She closed the file and took it to the counter, where a new archival assistant was on duty—somewhat older, also forthcoming and kind—and turned around to go. But before she went, she committed a theft. From an envelope that was lying in the file, she pinched a book, The Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France, with this inscription:
Binding made from a stolen folder, socks, and bread.
Bound March 4–6, 1934, in the most trying days of my sojourn in cell no. 2 in the Stalingrad prison.
Resigne Toi, mon Coeur,
Dors, mon soleil!
How it had ended up in here, and why it hadn’t been destroyed, no one would ever know.
The rain, which had been pattering gently for two days, had stopped. A late-afternoon sun, weak and uncertain, came out. Nora remembered that she had an emergency pill, which she never took out of her handbag. She found the pill, but, having no water to wash it down, she put the bitter medicine in her mouth and chewed.
She walked to the Lubyanka and stopped opposite the gray monstrosity. The tall doors of the entrances were dead—no one went in or out. From inside this hellish abomination, which pretended to be just an ugly, featureless building, came the vile, putrid smell of fear and cruelty, baseness and cowardice; and the gentle afternoon sunlight was powerless to combat it. Why didn’t a heavenly fire pour down upon it? Why didn’t pitch and brimstone envelop this cursed place? Poor little Sodom and pathetic, insignificant Gomorrah, refuge of depraved lechers, had been burned down; why was there no divine punishment, and why was this hellhole still standing in the middle of this indifferent, vainglorious, self-involved city? Would it stand here forever? No, nothing is forever. The Prolomnye Gates were gone; the Vitali Fountain was no longer on the square, nor was the Rossiya Insurance Company. Even the monument to Dzerzhinsky had disappeared. Nora turned around and walked toward the Teatralny Passage.
Her headache hadn’t let up, and the same thought kept pounding in her brain—“Poor Genrikh!” Kind, somewhat dull-witted, laughing at silly jokes, harmless and easygoing Genrikh. Why had he rushed to repudiate his father on the very next day after his arrest? Why had he denounced him, thus justifying himself and burying his father once and for all? Was he protecting his career, his place under the stunted, sickly sun—or perhaps his family? Mama and me? Poor Genrikh …
What kind of rot and decay was this? What kind of curse? Fear, cowardice … or perhaps he knew something that I’ll never know.
Nora walked homeward by a random, circuitous route. She passed Kamergersky Lane, and walked by the corner house immortalized by Pasternak. The house where “a candle on the table burned, a candle burned…” Antipov was renting an apartment there, and Yury Zhivago, caught in the lacy intricacy of an as yet unfulfilled fate, rode past, noticing this meaningless little flame in one of the windows, and committing it to literary eternity.
Then Nora turned into Stoleshnikov Lane. Before, there had been people she knew living in almost every house, but many of them had been resettled, had moved, or were already dead. When you live your whole life in one city, it is filled with points of memory, as though ineradicable memories are nailed to every gateway, to every corner.
In the Church of Cosmas and Damian, the bells started ringing. Before, this building had housed the printing press of the Ministry of Culture. Once, Nora had come here on business—to print some playbills or performance notices, she could no longer remember.
Walking past, she heard wonderful singing coming from the open window of the church. She stopped to listen. Beggars swarmed around the entrance. Inside, it smelled of apples and candles. There was a long table on the side where apples, grapes, and other fruits were arranged. The singing mingled with the air perfumed by the apples, and the sound was sublime. Nora sat on a bench right by the entrance. Next to her sat two old women and a mother with a sleeping child, a little girl of about two. It was impossible to make out the words that the choir was singing, but it didn’t matter.
All of a sudden, Nora started to cry. She was not at all religious. Russian Orthodoxy had no special meaning for her; nor did any other religion. But her heart responded to the sounds. My God, she thought, this is my other grandfather, Alexander Kotenko, the precentor, sending me a sign—this is his music, his life. I know nothing about him, absolutely nothing; he tormented his wife, he was evil and blind, as Amalia told it.
Why did this music move her so? Was it really a signal of some kind? They had all been so musical—both her grandfathers, Alexander and Jacob—and Genrikh … Genrikh … And from her heart a deep lament rose up and choked her, and it was as though it wasn’t she crying, but Genrikh in her. Little Genrikh, intolerable little child who threw himself on the floor and thrashed his arms and legs, who wanted to fly a glider or an airplane, whom they barred from his beloved profession of aviation—yes, of course, because his father, Jacob, was an enemy of the people and ruined everything. He was robbed of his dreams, his hopes, his shining, beckoning future. Oh, poor Genrikh!
Nora cried together with him, this boy, her future and former father, who had not been given the chance to live the life he dreamed about. He sobbed and gasped for air, then grew tired and moaned quietly, then howled again, and started throwing a tantrum. Nora just wiped away the tears. How awful! Would his grief never end? Would it never burn out, never die? Would it torment him, and Nora, and the newborn Jacob, who had only just arrived and was not guilty of anything at all? Is it possible that the evil we commit never dissipates, but hangs above the head of every new child that emerges out of this river of time?
She left the church. It was the eve of the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord. “As always, a light without flame shines on this day from Mount Tabor…” Yes, of course! The light without flame … The light has already waned, but the holiday has not yet ended. Suddenly she felt buoyant and weightless, as though someone had taken from her the whole burden of this day. She had crossed a frontier.
Almost next door was Aragvi, a restaurant that Nora and Tengiz used to frequent. She smiled, remembering this. The theater of shadows, which he had shown her without knowing it himself, was an intimation that what was beyond their corporeal existence, so full of fear and shame, was something else, something that, from here, was visible only as beautiful dim shadows.
Nora crossed Tverskaya Street through the underpass, then came out on Tverskoy Boulevard, which she saw with a kind of double vision—the way it looked today, and the way it looked after the war, lined with old trees, with the Pushkin statue at the head of the boulevard, a drugstore on Novopushkinsky Square, the wall, visible from here, of the ruined Strastnoy Monastery, and the long-gone music school in the courtyard of a long-gone building, where they had taken her in childhood to tap on the keys, in the spot where the present-day box of a building of the Izvestia newspaper was located.
She walked along Tverskoy Boulevard, remembering people she knew who had lived in the surrounding houses—her mother’s and her own classmates and friends. She passed the house where Taisia, who had died long ago in Argentina, had once lived. She crossed Tverskoy to Nikitsky, making a small detour around the rerun movie theater where she had received her introduction to art without being aware of it. She glanced in passing at the House of Polar Explorers, at the final refuge of Gogol, and Vitya’s first apartment, on the semi-basement floor, from where he came to see her, running across the boulevard—Vitya, her lawful husband and the father of her only son …
It grew dark, but the light without flame still warmed the sky. “Poor Genrikh!” Nora sighed one last time, and entered the house where she had lived her whole life. She didn’t bother taking the lift, but walked up to the fourth floor, glad that she could make it without undue weariness. And all the way up to her apartment, she thought about how everything had in fact worked out for the best; she still had time to take care of all the loose ends, and to think some things through about which she had a vague suspicion, but certainly could not be said to know. Perhaps she would arrange old let
ters and write a book, the sort of book that either her grandfather had not had time to write, or, if it had been written, had been burned in the Internal Prison of the Lubyanka.
But who is he, my protagonist? Jacob? Marusya? Genrikh? Me? Yurik? No. No one, in fact, who is conscious of an individual existence, of birth and an anticipated, and unavoidable, death.
Not a person at all, one might say, but a substance with a certain chemical makeup. And is it possible to call a “substance” something that, being immortal, has the capacity to transform itself, to change all its fine, subtle little planes and angles, its crooks and crevices, its radicals? It is more likely an essence that belongs neither to being nor to nonbeing. It wanders through generations, from person to person, and creates the very illusion of personality. It is the immortal essence, written in code, that organized the mortal bodies of Pythagoras and Aristotle, Parmenides and Plato, as well as the random person one encounters on the road, in the streetcar, on the metro, or in the seat next to you in an airplane. Who suddenly appears before you, and calls up a familiar, dim sensation of a previously glimpsed outline, a bend or a curve, a likeness—perhaps of a great-grandfather, a fellow villager, or even someone from the other side of the world. Thus, my protagonist is essence itself. The bearer of everything that defines a human being—the high and the low, courage and cowardice, cruelty and gentleness, and the hunger for knowledge.
One hundred thousand essences, united in a certain pattern and order, form a human being, a temporary abode for each and every person. This is, in fact, immortality. And you, a human being—a white man, a black woman, an idiot, a genius, a Nigerian pirate, a Parisian baker, a transvestite from Rio de Janeiro, an old rabbi from Bnei Brak—you, too, are just a temporary abode.
Jacob! Is this the book you wished to write, and could not?
Epilogue
Everything ends well: death follows the happy ending. Everything, at long last, is accepted—the destruction of a people; the funeral of one’s only child, who has died of leukemia. The old Jacob is reading otherworldly books in otherworldly libraries, and listening to otherworldly music. The little Jacob is learning to read, pecking on the piano keyboard, and attending to the clear sounds.
Marusya has finally found herself—look how the clouds move, changing their aspect from moment to moment, at will, not submitting to any logic. She moves in concert with clouds, and with sounds; and this is joy …
At the end of her life, Nora begins to resemble Tusya. She wears Tusya’s large rings on her bony fingers, and teaches theater to aspiring young artists.
Vitya receives the Major Prize, which he fully deserves, and which Grisha secretly dreamed about.
At the end of the 2030s, Grisha dies, an old, old man, in Jerusalem. At his grave, his innumerable children and grandchildren place a slab on which, according to his will, is carved not his name, but a URL: “www…” If the curious follow the link, they can read an ecstatic missive about the Divine Text, addressed to Grisha’s heirs and at the same time to all humanity. His text is as long and convoluted as it is remarkable.
Yurik, like his great-grandfather Jacob, is immersed in music. Not the clarinet, not the piano, not the guitar—he is trying to hear the music that pours through the cosmos. And it is not in the least important whether he became a professional composer, or remained that same small boy, who used to say:
“Mama, remember how I sang in your tummy?”
Author’s Note
Excerpts from letters in my family archives and excerpts from the file of Jacob Ulitsky have been included in this story. (KGB Archive No. 2160)
Acknowledgments
With thanks to my family and friends
This book would never have been written without the help and support of my family. To my husband, Andrei Krasulin—thank you for your patience and indulgence; to my sons Alyosha and, especially, Petya Evgeniev—thank you for all kinds of support, including technological; to my cousin, Olga Bulgakova—thank you for preserving the ambience of our family, of which almost no one remains.
To my friends—Nikita Shklovsky, who devoted so much time to conversation and discussion of the biological questions the book touches on; and Vladimir Andreevich Uspensky, who enlightened me in the parts of the book concerning mathematics. You are in large part coauthors of this book.
Special thanks to Katya Gordeeva for her brilliant participation and contribution—while I was giving birth to this book, she gave birth to her son Jacob, which lent authenticity to the whole of this partially invented story.
Thank you to my dear friends Lika Nutkevich, Ira Shchipacheva, Lyuba Grivorieva, and Tanya Gorina, for their care, patience, and support when my spirits fell and I came close to despair; and to Dianochka, who helps me in that department of life which is particularly difficult for me.
Thank you to my first readers and editors: the publisher Elena Shubina; Elena Kostioukovitch; Yulia Dobrovolskaya; and Sasha Klimin (he, more than anyone, gave his all and sweated over every page of the book!). I thank all those friends who sheared off sizable chunks of the text; to Dima Bavilsky, who opened my eyes to the use of possessive pronouns and a few obtrusive verbs; to Ira Uvarova and Alyona Zaitseva for sharing their expertise on theater; to Misha Golubovsky for scientific consultation. Thank you to my dear Alexanders, who have accompanied me throughout my life: Alexander Khelemsky, who explained things to me that I had spent my whole life trying to understand, with varying results; and Alexander Gorin, who advised me on questions of computer programming. Because of both of them, I now know a bit more than I did before I began. To Bondarev and Smolyansky, for their meticulousness; Okun, for his support at a critical moment; Varshavsky, for his indulgence; and Borisov, who prayed I would survive.
And to all the equally dear friends who helped me by not hindering me …
I thank all those whom I’ve forgotten to mention in these notes. In truth, I should go through my alphabetical index file and thank all my beloved friends from all the stages and ages in my life, some of whom are already gone …
This would be fitting, but there would be no end to it.
And one more, very special, expression of thanks. When I had already finished this book, my dear friend Katya Genieva died. I was able to say goodbye to her, and the dignity, intelligence, and grace of her leavetaking reconciled me to the necessity of parting from this remarkable, wonderful, and at times terribly difficult world we still live in.
I thank you all.
ALSO BY LUDMILA ULITSKAYA
The Big Green Tent
Daniel Stein, Interpreter
The Kukotsky Enigma
The Funeral Party
Medea and Her Children
Sonechka
A Note About the Author
Ludmila Ulitskaya is one of Russia’s most popular and renowned literary figures. A former scientist and the director of Moscow’s Hebrew Repertory Theater, she is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, including The Big Green Tent; several tales for children; and plays that have been staged by a number of theaters in Russia and Germany. She has won the Russian Booker Prize and twice won Russia’s Big Book Prize, and has been nominated for the Man Booker International Prize. You can sign up for email updates here.
A Note About the Translator
Polly Gannon is the director of cultural studies at the New York–St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition and Culture. She holds a Ph.D. in Russian literature from Cornell University. She lives, teaches, and translates in St. Petersburg, Russia. You can sign up for email updates here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Epigraph
Family Tree
1. The Willow Chest (1975)
2. The Watchmaker’s Shop on Mariinsko-Blagoveshchenskaya Street (1905–1907)
3. From the Willow Chest: The Diary of Jacob Ossetsky (1910)
4. Closing Chekhov (1974)
5. A New Project (1974)
6. Classmates (1955–1963)
7. From the Willow Chest: The Diary of Jacob Ossetsky (1911)
8. The Garden of Magnitudes (1958–1974)
9. Admirers (1975–1976)
10. A Froebel Miss (1907–1910)
11. A Letter from Mikhail Kerns to His Sister, Marusya (1910)
12. One-of-a-Kind Yurik: Yahoos and Houyhnhnms (1976–1981)
13. A Major Year (1911)
14. A Female Line (1975–1980)
15. Unaccommodated Man (1980–1981)
16. A Secret Marriage (1911)
17. From the Willow Chest: Jacob’s Notebook (1911)
18. Marusya’s Letters (December 1911)
19. First Grade: Fingernails (1982)
20. From the Willow Chest: Jacob’s Letter to Marusya: Volunteer Ossetsky (1911–1912)
21. A Happy Year (1985)
22. From the Willow Chest: Letters from and to the Urals (October 1912–May 1913)
23. A New Direction (1976–1982)
24. Carmen (1985)
25. The Diamond Door (1986)
26. From the Willow Chest: The Correspondence of Jacob and Marusya (May 1913–January 1914)
27. Nora in America: Visiting Vitya and Martha (1987)
28. The Left Hand (1988–1989)
29. The Birth of Genrikh (1916)
30. Endings (1988–1989)
Jacob's Ladder Page 66
