Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  It was the final letter of a correspondence that had lasted from 1911 to 1936—a quarter-century of love, friendship, and marriage.

  LAST LETTER FROM JACOB TO MARUSYA INTA–MOSCOW JACOB TO MARUSYA

  DECEMBER 10, 1954

  Dear Marusya,

  We haven’t seen each other in what seems like an eternity, and we most likely won’t be seeing each other again. We are both old now, living our final years, trying to tie up loose ends. It is natural that one’s thoughts hark back to the past. I’ll begin with the most important thing: I was happy throughout my youth, all twenty-five years of our marriage. After we met, the first years we knew each other, and the first years of our marriage, enveloped us in such limitless joy, such deep—and I say it unequivocally—happiness, that even the reflected light of these years should have illumined the later ones, should have helped soften the inevitable rough corners and edges.

  It was always interesting for us to be in one another’s company. We never experienced boredom in our marriage. My first impulse and desire was always to report my fresh experiences and impressions, all my joys and sufferings, all my new thoughts or creative efforts, to you. This practice has become so deeply rooted in me that, even now, though we long ago parted ways, I have not broken the habit, and I have to struggle against the desire to share something with you. This is not only the content of a marriage, but its very essence, its pride, its gem.

  And the world of art, through which we lived our life together? To this day, the radio has not ceased to stir me, to move me. Whether I hear Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, which brought us together, or Schubert’s “Barcarolle,” which I so often played to accompany you, or Glinka’s “Doubt”—all these charming pieces of our youth—as of old I repeat to myself, “These sad times will pass, and we will see each other again.” But will we? Is it still possible?

  The harshness of my fate prepared a difficult biography for me. Blow after blow, without respite; years of constant moves, one after another. A husband and wife must live together; marriage cannot survive on postage stamps alone. And now it is clear to everyone who is responsible for destroying my family. I am surrounded by thousands of others just like us.

  Stalingrad; Biysk; then the mine; Yegoryevsk; Sukhobezvodnaya, where I was horrified, seeing my approaching fate (oh, how little you understood then!); and then Abez. What sort of family could have survived such trials? It would have had to be made of steel. But now this is all Plusquamperfectum. I am now free. I am in Inta, and in a few days I will get a certificate attesting to my freedom, then travel to Moscow. Judging by the experience of my comrades, they are hardly likely to give me a resident permit—a “right to live” (remember this term from our youth?) in a large city. But Moscow is where I will receive the assignment for a city of residence.

  I am now a cripple, and I walk with a crutch. My life is approaching its end. My dream is to see you. We will not weigh old grievances and sorrows. I have never loved anyone, ever, but you.

  I can imagine the bitter irony of your reaction. However, someone who took the decision to divorce in absentia, someone who did not wish to hear either a confession or a defense, has no right to irony. This is absolutely true. In my situation, neither disingenuous avowal nor belated pretense is of any use. I have made many attempts at reconciliation—all for naught. At first there was simply distance, then alienation …

  If you agreed to meet me, or at least to send me a friendly word or two, it would afford me great relief. I would be able to shed a burden I have borne for many years. I would like to be able to kiss your hand in farewell. Or, if nothing else, a letter written in your hand.

  Thank you for my past, our past.

  I would be happy to see you when I am in Moscow. Eva lives in the same house on Ostozhenka where they came to arrest me six years ago. You know the address and telephone number. If you wish, you can get in touch with me through her.

  Jacob

  * * *

  There was no reply to the letter.

  * * *

  Jacob arrived in Moscow at the end of December 1955. The room on Ostozhenka, which had been sealed on the day of his arrest, had been given to the yardman. Jacob decided not to stay at his sister’s. His situation was the same one the authorities always forced on him: he was banned from entering Moscow, but the paper that would assign him a new place of residence, which was almost like a sanitized form of exile, he could only receive in Moscow, from the public prosecutor’s office.

  Asya, who still lived in her communal apartment on Ordynka—where there was no watchful yardman, and where other residents were few in number, beaten down, and disinclined to denounce people to the authorities—took Jacob in. In the apartment there was an elderly Jewish lady whose daughter was a famous poet, with a Stalin Prize under her belt and a note in her passport pointing to her ethnicity (the infamous “fifth paragraph”*). She had been trained by her daughter into weak-willed, approving silence. There was also a middle-aged couple who, for their entire lives, had concealed their aristocratic origins, their observance of their Orthodox faith, their education, which they had received abroad until 1917, as well as a new circumstance—their only son was in jail for robbery. These neighbors pretended not to be aware of the nighttime presence of a guest without proper registration papers or a residence permit in their apartment. They didn’t ask a single question.

  Jacob held in his hands a wonder about which he had not even dared dream—a pair of large white breasts, youthful, silken, only a trifle pendulous—objects of Marusya’s jealousy and envy. He hid his face in them and breathed in the scent of a woman’s skin. Asya stroked his head with her small, skillful hands, which could lance a boil, puncture a vein with a fat needle, give blood transfusions, and many other things. It was exactly as it had been in ’36, when Asya had come to visit him in Biysk, even before the news of the in absentia divorce. And it was even better than after the war, the first three years before his next arrest, when they were together for the second time. This was the third and final time Jacob had been with the woman whose love had embarrassed him in his youth and later, in Biysk, had inspired him with a sense of awkwardness and guilt because he couldn’t respond to her feelings in kind. Now her lifelong love, which for decades had been unsolicited and inconvenient, turned out to be the only anchor in his broken, unmoored existence. She was prepared to abandon everything, to retire from her job in the polyclinic and follow him anywhere—to Vorkuta, to Chita, to Magadan …

  Five days later, Jacob received the necessary papers and instructions to reside in the nearby city of Kalinin. Banished to the boondocks, the back of beyond. A day before his departure, he called his son’s apartment. Amalia, his son’s wife, answered the phone. She gasped when he said his name. She had never seen her father-in-law, even though she knew he was in the camps. Genrikh had hardly ever mentioned him, and she didn’t ask. Amalia invited him to visit on any day, though she asked that he warn her beforehand so she could prepare a festive meal. But it was now or never—he had to leave the next day for Kalinin, and today was his last day in Moscow.

  When Jacob came out of the Arbat subway station, he was drawn, as though by a magnet, in the direction of Povarskaya, to Marusya’s, and his own, house. But this destination and the route to it were now closed to him forever. With a heavy heart, he turned toward Nikitsky Boulevard. He had never been to his son’s apartment—only ten minutes away from their former home.

  Amalia was unable to warn Genrikh beforehand of his father’s arrival, and they converged at almost the same moment—Genrikh five minutes earlier. They embraced and kissed each other. The table was set in the larger room. Jacob was seated at the head of the table. He leaned his crutch on his chair. Nora emerged from the side room. It seemed to Jacob that the girl slightly resembled Marusya, though she was homelier. She sat down in her place without saying a word, and glanced furtively at her grandfather. Her glance alone told him she was a clever girl. He also guessed that Amalia didn’t love Genrikh.
He didn’t sense that fleeting but deep eye-contact that fills the interaction of lovers; they didn’t address each other at all, as though they were quarreling. But they weren’t quarreling. This was simply their life—without commonality, without intimacy, and with Andrei Ivanovich waiting on the sidelines. They divorced a year later. The girl, gloomy and silent, sat looking down at her plate.

  “What grade are you in?” her grandfather asked.

  “Fourth,” she said, her eyes still lowered.

  Reserved, unsociable. Not a very happy little girl, Jacob thought. “Do you like it?”

  “What, school? No, I don’t like school,” said the girl, looking at him for the first time.

  Her eyes were gray, circled with a dark fringe, like Marusya’s. Her neck was long, and her hair was light chestnut, parted at the top of her forehead and falling down in two waves, like Marusya’s. But her mouth and her cheekbones are mine, Jacob thought … Genes, genes …

  Amalia was sweet and cordial, but she looked at him with abashed curiosity: he was one of the first “newly freed” ones, and her eyes were full of unasked questions. Genrikh was tense, and also reluctant to ask questions. Instead, he tried to joke. Nora blushed at his jokes, though they didn’t in the least merit this reaction. Genrikh laughed at his own attempts at humor, and Jacob felt anguish inside, knowing that he would never ask his son the question that had tormented him for so many years.

  After tea, Jacob left. When they were saying goodbye, he stroked Nora’s head, patted Amalia’s shoulder, scratched the gray cat Murka behind the ears, and shook Genrikh’s hand. They never saw him again.

  The next morning, Asya accompanied Jacob to the station. He carried a rucksack on his back. In his right hand he held his crutch; in his left he carried a small suitcase in a canvas casing. They kissed each other on the platform. Asya’s little face was homely. Her gray, unkempt hair stuck out from under her beret, but under her heavy black woolen coat, under a rough woolen vest, under her white blouse, in the two ample linen pouches of her women’s undergarments, lay her wondrous breasts, which had awakened in Jacob his slumbering sensuality, and her love—he knew—was firm and enduring, and was sufficient for all the days of his life that remained. A life without Marusya …

  Two weeks after the New Year, and after finishing the matters she needed to attend to in Moscow, Asya arrived in Kalinin. He led her to a wooden house, relating to her the history of the city as they walked, telling her what a marvelous town it was, independent, recalcitrant. It had fought against the Golden Horde, had forged a friendship with the Lithuanians. The first generation had settled here before Moscow was founded, and the princes had been worthy and decent. He talked about the felicitous geographical situation of the city, about the river Tvertsa, which they simply must try to navigate in the summer, sailing from the mouth of the river to its source. About the wonderful local library, which they never seemed to weed out—he had discovered such remarkable ancient gems of literature behind its doors. About the possibility that he could continue his work, at last …

  The house was an old, dilapidated wooden structure, but the original porch with its finely turned wooden pillars, and the ornately carved window frames, had all been preserved. The room was large and clean, and the hospitable landlady was a quiet woman. The windows were too low, because the old house was sinking into the earth; but the four-poster bed, with metal knobs atop the posts, was too high. With his bad leg, it was difficult for Jacob to climb onto it. As soon as she arrived, he informed Asya that he had already found a carpenter who would hammer together a broad, low divan on which they could place a mattress.

  In a wonderful notebook in a wooden binding, which he had bought in a stationer’s shop on his first day back in Moscow in December 1955, Jacob managed to fill up several pages with his beautiful, but somewhat characterless, script. He decided to begin this fresh notebook in the New Year, and the first page was dated January 1, 1956.

  Below the date was a list of eighteen points. This was a to-do list for his professional affairs. On the second page, household matters, there were fewer points, and several of them were already checked off. Number one was a teakettle, and the kettle—sturdy, enameled in acid-green—was already standing on the table.

  “What a splendid green!” Asya ventured to say, touching the gleaming side of the new teakettle and smiling.

  “Asya, I’m color-blind. I was sure the color was a tranquil gray.”

  The eighteen points laying out his professional goals represented the project to which he planned to devote the remainder of his life. He no longer wished to return to the manuscripts that had perished in the Lubyanka, the secret police headquarters. The Abez prison camp had given him the kind of experience that in part canceled out, in part simply devalued his prosaic exercises—it was good that nothing had been preserved. Whatever would he do with it now?

  His scholarly research could have been continued. He felt it had a certain degree of social relevance—not today, not just now, but perhaps in ten years’ time. The only thing he was sure he wished to return to was music. The three-volume textbook on world musical culture, which he had begun to write in Altai, could even now be useful to a number of people—those trying to further their educations, or to broaden their culture horizons. Yes, yes, being a Kulturträger, a “culture bearer”—that was the right path for him now. But he decided to begin with that marvelous work that he had embarked on in the military, when he conducted the soldiers’ choir, an amateurs’ orchestra.

  As was his custom, as a person who thrived on organization, he began carrying out his plans by investigating the local libraries (check), and visiting the local Houses of Culture (check, with the name of the director beside it: Morgachev, Pavel Nikanorovich). At the bottom of the page was a short list of sheet-music titles that he would have to order in the regional library. There was no check after that entry.

  Jacob died eight months later, at the end of August, of a heart attack. Asya had gone to Moscow to pick up her pension, and when she returned, she found him lying on the mattress, dead. On his last desk there were two newspapers from the previous day, a pile of freshly written pages of cheap gray paper, and four library books: a Lithuanian language textbook; Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, the pages densely covered with penciled notes; Einstein and Infeld’s newly published The Evolution of Physics; and the prerevolutionary score of Händel’s oratorio The Messiah.

  Written on a sheet of dull paper stuck between the pages of the book by Lenin were these words:

  Always lags behind in his reading of scientific literature. Writes about the existence of matter in space and time in 1908, already after the discovery of the theory of relativity. Calls the transformation of matter into energy “idealism,” at the same time that, in 1884, John Henry Poynting demonstrated that energy, as well as the mass of matter, is localized, transferred by a field, and its flux has measurable density.

  Such were the last happy months of Jacob’s life.

  49

  The Birth of a New Jacob

  (2011)

  This time, too, Liza demonstrated her abundant organizational skills. She found places for Timosha and Olga in nursery schools. She hired a housekeeper, a fifty-year-old Georgian woman named Victoria, who was the sole support of her family in Kutaisi and needed to supplement her earnings. She had bought (notwithstanding the Russian superstition that counseled against doing so before the birth) a newborn’s layette. Her children were so eager for the birth of a sibling that they were practically glued to her belly. They tapped on it gently and chatted with their little brother, who, to their delight, they could sometimes feel answering back.

  The child’s first attempt to see the light of day occurred on New Year’s Day but he reconsidered. This was just as well, since it would have been most inconvenient. Victoria was off for the holidays, and dishes and pots and pans were piling up in the sink. Either because of the warmth in their home or the sense of impatience hanging in the air, the
Christmas tree had prematurely shed half its needles. Yurik suffered from an allergy whose cause was unknown. He itched and scratched like a mangy mutt, and, out of the depths of his long-lost childhood, the panicky fear of infection that had gripped him at the age of five, when Nora drew him a picture of some germ-monsters, came back to haunt him. This time he was not afraid for himself, however, but for Liza and the children. For several nights in a row, he slept on a narrow couch in the kitchen. Liza’s belly, which after all these months had grown used to Yurik’s nighttime embraces, felt forlorn. Liza was perplexed. For the past two years, she had fallen asleep and woken up alongside her husband, like a single indivisible being.

  Immediately after the New Year, the children also came down with Yurik’s inexplicable rash. Timosha was especially uncomfortable with it. Liza didn’t call the doctor, and she didn’t bother to take him to the polyclinic, since the holidays were still in progress. People hung around in their courtyards, exhausted from drinking, not knowing what to do with themselves; they were tired of the never-ending vacation. Buses seemed to be running at whim, the polyclinics were operating haphazardly, and it was not easy to reach them, since the roads were nearly impassable. Heavy snowfall alternated with thaws, and the Tajik migrant workers who usually cleaned them were idle, since they weren’t paid to work during holidays. Liza decided independently on a course of action—she gave everyone suffering from the condition antihistamine tablets—and the ghost of the evil germ vanished.

  On the morning of January 4, the little one sounded the alarm that he was ready to make his appearance. Labor pains began. They went to the maternity hospital to see their obstetrician, Dr. Igor Olegovich, who was straightforward and brusque and didn’t suffer fools. This was how he had won Liza’s heart when they signed the contract with him for delivering the baby. Yurik didn’t like him, but Liza defended her preference, saying he was as sharp as a whip, not some wishy-washy pantywaist. She herself was inclined to be straightforward and brusque, so it was all fine with her.