Jacob's Ladder

29 The Birth of Genrikh

(1916)

In the spring of 1914, Marusya finished out the Moscow theater season and returned to Kiev. Living in Moscow had been difficult for her. Jacob did everything within his power to overtake time, trying to finish his work at the Institute a year ahead of schedule by taking early exams, but it was already clear that he would still be bound to the Institute in the coming year. He implored his wife to come back to Kiev.

War broke out in the summer, and the prospect of being parted was frightening. Marusya quickly found herself a job, though only part-time. The Froebel Institute opened up its arms to her. They gave her a class in dance movement for workers’ children, and she began teaching rhythm and movement in a theater studio not far from home. The work was poorly paid, but during wartime it wouldn’t do to set one’s sights too high.

They lived in Jacob’s room. Having their own lodgings was unthinkable, for a number of reasons: overcrowding in the city because of the war, the high cost of living, the difficulty of arranging an independent domestic life and household, which would have told on Marusya’s weak health. Yet, in the prosperous home of Jacob’s parents, in spite of the burdens imposed by the war, the level of comfort remained undiminished. In the bathroom, which appealed more to Marusya than all the other bourgeois niceties, there was still running water.

All conversations revolved around the war, its incompetent management, and the base ruses of the Allies. By this time, the losses of the Russian army were already so great that many families had suffered the loss of loved ones. The Ossetskys, too, were in mourning. Jacob’s elder brother, Genrikh, a student at Heidelberg University and his father’s pride and joy, was captured while trying to return to his homeland. He was interned by the authorities in a concentration camp for displaced persons in the village of Talerhof near Graz, where he died of dysentery in January of 1915.

A good friend of Genrikh’s sent his family news of his death, along with a murky photograph of an unattractive young man with large ears. For Jacob, it was a devastating loss. He had idolized his brother as a child, and when he was older, trusted Genrikh’s judgment, his opinions, and his views unquestioningly. Genrikh played the role of the older friend Jacob had dreamed of having in his youth.

In 1915, the situation on the front deteriorated day by day. There were fierce battles on the Western front, and on the Eastern front it was not much better: Russian troops were pulling out of Galicia, Poland. Just then, at this most inconvenient time, Marusya got pregnant. The first weeks of her pregnancy were very difficult. She was overcome with nausea and could hardly eat, and, in addition to this, was terribly fearful about the future. She had complicated feelings about being a mother of a newborn, whom she would have wished instantly to be five years old—a charming little girl or a handsome lad. Mixed in with these feelings was irritation that, even before the baby was born, it was already destroying many of her plans. She had to give up teaching and her classes in the studio. She couldn’t continue with her German classes, which she had begun at Jacob’s urging, because she felt so unwell all the time. He insisted that even now, during the war, Germans had the highest technological and scientific potential; and in the field of pedagogy and psychology, German was indispensable. And, generally speaking, a person had to strive continually to raise her level of cultural proficiency; otherwise, degeneracy would set in. But the future child demanded sacrifices, and she offered them.

Jacob spent all his free time with his wife. He didn’t have much of it, however: he had finished his coursework and was writing his thesis, and had been promised a position as a teaching assistant immediately upon completing it.

Marusya was made ill by her pregnancy, as though protecting herself from being overcome by a more general sense of grief. The Ossetsky family treated her with gentle reverence as her belly grew visible. Sofia Semyonovna smiled to herself at this kid-glove treatment. She was one of seventeen children, the last child of her prematurely old mother, and had herself given birth eight times, of which only five children had survived to grow up; and she had lost track of the number of miscarriages she had suffered. She didn’t know about Marusya’s miscarriage two years before, and was surprised by Jacob’s anxiousness; he seemed to consider Marusya’s pregnancy to be some sort of dangerous illness.

Marusya’s parents didn’t often visit their daughter, and preferred that she herself visit them at home. Jacob’s family really was very wealthy, and to Pinchas Kerns, a struggling master craftsman, the Ossetsky patriarch appeared haughty and overbearing. As for Marusya’s mother, she was shy by nature, and visiting the grand apartment where her daughter lived was a trial.

Seeing how solicitous everyone was toward her, Dusya, the servant, began calling Marusya “Princess.” But after the exaggerated burdens of pregnancy followed a truly difficult birth, which almost cost Marusya her life. She was in labor with her firstborn for two days. Professor Bruno, the head of the Faculty of Gynecology and Obstetrics, and the best surgeon in town, performed an operation that saved the life of both mother and child. After the operation, she began to hemorrhage, however, and her life hung in the balance for several more days.

Jacob spent those terrible days in the public library on Alexandrovskaya Street. To try to understand what his wife was going through, he borrowed a volume of Surgical Obstetrics by Fenomenov. Here he encountered many unfamiliar words and horrifying pictures. He empathized and suffered with her, barely thinking about the child—the precious life of Marusya overshadowed the rest of the world, which seemed to be quaking under his feet.

Sofia Semyonovna, cursing herself for her dismissive attitude about what she had thought were the exaggerated sufferings of her daughter-in-law during her pregnancy, now sat in her room with the woman’s prayer book in Yiddish, wept over it, and prayed, not according to the book, but as her own heart moved her to pray. Dusya ran to the Mariinsko-Blagoveshchenskaya Church, ordered a service for Marusya’s recovery, and lit a fat candle for her.

Marusya was still suffering, but the esteemed Professor Bruno assured her that her current pain was only to be expected, that her life was no longer in danger, and that the best thing she could do now was to return home. The heating in the hospital was inadequate, and he felt she would recover more quickly amid the comforts of home. They did not show the baby to Marusya until the third day. She had never seen newborn babies, and was upset, having expected a pretty little child; this wrinkly bit of a thing, with its crumpled little face, inspired only pity in her. She began to cry.

A week later, Jacob brought his growing family home with him, but here there were new difficulties to contend with. Though Marusya’s childlike breasts were swollen with milk by this time, her flat nipples refused to open, and seemed to want to lock in the milk for good. Expressing the milk was painful, and the newborn was too weak to suck the milk out of her breasts for himself. Mastitis set in, followed by fever. Breast-feeding was out of the question. During the first days, the child was saved by a precious can of Nestlé powdered milk, which they managed to get hold of in the impoverished city through their combined efforts. Sofia Semyonovna, with the help of her extended family, found a wet nurse—a young village girl with a seven-month-old soldier’s son named Kolya. She and Kolya were settled in Eva and Rayechka’s room, and they moved into the living room. The baby, named Genrikh, stopped crying. Now he spent most of his time next to the ample breast of the wet nurse, and started squealing whenever he was removed from her. Kolya, the nurse’s own child, didn’t object. He clearly preferred the porridge of milk and white bread crusts that the experienced Sofia Semyonovna cooked for him.

Then Asya Smolkina, a relative of Marusya’s who was a certified nurse, showed up at their home. Always ready to offer medical assistance to her relatives, friends, and acquaintances, she worked as a surgical nurse in Kiev Hospital, where the wounded were transferred to undergo complicated operations that were impossible to carry out in the field hospitals. She rushed over to Marusya either early in the morning or late in the evening and made her compresses, applied lotions, gave massages, always wearing an expression that suggested it was an honor for her to be invited to their home. A week later, Asya managed to express the rest of the standing milk—it was excruciatingly painful—and bind Marusya’s breasts with a long linen wrapper, to kill the milk. She also massaged and manipulated her stomach, from navel to pubis, admiring the precise, evenly spaced stitches, which were Professor Bruno’s masterful handiwork. Asya idolized Marusya and was prepared to offer her medical services to her until the end of her life, if Marusya would permit it.

For the first six months of Genrikh’s life, Marusya was sick and in pain much of the time. Little Genrikh had brought her many new difficulties. In the evenings, when Jacob returned home from the library (he couldn’t study at home any longer), they brought the baby to them. Jacob and Marusya put him on display, examining his tiny little hands and feet; they felt surprised by, and gradually grew accustomed to, the new member of their little family. The three of them passed the time in one another’s company until the little one began to cry. Then Sofia Semyonovna took him back to the wet nurse.

After that the two of them were alone. Tenderness gave way to passion. Their mutual desire was as strong as ever, and fear of causing pain spurred the discovery of new ways of touching, new kinds of intimacy. Marusya, despairing at how disfigured her stomach was, covered it with her nightgown; but Jacob said that the stitches were particularly dear to him. He told her that the stitches not only did not spoil her looks, they bound the two of them together. They were a mark of her heroic deed, and she meant even more to him with them than without them. The dream of a family with many children had been foolish and empty: he would never again allow her to undergo such suffering.

Jacob kissed the wound that was suddenly right next to his lips, his fingers touched the moist forbidden depths, and for the first time in their relations they discovered not only the smell but also the taste of each other … They again began to talk about things that were in no way related to their ever more complicated domestic life. They made plans, and more plans for the future.

When the future arrived, it was not at all the one they had envisioned or hoped for. Things were going from bad to worse on the front. In the fall of 1916, after he had secured his teaching position at the Commercial Institute, Jacob was called up, and transferred from the reserves to active army service. He was sent to Kharkov, to the Second Sappers Reserve Battalion, in which there was a company orchestra. This was not the kind of music he longed for, but a rifle was even less enticing. He was stranded in Kharkov for a long time. The war turned into revolution, and revolution into civil war. Now frontiers and fronts lay between him and his family, and their communications were sometimes disrupted for many months.