Jacob's Ladder

46 Reunion in Moscow

(2003)

After Vitya’s departure for America, Varvara Vasilievna began to love Nora. This about-face seemed to be the result of some unknown variety of tectonic shift that took place in her psyche; Vitya certainly played no role in it himself. From the moment Martha began taking charge of Vitya’s life, he sent his mother money. Although sending money to Russia was no simple procedure, Martha managed to organize an intermittent but regular method: she sent the money through Nora. Now and then, Martha even managed to force Vitya to write a letter, but often he simply signed his name to a brightly colorful postcard, and Martha had it mailed to Moscow. Varvara, a person of unexpected decisiveness and unexpected, sometimes idiotic, ideas, in the meantime transferred her longtime hatred from Nora to Martha, although the wedding photograph of her son and his second wife hung above her bed.

This unexpected love for Nora bore a weekly character—on Saturdays she visited Nikitsky Boulevard, bringing with her a blackberry pie and a parent’s blessing. Nora served tea, cut the pie into slices, nibbled at it politely, praising it, then put it aside. After her mother-in-law left, she gave the pie to the neighbors.

From exotic esoteric beliefs, Varvara Vasilievna moved on to the more traditional Russian Orthodoxy. She no longer drove off evil spirits or purified her karma. When Yurik returned to Moscow, Nora’s problem—what to do with the weekly pies—was easily resolved: he ate them whole. Nora was used to spending Saturday mornings at home. She never made any appointments for then. She received her mother-in-law precisely at ten, took the still-warm pie from her hands, and woke up Yurik, so that his grandmother could see him take the first bite. After this, Nora handed her fifty dollars; Varvara Vasilievna preferred the U.S. currency to that of her homeland. Then, more than satisfied, she took her leave. Although Nora continually emphasized that Vitya was the one sending the money, Varvara was absolutely certain that it was Nora’s beneficence she was receiving. Her reasoning was simple: if Nora gave her the money and didn’t keep it for herself, it was a mark of her virtue.

This financial-gastronomic interaction continued for several years, until Nora noticed that for two Saturdays running her mother-in-law had not shown up. She didn’t answer the telephone, either. Nora decided to go to her house. No one answered the door, but the neighbor told her that Varvara Vasilievna was in the hospital. Through the district clinic, Nora soon found out that her former mother-in-law had been hospitalized after suffering a stroke. Nora and Yurik took turns visiting her, first in the hospital, then, after a month, in a rehabilitation center outside the city. Nora smiled wryly to herself. Who would have thought fate had such wit? The elderly woman who had hated her for so many years had fallen under her care.

Nora was sorry for the old woman, naturally, but she had no idea what past transgression she was paying for. Perhaps she was making a down payment for a future transgression, just in case?

Unlike Nora, Yurik fulfilled this filial duty without protest or complaint. He came to see his grandmother and took her for walks in the park in her wheelchair. Then he sat beside her on a bench and played the guitar. What did he play? The Beatles, of course. Varvara Vasilievna’s speech was slurred, but from her mumbling it was clear that she was very pleased with Yurik and his music. Nora did not catch the moment when Varvara Vasilievna had ceased to doubt Vitya’s paternity. Perhaps during the years when Yurik began playing chess with his father …

Varvara Vasilievna returned home two months later. She had become a complete invalid, though it was hard to distinguish between the symptoms of her senile dementia, her damaged speech, and her physical infirmity. The neighbor, who was a pensioner, agreed to look after the sick woman. Nora compensated her for these services, and put a checkmark next to the box: “Varvara—care.”

Yurik made a convenient ramp leading from the room onto the balcony. For half the day, Varvara dozed outside on the balcony, and the neighbor fed her and changed her diapers. A year and a half later, at the beginning of July, a few weeks before her eightieth birthday, Varvara fell asleep on the balcony and didn’t wake up.

Vitya and Martha, who had planned to visit Moscow for her birthday, ended up at her funeral instead.

Three years had gone by since Yurik left America. For three years, he hadn’t seen his father or Martha. For Nora it was longer. The last trip, when she and Tengiz had evacuated Yurik, she had never made it to Long Island. Vitya had not seen his mother in more than fifteen years. He hardly recognized her in the deceased woman with the crumpled stranger’s face, and began to cry. Then Nora, who had competently, without any fuss or bother, taken care of all the funeral arrangements—the visit to the morgue, the requiem service in the church, the gravesite at the cemetery—was so moved that she began to cry, too. For so many years, she had considered Vitya to be devoid of normal human emotions, but either she had been mistaken or he had stopped being completely self-absorbed. Martha must have removed the spell from him. Huge, hulking Martha, as big as a house, who was pouring out tears on Vitya’s shoulder.

They all got into Nora’s car and went to her house, the four of them. Nora drove, and didn’t try to enter the conversation. They all spoke English in Martha’s presence. Just as they were entering the apartment, the phone rang. Nora didn’t make it to the phone before the answering machine picked up. She heard: “Nora! It’s Grisha Lieber. I’m here for a few days, to see my granddaughter. Kirill had a daughter. I wanted to see you. Give me a call.”

He didn’t have time to say the number before Nora grabbed the receiver, exclaiming: “Grisha! Grisha! Vitya and Martha are in Moscow. Come over!”

Half an hour later, the doorbell rang. Grisha was staying in his childhood apartment on Malaya Nikitskaya, a ten-minute walk from Nora’s. At one time, it had been the grand residence of a famous surgeon. Then it had been occupied by Grisha’s parents, physicists, and now Grisha’s first wife, Lucy, who had never agreed to go to Israel with him, lived in it. The apartment was stuffed full of new residents—Lucy’s second husband, their small daughter, Grisha’s son Kirill, with his wife and newborn granddaughter, as yet nameless. Grisha, the former legal occupant of the grand apartment, was relegated to the kitchen, where he slept on a folding cot. The whole family was very amused by this, especially Grisha. In Israel, he had fathered another five children; one son lived in Australia, another in America, and all of them estimated how many folding cots in various parts of the world he would be sleeping on when he was an old man.

A little old adolescent man, with a tanned bald pate resembling an acorn and a scraggly beard, in a black yarmulke, wearing shorts, and holding a bottle of vodka in his hand. Nora, hardly able to suppress her laughter, announced as she greeted him: “We’re just back from a funeral. We buried Varvara Vasilievna today.”

“Oy oy oy! Baruch dayan emet, as they say in Israel. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. May she rest in peace.”

Grisha put his bottle down in the middle of the table and stood next to Vitya. They no longer resembled Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Vitya had expanded in width, and therefore seemed shorter, and Grisha had turned into a scrawny little old man, with not a hint of his former rotundity and paunchiness. No one was in a position to judge this but Nora, however.

I have changed less than anyone, Nora thought. But no one notices.

Suddenly Vitya said, “Grisha, look at Nora! She’s the one who hasn’t changed a bit.”

Unbelievable. What’s happened to Vitya? He never even noticed people before, Nora mused.

“It’s no surprise, Vitya. It’s no surprise. Because of our metabolism, you and I long ago exchanged all our material composition—you consist completely of matter of the New World, and I of matter of the Holy Land. And Nora renews her body by virtue of the molecular structure of local matter. That’s why she doesn’t change,” Grisha said, laughing heartily.

“I doubt that atoms carry that kind of information,” Vitya said, translating what Grisha had said to Martha, and asking everyone to speak English so Martha could understand. Self-absorbed no more.

“All right, but let me say one more thing. There is a DNA program that arranges molecules and atoms in a certain order, and this order includes—”

Here Nora interrupted him and invited him to sit down at the table. Yurik poured them each a shot of vodka. They poured the ritual glass for the deceased and covered it with a piece of brown bread. Only Grisha drank the vodka. Nora took a sip, for propriety’s sake, then drank no more. Vitya, Martha, and Yurik didn’t touch alcohol. They raised their glasses, filled to the brim, and set them back down on the table. With this the funeral rites came to an end. And the duet between Grisha and Vitya, which had lasted fifty years, with frequent interruptions, began again.

Grisha had progressed a long way in his molecular-Biblical research over the years, and had completely abandoned experimental science—never relinquishing his beloved notion of the quantum computer, however. He had immersed himself in areas of speculation completely unacceptable to Vitya, always relying on the latest achievements in molecular biology to back up his ideas.

Nevertheless, it was still a funeral repast, and at first they all observed the laws of decorum, without any special effort.

Grisha, as always, was drawn toward the higher spheres. He raised his glass, saying, “How happy I am that I can see you all, even though it is such a sad occasion. And what I would like to say is this: Death is not a glitch in the program, it is contained in the program itself. Nothing slips from the Creator’s grasp. Every human life is a Text. And this Text is necessary, for some reason, to God.”

“I’m not sure what sort of text my mother, Varvara Vasilievna, could communicate to God that He didn’t already know. It seems to me, Grisha, that you’re exaggerating a bit.”

Grisha downed another shot of vodka. “Vitya! Vitya! Every human being is a Text. The mysteries are being unraveled. The twentieth century resolved half the eternal questions that plagued humankind; people just don’t realize it yet. Everything that lives is a Text that has been written over the course of three and a half billion years, from the first living cell to my own granddaughter, born just one week ago—in fulfillment of the command to ‘go forth and multiply.’ And this is the only way of reading and producing the Divine Text. By realizing it. All the information collected by a human being throughout his life becomes part of a general repository—the memory of the Lord God. Varvara Vasilievna gave birth to you, and that was her part in the great work of enduring Creation. Grisha wiped the sweat from his forehead, sighed, and knocked back another glass of vodka.

“All right, all right, just leave my poor mother out of it,” Vitya said, laughing.

Yurik laughed, too. Nora didn’t quite get the gist of what Grisha was saying, but she didn’t feel like questioning him more closely about it. She understood very well, however, that a sense of humor, of which she had never seen any evidence before, had awakened in Vitya. Martha had never impressed her as much of a wit before, either. Did this mean that Vitya, like a sunflower in a field, had bloomed in proximity to his wife, from good light and beneficent watering?

Grisha drank another glass, sighed deeply, and ate a piece of brown bread. Nora pushed a fried chicken leg toward him—“Bush’s Legs,” as they were called at the time, since the foodstuff was an American import. He refused it: he was much more interested in talking than in eating. Besides, he had just consumed a piece of cheese, which was not permitted in combination with chicken, according to Jewish law.

“You see, no one eats those legs but you,” Yurik whispered to her.

It was true—these chicken legs had caused a scandal. People suspected they caused some infection or disease, which the Americans had injected in them. But Nora didn’t care; she wouldn’t turn up her nose even at these dubious legs.

Grisha went on: “The best computer ever made by the Creator is the living cell. It’s impossible to improve on it.”

Vitya jabbed a chicken leg with a fork and picked it up. He had no prejudices about the moral incompatibility of meat and dairy. Anyway, there was nothing in the world he preferred to white bread with his favorite kind of salami.

“Grisha,” Vitya said, “it is possible to improve on it. It’s possible to make a computer that works faster—and they’re already being made, you know that as well as I do. If a program is written well, a computer can solve problems at a far greater speed than the human brain will ever be capable of. All the more since computers are now self-learning, and they learn much faster than a human being does, too. The human consciousness is hampered by far greater limitations than a computer is.”

Grisha jumped to his feet. “The brain is not made from a network of neurons, basic elements, but from a network of molecular supercomputers. This alone completely defeats your notions. But I’m talking about something else. Human consciousness is the only place in the universe where texts can touch one another, interact with one another to produce a new text, new thoughts! This is what ‘in the image and likeness’ is all about. The human being resembles the Creator precisely in this—in the ability to generate new texts.” Grisha knocked on his head rather resoundingly with his fist. “Right in here! This is the only place.”

“Are you quite sure that’s the only place?” Vitya countered, somewhat lazily. “Are you sure that at this stage of evolution a new generation of people won’t emerge, superhuman people, who will represent a sort of hybrid product? Martha’s mother has been living with a pacemaker for ten years; our neighbor Jeremy uses his artificial hand to put drops in his eyes; and I don’t have to tell you the kinds of things that robots are able to do nowadays. The future is taking shape as we speak, and I don’t like to make predictions, but the world has entered a new stage: hybrid evolution is already under way. You understand that human consciousness, allied with the computer, is a qualitatively new product.”

Grisha, who had now finished off half the bottle of vodka, was growing more and more heated.

“Vitya! You fail to understand the most important thing. Excuse me, but you are a technician, a technocrat. Any text is a form of existence for information. Life on earth must be understood as a text. The Divine Text, which is not written by us. The Creator is information. The Divine Spirit is information. The human spirit is a fragment of information. The ‘I’ is a fragment of information. Life is not a means of existence of protein bodies, as Engels thought, but a means of existence of information. Proteins become denatured, but information is indestructible. There is no death. Information is immortal. But this American struggle of yours, the race for speed, leads in the final analysis to a world that belongs to the ones who have the fastest computers. And the instinct for consumption lies at the heart of this race. And self-destruction. Modern-day humankind cannot curb itself, rein itself in. It hungers for dominion, it thirsts for war. It wants to devour everything in its path. Whether America, or Russia, or China. This is a false path. Open your eyes. You’re working for war. In this slaughterhouse, only the Tibetan hermits, and other like-minded people, will survive. A new generation of people will arise out of them, and it will be a new branch in the evolution of sapiens, not amid mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, but amid rusty computers and in the presence of high levels of radiation…”

Here, finally, turning to Vitya, Martha put in her word: “Vitya, he speaks like a prophet.”

In a gesture very familiar to Nora, Vitya rubbed his clean-shaven chin.

“Martha, he’s talking like a Jew. It’s the Jewish passion for reading into a text something that wasn’t there to begin with.”

“What do you mean?” Grisha shouted. “It was written! It was written in very straightforward, down-to-earth words: ‘Hammer your swords into plowshares’! You have to read the texts!”

“I didn’t understand the reference,” Nora whispered to Yurik. “Translation, please.”

He translated.

The more agitated Grisha became, the calmer and merrier Vitya looked.

“Grisha, I did read that text you’re talking about. A long time ago. My wife, Martha, wanted very much for us to get married. I must admit, to this day I don’t understand why it was so important to her. I assumed that it meant putting on a black suit and tie and going to her favorite church, and losing a day’s work for going through the ceremony. But that’s not how it worked out. The priest demanded that I go to catechism classes before we got married. In short, it took loads of time, and I read the Bible. Perhaps for the Hebrews it was the Divine Text, but it seems to me to be a completely archaic document in the present world. Too much cruelty, too much illogic, too many discrepancies and contradictions. It’s not just by chance that for three thousand years Jews have been writing commentaries, interpreting and reinterpreting texts, and turning them inside out, trying to get rid of these contradictions. It seems to me that the proverbial inclination of Jews to scholarship derives precisely from this ancient nitpicking.”

“You don’t know how to read it,” Grisha bellowed. “Jews are the models or exemplars of the human being. As with any exemplars, there were simplifications. All people should, in a sense, strive to become Jews. Adam Kadmon, the original, the first, human being, was the spiritual appearance or manifestation of the human essence, the proto-image of the spiritual and material world. But today we understand that ‘spiritual’ is a synonym for ‘informational.’ And the human being is created, according to Rabbi Akiva (and I fully agree with him), in the image of Adam Kadmon. In other words, this was the model that was realized in the framework of the Creation.”

“Mama, I don’t think I understand any of this all of a sudden,” Yurik whispered to Nora.

“It is very interesting, nonetheless,” Nora said.

“That’s true,” Yurik agreed.

They sat there quietly, trying to follow the intellectual theater that was being played out before them by these two former schoolboys who didn’t seem to have grown up yet, though they were both already sixty. However surprising, Vitya seemed to be the older and more mature of the two.

Nora caught herself thinking that she actually liked Vitya. She had never liked him before, but now she did. He displayed a natural reserve, an economy with words, even a gentle tact in coping with Grisha’s verbal onslaughts.

It’s strange, but I never thought about it before, Nora thought. We really have ended up in a completely different world. Vitya is probably right—yes, they both are. Humanity has crossed some invisible boundary that the majority of people simply aren’t aware of. We were taught that there is a material world, that the human being is the crown of Creation; but he’s not a crown, not a ruler—he’s a child. A child of nature. Two hundred years ago, the theory of evolution was a scandalous idea. Today the human being has not only discovered the mechanics behind it, but has himself become not only its product, but its engineer. What a good thing it was that they told me this; I would never have suspected it myself. And how great—and what a coincidence—that Vitya is the father of my child. It might have been better if it had been Tengiz; but nature saw the matter differently.

Grisha still argued with Vitya for a long time. Yurik ran off to attend to his own affairs. Nora was tired of their conversation and stopped trying to understand it. Martha was dozing in an armchair; she should put her to bed.

Nora opened her appointment book. There was a to-do list for the week—go to Varvara Vasilievna’s apartment with Vitya and Yurik to find out whether there was a will, meet with a lawyer, go to the bank to pay the bills—so that she could mark it all as finished and get on with her own life.