Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  How could they have spent an entire month and a half without books, without music, without any interaction with others besides themselves? Liza mused. A strange rehab program. Some American system from Massachusetts, without medication, relying only on soul-saving conversations with psychologists … Well, as long as it helps. Poor Marfa, and this guy Yurik, too; poor things.

  She liked him. The expression on his face, the way he played …

  He has a happy face. How strange for a drug addict, but he has a happy face. Marfa, on the other hand, has always been inclined to suffering, Liza thought.

  Then the secretary came in and took out the stamps, and the two families gravitated apart, in order not to mingle.

  Fate attempted to unite Yurik and Liza a second time in the fall of 2006. By this time, he had become steeped in the history of jazz, and in music theory that lay beyond the realm of the purely academic. He had lost interest in performing with bands as a guitarist, and had mastered a profession that seemed to fall into his lap: he had become an interpreter. His English didn’t equip him for the task of literary translation, but it was just what was required for film, especially modern American blockbusters, featuring criminals, policemen, gangs, and prostitutes galore. This was the language of the ghetto, the African American and Latino ghettos in particular, a language in which he was absolutely proficient, and which was not taught in foreign-language institutes or universities. Naturally, he was invited to the “AmFest,” the first Russian-American film festival. He dubbed three films a day. The working schedule was frenzied, but he easily kept up with it.

  “The path from my ear to my tongue is short; it bypasses my brain completely,” he said. “My brain gets to take a breather.”

  In the break between screenings in the Horizon Theater, where the entire Moscow elite was gathered, especially the more disheveled variety, Yurik went to drink some coffee and ended up at the table where Liza was sitting. He didn’t recognize her. But Liza recognized him, and hesitated—was it worth reminding him that they had met? She asked him whether he remembered when he and Marfa were released from the clinic together. His cup froze in his hand.

  “Marfa died four years ago. I was at her funeral,” he said.

  “Yes, I arranged the funeral. She was my cousin. It was not the right occasion for getting to know someone, of course. But I don’t remember seeing you there.”

  “That year, three of the people who were in treatment with us died. Marfa, Mustafa, and Slava. There were twenty-five people in the group. Two of them, as far as I know, pulled themselves together and stayed clean; about eight people started shooting up again; one person was killed; and I don’t know anything about the rest of them. During the first year, everyone got together regularly in meetings, but, little by little, everyone stopped going. That’s in keeping with the statistics, actually. I’ve got to go now.”

  It was their second try, and it failed miserably. This rather plump girl, with long hair and a face that looked a bit feral—like that of a fox or a wolf cub—had reminded him of things he wanted to forget. And he promptly forgot about the encounter.

  Liza berated herself—what a little idiot she had been! As if she couldn’t pick a better topic. But she liked Yurik still more than she had at the rehab clinic. There was something indefinable in him that she had never sensed in other people, and the commonalities that other thirty-somethings of her acquaintance shared were completely lacking in him; she couldn’t quite put her finger on what the quality was.

  After Marfa’s death, Liza adopted her nephew, Timosha, as her own. He was born with a cleft palate and lip—or “harelip,” in the vernacular. This birth defect did not affect his mental development, but it certainly made his own life, and that of his relatives, miserable. Liza spent a great deal of time with the boy, arranged for consultations with doctors, paid plastic surgeons, and became very emotionally attached to him. Her aunt was only too grateful that she had taken him under her wing. Liza gave up journalism and went to work in a travel agency, as a full partner. Business started booming, in large part thanks to Liza’s talent for talking on the telephone. In addition to the gift of gab, her affable nature, and her sociability, she had a remarkably pleasant voice.

  In short, everything was going swimmingly. She had more than enough money. She exchanged her small two-room apartment in the back of beyond for a three-room apartment in a stately Stalin-era building in an old Moscow neighborhood. She arranged for Timosha to undergo four surgeries, after which he was as pretty as Marfa had been in childhood, but much smarter. By the time he was six, all the required surgeries had been performed. The surgeons did not rule out the possibility that he might need more cosmetic surgery as an adult, when his face was fully formed. Timosha was a wonderful child—clever, affectionate, with a sound character. His black Asian hair was the only thing he had obviously inherited from his unknown father.

  On the surface, everything was good. But Liza longed for another child. To carry, to bring into the world. Ideally, a girl. If there was one thing lacking in her otherwise prosperous and happy life, it was that she had never been married. She did not experience any great social discomfort because of this. She was surrounded by many unmarried, divorced, lonely people; and there were still more who were tormented by family life, constantly complaining about their husbands, former beauties desperately awaiting lovers. It was a commonly known fact that it was easier to chance it and get married when you are nineteen than to solve this problem at thirty, when you already understand the qualities a real partner should have. By that time, all the men who are worth their salt are already married. The only ones who are not taken are dyed-in-the-wool bachelors who are disinclined to family life, or those who have been rejected despite the meager supply of partners.

  Liza’s last romance, with a married man who was very compatible with her, fizzled out by itself: they went their separate ways. After that, she got involved with Pasha, a young manager at her company—a biker, and a fan of some kind of otherworldly sport that involved scaling roofs. Liza became pregnant from him. Contrary to expectation, he was delighted. He immediately proposed to her, and in the most traditional form—with a bouquet of flowers and a ring in a red box. Liza was deeply touched, accepted the ring—but didn’t marry him.

  The next attempt by fate to unite Liza and Yurik was also very clumsy. Liza was in the final stages of her pregnancy. They met at her travel agency by the Nikitsky Gates, where Yurik had come with Nora to buy a package deal to Croatia or Montenegro. Nora had suddenly been seized by the idea of such a trip, and within fifteen minutes she and her son were stopping by the nearest travel agency.

  Liza was sitting at her desk, talking on the telephone. She waved to them and said, holding her hand over the receiver, “I’ll be with you in just a moment.”

  A year had passed since their last meeting at the film festival, and this time Yurik recognized her. By her voice—rather low and husky, with a marvelous timbre.

  Liza advised them not to buy a package deal. She offered to book them a hotel in Dubrovnik and suggested they buy plane tickets instead. From Dubrovnik they could take a trip to Montenegro for a day or two, by bus. It was cheaper, and they wouldn’t feel so constrained. Nora laughed: “But what about your premium? I don’t quite understand.”

  Liza laughed, too, and said, “I don’t always understand myself. But I think you’ll like this option better.”

  She drummed on her large belly with her long fingers like a trained hare in a circus, and booked the hotel for Nora.

  After that, they didn’t see each other again for two years. Both of them were busy with their own affairs. Liza had a baby—a little girl she had named Olga. Timosha was happy. Liza could never have imagined the brotherly tenderness and delight that Timosha felt for his newborn sister. During Liza’s pregnancy, Pasha helped her a great deal. Now powerful paternal emotions had been awakened in him, and he moved in with her. It was a wonder how a fellow who was fairly unsophisticated, fairly rough ar
ound the edges, could be capable of so much tenderness and awe. After a month, when Liza was ready to hire a nanny for the children and go back to work, Pasha implored her to let him beg off work for good and stay home with the children. Timosha and Pasha had already formed a close bond. Liza decided to try it out. When Pasha had left his job and was staying home to take care of the children, Liza spent most of her time in the travel bureau; during her absence, the business had begun to go to rack and ruin. She threw all her energy into picking it up off the ground again.

  Pasha, with just as much enthusiasm, threw himself into raising the children. They rented a dacha for the summer, and he took care of the little ones. His mother, who in the beginning had greeted Liza with hostility, gradually melted. Of course, Liza was too old for him—eight years his senior—but when all was said and done, she was without peer.

  Pasha had grown up without a father, and family life, as he was now experiencing it, was very much to his liking. He liked Liza, too. None of his biker buddies had ever had such a remarkable woman—beautiful, calm, educated, and practical. Pasha was used to working off his emotions by driving fast and scaling roofs. Though he wasn’t given to strong passions, he valued having a good relationship. In short, everything was as fine as it could be. Liza came to the dacha on Friday evening and stayed until Tuesday morning, sometimes Wednesday. In this way, she managed to keep the business going, and the children were completely happy.

  Still, summer was high season for the travel bureau, and Liza couldn’t abandon the office altogether. Whenever she wasn’t there, slips and blunders tended to happen. On a Tuesday in August, Liza was driving out of the entranceway of a residential building next to her office, where she parked her car, when she saw Yurik standing there with two guitars, trying to hitch a ride with a chance passerby. Stopping in this spot, in front of an entranceway on Novy Arbat, was forbidden, and he could have stood there for a long time without having any luck. Liza drove up to him and shouted: “Quick, get in!”

  Yurik hopped into the car, and only recognized Liza when he was already sitting next to her. This was fate’s fifth try, if one counted Marfa’s funeral, where it was only by chance that they had not run into each other. But this didn’t occur to Yurik. Liza was the one who counted.

  “Where are we going?”

  Yurik named the address of a club that was popular among young people.

  “Do you have a gig?”

  “Something like that. I’m giving a lecture,” he said, smiling. “A lecture series. About the history of jazz. Tonight is the first one. I have no idea how it will turn out.”

  “May I stay and listen?”

  “Sure. That would be great. I’m not even sure if anyone will show up. So I’ll at least have an audience of one.”

  There were about twenty people in the audience. Yurik sat at the head of a long table, assembled out of eight small ones, and asked Liza to sit opposite him. He knew from his experience in music that when you don’t know the public, it’s good to find someone in the crowd to perform for. He began the conversation about jazz like a good teacher showing the first letters to a group of first-graders—giving them a sense of discovery, something happening before their very eyes.

  “Today we’re not yet going to talk about jazz, the parts of which came together during the course of twenty or thirty years. We’re going to talk about the musical realities that existed before it, that had always been there, that flowed together and spurred the development of a single huge current that falls under the general moniker ‘jazz.’”

  He began to talk and to demonstrate to Liza all kinds of things she had never known before. He played the guitar, and tapped out rhythms on a small drum, and sometimes sang a musical phrase or two. He played the blues, the music of the American slaves, and excused himself for the banality he couldn’t avoid when he told the audience the already classic definition of the blues—“The blues ain’t nothin’ but a good man feelin’ bad,” in the words of Leon Redbone. He played and showed and sang lines in English, then translated them, then sang some more. Then he came to the subject of black gospel music, which had its roots in the singing of praise songs, of the Psalms, and of what came to be known as “spirituals.” After this, he interrupted himself, saying that he had gotten carried away and hadn’t stuck to the plan of his lecture at all, but that he would continue the lecture at exactly this point in a week. In parting, he played the most popular and well-known spiritual in the world, “Go Down, Moses.”

  After the lecture, Yurik went up to Liza, who was clearly moved, and thanked her for being there so he could talk “to her” during the presentation, because her face was so intelligent, and also empathic.

  “I don’t think we say that in Russian—an ‘empathic face,’ but I like it. It was a wonderful lecture. Incredible!” And Yurik took Liza by the hand and they went to the bar, where they drank a glass of orange juice each, because they both had their own reasons for avoiding alcohol.

  Then they got into the car and left. Each of them was thinking at that moment: Where are we going?

  And they simultaneously answered the question. Liza said, “Your place?” Yurik said, “My place?” And they went back to Nikitsky Boulevard. Nora, very conveniently, was in Chelyabinsk, or Perm …

  The windows of the old apartment building on Nikitsky Boulevard looked out on Liza’s office, if rather obliquely. Yurik’s family had lived here for four generations already, more than one hundred years. This apartment remembered the blind precentor, his unhappy wife, the unhappy marriage between Amalia and Genrikh, the happy love of Amalia and Andrei Ivanovich, Vitya and his school notebook with literature notes, and Nora and Tengiz, who had been locked in a lovers’ struggle for the better part of their lives. The apartment had accepted them all and accommodated them graciously. It was good here, and no ghosts haunted the premises.

  A long conjugal life lay in store for Yurik and Liza, which they both immediately sensed. It was foolish to ask which was more important, the spirit or the flesh—and, indeed, it never occurred to them to ask that question. Their intimacy was full and boundless, a kind rarely encountered in anyone’s life.

  They took a hot shower together. Yurik admired Liza, and Liza Yurik, as if they were seeing with the eyes of Adam and Eve in the garden, who had just come to know … what was it again? They were both about the same height. He was skinny, his shoulders sloped, and his legs were slightly bowed. She was fleshy by today’s standards, with breasts that sagged slightly under their own generous weight, and curvy hips somewhat resembling jodhpurs. In the thick, steamy heat, their bodies turned pink, and the shower stand rose up between them like the Biblical Tree of Life.

  Then they sat in the kitchen, eating red apples. There was no other food in the house. Liza bit off an entire half of a small apple and said, “I like green apples best, though red ones will do.”

  “I’ll have to disappoint you. It’s unlikely I’ll be able to buy you green ones. I’m color-blind.”

  “No matter. I can buy as many as I need for myself.”

  He was thirty-four, and she was thirty-two. They had both been in love before, had had relationships, both happy and unhappy; but both of them had the same feeling, that the past had receded and was no longer significant. They were like the only two people in the world. They didn’t know each other well yet, but the most meaningful thing was resolved without words. She accepted his past as a drug addict—although there are no former drug addicts or KGB agents, as they say. She accepted the artistic chaos of his life and his rejection of that stability that Liza herself valued and maintained. And he accepted her—with her children, her family problems, Pasha and his indeterminate status in her life, her Aunt Rita, and the travel bureau.

  43

  Family Secrets

  (1936–1937)

  “A marriage will not survive on postage stamps alone. Come!” Jacob had written to Marusya. He was probably right. During his six years of exile, she came to see him only once, at the beg
inning of his ordeal, in Stalingrad. That was in 1932. His second reunion with his wife took place at the train station in Moscow just over two years later. This time, he was on his way from the Stalingrad prison to Novosibirsk, via Moscow. His sister and her husband had come to see him off, too, but they had presented no obstacle to renewed declarations of love. Jacob had only thirty minutes in which to change trains. Jacob and Marusya had to run from the Kazan station to the Kursk station, and talk in the presence of an elderly, weary captain of the local Ministry of State Security, who issued Jacob his ticket to Novosibirsk. One of the dubious privileges of exiles and prisoners was a free ticket from their place of residence to the destination where they would serve their term. The words Jacob and Marusya exchanged in haste, literally on the run, were insignificant, but the eye saw more than words could say. Marusya looked tired and depressed. She had dark circles under her eyes, and her usual leanness—she always complained of losing weight—inspired in Jacob a sense of guilt for inadvertently causing his wife to suffer.

  It wasn’t only these visible signs of suffering that oppressed Jacob. He felt much more deeply Marusya’s disappointment—in him, her husband, who had promised her so much in life and who had constantly let her down. She looked very unhappy. The differences in their inward dispositions were clearly manifested here. To be happy, Marusya needed constant external signs of success and recognition. When Marusya was able to admire Jacob, to be confident in their brilliant future together, her own strength was amplified. But her strong, passionate temperament went hand in hand with an inner fragility and weakness, and the vividness of her desires with volatility. Her soul balked when it had to cope with the blows that life dealt. She grumbled, blamed the circumstances, and fell into despondency.