Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  “I didn’t understand the reference,” Nora whispered to Yurik. “Translation, please.”

  He translated.

  The more agitated Grisha became, the calmer and merrier Vitya looked.

  “Grisha, I did read that text you’re talking about. A long time ago. My wife, Martha, wanted very much for us to get married. I must admit, to this day I don’t understand why it was so important to her. I assumed that it meant putting on a black suit and tie and going to her favorite church, and losing a day’s work for going through the ceremony. But that’s not how it worked out. The priest demanded that I go to catechism classes before we got married. In short, it took loads of time, and I read the Bible. Perhaps for the Hebrews it was the Divine Text, but it seems to me to be a completely archaic document in the present world. Too much cruelty, too much illogic, too many discrepancies and contradictions. It’s not just by chance that for three thousand years Jews have been writing commentaries, interpreting and reinterpreting texts, and turning them inside out, trying to get rid of these contradictions. It seems to me that the proverbial inclination of Jews to scholarship derives precisely from this ancient nitpicking.”

  “You don’t know how to read it,” Grisha bellowed. “Jews are the models or exemplars of the human being. As with any exemplars, there were simplifications. All people should, in a sense, strive to become Jews. Adam Kadmon, the original, the first, human being, was the spiritual appearance or manifestation of the human essence, the proto-image of the spiritual and material world. But today we understand that ‘spiritual’ is a synonym for ‘informational.’ And the human being is created, according to Rabbi Akiva (and I fully agree with him), in the image of Adam Kadmon. In other words, this was the model that was realized in the framework of the Creation.”

  “Mama, I don’t think I understand any of this all of a sudden,” Yurik whispered to Nora.

  “It is very interesting, nonetheless,” Nora said.

  “That’s true,” Yurik agreed.

  They sat there quietly, trying to follow the intellectual theater that was being played out before them by these two former schoolboys who didn’t seem to have grown up yet, though they were both already sixty. However surprising, Vitya seemed to be the older and more mature of the two.

  Nora caught herself thinking that she actually liked Vitya. She had never liked him before, but now she did. He displayed a natural reserve, an economy with words, even a gentle tact in coping with Grisha’s verbal onslaughts.

  It’s strange, but I never thought about it before, Nora thought. We really have ended up in a completely different world. Vitya is probably right—yes, they both are. Humanity has crossed some invisible boundary that the majority of people simply aren’t aware of. We were taught that there is a material world, that the human being is the crown of Creation; but he’s not a crown, not a ruler—he’s a child. A child of nature. Two hundred years ago, the theory of evolution was a scandalous idea. Today the human being has not only discovered the mechanics behind it, but has himself become not only its product, but its engineer. What a good thing it was that they told me this; I would never have suspected it myself. And how great—and what a coincidence—that Vitya is the father of my child. It might have been better if it had been Tengiz; but nature saw the matter differently.

  Grisha still argued with Vitya for a long time. Yurik ran off to attend to his own affairs. Nora was tired of their conversation and stopped trying to understand it. Martha was dozing in an armchair; she should put her to bed.

  Nora opened her appointment book. There was a to-do list for the week—go to Varvara Vasilievna’s apartment with Vitya and Yurik to find out whether there was a will, meet with a lawyer, go to the bank to pay the bills—so that she could mark it all as finished and get on with her own life.

  47

  Theater of Shadows

  (2010)

  It was the same disease that killed Amalia. Many years had passed since her death, and although they had not found a cure, they had learned how to prolong life. Sometimes the patient lived long enough to die of another illness, with a more pleasant name, or even of old age.

  Nora had already survived Amalia by twenty-odd years. Each time she celebrated another birthday, she remembered to add another year to that number. In the sixty-eighth year of Nora’s life, the defect, hidden away in some gene, handed down to her from her mother, manifested, and the diagnosis was the same. Ironically enough, the Theater Workers Polyclinic, which was renowned for its otolaryngology and its phoniatrics departments, but not for its oncology, managed nonetheless to diagnose Nora’s illness at a fairly early stage. They sent off a urine sample to be tested, found some sort of protein, and immediately got on the ball. She underwent the usual course of treatment, and after a year and a half the quality of her blood was restored. They discharged her and recommended regular checkups, blood tests, and testing for markers of the cancer cells.

  After six months of treatment, Nora had become reconciled to the idea of her untimely death. Now that she had received a respite for an indefinite period, she experienced an unprecedented surge of vitality. All her senses were sharply honed. Life, which she had never before experienced as a gift, now became a moment-by-moment celebration. Each tiny detail, all the inconsequential trifles, seemed to glow from within and afford her delight—her morning cup of coffee, water spurting out in the shower in a powerful stream, a line drawn in pencil across a piece of paper, a glimpse of a clump of grass working its way out from under a rock. Music that was once merely pleasant became an event, as though she were having a personal conversation with Bach or Beethoven. Trivial things that had once annoyed her—banal talk, foolish disputes—now ceased to bother her at all.

  She felt sheer joy at living, with an intensity that had suddenly increased a thousandfold. Even telephone conversations that had once distracted her, which she had felt to be a waste of time, gave her pleasure—the voices of friends, not necessarily terribly close ones, suddenly surfaced out of the distant past: a classmate she had nearly forgotten; a dressmaker from the sewing workshop of a Siberian theater in which she had staged a play twenty years before; a call out of the blue from Nikita Tregubsky, her first devastating heartthrob in the eighth grade … What did he want? He was visiting from Canada, where he had been living for a long time, and wanted to see his old friends. He realized that, more than anyone else, he wanted to see Nora. Funny, absurd, and completely unnecessary. David, a Georgian actor who had left Moscow to settle back in his historical homeland, called from Tbilisi, and asked her to come for a visit.

  “I’ll think about it,” Nora said. “Leave me your number.”

  She mulled it over for a while. Even before the phone call, she had been considering some sort of journey. A trip to Altai, or to Perm, perhaps to Irkutsk—to the cities where she had once worked. Tbilisi was the one place she hadn’t considered. The shadow of Tengiz, which had almost left her, seemed to stir again and come to life in the corners of her apartment. They hadn’t seen each other for ten years. He made the decision, and they parted. She hadn’t heard anything about him in a long while. She had read that he was staging productions in France and in Portugal, that he had received awards at various festivals, that he was teaching. Then he returned to Georgia, and the notices about him in theater publications ceased. He was fifteen years older than Nora. Eighty-three? Eighty-four? Is he even alive? Oh, what the hell, I’m going anyway, Nora decided. I’ve always loved traveling.

  The war with Georgia had already become chronic. Everyone was used to it, the way one gets used to bad weather. The weather was, however, glorious. It was April, replete with all its promise. There were direct flights to Tbilisi about once a week. Nora bought a two-way ticket; she would spend a week there. As someone who was used to traveling on business trips, she packed her suitcase deftly, grabbed a book of reminiscences about Tusya (written by her students after her death), bought some chocolates to give as gifts, and flew off, with a long-forgotten feeling of e
ase and lightness, a readiness to encounter both difficulty and adventure.

  The airplane landed. The design of the airport had changed, but the people looked the same. Even the customs officials smiled. The crowd waiting in the arrivals area was a sea of black headscarves on Caucasian widows and the ageless, ubiquitous flat black caps of the menfolk. David, now bald but still very youthful, stood just to the side, holding three blue irises for her. They embraced. He took her to the empty apartment of his aunt, who had also left on a trip. There was a loaf of bread wrapped in a napkin, a piece of Sulguni cheese, and a bowl full of raisins. There was also a bottle of wine. It was already late in the evening.

  “I’ll come by tomorrow morning, and we’ll go for a walk,” David said.

  It was a marvelous week. David was unemployed, and lived alone. Nora had never figured out exactly how he was able to make a living. He seemed to earn something from moonlighting as a gypsy cab driver in his old Toyota. In any case, he had long ago parted ways with the theater. On the first day, they went up Mount Mtatsminda, a de rigueur destination for tourists. They walked along its slopes, scattered with primroses, white and yellow. The buds on the trees were ripe to bursting, and on the highest sun-drenched spots the trees were already covered in a light-green lacy mist of newly opened leaves. A tree she couldn’t identify, which had taken the lead, was already shedding sweetly scented blossoms. David was the ideal guide for Nora. He hardly spoke, but when Nora asked him a question, the answer came, in words both spare and precise. They descended, not by the lift, but on foot, and then stopped by the ancient Church of Mamadaviti.

  It was a wonder to behold—a clean, beautiful space, with old brickwork, perfect and even, and just as perfectly imperfect monuments and statues in the necropolis—Vazha-Pshavela, Sergo Zakariadze, and Ekaterina “Keke” Geladze Dzhugashvili, Stalin’s mother. The finest monument was the one dedicated to Kote Marjanishvili. His grave resembled a round, stagelike platform. If only they hadn’t added the sculpted bust … Her grandmother Marusya had worked in his theater troupe in Moscow for a time, if Nora remembered correctly. A nice little tie with the past. But it was remarkable—such a dynamic, theatrical, artistic people—and such dreary Socialist Realism, pathetic and simplistic, against the background of the ancient, impeccable architecture. But what a tender, somehow weightless land it was—the green veil of emerging leaves, the scent of living soil, currents of thick, wine-laden air ascending the slopes, everything growing clean and pure, dissolving in light. How good it must be for a Caucasian to be living in his own land, in a world of mountains and valleys …

  For three days, they walked through the sparsely populated and silently hospitable city. Then David said that the next place they must visit was the David Gareja Monastery in the desert, but he had no money for gas.

  “The gasoline is on me,” Nora said, and thought: Poor guy, it’s clear he’s hard up, or he never would have mentioned it.

  Nora had never heard anything about a monastery in the desert, but in the morning, David came to pick her up, and they set off. They drove for quite a while. The view of the landscape from the window was captivating. Such a small and diverse country: mountains, foothills, vineyards, villages, but no desert that she could see. They left the car in a parking lot near the monastery. They walked a bit, then came upon scattered buildings, the monastery grounds. The monastery itself, built upon cliffs, had been founded in the sixth century by Syrian monks. Carved in the mountainside were dozens of caves that had been occupied by the early Christian hermit-monks who had arrived from the East, from Syria, in the sixth century. Here was one more page of a great culture that she had not yet come into contact with. And time was so short. It’s all because my life was lived entirely through the theater, Nora thought. I have missed so much. And that door does not allow you entry everywhere. A great deal remains sealed off.

  First they stopped in the monastery shop—paper icons, crosses, tourist trappings and trinkets. David bought two bottles of local wine. They glanced into the monastery itself, then began walking up a path. A beautiful, somewhat circumscribed vista opened up to them. There was a valley that extended nearly to the horizon. A desert. But in April it was green, carpeted with tiny, nearly invisible blooms. Mountains loomed blue on the horizon. Strange, alien, tantalizing.

  “This is the border with Azerbaijan. The desert is Azerbaijan. And those mountains are already Armenia,” David said, gesturing vaguely with his hand.

  From this vantage point, one could see churches in varying states of disrepair, caves here and there …

  When they were walking back from the monastery to the parking lot, they heard singing in the church. Nora stopped. The singing was different from what she was used to hearing in Russian churches. She recalled the folk ensemble that she had worked with long ago for a time. This was something absolutely different, completely different …

  They returned to Tbilisi toward evening. She still had one more day left, and David said he planned to take her to a rather distant village, toward the region of South Ossetia. It was the site of a fairly recent border skirmish, a military confrontation between Russia and Georgia. But it also held a working monastery, with a school; and there was an auditorium in which theater productions were often staged. Tengiz was the director of the theater. Excellent! She had not made a single move toward him of her own volition. The matter had arranged itself. She nodded: We’re going!

  The next morning, they set out again—and again she fell under the spell of the roads, the landscapes, the motion itself. They drove slowly. The road was uneven and pitted, and they were in no hurry to get to their destination. They had left early enough to have time to spare. Mountains, plains, vineyards. Half-ruined villages—signs of the recent war. David stopped the car and got out. Nora followed behind him. The road wound through a blackened vineyard, which had been burned down in the autumn, before the harvest. David broke off a cluster and placed it in Nora’s palm. When she touched the grapes, they crumbled into dust. A shadow of the wine that was not to be …

  Will I really see Tengiz? How strange that we’re still alive, Nora thought, without the least bit of agitation or excitement. Perhaps it’s because I’ve outlived my own death and reached old age. How wonderful old age is, what freedom it holds! She smiled, recalling how her heart had beat in her throat at the sound of his voice, how she nearly fainted at his touch. It’s not his fault that I was so madly in love with him. Only now can I understand what an emotional burden this must have been for him. Poor Tengiz! But what unrelieved gloom I felt when he told me he was going to marry again! He was already getting on in years, and I believed the remainder of his life belonged to me … I was such a fool! Nora smiled to herself, because the cancer was a blessing from God, and had completely liberated her from the habit of possessiveness.

  “We’re going to be a bit late, after all,” David said.

  Again, a church, a courtyard, monastery buildings. Bright and clean—inside and out. A long stone structure. Old, but the period from which it dated was unclear. The masonry was crude, and the stones had not been smoothed or finished. They opened the door.

  They entered a darkened room. The darkness was thick and palpable. They stood by the door, pressing themselves to the wall. They could just make out the soft sound of a high-pitched, insect-like droning. A screen—fairly long, not very tall—flickered with light. Vague, unidentifiable shadows passed over it in waves—perhaps water, perhaps grass, like an image under the lens of a microscope. Beautiful, incomprehensible—but no explanation was necessary. Then the shadows merged to form two figures, a male and a female. They moved together in mutual response and harmony. Suddenly they were not whole figures, but hands that approached each other, and touched; then the screen seemed to shatter in an explosion of shadows.

  There was no music in the conventional sense—only, from time to time, tentative ripples of sound that vaguely recalled music. Plants emerged out of nothing, out of nowhere, strange flowers bloomed and fade
d, and it was impossible to tell how this was accomplished until the hands appeared: a road, mountains, a landscape; a church on a mountain, a river. Absolutely unfathomable how it was done.

  The shadows were thick but also completely transparent. Fish swam past—schools of them. Then, instead of a multitude of small fry, two of them loomed into view, enormous, one a real monster. It wasn’t a struggle, but a dance. The screen glittered; there was nothing except shadows—and strange animals—some very familiar, dogs and rabbits, bears and elephants, and others, walking octopuses and interlaced snakes … An intricate, perfect, eventful process of life was unfolding, only the events were indecipherable. There were only hints, gestures, surmises.

  And mysterious sounds—a musical instrument, or a human voice, or an animal emitting some signals … They enchanted, bewildered, bewitched. Now the shadows clung to each other, they merged together and flowed over. And a baby appeared, a baby held on the palms of a pair of large hands … It was impossible to identify what sort of substance it was made of … There was no substance—it was a theater without matter, without substance. An Ideal Theater, in which there was nothing but shadows; neither was there music—just shadows of sound.

  Tears streamed down her face. There had never before been such a space on earth, never. It was a world that Tengiz had created completely from shadows, and the content of the world could not be expressed in any language. There wasn’t a single word to accompany it. There was, in fact, nothing at all … It was Creation. Not a story about Creation, but Creation itself. It almost made sense: why he had rejected the corporeal and substantial theater, why during the past years he had become weary of the crudeness of theater, why he spoke about the hypocrisy and insincerity of the theater, the lies of words, the deception of theatrical décor and props, costumes, makeup, the constant overreaching of gestures, the inadequacy of the points of departure, and the impossibility of reaching a goal that in itself wasn’t worth the effort … How could he reject that which formed the sine qua non of the existence of the theater—the actor? How did he find a theater troupe in which the performers agreed to renounce their need to reveal themselves onstage? The anticlimactic finale … What a wholesale retreat from theater! What was the use of Stanislavsky, of Meyerhold? What did Brecht matter, who was Grotowski? Tengiz had transcended substance, taken flight to a place where nothing but shadows existed anymore.