Jacob's Ladder

36 Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District

(EARLY 1999–2000)

The thought of Yurik never left her. Her previous visit to New York had been a failure. Nora saw Yurik only four times in the space of two weeks. He had a cold and a red, sniffly nose, and he was constantly rushing off somewhere or other. He was underdressed for the cold weather. She bought him a warm jacket. She couldn’t figure out where he was living. He said he lived with Tom, but asked her not to call him there. He said he had lost his cell phone, along with his passport and green card. Or, rather, that he had been mugged. Nora insisted that he apply for a replacement of his Russian passport. Together they went to the embassy and filled out the forms for a new one.

He was always late for their rendezvous. One time he didn’t show up at all, and she waited for two hours at Dante in the West Village, where he had agreed to meet her. She never made it to Long Island to see Martha and Vitya. Martha had gone to Ireland to attend the wedding of some cousin, eight times removed. Vitya spoke to her over the phone in monosyllables—yes and no—and she couldn’t get any information from him.

She returned to Moscow. She felt wretched, her mood was lousy; but she had long since decided that the best mood she could expect for herself was none at all. At least that was better than a bad mood.

Nora taught in the theater college, having taken over Tusya’s old position. She was constantly aware that she couldn’t possibly fill Tusya’s shoes—she didn’t have her freedom, her command of the cultural sphere. The old guard of teachers was passing away, and the new generation couldn’t measure up to the precedents of the old one. It seemed that the next generation of students would take another step down on the ladder. There were no interesting offers from the theater, either. Tengiz had been lying low for almost two years.

The mythical era of reconstruction, or “perestroika,” seemed to have ended with the 1998 default of the ruble. Both Tengiz and Nora had understood, of course, from the very beginning, that perestroika had no relation to them at all. It turned out that neither of them had anything to “reconstruct” in order to achieve a correspondence between the newly permitted freedom of thought and their own matured thinking about the world, and their own place in it.

Since her high-school years, Nora had felt a high-minded contempt for collectivism, and she rejected the false dichotomy of a “social good” superior to the “personal good.” In his patriarchal homeland of Georgia—from the age of thirteen, when his father went to fight on the battlefront during the Second World War—Tengiz had had to support his entire family by the sweat of his brow. He provided for his sister, his mother, his grandmother and grandfather, and his grandmother’s blind sister, who lived with them her whole life. This early burden of responsibility shielded him from all kinds of foolishness and idiocy. His schooling was constantly interrupted, and only after his father returned was he able to make up for lost time, grasping at all the opportunities he was deprived of in childhood. He went to live with an uncle in Kutaisi, and attended the Institute of Culture. He transferred to acting school, quit, served in the military construction battalion, then worked evenings and nights—as a nude model, a cobbler, even as a cook—until he decided to become a theater director. He had had no time for being either Soviet or anti-Soviet.

The officially authorized freedom, or its shadow, made no impression on him. Nora didn’t really notice it, either. She had always been so headstrong that willfulness had supplanted freedom for her from her earliest years. It was likely that Tengiz’s independence and Nora’s willfulness had struck a mutual chord in them. Somehow or other, both of them responded to the freedom they found in each other. It was a joy for them to work together. But their mutual endeavors—Nora had almost reconciled herself to this—had ended.

By the end of the 1990s, they had about two dozen joint stage productions under their belts. Even though the plays had not all enjoyed the same degree of popular success, they had received well-deserved professional and critical acclaim, a few prizes, and some international recognition. They had found friends in the Eastern European theater world, with whom they shared common views: a dismissively skeptical attitude toward politics, and an aversion to the coarser, cruder forms it took, such as the invasion of Prague in 1968 by Soviet troops and the recent American bombing of Yugoslavia, not to mention the secret killings, poisonings, and cloak-and-dagger intrigues.

It was just during these troubled times that a tentative, incoherent offer to stage a tried-and-true Russian classic came from their Hungarian friend István, the artistic director of a Budapest theater. He invited both Tengiz and Nora. Rise above politics! Theater for theater’s sake!

Tengiz called Nora and said, “Well, are you on board?” She agreed without a second thought.

It was a turbulent year. The Caucasus was in a state of upheaval, but the trains from Georgia were running, and the planes were flying. Tengiz arrived in Moscow two days after his phone call. The set design was still the same—the view of Nikitsky Boulevard out the window, the same Kuznetsov china teacups on the table, the spines of the same books on the same bookshelves. The old Persian rug with bare patches from the legs of a desk that had long since been moved to another spot. The wall that bisected the molding—a reminder of the building’s aristocratic youth, when the proportions between walls and ceiling were more commensurate, before the rooms were cut in half to accommodate more tenants.

The costumes were also the same—Nora in jeans and a man’s shirt, and Tengiz in a baggy sweater and outdated, shapeless trousers. This play of life had lasted so long that both of them had managed to age, and their relationship, once intermittent and nonbinding, had grown into a bond as strong as any marriage.

The most important things in Nora’s life had grown out of their combined efforts. She had learned to work without him, but always, internally, she consulted him on every new project she began. She corrected her course under his silent influence. Countless times during the past years, Nora had tried to break the chains of her servitude to him, but each time the chains seemed to grow stronger. Her fingers were callused and hard—and still she was not free.

“Take it easy,” Tengiz had said, by way of comforting her, after yet another attempt to break out of this bondage. “Accept it as a fact. A fact of our biography.”

This time, it was different. She made the bed in Yurik’s room for Tengiz. He stared at her in astonishment.

“Is this the way it’s going to be, then?”

“Yes,” Nora said, nodding.

“But how will we work together?” Tengiz said.

“Otherwise, the same as always.” And she closed the door behind her.

The next day, they went to visit Tusya, who had moved permanently to the dacha. They spent a long day there together. Tusya had grown decrepit with age, and was nearly blind. She read with a magnifying glass—memoirs of writers and cultural figures, to the exclusion of anything else. She admired Viktor Shklovsky, and Pasternak’s correspondence with his cousin Olga Freidenberg, and waxed indignant about Dostoevsky and the correspondence between Chekhov and Knipper. She painted, using a housepainter’s brush, on the back sides of old rolls of wallpaper, left behind after a renovation years since. Stripes, circles, spots …

“I just daub and mess around—but what a pleasure it is!” she said. And Nora smiled wryly; the drawings looked just like the work of the children in her art classes long ago.

The conversation then segued to their future work. They told her about the commission—a good Russian classic, above and beyond all politics.

“Chekhov,” Tusya proposed. “Who else?”

Tengiz shook his head. He and Chekhov had parted ways back in the seventies.

Tusya took off her glasses and looked at them with her naked, red-rimmed eyes.

“I understand. Love and death. How young you both still are.”

Young? Nora was already in her late fifties, and Tengiz was over seventy. Nora wanted to cite her favorite line from Brodsky: “From a mosquito’s point of view, a human does not die,” but she stopped herself short, because Tusya’s life had been very long, and not only from a mosquito’s point of view.

“The theater wants something very Russian,” Nora said, smiling. “I don’t know—Volga boatmen, river pirates, Cossack robbers … Any ideas, Tusya?”

“The most Russian of all stories is The Captain’s Daughter. It has everything: the begging bag and prison. And love, to a certain degree. Pushkin didn’t attach any significance to politics. It’s all about human worth and dignity. A rare subject in Russia.”

“No, no, Tusya, I can’t take that on. Staging The Captain’s Daughter … I wouldn’t dare attempt it.”

“Prison is a Russian subject. I’d suggest The Gulag Archipelago, but in our era Solzhenitsyn is still not a Russian classic. And his work is almost all politics—drenched in tears and blood. Leskov: Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. That has everything.”

She read my mind, Nora mused.

“I thought of Katerina Izmailova right off; but Shostakovich gave me pause,” Tengiz said.

They exchanged glances. Yes, of course. Passion. Death. Infanticide. The begging bag and prison. Fate … Yes, of course.

“At first I didn’t understand why Shostakovich threw out the infanticide. He was twenty-seven when he wrote the opera. He didn’t understand that the murder of a child was a blood sacrifice. It’s just that Katerina doesn’t realize what she’s doing. She is devoured by passion, and she throws everything into this fire—both Fedya, and her own child … She gave birth and she gave it away—take it! Take every single thing! As though she didn’t even notice what was happening after the murder of Fedya. She’s a far cry from Lady Macbeth. Her passion is fairly superficial—to wear a crown. But her conscience is alive. She goes mad, she can’t wipe the blood off her hands. And she didn’t even commit the murder herself.

“No, Nora, Lady Macbeth can’t hold a candle to our Katerina. Our merchant’s wife is blinded by her passion, blinded by it. Poor Katya! What a fate! And Shostakovich’s music is pure fate. And we’re working without this music. Nora, I want it all to be about fate; I don’t want anything else to interfere. Horrible fate thrusts its finger into the genitals of an ordinary woman—not a sorceress-Medea, not Lady Macbeth, but a simple woman indistinguishable from a million others. And look what happens! Fate! How is she to blame? She has a petty soul, and an overload of passion—that’s what fate is! She’s not guilty! And all Leskov’s prisoners—they’re also victims of fate. A Russian fate, I’d like to note. It’s the same—from the begging bag and prison … I want to show that fate and prison are one and the same; fate is a kind of prison.”

The play took shape out of these inarticulate ramblings. This time, fate was woven from threads of about the thickness of a whole hand. An enormous, invisible spider ensnared the entire opening of the stage with dark filaments, a curtain of crude, shaggy ropes that lightly swayed and shivered. A spiderweb. The spider itself hid above it, in the rigging. The only things visible were its hairy legs. As they moved slowly, the ropes stirred as though they were flowing from the four pairs of legs. Across the proscenium, from left to right, filed the convicts—slowly, hunched over, singing a mournful song. They shuffled along in a continual cyclical movement, all of them alike, wearing long dark clothes, without faces, neither male nor female; and each figure seemed to be hanging from a thick black rope descending from the legs of the invisible spider.

The convicts filed offstage, and their lugubrious song faded away with them. Suddenly Sergei appeared, in his red shirt and black boots, holding an accordion, and shaking a curly lock of hair. He started dancing this way and that, squatting and throwing out his legs, and leaping to his feet again. Sergei, the lover … He danced his way back in the other direction—from the wings where the convicts had disappeared to the side from which they had appeared. Then a small platform with two levels materialized. On the upper level was Katerina Izmailova, with a distaff, a spindle. She impassively spun the yarn with her plump pink hands—fluffy white yarn …

“This structure, this set, can serve as a house, the police station, the prison, and the barge, without any transformation. We just have to decide about the water. The Volga River,” Nora said, showing a sketch.

“Fewer words, fewer words,” Tengiz said. “Incoherent, disconnected cries, cursing, fragments of musical phrases. We’ll bring in some Shostakovich, I’ll ask Gia … Or we’ll find a composer in Budapest. Forget about Leskov’s original text. We’ve thought everything through. We’ll weave fate ourselves. And let Katerina be knitting some little socks—well, some large ones, even huge ones! With a red arrow up the sides. And in the first love scene, let her wind the yarn into … I don’t know what it’s called, you wind them on your hands.”

“Skeins,” Nora prompted.

“Yes, skeins. Skeins. The hands wind them and approach one another … I don’t know, I don’t know. You think up something,” Tengiz said.

“Good, good. Winding the yarn is right. I think the entire first love scene is like a cocoon. The spider’s thread winds around them. Let it be red, and the old man Izmailov comes and flings open the door, and the door breaks the thread.”

“Now, that I’m not so sure about. But let’s move along. I need the old man to be wrapped up in a shroud, and let’s put him not in the basement but, rather, in the attic. We’ll have this mummy hanging in the spiderweb up there on high. And some evil spirit or vermin, like a cat or a werewolf, is walking there above, and not below. How did Leskov manage to forget about witches? My God, it’s unforgivable! They’d be perfect. They could hang from the hairy black ropes, and drop down.”

“The attic—that means we need a third level. That’s too much. There should just be two,” Nora insisted.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. We can tackle the technicalities later. I need the dead—all four of them—to be wrapped in shrouds, in black shrouds.”

“Wait a minute—why four? The old man Izmailov, Zinovy, and Fedya—”

“And the baby? Four! No, five! We forgot Sonyetka. She drags her into the water.”

“Tengiz, this is frightening. Terrifying, even.”

“And rightly so! It must be terrifying. This is not your everyday Ukrainian Viy! It’s Russian. It is terrifying!”

“No, no. I can’t do this. I don’t want to!” Nora objected.

“Did you want a light at the end of the tunnel? Well, there’s no light there. Everything is dark and dismal.”

“And the boy? Fedya? The innocent boy, Fedya?” Nora said, grasping for some ray of hope.

“Fine, the finale is yours. Go ahead and do it. I’ll watch and see what kind of heavenly kingdom you salvage out of this story,” Tengiz said, agitated. “Come on! Do you remember Shostakovich’s finale? You can’t outdo him.”

“That has no bearing on what we do. We’re not staging an opera. Besides, I’m against the idea of using Shostakovich’s music. Also, if you take three minutes of music, there will be no end of trouble over copyright issues. It would be far better to commission some up-and-coming young composer.”

They argued for a long time over the finale. Right up until the moment when they had to submit the play, they couldn’t agree on an ending. Their creative kinship had never been put to such a test before. Ultimately, they had to call upon the artistic director to make the final decision. And Nora’s idea for a finale, with butterflies, won out. Tengiz accepted it, after much resistance. From a two-story structure—at Nora’s insistence—the convicts emerge, into real water poured into flat zinc troughs. They wend their way down to the shore, all linked together by hairy black threads from the legs of the invisible spider, and, like black dirigibles, four cigar-shaped figures shrouded in black hang in the air from above.

The people look up, craning their necks, to see an enormous, iridescent black metal spider with a gleaming cross in the middle of its belly and dangling bent legs, each with three claws on the end. Everyone freezes, attending to some faint, modulating sounds. One of the figures begins to crack. The sound grows louder. Out of the crack flits an enormous white butterfly … And another … A flute begins to play a tentative Eastern melody …

They stayed in Budapest for three months. The technical side of the play proved to be difficult. Tengiz rehearsed with a translator, pretty Tanya, the Russian wife of a Hungarian journalist. They ate together in a café during the breaks. Nora was jealous but refused to show it. From morning till night, she was in the workshops, making miracles. The head of the set construction department came to hate her. Old, conceited, hailing from some aristocratic family or other, not used to being prevailed upon like an inexperienced novice—first she needed this, then she needed that … But after the opening night, he went up to Nora and kissed her hand. Success. A great success.

Tengiz also went up to her afterward and told her to stop being an idiot: “You can’t fool fate.” And everything returned to the way it had been. In mid-December, they went back to Moscow. Nora didn’t make up the bed in Yurik’s room anymore.

He decided to spend the New Year—the year 2000—with Nora. The Second Chechen War was in full swing. The siege of Grozny began on December 26. Nora had not been able to get through to Yurik on the phone for three months. Tom kept telling her Yurik wasn’t home. She got the impression that he didn’t live there anymore. Martha, whom she called about once a week, had heard no word from Yurik, either.

Nora and Tengiz spent the New Year with a boisterous group of actors. The Vlasovs, who had never really recovered from their son Fedya’s death—they carried their sorrow inside of them—were there as well. Every time Natasha Vlasov saw Nora, she seized the opportunity to whisper in her ear: “Don’t let Yurik come back. I beg you, don’t bring Yurik back here.”

In the beginning, everyone made merry. Then the merriment gave way to political prognostication. Yeltsin, sitting in front of the Christmas tree, announced he was retiring. They argued about whether that was bad or good. They argued about when the war in Chechnya might end, and whether a war in Georgia would begin. They argued about whether the twenty-first century had already begun, or whether they had to hold out for another year. The new millennium had begun, but no one expected any good to come of it.