Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  “Yes, I knew about it, of course. But I had never heard it.”

  My word, Yurik. What an amazing place! she mused. Then she thought: I need to get him enrolled in some school or program as soon as possible. He could easily get stuck here for good.

  She herself was completely enamored with it: a Rastafarian with a mass of intricate dreadlocks, and a parrot sitting on his shoulder; an anorexic-looking girl, bound up from head to foot like an Egyptian mummy. There was also a guitarist whom Yurik recognized. He almost fainted: “Mama, do you know who that is? It’s John McLaughlin!”

  The group sitting at the table next to theirs seemed to be playing cards. In fact, it wasn’t a card game at all. A well-known fortune-teller was reading the tarot. In one dark corner of the room, a six-foot-five strikingly white person in an orange cape was sitting in the lotus position. An albino.

  They walked to Bleecker Street. Nora was tired. The day was fast turning into evening. At the entrance to the subway, Nora went to buy a ticket. Yurik glanced into the cashier’s window and struck up an animated conversation with an elderly black man in a subway employee’s uniform. Nora couldn’t understand a word of their conversation. She walked away. The cashier opened up a side door and walked out of his little cage, pumped Yurik’s hand, and clapped him on the back. Yurik told Nora that this aging fellow was a marvelous guitarist, an erstwhile hippie, who had taken on a steady job when the years started to overtake him. Everyone called him Gnome Poem. Yurik couldn’t remember his real name.

  They agreed that Nora would return to Marina’s house in northern Manhattan by herself, and that he would hang out here for a while. He said he’d come back around eleven. He showed up at three. Marina had already gone to bed, and Nora was sitting in the kitchen, worrying about what she should do in these circumstances. Go looking for him? But where? Call him? Whom could she call? And, generally speaking, what should she do now, tomorrow, in a year?

  * * *

  Nora didn’t make it to Long Island the following year. By this time, Yurik had left Long Island completely and put down roots in New York. It was a soft landing, however. Martha kept trying to persuade him to continue his studies, but Yurik considered that life in New York offered a better education than anything he could get at a university. By the middle of the summer, he had become so much at home in the Big Apple that it was no more possible to lure him away than it was to lure a worm out of the hard flesh of the sweet fruit. A few months later, he already knew dozens of other guitarists and drummers and horn players who had burrowed into the heart of the Apple, and they were all on a first-name basis with one another.

  When he went to Long Island to take a bath and get clean underwear, Martha would lend him a few twenties and fifties. In the evening, sitting at the computer, Vitya showed his son new programs, marveling slightly at his slowness. Then they called Nora. The calls were expensive. Yurik couldn’t allow himself such luxuries, and Nora could never find him at home when she called. Her strong and enduring connection with her son, which she had once feared might be a problem in itself, became more and more attenuated, and finally threatened to disappear altogether.

  Vitya had never taken much interest in Yurik, and had no idea how he made a living. Martha took the burden of these trivial matters in life onto her own shoulders—she paid all the bills, bought all the food and clothing. Vitya had only the vaguest notions of what it took to get by in life.

  In the first year after Yurik graduated from high school, Martha began to pay for his expenses as well, but she felt that what she was doing wasn’t right. She came from a poor Irish family, and though she was Catholic, her views on life were completely Protestant. At the end of the first year of Yurik’s semi-independent existence, she forced herself to tell him that she was not going to provide for him anymore. Yurik thought about getting a job.

  An opportunity came his way through Ari, an Israeli friend of his who had been on an extended vacation in the United States after finishing his military service in the Israeli army. Ari had been born in Russia, and his family still spoke Russian at home, so he was happy for the chance to be able to chat with Yurik in their mother tongue.

  The main topic of discussion was the army. Yurik, who had left Russia at the insistence of his mother to avoid military service, did not try to conceal this fact of his biography. To Ari’s mind, this was immoral. Yurik considered military service itself to be immoral. He was well aware of the vagaries of Russian politics, and understood that, after Afghanistan, there had been other conflicts—Ossetia-Ingushetia and in Georgia-Abkhazia—not without the involvement of Russia. Now there was turmoil in Chechnya, too. All of this smacked of war, which his mother feared. Yurik didn’t want to kill or to be killed. He wanted to play the guitar. Yurik’s story about the Russian fellow who had hanged himself after serving in Afghanistan didn’t make an impression on Ari. Ari’s experience had been different: he adored the army.

  “Before the army, I was just a piece of meat—an idiot with a guitar, and a source of shame for my family. After three years in the army, I became a real professional. I specialized as a radio operator, and I learned Arabic. The army teaches you how to survive, which is also a kind of science. The main thing was that I learned how to learn. I can teach you, too. I’ll teach you how to be a furniture mover. Don’t laugh—it’s kind of like science, too. Not everyone can do it.”

  Yurik accepted the offer immediately.

  The next day, Ari took him to a small moving company. The person who ran the operation was a Russian Jew with an Israeli passport and a checkered past. Around him revolved a motley assortment of people from all ends of the earth—losers, pariahs, and eccentrics of every stripe. The first crew he worked with was Israeli, and they taught him the tricks of the trade. They worked in a group of four: Ari, two more former Israeli soldiers, and Yurik. It turned out that a pack mule’s endurance was more important than brute strength in this profession, and good mind-body coordination was more necessary than broad shoulders. He worked with this crew for three weeks, until it disintegrated because Ari and his friends went back to Israel. Then Yurik started working with a new crew: two Sherpas and another newbie, a towering African American hulk.

  Both Sherpas—Apa and Pema—came up to about Yurik’s chin, but their strength and stamina were the stuff of legend. Though they were unsociable at first, after a few days working together, watching Yurik toiling alongside them and trying to keep up, they grew very friendly and warm toward him. On the first day, the hulk cast disparaging glances at the Sherpas, but after three hours of work, he lay down next to the wall and didn’t budge. Yurik and the Sherpas worked another ten hours before calling it a day, and the black giant never came back to work.

  Yurik lived in an abandoned house. Alice, an aging alcoholic with a past in the theater, was the temporary landlady and self-appointed manager. She “enrolled” acceptable candidates and kicked out the ne’er-do-wells. She quelled conflicts, enforced sanitary norms, and negotiated with the municipal authorities, so that they would tolerate the existence of this illegal homeless shelter. She protected Yurik. He had lived under her roof for three years when the municipal authorities cleared the squat. Someone bought the building, and it was scheduled for restoration. Alice was offered a job with the municipality; she became an official.

  Yurik also climbed up a notch on the social ladder: he rented an apartment. He and a friend, a thievish guitarist from Peru, split the monthly rent of three hundred dollars for a room in an apartment in which four other seekers after the American experience were living: an Arab girl who had run away from home, two Poles who were working in construction, and a Hindu preacher of some obscure offshoot of the religion. The Arab girl and one of the Poles inhabited the largest room, the Hindu and the other Pole lived in the middle-sized room, and Yurik and the Peruvian were in the smallest room.

  Half a year later, the Peruvian underwent a miraculous change. To the bitter disappointment of the Hindu, he converted to Christianity. He st
opped stealing, considered himself henceforth to be saved, and believed that in the coming months the Lord would summon everyone who had been saved, including himself, and that they would be ushered into the blessed beyond. He called himself a “born-again,” sang hymns, and wrangled with the Hindu in the kitchen, until he set out for California, to meet even more blessed people.

  Now Yurik was the sole inhabitant of the room. The bighearted Martha agreed to sponsor him, forking out the $150 a month that the Peruvian would no longer be contributing. His departure was very timely, because Yurik had found a girlfriend, one Laura Smith, and all his previous casual loves paled in comparison with her. Laura, who was just finishing high school, was the proverbial black sheep of an upstanding American family. They saw each other every day. She liked having a Russian guitarist for a boyfriend, and she went with him to all his gigs, whether in the subway, at clubs, or on street corners—wherever one of the two bands that invited him as a replacement was performing. Laura also had a dream of doing something creative. She wanted to be a belly dancer. She practiced her art constantly: at school, at home, in the subway, and on the street. A small girl, she undulated as she walked, swaying her boyish hips to and fro. She danced and danced …

  Yurik’s room became their love nest. And a messier room the world had never seen. It was a jumble of dirty socks strewn about the floor, sheet music, CDs, cigarette butts, paper plates, and half-filled cans of Coke. An old Hammond organ, left behind by former tenants, stood in the hallway, blocking half the entrance and leaving only a narrow space to squeeze through.

  This was the room where the young couple broadened their knowledge of the world, from time to time ingesting substances that took them to other spaces and realities. But when Laura finished high school, and showed her parents the report card with grades that would never get her admitted into a decent college, she announced to Yurik that he had no prospects, and danced off forever. After leaving Yurik and giving him his first broken heart, she went to California. Then she flew off to the places where fearless and brainless enthusiasts of dangerous journeys fly to.

  Yurik, his injury still fresh in his mind, wrote three songs, which the leader of a well-known band liked so much he added them to the band’s new repertoire. For the first time, Yurik knew what it felt like to be a real songwriter. And he understood that new music arises from new experiences and sensations and troubles. That’s what I was missing, he thought.

  Since he had arrived, he had felt like a part of this city. Music, his music, rang out from every corner, from every nook and cranny. When he went to Long Island to visit Martha and Vitya, which he did rather infrequently, he began missing the city while he was still on the commuter train. The Moscow of his childhood was so remote to him that thinking about it was like looking at a picture through the wrong end of the binoculars. Only Nora’s visits reminded him of his pre-American existence.

  Nora came for Parents’ Weekend, as they called her yearly visits to New York. This visit disrupted Yurik’s plans for acquiring new experiences. One week after his stint at the moving company, instead of the new experiences he desired, he was refreshing his old ones: he was walking through the city with Nora, showing her his favorite back streets and alleys. Nora was walking next to a completely grown-up man, handsome and tall, but not at all like the young people, students and actors, with whom she interacted at home. How was he different? In his absolute casualness, his lack of inhibition, his disarming childishness, and a kind of relaxed freedom.

  No, Nora thought, trying to reason with herself. It’s just that our life together has ended, and he is going his own way. His own way. I can’t get him back. Why should I want to? And who am I to talk? I went off on my own at fifteen.

  Nora had spent the evening before that with Martha and Vitya. The women understood that Yurik was having a hard time; Vitya nodded absently. They made the decision to encourage Yurik to study somewhere, study something. Nora didn’t know whether she had any influence over him anymore; she didn’t know what was happening to him. Was this just the way he was growing up, or was he becoming American?

  In January, Nora had called him from Moscow to wish him a happy birthday. After a short pause, he said, “Mama, I’ll never be a teenager anymore. It’s sad.”

  They talked and walked, walked and talked. They were walking through Chelsea, perhaps the most stable and enduring part of town, the area most impervious to the ravages of time. The old mansions of the English inhabitants, symmetrical buildings with drop-down fire escapes, shabby walls, broken sidewalks.

  “Here is an old Irish bar where they sell Guinness. Here’s the hotel where everyone who was anyone stayed—Jimi Hendrix lived here, and all the major American writers, who were every bit as good as Dickens,” Yurik said proudly, as though he himself were the owner of the hotel. Nora glanced into the entrance to the yard, where a single desiccated tree was standing. An old bench. It seemed as though the old man from the story “The Last Leaf” could have lived here, and in that apartment on the upper floor Jim and Della Dillingham, the main characters of the story “The Gift of the Magi,” might have lived. Nora had so loved these stories as a child that she immediately recognized settings from O. Henry’s stories. Nora stopped. Hell’s Kitchen, the Garment District, the Meatpacking District—it was all here somewhere.

  They stopped in front of a house where Yurik’s teacher and friend Mickey lived, or, rather, was dying, of AIDS. He was quite a famous musician, a singer, who experimented in all kinds of ways with his voice. He had performed with all the jazz greats, but his name was connected for the most part with a marginal, noncommercial musical current—a driving mélange of funk and heavy metal. Now and then, one of the jazz masters, someone so great that Yurik had never seen him up close, would invite Mickey to cut a record.

  Yurik spent a lot of time at Mickey’s, and brought him the drugs he needed to survive. Now Yurik wondered whether he should tell Nora about this extraordinary fellow, about the tragic history of the gay man who had been banished from home at the age of thirteen; who, from being a homeless street kid, had become the owner of an apartment in one of the most famous buildings in Chelsea, which had been mortgaged, and remortgaged … At one time it had been luxurious, but it had fallen into disrepair and become a shelter for homeless cats and his down-and-out friends. No, it probably wasn’t a good idea to tell her.

  They continued walking west and ran into the Hudson. An old pier. Heavy, slow-moving water, boardwalks, abandoned coastal lands, boats lying askew on the shore, seagulls, some warehouses, abandoned factories … Silence. No one else in sight.

  “What’s over there?” Nora pointed to the opposite shore.

  “That’s Hoboken. It’s in another state. I’ve never been there. They say it’s cool.”

  Nora was wondering whether it was time to tell Yurik about the family decision, which was more like an ultimatum, that he needed to study something. When he heard it, he agreed without a second thought—though he did say that what he needed more than anything else was practice, and everything else would follow. They discussed the various possibilities. It ended with an explanation that the point in studying would be to allow him to earn his living not as a furniture mover, but as something for which he needed professional qualifications. Under pressure from the family, he agreed to enter the Sam Ash Music Institute, to train as a sound engineer.

  Nora returned home, leaving Martha with money for the first semester’s tuition.

  After his mother left, Yurik actually did undertake to change his life. He quit the furniture movers, but he didn’t go far. Using his music connections, he got a job with a music producer, an unsuccessful guitarist of about forty, and started transporting equipment, fine-tuning it, and doing repairs on it. In the fall, he did enroll in the sound-engineering institute, which turned out to be a rather sketchy establishment that prepared its graduates to be, at most, salesclerks in music stores. This is what Yurik reported to Nora, when he quit after a month of “studying.�
� At the same time, he left the employ of the producer.

  Meanwhile, Mickey’s health had taken a turn for the worse. His last partner, a very femme young man from Malaysia with an everlasting smile, with whom Mickey had lived for five years, ran off, but not before withdrawing every last penny from Mickey’s bank account. That was when Mickey asked Yurik to move in with him: “Not forever, Yurik; I won’t be around for much longer.”

  Yurik gathered his belongings together and stuffed them into a large plastic garbage bag, grabbed his two guitars, and left his little room behind. He settled down into the dilapidated splendor of Mickey’s house.

  Mickey asked him to play, and he did, but on occasion Mickey would stir his gnarly, peeling fingers and repeat: “If you make a mistake, just keep playing until you get it right. Don’t try to fix the mistake, just wait until your mistakes turn into something interesting.” Sometimes he berated Yurik: “Why do you always say ‘I’m going to, I’m trying to, I want to’? It’s a way of doing nothing. Just do it.”

  Yurik kept thinking that something like this had happened to him before, music and death entwined, but he couldn’t remember when or where. A captivating tremulousness surrounded Mickey like a cloud. With Mickey, Yurik got pretty well hooked on junk; sometimes he couldn’t tell night from day, and sleep abandoned him altogether.

  Throughout the dark, dank winter days, Yurik sat next to the slowly dying man. He dressed his festering feet, fed him, and got hold of the drugs without which Mickey couldn’t have lasted another day. Yurik met with people who had been in debt to Mickey for a long time and pumped them for the money that Mickey was in the habit of lending freely. He became acquainted with dozens of dealers, and rushed around the city to score Mickey’s heroin. The city took care of its sick, and gave away painkillers and sedatives for free, but this didn’t suffice. They suggested that Mickey be admitted to the hospital and then into hospice care, but he refused: he wanted to die in his home. Yurik knew that he’d stay with him till the end. But it didn’t work out that way.