Jacob's Ladder

5 A New Project

(1974)

From the airport, Nora went straight to Mziya’s and collapsed onto the bed that still smelled of Tengiz. She didn’t budge from the little second-floor room for two weeks. For about ten days, all her bones hurt; then they stopped. Mziya brought her tea in the mornings. Nora pretended to be asleep, and Mziya would put the cup on top of a checkerboard tabletop next to her. Then she left, closing the door behind her. Almost every day at around noon, the sound of scales being played would drift upstairs: piano students had arrived. There were beginners, who played Czerny’s études; several advanced students; and one boy who came in the evening twice a week and played wonderfully well. Mziya devoted longer lessons to him. He had learned some Beethoven sonata, but Nora couldn’t recall which one it was. Definitely not the Tempest, and not any of the three final ones … Nora had quit music school when she was in the sixth grade. Though her abilities weren’t exceptional, she had inherited a good ear for music from her father.

Mziya’s instrument was adequate, but the sound was weak and muted. Nora didn’t feel the pain so much when she could listen to music. When she woke up, she told herself, Today I can’t get up; maybe tomorrow I’ll manage. But the next day she couldn’t make herself get out of bed, either. Sometimes Mziya came to the door and invited her to have something to eat. On the fifth day, Nora went downstairs. Mziya didn’t ask anything, and Nora was very grateful to her for that. Only now did she really perceive the cultivated expression on Mziya’s face, which was covered in tiny lines, her cheeks rouged. Her hair was dyed in the Caucasian style with thick henna and gathered into a bun at the back of her neck; her tiny feet, in their slender high heels, tapped out rhythms. While Tengiz was here, Nora had barely noticed his silent aunt. She hadn’t even paid proper attention to Mziya’s idiosyncratic, fancifully adorned apartment. Now she sat downstairs, at the table covered with wine-colored velvet, and Mziya put a plate before her with two sandwiches and an apple, peeled and sliced into small pieces.

“Since my husband died, I have never cooked a real meal,” Mziya said apologetically, and Nora felt that they were, most likely, kindred spirits.

I’ve never in my life cooked anything for my husband, Nora thought. She smiled for the first time in all those days and said, “Forgive me, Mziya, for dumping myself on you like this.”

“You can stay for as long as you wish, child. I’m used to living alone. I’ve been alone for a long time. But you don’t disturb me in the least.”

“I’ll just stay a few days longer, if that’s all right with you.”

Mziya nodded, and they didn’t talk anymore. About anything.

Nora lay around on Tengiz’s sheets until his scent had nearly faded away; only sometimes the pillow would still yield a hint of his body, and Nora would feel convulsed with pain.

It’s simply a molecule, a molecule of his sweat, Nora thought. And I have some sort of illness, a hypersensitivity to his smell. What is this unfortunate condition? Why do such momentary chemical transmissions leave such long, deep traces, such scars? What if he were just an ordinary lover, the sort you go on vacation with to the Crimea for a week, or an affair you have while you’re on tour? There was that wondrous young boy last year in Kiev, or even old Lukyanov, the actor, a skirt chaser, a connoisseur of niceties and detail, nearly twenty years her senior. Would I hurt just the same? But there was no answer.

This was the sixth time Nora and Tengiz had parted, and each time it was worse than before.

She sniffed the pillow, but his scent had disappeared; it was redolent of dampness, dust, and whitewash. She dozed off, then woke up. From downstairs she heard scales and Mziya’s voice: “Misha! It’s a third! The right hand begins with E! When it’s a tenth, the right hand begins with the E, but an octave above! Misha!”

The scales ran up and down. Nora dozed off, started awake, then dozed off again.

I can’t fall out of love with him; I have to bury him. I just have to think how to do it. So that it happens suddenly, right now, not after a slow decline from illness! Let him drown, or tumble down a mountain. Better yet, die in a car crash. No, we’ll die together in a car crash. Two closed caskets side by side. His wife will come from Tbilisi, wearing black. My mother will be sobbing. Vitya will come with his crazy mother, Varvara. And Varvara will weep, too! At that point she smiled, because her mother-in-law couldn’t stand the sight of her, and would most likely be thrilled on the occasion of Nora’s funeral. Poor, poor things … Both of them mad … Oh, this is all horrible. I’m being ridiculous.

Half asleep, Nora imagined receiving a telegram about Tengiz’s death, or tearing up his passport, or she saw herself taking his jacket out to the garbage and stuffing it into the dumpster—and she was free of him. During the second week, she began inventing a new life for herself. She had to leave the theater; that was the first thing. The second was to hit upon something completely new—not teaching drawing to children, which they had been urging on her for a long time, but something unprecedented in her life. Getting another degree of some sort: becoming a chemist, or a biologist. Or becoming an ace dressmaker. No, she didn’t want to be that kind of woman. In short, for the time being, she couldn’t quite find what she was looking for. But one amusing thought came to her all of a sudden, and she began to get used to it, very gingerly. This would definitively be all her own … Nothing like this had ever occurred to her before …

Three days later, Nora crawled out of her now finally deserted bed and went downstairs to say goodbye. Mziya kissed her, told her not to forget about her and to come back to visit. The aunt was a marvel. She didn’t say a single word about Tengiz. Nora was grateful for this.

From the closed yard, she went out and crossed over Znamenka toward Arbat Square. Everything was nearby. Nora walked slowly, because, as she discovered, she was extremely weak. A rainy mist hung in the air. She crossed Arbat Square, then turned toward her home. At the entrance, she met a neighbor, Olga Petrakov, pushing a baby carriage, which she helped her squeeze into the elevator. The neighbor was no longer young, certainly over forty, and she had a fairly grown-up daughter, about fifteen years old—and here she had a new baby.

“Why do you look so surprised? This is my granddaughter. My Natasha had a baby. You didn’t know? The whole building knows.”

Oh, so that was the story. The slutty schoolgirl got knocked up. In ninth grade, was she? Curious. In ninth grade, I found a superman, too. Nikita Tregubsky. Because I was shameless and daring. And proud. But having a baby? No, back in those days I would have had an abortion.

Nora glanced into the baby carriage at the offspring; only the nose poked out of a little pink cap.

“Cute!” Nora said approvingly. She nudged the carriage into the lift. “You go on ahead. I’ll take the stairs.”

“What’s so cute about her? Spit and image of the father. Look at that nose! It’s Armenian!” And, propping the door open with a hand, she added, “The baby’s got the whole family wrapped around its little finger. That’s Armenians for you.”

Nora went up the stairs to the fourth floor. By the time she reached her apartment, she knew for certain that she was going to set her life to rights, and that it would be more interesting than she could ever have imagined before.

The door to the apartment had two locks, and both were locked. Her mother must have been here: Nora usually only locked the lower one. Mama and her husband, Andrei Ivanovich, rarely came to Moscow. There was a note on the kitchen table: “Nora, you got calls from Anastasia Ilyinichna, Perchikhina, and Chipa. Call me. We’ll be here on Friday evening and leave again on Saturday. Hugs, Mama.”

The only thing she couldn’t figure out was which Friday she meant—last Friday, or the Friday before that. The days of the week, and the dates, had all run together for her.

Without even stopping in her room, she went to take a bath. She soaked for a long time, even drifted off for a bit. Tengiz kept trying to break into her semi-sleep, to let her know he was still there, but Nora chased him away. Then he sent Anton Chekhov, with his sepia sisters—and that was his mistake, because the three sisters, doleful and unhappy, pushed her toward life, with all its harshness, without sentiment, life with its problems and solutions. She hurried to get out of the water, which was cooling off quickly, and to turn on a steaming-hot shower.

I have a new project, she told herself. She sprang from the bathtub and wrapped herself in a terry cloth robe, because she had forgotten to bring in a clean towel. She suddenly felt famished.

It can’t possibly be Friday. It must be Wednesday. I’m going to run down to The Gut (a nearby grocery store by the Nikitsky Gates that had a long hall lined with food counters) to get some food, and then I’ll call Vitya. Good old Vitya. A joke of a husband she had not lived with for a single day. And it would have been impossible, anyway. He was a genius—autistic and crazy. They had married right after high school. And there was no love in it—only calculation. To take revenge. But on whom, and why? Nikita Tregubsky. She had run into him five years later, in a café, the Blue Bird. He had walked up to her, swinging his shoulders nonchalantly, with a rangy, athletic gait, as though they had just parted ways yesterday, as though nothing at all had happened. My God, what an idiot! A plastic mannequin! Was this the person she had been in love with? What a fool she was! But she couldn’t seem to change her ways: Tengiz also looked like a superhero! Just a different one. Damn hormones. A new project! Vitya!

She called him. Varvara Vasilievna picked up and handed the phone directly to Vitya, without bothering to talk to her. Nora’s mother-in-law hated her with blunt intensity. They were both quite mad—mother and son. Just in different ways.

“Could you come over, Vitya? This evening?”

“Okay.”

Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea? But I married him for something, didn’t I? I’ll give it a shot. It is the right thing to do; maybe my baby will be a genius. And it will redeem that childhood mistake.

The rain grew stronger toward evening. Nora put on a jacket with a hood and ran to The Gut to buy frankfurters. For her husband.

More than a year had passed since Tengiz had left. Nora had changed everything in her life, turning it upside down and setting it right again. She didn’t want a trace of the past to remain. She didn’t want any more conflagrations, or floods, or earthquakes, because she had to live. She had to survive, and Tengiz was always going away, going away for good, with his unshaven face, his sculptural hands that resembled the hands of Michelangelo’s David, with his overbite, his smell of cheap country tobacco, with his narrow hips and his lanky, doglike legs. Tengiz was gone; and their own magnificent smash-hit show for two would never be performed again …

They were not in the habit of writing letters to each other. There were just one-way phone calls from time to time—from Tengiz to Nora. This could have been because he wanted to protect his Tbilisi life from her, or because their long-term relations were put on hold, bracketed off, like something especially valuable that wouldn’t mix with the quotidian flow of Tengiz’s Tbilisi life, which Nora didn’t know, the life in which he had women, and family ties with some big-shot criminal who sometimes rescued him when he was in trouble … The only letter that Nora had received from Tengiz came a year and a half after he had left her, after his monthlong stay in Poland at the Laboratory Theatre of Jerzy Grotowski. The letter was clumsily written on what seemed to be a piece of wrapping paper, brownish and old-looking. He informed her that he had converted, changed religions, that everything from the past was shattered, and that the shards were better than the original whole had been … “We need to talk,” he had scrawled across the bottom. But it would be two whole years before she would see him again.

Yurik was already walking, tottering around, and falling down on his little bottom.