Jacob's Ladder

50 The Archives

(2011)

In 2011, unexpectedly, old age caught up with her. No, it wasn’t that she was in her dotage. It would be more accurate to say that youth ended, never to return. She had managed to overcome her congenital cancer, at least temporarily. Yurik and Liza made her happy, with the equanimity and delight that radiated from them. Nora had never experienced this kind of familial happiness. Even Amalia and Andrei Ivanovich, with all their enveloping mutual affection, suffered from a lack of fulfillment—they left no direct progeny. Yurik and Liza had a son, Nora’s grandson, who brought with him a completely new kind of happiness. Nora scrutinized the little fellow and was able to descry the intermingled legacy of previous lives, of his predecessors—Amalia’s rounded eyebrows, Genrikh’s small, neat mouth, Vitya’s fingers, and Liza’s light-brown Asiatic eyes—a gift from her Buryat grandmother. All of this went deep down, far and wide, back to a time when the depiction of faces with the help of silver salts had not been invented, in the pre-photography Mesozoic Era, when only artists—with varying exactitude of vision, varying gifts and habits of the imagination—were able to leave lasting images. There were no portraits of forebears in Nora’s family. After Genrikh’s death, what remained was a sheaf of photographs.

The haste in which Nora had lived her entire conscious life ceased. Her journey to Tbilisi had helped her to arrange things in her mind and heart, to put everything in its proper place. She had not been mistaken; she had not gone astray. Not only did Tengiz not disappoint her, but he ultimately turned out to be the very person who pushed her, who led her, in just the way she needed to be led in order to arrive at this quiet and meaningful point. The storms of love that she had experienced with him left neither bitterness nor pain—only vivid and rich memories, and slight perplexity: Why had these hormonal surges, these flashes and flickers, taken up such a great part of her life? Was it just the way the female body worked? Ultimatums of her genome? Laws of biology that ensured the propagation of the species?

By this time, Nora had written a book about the Russian avant-garde in theater. The very same year, it was translated into English and French. She devoted herself more and more to teaching—seminars on the history of theater and stage design in the theater school, the same seminars that Tusya had once taught. And, just as Tusya had been, Nora was now the idol of her students.

She was happier than she had ever been in her life. The only thing that worried her was a number of unfulfilled tasks. She made a list of things to do in the near future, beginning with the household affairs. She replaced the bathtub with a shower stall; bought a new stove; acquired two antique Swedish bookcases at the antiques store on Malaya Nikitskaya; and got rid of the old, warped homemade shelves. She weeded out her overgrown library. And when, finally, all the entries on that to-do list had been crossed out, she took the bundle of letters that had been passed down to her from her grandmother Marusya out of the desk drawer. She hadn’t opened the bundle since her grandmother’s death, but she remembered that on the top were letters from her grandfather Jacob, dating from 1911. She unfolded the oilcloth in which they were wrapped, now disintegrating with age. The delicate letters had survived for a century, and Nora realized that she was the only person on earth who remembered these long-dead people: Marusya Kerns, whom she had so loved when she was a child and then fallen out of love with, and Jacob Ossetsky, whom she had seen only once in her life, when she was a girl, not long before his death, when he visited them on Nikitsky Boulevard after one term of exile was over and before the next one began.

The letters were neatly arranged by year, all of them still in their envelopes, with stamps, dates, addresses, and inscriptions in the sort of handwriting that no letter on earth would ever be written in again.

It took her a week to read all of them, almost without a break. She cried, she laughed, she was perplexed. She was filled with delight. In the same bundle, she discovered several notebooks that Jacob had begun keeping as an adolescent. The story of a great love, the story of a search for meaning, creativity as a way of life, and an unquenchable passion for knowledge, for trying to understand an unruly, disheveled, mad world. Many family secrets came to light, but questions arose as well—questions for which there were no answers.

Nora arranged the old photographs—Genrikh’s legacy. There were quite a few of them. Some of them were signed, and these Nora put aside. Many photographs depicted people she didn’t know: relatives and friends whose names it was no longer possible to recover. At the turn of the twentieth century, amateur photography was virtually nonexistent; all of these were taken in a studio by a professional, and affixed to a piece of cardboard bearing the address of the studio, and often the name of the photographer. The earliest photograph was dated 1861. It was a picture of an old man with a large beard, in a yarmulke. Most likely Marusya’s grandfather.

A strange, powerful feeling gripped her, as though she, Nora, the one and only Nora, were floating down a river, and behind her, like a fan opening up, were her ancestors, three generations of them, imprinted on pieces of cardboard, with familiar names. Behind them, in the depths of these waters, was an endless line of nameless predecessors, men and women who had chosen one another through love, through passion, through convenience, or by arrangement of their parents. They produced and protected their progeny, great multitudes of them, and they settled the entire earth, and the shores of all the rivers. They had propagated and multiplied, in order to produce her, Nora; and she to bring forth her only son, Yurik; and he to produce still another little boy, Jacob. It is an endless story, the meaning of which is so hard to discern, though it always beckons, as the most fragile of threads.

All the work of generations, all the games of chance—all so that a new child, Jacob, would be born and become part of this eternally meaningless, meaningful current. This play has been performed for thousands of years, with insignificant variations: birth-life-death, birth-life-death … So why is it still interesting and exciting to float down this river, watching the landscape change? Is it not because someone, at some time, dreamed up an intricate little bubble, the sheerest of membranes, to enclose within delimited boundaries each living being, each “I” floating down the river—until it bursts, with a dull moan, and pours back into the waters of eternity? These ancient letters, preserved by some miracle, are the everlasting contents of this “I,” the trace of existence …

Why did I wait so long to read these letters? Nora asked herself. Out of fear. I was afraid to discover something terrible about Jacob, who lived in exile and in labor camps for at least thirteen years; and about Marusya, who was always hiding something, and constantly almost revealing secrets, and then maintaining a deafening silence again. I was afraid to find out about the fears and passions that devoured them, and about those base acts that fear pushes people to. But the letters explained a great deal.

Now there was just one thing left to do—to find out about what happened beyond what the letters revealed. That was Nora’s final step. She visited the KGB archives.

The archives were located by Kuznetsky Bridge, five minutes by foot from the dark heart of the city, from the Lubyanka. Nora said she would like to see the papers on file for the case of Jacob Ossetsky, who was released from prison at the end of 1955. The archival assistant asked Nora whether she had any documents attesting to her relationship.

“I have the same surname, and I have my father’s birth certificate, which bears the name of my grandfather.”

“No problem, then. Leave your phone number, and we’ll order the file of your grandfather’s case and call you within the next two weeks,” said the very forthcoming archival assistant.

Two weeks later, she called to inform Nora that she could come to acquaint herself with Jacob Ossetsky’s case. Nora went to the archives.

The woman delivered a folder, on the cover of which were these words:

Case. OSSETSKY, J. S.

Opened: 1 December 1948.

Closed: 4 April 1949.

Submitted to archive R-6649

KGB Archive No. 2160

The folder was thick. There were large-format sealed envelopes inserted between the yellowing pages, sewn together. The archival assistant warned her that the envelopes must not be unsealed. It was also forbidden to photograph, scan, or photocopy the contents, but she was permitted to take notes and copy extracts. She found a photograph in an unsealed envelope. Jacob Ossetsky, on the day he was processed, in profile and full face—with a shaved head, a small mustache, and a firmly compressed mouth.

The face took her breath away.

Nora placed a plain notebook she had brought from home next to the case file. The first three pages of the notebook had been filled up with Yurik’s handwriting in 1991, not long before he left for America; she hadn’t been able to find a fresh notebook at home, and the stationer’s store was closed. She turned the page with Yurik’s chicken scratch, and began to take notes:

Born … studied … served in the army … worked …

First arrest 1931: 3 years exile (Stalingrad Tractor Plant)

Second arrest 1933: 3 years exile (Biysk)

Third arrest: December 2, 1948

Nora had already read about the first two terms of exile in her grandfather’s letters. About the last term, she knew only that he had been imprisoned in 1948 and released in 1955.

Her eyes came to rest on a sheet of thick, fine-quality paper on which was written, in wonderful prerevolutionary clerk’s script: “Arrest Warrant from December 1, 1948.” And a fingerprint!

On the other pages—yellowing, dog-eared—was written the entire history, in an awkward, unlettered (in every sense) hand. Nora barely noticed these shortcomings, however.

The search was carried out at the place of residence of his sister Eva Samoilovna Rezvinsky at 41 Ostozhenka Street, Apt. 32, who works as a teacher of French and German in School No. 57. During the search, his sister E. Rezvinsky and the yardman and building janitor Soskova, M. N., were present. The witness was Chmurilo, A. A.

What followed was a long list of his belongings, which Nora began to copy down, though she stopped before reaching the end of the list.

DESCRIPTION OF PROPERTY:

  1. Iron bed

  2. Bookstands, two pieces

  3. Telefunken radio set, imported

One page of entries was missing. The list began again with:

17. Plywood suitcase

18. Abacus

19. Safety razor

20. Slide rule

21. Men’s overcoat, mid-season, herringbone, used

22. Men’s overcoat, summer-weight wool

23. Men’s suit, wool

24. Black two-piece suit—old

25. Men’s jacket, wool

26. Shirts, 3 old

27. Undershirts, 2 old

28. Long underwear, 4 pairs, old

29. Underwear, 4 pairs, old

30. Towel, cotton

In her mind, Nora arranged the bed, the two bookcases, and a table in a narrow room. She distributed some of the “used” objects, and realized she was already staging a play …

DURING THE SEARCH, THE FOLLOWING ITEMS WERE CONFISCATED:

  1. Dissertation of J. Ossetsky, Demographic Notions of Generations, 3 volumes, 754 pp., 1946–1948

  2. Brochure by J. Ossetsky, Statistical Data on the European Economy

  3. Journal, Thought, issues 6–11 from 1919, Kharkov

  4. Materials in draft form, British-Palestinian Handbook, 577 pp.

  5. Notes on economic statistics, 314 pp.

  6. Letters, 173 items, numbering 190 pp.

  7. Newspapers in various foreign languages (English, German, French, and Turkish—according to J. Ossetsky), 18 items

  8. Reports for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee on the Palestine question, 4 volumes, typewritten, with an inscription on each volume: “Mikhoels”

  9. Report on the Palestine question for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR (with an inscription: “to B. Stern, adviser at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs”)

There were sixty-eight entries altogether. Following this was a list of books, also lengthy:

BOOKS:

  1. Pokrovsky, Rus. History

  2. Martov, History of Russian Social-Democracy, with notations

  3. Urlanis, Population Growth in Europe

  4. History of the Jewish People, Mir Publishers, 1915

  5. The Jewish Encyclopedia, prerevolutionary edition, 17 volumes

  6. L. Rosenthal, About Uprisings, with notations

  7. Yu. Larin, Soc. Structure of the USSR and the Fate of the Agrarian Population, with notations

  8. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, with notations

Nora glanced at the end of the list—980 entries, half of which were in foreign languages.

During the search, also confiscated were 34 large-format notebooks, 65 folders and 180 notepads on the history of literature and music, and a savings-account passbook to the tune of 400 rubles.

There was also a receipt, No. 1807/6, from the internal prison of the Ministry of State Security, dated December 2, 1948, and a list of what he carried with him, from pillowcases to cuff links.

On a separate piece of paper, twenty pages later, Nora discovered the following decree:

Decree of March 21, 1949:

The enumerated materials are to be destroyed by means of burning.

Signed: Major Ezepov

On the following page was a report on the “fulfillment of the decree to destroy by burning in the Internal Prison of the Ministry of State Security–KGB, in the presence of Major Ezepov.” With the signature of the major.

The experts had studied Grandfather’s book and papers for three months, judging by the dates, before they were condemned to fire.

At this point, Nora was overcome with nausea, broke off her note-taking, handed the “Case” back to the kindly archival assistant, and left. She returned on the following day and kept coming until the end of the week, copying out excerpts of the case into a notebook, not really understanding why she was doing this. The notebook was already half filled, but Nora couldn’t stop.

Medical files and records. In one, “chronic radiculitus”; in another, more cultured, in Latin—“eczema tybolicum, chronic case.” And, the conclusion—“able-bodied and fit for physical labor.”

Nora glanced down at her wrists. During the last few years, her eczema had abated. The only reminder of it was the thin, shiny layer of skin that covered the formerly affected parts. And the newborn baby, from his first days, had allergic contact dermatitis. Evidently a congenital condition. Genes …

Protocol of interrogation from December 2, 1948.

Twenty-four handwritten pages. At the end, the signature: Lieutenant Colonel Gorbunov. And another one: Ossetsky.

It was a mild interrogation, neutral. Question-and-answer.

Q: Among the material evidence in your case is the work Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? Did you have any doubts in this regard?

A: The work in question was written by Lenin. It was written in September 1917, and we were discussing this article in 1931 or 1932 … I don’t remember exactly.

Q: We, meaning who? Identify them by name.

A: That was more than sixteen years ago. I don’t remember exactly.

At first, Nora copied everything down in sequence; then she began to cull excerpts—parts that were underlined in red pencil.

—Denies anti-Soviet activity (propaganda) …

—Denies taking part in the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies in Kharkov in 1918 …

—States that his father, Samuil Ossetsky, was an employee at a mill before the Revolution …

—Admits to being acquainted with the chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Solomon Mikhoels, and the secretary, Heifetz …

—Admits to taking part in the work of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee as a hired consultant, carrying out literary work on commission.

Following this was a list of places he had been employed, remarkable in its length and diversity:

1919: Municipal labor exchange, statistician, Kiev

1920: People’s Committee of Labor, head of statistics of the labor market, Kiev

1920–1921: Head of statistics, Union of Workers’ Cooperatives, Kiev

1921–1923: Office of the Tsentrosoyuz, Kiev

1923–1924: Central Statistical Administration of the Sovnarkom, Moscow

1924–1931: Supreme Soviet of the National Economy, economist, Moscow

In 1931: arrested, charged with sabotage. By the decision of the Collegium of the Joint State Political Directorate, banned from residence in 12 controlled-access cities of the USSR.

1931–1933: Economist at the Stalingrad Tractor Plant. Arrested in 1933, 6 months under investigation. Sentenced by the Special Council of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the USSR (NKVD) to 3 years exile. Resided in the city of Biysk until December 1936, after which he returned to the Moscow region.

1937: Yegoryevsky region, mines, head of the legal department.

1938: Civilian head of the planning department in the Unzhinsk corrective labor camp

1939: Returned to Yegoryevsk, gave private music lessons

1940: Kuntsevo, Krasin Pencil Factory, head of production group

1941: Scientific Research Institute of Municipal Transport, head of the planning-contract department

1941, October: Ulyanovsk, planner in the building-and-assembly administration

1943, May: the organization re-evacuated to Moscow

1944: Research fellow at Timiryazev Agricultural Academy

1945–1948: Instructor in statistics at the Economics Department of the Institute of Cinematography

From September 1, 1948: No specific occupation

She went back to the beginning of the file, examined the transcript from the first interrogation, paged forward to the next one, and started to compare them. The second interrogation transcript was half as long. The questions were the same, but the answers were different. Why the answers had changed, and what had happened to Ossetsky during the interval of six days between the first and the second interrogations, was anyone’s guess. Nora felt sick. She didn’t understand why she was copying out these excerpts, without rhyme or reason. But she couldn’t stop.

J. Ossetsky is exposed as guilty, according to the deposition of Romanov, V. I., of using “malicious and obscene language when describing the leadership of the Soviet Bolshevik Communist Party and government,” as well as the deposition of Khotinsky, O. I., accusing Ossetsky of spreading rumors about starvation in Kuban during the period 1932–1933.

J. Ossetsky denies “the possibility of [him] using any malicious and obscene language when describing anyone and admits to his participation in spreading rumors about starvation in Kuban.”

J. Ossetsky acknowledges that before the Revolution his father, Samuil Osipovich Ossetsky, was a merchant in the first guild, a purveyor of grain, leaseholder of a mill, owned a ferry on the Dnieper, and was in possession of his own barges. In 1917, all the property was nationalized. During the NEP years, he carried on petty trade. In 1922, he was prosecuted for concealment of gold.

J. Ossetsky acknowledges that he greeted the “bourgeois-democratic revolution positively, then worked in the Kiev Social Revolutionary–Menshevik Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, and shared the views of the Mensheviks. [He] worked in the Soviet as an instructor in the legal department until October 1917. [He] greeted the October Revolution with hostility, carried out agitation that aimed to undermine and overthrow the Soviet authorities. In 1918, [he] finally renounced [his] Menshevik views, because this party ceased to interest [him].”

“I acknowledge that in 1931–1933 I entertained hostile views toward the policies of the Soviet Bolshevik Communist Party on issues of the collectivization of agriculture, and expressed these views to people with whom I was in communication.”

“Be informed that I made the acquaintance of Mikhoels on my own initiative, with the goal of offering him my services in drawing up reports on the question of Palestine … I submitted four reports, numbering 150 to 250 pages, to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. The reports were approved, and I received payment amounting to more than 3,000 rubles. I expressed a pro-British bourgeois-nationalist point of view on the question of Palestine.”

Q: With whom else did you communicate in Mikhoels’s circle?

A: With the head of the Middle Eastern Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a former Menshevik, Stern. I was tasked by these persons to elaborate the so-called political problem, and provided them with slanderous bourgeois-nationalistic materials with a pro-British bent, which I adopted from foreign sources.

This was an “openhearted confession,” and from this moment on it was already clear that he was doomed. It was only a matter of whether he would be sent away with the first echelons, all of whom were executed, or with the second, who received reduced sentences, starting at ten years.

Then they produced Ossetsky’s telephone book.

Q: Tell us about your relationships with the people in your phone book. Alphabetically … Abashidze? Nikolai Atarov? Dmitreva? Gerchuk? Krongauz? Levashev? Litvinov? Lukyanov? Naiman? Polovtsev? Polyansky? Potapova? Shklovsky? Shor? Urlanis? Viktor Vasiliev?

Dozens of surnames …

Answers: Colleague … never heard of him … I don’t have his home address, never visited his home, no information, don’t remember the house number … a neighbor, used to walk his dog in the courtyard … I don’t remember the apartment number, never visited his home … a chance acquaintance from Kiev … member of the editorial board … colleague, we didn’t communicate …

Q: Who is Mikhail Kerns?

A: An acquaintance from Kiev. We haven’t met since before the war. He died during the war.

Kerns was Marusya’s brother—Nora remembered this perfectly well. She knew his granddaughters, one of whom, Lyubochka, was an artist. Jacob didn’t say a word about his being Marusya’s brother. He protected her. He protected everyone. About Marusya, he said that he had cut off all relations with her in 1931. He had had no communications with her, and no information about her.

On the fourth day of her research, Nora discovered some documents in the file that astounded her. It was a statement filed by Genrikh Ossetsky to the Party Bureau of the Institute where he worked, dated December 3, 1948, two days after his father’s arrest, and another, similar one, from January 5, 1949, addressed to the minister of state security at the time.

Statement by Genrikh Ossetsky, head of the laboratory of the All-Union Toolmaking Scientific Research Institute, 49 B. Semenovskaya St.

I informed the Party Bureau of the Institute where I work about the arrest of my father, Jacob Ossetsky, by the Ministry of State Security. The arrest took place on December 1, 1948, by order of the Ministry of State Security No. 359.

During the examination of my statement at the meeting of the Party Bureau on December 24, 1948, I was asked to recall whether there had been any hostile expressions or actions on the part of my father. Since I have not lived with my father since 1931, I interact with him very seldom. However, I did recall one fact, which seemed suspicious to the Party Bureau, and the Party Bureau requested that I report this to investigative bodies.

At the start of the war, in about September 1941, I met my father on the street by chance. We talked about the situation at the front. My father suggested that within a short period of time the Germans might reach Moscow and occupy it. (I don’t remember the precise wording of this phrase, but that was the gist of it.) At the time, I didn’t pay any attention to what he had said, and only later did I judge his views to be reflective of a defeatist attitude.

In carrying out the decision of the Party Bureau, and asking you about this fact, I request you to consider that henceforth in this case, if you are in need of my testimony, I will provide it to you not as the son of a prisoner, but as a member of the Bolshevik Soviet Communist Party, since I put my political convictions above my filial sentiments.

In the event that my father is declared an enemy of the people, I will renounce him without hesitation, for the Party and the Soviet authority, which have nurtured and educated me, are dearer to me than everything else.

January 5, 1949

After this there was a page with the transcript of the interrogation of Genrikh Ossetsky. Her head ached terribly. She felt sick to her stomach, and her mouth was parched. A migraine, which Nora had not had for a long time, flared up. The last excerpt Nora copied that day read: “Bound for the special camp of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR—sentenced to 10 years for political agitation and propaganda, and being in possession of counterrevolutionary literature.”

She closed the file and took it to the counter, where a new archival assistant was on duty—somewhat older, also forthcoming and kind—and turned around to go. But before she went, she committed a theft. From an envelope that was lying in the file, she pinched a book, The Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France, with this inscription:

Binding made from a stolen folder, socks, and bread.

Bound March 4–6, 1934, in the most trying days of my sojourn in cell no. 2 in the Stalingrad prison.

Resigne Toi, mon Coeur,

Dors, mon soleil!

How it had ended up in here, and why it hadn’t been destroyed, no one would ever know.

The rain, which had been pattering gently for two days, had stopped. A late-afternoon sun, weak and uncertain, came out. Nora remembered that she had an emergency pill, which she never took out of her handbag. She found the pill, but, having no water to wash it down, she put the bitter medicine in her mouth and chewed.

She walked to the Lubyanka and stopped opposite the gray monstrosity. The tall doors of the entrances were dead—no one went in or out. From inside this hellish abomination, which pretended to be just an ugly, featureless building, came the vile, putrid smell of fear and cruelty, baseness and cowardice; and the gentle afternoon sunlight was powerless to combat it. Why didn’t a heavenly fire pour down upon it? Why didn’t pitch and brimstone envelop this cursed place? Poor little Sodom and pathetic, insignificant Gomorrah, refuge of depraved lechers, had been burned down; why was there no divine punishment, and why was this hellhole still standing in the middle of this indifferent, vainglorious, self-involved city? Would it stand here forever? No, nothing is forever. The Prolomnye Gates were gone; the Vitali Fountain was no longer on the square, nor was the Rossiya Insurance Company. Even the monument to Dzerzhinsky had disappeared. Nora turned around and walked toward the Teatralny Passage.

Her headache hadn’t let up, and the same thought kept pounding in her brain—“Poor Genrikh!” Kind, somewhat dull-witted, laughing at silly jokes, harmless and easygoing Genrikh. Why had he rushed to repudiate his father on the very next day after his arrest? Why had he denounced him, thus justifying himself and burying his father once and for all? Was he protecting his career, his place under the stunted, sickly sun—or perhaps his family? Mama and me? Poor Genrikh …

What kind of rot and decay was this? What kind of curse? Fear, cowardice … or perhaps he knew something that I’ll never know.

Nora walked homeward by a random, circuitous route. She passed Kamergersky Lane, and walked by the corner house immortalized by Pasternak. The house where “a candle on the table burned, a candle burned…” Antipov was renting an apartment there, and Yury Zhivago, caught in the lacy intricacy of an as yet unfulfilled fate, rode past, noticing this meaningless little flame in one of the windows, and committing it to literary eternity.

Then Nora turned into Stoleshnikov Lane. Before, there had been people she knew living in almost every house, but many of them had been resettled, had moved, or were already dead. When you live your whole life in one city, it is filled with points of memory, as though ineradicable memories are nailed to every gateway, to every corner.

In the Church of Cosmas and Damian, the bells started ringing. Before, this building had housed the printing press of the Ministry of Culture. Once, Nora had come here on business—to print some playbills or performance notices, she could no longer remember.

Walking past, she heard wonderful singing coming from the open window of the church. She stopped to listen. Beggars swarmed around the entrance. Inside, it smelled of apples and candles. There was a long table on the side where apples, grapes, and other fruits were arranged. The singing mingled with the air perfumed by the apples, and the sound was sublime. Nora sat on a bench right by the entrance. Next to her sat two old women and a mother with a sleeping child, a little girl of about two. It was impossible to make out the words that the choir was singing, but it didn’t matter.

All of a sudden, Nora started to cry. She was not at all religious. Russian Orthodoxy had no special meaning for her; nor did any other religion. But her heart responded to the sounds. My God, she thought, this is my other grandfather, Alexander Kotenko, the precentor, sending me a sign—this is his music, his life. I know nothing about him, absolutely nothing; he tormented his wife, he was evil and blind, as Amalia told it.

Why did this music move her so? Was it really a signal of some kind? They had all been so musical—both her grandfathers, Alexander and Jacob—and Genrikh … Genrikh … And from her heart a deep lament rose up and choked her, and it was as though it wasn’t she crying, but Genrikh in her. Little Genrikh, intolerable little child who threw himself on the floor and thrashed his arms and legs, who wanted to fly a glider or an airplane, whom they barred from his beloved profession of aviation—yes, of course, because his father, Jacob, was an enemy of the people and ruined everything. He was robbed of his dreams, his hopes, his shining, beckoning future. Oh, poor Genrikh!

Nora cried together with him, this boy, her future and former father, who had not been given the chance to live the life he dreamed about. He sobbed and gasped for air, then grew tired and moaned quietly, then howled again, and started throwing a tantrum. Nora just wiped away the tears. How awful! Would his grief never end? Would it never burn out, never die? Would it torment him, and Nora, and the newborn Jacob, who had only just arrived and was not guilty of anything at all? Is it possible that the evil we commit never dissipates, but hangs above the head of every new child that emerges out of this river of time?

She left the church. It was the eve of the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord. “As always, a light without flame shines on this day from Mount Tabor…” Yes, of course! The light without flame … The light has already waned, but the holiday has not yet ended. Suddenly she felt buoyant and weightless, as though someone had taken from her the whole burden of this day. She had crossed a frontier.

Almost next door was Aragvi, a restaurant that Nora and Tengiz used to frequent. She smiled, remembering this. The theater of shadows, which he had shown her without knowing it himself, was an intimation that what was beyond their corporeal existence, so full of fear and shame, was something else, something that, from here, was visible only as beautiful dim shadows.

Nora crossed Tverskaya Street through the underpass, then came out on Tverskoy Boulevard, which she saw with a kind of double vision—the way it looked today, and the way it looked after the war, lined with old trees, with the Pushkin statue at the head of the boulevard, a drugstore on Novopushkinsky Square, the wall, visible from here, of the ruined Strastnoy Monastery, and the long-gone music school in the courtyard of a long-gone building, where they had taken her in childhood to tap on the keys, in the spot where the present-day box of a building of the Izvestia newspaper was located.

She walked along Tverskoy Boulevard, remembering people she knew who had lived in the surrounding houses—her mother’s and her own classmates and friends. She passed the house where Taisia, who had died long ago in Argentina, had once lived. She crossed Tverskoy to Nikitsky, making a small detour around the rerun movie theater where she had received her introduction to art without being aware of it. She glanced in passing at the House of Polar Explorers, at the final refuge of Gogol, and Vitya’s first apartment, on the semi-basement floor, from where he came to see her, running across the boulevard—Vitya, her lawful husband and the father of her only son …

It grew dark, but the light without flame still warmed the sky. “Poor Genrikh!” Nora sighed one last time, and entered the house where she had lived her whole life. She didn’t bother taking the lift, but walked up to the fourth floor, glad that she could make it without undue weariness. And all the way up to her apartment, she thought about how everything had in fact worked out for the best; she still had time to take care of all the loose ends, and to think some things through about which she had a vague suspicion, but certainly could not be said to know. Perhaps she would arrange old letters and write a book, the sort of book that either her grandfather had not had time to write, or, if it had been written, had been burned in the Internal Prison of the Lubyanka.

But who is he, my protagonist? Jacob? Marusya? Genrikh? Me? Yurik? No. No one, in fact, who is conscious of an individual existence, of birth and an anticipated, and unavoidable, death.

Not a person at all, one might say, but a substance with a certain chemical makeup. And is it possible to call a “substance” something that, being immortal, has the capacity to transform itself, to change all its fine, subtle little planes and angles, its crooks and crevices, its radicals? It is more likely an essence that belongs neither to being nor to nonbeing. It wanders through generations, from person to person, and creates the very illusion of personality. It is the immortal essence, written in code, that organized the mortal bodies of Pythagoras and Aristotle, Parmenides and Plato, as well as the random person one encounters on the road, in the streetcar, on the metro, or in the seat next to you in an airplane. Who suddenly appears before you, and calls up a familiar, dim sensation of a previously glimpsed outline, a bend or a curve, a likeness—perhaps of a great-grandfather, a fellow villager, or even someone from the other side of the world. Thus, my protagonist is essence itself. The bearer of everything that defines a human being—the high and the low, courage and cowardice, cruelty and gentleness, and the hunger for knowledge.

One hundred thousand essences, united in a certain pattern and order, form a human being, a temporary abode for each and every person. This is, in fact, immortality. And you, a human being—a white man, a black woman, an idiot, a genius, a Nigerian pirate, a Parisian baker, a transvestite from Rio de Janeiro, an old rabbi from Bnei Brak—you, too, are just a temporary abode.

Jacob! Is this the book you wished to write, and could not?