Jacob's Ladder

4 Closing Chekhov

(1974)

They had been together for eleven years. Tengiz said it was time to close Chekhov. Nora was surprised: Why all of a sudden, why now? What was a Russian theater without Chekhov? But Tengiz said that he had wanted to for a long time already. And he began picking apart Three Sisters, scene by scene, line by line, with unexpected, pitiless trenchancy. He raised his beautiful, very beautiful hands, held them up in the air while he talked, and Nora didn’t hear his speech as single, separate words, but soaked it up whole, in strings of words, strange phrases it would have been impossible to recount. His Russian wasn’t quite perfect, it must be said, but he spoke with intense, expressive eloquence. He had a rather strong Georgian accent, which sometimes garbled the meaning. And sometimes even deepened it. Though Nora could never understand why this should have been the case, she always felt glad that it wasn’t only about the language, but about the whole cast of thought of a person from another place and culture …

“Just tell me one thing, why did they shut down Efros? He staged Three Sisters the way it should be performed! Poor things, it’s so unfortunate. I feel so sorry for them, it brings me to tears. Since 1901, they’ve been elevating this play to the skies, higher and higher it goes. Right? I just can’t bear to see it anymore! Enough is enough, right?” His drawling, ascending “right” wrapped around Nora and drew her in.

“Nora, Nora! Tolstoy said about Three Sisters that it was a ‘dreary bore’ of a play! Did Leo Tolstoy know a thing or two, or not? Everyone is bored, full of gloomy longing! No one works! No one works in Russia; actually, in Georgia it’s no different, no one wants to work. And if they do, it’s reluctantly, with disdain. Olga is the director of a school. This is an excellent position at the beginning of the century: they’ve started teaching the women students science, and not just embroidery and Holy Writ, and they are educating the first professional women. But Olga’s bored, and her strength of will and her youth desert her, drop by drop. And, out of pure boredom, Masha falls in love with Vershinin, very noble, but very stupid. He’s pathetic! What kind of man is he? I don’t understand.

“Irina works in an office—at the telegraph, or God knows where. Her work is dull, tedious; everything is bad. She doesn’t want to work; she wants to go to Moscow. They complain—all they do is complain. And what are they going to do in Moscow when they get there? Nothing! That’s why they’re not going!

“Andrei is a nobody. Natasha is a coarse animal. Solyony—a real beast! And poor Tusenbach—how can you marry a woman who doesn’t even love you? It’s a rotten life, Nora! Do you understand who the real hero is? Do you? Think—it’s Anfisa! Anfisa is the true protagonist! The nanny who goes around cleaning up after everyone. She is the one with a meaningful existence, Nora. She has a broom, a mop, rags; she washes and wipes things down, she picks things up, makes things smooth and shiny. All the others—they’re just layabouts, idiots who sit around twiddling their thumbs. They’re bored! And what is it that’s all around them? The turn of the century, right? The industrial revolution is under way, capitalism. They’re building roads, factories, bridges. But they want to go to Moscow, and they can’t even make it to the station! You understand me, right? Right?”

Nora was already way ahead of him: she already knew what she would draw now, how she would design the set. She knew how glad Tengiz would be that she had immediately hit upon it without even moving an inch from the spot—the entire play! She already saw the Prozorov home, open, exposed, pushed far out into the foreground—and on the left and on the right, everywhere, building sites, cranes rising to the sky. Freight trains are carrying goods, and life is on the move; there are loud screeches (of metal), and some whistles and signals … But in the Prozorovs’ house they don’t notice a thing; the activity and transformation completely pass them by. They wander around the house drinking tea, conversing. Only Anfisa is busy, lugging around buckets, rags, pouring out basins … Excellent. Excellent! All the characters are shadows, shades; only Anfisa has substance. They are all dressed in muslin, like smoky mist, and the military men also seem to be only half there. Anemia. A suspended space. A garden of nearly insubstantial souls. And she will clothe everything in sepia, like the faded, colorless garments in old photographs. True historical antiquity. Yes, of course, Natasha Prozorov is plump; she inhabits her body. A deep-rose dress, with a green belt. The background will be sepia all over, drained of color, beiges and browns … Brilliant!

And Nora said, “Right.” Tengiz put his arms around her and crushed her to him. “Nora, we’ll do something that no one has ever seen before! And never will! They’ll destroy us completely, of course, but we’ll do it anyway. It will be the best thing we’ve ever done!”

For two months, they were together constantly. Tengiz rehearsed the play. Chekhov’s text, mundane, down-to-earth, laconic, always packed with subtle directorial subtexts, heightened significance, was transformed into mechanical chatter. The viscous familial space became dreamlike, as though the dreams and unrealized plans were the reality of life—the transparent patterns of the imagination. Theater of shadows! Shadow puppets. And in this illusory, volatile space, only two people do any real work—Anfisa with her rags, and Natasha, taking in hand all the substance of life—the rooms of the sisters, the house, the garden, the local municipal officials, all the world available to her.

Tengiz did not divulge his killer plan to the actors, and over and over again they repeated the hackneyed text with bored indifference. Which was precisely what Tengiz wanted of them.

Tengiz lived with his Moscow aunt, Mziya, a widowed pianist who worshipped him. Nora, at Tengiz’s request, moved into her apartment, which was a strange, two-story structure in back of the Pushkin Museum that had by some miracle been spared demolition. Mziya gave them two tiny rooms on the second floor, and lived herself on the first, in a large room with an ancient, cavernous ice cellar under the floor. At one time, ice from the river had been kept there for the entire summer. Now it held only a damp, hollow, ringing emptiness, covered with a lid of wooden slats.

Yet again, Nora was carrying out this ritual, mounting this celebration with Tengiz, as she had countless times before. All ordinary boundaries and routines were swept away by the pressure of work and love, and by an astounding surge in their strength and capabilities. The fullness and intensity of life were remarkable. Nora lost all sense of the past and future, and all other people—relations and friends—seemed to evaporate completely. She called her mother only two or three times during those two months. Calling her was complicated. It was usually done through the post office, where she had to order the call, then wait for the call to be returned, most often with a poor connection. Amalia had to trudge three kilometers to the post office to receive it. Inevitably, she would be offended that Nora called her so seldom, and chide her timidly.

In fact, everything had fallen into place long ago. Since the moment he entered her life, Amalia Alexandrovna had adored her Andrei Ivanovich, and she had pushed her daughter away. This passion of old age, as Nora viewed it, was a fire that consumed the entire world around it. The couple had left for Prioksko-Terrasny Nature Reserve, the birthplace of Andrei Ivanovich, where he began working as a park ranger. They bought a house, and started building their own little paradise, which Nora found unendurable. This time, her mother invited Nora to come to visit them in the countryside “with that director of yours,” and Nora promised they would. She usually didn’t stoop to lying, but now she didn’t feel like wasting time on superficial conversation.

It took Nora a week to make her preliminary sketches and to assemble a maquette of the stage. When he saw the building cranes, hanging virtually over the roof of the Prozorovs’ home, and the structures drawn on the backdrop resembling skyscrapers or Gothic cathedrals, Tengiz moaned with delight. The play seemed to stage itself. Anfisa enters and walks along in front of the closed curtain, wiping the floor; then the sounds of the construction site start blaring. The curtain opens, and the entire stage is thrown into an exaggeratedly industrialized mode of existence: the screech and thunder of metal, of pneumatic hammers, ring out, and the cranes start to sway. Then the commotion dies down, evaporates into air, and the Prozorovs’ home seems to materialize from behind a curtain of light. It is morning … The table has been set … “Father died exactly one year ago, on this very day, the fifth of May…”

Everything unfolded of its own accord, naturally, like grass growing in the yard, only very swiftly. Svistalov, the arrogant and influential production manager of this hallowed, distinguished theater, treated Tengiz with uncharacteristic respect, getting him a bit confused with Temur Chkheidze. He gave the green light to all the theater workshops and departments, and they got right down to work—there had never been a light so green! Everyone knew Svistalov’s character; he loved to throw his weight around. He had argued with Borovsky, had put obstacles in the way of Barkhin, and had even set the dogs on Sheintsis—in other words, he had played dirty and interfered with all, all of Nora’s favorite set designers … A miracle, it was just a miracle! Perhaps the administrator really was touched by Tengiz’s appearance, by outward considerations; for some reason, people in Russia did like Georgians, in contrast to Jews, Armenians, or Azeris …

They floated arm in arm, the two of them in a cloud of love, through the staff-only entrance. The doorman and the buffet servers smiled at them, and their happiness wove such a lovely cocoon around them that Nora felt, as they moved along in harmony with each other, that they were like figure skaters, or ballet dancers, and they were flying, flying …

The play was shut down on the eve of the premiere. They managed only to perform the dress rehearsal, all the sets in place. When their own people in the audience, relatives and close friends, began to disperse, and only the administrators and Party bigwigs, thirsting for blood, remained (they had come intentionally one day earlier than they had promised), it became clear that a scandal was brewing, and Tengiz went out onto the stage and requested that the dear members of the audience stay for a discussion of the play. But the ministerial special forces, the Party hacks, only grew more incensed at this, and it took them just fifteen minutes to kill the play.

Tengiz mounted the stage again, together with Nora, whom he led, very respectfully, by the hand, and said, in a loud voice livid with rage: “Respected guests! You allowed Efros to play his Three Sisters thirty-three times! Is our Three Sisters really that much better?”

Nora accompanied him to the airport. A gloomy spring, without a single sunny day, and a gloomy Tengiz. He seemed not to see Nora at all; no one smiled at them anymore; the love cloud had vanished. He was flying to Tbilisi, back to his wife and daughter, in a heavy metal airplane. He stood there dejected, unshaven, graying at the temples, with his sloping Neanderthal forehead, reeking of stale alcohol, sweat, and, surprisingly, tangerines. He took a tangerine out of his pocket, thrust it into her hand, winked, gave her a peck on the cheek, and hurried to the boarding area.