Jacob's Ladder

6 Classmates

(1955–1963)

They were supposed to beat up Vitya Chebotarev. It wasn’t a choice; it was an obligation. But he was lucky—they beat up Grisha Lieber instead. And they didn’t mess him up too much—just enough to display their contempt for the wunderkind Jew. They were both wunderkinder, in fact, but Grisha was a half-pint Jewish kid, chubby and pink, whereas Vitya was a strapping lad who disarmed people by his obliviousness to society’s dissatisfaction with him. Vitya’s upper lip protruded slightly, the consequence of too many tightly packed teeth, and this gave him a good-natured expression. He was somewhat autistic—“a bit odd,” as his mother, Varvara Vasilievna, described him. She was from the country, unpretentious but smart. She had worked her way up the ladder from housekeeper to administrator in the Housing Maintenance Committee.

Even before he started school, she sought advice about her little Vitya from an elderly professor, an acquaintance from her former housekeeping days, who told her that the boy was in no sense a moron, more likely even a genius, but one with peculiarities. Such children were what you might call rarities, and must be handled with care. With proper nurturing, children like this could grow up to become great scientists; otherwise, they could end up on the margins of society. Varvara received this news with delight, and she never so much as laid a hand on him, but protected him and expected great things of him. She was someone who had raised herself high above the place where she had begun in life. Working for good employers, she was able to graduate from primary school, then trade school for housing-maintenance workers, and finally to get assigned a private room for herself. Afterward, when she was already working at the HMC, she became eligible for a separate apartment in the city center—albeit on the ground floor, as they deferentially called the cellar of the building, located in close proximity to Gogol’s last apartment.

Such was the career of Varvara Vasilievna; it was as though she had made the transition from plumber to academician in a single leap. Thus, she had high hopes for her son, born of a not entirely successful union. And her maternal hopes were not disappointed. Varvara stoically endured the first years of Vitya’s education, when the teacher complained about his inattentiveness, his absentmindedness and inability to blend in with the other children and take part in their activities. But in the fifth grade, when simple arithmetic was replaced by algebra and geometry, Vitya blossomed. The math teacher immediately singled him out from the other students, and began sending him to the Math Olympiad, where he excelled and enjoyed his first faint glimmers of fame.

The elderly professor had been right. Vitya was inattentive to what didn’t interest him, but when something engaged his mental capacities, he was quick, sharp, and hungry for knowledge. Despite his unusual memory and his innate abilities in logical thought, he was emotionally rather backward, and had not an iota of a sense of humor. There seemed to be some sort of short circuit in his head that allowed him to exist happily in the most abstract realms of mathematics, whereas any literary text, from “Little Red Riding Hood” to King Lear, which he read as an adolescent, filled him with indignation at the lack of logic, the contrivances, and the flouting of causal connections and motives in the behavior of both characters and authors.

His classmates, with their soccer and their paper airplanes, did not interest him; only Grisha Lieber proved to be a satisfactory interlocutor. They made a funny pair: little Grisha, who was much shorter than his classmates but far exceeded most of them in weight, rolled around the rangy, lanky Vitya like a ball, constantly trying to prove a point to him. Vitya would listen silently, nodding and scratching his prominent forehead. He received a great deal of interesting information from Grisha, whose father was a physicist and discussed such matters with his son. Grisha was by nature sociable and talkative, so they were an odd couple—a garrulous little ball and a taciturn beanpole. When the classmates had to read Don Quixote, they started calling Grisha Sancho Panza. And he did indeed play the same role. Thanks to Grisha, Vitya finally even got to know some of their other classmates, who up until then had been so unimportant to him he didn’t even know many of them by name.

In the fifth grade, the boys’ and girls’ schools joined together, but even this momentous event went practically unnoticed by Vitya. The girls paid no attention to him, either, it must be said. The only girl he sometimes talked to was Nora, and their relations were not spontaneous, but thanks to the promptings of the literature teacher and class adviser, Vera Alexeyevna. She appointed Nora (a book lover with an innate grasp of grammar) to help Vitya bring up his grades in that subject. During their sessions, they didn’t become friends, but they did at least get to know each other. And Nora helped him pull up his grades until the ninth grade. He intrigued Nora with his critical reading of any work put in front of him, which he analyzed with unwavering precision, pointing out the glaring inadequacy of any metaphor taken on its own merits, and the fundamental logical inconsistency and lack of rigor of the humanities as a whole. His grades never rose above a C in Russian language and literature, but the teachers were quick to pardon this star of the Math Olympiad for many years running.

Vitya was not popular with his classmates, and the girls dismissed him because they thought he was a smarty-pants who imagined himself to be more intelligent than everyone else. In fact, he imagined no such thing, since his imagination was restricted to very specific tasks and orders of knowledge where girls rarely ventured, so there was barely a whiff of them around him.

In the seventh grade, they were laid low by an epidemic, something akin to chicken pox: everyone fell in love. The girls quarreled and wept, the boys got into fights more often than usual, and a weak electric charge hovered in the air. Vitya himself never fought. Nor did he express any interest in girls.

A cloud of tension grew thick around Nina Knyazeva, a budding beauty, and Masha Nersesyan, who had developed early and was already in full bloom at fourteen. There were a few other pretty girls who turned the boys’ heads, but not as dramatically. Nora was not one of them. She did have one admirer, however—funny, sweet Grisha. Nora ignored Grisha entirely. Though she had been independent and idiosyncratic from an early age, this time she traveled the general route.

Nikita Tregubsky was the embodiment of all the girls’ notions of masculine perfection. He moved confidently, had a nice smile, and was affectionate and impudent, both at once. He had virtually no rivals. The other boys had not achieved enough manliness to meet with any kind of success. At the very sight of Nikita, half the girls in the class went into preservation-of-the-species mode. Nora was not spared this fate. She fell desperately in love with Nikita in the sixth grade, and in the eighth, she fearlessly, without shame, offered him her love in the most literal sense. Nora was taken by surprise at the wondrous world that awaited her between the sheets, and she happily explored it at every opportunity over the course of several months. Later, Nikita would stay overnight at Nora’s, to the silent consternation of Amalia.

The young lovers kept their secret to themselves for a whole year. At the beginning of the ninth grade, rumors began circulating. Most likely, Nikita had boasted of his conquest to the other boys, and it had finally reached the staff room. Vera Alexeyevna, the class adviser, undertook to have a heart-to-heart pedagogical talk with Nora, with the noble purpose of nipping the brewing scandal in the bud.

Scratching her head nervously, Vera Alexeyevna, who was deeply agitated, broached the ticklish subject by referring to moral principles. Nora didn’t even allow her to finish. She informed her coldly that she had no intention of discussing her personal life, that her relations with men—that’s what she said, “with men” (and here Vera Alexeyevna started scratching her head with redoubled energy)—were no one’s business but her own and one other person’s, whose existence she was not going to broadcast. In short, mind your own business!

Vera Alexeyevna was offended and kicked up a fuss. The Party organizer of the school, Elena Azizovna, suggested convening a PTA meeting after school devoted exclusively to the crimes of ninth-grade minors. The criminals’ parents were invited. Romeo made a poor performance, publicly repenting his love affair and offering a version of events whereby he was not the initiator but, rather, the victim of her machinations. Dark with fury, the father of the “victim,” a hockey coach the size of a double-door refrigerator, made a testimony denouncing Amalia Alexandrovna. He seemed to be well informed about the family life of the mother of the juvenile delinquent. At that time, Amalia Alexandrovna was still not married to Andrei Ivanovich—that is, she was in a relationship with a married man, which Tregubsky père announced to a rapt audience. When Nora glanced at her mother, who was sitting in a corner of the classroom looking crushed, she was suddenly filled with a rage that surpassed anything she would ever again experience. How dare this old goat insult her mother! She saw a dark-crimson mist before her eyes, and suddenly she exploded. Later, she couldn’t remember the content of her retort to old Tregubsky and the PTA members, but most of the words she used could not be found in a standard dictionary. Taking her mother by the hand, she left the room, slamming the door behind her. She was immediately expelled from school, without further deliberation.

The next day Nora, her eyes red and swollen from weeping, as composed and collected as a parachutist before a jump, went to school and collected her records. Then she wept for three days straight. Amalia Alexandrovna tried to comfort her, but Nora rejected any involvement of her mother in the unpleasantness that had befallen her. Poor Amalia was no less traumatized than her daughter by the public execution. Nora was offended more on her mother’s behalf than her own, and resented Andrei Ivanovich with renewed vigor for putting his beloved in such a compromising position. She hated Nikita with a passion, and at the same time wanted to engage in criminal action with him again as soon as possible, which would go a long way toward mitigating the state-sponsored unpleasantness.

These events brought with them important lessons in life. First, she decided that she would never in her life have an affair with a married man, as her mother had. Second, she understood that love made a person defenseless and vulnerable, and that sex had to be kept separate from human emotions and relationships for reasons of personal safety. And, third, as she told herself: I don’t want anyone to pity me. Nor will I ever pity myself.

On the day when the announcement of Nora’s expulsion from school was pinned on the official notice board, and rumors about the scandalous PTA meeting were making the rounds among the upperclassmen, a fight—or, more accurately, a skirmish—broke out at the entrance to the school. Grisha Lieber stopped Tregubsky, who was running late, as usual, and uttered, with grim solemnity, these words: “You, Tregubsky, are scum.”

Grisha had planned to give him an aristocratic slap in the face, but, though he swung his arm out, the theatrical gesture fell flat. Nikita forestalled the blow, and punched Grisha’s soft little face with his hard fist. The duel never got off the ground. Grisha slumped down, hitting his face on the iron door handle, and, without breaking stride, Nikita rushed in through the wide-open door and up to the third floor. He lived almost next door to the school and was the only one who always arrived without a hat or coat in any kind of weather. The school nurse took the bloodied Grisha to the nearest emergency room, where they gave him stitches over his cheekbone. He explained what had happened by saying he had tripped and fallen, knocking his cheek against the door. This scar—in a faint V-shape, like a checkmark in a box—stayed with him his entire life, a memory of his first, secret love for Nora.

A week later, Vitya learned that Nora had been expelled, from Nora herself. He had come over to her house and sat down; without saying anything about it or asking any questions, he just pulled out his literature notebook. They were studying Goncharov.

“Here’s Oblomov,” he said.

“You want me to study with you? Don’t you know they kicked me out of school?”

Somehow he had managed to remain oblivious to the event, which had been hotly debated in the men’s, not to mention the women’s, bathrooms. At this point, Nora finally had to laugh. She told him what had happened between her and Tregubsky. Vitya stayed for about fifteen minutes. They didn’t feel like discussing Oblomov and the Oblomov syndrome, but there wasn’t anything else they could talk about. He drank a cup of tea, which he took with five spoonfuls of sugar; ate all the food that was set before him, emptying out the refrigerator completely; and headed for the door. Walking right behind him, Nora, who had cheered up considerably after this unexpected visit, invited him to drop by any time he needed to write an essay. One reason his visit was nice was that he was the only one of all her classmates who had visited her. In fact, she was not really friends with anyone in the class. There was Chipa, Marina Chipkovskaya, though they hadn’t met in school, but in the art studio she had started attending that year.

Vitya visited Nora after that on a regular basis, albeit not very frequently. He would appear at her door, but for the life of her she couldn’t figure out what drew him to her—certainly it wasn’t for a cup of tea. He himself couldn’t have explained it. Most likely, it was just out of inertia, a conditioned reflex he had developed: literature, Nora, essay … He visited Nora now and then in this manner until the end of the school year. In the summer, the visits stopped, which was only natural—classes were over.

During the summer, Nora breezed through the entrance exams for the Theater Arts Institute, and when the new school year began, she rode the “B” trolleybus to Sretenka Street every day to attend classes. She found everything interesting, from the trolley ride to the subjects she was studying there. Her most important new acquisition, however, was her teacher, Anastasia Ilyinichna Pustyntseva—or Tusya, as she was called—a true theater artist and set designer, teacher, and the embodiment, according to Nora’s notions, of the ideal modern woman. Studying to become a set designer and theater artist was interesting, and Nora was glad that she had been kicked out of school; otherwise, she would have had to languish in the back row for two more years.

The only thing that cast a shadow over her life was her own appearance, which had never satisfied her, and now even less so. But the theater offered her a new approach to life. Nora began to experiment, searching for a new image. She used a lot of makeup, cut off almost all her hair, lost weight—inadvertently, it must be said, but she liked it. Plump cheeks made her look like a little pink doll, but with hollows under her cheekbones she felt very sharp and stylish. She began to watch her weight seriously, forbidding herself to eat sweets—a ban she held herself to for the rest of her life, having once told herself, I don’t like sweet things. And it seemed she really did not. She picked up smoking—heavily, without deriving any pleasure from it whatsoever. Amalia could hardly keep from crying as she threw out the butts from the ashtray: “Nora, even drinking is better than smoking. It goes without saying that it’s bad for you, but the smell is also disgusting! Chekhov said that kissing a woman who smokes is like licking an ashtray!” Nora dismissed her with a wave of the hand and said, laughing, “Mama, Chekhov and I will never have to kiss anyway.”

But she really did want to kiss someone, she needed some small love conquest—or, better yet, several. She coldly examined the horizon of possibility and discovered that the most attractive young man was in the third year, from the design department. His name was Zhora Beginsky, and although his appearance was nothing like Nikita Tregubsky’s, there was something in his manner that did remind her of him. No, no! Please, no! She didn’t need that again. She had no intention of ever falling in love again. Not now, not ever. Especially with another superhero. Subjects of average quality, or of no quality at all, among the future stagehands, lighting designers, and sound operators were a dime a dozen. Fairly soon thereafter, Nora had won her first minor victories. They had not cost her much, and she understood perfectly well that at this period in her life she was interested only in the technical aspects of love; she practiced her new skills on every possible occasion, with every more or less suitable partner. With each new victory, her womanly self-respect increased.

Vitya became unwitting prey in this long line of victims, and as prey he was grateful. He fell into Nora’s clutches somewhere in the vicinity of an essay on And Quiet Flows the Don. For him it was completely unexpected that there could be something in the world that afforded so much pleasure unrelated to calculus. He was prepared to lose a portion of his valuable mathematical time for the sake of these new joys, even though he was in the tenth grade, and entrance exams to the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering of the university were on the horizon—a challenge even for him, winner of the Math Olympiad year after year. They began to meet again, reviving their old custom but dramatically altering the content.

Vitya didn’t have an ounce of playfulness in his nature. Honesty, earnestness, and conscientiousness were present in everything he undertook. The question of whether she was pretty or not ceased to worry Nora when she was around him. He simply didn’t notice any of her experiments in search of beauty, style, and success. He noticed only that the way she cut her hair was different from the way other women did.

The presence in Nora’s life of the solid and dependable Vitya in some sense freed her from concern with her appearance. Even the question of whether men liked her or not lost its poignancy. Both of them were busy like never before with their studies. They met at Nora’s whenever there was a gap in their schedules; the time they spent together was light and carefree, and things always went without a hitch. There was nothing to talk about, but, then, that was not why they were meeting.

Toward the end of the school year, Nora began thinking about how funny it would be, after her scandalous expulsion from school, to show up at the graduation party in a white dress and a veil, as Vitya’s bride. It would be very, very funny! Let the old bags chew on that, let Nikita eat his heart out, while I look on! And she proposed to Vitya, suggesting they get married for a laugh. He did not consider the idea to be particularly funny, but marriage would not pose a threat to his plans in life. Moreover, his notions about society in general had their genesis in his mother’s perpetual dissatisfaction and suspicion of others, and through her he had formed a conviction that intimacy outside marriage was virtually criminal, or, at the least, very wrong.

They went to the municipal marriage registry, not telling anyone, and submitted their application for an appointment to tie the knot.

Their application was accepted, though not automatically. Nora, hanging her head solemnly and folding her hands over her belly, whispered to the woman official that she had reason to want to hurry things up. The woman smiled—it wasn’t the first time she had seen this in her line of work. She took the bait, and, full of tenderhearted patience, explained the process to them. Soon, through Nora’s efforts, all the bureaucratic obstacles facing the underage newlyweds were removed—with the active participation of one of the senior students from the arts college, who earned his living by preparing falsified certificates, IDs, transport passes, and other fairly simple documents—and at the beginning of June, both their internal passports were adorned with the necessary stamps attesting to their union.

Nora later ditched the idea of the white dress, realizing that there would be a lot of girls dressed in bridelike white at the graduation festivities. Instead, she conceived of something that was far more theatrical and extravagant.

Nora turned up at the school graduation with Vitya in tow and, as they entered, announced to the whole school that they had gotten married. She was dressed in a devil-may-care manner—that is, with extreme impropriety. In the midst of the girls in their white finery, she looked like a crow in the snow: she wore ragged black shorts and a black, completely transparent blouse, on top of which she wore a white satin whalebone corset that she had borrowed from the Stanislavsky Theater costume department. Her getup had the desired effect. The teachers, who keenly remembered the scandal from two years before, startled to life: Should we ask her to leave? Or let her kick up her heels at the event that she had deprived herself of the right to celebrate? Nora’s reputation as a libertine and hooligan was solidified.

This dramatic performance—the wedding and Nora’s appearance at the graduation—made a very strong impression on Grisha. He never even suspected that the quiet Vitya had been so successful in the romance department. Grisha’s crush on Nora had long since evaporated, leaving only the scar on his cheek. What impressed him far more was the way Vitya had kept secret from him, his only friend, his relationship with Nora. Not to mention the marriage.

Vitya, whom the teachers viewed as Nora’s next victim, didn’t even notice Nora’s outrageous attire. He was only waiting for one thing—for the official ceremony to end, so he and Nora could go home to her house, close the door, and engage in that fascinating activity that he sometimes found even more interesting than solving mathematical equations.

Nora never even glanced at Nikita Tregubsky. He was so dumbfounded that he couldn’t bring himself to approach her. He hovered at a respectable distance from her and blinked his ramlike eyes, adorned with thick eyelashes. The whole marriage charade was for Nikita’s benefit, and yet Nora derived no pleasure from it.

Both Nora and Vitya quickly forgot about this one-off graduation performance. The parents of the young couple didn’t find out about the strange marriage—which was neither exactly fictitious nor conventional—until two years later. Varvara Vasilievna was beside herself when she discovered this prank, and fumed in indignation for a long time afterward. Then that passed, replaced by a real hatred of the daughter-in-law, whom she had never yet laid eyes on. When they finally met, by chance, she didn’t like Nora one bit, and, it seemed, never would. Amalia, when she found out about her daughter’s secret marriage, threw up her hands and said, “Well, Nora, it’s impossible to know what you’ve got up your sleeve.”

Vitya called Nora now and then. They did see each other, but she forgot all about him between one visit and the next. A few times, she brought out her marriage license to show one of her girlfriends, more for a good laugh than anything else; and her marital status freed her from the anxiety of unmarried girls that reigned all around her.

In her third year of marriage, Nora embarked on a feverish romance that lasted for a full two weeks. This was her first affair with someone other than a fellow student her own age. He was a grown-up man, a theater director, who had dropped by Tusya’s studio to wish her a (belated) happy birthday. On the first evening, the director tried feebly to fend her off, but Nora all but turned somersaults around him. Used to women’s advances, he gave in through sheer laziness. He had always been attracted to fleshy women with large breasts, hair, and legs. Young girls with delicate, slender legs, transparent ears on an almost bald head, and eager lips frightened him. Recently, many girls of that description had appeared in actors’ circles, and up until then he had managed to steer clear of them. But on this particular evening, he was tired and not as vigilant as usual. He’d had a bit to drink, felt soft and mellow from conversation, and surrendered without resistance. A Moscow romance in no way fit into his plans, but the girl wouldn’t let him out of her clutches; for two weeks, they were inseparable. Then he left, taking with him a heightened respect for himself and gratitude toward Nora, who, with her fierce love, had awakened in him hidden powers that he intended to use, of course, for something else altogether.

Nora remained in Moscow, bereft, trying to stop up a hole that felt bigger than she was herself. It turned out that the affair with Nikita Tregubsky, which she thought had left her older and wiser, had not taught her anything. She had fallen in love again. By now, she already understood that you have to fight fire with fire—she mobilized all her admirers, and tumbled around with them in various positions and situations—but the memory of this infernal Tengiz would not fade. At that time, she still hoped that she could get along without him. Neither he nor she could have supposed that what they had begun would last a lifetime.

That year, Nora hardly saw Vitya at all. Just by accident, near the metro station, they ran into each other, and their relationship flared up again for a while. It was during this time that Andrei Ivanovich finally managed to get divorced, Amalia resigned from the design bureau where she had worked as a draftsman for twenty years, and they went to live in the country, at Prioksko-Terrasny Nature Reserve. At first, they would travel back and forth to Moscow, but then they renovated a house, adding almost all the modern conveniences, took in pets, and came back to the city less and less often.

Vitya again started coming over to see Nora now and then, and sometimes stayed the night. Varvara Vasilievna’s hatred for her invisible daughter-in-law grew more and more intense, but Nora was oblivious to it, a cause for more annoyance to Varvara Vasilievna: What kind of an attitude was this? She was just waiting for the chance to give Nora a piece of her mind, and to quarrel to her heart’s content; but the chance eluded her. It eluded her for a long, long time. In fact, Nora never did give her mother-in-law the opportunity to air her grievances on the subject once and for all for the rest of her life.