criticisms.

  “Open to No. 22: ‘Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world,’” the teacher’s voice boomed out.

  Yurik opened a homemade book of music and text. He found No. 22. All of them had these books. The teacher, waving his hand, looked more like a basketball player than a musician. His hands were like enormous shovels, and his arms flailed as if he were battling with enemy air.

  To Yurik’s ear, the choir sounded marvelous. There was no accompaniment, and groups of voices worked like different instruments. Yurik listened to them almost in a trance. He knew that the instrument could sound like a human voice, but that the voice could sound like an instrument—Yurik had never heard anything like it! The singing awoke a storm of feelings in him, an astonishing chaos he couldn’t make sense of, but he felt on the verge of tears. Every now and then, the teacher stopped the singing with a gesture and explained to them where and how they had bungled it. It was remarkable, but Yurik understood him. The focus of his interests helped him in understanding a foreign language.

  Fortune smiled on Yurik. He would finally have teachers who interested him in the subject, and he was able to escape from the dead end he had been stuck in at home. He understood that he was in the right place at the right time.

  The best teacher of all was the one who taught music theory. He played strange Japanese music on the koto, an ancient Japanese instrument that had no definite number of notes per octave—not seven, not twelve, but as many as one wished. Instead of a scale, there was infinity … It simply boggled the mind.

  His first jazz-guitar teacher, on the other hand, turned out to be a dry old curmudgeon, cut from a completely different cloth. A fat black man, a Southerner, with a bald pate and a rich ring of hair circling it, he didn’t even listen when Yurik played. He just pointed his finger at Yurik and said, “Practice scales!” This is what he told everyone, but the lessons in technique were individual, and Yurik didn’t know that Mr. Kingsley taught everyone by the same method: he demanded that a student play 120 scales over two octaves in the course of ten minutes, and if the student made the slightest mistake he had to do it all over. The stress was such that Yurik even had a nosebleed during the second lesson. Kingsley wouldn’t allow the students to play anything else. And he didn’t let anyone talk, either. Much later, Yurik summed up this maniacal method by saying that there was not the slightest drop of joy in Kingsley’s approach to music, only finger gymnastics. But Yurik already understood that if music brought no joy to the musician it wouldn’t bring joy to anyone else, either.

  The piano teacher was a charming elderly Frenchwoman. Watching her small wrinkled hands fluttering over the keys, Yurik experienced professional envy. Whereas the pianist uses the same mechanism of movement for both hands, a more complex coordination is required of the guitarist: the left and the right hands must live different lives, but stay in perfect sync. And, of course, the main advantage of the piano is that it allows one to introduce several voices simultaneously, and opens a whole universe of sounds that the guitar can’t reproduce. In addition, there is an enormous amount of music literature for the piano—more than for any other instrument.

  The classes in classical guitar, which he didn’t like, expanded his abilities. The teacher, Emilio Gallardo, who happened to have the same name as, or was a relative of, the famous Spanish classical guitarist, showed his plucking technique on an excellent Antonio Sanchez instrument. Yurik began playing without a pick, and resorted to it only in special circumstances or when he broke a fingernail. Plucking the strings with his nails produced a completely different quality of sound. At the same time, Emilio Gallardo taught him how to treat his nails properly—how to grow them out and file them in a straight line, with the file held at a forty-five-degree angle to the nail. This was how the childhood trauma of nail cutting, the occasion of constant struggles with his mama, was resolved.

  After his torments under Mr. Kingsley, Yurik transferred to another class with another jazz-guitar teacher, James Lovesky. Their tastes were more similar. Every day opened new possibilities, but he needed more theory. Before, Yurik had played the guitar as if it were something like a wind instrument; now he began to understand polyphony. It was in the jazz-guitar class that he acquired his musical literacy, and began writing his first arrangements of jazz standards. This turned out to be the most interesting aspect of study for him.

  Yurik attended the school for a year and a half. He played in the school jazz band, and was definitely considered to be a cool cat. He himself didn’t doubt this. He considered his former infatuation with the Beatles to be just a phase he’d had to go through—though a necessary one, and he still cherished the memory of his first musical love. Now he played what the great jazz guitarists played—Wes Montgomery, Charlie Byrd, George Benson. He imitated them, biting the inside of his lip, tense and focused. Among his numerous new musical influences, Django Reinhardt, a Belgian Gypsy with two fingers missing on his left hand, occupied a special place. He was simply beyond comprehension, the way a creature from another planet is beyond comprehension. There could never be another like him.

  In the first year of his American life, Yurik discovered New York on his own, and fell in love with the city. It was the capital of his music, and the musical life of the street in the Big Apple captivated him most of all. It was the city of a dream come true. When he got there, he was ready to follow the first street musician he came across, as he had used to follow cats through the neighborhood in childhood.

  Every Sunday, he wandered through the city, either with other classmates or on his own. When he grew bolder, he began to take his guitar with him and join up with musicians playing in the subway, or in the squares. Sometimes they chased him off; sometimes they let him play with them. But from that moment on, he never parted with his guitar. Wherever he went, the guitar went with him.

  His relations with Mart
ha were strong and positive, although she was often very worried about him, especially the first night when he failed to return from the city, staying overnight with a group of musicians and smoking weed with them. These all-nighters became more and more frequent. New York was so hospitable, so friendly … Long Island now seemed to him to be claustrophobic, like a village where nothing ever happened. This was not the case, of course—it had its own jazz festivals, its own in-crowds. But nothing could compare to New York.

  Somehow or other, he managed to graduate from high school. He never learned to read Shakespeare in English, but his “home schooling” with Nora, her reading aloud, and the constant theater talk, in which Shakespeare received a lion’s share of attention, gave him a strong enough background so he could get passing grades. The math teacher, who occasionally had to wake Yurik up during class, was irritated by his somnolence; but she knew that the math problems, which his classmates sweated over, he could solve better than they, even in his head, and more quickly. They taught math better in Russia; or maybe Vitya’s genes had something to do with it … He had very good grades in his music subjects, and Martha, who had no ear for music, was excessively proud of his achievements and dreamed that he would continue his studies, perhaps at a first-rate music school, like Berklee.

  At the end of his second year, Yurik had asked James, his favorite music teacher, “What would you do if you were me?”

  “I would lock myself in my room for five years and play. You don’t need to do anything else.”

  This suggestion was very much to Yurik’s liking. The only thing that didn’t appeal to him was the locked room. The city, which was everything but a locked room, beckoned to him. Life was lived to the hilt there, on every street corner. He wanted to learn by engaging in life, playfully.

  Nora flew over for his high-school graduation ceremony. The plane landed early in the morning. She dropped her big suitcase off at Marina Chipkovskaya’s and went directly to Long Island.

  Yurik was glad to see his mother, but he greeted her as though he had just said goodbye to her yesterday, and not a whole year and a half ago. He immediately grabbed his guitar to show her what he had learned during that time, and played for four hours straight.

  After the trans-Atlantic flight, Nora was a bit groggy and disoriented. She hadn’t slept in two days. At first she was very happy about Yurik’s music; then she started nodding off, and ended up in a strange state between sleeping and waking. In her head, some sort of light show was set in motion: northern lights of blue and acid-green, a hideous scarlet and orange, and she slipped into some parallel musical space, where dangers lurked, and from which she couldn’t escape.

  She stayed overnight at Vitya and Martha’s house, in the living room. Martha was kind and welcoming toward her. It seemed that her adoration of Vitya extended to Nora as well—amazing. Out of the corner of her eye, Nora noticed how Vitya squeezed Martha’s wrist affectionately, how he pulled the chair out for her when they were sitting down to dinner. Apparently, he had learned to see other people. Was it actually possible that a person who had taken a purely expedient view of other people his whole life had finally matured when he was in his forties? Could his love for a plain woman, no longer young, actually bring this about? It was also remarkable that Vitya never even asked about what was going on in Russia. Granted, what was happening there had no bearing on his professional activity, and he didn’t perceive any difference between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, as he didn’t perceive so much else.

  The next morning, Nora and Yurik went to New York together. Yurik showed his mother around town, taking her to the musically hip spots that upstanding citizens and prosperous folk weren’t even aware existed. He took her to the Lower East Side, to all his favorite places. Nora, who had explored the city quite thoroughly on her previous visit, with Tengiz, marveled at how multifaceted it was—it seemed to contain a whole host of disparate cities, independent and aloof from one another, but blending seamlessly into a larger whole. On one end of the street, you saw well-heeled, manicured people in business suits rushing to and fro; at the other end, brash, down-and-out tramps and dangerous-looking fellows in ripped undershirts were hanging out on the street corner.

  They had not gone two steps before they ran into a black musician, who was snacking on a hot dog, sitting among a collection of pots and pans arranged around him, some of them standing on the ground, others hanging. Yurik greeted him with a warm handshake and clapped him on the back, and they exchanged a few words.

  “My mother,” Yurik said, pushing Nora toward the man. He held out his hand to her. For a plump hand, it was unexpectedly lively and mobile, like a small animal. The musician finished eating his hot dog and struck the hanging pot, which resounded with a surprisingly low sound. This was the overture. He let the sound fade out, then began tapping with his fingers, beating with his fists, and slapping with his palms, and in this way played his improvised drums.

  “They call him ‘Pots and Pans,’” Yurik said proudly. “A local genius. The only one of his kind in the world.”

  The City as Theater, Nora thought, still not having managed to explore all the little squares that deserved attention, its cozy, secluded stages and wings, utility rooms and workshops. Yurik did not just show her his favorite places, but revealed to her at the same time how the city accepted him as one of its own children, one of the multitude of players, dancers, the dissolute, the merrymakers. Nora didn’t fully understand at that time the degree to which this atmosphere of freedom and flight was fed by the fumes of marijuana, hashish, and other intoxicating substances. And heroin would never have occurred to her.

  Yurik invited Nora to his favorite hangouts—Performance Space 122 and Collective Unconscious. There were almost no people around when they stopped by at Collective Unconscious, only empty Coca-Cola bottles, bags, old bicycle parts, a dirty mattress, a sleeping bag, and a broken umbrella that represented the eponymous “collective unconscious” of the club. This was the very epicenter of lowlife revels and mad freedom, a place where people sang, drank, played, and shot up, all through the late evenings and into the night. She began feeling uncomfortable. They went around to several other, similar places. Yurik knew a few people, whom he greeted. He clearly felt proud of his connection to this underground world. Several fellows were sound asleep, wrapped up in sleeping bags. One old man, obviously drunk, woke up and crawled out of a pile of rags, asking for money. A human wreck.

  “Give him a dollar, Mama.” Nora gave it to him.

  Yurik led Nora through town along a sinuous, meandering route. Although she had a map, she didn’t want to refer to it, and she only approximately understood which way they were going. In this city, more than all others she was familiar with, there was an invisible compass pointing one toward the north, or toward the south … But they were in fact headed east, to the East River.

  On Avenue A between East Seventh Street and St. Mark’s Place, Yurik ducked into a place that was little more than a hole in the wall.

  “Now we’re going to have falafel. The cheapest in the whole city—a dollar twenty-five,” he said. “All the Russians in town come here. The falafel is excellent. Akhmed the Cripple runs it.”

  Akhmed proffered Nora the thin dough pocket with its steaming-hot filling. She took a nibble and thought: If I were eighteen years old, I’d get stranded here for the rest of my life. I don’t think I’d ever want to leave. It’s a dangerous place, though. It’s as though the sirens sing and call out, but don’t devour you all at once; they suck you up gradually. But for now the shadow of danger only added to the charm of the place. Like a huge elephant, the city showed the inquisitive spectator first one side, then the other: now the tail, now the trunk.

  Then Yurik took Nora to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. At this late-afternoon hour, there were still not many visitors. The walls were plastered with photographs of famous people, of whom Nora could recognize only Che Guevara. For the first time in his life, Yurik turned out to be better informed than sh
e was. “Look! It’s Allen Ginsberg.” Under the photograph (his face was unprepossessing, to put it mildly) was a quote from the poet, in white letters on a black background: “The most integrated place on the planet.”

  Well put, but impossible to translate into Russian. An integrated place … But you could make sense of it—it was a place where people were equal, there was no segregation, freedom of expression was pushed to its utmost limits; a place where boundaries and limits of all kinds were suspended. Nora’s literary imagination immediately started roaming to all the celebrated fin-de-siècle cafés she had read about: Les Deux Magots and the Café de la Rotonde in Paris; The Stray Dog in a Petersburg cellar; Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona. All of those places were the forebears, three generations removed, of this contemporary magnet for artists and literati; but this place was redolent not of Decadence or Futurism, not of Dada, but of social protest, revolution, and terrorism. Here was the modern-day, and even slightly dated, avant-garde. It was the front line of progress, of breaking with convention. There was music, and poetry, and performance, and none of it had anything to do with mainstream culture, with commerce. They were playing the music of some fantastic opera singer, and Nora stopped to listen. Yurik was quick to tell her that it was a countertenor. Such high male voices had been popular in Italy, and music was composed especially for the castrati. Now these voices were popular again. Yurik explained all of this, then said brightly, “You weren’t aware of this before?”