Jacob's Ladder

12 One-of-a-Kind Yurik

Yahoos and Houyhnhnms

(1976–1981)

At least a whole year passed after the child was born before Nora realized what profound changes were taking place in her as well. Besides the obvious things, things that were to be expected—that she was destined for lifelong servitude to Yurik, that she was intimately, physiologically dependent on whether her child was hungry, healthy, or in good spirits—she discovered that her perception of the world had become doubled, as though it had acquired a stereoscopic property. A pleasant puff of wind blowing through the window became both frightening and alarming, because Yurik turned over in his crib from the stream of air on his cheeks. The tap of a hammer in the apartment above, which she wouldn’t even have noticed before, was painful to her ears, and she responded to these blows from the depths of her body, just like the baby. Moderately hot food now burned her mouth; the tight elastic of her socks irritated her. These and many other things she now seemed to measure with two different thermometers—one for adults and one for children.

The habit of constant analysis so quickly took root in her that she became a bit frightened for herself. She hadn’t expected motherhood to alter her entire biochemistry so thoroughly. She hoped that when she stopped breast-feeding him her familiar world would re-establish itself. But this never happened. On the contrary, it was as though, together with the baby, she was learning to know what was soft, hard, hot, or sharp; she looked at the branch of a tree, a toy, any object at all, with primordial curiosity. Just like him, she ripped pages of newsprint and listened to the rustling of the paper; she licked his toys, noting that the plastic duck was more pleasing to the tongue than the rubber kitten. Once, after she had fed Yurik, she was wiping the sticky cream of wheat off the table with her hand and she caught herself thinking that there was indeed something pleasurable about smearing it on the surface. Yurik was thrilled when he saw his mother doing what he liked to do, and started slapping his little palm in the mess of porridge. Both of them were rubbing their hands around on the tabletop. Both of them were happy.

Nora shared fully in the surprise and excitement of the baby the first time he saw snow falling from the sky and the cold white carpet on the ground. He stamped around in his little boots, examining the ribbed footprints and tracks they made, caught snowflakes, put them in his mouth and wanted to chew them (but they melted, and he didn’t understand where they had gone—he stuffed his mitten into his mouth and licked it). Nora stood beside him and tried looking around through his eyes: a huge dog that towers a head above you, a giant bench you can neither climb up on or sit on, a statue of Timiryazev with only the pedestal visible, the rest of the monument stretching up to the clouds.

With her son, Nora became reacquainted with the feeling of water—she filled up the bathtub, crawled in with the baby, and enjoyed watching him splash the water with the palms of his little hands, trying to drink the flowing streams and grabbing hold of the water to lift it up, indignant and unable to understand why it ran through his fingers.

Sensing that the child and his remarkable world were leading her into a volatile, uncertain region, she decided to put down anchor—she acquired a once-a-week lover, youthful Kostya, one of the recently matured young men who had studied under her several years before in the classes for young people. “Dialysis” was how she referred to these hasty evening visits. She didn’t bother to invite Vitya for this purpose: he was angry at her and couldn’t forgive her callous use of him to fulfill her biological needs. Kostya was easygoing, frisky, and nearly mute; he demanded nothing of Nora. Sometimes he even brought her flowers. Once, Nora put these abstract, meaningless carnations into a vase in the evening, and in the morning, when she woke up, she saw something very amusing: Yurik had climbed up onto the table and yanked the flowers out of the vase, and was stuffing a whole flower into his mouth with a frown. Nora snatched him off the table, then slowly and deliberately ate a flower herself. It wasn’t at all tasty, but it was edible. That is to say, if you were certain it was food, you could learn to like it.

Yet even Yurik wasn’t enough to fill the gaping hole Tengiz had left in her life, and she tried to patch it up with any available material. Once-a-week Kostya didn’t plug the gap; he was just a little bandage on a big wound. The best caulking for the hole was work; she was eager for any task or job that didn’t require her to leave home.

She bought several watercolor pads of twenty pages each, and every evening, after she put the baby to bed—if she didn’t have visitors from the theater, who had grown fond of her home as a hub on various Moscow walking routes—sketched his fingers and toes, his ear, his back, his folds and fat rumples, and tried to capture his gestures. Only one other body in the world was that intimately familiar to her: a head, slightly flat in back; round, delicate ears, much softer than the rest of him; a broad forehead; deep-set walnut-colored eyes; long clefts along his cheeks; an aquiline nose with a delicate bridge at the top; a neat little mouth with a somewhat protruding lower lip; and a number of missing teeth.

With the tips of her fingers, with her lips, she had explored that body so thoroughly that she could sculpt it in clay. She knew by heart the slightly sagging skin on his neck and in places surrounding the muscles—on his chest and his arms. She knew all the skin folds on his stomach that formed when he sat cross-legged, slightly stooped over.

Tengiz had grown older through the years she had known him, immersing herself in the most intimate details of his body and mind (with long pauses, though deeper and deeper every time); but her child developed more and more wonderful details with each passing month. As he grew, the soft plumpness gradually turned into his first, barely defined shapes—the soles of his feet flattened and roughened up, his teeth came in (slightly crooked on his upper jaw), and the shape of his mouth began to change.

Nora tried rebuilding her life in a way that would free her from Tengiz. Or, rather, from the absence of him.

He appeared again, as always, at the moment when Nora had already begun to think that she had parted with him for good and was already reconciled to the idea that the movie that had been in vivid color with him, and was black-and-white without him, was nevertheless interesting. Just then, he called her and asked whether it was convenient for him to drop by in about fifteen minutes.

“Sure, come right over,” Nora said casually. It had been two years since she had last seen him.

She hung up the phone and began rushing around. The doorbell rang almost immediately, even before she managed to control the cold sweat that made her shiver. He stood in the doorway, dressed in an old sheepskin coat that still carried the acrid stench of living creatures. He was carrying a stuffed bear in his arms—exactly the kind of bear that Genrikh had given Yurik—and the ancient duffel bag that he always traveled with.

“You won’t send me packing?” Tengiz said, sloughing off the sheepskin.

You bet I will, Nora thought to herself; but out loud she said, “Come right in!”

The shivering stopped. Nora realized that, in the space of one moment, she had re-entered the basic condition of her existence—being together with Tengiz. This was, perhaps, the best thing she knew—talking to him, sitting with him at the table, sleeping and sharing her silences with him.

“I want to chase you away and go to bed with you, both at the same time, Tengiz. I’m a Capricorn. For a Capricorn, the world ceases to exist when she is doing what she most loves. And what I love most in the world is you.”

“I adore you, Nora. And I, as it turns out, am a Dragon! Natella has grown keen on astrology, and it’s the best madness she’s ever suffered from.”

“Wait a minute—the Dragon is from another astrological calendar. According to the Chinese, I’m not a Fish … a Goat, I think.”

“For Dragons everything is good! They’re brilliant and wise, and lucky in everything! Like me!”

The dialogue continued, but their clothes already lay in a heap on the floor next to the coatrack. Nora breathed in his smell, the only one in the world that all her receptors were attuned to—sheepskin, the crude country tobacco he liked to smoke, and Tengiz’s body. He noisily expelled a breath of air, like a runner coming in to the finish line.

“Don’t pay any attention to me; it’s just that I haven’t been here for a while.”

But now he was back, and he was still the same, whole and undamaged. Was such a coincidence possible? Inhale, exhale, pulse, blood type, what have you … Nora spat out a piece of the wool that had immediately found its way into her mouth. Tengiz laughed and removed it from her lip. The last time he was in Moscow, it was also winter, and the sheepskin coat had served them trustily in all kinds of unpredictable adventures.

One-and-a-half-year-old Yurik woke up, crawled out of his crib, and toddled up to them. Right away he noticed the bear lying next to the door and grabbed hold of it. He paid no attention to Tengiz. Nora, hopping on one foot, struggled to put on her trousers, which had turned inside out. Tengiz shook out the sheepskin, releasing a cloud of the acrid fragrance, and hung it on a hook on the coatrack.

“Now, where were we?” he asked Nora, and took out a handful of tangerines and a bottle of Cognac from his duffel bag.

“Right here, at this very place,” Nora said, laughing. No, they hadn’t parted ways. They hadn’t parted in any sense whatsoever.

Nora picked up Yurik along with the bear and started dressing him.

While Yurik was introducing the new bear to the old one, Nora went out to the kitchen. “Are you hungry?”

Tengiz nodded. “I haven’t had a bite to eat since yesterday.”

“Buckwheat porridge. Sauerkraut. That’s all there is.”

“Excellent.”

He ate slowly, almost reluctantly, as though he wasn’t even hungry, like all well-mannered Georgians. Nora sat across from him, her chin resting on her interlocking fingers, not feeling anything but his nearness, while he ate silently; but her entire body, still full of his presence, glowed with happiness.

He placed his fork on the empty plate and said, “Let’s start on a new project, Nora. Puppets—this time we’re going to work with puppets. They will be large. Architectural. With actors inside, and they’ll be able to emerge from them. A real actor will play Gulliver.”

“Wait, wait, I’ve never worked with puppets. What’s the play? And where will we perform it?”

“Oh, Nora, Swift, of course!”

“Gulliver in the Land of the Lilliputians?”

“Yes, only now it will be about the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms. About people who’ve lost the semblance of humans, and the horses that are superior to the people. And Gulliver is also an instrument for taking temperatures by this standard of measure.”

“And the play?”

“What play? There isn’t one.”

“But some sort of script?”

“We have to come up with the idea first; and I know someone I can ask to write it.” Tengiz was in top working form, in a white heat of excitement and inspiration, and this enthusiasm was already communicating itself to Nora, though she had only read Swift as a child, in an adapted, abridged version, and didn’t remember it very well.

Tengiz took a dilapidated book out of his duffel bag. “Here!”

Nora held the tome in her hands and began glancing through it. The book was in Russian, with a blue library stamp in Georgian script. It was a 1947 edition.

“Did you steal this from the library?”

“I took it for business purposes.”

“I’ll have to reread it.”

“Well, sit down and read.”

“I have to walk Yurik before it gets dark.”

“No problem. Get him dressed, and I’ll take him out for a walk. You read. Read!”

While Nora was getting Yurik dressed, he made a bit of a fuss, because he wanted to take both bears with him on the walk. Nora tried to distract him by giving him a little shovel.

“What’s the big deal? We’ll take the bears for a walk, too. Come on, little fellow! Let’s get going,” Tengiz said.

Nora was absolutely sure that Yurik would refuse to go with Tengiz, but he went willingly. When they were already on their way out the door, Tengiz was still pulling on his sheepskin coat. Yurik hugged his stuffed animals to his chest. Nora watched as they slowly shuffled to the elevator, half a flight of stairs down, and felt an unprecedented churning in her heart—here were the two men, the most important men in her life, together; but it was impossible for that to last longer than an hour’s walk down Nikitsky Boulevard.

In the evening, after Yurik was in bed, they continued their conversation.

“Okay, I like the premise, but why puppets? All our puppet theaters are for children. Who will we perform the play for? Plus, you haven’t said a word about where you plan to perform it.”

Tengiz brushed her objections aside.

“For children? What gave you that idea? As you know, in the seventeenth century, when Shakespeare was already gone, the British Parliament outlawed dramatic theater. A bill, an edict, whatever it was called—I don’t remember. But that was when puppet theater started flourishing. They performed in markets, on city squares. It was theater of the highest order. Nothing childish about it. So—any objections? Look, there’s this Yahoo, a lumpen, a boor, and next to him a noble animal, the horse. Have you ever ridden on horseback? Do you know anything at all about horses? And the theater is a good one! In the provinces, as usual. In Altai. They’ve made me an offer. I haven’t signed on to it yet. If we can agree on it, you and I, I’ll fly out there right away. Generally speaking, I have to tell you that puppet theater is where the most interesting things are happening right now. That’s where there is freedom. Well, for the puppets, anyway.”

Nora shook her head. Tengiz was waiting for her response, her objections. This was their little game: it was precisely on the foundation of her queries, her objections, that he would construct his directorial arguments. No one knew how to play this role better than she did.

“I don’t know anything about horses. We didn’t have horses. We didn’t even have cats. We have allergies. And I don’t know anything about puppet theater. I need to finish the book. I can’t commit to it just like that, out of the blue.”

Nora finished reading toward morning. She read quickly—but not all of her time had been spent with Swift. Afterward, Tengiz embraced her and said, “Now, read, read. Don’t get distracted.”

But distracted she was. Then Yurik woke up and started crying. It seemed to Nora that he had a bit of a fever, but he went back to sleep very quickly, before she had time to give him any medicine.

The men slept late. Nora finished Swift and closed the book. It contained so much, it required contemplation. She cooked some porridge and put the pan under a pillow to keep it warm, then took a soft pencil and began sketching a horse. The first horse in her life. She kept thinking about how the Houyhnhnms differed from horses, and the Yahoos from people. Yurik woke up completely healthy. He ate his porridge. And Nora said yes.

As soon as Nora agreed, Tengiz hopped on a plane to Altai to sign the contract and discuss details. The general director of the theater had studied with him at the Moscow Art Theatre school, where he had spent two years in the now-distant past. Everything was falling into place. Three days later, he returned, happy; he had found an actor who was, in his word, brilliant.

The happiest time in Nora’s life now began—the three of them together, Nora, Yurik, and Tengiz.

The play was born out of wrangling over sketches and hashing out the basic question posed by the piece: What was the point at which a human being becomes an animal, and an animal a human being? What does this distinction consist in, and how can it be expressed in dramatic form? When she read the book more attentively, Nora concluded that the society of Houyhnhnms was hardly exemplary; they were rather dull, limited, and overall boring beasts. Here Nora became a bit despondent, because her thoughts about the society of horses and humans were hard to translate into the idiom of puppet theater. In time, however, this sorted itself out. Tengiz set her mind at rest: for their work, it was enough to recall Swift’s/Gulliver’s pronouncement about humanity, “Upon the whole, I never beheld, in all my travels, so disagreeable an animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an antipathy.”

“To work with this material, we just have to set aside our surmise that the noble Houyhnhnms are dullards with no emotional intelligence. They don’t know love or friendship, anxiety, or sadness. The hatred and wrath they experience is reserved for the Yahoos, who in their world occupy about the same position as Jews did in Nazi Germany.”

Nora accepted these premises. The boundaries had been laid out. Tengiz and Nora went to pay a visit to an elderly playwright, the widow of an avant-garde director who died before the war in a lucky accident that saved him from being arrested. The widow, a faded butterfly of the Silver Age, lived in a dilapidated one-story house on Mansurovsky Lane. She served them weak tea and was abundantly kind and sympathetic to them, immediately understanding what they needed from her. She wrote the script in a week. It worked very well, and required only a few adjustments during the rehearsals. Unfortunately, she never managed to collect the fee for her work. The theater had negotiated the contract with her, and had submitted the request for approval from the Ministry of Culture, but while they were awaiting a decision she died.

Nora worked conscientiously. By way of beginning her project, she decided to spend time with living nature, and she took Yurik to the zoo to see all sorts of ungulates. Yurik showed most interest in the sparrows and pigeons roaming at large, which were not exhibits at all, but were, if anything, service workers. Even the elephant himself failed to impress him: the scale of the creature was simply too large for Yurik to notice it. Nora made several sketches in her notebook, and realized she was pursuing the wrong path. She rejected the idea of studying from nature, and immersed herself in visual art. She sat in libraries and contemplated all kinds of artists’ depictions of horses. The library of the All-Russian Theater Association allowed her to bring Yurik along; she had known the librarians there for nearly twenty years and was on good terms with them. She had to enlist Taisia’s help when she went to the other libraries. Sometimes her friend Natasha Vlasov took Yurik under her wing and brought him home with her, where her son, Fedya, was happy to look after and amuse the little fellow.

Soon Nora knew precisely which horses she needed. And which Yahoos.

Tengiz, who had gone to Tbilisi to sort out some domestic affairs, returned, and announced that rehearsals would begin in a week.

Nora placed a stack of sketches in front of him. He took the first one and examined it. Gulliver occupied one side of the page, an observer, and in the center were two trusslike horses that appeared to be constructed out of the metal rods and bars of a child’s construction set, held together by crude bolts, articulate, hinged, with huge bellies that contained a small platform for the actors. Their faces were vaguely human, smiling, with bared teeth—but fearsome nonetheless.

“You’re a genius, Nora! You did it.”

In the second sketch, Gulliver was crawling out of a tiny house with a ring on the roof, squeezing through a swing door. All around, hairy, unkempt creatures with wild but recognizably human faces were frolicking. All of them were bound together with a single net.

“Excellent. The masses,” Tengiz said. Then he took the next drawing.

He was sitting down, and she was standing in front of him; they were at eye level with each other. He scratched the gray stubble on his cheek, smacked his lips now and then, frowned, and said, in a mock mournful tone, “You’ve thought of everything. The whole thing can be staged without me.”

“Without me, Tengiz. Without me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t go with you. I have no one to leave Yurik with.”

“We’re not leaving him; we’re taking him with us. I rented a two-bedroom apartment. There weren’t any three-bedroom apartments in the entire town. It’s spacious, though. We’ll all fit.”

Nora shook her head. “No, I’m not going.”

“You’ve lost your mind! I can’t work without you! I know it! I’ve tried! How can you abandon me like this? Our flight is in three days, and the boy’s going, too. They already bought us the tickets.”

At that moment, Yurik shuffled up and held out his hand to Tengiz. Nora realized that she would go. She would fly and she would crawl on her hands and knees. Anywhere. Anywhere at all. To Altai. To the back of beyond. To hell and back.

“Want to go for a walk?” Tengiz said. Yurik hurried into his room to fetch the two teddy bears.

“What about a shop to work in there? Even here the construction would be fairly difficult. I consulted one of the best Moscow puppeteers, and he said that not every craftsman would be up to it.”

“They’ve shut down some sort of military factory there. Two of the craftsmen used to work there. Not only can they build you a horse—they’ll build you a rocket if you need one!”

Then Amalia came over. She said that she would take Yurik to the nature reserve. Fresh, clean air, goat’s milk, homegrown vegetables … Andrei Ivanovich, too, thought it would be a mistake to drag the child off to such a remote region.

She should never have mentioned Andrei Ivanovich and the “mistake.” More than once, tempers had flared on this subject.

“Mama, please let me make my own mistakes. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t make them. I’d be you.”

“But think of the child! Who has ever shown you such … cruelty?” The question was rhetorical and should have been left hanging, but a quick retort followed: “You.”

At this point, Amalia began to cry, and Nora got upset: she could have kept her mouth shut. Nora put her arms around her mother and whispered in her ear: “Mama, I’m sorry, I won’t say that anymore. But don’t pressure me. Please don’t try to make me do things I don’t want to.”

By the time they parted, they had made peace. Things were even better than before; each of them felt she was guilty.

And another happy chapter in her life began—in a provincial Altai town with a large river, doing work that felt like a celebration. Nora discovered that puppeteers were a special breed of actor, who hadn’t veered very far from the old Punch and Judy shows in market squares of yore. Such playful, entertaining folks could never be satisfied with ordinary theater. The director of the puppet theater, a former Party official, turned out to be a marvelous woman, exceptionally so, for which she was subsequently fired from her job—luckily, not for Gulliver, but for the next one. For Gulliver she only got a reprimand.

The Altai episode in their lives turned out to be very important for Yurik, too. He was late learning to talk, but here he began speaking in complex sentences that were both striking and funny. Many years later, it became evident that his prodigious memory had begun working here as well. His earliest memories were about the theater, the construction workshop, and Tengiz, whom he decided to adopt as his father.

The opening night was September 15. On the morning of that day, Tengiz received a telegram that his mother had died. He left for home the moment the play reached the end. The premiere went off without a hitch. The audience was in raptures, but Tengiz was not present to take a bow. He was already flying on a flimsy local airplane to the big city of Novosibirsk, from where he would fly to Moscow, then on to Tbilisi.

Nora hardly had time to say goodbye to him. She stayed on at the theater for three days, and even managed to catch a thrillingly scathing review by the deputy head of the local department of culture, someone by the name of Shortbread (you couldn’t make it up if you tried!), who detected in the play “bourgeois avant-gardism and Picassoism.” The second critical notice took a more substantive approach: “From whence this disregard for the human being? Does the director really imply that people are worse than animals? Does this not cast aspersions on the Soviet people?”

Nora and Yurik returned to Moscow in the second half of September. It had rained all July and August, and now, by way of compensation, a true Indian summer had set in. Tengiz didn’t call. He had told her that he had plans to go to Wrocław in the fall to work in Jerzy Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre. Poland was the most liberal of the socialist countries, and Georgia was the most liberal of the Soviet Republics, and Tengiz received ideologically supportive permission from the Georgian Ministry of Culture for the trip. He sent no letters, either about Grotowski or about anyone else. Nora had to go through a final parting with him yet again. This time it was easier for her, though—perhaps because of Yurik?

The three of them had spent half a year together, the happiest half year of her life thus far. After that, another life began, in which she had to get used to Tengiz’s absence and fill up the yawning hole. Now, however, she had the feeling that he might show up at any time, walk in with his duffel bag and his sheepskin coat, wearing a hand-knit sweater or a baggy T-shirt, and the holiday would start all over again.

Taisia, who had remained “on call” to help out and was now almost a member of the family, thought that Yurik was behind in his development. But when Yurik met her after the two-month sojourn in Altai with the words “Hairy Taisia came to see Yurik, and brought him candy,” she stopped insisting for a time that Nora take him to a neurologist, a speech therapist, or a child psychologist.

Nora felt that she had finished her work on Yurik’s babyhood. She still drew him, but now, on the same large pieces of Whatman paper, she wrote down his little utterances. She had to jot them down immediately. Sometimes they were so strange and unintelligible that Nora had a hard time decoding them.

One day, when he was washing his hands in the bathroom, he turned on the faucets over and over again—first the cold, then the hot, then again the cold. Nora waited patiently.

“Nora, why does the cold water have a man’s voice, and the hot water a woman’s voice?”

Nora thought for a bit. She didn’t hear any difference, she told him. Then he waved his hand as if to brush off his disappointment, and said, “Well, tell me where the very middle of the water is, then.”

Nora felt that she was the one who was lagging behind her son in his magical absorption in the world, his unfolding within it.

“There’s a little bit of fire in each thing,” the boy said while he was playing with a piece of twine.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” Nora said, leaning over him.

He clutched the twine in one hand and pulled hard on it with the other. “See? There’s a little bit of fire in the rope, and it stings.”

He unclenched his fist. There was a red mark on his palm.

“Mama, does the twine have a round face?”

When he was about five, Yurik developed a new infatuation. A friend of Nora’s, the puppeteer Sergei Nikolayev, gave him a real African drum, a djembe, and tapped out a simple rhythm: “Baby Avocado, Baby Avocado, Baby Avocado went to bed.” This straightforward, no-frills toy became his favorite for months to come. Yurik would beat on the drum for hours—with his palm, with a spoon, with a stick, with his fingertips—galloping around it in a circle all the while. Nora was exhausted by the constant pounding and tried to distract him with less noisy activities. Once, she complained to Sergei that he had ruined her life. Sergei brushed her comment aside, but took it to heart—his next present, a xylophone, rectified the situation somewhat. Now Yurik was captivated by a new musical instrument—and the sound was considerably less jarring than the pounding of the djembe, it must be said.

I should have taken Grandmother’s piano, Nora thought. Maybe he has an ear for music? It’s too bad I left the piano behind with the neighbors. She remembered perfectly how her grandmother had tried to give her piano lessons, and what a torment it was to her. And for her grandmother as well … She had no inclinations in that direction whatsoever. Maybe her hearing wasn’t sharp enough? Genrikh had a wonderful ear for music, and Nora remembered how he used to sing long operatic arias at any holiday gathering, after downing his first glass. Amalia was always humming some Soviet song or other under her breath. Nora’s maternal grandfather had been a precentor, so he must have been musical, too. Perhaps Yurik took after Genrikh or after that great-grandfather …

When he gets a little older I’ll send him to music school, Nora decided.

Then he learned to read. All by himself. Nora discovered it by chance. He couldn’t get to sleep, so he asked her to read to him. When it was already after eleven, and Nora was getting tired herself, she closed the book. “That’s all. Now go to sleep.”

He resisted, saying, “Okay, then. I’ll read myself.”

Nora always tried not to contradict him. She agreed to his demand. “All right, only you have to read out loud. I read to you, now you read to me.”

And he started reading—not very confidently, stopping here and there, but reading whole words, not just sounding out the letters. It was a story about a rejuvenating apple tree, and he couldn’t have memorized it, since it was the first time they were reading it. Nora didn’t say anything; she didn’t ask him how he had learned to read. But she thought: Well, that’s that. Another childhood milestone passed. He’s got Vitya’s head. He’ll probably be a mathematician. Or a physicist. And she didn’t believe any good would come of it.

Yurik constantly surprised Nora. Once, he sat on his haunches for a long time, studying the grass.

“What do you see there?” Nora said. Without taking his eyes off the grass, he said, “Nora, am I growing headfirst or feet-down?”

Then, suddenly, he hugged a tree, pressing his ear to the trunk and caressing the bark. He made a fist and pounded softly on the bark, still listening. When Nora asked whether he heard something, he shook his head. “I don’t hear anything. I’m wondering why people don’t have such nice shapes as trees. You don’t know? It’s because they stand still and be pretty. But people are always running and running and running.” And he stood next to the tree again, threw out his arms, and froze. A little boy in a red jacket with a pocket on the front.

Tengiz didn’t stay away for long. Now he would summon Nora to collaborate with him, sometimes in the Baltic Republics, or in Siberia. The country was huge, stretching from Brest to Vladivostok. They began to get invitations as a team. The couple enjoyed great success, sometimes even notoriety. They received awards and warnings in turns. Tengiz was offered a theater in Kutaisi. He considered it, then rejected the offer, primarily because of Nora. The position of head director would not allow him to travel about the country so freely, and he couldn’t invite Nora to Georgia. And she wouldn’t have gone, anyway. He visited Nora at home now and then, but tried not to stay overnight, preferring to check into a hotel. The boy had chosen him to be his father, would cling to his leg every time he saw him, and it was cruel to create the illusion that they were a family. And things were getting harder and harder for Tengiz.

When he was nearly six, Yurik started asking about his father. Nora had prepared for this question beforehand. Vitya, who had only seen Yurik once, when he was a year old, had completely disappeared from the child’s memory. Vitya had visited Nora two or three times since, but each time the boy had been asleep. Vitya had already grown used to the idea that Nora had deceived him in giving birth to a child without consulting him about it, and was reconciled to the fact of the child’s existence. This was why, when Nora called him and asked if he wanted to see his son, he agreed, albeit without much enthusiasm. Without taking his mother’s point of view into consideration, he agreed with Nora that she and Yurik would visit him at his house.

Nora, yet again, smiling to herself, bought a cake and set out to visit the relatives. Vitya and his mother had moved from Nikitsky Boulevard to an apartment near the Molodezhnaya metro station, and this shift in geography added another dot to the long ellipsis of their sporadic and artificial relations.

The visit was a short one. Varvara, torn by conflicting feelings—hatred of Nora and curiosity—went to see the neighbors. Vitya set up the chessboard and showed Yurik how the pieces moved.

“Is this a game of war?” Yurik said. Vitya thought for a while and said that it was.

“Why are there so many pawns? They’re all the same.”

“Well, they’re like the foot soldiers. They need to protect the king and queen, and to attack.” Vitya moved first. “The first moves of the game are called the opening.”

“Can you do it another way?” Yurik asked.

Fifteen minutes in, Yurik got the hang of the game, and said that he wanted to start again. Vitya refused, saying that it wasn’t fair to stop a game in the middle, and very quickly won. They began another game. In the middle of the third game between her son and her half-acknowledged grandson, Varvara returned. Curiosity had triumphed. She pretended she hadn’t expected to see them, but the ingenuous and uncompromisingly honest Vitya unmasked her with his blue-eyed astonishment: “But I told you they were coming, Mama.”

She waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, Vitya, I never know what you mean.”

Yurik lost the third game in a row, and was about to start howling, but Vitya said, “My friend, you play very well. I couldn’t play as well as you do at your age. Now I’ll show you one more move, and no one will ever be able to beat you in the game again.”

Vitya set out the pieces again in order to show Yurik a “fork.” Yurik caught on immediately and laughed, asking Vitya to show him another trick like that. After this, Vitya liked the boy so much that he had no objections to seeing him from time to time.

“Wonderful!” Nora said. “You can come and see us. You can play chess together. Just call beforehand to let us know.”

While they were riding on the metro to go home, Nora kept thinking about what she would say the next time Yurik asked about his father. She herself didn’t bring it up. A week and a half later, Yurik asked a question out of the blue, which, at the same time, prompted a satisfactory answer.

“Mama, is there such a thing as a cousin-papa?”

Which of Nora’s men was the papa-papa and which the cousin-papa was never determined with absolute certainty. Vitya began coming over now and then. He didn’t really stand out among the other numerous visitors to the “crossroads.” All Nora’s friends loved and spoiled Yurik—both those who considered him to be smart and wise beyond his years, and those who were wary of his eccentricities. Among the latter was Taisia, who continued to urge Nora to take the child to a children’s neurologist and other specialists. Nora, however, was reluctant to consult the specialists, until she realized that Yurik could distinguish colors only by their intensity. First she went to see an ophthalmologist. After studying a chart for ten minutes, the doctor announced that Yurik suffered from color blindness, and a rare form of it at that. They were referred to a neuropathologist, and from there made the rounds of all the specialists at the children’s polyclinic. Finally, they gave her a referral to the Institute of Defectology, where Yurik was examined by a whole brigade of doctors. Nora, who was present at this council of physicians, was astonished by the imprecision of the doctors’ questions, and the accuracy of Yurik’s answers. To begin, they asked whether he knew the names of the basic geometrical forms—triangle, circle, square. Then they asked, “What shape is a Christmas tree?”

“Round,” Yurik said without missing a beat.

They presented the geometric shapes again, and then asked the same question.

“Round,” he said. Another explanation followed, and the question was put to him again.

“But I’m looking at it from above!” Yurik said, agitated. Nora could hardly suppress a smile. She knew about his ability to look at things from his own perspective.

The doctors exchanged glances and presented him with the next task. On a piece of paper divided into four sections, there were pictures of a horse’s head, a dog, a goose, and a sled.

“Which picture doesn’t belong here?” an older woman with a braid encircling her head asked him in a sugary voice.

“The horse.”

“Why?” all the doctors said in a chorus.

“Because the other ones are all whole, and there’s only one piece of the horse—his head.”

“No, no, that’s wrong, think again,” the lady with the braid said.

Yurik thought for a while, and examined the picture with great concentration.

“The goose,” Yurik said confidently.

And again they were taken by surprise.

“Why?”

“Because the horse and the dog can be hitched to the sled, but not the goose.”

The women in the white robes exchanged significant glances again and requested the mother to leave. By now Nora had guessed that the correct answer was “sled,” since it was the only inanimate object in this menagerie. She left the room.

When she was in the corridor, she no longer found it amusing, and felt angry at herself. Why had she dragged her bright child here to be examined by these idiots? They didn’t even realize how much better organized his mind was than their own. Nonetheless, they made a diagnosis: retardation of psychological development. In addition to giving Nora the paper with the diagnosis, they also directed her to a special live-in school for children with psychological aberrations.

Not on your life! Next year, when he turned seven and was ready to go to first grade, she would enroll him in the same school that Nora’s parents had attended. She herself had not been able to attend because of new zoning rules requiring that she go to another school, which she still shuddered to remember. But there was still a year to go before he entered first grade, and Nora decided to start him in music school in the meantime.

The closest one was the Central Music School, curated by the Moscow Conservatory. It was one of the best schools in the city, a rather refined and snobbish place that had been evacuated for a time for refurbishment but had just begun to function again in its home premises. Everything was institutional green-and-tan and smelled strongly of paint. Yurik inhaled the thick air through his nose. The interview was conducted by a plump middle-aged woman with an impressive tortoiseshell comb in her wispy gray hair, held back in a small bun.

The woman first asked Yurik to sing, but he outright refused, and made a counteroffer to the woman—he suggested they play a game of chess. The lady raised her eyebrows slightly and declined the offer. She tapped her fingers on top of the piano and asked him to tap out the same rhythm. Yurik put his hands on the lid and beat out a rhythm that was long and complex, but in no way resembled what he had just heard; he was remembering his African djembe. The woman turned out to be needlessly persistent, and, bending over him, urged him to repeat the simple passage. Again he beat out a rhythm of his own. The teacher opened the lid of the piano and played do-re-mi. Yurik, standing next to her, held his nose and said, “It really stinks in here.”

Perhaps if the woman had not doused herself with the old-fashioned Red Moscow scent, and had sprinkled the more modern Silver Lily-of-the-Valley or Carmen, Yurik’s life would have taken a different turn.

They walked home. Yurik was quiet the whole way, contemplating something deeply. Next to their entranceway, he stopped, took his mother’s hand, and said, “Nora, why am I me?”

Nora took in a gulp of air. How could she answer a question no one could answer?

“Well, you know about yourself that you’re your own person, one of a kind, that you’re … ‘I.’ Other people are not you, but they all have their own ‘I.’”

“But how do you know that I’m a one-of-a-kind person?” As they stood at the front door to the building, Yurik fiddled with Nora’s hand. She felt helpless with confusion. Then he said, “We’re all one-of-a-kind. Me, Grandmother Amalia, and Taisia. But I thought I was the only special one.”

“Well, you were right,” Nora said, unsure what else to say.

“And Vitya is also one-of-a-kind,” Yurik added, after thinking about it a bit.

Nora froze. He’s right, she thought. They are both as different from other people as the Houyhnhnms are from the Yahoos.