Jacob's Ladder

43 Family Secrets

(1936–1937)

“A marriage will not survive on postage stamps alone. Come!” Jacob had written to Marusya. He was probably right. During his six years of exile, she came to see him only once, at the beginning of his ordeal, in Stalingrad. That was in 1932. His second reunion with his wife took place at the train station in Moscow just over two years later. This time, he was on his way from the Stalingrad prison to Novosibirsk, via Moscow. His sister and her husband had come to see him off, too, but they had presented no obstacle to renewed declarations of love. Jacob had only thirty minutes in which to change trains. Jacob and Marusya had to run from the Kazan station to the Kursk station, and talk in the presence of an elderly, weary captain of the local Ministry of State Security, who issued Jacob his ticket to Novosibirsk. One of the dubious privileges of exiles and prisoners was a free ticket from their place of residence to the destination where they would serve their term. The words Jacob and Marusya exchanged in haste, literally on the run, were insignificant, but the eye saw more than words could say. Marusya looked tired and depressed. She had dark circles under her eyes, and her usual leanness—she always complained of losing weight—inspired in Jacob a sense of guilt for inadvertently causing his wife to suffer.

It wasn’t only these visible signs of suffering that oppressed Jacob. He felt much more deeply Marusya’s disappointment—in him, her husband, who had promised her so much in life and who had constantly let her down. She looked very unhappy. The differences in their inward dispositions were clearly manifested here. To be happy, Marusya needed constant external signs of success and recognition. When Marusya was able to admire Jacob, to be confident in their brilliant future together, her own strength was amplified. But her strong, passionate temperament went hand in hand with an inner fragility and weakness, and the vividness of her desires with volatility. Her soul balked when it had to cope with the blows that life dealt. She grumbled, blamed the circumstances, and fell into despondency.

The sense of being unhappy was alien to Jacob. He did not permit himself the luxury of such feelings, and was ashamed when such thoughts occurred to him. Even in the most vexing circumstances, he tried to derive joy from the small, quotidian gifts of life: the sun peeping out, a green branch outside the window, a pleasant person he met along the way and chatted with about this and that; and, most important, good books. Marusya also knew how to derive joy from small things, but for this she needed Jacob to be beside her. Joy did not come easily to her if there was no spectator to witness it. An actress always needs an audience.

Jacob was certain that he could conquer Marusya’s despondency with his masculine authority and power, with that rare and wonderful intimacy that had always enhanced their conjugal life: to smooth away, caress, kiss, and bring her to the peak of mutual pleasure, and even beyond, into a realm of pure bliss that left the joys of the flesh behind.

But, despite his virtuosity with the pen, and however deep and tender his letters to his wife may have been, his physical absence was an insurmountable obstacle for them. He felt this in her letters to him, in the irritation that broke through, in the jabs and reproaches, and, mainly, in the increasing expressions of ideological protest on her part. She called herself a “nonpartisan Bolshevik,” and accused Jacob of political myopia, of floundering in a petit-bourgeois swamp. She had become irreversibly alienated from him.

He knew Marusya’s impressionability and the enthusiasm with which she always adopted new projects—her infatuation with pedagogy during her studies at the Froebel Institute; pedology, the rejected sister of pedagogy; the new religion of “movement” in the Rabenek studio; followed by theater, then journalism … He was moved by her touching conviction about the “higher good” when one infatuation replaced another, and then hoped that her enthusiasm about Bolshevism, in its nonpartisan variety, would not give way to Party membership. In fact, they would not have accepted her, anyway—the wife of a “wrecker,” an enemy of the people.

There was still another obstacle, one that lurked in her own character: a boundary that Marusya would not have been able to cross. She was essentially bohemian in nature, and any kind of orthodox discipline, strict Party discipline in particular, was anathema to her. It was Jacob who had reported dutifully to work from a young age; until the end of her life, Marusya was never willing or able to tie herself down with routine work. Her worst fear, the greatest bugaboo to her, was punching in and out—that is, showing up on time for work every day, and leaving at a certain hour, and registering one’s arrival and departure on the time clock.

There was one other thought that alarmed Jacob. He knew Marusya’s susceptibility and suspected that she might have fallen under the spell of a new, different kind of infatuation. With a man. Jacob was not jealous, although when they were young Marusya had unconsciously provoked him with stories of important, interesting men who had sought her out. She conveyed this primarily in letters. Yet Jacob had actually been inclined to feel some pride in these reports. He completely understood the men who showed an interest in his fiancée, then his wife. Her attractions were such that Jacob could not even imagine comparing her to other women. She surpassed all others in her charms. Even in the fits of jealousy to which she was prone, she never lost her fascinating appeal.

Her jealousy was unfounded: Jacob never betrayed his wife. That is not to say that Jacob didn’t like other women. He did; he liked them very much. When he was young, he had been desperately in love with a fellow student named Lydia, but she preferred another to him. Back then, at seventeen, he went through the experience of rejection. Even before that, he had liked very much the daughter of the family’s neighbor, the architect Kovalenko; he had been attracted to the sister of one of his friends, and another girl he knew, who attended college. Later, when he was already married to Marusya, he was enamored with a nurse, Valentina Beloglazova, who had given him glucose injections when he was stationed in Kharkov; he also liked Nadezhda Belskaya, secretary at the People’s Commissariat of Labor, where he often found himself. She liked him very much, too, and she gave him to understand this. It was not his eyes, but another organ greedy for pleasure that gave him a signal, which he immediately refused. He kept his own body under control, and didn’t let its demands overmaster him. All in all, accepting the postulate about the primacy of matter and the subordination of the spirit to it, the couple made wonderful mutual use of the body for promoting conjugal happiness, while still considering the Seventh Commandment to be sacrosanct.

Yet, on this particular issue, Marusya experienced some sort of psychological or emotional malfunction. For some reason, it was terribly painful for her to feel that her husband was attracted to another woman. He never betrayed her, or gave in to his desires—this he swore to her—but if he was attracted to another woman, and only refused to give in to his desires out of moral considerations, what was this morality, then? Was it not purely spiritual? Was it not higher than the flesh in that case? At this point Marusya grew weary, and began to cry. But, at the same time, she insisted on complete honesty in their relations, and constantly tormented herself with the confessions she forced from her husband about how his body reacted to this, that, or the other woman.

Now this had all receded into a realm of Jacob’s memory that only called up a sad smile in him. Since he could not change his wife’s mood, he postponed the clarification and restoration of their good relations until such time as he could put his arms around her thin shoulders, and chased away the jealous suspicion that someone else was occupying Marusya’s feelings and thoughts, embracing her small shoulders, and doing with her all the mundane things in which there was no beauty, no mystery, but only mutually coordinated movements. Small details seared his imagination—her head thrown back, the blue vein in her neck, the grayish mother-of-pearl of her eyes looking out from under the half-closed lids, and the elongated dimple in her chin. Jacob chased away these thoughts and memories and devoted all his energies toward what he called “productive life.” He went to work, invented all kinds of extra sources of income for himself, such as private language and music lessons; he arranged and settled his life, and sent money and parcels to Moscow, though it was customary for such “care packages” to travel in the other direction—from Moscow to Biysk, to those in exile.

The letters from home were not comforting. Marusya dredged up all their disputes, artistic or political, and invested them with new energy. Jacob tried to explain himself, which added fuel to the fire; everything became a pretext for new reproaches, until Jacob understood that Marusya simply wanted to pick a fight, no matter the reason. His replies became more reserved, and the intervals between letters grew longer.

At the same time, his eczema flared up again. His hands and feet were covered with a dry crust that erupted in tiny wet pustules, and it itched, burned, and made him generally miserable. During the day, he kept himself in check, but at night, when he was asleep, he scratched himself until he bled. He would wake up from the pain, then fall asleep again, reaching some strange state of semiconsciousness in which he came to an agreement with the unbearable itching: I’m sleeping, and in my sleep I can scratch the wounds …

The subject of health became one of the safest in their correspondence. He once wrote his wife that the eczema was playing up to such a degree that it freed him from all the sad thoughts that would otherwise preoccupy him.

A few days after she received this letter, Marusya’s wrists began itching. The connection between herself and her husband turned out to be much stronger and deeper than she would have liked. Jacob was to a certain degree correct in his surmises. She wanted to free herself from him, but was unable to do so, and she was unconsciously seeking masculine authority and power.

She was no longer the young, bewitching actress with an undefined and exciting future ahead of her; older men no longer turned around to look at her. But she was not seeking a man so much as an idea that would free her. The ideas about emancipation that had long preoccupied her stalled at this point: the bearers of ideas, Marusya’s protests and objections notwithstanding, were men.

Jacob, with his intelligent love, knew how to quell the mixture of pride and uncertainty that created a room-sized hell in her soul, but she was not alone. Their son, Genrikh, was also in need of support. Like Marusya, he, too, was preparing for flight, but in the most concrete terms: gliders, airplanes, air, the sky … Yet life had deposited him in a place that was the polar opposite of his dreams: the Metrostroi, construction of the subway system. Yet even underground he managed to find the communist romanticism that was so dear to him. Marusya supported him in any way she could, but she had her own problems to deal with.

Then Ivan Belousov reappeared. A person from the past, from her Kiev youth, a friend of her brother’s, who once was desperately and hopelessly in love with her. He had spent summer evenings in the courtyard of her family’s home, at a long wooden table with a small table adjoining it for the samovar. Incidents seemed to follow Ivan all the time: He would burn his fingers on the samovar, or overturn a glass of tea on her father’s duck-cloth trousers. Once he stepped on an old dog lying beneath the table, and it bit him. It was probably the first time in its entire life that this dog had bitten anyone, and more out of fright than pain. Everyone laughed at Belousov constantly, and there was no person on earth who was more good-natured about the jokes and jibes leveled at him by Marusya’s brother Mikhail.

Belousov, unable to conceal his feelings for Marusya, watched the sixteen-year-old girl like a child staring at candy. Though Marusya pretended to be angry, she was really flirting with him, always flirting. Several times, she went with Belousov to the theater, and felt uncomfortable and disproportionately small next to him. At six feet six inches, he was twice her size. When he took her by the arm, she yanked it away and advised him to bring a collar and a leash next time—that would make it easier for them to walk together. His excessive height inspired mockery in the Kerns, who were all rather small in stature. He was embarrassed by his height, his long thin hands, which stuck too far out of the sleeves of his shirts, and his enormous boots, which were specially made for him by an Armenian cobbler who charged him for one and a half pairs instead of just one. Ivan turned red, then bunched up his handkerchief in his sweaty hands and rubbed his forehead and his prominent nose, with its large nostrils. To all appearances a mild-mannered, gentle, awkward fellow.

Meanwhile, Ivan Belousov was a genuine revolutionary, one of the few Bolsheviks in Kiev who knew how to write leaflets. The first one he wrote was about the death of Tolstoy, very cocky and self-assured, summoning people to band together “under the banner of the Social Democratic Labor Party, to struggle for the overthrow of the government of robbers and thieves, against the violence and tyranny of the Tsar’s henchmen, against the deadly etc. evils and of the disintegrating bourgeois-capitalist system.” Tolstoy would hardly have approved.

At first, Marusya didn’t see him as a real activist. In the fall of 1913, however, when Kiev was reeling from the Beilis Affair, he brought her a leaflet from the RSDRP with a call to protest against the oppression of the non-Russian peoples of Russia, and to strengthen the international union of workers of all nationalities, and informed her that he was the author of the text. That was the moment when Marusya began to regard him with seriousness and respect. But nothing more. She was already eternally, as she thought then, bound to Jacob.

At about this time, Ivan Belousov was expelled from the university, became a member of the Kiev committee of the RSDRP, and ran a propaganda study circle to which he invited Marusya. He was no longer comically in love with her, although he still blushed and bunched up his handkerchief in her presence. She visited this semi-underground gathering several times, but her enthusiasm for the Froebel movement outweighed her interest in revolutionary politics.

Shortly before the start of World War I, Ivan disappeared. Marusya didn’t think about him anymore. Twenty years later, in 1935, when she attended the courses on the history of the Communist Party for journalists, in the Institute of the Red Professorate, she met him again. The lecturer, a large bald man in a gray service jacket, was one Comrade Belousov, a professor.

He began his first lecture with a quote from Lenin: “You can only become a communist when you have enriched your memory with the entire wealth of knowledge accumulated by humanity.” He went on to discuss Marx and Engels, whose ideas Marusya knew already but now listened to attentively. Ivan spoke distinctly, clearly, with careful diction. The only thing lacking in him was artistry, and Marusya had something to compare him to: she had attended lectures by some world-class pedagogues at the Froebel Institute.

After the lecture, Marusya approached Professor Belousov—not to renew their acquaintance, but to ask him about the program of study. And to get a good look at him … and … just because …

“Marusya? How did you end up here?” He blushed, took his crumpled handkerchief out of his pocket, and mopped his brow.

There he was, Ivan Belousov himself. It could not have been said that she liked him in his new guise; rather, he interested her. He walked her home. From the Strastnoy Monastery they walked along the boulevards to the Nikitsky Gates, then turned toward home. He didn’t hunch over to talk to her, as he had before. On the contrary, Marusya strained her long, graceful neck to look up at him, and it seemed to her that he was looking down at her tenderly. They said goodbye at the entrance to her building. From then on, they renewed their friendship and saw each other regularly. Talked about things. Discussed politics. Marusya valued his proletarian rootedness in life—that which was lacking in her.

At the beginning of March, Marusya’s cousin Asya Smolkina, whom she rarely saw, called her and asked whether she could drop by for a minute. It was inopportune, but Asya said she was already in the neighborhood, and Marusya had to agree. Among her many cousins, Asya had a reputation as the kindest and the stupidest. It is likely that these two qualities share a common core; but perhaps people who are intelligent and unkind yoke them together only to justify the absence of goodness in themselves. Be that as it may, Asya showed up, both good and stupid. Since childhood, she had looked up to Marusya, extolling her many talents, authentic and imaginary; her beauty, which had faded somewhat by now; her intelligence; her education; and, of late, the bitterness of her lot. But, for all her admiration of Marusya, she held Jacob in even higher esteem.

Her relatives didn’t appreciate the selfless and unquestioning help that Asya bestowed on all of them, distant and close, without exception. They took her empathy and altruism for granted. Only once had Asya received a sign of gratitude for her invisible exploits and deeds—lancing abscesses, giving injections, preparing poultices, and administering enemas to old ladies on their deathbeds. Her whole life, Asya had remembered how Jacob, after returning to Kiev from Kharkov during a three-day furlough, came to her house with a bouquet of flowers, a nearly forgotten sign of gratitude, kissed her hand, which was desiccated from constant exposure to alcohol (the hand of a surgical nurse), and thanked her for saving his son’s life, and his wife’s breasts, with her healing arts. But where had he managed to get hold of flowers during the harsh privations of 1916?

“My goodness, Jacob, what do you mean? You’re exaggerating. I’m only glad I could help,” Asya murmured, feeling as though she had received a decoration. From that moment on, she had considered him to be the noblest person she had ever met in her life.

During the rare celebrations when all the relatives got together, Asya usually sat at the far end of the table and devoured Jacob with her eyes, unaware that the other cousins were winking at one another and exchanging glances at her expense. She didn’t consider her raptures over Jacob to be anything like being in love, because since childhood she had been certain that no man would ever marry her, and that it wasn’t even worth dreaming about. The best thing she could do was to serve all the people who surrounded her, without exception. The notion of people who were “near and dear” was unknown to her. She did not suspect that she had taken a kind of monastic vow, and she didn’t even know she was making sacrifices. Well, is that not what others would call stupid?

She entered Marusya’s house, smiling her bland, foolish smile. She had tender hairs on her upper lip that promised to become more mannish with the years. Her close-set eyes shone. When she smiled more broadly, her long mouth opened to reveal perfect, white, evenly spaced teeth that looked as if they had been intended for someone else. In her hands she was holding a paper bag with pastries. Marusya boiled the teakettle on a hot plate she had in the room—she tried to avoid going into the communal kitchen if she could help it. Drinking tea and eating éclairs, they discussed the relatives. Marusya didn’t mention Jacob. When Asya asked what news she had of him, Marusya told her about the eczema, which had grown worse. Asya opened her arms wide in a gesture of surprise, exclaiming: “Really? But what a coincidence! Vera’s Annechka also has eczema.”

Marusya just shrugged. Which Vera was she talking about? Who was Annechka? What was she so thrilled about?

“I mean that I’m happy because my colleague Vera discovered some old lady in a village near Moscow, an herbalist or some such person. And she gave Annechka, her daughter, some kind of poultice. It stank to high heaven—black stuff, God knows what’s in it—but it helped. It worked wonders! Two weeks later, she didn’t have a single spot. It was just recently. If you want, I can find out about it, and get some of it for Jacob.”

Marusya promptly forgot about this herbalist and her miracle cure, but a week later Asya called her on the phone. Brimming with excitement, Asya informed her that she had managed to get hold of the potion, that the old woman was simply remarkable, that she lived in the village of Firsanovka, that her whole house was covered with icons. The woman was a fervent believer, but not slow-witted—very sensible and wise, and even rather well read. She had books on botany … A genuine herbalist, and her own grandmother had been an herbalist, too. So folk medicine really was better than any newfangled treatments; Marusya should make sure to get this potion to Jacob, and right away! Otherwise, within two weeks it would go bad and lose its healing properties.

Marusya asked her to send the remedy by mail. Asya was at a loss for words. When she recovered her composure, she said yes, she could send it by mail, but by the time it got there it wouldn’t work anymore. Besides, would they even allow her to send a bottle through the mail?

Politely, without any spite, Marusya told Asya that she had no plans to go to Biysk in the near future, and that if Asya considered it necessary she was free to go herself—today, if need be.

Asya, thrown off guard, and living up to her reputation, said, “But I don’t even know where Jacob lives.”

“The town of Biysk, 27 Kvartalnaya Street. Please excuse me, Asya, I can’t talk right now.” And Marusya hung up the phone. My goodness, what an idiot, she thought to herself.

Asya went to the train station and bought a ticket for the city of Novosibirsk. They told her that she could only reach Biysk by a local commuter train. By the evening of the next day, she was sitting on a train to Siberia, traveling to a place that Marusya would never make it to.

In her suitcase, encased in a canvas covering, Asya was carrying a carefully wrapped half-liter bottle of a viscous dark-amber liquid, and, just as carefully wrapped, foodstuffs—two bottles of homemade jam, two kilograms of flour, and two kilograms of millet. She looked out the window, and enjoyed watching the fields and forests slip past; she hadn’t gone on vacation in three years, and everything she saw delighted her.

Since her youth, she had spent the greater part of her time in hospitals and clinics, among doctors and the sick, and twice she had been called upon to assist famous surgeons. One of them was killed in a field hospital during the war, by a random shell. The second, an old country doctor, died of a heart attack while he was operating. Admiration was a requirement for her rapturous nature, and the surgeons she worked with now did not inspire respect. One of them accepted gifts from the patients—bribes, in other words. Another had a reputation as a ladies’ man, and surrounded himself with a flock of pretty nurses, with whom he amused himself in convenient nooks and corners of the clinic. For shame, for shame …

Asya was unable to find her ideal in her immediate surroundings, but Jacob, to whom in her youth she had assigned the role of ideal man and human being, still existed in some far-off place. The dark-amber liquid in the bottle that she had brought from the back of beyond was intended to allay his suffering. This was her mission—it was not the ordinary journey of a distant relative to an exile banished to a remote realm, somewhere deep in Siberia. What a pity that it was she and not Marusya on that train—a visit from his wife would have brought Jacob far greater joy!

While the crazy Asya was journeying toward the Altai Mountains with the miracle potion in her suitcase, Marusya was also thinking about Jacob. The reason for this was Ivan Belousov, with whom (not simply out of the blue) she had renewed her relations. The history of the Party was the main topic of discussion, and Marusya tenderly recalled the time when the curly-haired, clumsy Ivan had tried to take her by the arm.

Ivan walked her home now after classes. He took her by the arm without any hesitation, was friendly but reserved, and did not transgress any boundaries. But their conversation, starting with the main topic, Party history, somehow flowed smoothly into the memories of their youth, and at one point he squeezed her arm above her elbow—not very firmly, but not too weakly, either; with just the right degree of pressure. At that moment, Marusya felt that she was betraying Jacob. Yes, she wanted to betray him … After she got home, she weighed every word that Ivan had said that evening and realized that she agreed with him. Jacob would not have agreed with him: he would have said something sharp and critical! And she experienced a surge of irritation toward her husband.

She had to admit that Belousov, ridiculous and awkward in his youth, had now become a kindred spirit. He was educated, but in another way from Jacob; and, like Jacob, he was also a writer, but in a different vein. How easily his dyed-in-the-wool proletarian origins won out over Jacob’s bourgeois complexities!

Their walks after classes lasted longer and longer, and Jacob was a constant presence, somewhere in the background. Marusya felt she was carrying on a conversation with two people: with Ivan out loud, and with Jacob in her head.

Asya had to wait for the train to Biysk for three hours, and she managed to send a telegram to Jacob to let him know she was coming. He didn’t meet her at the station. Late in the evening, with a suitcase and a handbag, in boots with little heels that sank into a deep layer of freshly fallen snow, as soft and light as feathers, she wandered around for a long time in search of Jacob’s house, though he lived only ten minutes by foot from the station.

The telegram was delivered while Asya was groping through the darkness next to the house where Jacob rented a room. She couldn’t imagine the intense surge of happiness Jacob felt when he took the telegram and read the words “Meet me.” For years now, these words had been connected with the dream of a visit from his wife. Nor could she have imagined how deep was his surprise and dismay when he saw that the signature on the telegram read “Asya.” He didn’t immediately understand who this Asya was that was coming to see him. It occurred to him it might have been some sort of mistake. He put on his overcoat and went out onto the porch, and a moment later was greeting his visitor. He pressed the frozen hand that she worked out of her sleeve, grabbed the suitcase, half buried in the snow, and led her into the house, nearly weeping from sad disappointment.

After helping Asya take off her coat, her headscarf, her boots, he put the kettle on for tea. Asya smiled and began rubbing her red hands together—intelligent, skillful hands with fingernails clipped nearly to the quick, and with a permanent outline of iodine around the rims.

Jacob didn’t even think to wonder why she had come. He assumed that she had affairs of her own to attend to, that she was on some sort of business trip, or whatever it was called in her line of work. While she tried to get warm, he placed a mug and a glass on the desk (he had no other table in the tiny room) and poured out the tea. They ate black bread and butter and drank bitter tea. Asya regretted that she had not thought to buy good tea (and would not have had time, anyway) at Eliseyevsky’s delicacy store. At first their conversation revolved around the family, but Asya had no information to convey about the daily affairs of Marusya and Genrikh. She saw them seldom, and couldn’t add anything to what Jacob already knew. He began to question Asya about her work, and she eagerly, even fervently, informed him about the hospital where she had been working for ten years. She told him about how she had gotten the job, and which prominent surgeons she had assisted, on which occasions.

She glanced furtively at his hands; they looked terrible.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll have a look,” Asya said.

Jacob placed both hands on the top of the desk. They looked as if he were wearing crimson fingerless gloves. His long, white fingers, which bent slightly at the last joints, were clean, but from the knuckles upward, and running under the sleeve of his sweater, was one big scab. She turned his hands over and began examining his palms. The skin was healthy up to his wrists, but above them it looked like a sleeve made of some rough red fabric.

Jacob smiled through his mustache and said, joking, “Asya, did you come here on account of this?”

“Yes, of course! Didn’t Marusya write you about the wonder-working potion? My friend”—here the scrupulous Asya corrected herself—“the daughter of my friend, that is—was cured in two weeks. And she had already tried everything; they even took her to the Military Academy Hospital in Leningrad and gave her X-ray treatments, but nothing helped.”

Asya rushed over to her suitcase, still in its canvas casing and standing in a puddle of melting snow. She started peeling off the soaking layer of heavy fabric. Jacob tried to help her, but she said no, no, she would do it herself. Finally, she pulled out the sacred bottle, removed an outer layer of newspaper, then the thick black paper in which it was wrapped, and plunked it down on the table.

“There. For you.”

How touching, how sweet this Asya is, thought Jacob. She’d carried this ridiculous bottle all the way from Moscow to Siberia.

“Thank you, Asya, I will certainly give it a try. There have been times when the rash cleared up completely, but then it came back. I don’t think they have invented a medicament that will cure eczema once and for all. But I will definitely try it.”

“Let’s try it right now, so as not to waste any more time. Annechka already saw a difference in her condition by the third day. You know, Jacob, I have a return ticket in only eight days. I took a leave of two weeks, but the traveling time takes nearly seven days. So let’s start right away. I’ll apply the poultice and then go to a hotel. Is there a hotel near the station?”

“Asya,” Jacob said. A wild suspicion seized him. “Did you come to Biysk on a business trip, or…?”

“No, no. Didn’t Marusya tell you? I got hold of the medicine, thinking that she would bring it to you herself, but she was busy, so she gave me the address, and … here I am.”

This was some sort of madness. Asya here, and some old lady, a poultice … And this is why she came all the way to Biysk?

Scratching his hand, Jacob suggested that they postpone the first treatment until the next day, but Asya insisted: Right now! No waiting. He firmly announced that it was too late today and that he needed to go to bed, because he had to go to work early the next morning. He settled Asya on his narrow cot and made a pallet on the floor for himself—a sheepskin coat covered with a sheet. There was no hotel to speak of in Biysk, but he’d have to go to the police to register her tomorrow.

In the morning, Jacob went to work at the bank. When he returned, Asya was sitting at the desk, crocheting white lace with a tiny hook. She was embarrassed.

“Everyone says it’s silly and bourgeois, but it’s so soothing.” She quickly folded away her handiwork in a knitted bag.

In the evening, the first treatment took place. At the same time, there was a fall from grace. He didn’t even get the chance to start liking the woman. In all her forty years, no man had ever liked her, even in her youth. But her firm and gentle touch on his hands, and his legs, and his groin, which was also covered with the small, fiery-red spots of eczema, was so arousing that it happened in a flash, almost unconsciously. The prolonged male hunger and the professional sympathy of a woman’s hands came together and quickened the flame of passion.

Asya had no wish to seduce someone else’s husband, especially the husband of her revered Marusya, but everything happened so fast, so spontaneously, for both of them.

They lay on a white sheet spotted with brown herbs from the potion, themselves smeared with the herbal sludge, pressed closely together—and they both cried. It was an upheaval, and a great corporeal celebration, and a terrible shame, which receded when Jacob again entered the heart of the world, the depths of the body of a woman to whom he was not bound by anything except perhaps gratitude. And so, until morning, they both struggled with shame, and came out victors. Almost victors. Devastation, then tenderness, and again gratitude.

They spent the whole week with hardly a break in their nighttime embraces. Then they parted—a decision they had made mutually—forever. Jacob accompanied Asya to the station. The March snow had not ceased falling since the day Asya arrived. She brushed the snow from her eyelashes, and lifted her boots out of the drifts, in which they kept getting stuck. Jacob carried her suitcase. With a certain sense of relief, Jacob kissed Asya, pushed his hand under her coat, and stroked her heavy breasts, destined for nourishing a multitude of children but preserved in barren virginity. They had decided between them that they were not guilty of anything, and that fate had presented them with a holiday they would keep secret for the rest of their lives. And Marusya had nothing to do with it. As for the main purpose of Asya’s visit, it had not been achieved. The wonder-working brew had absolutely no effect on Jacob’s eczema.

Moscow had experienced the same heavy snowfall as there had been in Altai. Ivan Belousov waited for Marusya by the entrance on Povarskaya Street, and when she came downstairs—wearing a black coat with a lambskin collar and a lambskin muff, and with her slightly reddened eyelids lowered, Ivan suddenly embraced her and kissed her. Nothing like that had happened before between them, and the kiss was more like one of childish ecstasy than mature, masculine delight.

Marusya had been spending a great deal of time with Professor Belousov for half a year already. They no longer limited their time together to walks down the boulevards. They attended lectures at the Polytechnic Museum together and went to various concerts and performances. This time, Ivan had invited Marusya to the première of the opera And Quiet Flows the Don.

Marusya was agitated. For one thing, whatever would she wear? She had no appropriate garments for an opening night. Second, going to the opera like this was an open challenge, and an admission. A challenge to those acquaintances she might meet in the theater, and an admission that Professor Belousov had the sort of relationship with her that allowed him to invite her to the theater. In twenty-five years she had never been to the theater with any man other than her husband. In fact, though, Ivan had also invited her to the theater when they were even younger … But the main question was, what should she wear?

When she was able to think more seriously about it, Marusya told herself that one’s attire, in this case, was completely insignificant. This was proletarian art, and it would actually have been awkward to dress in silk and velvet for such an event. Moreover, she didn’t have any fancy attire; she had only old dresses that had long since gone out of fashion and were completely worn out. So never mind!

They took their place in the orchestra seats—Ivan in his everyday service jacket, and Marusya in her blue dress with a striped sash and striped cuffs, modest but stylish, and listened to the music of Dzerzhinsky—not the notorious founder of the Cheka, the secret police, who was already dead, but his namesake.

The music didn’t impress Marusya as being very good, but it wasn’t bad, either. It was strange music—in some places it was crude, in other places strains of folk music could be heard. One thing Marusya understood unequivocally: this was not Shostakovich. It didn’t have the power, the novelty. But Shostakovich had been hauled over the coals without mercy in Pravda for his Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. It would be interesting to see how And Quiet Flows the Don fared. And Jacob, who could have explained whether the music was good, and in what way, was not with her … The voices were marvelous, although Smolich’s staging seemed somewhat lacking.

Their evening at the Bolshoi Theater changed something in their relationship. All of the preliminaries had been taken care of. Jacob hardly existed anymore in her life—or so thought Ivan, gathering this from Marusya’s own words. He himself had long lived in a semi-divorced state from his wife, who had moved with their daughter to Kiev, and whom he seldom saw. Ivan considered the marriage, which had lasted about ten years, to have been a mistake, and he hinted to Marusya that he had loved only one woman in his life, and Marusya knew who she was. When he looked at her with his devoted eyes, her memory of that absurd Kievan Ivan Belousov was immediately awakened.

In the Institute of the Red Professorate, Ivan taught courses on the history of the workers’ movement, historical materialism, and Western European philosophy; he led study circles in factories, wrote brochures, read and remembered a great deal, studied German his entire life, but read Kant and Hegel only in translation.

Marusya recalled how Jacob disparaged these translations, claiming that translating the German philosophers into Russian was futile: since Russian had not developed philosophical terminology, the translations were unintelligible and abstruse. He also said that, strange as it might seem, Kant was more accessible in English. He spoke about the grammar of language, about how it was linked to the national character, and that it had not been determined whether the language conditioned the character of the people or the other way around. He knew everything, everything, and he had a theory about everything, Marusya thought with irritation. But he was never capable of a simple “yes” or “no.” It was all devilish nuance and complexity! Ivan is simple and straightforward, she thought, and how refreshing that is! A healthy proletarian foundation removes all the confusion, all the fruitless play of the mind that prevents one from achieving goals. Ivan’s goal is simple and noble—creating the new man, preparing cadres for the future, giving the youth what is necessary and sufficient. Jacob has always been interested only in what was superfluous. He doesn’t know how to cut away these superfluities. And this is his tragedy. Woe from Wit! And this is the source of his endless conflicts with the authorities, with the proletarian government, than which nothing better has ever been invented in history! And Ivan is right on this point, not Jacob. In a matter so grave and so grand, one needs to pay attention not to the mistakes, which are inevitable, but to the achievements. Here again, Ivan is right. We are tainted by our families. Ivan’s father is a railroad worker. Ivan forged his own road, but Jacob was educated by hired teachers—language teachers, music teachers. A bourgeois environment. And I so wanted to break away from my petit-bourgeois home, from the milieu of small craftsmen, storekeepers, the strictures of that airless Jewish stuffiness. And where did I end up? In a wealthy home, at a formal dining table with a bourgeois papa at the head and a white tablecloth and a pink-and-white dinner service with a cook and a chambermaid. And I wanted only simplicity, purity …

All these thoughts drew her closer to Ivan. No, there was nothing sensual in the attraction, but something upright, something enviably direct. Without any refined, intellectual moaning and groaning.

The end of Jacob’s term of exile was approaching, and Marusya thought with anguish about how he would soon return home—and again she would be racked with internal conflict, and would always lose out to him; and again her work would seem secondary and insignificant compared with his important scientific pursuits. Would they even give him a residence permit in Moscow? If they did, would he be able to find a job? And if they didn’t register him in Moscow, he would leave again for some far-off realm, and she would live in the same way, bearing the stigma of rejection, with papers in which every personnel officer, every cadre, could see her social stain. Divorce was the only thing that could save her from this.

But she had Genrikh to think about. He was twenty years old. The spoiled and capricious child had disappeared, and in his place had emerged a completely new person, practical and single-minded. He lived a difficult and demanding existence, and he coped with it well. He brought home his paycheck from work to his mother, leaving for himself only what he needed for transportation and a midday meal at work. He had been accepted into the Komsomol, and he was proud of this. When he finished at the Workers’ University, he entered the Technical College and was just as enthusiastic about his studies as he had been about his construction set when he was a child. He had spent the most difficult years of his adolescence without his father, consciously turning away from his father’s precepts and admonitions and cultural values, and even feeling a certain degree of contempt for them. The sole thing that interested him was science and technology.

Genrikh was the only one with whom Marusya shared her new thoughts. She was nervous before the conversation, but, much to her surprise, her son encouraged her to decide on that course of action. “I think you’re right, Mama. Perhaps you should have done it sooner. In Stalingrad.”

And so she made the decision to carry out her intention. She didn’t have to appear in court; it was very quick. In the hallway were three other women waiting for the same decision. The court dissolved all the marriages, and all it took was fifteen minutes for the four of them together. This was a common practice during those years. Although the NKVD memorandum about divorce from imprisoned spouses had not yet been published, the employees of the Marriage Bureaus had already been acquainted with the directive concerning the granting of one-sided divorce of spouses who were incarcerated or in exile; it was not necessary for the absent spouse to fill out any forms or sign any papers. Marusya received the document granting her divorce in August 1936. Only two people knew about this: she herself and Genrikh.

Marusya did not write to Jacob about the divorce; she kept postponing it. Their correspondence continued, though it was rather strained. The nearer the time for her husband’s release, the more certain Marusya was that she wanted to live alone. It had been Marusya’s fate to live her entire youth as the wife of her “one-and-only husband.” Emotionally and intellectually, she was a free woman in a new era, emancipated, though outwardly she adhered to established bourgeois expectations. This was the way it had happened. Jacob completely occupied her feelings, and she had never longed for anyone else’s embrace. Theoretically, she completely subscribed to the “glass of water” theory of absolute sexual freedom, which had been propagated by Aurore Dudevant (George Sand), Alexandra Kollontai, and Inessa Armand. In practice, something had always stopped her. Marusya even kept her open admirer at a distance, though they were already on the verge of intimacy. Ivan was either noble or perhaps timid, or else he was waiting for an overt sign from her. Everything came down to the fact that the time had come to free herself from the unbearable authority of an old love. Cast it off! Cast it off!

At the end of November, Marusya received a letter from Jacob with a list of official papers he would need to get a residence permit. He didn’t know that there were already papers that would doom all his efforts to failure—the divorce papers. Marusya was filled with confusion, but the divorce had been finalized, and she had decided. She would not allow Jacob to be registered as her husband, so that she could keep … no, not her apartment, but her independence, her individuality.

Ivan also made an important decision. After all, he was no Mr. Greenhorn. He had been courting her for so long, it was time to resolve the matter. Marusya never invited him to her home; indeed, it wouldn’t have been possible, since she had a grown son. Ivan also hesitated to invite her to his tiny room in a communal apartment, stuffed with boxes overflowing with file cards, quotations, alphabetically ordered clippings—an enormous collection of Lenin’s excerpts and dicta about everything under the sun. Ivan was an acknowledged expert on the texts of the leader, and not even the card catalogue in the Lenin Library was as abundant as his collection. But he could hardly invite Marusya to his dusty lair, to share a soldier’s iron cot, on torn sheets …

Ivan found the solution: he called the Central Commission for the Betterment of Living Conditions of Scholars and requested two vouchers to the sanatorium in Uzkoye, a wonderful spot just outside of Moscow. The great scholars and scientists all vacationed there. The academics who ran the sanatorium did not particularly like the Red Professorate, but the Academy of Sciences had not long before merged with the Communist Academy, and spots had been allocated to them. They promised a place to Belousov as of December 1.

“Marusya, we’re going to a sanatorium. We need a vacation,” the soft-spoken Ivan announced firmly.

“When?”

“The first of December.”

This offered the best possible resolution of Marusya’s agitation and disquiet. She simply wouldn’t be in Moscow when Jacob returned. In this way, she could at least put off a tormenting, painful explanation. As for Ivan, she would just have to see how things panned out. Radical? Yes! It was a desperate, mad act.

The December morning was damp and seemed darker than usual. Marusya rocked back and forth in the automobile and felt slightly sick to her stomach. She almost always suffered from motion sickness, and berated herself for agreeing to come on this trip. By the time they reached Uzkoye, it was already light. They entered the tall entrance gates, and an avenue of old trees opened up before them. Beyond was a house with a portico and columns, and a church, with a service in progress. When they entered the main building, her heart skipped a beat. Everything was orderly, formal, restrained, and refined. Her back seemed to straighten up of its own accord. Her chin lifted higher, and her former posture and gait, which had been lost in the humiliations of life, were restored in a single moment. The noble furnishings inspired equanimity and confidence in her, and a sense of her own dignity and worth. A lady with gray curls gathered on top of her head led them along the corridor and showed them their rooms.

“We usually settle most of our guests in the wing, but this room happened to be unoccupied. If you please…”

They didn’t attend lunch, but they did go down for dinner. There were few people in the dining room, primarily elderly and even aged men, with vaguely familiar faces. They were most likely all academics. Marusya recognized one of them—Fersman, a geochemist.

Marusya was wearing a dark-blue suit and a modest but brightly colored blouse decorated with an Egyptian motif on the sleeves. She immediately felt that she was in her element, and thus felt perfectly at ease. Besides the waitress, there was only one other woman among the guests in the dining room. She was large, with a birthmark that covered half her face, probably also an academic. She was eating and reading a newspaper at the same time.

After dinner, Marusya settled down on an uncomfortable Voltaire armchair in the small dining room with Céline’s novel Journey to the End of the Night. The novel had been published a few years before. She was reading, not the French original, but a translation by Elsa Triolet. Marusya picked it up after reading a recent scathing review in Pravda. The author of the piece railed at Céline for his “aesthetic of filth,” which was, moreover, the filth of capitalistic society, the filth of the bourgeoisie. Marusya enjoyed both the novel and the translation, and at the same time she admired the paintings, the mahogany furniture, and the view onto the park. She perceived the advantages of aristocratic life over grasping bourgeois decadence.

The first three days, they walked through the huge park after breakfast: ponds, tree-lined avenues, a birch grove, lime trees. It was very pleasant, but a bit wearisome: as they talked about social and political subjects, the conversation was strained. Ivan, tired of walking around in circles, lost his self-confidence. Too bad. He left Marusya, intending to sit down to work on his never-ending Bulletin of the Institute of the Red Professorate, which he had maintained almost single-handedly for the past five years.

On Sunday morning, December 6, the papers arrived bearing news of the Stalin Constitution. Ivan had already known for a long time that the great event was in the offing, and here it was. The newspaper announced that socialism had been built, and that the dictatorship of the proletariat had accomplished its mission. Professor Belousov would now have to modify his syllabus to accommodate these new achievements. To celebrate this remarkable turn of events, Ivan took a bottle of Kagor, monastery wine from Moldavia, out of his suitcase. He had been keeping the wine for just such an occasion, and he invited Marusya to spend the rest of the evening in an intimate setting, in his room.

Ivan succeeded in luring Marusya into his love net in the short interim between the second and third glasses. She was not aware of much, since alcohol, even such a pious variety, had a rapid and violent effect on her. She smiled, and laughed; then the walls started reeling, and she clutched Ivan’s sleeve so she wouldn’t collapse. Belousov grabbed her and did not waste any time—and five minutes later exulted over his blitz victory, while Marusya ran off to the next room, where she threw up the thick red wine. She felt very sick.

When Ivan knocked on her door about twenty minutes later, she was lying on top of the covers, pale, in her decorated blouse, her chest all wet. Ivan ministered to her gently, carrying out her every wish. He put a hot compress on her head and made some tea; she asked for more sugar. Then she vomited again. Ivan nearly cried from tender sympathy: sweet, fragile girl … He took care of her as he had taken care of his own daughter when she was sick with scarlet fever. Marusya was touched. He was a warm person—a caring, warm person. And the most important thing was that he had clear positions, solid and benign, with no intellectually refined twists and turns of thought.

Jacob sent a telegram when he was leaving Novosibirsk. Neither Marusya nor Genrikh was there to meet him when he arrived. On December 4, he went to Povarskaya Street. The neighbors opened the door of the communal apartment. The door of their room was locked; he didn’t have a key. He went to his sister’s.

In the evening, he managed to get through to Genrikh by phone. His son said, “Congratulations on your release. Mama’s in a sanatorium. I’m not sure which one.”

Jacob found out about the divorce that had already been officialized when Marusya returned from her holiday. By this time, he already understood that he would have no Moscow residence permit; nor would he have a wife or a son. He would have nothing that he had been counting on. He did find a job, however, outside Moscow, in the Yegoryevsky District, in the planning department of a paltry little factory.

Before he left to start his new job, he sought out Asya. They met by the Novokuznetskaya metro station. Pink, touching, wearing a little beret, with an expectant expression in her eyes, Asya asked him how his eczema was. “My eczema is feeling just fine,” he joked. She invited him to her house—she lived nearby, on Pyatnitskaya Street. Jacob declined. They walked down Ordynka Street. When they were saying goodbye to each other, Jacob, in an old-fashioned, gallant gesture, kissed her hand.

Marusya and Ivan did not continue to see each other much longer. He was straightforward and reliable—politically competent, and morally steadfast. But in April he was arrested. The trial was carried out quietly, drowned out by other, more celebrated cases of that fateful year. When Ivan’s house was searched, among the catalogued drawers and boxes full of quotations from Lenin, excerpts from the French newspaper L’Écho de Paris, with a review of Trotsky’s last book, The Revolution Betrayed, were found. Marusya, whom Ivan had asked to translate the article, had underlined in red pencil this shocking phrase: “Without wanting it himself, the Georgian with the low forehead has become the direct heir of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine II. He destroys his opponents—revolutionaries, true to their infernal faith, who are consumed by a constant neurotic thirst for destruction.”

Ivan honestly denied having a knowledge of French during the interrogation. He did not name the person who had marked the passage—firing-squad words—with a red pencil.

Two months later, all those involved in the case were executed as Trotskyites. Ivan had never been a Trotskyite. Though he was a true Leninist, this had no bearing on the matter. It was 1937. Surviving the year would be difficult. But people survived. Some of them.