Jacob's Ladder

31 A Boat to the Other Shore

(1988–1991)

The war in Afghanistan, which lasted for years and then burned itself out, hardly touched the lives of Muscovites who were not involved in politics, in particular artists and nonconformists, who had their own reasons not to see eye to eye with the government. The radio droned on and on about the duty to internationalism and the dangers of American imperialism. After a short stint in a training unit, eighteen-year-old conscripts were sent to Afghanistan, where they fought; and then came back—though not all of them. Some of those who did come back were badly crippled. But all of these soldier-internationalists without exception were knocked off balance, traumatized; they carried monstrous memories inside them, which they would have to outgrow in order to return to a normal life.

Yurik’s friend Fedya couldn’t cope. He was unrecognizable when he got out of the army. Yurik rushed over to the Vlasovs’ during the first week after Fedya was demobilized. He wanted to invite Fedya to a New Year’s Eve party where he had been asked to play, but Fedya refused to get up off the divan. He answered Yurik’s questions with inarticulate mumbling, and Yurik left feeling angry and hurt, thinking that Fedya no longer wanted to spend time with him. But Fedya didn’t want to spend time with anyone, even his parents. He lay on the divan for two and a half months without speaking, his face turned to the wall. Suddenly, while his parents were temporizing, wondering whether it was time to consult a psychiatrist or a psychologist, he disappeared. Without saying a single coherent word … They found him a week later in the attic of their dacha. He had hanged himself.

This happened during that same “lethal” year when Nora buried her parents and discovered that, with their deaths, the wall separating her from her own demise had collapsed. She had to grow accustomed to a new sense of her own personal chronology—I’m next in line. The fact that this chronological order could be broken, and that children could die first, Nora realized only now.

All the friends of the Vlasovs knew Fedya. From the time he was a young child, his parents had taken him everywhere with them, beginning with the Bulldozer Exhibition^* during the Khrushchev era, where he was probably the youngest witness of the infamous battle between tractors and paintings; the Izmailovo exhibit; and all the exhibits in private apartments and in the basements of the Municipal Committee for Graphics on Malaya Gruzinskaya. Sweet-natured Fedya, emotionally attached to his parents, charming, rather sickly and physically stunted, and not yet matured into manhood. The war in Afghanistan destroyed him from within. For Yurik, who had just been forced to accept the deaths of his grandparents and become reconciled to the idea that old people ultimately die, the death of Fedya, his friend and nearly his peer, was unbearable. Moreover, it was suicide, which left all those who had been close to him with a sense of guilt.

The funeral was attended by a large crowd of people, and was particularly gloomy. The entire Moscow underground art scene, and other friends and acquaintances of the Vlasovs, gathered at the Khovanskoye Cemetery, which was forlorn and desolate, like all the new cemeteries surrounding the city.

Tengiz, who had arrived in Moscow at just this time with indefinite plans, would not let Nora go to the cemetery alone; he accompanied her. Yurik didn’t go to the funeral. He stayed in his room, weeping. He was badly shaken. Nora didn’t try to persuade him to change his mind. She saw terrible confusion and despair in his eyes.

Tengiz stood by the grave, behind Nora, with his hand on her shoulder. His brow was furrowed. It was painful to look at the Vlasovs—they looked like two black shadows. Natasha’s head was shaking … and in the past few days Lyonchik had aged visibly, and was so bent over that he looked older than his own father, who was holding him by the arm.

On the way home, Tengiz drove. They were silent the whole way. When they were approaching their house, he said, “The boy was murdered.”

Two days later, Tengiz flew back to Tbilisi.

Nora couldn’t stop thinking about Fedya Vlasov.

Yurik was already fifteen. His grades were poor. Getting into college, which would exempt him from the draft, was out of the question. It was very unlikely he would even be accepted at the conservatory, since he didn’t have a certificate of completion from an ordinary music school. In any case, a music college wouldn’t disqualify him from military service. The concussion that was described in his medical records provided no guarantee of exemption, either.

It was strange, but the recent deaths of her parents were less devastating to Nora than Fedya’s. She lived in a state of quiet, unrelenting, veiled horror. The image of his closed coffin haunted her during the daytime, and she dreamed about it at night. She looked at Yurik, and she saw Fedya, as she remembered him long before his death, when he was probably fourteen—a stooping posture, with a sweet, pimply face and a side part in his sleek hair.

She had to get Yurik away, before he got snatched by the army. One war had ended, but they could easily start another one.

There were two possibilities. One, the less realistic, was Israel. But what would she do, a half-blood, in a foreign country, with a son who didn’t even know he was one-fourth Jewish? The other one, more reliable but even less acceptable to Nora, was to send Yurik to America to live with his father. At this point, Nora fell into a stupor, paralyzed with indecision.

There were still two more years, but she needed to sort the problem out now. She couldn’t stop thinking about it. Soon she took the first step: she wrote a long letter to Vitya, expressing her worries about Yurik’s future. A reply came two months later. And it was written not by Vitya but by Martha, in English. This rather absurd woman—or so she had seemed to Nora, after their only meeting—was thrilled about the idea of Yurik’s coming to live with them. She wrote: “We will be happy … We will do everything we can for him … We await Yurik’s arrival, today or any day.”

Huge, shapeless, wearing a jogging suit and sneakers, with a pink face and unrefined features, and a smile that stretched from ear to ear … She moved as though she were carved out of wood—not a log, however, but a huge trunk of soft linden. And her squeaky voice, like that of a cartoon character … And madly in love with Vitya. Martha seemed to see merits and qualities in him that were invisible to Nora. Nora pondered the matter.

Vitya’s life was evidently undergoing a profound shift. Now it was not Varvara Vasilievna who governed his behavior, but Martha. Whether Vitya himself had changed, whether he was ready to take on day-to-day decisions, whether any emotional movement was under way in his heart, was unclear from the letter. What was clear, however, was that there was a good woman at his side. She loved him. From the moment Nora received the letter from Martha, her soul felt less heavy. Her plan to send Yurik to live with his father had taken on weight and definition. Nora answered the letter. They struck up a correspondence. Martha had clear handwriting and a straightforward style.

When Yurik entered the tenth grade, Nora asked Martha to send Yurik a “visitor’s” invitation for a visa. It arrived fairly soon. Only at this point did she ask Yurik whether he would like to go visit his father and stay there to study, if it all worked out.

“To America? Really, to America? To live with Vitya? Hooray!”

During the years when they hadn’t seen each other, Yurik had thought about his father about as much as his father had thought about him. But he was over the moon about the idea of going to America to live with him. Music! American music!

Nora covered her face with her hands and shook her head. How old was her son, judging by this behavior? Six? Ten, at most? They were both immature—like father, like son. Infantile …

“Yurik, you understand that it might be for a long time. I’m worried about the army.”

“Well, sure, I understand. But you don’t. America is where it’s at! I can learn a kind of music there that they don’t even teach here.”

Thereafter, things unfolded at a fevered pace—and, as it turned out, none too soon. From January 1, boys who were born in 1975, Yurik’s year of birth, were to be registered for the draft. After this date, it would be mandatory to ask permission from the draft board to travel abroad. But for Yurik, acquiring documents, a visa from the consulate, and the departure itself—all fell into place with remarkable, almost magical ease.

The final step—buying the ticket—happened with lightning speed. There were no plane tickets available; they were sold out for the next two months. It was always difficult to come by tickets of any kind—to the skating rink, to the theater, or to the conservatory. Everything was in short supply; but people learned the art of procuring things by hook or by crook. The well-trained Soviet citizen used circuitous means, and if he didn’t know how, he wouldn’t be able to make it to Leningrad, say, to attend his grandmother’s funeral. Nora had her own resources, her own currency of exchange—her connections in the theater. People approached her for tickets, and her connections were such that she could get tickets to the Bolshoi, to the Theater on Malaya Bronnaya, or to the Taganka.

This network offered her the possibility to barter, and when she needed a ticket to New York—before the New Year; it had to be before January 1—Nora issued a call, and it worked. A day later, armed with Yurik’s passport and the American visa, she went to meet a cashier from the Aeroflot office, who charged her exactly two times the normal price for a ticket to New York. Nora hadn’t counted on having to pay such a steep rate, but, out of habit, she had taken with her every last bit of money she had before she left home. After she paid, there was just enough left, not a kopeck extra, to pay for a ticket on public transportation to get home. Nora took this as a good omen.

Yurik, an adolescent whom it was nearly impossible to consider a young man by any stretch of the imagination, had slipped out of the clutches of the army, skipped out, flown the coop: he was on a plane headed for New York on December 29. Just under the gun.

Nora was approaching fifty, an age at which it was similarly not possible to consider a woman young by any stretch of the imagination. She stayed behind, alone. However things worked out in America with Vitya and Martha, there would be no Afghanistan in his life.

A time to stop and reflect had arrived for Nora. She returned in her thoughts to the depths of despair she had felt, dragging herself back to her empty apartment after her sojourn in the strange, wonderful home of Mziya, Tengiz’s aunt. After parting from Tengiz again, after countless such partings—when she had understood that only a child would save her. And he was born—kind, amusing, with a wonderful sense of humor, a supremely original human being, with difficulties. And now he had grown up and gone to live with his father, another original human being, with difficulties of his own. Perhaps he had gone there forever. Perhaps it was for the best if it was forever. And she remained alone.

Maybe it was even worse for her now. She was in the same place, with the same Tengiz, who was again far away from her. Yurik hadn’t solved any of her big problems. For so many years, she had been going round and round in circles, along the very same path. Maybe she had been gaining altitude? Maybe she was falling down deeper each time? How could she live without Yurik? No, that was the wrong question. Forget about yourself. Yurik will get along fine without me. There’s no need to live under illusions: Yurik loves me very much, when I’m right there in front of him. But when I’m not there—I’m not so sure.

Nora boiled coffee for one in a small long-handled Turkish pot, as she had learned to do long ago from Tusya. She spread out a cloth napkin, got a blue Chinese ashtray, and put her cigarettes and lighter next to it. She fetched a coffee cup from the shelf. She got everything ready for her morning ritual. The way it turned out, after Yurik’s departure she resumed her old life. And what was that?

She had always done what she wanted to do. She had wanted a child—there he was. He grew up and left home. She hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly. But, fine, this was what she wanted. All right. But I remember Fedya Vlasov, she thought. And that won’t happen in this case. It’s so obvious that Yurik doesn’t fit into the mold of life here; he’s more likely to find himself elsewhere. Yurik’s music is all from over there. He can stay there if he wants to; if he doesn’t, he can come back here. In any case, he has a choice. I didn’t want to send him away. Yes, I did. I’m afraid for him. It’s not selfishness on my part. He never got in my way; on the contrary, he deepened and broadened my life. Motherhood. I haven’t been the best mother, of course. But I’m afraid for him here. Now I have to fill up the emptiness. I have to try to arrange my life without Tengiz, without Yurik. Look at Tusya. Now, there’s a wise older woman. She’s an inspiring example of both freedom and female virtue. No, that’s a silly thought. What do I know of her younger years? A pregnant silence. An all-encompassing silence.

Nora hadn’t seen Tusya in more than a month. She hadn’t even called her. Actually, Tusya didn’t like the telephone, and trained all her close friends to use the phone like a telegraph—for short messages, not for lengthy conversations.

After her coffee ritual was over (her version of morning meditation: Everything is fine, Nora, all is well, above, below, here and now), she called Tusya to agree on a time to meet.

“So—did you send the boy off?” Tusya said, greeting her in the doorway to her studio. Tusya had two homes—one in the country, a dacha, in a settlement of old Bolsheviks, most of whom had died out, and this studio, in the center of the city, rather small, with an alcove in which she could sleep if she wished.

“Yes.” Nora nodded. “I feel empty, somehow.”

“What do you think about that folkloric play? It’s not really drama—more like an experimental piece,” Tusya said.

Just then, Nora remembered that at their last meeting Tusya had suggested she work with some choral ensemble. In all the confusion surrounding Yurik’s departure, Nora had completely forgotten about it. Besides, the idea of a folklore ensemble was itself rather dubious.

“To be honest, it completely slipped my mind. Tusya, I just don’t like musicals. I don’t like taking on music—music is so much larger than theater, it makes it hard for theater to compete. Impossible, in fact.”

“Yes, I know. But in this case it’s just about assistance. The director of the ensemble is very talented, maybe even a genius. He deserves our support. He wants to get away from the folkloric-costume kitsch. He wants minimalist set design. Perhaps you know him? No? Go talk to him, listen to what he has to say. It will be interesting, I guarantee you.”

Nora and Tusya sat talking for hours, until well after midnight. There had been many such evenings over the past thirty years of their friendship. Tusya’s unique gift was that she treated her students as equals, and, in some wonderful way, this elevated her interlocutors above themselves. These interactions inspired them to grow into their future selves, and afterward they felt more confident and certain.

When Nora left Tusya’s, she had a large volume of Frazer’s The Golden Bough under her arm. This book, which she had been unaware of, pushed her thinking in new directions, and not just because of its study of magic, its myriad facts about the development of religion and the byways of human thinking; the book confronted her with the abyss of her own ignorance. She had missed so much during those years when she was blindly following all Tengiz’s initiatives.

Now she sat in the Theater Society library from the moment the doors opened until it closed, researching the aquatic spaces that appeared before the human soul just after death in the mythologies of all peoples. They were small rivers or streams, sometimes underground, sometimes oceans, enormous, bleak waters of all peoples, extinct and still living: the ancient Egyptians, Scandinavians, Indians, Native Americans, Mongols. But for Nora it was important to figure out how the Slavs envisioned this river. The practical task of set design was only a pretext for this captivating reading. Although Nora had a prodigious memory, she made small notebooks in which she jotted down the names of rivers and the names of ferrymen, sometimes even the names of the vessels that were charged with enacting this great passage, as well as vestiges of rituals that had been preserved. The boats themselves were extremely diverse—from rickety rowboats to winged sailing ships.

It was clear that the vision and scope of this small folkloric ensemble and its director were vast, in addressing one of the most forbidden and impenetrable questions of human experience: the fate of the soul after death. The view seemed to be universal in all cultures—the human world, earthly and concrete, is surrounded by great waters, and after death one must undergo a passage through the waters in order to reach the other shore. Nora already saw in her mind how, from backstage, on both the left and on the right, the shores of all these worlds would float into view, and in the center, amid the dark waves of the waters that washed them, a boat full of rowers, a crew, a captain, and a boatswain would be plying its way forth, as described in all world mythologies, in all books of the dead. It could be any river—let it be the Volga.

Then the memory of an event that Nora only knew from her mother’s account rose up from the depths of her past. When she was just four years old, they rented a dacha in Tarusa, on the banks of the Oka River. The summer was hot, and the children splashed in the shallows of the water. Nora wandered a bit too far from shore, beyond the drop-off. Without a sound, she sank to the bottom. When she lost sight of Nora, the little girl she had been playing beach ball with called out to her, and set up a howl when she couldn’t find her. Nora was pulled out of the water and revived with great difficulty. She hadn’t remembered any of this, but she still had a fear of water—which she loved very much in measured quantities, from the faucet. She never learned to swim.

Now, sitting over her books in the library, she could clearly remember this river in Tarusa, and herself, lying on the shore, on an old flannel blanket, which they had used as a stretcher; she saw the four-colored beach ball, and a young man with wet hair leaning over her. Everything matched up: Amalia had told her that the son of the landlady, a medical student, had saved her and administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She associated this distant memory with a recurrent dream she had, also involving water: She was swimming in some terrifying inky moisture, heavier and more viscous than ordinary water, to the shore. The shore was getting closer, but when Nora was already crawling out of the water, she realized that she had swum not to dry land but onto an enormous monster. She was filled with an indescribable horror, which jolted her, panting and drenched in sweat, out of the dream like a cork popping out of a bottle. The stench of her own sweat was awful, but it was in fact the stench of that awful water …

She finished her reading and put the books aside. From the time she had been able to formulate the question of religious belief in her life, her answer had been a flat-out no, and she had considered herself an inveterate materialist. Neither the turbid pantheistic views of her grandmother Marusya, nor the touching, childlike, superstitious faith of Amalia, and even less the bookish pronouncements of her friends, newly converted Christians with ecumenical inclinations, appealed to her in the least. Now, however, after this essentially archaeological reading, she felt that another shore did exist, and, consequently, death—as she had envisioned it, observed it, touched it—did not. Instead, there was something of far greater importance and complexity, something far more fascinating, and music was what affirmed this best of all. Perhaps those primordial yelps and cries that the brilliant director of the folklore ensemble collected, making the rounds of dying villages to record the rasping, quavery voices of already half-dead old women, provided the best evidence of all. In fact, Nora had had the impression that this genius, with the overbearing mien of a provincial actor, with his heavy jaw and tiny eyes drowning in dark folds of skin, was a self-absorbed egotistical crank.

Nora prepared for the meeting, bringing a sheaf of drawings with her. On the turquoise fabric that rose up to the horizon, representing water, was a large, elegant boat with its prow facing the audience. This was where the first scene took place—though there were no scenes in the conventional sense, since the action would unfold without intermissions between scenes and acts. Changing the sets would be a rather formidable task, and Nora decided to employ various lighting effects to accomplish it. Then the ship shed the decorations on its prow, its elegant sails unfurled, its chorus-crew turned into oarsmen, and at the culmination of the extended act, two dark, looming cliffs moved onto the stage—Scylla and Charybdis, say. The ship split into pieces, and the actors came out on the proscenium to sing the thundering finale.

The genius, who was both the artistic director and the choirmaster, studied the sketches for the sets with sullen attention, then requested to see the costume designs. Nora placed a pile of drawings in front of him. The first ones resembled nearly true-to-life folk attire of the Russian north. He shuffled through those without even pausing to take a closer look. The second series, which Nora had dubbed “X-rays,” depicted faded gray smocks, with only minimal differences between the men’s and women’s garments, overlaid with the hastily dashed-off outline of skeletons, corresponding fully to human anatomy. This series of drawings caught his attention, and he tapped them several times with a discolored fingernail, murmuring “um-hmm, good.” In the third group of drawings, which Nora called the “peacock’s tail,” the shape and cut of the traditional peasant costumes—the apronlike sarafan, blouses and vests, the povoinik and kokoshnik headdresses—were preserved, but the usually somber northern colors were replaced with orange-red-lilac and blue-green tints. Pure India, Africa, Mexico … These he immediately pushed aside, then rested his chin on his hand and seemed to reflect on what he had seen.

“You’ve hit on something here. Yes, there’s a great deal in them. Perhaps too much. I’ll need to think about it. But, to be honest, I’m inclined to the most banal, denuded approach—making everything from black broadcloth. So as not to distract the audience.”

He never called back. Tusya, much later, told Nora, “You aimed a bit too high for him.”

Nora was not in the least distraught. While she was exploring these mythical watery spaces, Yurik’s life across the ocean had completely sorted itself out. Martha—wonder of wonders!—wrote Nora weekly letters that arrived in a desultory fashion; it took them a week or even ten days to cover a distance that took ten hours of flying time. Once in a while, Nora called to America from the Central Telephone and Telegraph office. Yurik sounded well. He was going to school, had learned to speak English fairly quickly, and, most important, was playing in the school jazz band. That was all he needed to be happy.

Nora had crossed a new Rubicon, and life continued.