Jacob's Ladder

21 A Happy Year

(1985)

In the fall of 1984, disaster befell Taisia—a disaster that became an unexpected boon for Nora. Taisia’s husband, Sergei, a quiet, henpecked man, left her. No one could have expected such an audacious step after such a long, harmonious, and uneventful marriage. He left her without warning or regret, having stuffed his pants and instruments into a gym bag. He did not intend to return. Taisia was still trying to recover her composure after her initial bitter indignation when her listless, indolent daughter, Lena, a student in her final year at the Agricultural Academy, announced that she was getting married to a classmate, an Argentinian exchange student, and leaving with him for Argentina. While they were going through the bureaucratic rigmarole that attended such a move, her daughter brought the pushover husband home to live with them. They settled into Taisia’s orphaned bedroom, and instead of Sergei, this disgusting “black-ass,” as Taisia referred to her son-in-law, now frolicked in her bed. Her sagging, unattractive Lena suddenly straightened out and bloomed, fully liberated from her indisputable dependence on her mother. Taisia, who had spent her whole life teaching quotidian domestic wisdom to young mothers, now witnessed the complete destruction of her personal universe. She came to Nora and, sobbing, recounted both stories. She ended by saying she couldn’t bear living under the same roof with a “black-ass.” What should she do?

Without even considering the new possibilities that would open for her, Nora invited Taisia to move in with her until the newlyweds moved away, and Taisia gladly accepted the invitation. They began reorganizing the household right then and there. They moved Nora’s desk into the room she called the “living room,” and covered the divan with her bedsheets. Grandmother Zinaida’s ancien-régime boatlike bed was put at Taisia’s disposal. When Yurik got home from school and discovered Taisia, whom he had always considered to be some close relative, in Nora’s room, he was delighted.

Not until that evening, when they were sitting over dinner together, did Nora realize that Taisia’s constant presence in her home offered her a freedom she had never even dreamed of. Taisia had immediately taken early retirement when she moved in with them, and now picking up Yurik from school and feeding him dinner had become her sacred duty. Nora paid her the difference between her pension and what she had earned at the polyclinic, and both of them were happy with the arrangement.

Nora didn’t manage to take advantage of the new opportunities right away, because, a couple of weeks after Taisia had moved in, Tengiz appeared again—without warning, without so much as a phone call.

They hadn’t seen each other in a year. Their last meeting, in Tbilisi, had been short and accidental. Nora had arrived in Tbilisi with a theater company to stage a play—a rather weak one, a detective story with a set that resembled the labyrinth of a child’s pocket maze puzzle. Nora had no intention of seeking out Tengiz. The unwritten rule of their relationship had never changed: they took it up again at any moment, in any place, that he wished; then he disappeared, as though he had never been. Nora had never taken the first step to contact him.

It was the first time Nora had ever been to Tbilisi, Tengiz’s city. In the evening, she left the hotel to take a walk through the unfamiliar town by herself. She walked along Rustaveli Avenue, then wandered into the oldest part of town, down a crooked, deserted lane. She kept expecting him to appear from around a corner, waving to her. She walked along, enjoying both the sights of the city and her own fearlessness. He didn’t appear from around a bend in the road or stepping out of a taxi; but his name popped up in a conversation the next day.

The director with whom she was working invited her to visit a local celebrity. They went in a large group to the dreary outskirts of Tbilisi, to a gray nine-story apartment building, where an Armenian artist about whom Nora had heard from some mutual friends lived. They were welcomed by someone who resembled a soothsayer or conjuror. She had a nose like a beak, and bright violet-plum eyes, and wore a strange, threadbare, dove-colored garment made of silk and some sort of intricate turban on her head. Nora immediately wanted to draw her.

Nora didn’t say a word, but looked at the paintings that covered every available space and stood three rows deep against the walls. It was impossible to know where the artist in her silks slept, because every surface was covered with easels, stretchers, pads of paper, and jars. Among all this painting paraphernalia was a small burner with two long-armed Turkish coffeepots and a few cups and saucers. There wasn’t a single hint of daily routine, of daily life, of a bed. All the paintings depicted imaginary mythological beings—fairy-tale beasts, snakes, goddesses, and virgins. Colorful Oriental madness, executed with great talent and skill. In the middle of the room, on an easel, stood a large portrait of Tengiz, very academic, painted with a strong hand, and without even a touch of whimsical Orientalism. He was looking out from under his brow. The artist had grasped some precise crease of the lips, and the coloring of the portrait was so accurate, heavy, and above the head it seemed there was an explosion of sky—a desperate blue … The portrait was large and as yet unfinished. Nora imagined she could even smell his homegrown country tobacco … He was just here, sitting for the portrait, she mused.

She spent the entire next day at the theater, but after the first act she slipped away with David, a sweet young Moscow-Georgian actor who had grown up in Tbilisi. They killed him in the first act, so by the second, when the plot was unfolding, he was already as free as a bird. They were good companions, and he offered to show her around town. First they went down to the Kura River, then walked along the embankment. When they got hungry, they stopped at the first little wine cellar cum restaurant they came to. There was some sort of celebration under way. One half of the rather small room was occupied by a long table, and at the head of the table sat Tengiz. Next to him was a large Georgian woman with a drooping lower lip, who looked like a Gypsy. They were celebrating Tengiz’s birthday.

He saw Nora and her companion as soon as they walked in. He stood up and announced: “Oh, we have guests from Moscow! Now, this is a real birthday present! Nora Ossetsky, my favorite artist! And her friend…” Tengiz faltered.

With a tender smile on her face, Nora said her friend’s name to fill in the awkward pause.

“Sit down, sit down!”

Nora and David sat down on the chairs they were offered. For an hour and a half, Nora sat as though onstage, in the midst of the happy din of the Georgian feast, after which she and David stood up to go, thanking them all for their hospitality. Then they left, holding hands like lovers. She felt heartsick—Tengiz might think that she had planned this.

They went to the hotel without talking. Nora had a private room, like a VIP; the actors were all assigned shared rooms. David stayed in her room until the morning. He was wonderful, very young and shy. And it was good that he stayed. He probably wouldn’t have if Nora had not invited him in. She had never discovered a better way of curing the wounds that Tengiz inflicted on her.

This time, Tengiz arrived with the words “You won’t chase me away?” He was carrying the same duffel bag, and under his arm he had a case with a guitar for Yurik: a nearly full-fledged instrument, three-quarters of the size of a grown-up’s guitar. Yurik grabbed hold of the instrument and immediately started strumming all six of the strings at once.

“Wait, we need to tune it first.” And they went off to Yurik’s room. Tengiz turned the tuning pegs deftly with his sensitive fingers and demonstrated the first five chords.

“Learn these chords and you’ll already be able to play something,” he said, and they strummed for a whole hour. With the movements of a sculptor, Tengiz arranged Yurik’s fingers on the strings, and he got results almost immediately.

After dinner, Tengiz told Nora that he had come for half a year or a year, depending on how things worked out. He had gotten an interesting offer from Mosfilm, and in a few days, after the details were decided, he would be moving to a rented apartment that the studios had promised to provide him with. Then he went quiet, mumbled something, and went quiet again. Nora didn’t say anything, either; but both of them were thinking about the same thing.

“There have been some changes in my life, you see. Nino got married, and her husband has a house outside Tbilisi. Natella decided to move in with our daughter—they’re living there now. Natella left me, right? I’m a lone wolf now.”

“I see,” Nora said, nodding. He did have a trace of the wolf’s gauntness about him—his eyes glittered with fierceness, or perhaps hidden fear. And he wants to stay here, with me!

Tengiz’s hands had always been stronger than his head. He even said this about himself: “especially when my hands are you,” he told Nora. But that wasn’t quite what he meant. What he wanted to say was that Nora could put into words what he was unable to express. Russian was not his first language, of course, but even in Georgian he didn’t know how to articulate his thoughts with precision. He relied on circumlocutions, gesticulations, howls and groans, and other forms of body language to get things across, but he ultimately succeeded in making the actors submit completely to his will. And not just the actors. It was a gift. He knew how to motivate people, and they did what he wanted them to. It was probably some ancient power of suggestion. There was possibly only one person on earth who didn’t succumb to his power—his wife, Natella. He was in thrall to the primordial but insurmountable female power she wielded. For almost thirty years they had been locked in constant battle. Both of them felt doomed to continue this struggle, which neither of them could win.

“You’re a witch, Natella, a witch,” he would say in despair when he couldn’t bear the sight of her any longer. “Just kill me outright. Why do you suck my blood, like a bird?”

Why a bird, he couldn’t explain in ordinary, daytime language. He had a recurring dream, a nightmare: He was lying naked on the warm ground, in a pale-grayish-brown light, and someone seemed to be poking needles into his veins. And then he saw that they were actually filthy birds, covered in dirt, sucking his blood through their thin beaks—one on his neck, another on his stomach, and a third in his groin …

Nora gave him what Natella took away from him; this was the secret of their enduring relationship. Nora was the ideal receiver and retransmitter of his will, and working with her on a play was a pleasure for Tengiz. She was adept at translating his intentions, his mumbling and bellowing, into material language—a dark-red wall imitating brickwork, sepia-colored dresses, a white backdrop that had been spattered by a hail of artillery fire … And she kissed his hands, and licked every one of his fingers, like a puppy that nuzzles its mother’s belly, looking for a nourishing teat.

“My clever girl,” he whispered to her, surrendering his hands to her moist lips, her hard tongue.

What precisely she was licking off cannot be captured in words, but after each new episode, after each new performance, Nora became stronger and more sure of herself. Later, when Nora herself proved her mettle, transforming herself gradually from an artist and a set designer into a director, even an author, and staged her first plays in provincial theaters, she told him, “Tengiz, my directorial skills were sexually transmitted.”

That first night, Tengiz slept on the floor, on a quilted cotton comforter spread out in the living room. The next day, they moved the furniture around again: Grandmother’s boat bed sailed into the living room, the divan was passed on to Taisia, and the former population of the apartment (Nora and her son) was doubled, much to Yurik’s delight.

Several days after Tengiz moved in, Yurik whispered in Nora’s ear, “It’s even better this way than with a German shepherd.” It wasn’t about the dog, of course, but about the guitar. He took it in his hands and began to like himself more. When no one else was home, he went out into the hallway, where there was a full-length mirror, and played, watching his reflection out of the corner of his eye. The happiness he experienced at this moment wasn’t completely unprecedented. He suddenly remembered feeling the same thing when he was five years old, beating out rhythms on the African drum, and then on the xylophone. But he was also learning to read at just that time, and he had traded the xylophone for Kipling: first there was a cat who walked by himself; then Mowgli, who for many years was his favorite character from a book; and after that, four other books, which Nora thrust under his nose in short order, one after another. Now all that he had forgotten came rushing back to him. The guitar seemed to contain the rhythm of the drum, and the xylophone, and sounds, sounds from which phrases emerged in some mysterious fashion—though the phrases were different from those in books.

Tengiz shared his rudimentary theoretical knowledge of music with Yurik, and no new information inspired him like the ideas of modes, major and minor keys, intervals, and chord changes. He listened attentively now to the sounds of the world around him, evaluated them in the light of his newfound knowledge, and discovered every day anew that all the sounds of the world could be described with these new rules, and that there was music playing everywhere, at every moment, even in your sleep, getting louder or dying down. Now he heard a complex rhythm in the patter of the first raindrops, the dangerous pauses in the rumbling of the iron sheeting on the roofs of sheds; in the trill of the doorbell he caught the sound of a minor third … Tengiz had no idea what a powerful mechanism for perceiving the soundscapes and aural structures of the world he had unlocked. He was just happy about the boy’s rapt attention, and the eagerness with which he absorbed this new information. Not that everything he discovered in this new aural universe was radiant and blissful: sometimes his new capacity for hearing filled him with anxiety, even torment.

Yurik now came straight home from school, not dawdling, and not getting distracted by the ways and habits of cats, which he used to follow for hours on end in their meanderings through the courtyards, over the roofs of sheds, and into basements. Nora was now teaching a children’s drawing class—her only source of regular income during that year—so twice a week she was unable to pick Yurik up from school. Taisia wasn’t always able to catch the boy at the school door. Sometimes Nora rushed home after her classes and found no sign of either Yurik or his book satchel. Then she would wander around the neighborhood for hours, looking for him. But after acquiring the guitar, Yurik no longer roamed the streets and courtyards, and when Nora got home she could already hear him strumming from the stairwell.

Tengiz met the screenwriter every day to discuss the grandiose project Mosfilm had offered him—the film version of The Knight in the Panther’s Skin. They were trying to collaborate on the first draft. Nora read The Knight and tried to find something in it that spoke to her, to untangle the endlessly complicated story of the relationships between the sovereign, his knights, and their beloveds; it all seemed to her to be extremely ornate and fussy, mannered, and convoluted. When she tried to convey this to Tengiz, he brushed it off, saying it was only the preliminary material. The script they were writing would be very different from the original source. It would be about something different altogether.

“Just read it, and then we’ll talk about it. When the script is finished, we’ll do our own thing with it.”

Tengiz never doubted for a minute that he could arrange Nora’s confirmation as art director of the future film. But she had never worked in film before, and she understood that they had their own close-knit professional community, which would hardly welcome an outsider, with no experience in film, into their midst. This didn’t worry Tengiz in the least. “We’ll make you assistant director in that case,” he said. In the meantime, Nora drew sketches that had been commissioned from her in Tashkent for The Snow Queen, feeling amused by the likely disparity in temperatures between the auditorium and the scenes unfolding onstage. But, for the time being, they were leading a happy and unusual life, visiting friends almost every evening, often taking a delighted Yurik along with them, or inviting friends over to their place. Natasha Vlasov came most often, with her eccentric husband, Lyonchik, and sweet Fedya, their son, who was connected to his parents by two umbilical cords. Yurik latched on to Fedya; at Yurik’s age, an older friend was a valuable possession.

The only thing that remained unchanged for Nora was the need to oversee Yurik’s daily homework. By this time (he was already in the fourth grade), it had become very clear that Yurik couldn’t manage it on his own. Actually, even under Nora’s supervision, he did it every which way. The main problem was his penmanship—a misnomer, since it was more like chicken scratch. Every time Nora sat him down to do his homework, the most agonizing task was getting him to do his lessons in Russian. He wrote as if he were seeing a pen for the first time in his life and his goal was to invent some new, nonstandard way of depicting familiar letters. He had a whole pile of unfinished notebooks, abandoned efforts to write legibly. It was seldom that Yurik managed to complete the third page of an assignment well enough to present it to the teacher, though the first and second were more or less acceptable. The teacher, Galina Semyonovna, was horrified by his handwriting, which she conveyed to Nora with inexhaustible zeal, hinting from time to time that Yurik belonged in a remedial school. Now Nora had a lever of influence: “You can play the guitar only after you do your homework.” But the results weren’t very impressive; though he started doing his homework more quickly, it was no better. Maybe this really was the best he could do?

Tengiz, observing Nora’s frustration, shrugged and said, “Leave him alone. Can’t you see? He’s a wonderful boy.”

Whether it was because Tengiz had been able to nudge awake the boy’s slumbering memory of their trip together to Altai, or because Yurik had simply decided to assign the role of father to Tengiz, Yurik stuck to him like a burr. Tengiz responded to the boy’s love with all his heart. Yurik discovered that Tengiz had a great many virtues. To Yurik’s ear, he played the guitar beautifully; he taught him new chords, new tunes, and introduced music into their home that Yurik never knew existed. Tengiz ate with his hands, dexterously and with graceful ease, as only people who grew up in the Caucasus Mountains knew how to do. In his presence, Taisia stopped making remarks about how Yurik should be holding his knife and fork. Tengiz knew how to whistle. Not only that, but Yurik played chess better than Tengiz. At least, when he played against Tengiz, Yurik finally got to know the sweet taste of victory. Vitya very rarely lost, but Tengiz conceded defeat cheerfully and easily, which only added to his merits.

On Sundays, when Taisia gave in to her newfound urge for churchgoing and wasn’t there to restrain Yurik in the hallway by Nora’s bedroom door, Yurik burst into the room and crawled into their bed. Yelping like a puppy and poking them with his knobby knees and elbows, he dived under the covers and nestled his way between the still-sleeping Nora and Tengiz. Yurik, so sensitive to smell, didn’t seem to notice the mixture of sweat and lingering vapors and traces of love, which the lovers had had no time to wash away. At first, Nora tried to discourage her son from these Sunday incursions, and even wanted to put a lock, or at least a latch, on the door. But Tengiz wasn’t in the least shy or embarrassed. He hugged the boy to his chest and tickled him, laying his mouth against his belly and blowing noisily, which sent Yurik into gales of laughter. The game was, of course, an infantile one, but Yurik had evidently not outgrown the need for it.

The punctuated romance between Nora and Tengiz had lasted for more than twenty years, but they had never been completely alone. There was always a third party between them: the play they were staging together. This time, they had no common project, only indefinite plans. Now the third party was Yurik. It was genuine family life, a new arrangement of power, in which, fairly often, Tengiz and Yurik stood together against Nora in deciding the small issues that arose from one day to another. These were mostly trivial matters—potatoes or pasta for dinner, where they would go on Sunday, what to give Taisia for her birthday. But it was life as a threesome, family life, something wonderful and new in their shared experience; and they were happy in it.

Not long before the New Year, Genrikh came to visit. He had already met Tengiz, and liked him; and Genrikh wanted Tengiz to like him, too. From the first moment of their acquaintance, Genrikh had plied him with jokes and stories, laughing and slapping Tengiz on the back, very hail-fellow-well-met. He usually stayed a long time, and didn’t want to leave. This time, though, he was uncharacteristically despondent. Still standing in the doorway, he told them he had contracted some strange illness called narcolepsy. From time to time, he would just fall asleep, all of a sudden, without warning—during a conversation, at a meeting, even while driving. Twice he had nearly crashed, and now he had come to the decision to part with his favorite toy, his trusty blue Lada, polished and gleaming inside and out, his Valya. He was in the habit of giving names to all his automobiles—the previous one had been called Marusya. Genrikh had even made a graph to keep track of all his inadvertent sleeping spells—from the first incident, a year and a half before, when he fell asleep during a meeting of the Academic Council, during a talk by one of his graduate students, right up to the most recent, very dangerous spell, on the road to the dacha, with his wife’s daughter and grandson in the back seat. It was lucky he had ended up in the ditch, and not in the lane of oncoming traffic. In short, this time he was not full of jokes and fun. He looked defeated and doleful, and Nora pitied him.

He’s still a kid—a kid, just like Yurik, Nora thought. Then Genrikh said, “If Yurik weren’t so young I’d give the car to him, rather than try to sell it.” Yurik, who had been preoccupied with fishing out the longest, juiciest strips of Taisia’s home-fried potatoes from the serving dish, suddenly said, without missing a beat, “You could give it to Nora and she’d drive me around,” and went back to eating his favorite meal.

“Now, that’s a thought!” Genrikh said, brightening up. “I’ll teach you to drive myself. I’ll use my own method, and you’ll become a pro in two weeks. All those driving instructors take the wrong approach, you know, like they’re teaching you to read, letter by letter, syllable by syllable. But driving is like swimming, much closer to swimming than reading. You have to feel the movement! When you understand that it’s about the movement of the car, or yourself in it, you’re already a driver. What do you say, Nora? You do want to learn to drive, right?”

Now Genrikh, who had been so gloomy when he arrived, was beaming.

He’s basically so kind, Nora thought. It wasn’t often that she thought good things about her father, but now he was making her feel happy. A kind sort—he really is. He’s showing off a bit, naturally, for Tengiz and Yurik. He wants them to like him. Actually, he wants everyone to like him … But he is a good man.

“Of course I want to. I always did. But listen, Dad, are you sure about this? You won’t miss the car later?”

Tengiz poured Genrikh some wine. They drank to Nora’s new automotive future. She hadn’t thought about cars at all before this, but after Genrikh’s suggestion, she suddenly realized that she wanted very, very much to shut the car door and step on the gas, to tear off down the road. And to steer! To steer!

The following Sunday, Genrikh stopped by to pick up Nora and fairly quickly taught her the essentials of driving. Much faster than she would have learned in driving school.

Two months later, Nora got her driver’s license, after passing the exam on her first try. Genrikh signed the car over to her as a gift, and it became official: she was the driver of her own car. And it came in very handy indeed.

By spring, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin had ground to a halt. Tengiz had quarreled with the screenwriter; launching the film at the beginning of the following year was out of the question, so either the director or the screenwriter had to go. The film studio decided to get a new director. They invited someone else, also a Georgian, who lived in Moscow; but, as they later found out, that arrangement didn’t work out, either. Then the funding for the film was withdrawn, and it was never made.

While both of them were trying to cope with the fallout from this fiasco, all their money suddenly dried up: both Tengiz’s advance and Nora’s small savings. Without telling Tengiz, Nora first borrowed twenty rubles from Tusya, who had played the role of older friend her whole life. Nora didn’t want to ask Amalia—although the puppy business was thriving, and the “dog money” was constant—because Amalia would start to worry, to pity Nora and Yurik, and to bemoan Nora’s unfortunate life-choices. As for Taisia, who understood the complications of the situation, not only did she turn down her pay, but she spent her whole pension on food and considered going back to work at the polyclinic part-time.

Tengiz grew gloomier with every passing day. He had worked to support his family since childhood, had done all kinds of odd jobs in his college years … But he had forgotten, during this half a year of living with Nora, that a man is responsible for the upkeep of the family. He stayed in Nora’s home like a guest, bringing home food and drink, extras they didn’t really need, without thinking about providing sustenance day in and day out. Tengiz was already considering capitulation—going back to Tbilisi. Not only out of humiliating penury, but also out of fear, fear of losing his self-respect. Nora could understand this.

They were driving home after visiting friends on the outskirts of Moscow late one evening when a nicely dressed older man with a briefcase hailed them on a street in the Belyaevo-Bogorodskoe neighborhood. He asked whether they could give him a lift to Razgulyai. Nora was just about to tell him it was out of their way, when Tengiz intervened; he told her to take the passenger’s seat next to him, and he himself got behind the wheel. The passenger got into the back seat. They drove to Razgulyai in silence. When they arrived, Tengiz took the five-ruble note the passenger proffered to him. The passenger got out.

“Let me earn money this way, Nora. I used to moonlight using my uncle’s car when I was a kid. I can still do that, can’t I? Until some work comes our way.”

That night, while Zinaida’s bed was still sailing over to dry land, Tengiz asked Nora: “What do I mean to you, Nora? Who are you to me?”

“Do you really want me to put it into words, an exact description?” She was delighting in the protracted moment of blissful emptiness.

“Yes, tell me.”

Nora pondered for a minute, then said, “However shameful it is to admit, I’m prepared to be whatever you want me to be—an artist and set designer, a lover, a girlfriend, service personnel—even a floozy or a doormat, I guess. The fact is that you’re the largest and best part of my life.”

“But that’s terrible. I have no way to repay you. There’s not enough of me for that.”

“For the time being, what you are is enough,” Nora murmured. “Shh, shh…”

She was terrified that she would scare away the happiness that swept her up and held her afloat. And the better it was, the more terrified she felt.

The next day, Tengiz brought home a record that changed Yurik’s life. Tengiz called him over and turned on the record player in the living room. It was a single by the Beatles: “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” In those days, Beatles songs were still in the air, and although the group was already a thing of the past, Yurik was hearing their music for the first time. He sat with his eyes fixed to one spot, his fingers tightly clenched, swaying his head and shoulders back and forth like a Jew during prayer. Then Tengiz noticed that his feet were tapping out the rhythm. He said something, but Yurik didn’t seem to hear him. They listened to the song till the end.

“Tengiz, what was that?”

“The Beatles. You’ve never heard of the Beatles?”

Yurik shook his head and put the record on again. It was impossible to drag him away from the record player until evening. When Nora took the record away, Yurik asked Tengiz whether he would buy him more Beatles.

“It’s easier to get tapes. There are tons of them. The band doesn’t exist anymore, you know—John Lennon was killed some years ago.”

“What? Someone killed him? That’s impossible!” Yurik wailed.

“But the band broke up before his death. Some years before.”

Yurik began to cry.

“Why are you so upset? Only this morning, you didn’t even know this John Lennon existed.”

“Did they really kill him?” he sobbed. “I didn’t know they killed him! And the drummer? Did they kill him, too?”

“Come, now. The time for all those tears has passed. He managed to accomplish in his life what few people even dream of doing,” Tengiz said to Yurik, trying to comfort him. “But the drummer—his name is Ringo Starr—is alive and well, and plays with other people.”

“With other people? How could he! What a bastard!”

“Never mind, he wasn’t the best drummer in the world; they invited other musicians to take his place on their studio recordings.”

Yurik banged his fist on the table, so hard that the record player jumped slightly, and ran into the other room, howling. In a single day, he had experienced, both at the same time, unbearable love and unbearable loss. Nora, who only caught the second part of this rather protracted scene, couldn’t understand what had happened. Yurik had shut himself up in his room. Tengiz couldn’t quite grasp what had happened to the child, either, why he had dissolved in grief.

But for Yurik, it was all as clear as day: Someone killed John Lennon. It was a terrible misfortune, because now there was no one to write that sublime music, music he needed from the first moment he heard it, as he needed air to breathe; music he would need, it went without saying, for the rest of his life. But no one, no one, understood. Not even Tengiz.