Jacob's Ladder

14 A Female Line

(1975–1980)

Yurik was growing up. Nora grew up with him, always aware how indebted she was to her son for so much. When the other “playground” mothers and grandmothers talked about child-raising in her presence, she only smiled. She understood early on that the child was raising her to a much greater degree than she was raising the child. The child demanded a patience that she was completely devoid of by nature; but each new day required her to exercise this indispensable ability. The hardness of her own character, her resistance to the imposition on her of someone else’s will, and even someone else’s opinion, had complicated her relations with her mother during her adolescence. Now she had learned to see everything from Yurik’s perspective, as a two-year-old, a five-year-old, a first-grader …

From his first days of life, Nora had shared hers with Yurik, which the baby sling that Marina Chipkovskaya had given her greatly facilitated. In it the baby traveled with Nora to exhibits, to the theater, to visit friends. At that time, this blue baby sling had been an imported novelty, but in later years, throughout the entire world, it became one of those objects that fostered a new relationship between mother and child. Now the child was not left at home with a babysitter, a grandmother, or a neighbor, but was brought along to places and events to which one would never have thought to bring a child in former days. The sling allowed for a certain freedom of movement, making the connection between mother and child yet more profound. Nora thought about this when Yurik started walking. Even after he was sure on his feet, he was still reluctant to stray too far from his mother. Nora devised a new strategy, diametrically opposed to her earlier practices: when Yurik took one step away from her, she would increase the distance between them by one step in the other direction. This was how she encouraged his independence. Fully aware of the dangers inherent in their double introversion, she made a conscious effort to establish some distance, baby step by baby step. It didn’t take long for him to develop a taste for freedom.

Taisia spent more and more time with Nora, to their mutual advantage. She had been working for time-and-a-half pay at the polyclinic, but Nora asked her to cut back her hours and to come to relieve her two days a week. Taisia agreed. Nora’s child-rearing methods seemed too harsh to Taisia, however, and she spoiled her charge with all the means at her disposal. Nonetheless, Yurik was learning to be very independent and self-reliant. Sometimes Nora detected signs of Vitya’s self-absorption, his introspective unwillingness to engage with his surroundings. Yurik had a hard time accepting new people. Sometimes it took him a long time to call by name another child he played with every day on the playground. He knew how to amuse himself, and didn’t necessarily need someone else to play with.

During the first years of Yurik’s life, Nora thought a great deal about her own family history. Only now had she come to understand why she had so wanted a son, and had rejected even the possibility that she might give birth to a girl. The thought alone had frightened her. Her memories of her maternal grandmother, Zinaida Filippovna, were vague. She had died before Nora turned seven, and had been bedridden the last two years of her life, growing weaker and weaker. She always wore a woolen cap and lipstick, and from time to time she shouted at Amalia—vociferously if rather indistinctly, though the individual curse words were completely audible.

Much later, after she had grown up, Nora asked Amalia to tell her about her mother. Her story was quite short. Zinaida had had an unhappy life. Her parents, former merchants whose finances had been ruined, threw their daughter onto the street when she was only sixteen. Though Amalia didn’t know exactly why, she suspected it was because her mother had had a secret lover. Zinaida left for Moscow and worked as a servant in various homes. She married the last master she worked for: Alexander Ignatievich Kotenko. He was much older than she was, a widower, and half blind. In his younger years, he had been a precentor in a choir, and continued to sing in the choir in a deep, booming bass, for which Zinaida called him the “Trumpet of Jericho.”

The marriage was difficult. Her husband drank too much and beat her from time to time. Not to be brutal with her—just to teach her how to behave. Into this joyless marriage, Zinaida’s daughter, Amalia, was born. Kotenko claimed that the child was illegitimate, that he had not fathered it, but he didn’t throw his wife out. He was indifferent toward Amalia, but for the most part treated her well. True, Kotenko, who remained in doubt of his own paternity, insisted on having her christened as Magdalena; but she later changed the name to Amalia on her official ID. This was Zinaida’s life, putting up with silent battering and verbal abuse at the hands of her husband, now completely blind, until he died, in 1924.

“I remember the funeral service at the church where he sang in the choir, somewhere in the neighborhood of Dolgorukovskaya Street, on a small lane. If Mother ever knew any peace in her life, it could only have been after her husband’s death; but she was never happy. She was afraid of everything, especially her husband. I felt so sorry for her. And she was very beautiful; everyone turned around to look at her when she walked by. Perhaps her beauty annoyed your grandfather—I don’t know. Sometimes I think that there was someone else she loved. She was aware of her own beauty—she curled her hair, used lipstick. She didn’t pay too much attention to me. At the end of her life, she was senile, and she cursed up a storm. At the end, I put up with a lot of grief from her, but all in all, no, there was no love lost between us…” Here Amalia ended her brief account.

In her childhood, Nora had been very attached to her mother, in part out of protest against her father, and the hostility she had felt toward him from an early age. Her relations with her mother were uneventful and calm: no childhood passions or conflicts. The alienation between them occurred later, when Andrei Ivanovich entered their lives.

In her adolescence, Nora considered her mother’s relationship with him to be a betrayal. The way her mother shone in his presence, the way her voice changed, and the coquettishness and tenderness that appeared when her mother looked at him filled Nora with fastidious irritation. This was exacerbated by the fact that her mother took Nora, not very wisely, into her confidence, extolling the high moral virtues of her chosen one. Finally, Nora remarked very sharply that it was impossible for one and the same person to be an exemplary husband and family man, and at the same time someone’s devoted lover. Amalia sighed sorrowfully. “You’re too young to understand, Nora, that such a thing is possible. Andrei doesn’t want to cause his wife and children pain, and I am prepared to put up with the equivocality of my situation for his sake. You realize that he would have left his family long ago if I wanted him to. But I know how much he would suffer.”

“What about you? Don’t you suffer from this ambiguity?” Nora said hotly.

Here Amalia started to laugh, her pretty face beaming.

“Ambiguity? Don’t be silly! It’s a very small price to pay for love.”

“Well, I find it humiliating. I would never stand for that kind of relationship. I would break it off. You have no character, you’re just weak! It should be one way or the other.” And Nora lifted her chin, proudly and defiantly.

Amalia laughed again. “You silly girl! I’ve left two husbands. I didn’t love either Tisha, my first husband, or Genrikh. I didn’t even know what love was. I only began to understand it with Andrei. And you’re still too young to understand.”

Their secret love affair lasted for years. Until he finally decided to leave his family, he stood next to the entrance of their apartment building every morning at quarter to eight, waiting for Amalia to come out, so he could walk her to work. She had already divorced Genrikh long before …

At exactly five in the evening, she would rush home and make dinner for Andrei. Nora never got home before seven. This was their agreement—don’t disturb. If Andrei was working the second shift, Amalia met him by the sound-recording studio where he worked; now it was she who accompanied him, to the train station. He lived out of town and took the commuter train to work, until he bought a car in the late sixties.

This was their routine, every day except Sundays and national holidays, for many years. The lonely New Year’s and May Day holidays were only a small sacrifice for Amalia. She never visited other people on these days. Society viewed single women with hostility; they made married women uneasy. Amalia had no desire to spend time in the company of other single women, sharing in their complaints, their gossip, and their wounds and hurts. She spent these holidays at home. She put on her nightgown, smeared her face with cold cream, and went to bed with a good book and the telephone (which she had moved into her room). Sometimes Andrei called her from home; when she picked up, he either remained silent or said, “Excuse me, I must have dialed the wrong number.”

Chicken; silly goose—this was how Nora dismissed her mother. But these judgments were in fact about herself, herself alone … As the years passed, a peaceable alienation set in. There was one other curious angle to Nora’s relations with her mother. When she was about fifteen, Nora discovered that in one sense she was more mature than her mother. Amalia acknowledged this seniority with a cheerful equanimity. She had a simple, open heart, but she was no fool. She sensed in her daughter a maturity that exceeded her age, and she surrendered without a struggle. Not only did she stop trying to manage Nora; she even stopped trying to guide her with advice, especially after the scandalous school episode.

After Yurik was born, Nora realized that the entire female line to which she belonged suffered from some general defect—an illness, as it were—the daughters didn’t love their mothers, and protested against the model of behavior their mothers represented. Nora herself inherited this deep-seated negativity, this mistrust and concealed enmity. Where did it come from? About such matters, Grandmother Marusya would have said, “It’s all in the genes.”

How glad I am that I have a boy, Nora thought with satisfaction. At the same time, however, she realized that this perpetuation of familial female hostility had to be stopped. It seems that I know a thing or two about what Freud was saying … Actually, I need to find out more about the Oedipus complex. She recalled that among her grandmother’s books rescued from Povarskaya Street were some well-worn copies of Freud’s work, with notations in the margins. She would have to read them. What had he written about Oedipus? Who wanted to kill whom, and for what? The boy struggles with his father, and the girl—with the mother? Was that it? No, no, it was a horrible idea.

The practical result of these confused, inconclusive meditations was that Nora decided to invite Amalia and Andrei Ivanovich to share in her own narrow, cramped family life, in order to give Yurik the chance to develop emotionally. He was, beyond any doubt, emotionally immature. She would let him visit Prioksky. There were lots of animals and plants there, growing things, and other delights completely unknown to a city boy. Moreover, she imagined how wonderful Andrei Ivanovich would look in his sweatshirt, with an ax or a pitchfork in his hands, and how appealing that would be to a small boy. She already felt a bit jealous, scared that they might commandeer the boy and smother him to death with love.

In the summer after Yurik had just turned five, he was “set free” for the first time. Andrei Ivanovich came to pick them up. Amalia had stayed behind in the country, and was waiting for them with freshly baked pies and goat’s milk; there were still no berries at the beginning of June. Nora spent a day and a night there, then left, feeling a bit sad that Yurik was happy, and that he would now long to go see his grandparents. She admitted to herself that her mother’s happiness annoyed her—that she displayed a kind of inappropriate childishness, as though she were twelve years old and not sixty-four, that there were too many pies, and too many puppies, of some rare Chinese breed, by means of which the happy couple were trying to earn extra income. And there was too much kissing—they lavished kisses on each other when they were only parting for an hour and a half, while Andrei Ivanovich drove Nora to the train station, where she would catch the commuter train.

For half the journey back to Moscow, Nora contemplated her own intolerant temperament, her inability to forgive her mother her silly, girlish happiness. Then she opened a volume of Sukhovo-Kobylin.

The play Tarelkin’s Death had intrigued her for a long time. The device of a sham death offered a wealth of possibility. Last year, she had been the stage designer for Sleeping Beauty in a provincial children’s theater. She had turned the plot over and over in her mind, trying it out this way and that, finally coming up with what seemed to her to be a nice twist—at the end of the play, the Prince wakes up, and Sleeping Beauty turns out to be a dream within a dream. But Tarelkin’s Death—she could really do something unprecedented with it. If only she could find a director to work with. She would direct it herself, if they gave her half a chance. Tengiz, Tengiz … An empty summer, a completely empty summer, stretched out before her. It was the first time she hadn’t rented a dacha, the first summer she would spend without Yurik. She arrived home late in the evening. When she opened the door, she heard the last trills of the telephone, before it went silent. She undressed and took a bath. Just as she was getting out of the bath, the phone started ringing again. This time, she was able to answer it.

“Where on earth have you been, my dear? I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day.” A Georgian accent. Tengiz.