Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  The next day, Nora and Tengiz went to buy tickets. They bought a new one for Yurik, but Nora’s return ticket was, just by chance, for that very date. A hundred-dollar fee allowed them to change the date on Tengiz’s ticket so he would be on the same flight.

  Nora asked Yurik to come over on the evening before the flight. Marina’s nerves were so strained that she took the children and went to stay with a friend in Tarrytown. Yurik didn’t show up that evening. Nora didn’t sleep the whole night. She called Yurik every half hour at what she thought was his apartment—Tom Drew’s, that is. Tom first told her that Yurik wasn’t there, and then stopped answering the phone. If he knew where to look, he would have tried to find him, but no one knew. Yurik himself might not have known where he was.

  To make it to JFK on time, they would have to leave home at four o’clock in the afternoon. Tengiz had hardly slept all night, either. He was gloomy and depressed, and went to take a walk in Central Park. He said he’d be home by two.

  Nora stayed behind alone. She had never in her life felt so desperate and helpless. She counted her money—$830. It was clear that they’d have to rebook their existing tickets, because there wasn’t enough money to buy new ones. She wondered how much Tengiz had on him. It would hardly be possible for them to buy three new tickets. They could go to the Aeroflot office and try to exchange them. But something stopped her—the faint hope that Yurik would show up in time. She wandered around the empty apartment. She found a bottle of whiskey in the kitchen cupboard, poured herself a shot, and drank it down. Vile stuff. But she immediately felt somewhat better, though not at all relaxed. She looked at the clock: ten in the morning. They still had six hours before they needed to leave the house for the airport.

  She lay on the couch in the living room. One wall was covered with Marina’s paintings, which had a tinge of the screams and anguish of expressionism. Marina had graduated from the Stroganovsky Institute of Industrial Art, but soon thereafter immigrated to the United States when her career in Russia was just getting under way. She had been one of the most promising students in her graduating class, but things didn’t work out for her in America. Immigrants always land on the lowest rung of the social ladder, from which they need to start to work their way up again. Nora closed her eyes. Marina’s pictures, which loomed before her, weren’t making her feel any better.

  Tengiz made his way to Columbus Circle and then into Central Park. He had no idea how enormous it was—this piece of Manhattan, with its granite boulders heaving up from the ground, overhangs, bare trees, snowy expanses, and frozen puddles. It was cold and sunny. The paths were peopled with multitudes of sweaty joggers, some with headphones and some without, bicyclists, and even horseback riders. No, Tengiz did not like America, although the park was wonderful. Something prevented him from taking a shine to it. Maybe, despite all its charms, it was still too big, too simple, too indifferent, this America; and our boy was being stalked by death here …

  He went down to the big lake. It glittered with a fresh layer of ice. He sat down on a bench and felt as cold as the devil on a church pew. He lit up a cigarette. The bench was in a secluded nook, away from the runners and the walkers. Two black fellows were sitting on another bench not far away, one of them with a guitar. He was strumming quietly. A third fellow joined them—a young white man. It was Yurik. They shook hands, and exchanged something in the process. Holy shit, heroin! Of course, it was heroin. Tengiz was afraid he might scare them, but he couldn’t let Yurik get away. So he started to sing. He sang a Georgian folk song at the top of his lungs. Yurik turned around and saw him, and his face lit up. He said goodbye to the others, who melted into the bushes immediately. Tengiz hugged Yurik, and they clapped each other on the back. Without withdrawing his hand from Yurik’s shoulder, Tengiz announced joyously, “Let’s go home, kid! We’ve got a plane to catch.”

  “What do you mean, Tengiz? I thought it was tomorrow.”

  “Why tomorrow? Tomorrow’s today. Besides, what difference does it make? Let’s go.”

  “Hold on, I have to collect my things, my guitar.” Yurik tried to wriggle out from under Tengiz’s grasp.

  “What things, buddy?” Tengiz put on his most winning Georgian accent, the one he used for telling jokes. “What do you need that stuff for? An old guitar? Come on, we’ll buy you a new one, and go to the airport.”

  Buying a new guitar was a dream Yurik had long cherished. He had sold his favorite instrument dirt-cheap several months before to a dealer, and his only other guitar wasn’t worth beans. “Let’s see. I know of this place with good prices, but it’s sort of far away. Let’s go to the Guitar Center; maybe we’ll find one there.”

  By two o’clock, Tengiz, Yurik, and the new guitar all arrived at Marina’s apartment.

  Nora had already called all the ticket offices and agreed with one of the Aeroflot employees to rebook the tickets at the airport. She would pay a fee for these services to one Tamara Alexandrovna, who would meet her at the JFK entrance. How convenient it is to be Russian sometimes, Nora thought. Our bribery network functions the world over. The last vestiges of Nora’s anxiety evaporated when she saw her men standing in the doorway. “Oh, Tengiz…” was all she managed to say. Yurik sat down in a chair and began to tune the guitar, as if nothing at all had happened.

  Before leaving the house, Nora said something that mothers rarely have occasion to say to their sons: “Yurik, you do understand that we’re going without heroin, don’t you?”

  “But I’ll go into withdrawal.”

  “I know. So go to the bathroom and shoot up one last time.”

  But he shook his head and said he didn’t need to yet. He would take his last fix at the airport, just before they took off.

  “Are you crazy? What if they catch you?”

  “Mama, I know what I’m doing. I have it hidden in my sock. And I’ll already be clean when we board the plane.”

  Nora was the one losing it, not Yurik. Tengiz gripped her by the shoulder and said, “Be quiet.”

  They were traveling lightly—Nora with a small suitcase, Tengiz with a backpack, and Yurik with the guitar, with which he quietly carried on a conversation. Nora felt they had already made it to the last leg of their journey, but another surprise was waiting for them at the entrance to the airport. The baggage check took place not in the terminal, as she had come to expect, but right at the entrance. There were two policemen with a sniffer dog standing right behind the baggage conveyor belt. The dog wasn’t a ferocious German shepherd, but a friendly setter that she immediately wanted to pet.

  They stopped.

  “Yurik, go outside and throw your junk away, into the first garbage can you find,” Nora said quietly.

  “I can’t. I’ll go into withdrawal in two hours if I do. You have no idea what it’s like,” Yurik said morosely.

  “Have you lost your mind? Toss it out,” Tengiz ordered sharply, the first time in all these days, and perhaps in their whole life together, that he spoke in such a tone.

  Yurik’s lips trembled, the corners of his mouth drew downward, and Nora understood that it was not a twenty-five-year-old man standing before her, but a fifteen-year-old boy who was gripped with fear. She hugged him tight, and whispered in his ear, “Don’t be afraid. I have a sedative with me that would put an elephant to sleep. If you take it, you won’t wake up for nine hours. Come on, throw the stuff away.”

  “You don’t understand—once the withdrawal pains start, there’s no way to stop them.”

  While they were negotiating, the dog fixed his intelligent eyes on his master and growled softly: he needed to relieve himself. The policeman with the dog left. Tengiz placed his things on the conveyor belt. Yurik was reluctant to part with the guitar and didn’t want to put it under the X-ray, but he finally did. Nora thought again—fifteen years old, fourteen years old … Vitya, Vitya … The X-ray didn’t reveal anything dangerous, and they walked briskly toward the terminal.

  They had a bit of time for a snack, and
sat down at a table.

  “Well, it’s time. Go to the bathroom and take what you’ve prepared,” Nora said. And she thought, It’s like a bad dream. Is this really happening to me? Like some B-movie …

  “You know, I don’t think I need to yet. I’ll know when it’s time. I’m okay for now.”

  They ate some sort of rubbery salad in a little plastic trough, and some plastic bread, and drank some American coffee that resembled dishwater in a paper cup. Nora recalled how she had liked all of this the first time she visited America. Where have we ended up as a result? This hasty, catastrophic departure from America, and his departure from Moscow to America nine years earlier, suddenly seemed to blend into a single event—damn, it was all her own doing. It’s because she was so headstrong, it’s because she wanted to take life into her own hands and mold it, organize the process to meet her needs and demands, to stage her own play …

  A voice announced that their plane was boarding. They entered the plane, and there were no more checks. The plane was enormous and half empty. They sat down in the middle row—Yurik sitting between Tengiz and Nora. The plane took off. Nora, leaning over Yurik, took Tengiz’s hand and kissed it. Tengiz didn’t take it away, and even held it still for a moment; then he pulled her nose sharply … She laughed. A director indeed. He couldn’t stand pathos. But she knew that, without Tengiz, she would never have been able to save Yurik.

  It seemed to her that the worst was already behind them, and she fell asleep even before the plane finished its ascent.

  An hour later, Yurik poked her in the side: “Now, Mama.” She let him go, and he went to the bathroom. Five minutes later, there was an announcement that they had encountered some turbulence, and they requested passengers to stay seated and to fasten their seat belts again. The plane did begin to rock and shudder. Nora did, too—for her own reasons. Fifteen minutes later, Nora began to feel alarmed that Yurik was taking so long in the bathroom. Ten minutes later, she got up and went to the bathroom, then started to pound on the door, calling: “Yurik! Yurik!”

  Silence … At that moment, Nora was gripped by panic. She banged on the door. A moment later, she heard him say: “Just a minute…”

  He emerged, soaking wet from head to toe, as white as a sheet, enormous black eyes staring out—his pupils were so enlarged that there was no blue around them.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. I’m okay. The plane was shaking so hard it knocked the syringe out of my hand and the vein burst. Blood was spurting everywhere. I washed everything, and I had to rinse my clothes. I was covered with blood.”

  Much later, after a year or two, Yurik told his mother the details of what had happened, which she would otherwise never have known. “My brain had already switched off, and I didn’t know what I was doing, Nora. I didn’t have just one fix—I had four. I wanted to get good and high. If it hadn’t been for that turbulence, I wouldn’t have made it to Moscow alive.”

  He told her many things about his tenure in America, but the primary account of that experience was a thick notebook that he had filled almost completely during his six weeks in a clinic and then put away in his desk. Nora had opened it and wanted to read it, but she couldn’t make out a single word. The handwriting was the same childish, uneven, crooked scrawl he had always written. This was part of the therapy: the patient had to disgorge everything he remembered about his past of drug addiction, not only in conversation with the psychologist, but also in written form. He had to reconstruct the whole history of his lethal experience. It was a text that had to be written and then excised from his life. Nora leafed through the notebook and put it back in its place—as part of the family archive.

  40

  From the Willow Chest—Biysk

  Jacob’s Letters

  (1934–1936)

  BARABINSK STATION–MOSCOW JACOB TO MARUSYA

  (En route to Novosibirsk)

  APRIL 3, 1934

  Dear Marusya! I’m not sure this note will reach you. A good man I met along the way promised to send it. For the last four days and nights, I have been full of the memories of our brief Moscow reunion—after two and a half years! I cannot begin to describe to you the joy it gave me—seeing your lovely but exhausted face—and how it grieved me to feel the estrangement and tension that emanates from you now. I will never forget our meeting in Moscow—I’ll remember it till the very last. There was much I could not say to you in front of other people. They arrested and took away six of us, one of whom turned out to be a provocateur—Dr. Efim Goldberg, a convict like the rest. Half a year in a Stalingrad prison, heavy interrogation. The charge was anti-Soviet conspiracy. They accused me of being the most active member of a Trotsky-inspired anti-Soviet gang. This despite my lifelong aversion to Trotsky! I was sentenced to three years in exile by the Special Council—the most lenient sentence possible.

  During this half year, I realized how misguided we have been, what kinds of illusions we have cherished. It seems to me I can put my finger on the very places out of which the illusions grew, the places where departures from the truth began. All of us will have to acknowledge what has been, and this realization will be the only thing that remains.

  My dearest wife, the mistake in the Bible was that Eve was not made from Adam’s rib, but that she was cut out of his heart. I feel this place in my heart physically. I am grateful to fate for you. Please forgive me for all the difficulties I have involuntarily caused the people I most love in the world—you and Genrikh.

  Jacob

  BIYSK–MOSCOW JACOB TO MARUSYA

  JUNE 19, 1934

  My dear, marvelous, TRUEST (as you signed your letter) friend! Today I celebrate, because I received the first letter from all of you (express mail). It is the first letter I am able to read alone, without intermediary readers, in all these months. I’ll try to write about everything in as much detail as possible, as you request.

  After Moscow, the second half of the journey began. It was terribly sad to leave. My need to be with you had never felt so deep. Along the way to Novosibirsk, I read Gorky, partook of the delicious provisions you brought for me, and at the same time experienced conflicting feelings—sorrow for those I had left behind at the station, pleasure in my state of semi-freedom, the unknown future that beckons, and thirst, an enormous thirst for labor. We arrived in Novosibirsk in the evening. Although I was prepared for it, all the same I felt a strong sense of disappointment and deep sadness: it’s like a repeat of Stalingrad, but a worse version of it. The worst thing of all is the dearth of books and cultured people. It was just by chance I had the book by Gorky, which I reread, but I realized I just couldn’t read it a third time. During the hour of labor, I made a chessboard and pieces and played a game against myself. My only comfort is eating one piece of chocolate every evening from Eva’s box. As they say, sweetness overcomes great sorrow.

  I spent eight days in Novosibirsk. Only one interesting thing happened during this time—I met a young engineer, a former Komsomol member. He turned out to be a first-class chess player. I lost five games to him in record time, but there was compensation. For the first time in my life, I played a “blind game”—that is, looking at an empty board, with no pieces, you both call out your moves and write them down. I thought I wouldn’t be able to play half the game. Imagine my surprise when it turned out I won! If Genrikh is interested, I can send him the move list with the moves explained.

  In Novosibirsk, they gave me a choice of several places to settle, and I randomly picked Biysk. I arrived here at twelve midnight. After going through all the formalities, I walked along the sleeping streets to a hotel, which had received notice of my arrival by telephone from my supervising officer.

  Today I’m sitting at work in the Fuel Plant, where I began work by writing a personal letter to you. I’ll get three hundred rubles; but instead of distributing bread ration cards, they give you vague promises. Though they do sell commercial bread here, the lines are terribly long; the wait is too long for a solita
ry individual. I don’t consider this work to be real work: it has nothing to do with my basic vision or goal.

  Planning. En route from Novosibirsk to Biysk on the train, I thought for a long time about how to regulate my life so that I don’t get sidetracked, but establish continuity with my former work in economics. I was a proponent of the idea of monographic research in industry. Now I must apply this idea to the regional economy. It is mandatory that I carry out economic research on “the Biysk region and its economy.” In order to do this, I’ll have to work in the Regional Planning Office. As soon as I arrived, I went there. I was received well, but the next day it became known that the budget is already exhausted and they can’t take on a new person. I was doubly discouraged, since it seemed my primary goal was thwarted. I had to take another job; but not only did I refuse to give up on my plan, I actively started carrying it out. The library and museum are good here. In the Regional Planning Office, we agreed that I would transfer there in a few months. Now all my efforts are directed toward finding a room. There’s a little hovel, and if nothing better turns up tomorrow, I’ll have to move into it temporarily, because the tourist hostel has eaten up all my finances.

  My work on the book is fascinating. I’m already contemplating with pleasure the different parts or phases of the work. I think that it will be unique in economic literature, something between economic research and a feature story or essay.

  Biysk is a small town. The Siberian Biya River is cold, and the waters are ample. It is probable that there are few cultured people here. I am expecting solitude and intensive work. There are occasional tourists. I play the piano in the tourist hostel, and remember my entire repertoire. The city is built on a plain. The high Altai Mountains are nearby, which is where the tourists go. But the Biysk region itself is not mountainous—it’s flat—and it is not a very rich subject for an economic monograph. However, the scantier the subject matter, the easier it is to expand it in different directions. It must be exhaustive—that is my task. I have about six to eight months to complete it.