Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  Then all four of the undertakers picked up the casket and carried it down to the street. The hearse (which resembled an ordinary small bus; it accommodated the coffin and about ten of the mourners), took off, and her father followed behind it in his Moskvich.

  It was only a short distance to the Donskoy crematorium. They arrived earlier than necessary, and milled around for a half hour, waiting their turn. Then the casket was loaded onto something resembling a baggage trolley, and Nora and Genrikh were allowed to proceed ahead of the others. Nora was again in charge of the flowers. It seemed to her that since the time she had bought them the flowers had opened further, and were now fully bloomed. This time she chose not to cast them chaotically into the casket, but to lay them down deliberately, with foresight: the rose-pink blooms closer to the yellowed face, the lilac ones in an unbroken line around her head and along her arms. And all those inappropriate carnations that the mourners were now bringing in—Nora decided to toss these at her feet.

  Then the mourners entered, all of them dressed in heavy black coats with red carnations, and surrounded the coffin in a horseshoe formation of relatives and friends. Everything looked a bit shimmery, but she could see with perfect clarity. In the midst of this clarity of vision, she realized that all the relatives fell into two different breeds: her father’s cousins, who reminded her of hedgehogs, with their coarse hair growing low on the forehead, long noses with a snout on the end, and shortish chins; and her grandmother’s nieces and nephews, who had slender, elongated faces, large eyes, and triangular fish-mouths …

  And I’m from the hedgehog breed, Nora thought, feeling hot and queasy all of a sudden. At that moment, Chopin’s “Marche funèbre” began to play, disrupting her strange vision. The march had long ago become an aural impropriety, fit only for comic scenes.

  “Hold my hat,” whispered Genrikh, who was standing near her, thrusting his Astrakhan sheepskin cap into her hand. Then he rummaged through his briefcase to make sure he had remembered to bring his passport. Nora immediately caught the smell of his hair, which had permeated the cap, a smell that she had found unpleasant since childhood. Even her own hair, if she failed to wash it every day, gave off this same acrid scent, an admixture of coarse fat and some sort of disgusting plant.

  A woman functionary read some official nonsense from a piece of paper. Then her father uttered some commonplaces, equally bland. Nora felt more and more disheartened by the triteness and vulgarity of the event. Suddenly, out of the blue, her despondency was dispelled by that same tiny old woman who had wept in Grandmother’s room. She went up to the head of the casket and, in a surprisingly resonant voice, made a genuine speech. She began, it was true, with the official phrase, “Today we are saying farewell to Marusya,” but what followed was passionate, and anything but predictable.

  “All of us standing here now, and many who are already in their graves, buried in the ground, were shaken, shaken deeply, when Marusya came into our lives. I don’t know of anyone who was acquainted with her just in passing. She would turn everything upside down, then set it all back on its feet again. She was so gifted, so vibrant, even eccentric. You can take my word for it. Because of her, people learned to feel surprise; they began to think with their own minds. Do you think Jacob Ossetsky was such a genius merely through his own merits? No, he was a genius because he had known a love like hers from the age of nineteen, a love they only write about in novels.”

  A whisper started moving through the dark clump of relatives, and the old woman noticed this: “Sima, you hold your tongue! I already know what you’re going to say. Yes, I loved him. Yes, I was with him during the last year of his life, and this was my joy, my happiness—but not his. Because she left him. And you don’t need to know why she did. I don’t know myself how she was capable of such a thing … But here, by her coffin, I want to say, in front of everyone, that I am not guilty before her. I would never have so much as looked Ossetsky’s way. He was a god and Marusya was a goddess. And who was I? A registered nurse, that’s what I was! I am not guilty before Marusya; and only God knows whether Marusya was guilty before Jacob…”

  At this point, Genrikh grabbed the old woman, and her ardor ceased. She brushed him aside with a flutter of her dry hands. Then, hunching over, she left the hall with a brisk tread.

  Everything faltered. The functionary rushed up to restore order, strains of the unbearable music struck up again, and the coffin was lowered, sinking slowly down to where it would be consumed by the unquenchable fire, and sulfurous rains, and fiery Gehenna … although worms were unlikely to survive down there. She’d have to ask her father who this old woman was, and whether he knew her story.

  Throughout the entire painful and distressing event, Nora had not given a single thought to the repast. Her father reminded her. “Shall we go?”

  The relatives piled into the funeral bus in an orderly manner. Nora got into her father’s Moskvich. Along the way, without taking his eyes off the road, he said, “Looks like your mother didn’t think it necessary to come and pay her respects.”

  “She’s sick,” Nora fibbed. In fact, Nora hadn’t even called her. She’d find out soon enough. After Genrikh’s divorce, Marusya had stopped seeing Amalia.

  The door to the apartment was wide open, and the smell of pancakes from the kitchen wafted through the corridor. The door of Grandmother’s room was open, too, allowing the scents of her eau de cologne and the scrubbed floors to mingle with the kitchen smells. The window in the room was flung open, and the white pillowcase that had been hung over the mirror billowed slightly in the breeze. Nora went in, took off her coat, and threw it on the armchair. She sat down on the coat, peeled off her woolen cap, and glanced around. Even the age-old dust on the piano top had been wiped off. When she was about five, Grandmother had seated her on top of two pillows and begun teaching her to play on this instrument. At that time, though, Nora had more fun playing with the piano stool than playing on the piano. She had turned the stool on its side, sat on the stem, and tried to turn the seat like a steering wheel. Now she touched the stool—at one time shiny with lacquer, now covered in dull patches. Maybe I should take the piano for Yurik? she thought. But she immediately rejected the idea. Movers, a piano tuner, shifting furniture around … No, no way.

  Then the whole busload of relatives, in the same order in which they had been sitting, entered in pairs: her father’s hedgehog-cousins, four of them, took off their black coats and placed them on the divan. Then the women’s brigade, the fish breed, swam through the door like the school of fish that they were. They were all wearing fur coats—Grandmother’s three nieces with two young daughters, Nora’s second and third cousins, all of them with sharp little chins pointing downward—very charming. And another pair of ladies she didn’t recognize. Nora had met her cousins in childhood at parties that her grandmother had organized for them. But they were all younger than Nora, and thus bored her. Nora hadn’t liked younger children—she had always preferred people who were older than she was. There was one person in the women’s brigade who stood out—the tall Mikaela, a brunette with a faint dark mustache, who was about sixty. Nora tried hard to remember whose daughter or wife she was, but she couldn’t; she had forgotten. She saw these people only once every decade, at other such family gatherings or events. The last time was a celebration in honor of her father, when he had defended his doctoral dissertation. Lyusha, Nyusya, and Verochka were the older cousins, and their daughters were Nadya and Lyuba. Then there was this solitary Mikaela.

  The women stamped their feet on the rug by the door, shook off the dirty snow that had stuck to their boots, and threw their coats on the divan. Nora noticed that a puddle had formed on the clean floor around her own shoes.

  Then, in a whirlwind, they all made their way into the kitchen, where the neighbors were waiting for them. The awkward absurdity of what was under way didn’t escape anyone’s notice. In the middle of the large communal kitchen, two tables had been pushed together and covered with newsp
aper. A mountain of pancakes towered in the center. Galia, an old actress, a former bosom buddy of Grandmother’s to whom she hadn’t spoken in more than twenty years, was cooking the rest of the pancakes in three different frying pans. Katya was pouring warm fruit compote out of a saucepan into Grandmother’s washstand pitcher. It was covered with a web of tiny cracks. The estranged washbowl, the other half of the set, contained a spartan beet salad made of ingredients that Katya had been given by her sister free of charge, which she had chopped up fine with her own two hands.

  There was nothing to drink but vodka.

  On Grandmother’s tiny table—she never cooked, but preferred to eat in public cafeterias or eat convenience foods at home—there was already a shot glass full of vodka, covered with a piece of rye bread. Nora felt a surge of sharp annoyance. It was all a farce, a sham! Grandmother had never taken a drop of vodka in her life. To her way of thinking, even drinking wine was verging on decadence. Again, the absurdity of the situation gripped her, and Nora felt personally responsible for what was happening here. How hard would it have been to announce, with grim finality, “No, you won’t have any funeral dinner”? But the neighbors were running the show here, and now this communal repast would just have to play itself out.

  Katya felt she was the hostess of this celebration, and the relatives and mourners were her guests. Genrikh looked complacent—all the unpleasantness was behind them now. They poured out vodka, raised their glasses, and drank it all in one go, without clinking glasses, according to the unspoken rules of a funeral repast. “May she rest in peace.”

  Genrikh threw himself at the food hungrily, and Nora felt the usual irritation at her father—irritation that had evaporated while he was rushing around making the funeral arrangements. He chewed energetically, and Nora, who had always eaten very little, and always slowly, recalled how, when he had lived with them, she had also watched with annoyance as he wolfed down his food.

  How heartless I am, Nora thought. He just has a good appetite.

  She plucked a beet out of the salad. Though the beets were delicious, she could hardly force herself to swallow anything. And her breasts were sore; it was time to express her milk.

  Old Kolokoltsev, dressed in his at-home attire, his jogging pants, sat on a tiny stool, his bottom hanging over the sides. Raisa led in her daughter, Lorochka, an old maid with an unaccountably intelligent, refined face. Katya’s Ninka also took a seat at the table. Marusya had been on good terms with Ninka. Marusya, who considered herself to be a great expert on child rearing, had helped her in her schoolwork all five years she attended school. When she was small, Ninka had received hand-me-downs from Nora; but by the time she turned eight, she was already bigger than Nora, though she was two years younger. Then some bad girls had taught Ninka to steal, and everything went awry. Marusya had grieved when Ninka was sent off to a correctional institution for juvenile delinquents; she believed Ninka had real potential.

  Ninka and her potential sat on a stool, resting her ample bosom on the table. She wanted to talk to Nora about babies: about labor, about breast-feeding. She had given birth recently, too, but she had almost no milk and fed her newborn on baby formula. He bawled nonstop.

  As it turned out, all the relatives had gravitated to one side of the table, and all the neighbors to the other. Face-to-face, wall to wall. Nora was already starting to see a play unfold, which could be staged right here. With this very scenery, just as it was. A play with a compelling social critique as a subtext. How they all suddenly start remembering the deceased, and eventually it comes to light that … But what exactly was revealed, Nora didn’t have time to consider, because that woman in the crooked wig from the Housing Management Committee who had been conferring with the neighbors yesterday tapped her on the shoulder: “Nora, just for a moment. Come into the corridor. We need to talk.”

  Her father was already there. The woman said that the room would revert to the ownership of the state. Tomorrow they would seal the door. “Whatever you need, you should take today.” Her father was silent. Nora didn’t speak, either.

  “Let’s go take a look,” the woman suggested.

  They entered the room. Someone had closed the window, but it was still cold. The pillowcase gleamed on the mirror like a cataract. The overhead light had burned out, and the desk lamp cast a meager light.

  “I’ll go get a new one,” her father said—this had always been his task—and off he went to fetch a new bulb. He knew where they were kept. He screwed it in. The light blazed, sharp and intense. Grandmother didn’t have a lampshade; that would have been a bourgeois extravagance.

  A stage set, Nora thought again.

  Her father took a spherical clock, about the size of an apple, off the piano—as a memento of his grandfather, who had been a watchmaker.

  “That’s all I need,” he said. “Nora, you take whatever you want.”

  Nora glanced around. She would have liked to take everything. Except for the books, though, there was nothing here one really needed for life. It was a tough decision. Very tough.

  “Can’t we decide tomorrow? I’d have to sort through things,” she said hesitantly.

  “Tomorrow the district police will come over to seal it. I don’t know whether it will happen early in the morning or later in the day. I’d advise you to finish with the business tonight,” she said, and tactfully retreated, leaving Nora alone with the nagging thought that this woman and the neighbors might be in some sort of conspiracy together, wanting to get rid of Nora and Genrikh as soon as possible so they could make off with the spoils.

  Genrikh surveyed the room sadly—his first home. He no longer remembered his grandfather’s apartment in Kiev, where he had been born. But in this long room, two windows wide, he had lived together with his mother and father until 1931, his fourteenth year, when his father was arrested.

  There was nothing, nothing among these meager belongings, that Genrikh needed. And what would his current wife, Irina, say if he dragged any of this junk home with him?

  “No, Nora, I don’t need any of it,” he said, and stomped back to the kitchen.

  Nora closed the door gently and even fastened the small brass latch. She sat down in Grandmother’s armchair, and for one last time let her eyes roam about the room, which was still alive, though the person who had inhabited it was not. On the walls hung several small pictures, the size of large postcards. Nora knew them all by heart. A photograph of her grandmother’s brother, Mikhail; an autographed picture of Kachalov, the famous actor; and a photograph—the smallest of all—of a man in a military jacket, with the inscription “To Marusya” grazing his cheek. She didn’t know who it might be. For some reason, she had never asked her grandmother who this gentleman was. She’d have to ask Genrikh. Nora looked at her watch; she needed to get home. Poor Taisia had spent her entire day off at Nora’s house, watching the baby.

  Under the window stood a chest woven from willow branches. Nora lifted the lid. It was full of old notebooks, writing pads, piles of paper scrawled all over. She opened the one on top. It looked like a manuscript or diary of some sort. There was a stack of postcards; newspaper clippings …

  That settled it—she’d salvage the books and this willow chest. Still looking around, she took the pictures from the walls and stuffed them in the chest, too, along with the slender silver goblet in which Grandmother kept her hairpins, and another one she used for her medicine, as well as a single faience saucer without a cup, which Nora herself had broken at some point in her childhood. Then, from the buffet, she rescued a small sugar bowl, with tiny pincers for lump sugar. Her grandmother was diabetic, but she adored sweet things, and from time to time would break off minuscule pieces of sugar, no bigger than a match head, with these pincers. She then remembered about the washstand pitcher and bowl; but they had already begun a new life in the old kitchen—as common property. Damn it all.

  An hour later, when the relatives had all gone their separate ways, Nora and her father together took the chest
and the books down to the car. The chest fit into the trunk, and the books were piled up like a small mountain filling the whole back seat and blocking the rear window. Her father drove Nora home and helped her carry all the stuff up to her apartment. He didn’t come inside, but stopped in the front hall. Nora didn’t invite him in. He had been there about two months before, to see the baby. At one time, in these three smallish rooms, he had lived with his family of four: he and his wife, their daughter, and a mother-in-law. Now there were only two living in it.

  It’s a nice, comfortable apartment. Good thing they don’t “densify” anymore, forcing people to forfeit space to accommodate strangers, he thought. And, out of nowhere, it occurred to him that it was too bad Mama’s room would revert to the state.

  With that, he left for his new home, in Timiryazevka, where Irina was waiting for him.

  In a flurry, Taisia gathered up her belongings, kissed Nora on the cheek, stepped over the piles of books strewn about, and left the apartment, looking back to say, “Oh yes, someone named Tusya called, and Vitya called twice, and some Armenian—I didn’t catch his name.”