Jacob's Ladder

48 Liberation

(1955)

Jacob’s final prison camp was a special one—the Abez camp, for invalids. It was the place they sent the sick and the weak, the convicts exhausted by work in the Inta mines, as well as the rest of the goners from all over the Komi Republic. It was a barracks settlement with whimsical, eccentric structures—workshops, barns, two retired steam engines whose boilers worked to heat only the administrative headquarters. From the hangar that had grown up around the steam engines, monstrous pipelines wrapped in hairy black insulating material loomed over the heads of people from all sides, like the malignant spiderweb of a concealed arachnid.

At first, after the prison officials had glanced at his documents and determined his level of competency, they sent him to an elite technical department in the accounting office. But there he had a falling out with the boorish boss, also a convict, who wrote a memorandum with contents that Jacob was not privy to. First they threw him in the lockup for five days and nights, and then appointed him to work in the library in the Culture and Education Section, where he was more a watchman than a librarian.

Prisoners convicted for espionage and slander against the touchy Soviet authorities settled in the town. Read: Russians from every part of the country, Lithuanians, Poles, Jews, and other people of every possible description. An enormous graveyard of nearly four hectares had grown up on the outskirts of the camp, beyond the drainage ditch, in a place that never dried out, either because a stream flowed through it, or because a swamp festered there. Makeshift bridges made of railroad ties were thrown over the ditch; beyond, stretching to the very horizon, were the same kinds of ditches, only they had been dug to serve as graves. In the winter, the snow mercifully covered the common graves, which had been dug in a timely manner before the first snowfall—each ditch to hold fifty corpses. In the spring, when the snow melted, earth was strewn over the thawing corpses. No pickax was capable of breaking up that earth after the frost set in, especially since the people who were still alive to perform the task were weak and sickly. Thousands and thousands of bodies of exhausted foes and admirers of the authorities, the illiterate and the highly educated, the stupid and the wise, the world-renowned and the completely obscure, lay side by side in these ditches. Under pegs to which numbers were affixed.

Jacob knew a secret that a casual friend, the field doctor Kostya Govorunov, had divulged to him. Somewhere in these ditches, among thousands of others, lay the Orthodox philosopher Karsavin, until recently a professor at the University of Vilnius. A Lithuanian doctor, also one of the convicts, who had performed the autopsy, had secreted in the stomach of the deceased a small dark-glass flacon containing a piece of paper with the philosopher’s name written on it. Kostya was present during the procedure, and saw it with his own eyes. This doctor hoped that the time would come when the exhumation of bodies would begin, this note would be found among the remains of the nameless bodies left there to rot, and a monument would be erected to the philosopher.

For a long time already, Jacob had been trying on for size the intolerable idea that he would be buried here, near the Arctic Circle, in a common grave under a peg. This had been the fate of many in his immediate and extended family, of his people. They lay in a common grave in Kiev, at Lukyanovo cemetery—his murdered younger brother, four of his girl cousins … Altogether, twenty-nine blood relatives. And all over Europe, many millions he was not directly related to.

It was the second year that he had been living in Abez, after his left leg had refused to work and he had been able to walk only on crutches. The camp was the worst of all those he had been forced to live in, and he now recalled his previous years in exile as paradise. Meaningful, solid years, shot through with hope, full of plans, a variety of projects and ideas, work. The only thing that Jacob didn’t feel he was lacking here was company. Human interaction. The camp was populated with members of several generations who had been plucked out and earmarked for annihilation. Scholars, scientists, poets, artists—the flower of the Russian intelligentsia, branded by the founder of the Soviet government as the “shit of the nation.” Among this multinational “shit,” Jacob found several very precious acquaintances. His neighbor in the barracks was an elderly hydrogeographer, Richard Werner. Conversations with him were an inspiration and a pleasure. They read German poetry to each other. He introduced Jacob to Rilke, whom Jacob hadn’t known, or appreciated, before. After they had been acquainted for about three months, they began talking about Sudak, where Werner and his wife had vacationed earlier. Word by word, Marusya and little Genrikh were drawn out of the depths of Werner’s random recollections. In the camp, a fleeting moment or coincidence, a long-forgotten crossing of paths, acquires great significance. Richard suddenly became like a long-lost relative to Jacob, and was a source of joy. Half a year later, Richard Werner died of pneumonia. Then Jacob began to gather material for his future work. He had not thought of a title, but he had subject matter in abundance. It would be a demographic analysis of this labor-camp “shit”—the most erudite, highly educated members of society, whose lives ended in Abez.

Being a librarian was very much in keeping with his scholarly interests. He had at his disposal not only the card catalogue, but also the personal library cards of all the readers, on which his predecessor had scrupulously written their professions and titles. He had finished the demographic analysis in two weeks and then ran out of material. He hit upon the idea of a special educational index and envisioned doing the same for the camp authorities and wards, but there was no material whatsoever on them. This demographic of the camp population did not visit the library; they read their own newspapers for political education.

His post as librarian, which was in some sense the nadir of his life, was among the safest and most secure in the camp. The library holdings were more or less rubbish. They consisted primarily of books confiscated from convicts. The best of the collection was the second volume of Alpatov’s work, devoted to the Renaissance, and sent to the camp to Nikolai Nikolayevich Punin. The book survived with Punin for a year, but ultimately ended up in the library. Jacob put a stamp in it, appropriated the inventory number, and gave himself over to the Renaissance for several days, all the while lamenting that the Northern Renaissance was so poorly represented, and that the Italian Renaissance was so clearly valorized. He was already mentally developing an idea about the differences in perception of the human image in paintings of the Italian and the Northern Renaissance; but, recalling the death of the manuscript of his novel when he was convoyed to Abez from his previous camp, he stopped himself. In his heart, he had abdicated from his favorite pastime—writing.

Since he didn’t know how to exist without big projects or tasks, he began studying Lithuanian. It proved easy for him; besides its being an Indo-European language, he was surrounded by many native speakers he could consult.

He was already sixty-three years old, and old enough to start contemplating the years he had lived with the benefit of hindsight. The Boustrophedon of My Life—he laughed to himself. But there wasn’t even anyone to share this with. Marusya … He still wanted to write letters to her, but she had imposed a ban on correspondence, even one-sided, with him. Warming his frozen hands with his breath, by force of habit, he composed letters with no addressee, and categorized them under the empty term “Texts.”

Everything changed in the space of a single day. The copy of Pravda that reported the Leader’s illness, dated March 4, 1953, reached the camp, as usual, one day late—on March 5, when the radio was already announcing his death. Kostya Govorunov rushed over from the dispensary to tell Jacob, “Stalin is dead!”

A commotion started up, quiet but widespread. The workday was in progress, but people spilled out onto the street, hobbling out as though they had been called to a task.

Agitated by the announcement, Jacob even limped over to see Samuil Galkin, a Jewish poet whom he had gotten to know in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1947. He had to discuss the astounding news. Galkin waved his hands. “Be quiet, Jacob—hold your tongue. Don’t jinx it.” And he commanded an interlude, as usual, by reading a poem in Yiddish. He valued Jacob as perhaps his only listener who didn’t need a translation.

But Jacob was unable to listen: the prospect of return held him captive, tantalizing him. Was it really possible that he would make it back, that he would be able to see his sisters, his mother, his cousins—his heart quaked—perhaps even Genrikh, and his granddaughter, whom he had never met before? Here his thoughts faltered, and he was brought up short.

He didn’t sleep that night. His leg, as usual, ached, as did all his joints. But his head felt as clear as a bell. Of course, he should begin writing letters to all the appropriate organizations, and he tried to go down the list, deciding whom to write, why, about what—a review of his case; rehabilitation; pardon? Then his thoughts turned in another direction. His demographic theory found a practical application. The death of Stalin should serve as a point of departure for the birth of a new generation. No matter how the history of the Soviet Union unfolded in the future, the era that began on this day would be known as “post-Stalinism,” and the children born in 1953, after the death of Stalin, would no longer be called “postwar,” but would be known as the “post-Stalin” generation. He wouldn’t live much longer, his days were numbered … but how fascinating it might be, what a turn things might take! Yes, I have an idea how this research project should be organized. I’ll ask Urlanis, Kopeishchikov, Zotov … Hold on, I’m getting carried away.

On March 6, they were not marshaled to go to work. They sat in the barracks, expecting some sort of sea change in the routine of life—if not today, then tomorrow. They talked very little. At night, on the 7th, they erected a crude rostrum out of slabs of wood. The quartermaster, a former priest, whispered that all the black fabric from the depot had been commandeered, on the orders of Bondar, the camp’s warden. No one knew who sewed the banners that night—perhaps the officers’ wives—but in the morning, red cloth panels with black funeral lining were draped over the main gates and above the rostrum. Work was again called off, and all the inmates and residents of the camp were assembled on the parade grounds. Music started pouring out of the loudspeakers in the damp gloom of the dull northern morning.

From the first notes, Jacob recognized the dear, familiar sounds of the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. He had not forgotten a single note: the main section of the fourth movement begins with the same theme as the secondary theme of the first … And it emerges and builds, and suffers, and threatens, then transforms itself into a requiem, into the adagio lamentoso …

Jacob started weeping at the first sounds. How long it had been since he had heard music, how he had longed for it! Ibrahim, a mullah from Samarkand standing beside him, looked at him curiously. Valdis, a Lithuanian nationalist who was standing on his left, smirked. What was he crying about? But Jacob didn’t notice. His eyes were closed, and tears ran down his cheeks—the strangest tears of all the tears shed all over that huge country. But Jacob’s tears did not end here, because after a short pause, almost a splice, the seventh movement of Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, the Lacrimosa, started up.

At the very same moment, Nora, Jacob’s twelve-year-old granddaughter, stood in her school’s auditorium before a plaster bust of the Leader, his head hardly visible above a mountain of flowers, suffering from a terrible sense of loneliness, alienation, and her inability to share in the common grief of her classmates and teachers. For the life of her, the tears just wouldn’t come.

Meanwhile, on the camp rostrum, things were not going as planned. Captain Svinolup and Lieutenant Kunkin had taken their places long before, but the warden was nowhere to be seen. The middle of the rostrum, the traditional spot for the warden Bondar, remained vacant, and proceedings could not begin without him. It was cold, and the situation was alarming and incomprehensible. Everyone was already frozen stiff, but, apart from the music, nothing at all was happening. At this very moment, a doctor, shaking with fright, was administering drops of valerian to Bondar, who had suffered a mild heart attack. Forty minutes later, pale and bloated, Bondar appeared, and the music stopped. The event got under way.

Stalin was dead, but on the surface it was as though nothing in life had changed. The camp, which was intended to hold five thousand people, in fact accommodated more than eleven thousand. All of them had a burning interest in politics. They followed the newspapers avidly in search of deeper changes. Strangely, the changes that promised to transform the country after Stalin’s death reached them only very slowly. Again, a circle of “clever ones,” people fond of political debates, of launching new concepts and ideas, developed around Jacob. The primary instincts and penchants of the intelligentsia were rekindled. They wrote letters to secure their release. And they waited.

At the end of March, the Gulag was transferred from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice, and this reassured them. A year passed; the Gulag was again placed under the auspices of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Again the prisoners wrote all manner of letters to all possible addresses, and again they waited. Jacob sat up until late in the library of the Culture and Education Section. He had formulated for himself a plan of life again, with points, sub-points, and commentaries, and life took on new meaning, which had almost been extinguished in the “Abez Hole,” as he called his existence there. Along a circuitous route, through one of the camp’s hired civilian employees, and then through his sister Eva, he managed to send several letters to colleagues of his, conveying scholarly concerns and proposals. He wrote one other letter—to Marusya. He wrote this one after his discharge, when he was already wending his way back toward Moscow.

It was the final letter of a correspondence that had lasted from 1911 to 1936—a quarter-century of love, friendship, and marriage. LAST LETTER FROM JACOB TO MARUSYA INTA–MOSCOW JACOB TO MARUSYA

DECEMBER 10, 1954

Dear Marusya,

We haven’t seen each other in what seems like an eternity, and we most likely won’t be seeing each other again. We are both old now, living our final years, trying to tie up loose ends. It is natural that one’s thoughts hark back to the past. I’ll begin with the most important thing: I was happy throughout my youth, all twenty-five years of our marriage. After we met, the first years we knew each other, and the first years of our marriage, enveloped us in such limitless joy, such deep—and I say it unequivocally—happiness, that even the reflected light of these years should have illumined the later ones, should have helped soften the inevitable rough corners and edges.

It was always interesting for us to be in one another’s company. We never experienced boredom in our marriage. My first impulse and desire was always to report my fresh experiences and impressions, all my joys and sufferings, all my new thoughts or creative efforts, to you. This practice has become so deeply rooted in me that, even now, though we long ago parted ways, I have not broken the habit, and I have to struggle against the desire to share something with you. This is not only the content of a marriage, but its very essence, its pride, its gem.

And the world of art, through which we lived our life together? To this day, the radio has not ceased to stir me, to move me. Whether I hear Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, which brought us together, or Schubert’s “Barcarolle,” which I so often played to accompany you, or Glinka’s “Doubt”—all these charming pieces of our youth—as of old I repeat to myself, “These sad times will pass, and we will see each other again.” But will we? Is it still possible?

The harshness of my fate prepared a difficult biography for me. Blow after blow, without respite; years of constant moves, one after another. A husband and wife must live together; marriage cannot survive on postage stamps alone. And now it is clear to everyone who is responsible for destroying my family. I am surrounded by thousands of others just like us.

Stalingrad; Biysk; then the mine; Yegoryevsk; Sukhobezvodnaya, where I was horrified, seeing my approaching fate (oh, how little you understood then!); and then Abez. What sort of family could have survived such trials? It would have had to be made of steel. But now this is all Plusquamperfectum. I am now free. I am in Inta, and in a few days I will get a certificate attesting to my freedom, then travel to Moscow. Judging by the experience of my comrades, they are hardly likely to give me a resident permit—a “right to live” (remember this term from our youth?) in a large city. But Moscow is where I will receive the assignment for a city of residence.

I am now a cripple, and I walk with a crutch. My life is approaching its end. My dream is to see you. We will not weigh old grievances and sorrows. I have never loved anyone, ever, but you.

I can imagine the bitter irony of your reaction. However, someone who took the decision to divorce in absentia, someone who did not wish to hear either a confession or a defense, has no right to irony. This is absolutely true. In my situation, neither disingenuous avowal nor belated pretense is of any use. I have made many attempts at reconciliation—all for naught. At first there was simply distance, then alienation …

If you agreed to meet me, or at least to send me a friendly word or two, it would afford me great relief. I would be able to shed a burden I have borne for many years. I would like to be able to kiss your hand in farewell. Or, if nothing else, a letter written in your hand.

Thank you for my past, our past.

I would be happy to see you when I am in Moscow. Eva lives in the same house on Ostozhenka where they came to arrest me six years ago. You know the address and telephone number. If you wish, you can get in touch with me through her.

Jacob

There was no reply to the letter.

Jacob arrived in Moscow at the end of December 1955. The room on Ostozhenka, which had been sealed on the day of his arrest, had been given to the yardman. Jacob decided not to stay at his sister’s. His situation was the same one the authorities always forced on him: he was banned from entering Moscow, but the paper that would assign him a new place of residence, which was almost like a sanitized form of exile, he could only receive in Moscow, from the public prosecutor’s office.

Asya, who still lived in her communal apartment on Ordynka—where there was no watchful yardman, and where other residents were few in number, beaten down, and disinclined to denounce people to the authorities—took Jacob in. In the apartment there was an elderly Jewish lady whose daughter was a famous poet, with a Stalin Prize under her belt and a note in her passport pointing to her ethnicity (the infamous “fifth paragraph”^*). She had been trained by her daughter into weak-willed, approving silence. There was also a middle-aged couple who, for their entire lives, had concealed their aristocratic origins, their observance of their Orthodox faith, their education, which they had received abroad until 1917, as well as a new circumstance—their only son was in jail for robbery. These neighbors pretended not to be aware of the nighttime presence of a guest without proper registration papers or a residence permit in their apartment. They didn’t ask a single question.

Jacob held in his hands a wonder about which he had not even dared dream—a pair of large white breasts, youthful, silken, only a trifle pendulous—objects of Marusya’s jealousy and envy. He hid his face in them and breathed in the scent of a woman’s skin. Asya stroked his head with her small, skillful hands, which could lance a boil, puncture a vein with a fat needle, give blood transfusions, and many other things. It was exactly as it had been in ’36, when Asya had come to visit him in Biysk, even before the news of the in absentia divorce. And it was even better than after the war, the first three years before his next arrest, when they were together for the second time. This was the third and final time Jacob had been with the woman whose love had embarrassed him in his youth and later, in Biysk, had inspired him with a sense of awkwardness and guilt because he couldn’t respond to her feelings in kind. Now her lifelong love, which for decades had been unsolicited and inconvenient, turned out to be the only anchor in his broken, unmoored existence. She was prepared to abandon everything, to retire from her job in the polyclinic and follow him anywhere—to Vorkuta, to Chita, to Magadan …

Five days later, Jacob received the necessary papers and instructions to reside in the nearby city of Kalinin. Banished to the boondocks, the back of beyond. A day before his departure, he called his son’s apartment. Amalia, his son’s wife, answered the phone. She gasped when he said his name. She had never seen her father-in-law, even though she knew he was in the camps. Genrikh had hardly ever mentioned him, and she didn’t ask. Amalia invited him to visit on any day, though she asked that he warn her beforehand so she could prepare a festive meal. But it was now or never—he had to leave the next day for Kalinin, and today was his last day in Moscow.

When Jacob came out of the Arbat subway station, he was drawn, as though by a magnet, in the direction of Povarskaya, to Marusya’s, and his own, house. But this destination and the route to it were now closed to him forever. With a heavy heart, he turned toward Nikitsky Boulevard. He had never been to his son’s apartment—only ten minutes away from their former home.

Amalia was unable to warn Genrikh beforehand of his father’s arrival, and they converged at almost the same moment—Genrikh five minutes earlier. They embraced and kissed each other. The table was set in the larger room. Jacob was seated at the head of the table. He leaned his crutch on his chair. Nora emerged from the side room. It seemed to Jacob that the girl slightly resembled Marusya, though she was homelier. She sat down in her place without saying a word, and glanced furtively at her grandfather. Her glance alone told him she was a clever girl. He also guessed that Amalia didn’t love Genrikh. He didn’t sense that fleeting but deep eye-contact that fills the interaction of lovers; they didn’t address each other at all, as though they were quarreling. But they weren’t quarreling. This was simply their life—without commonality, without intimacy, and with Andrei Ivanovich waiting on the sidelines. They divorced a year later. The girl, gloomy and silent, sat looking down at her plate.

“What grade are you in?” her grandfather asked.

“Fourth,” she said, her eyes still lowered.

Reserved, unsociable. Not a very happy little girl, Jacob thought. “Do you like it?”

“What, school? No, I don’t like school,” said the girl, looking at him for the first time.

Her eyes were gray, circled with a dark fringe, like Marusya’s. Her neck was long, and her hair was light chestnut, parted at the top of her forehead and falling down in two waves, like Marusya’s. But her mouth and her cheekbones are mine, Jacob thought … Genes, genes …

Amalia was sweet and cordial, but she looked at him with abashed curiosity: he was one of the first “newly freed” ones, and her eyes were full of unasked questions. Genrikh was tense, and also reluctant to ask questions. Instead, he tried to joke. Nora blushed at his jokes, though they didn’t in the least merit this reaction. Genrikh laughed at his own attempts at humor, and Jacob felt anguish inside, knowing that he would never ask his son the question that had tormented him for so many years.

After tea, Jacob left. When they were saying goodbye, he stroked Nora’s head, patted Amalia’s shoulder, scratched the gray cat Murka behind the ears, and shook Genrikh’s hand. They never saw him again.

The next morning, Asya accompanied Jacob to the station. He carried a rucksack on his back. In his right hand he held his crutch; in his left he carried a small suitcase in a canvas casing. They kissed each other on the platform. Asya’s little face was homely. Her gray, unkempt hair stuck out from under her beret, but under her heavy black woolen coat, under a rough woolen vest, under her white blouse, in the two ample linen pouches of her women’s undergarments, lay her wondrous breasts, which had awakened in Jacob his slumbering sensuality, and her love—he knew—was firm and enduring, and was sufficient for all the days of his life that remained. A life without Marusya …

Two weeks after the New Year, and after finishing the matters she needed to attend to in Moscow, Asya arrived in Kalinin. He led her to a wooden house, relating to her the history of the city as they walked, telling her what a marvelous town it was, independent, recalcitrant. It had fought against the Golden Horde, had forged a friendship with the Lithuanians. The first generation had settled here before Moscow was founded, and the princes had been worthy and decent. He talked about the felicitous geographical situation of the city, about the river Tvertsa, which they simply must try to navigate in the summer, sailing from the mouth of the river to its source. About the wonderful local library, which they never seemed to weed out—he had discovered such remarkable ancient gems of literature behind its doors. About the possibility that he could continue his work, at last …

The house was an old, dilapidated wooden structure, but the original porch with its finely turned wooden pillars, and the ornately carved window frames, had all been preserved. The room was large and clean, and the hospitable landlady was a quiet woman. The windows were too low, because the old house was sinking into the earth; but the four-poster bed, with metal knobs atop the posts, was too high. With his bad leg, it was difficult for Jacob to climb onto it. As soon as she arrived, he informed Asya that he had already found a carpenter who would hammer together a broad, low divan on which they could place a mattress.

In a wonderful notebook in a wooden binding, which he had bought in a stationer’s shop on his first day back in Moscow in December 1955, Jacob managed to fill up several pages with his beautiful, but somewhat characterless, script. He decided to begin this fresh notebook in the New Year, and the first page was dated January 1, 1956.

Below the date was a list of eighteen points. This was a to-do list for his professional affairs. On the second page, household matters, there were fewer points, and several of them were already checked off. Number one was a teakettle, and the kettle—sturdy, enameled in acid-green—was already standing on the table.

“What a splendid green!” Asya ventured to say, touching the gleaming side of the new teakettle and smiling.

“Asya, I’m color-blind. I was sure the color was a tranquil gray.”

The eighteen points laying out his professional goals represented the project to which he planned to devote the remainder of his life. He no longer wished to return to the manuscripts that had perished in the Lubyanka, the secret police headquarters. The Abez prison camp had given him the kind of experience that in part canceled out, in part simply devalued his prosaic exercises—it was good that nothing had been preserved. Whatever would he do with it now?

His scholarly research could have been continued. He felt it had a certain degree of social relevance—not today, not just now, but perhaps in ten years’ time. The only thing he was sure he wished to return to was music. The three-volume textbook on world musical culture, which he had begun to write in Altai, could even now be useful to a number of people—those trying to further their educations, or to broaden their culture horizons. Yes, yes, being a Kulturträger, a “culture bearer”—that was the right path for him now. But he decided to begin with that marvelous work that he had embarked on in the military, when he conducted the soldiers’ choir, an amateurs’ orchestra.

As was his custom, as a person who thrived on organization, he began carrying out his plans by investigating the local libraries (check), and visiting the local Houses of Culture (check, with the name of the director beside it: Morgachev, Pavel Nikanorovich). At the bottom of the page was a short list of sheet-music titles that he would have to order in the regional library. There was no check after that entry.

Jacob died eight months later, at the end of August, of a heart attack. Asya had gone to Moscow to pick up her pension, and when she returned, she found him lying on the mattress, dead. On his last desk there were two newspapers from the previous day, a pile of freshly written pages of cheap gray paper, and four library books: a Lithuanian language textbook; Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, the pages densely covered with penciled notes; Einstein and Infeld’s newly published The Evolution of Physics; and the prerevolutionary score of Händel’s oratorio The Messiah.

Written on a sheet of dull paper stuck between the pages of the book by Lenin were these words:

Always lags behind in his reading of scientific literature. Writes about the existence of matter in space and time in 1908, already after the discovery of the theory of relativity. Calls the transformation of matter into energy “idealism,” at the same time that, in 1884, John Henry Poynting demonstrated that energy, as well as the mass of matter, is localized, transferred by a field, and its flux has measurable density.

Such were the last happy months of Jacob’s life.