Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  She hung up the phone and began rushing around. The doorbell rang almost immediately, even before she managed to control the cold sweat that made her shiver. He stood in the doorway, dressed in an old sheepskin coat that still carried the acrid stench of living creatures. He was carrying a stuffed bear in his arms—exactly the kind of bear that Genrikh had given Yurik—and the ancient duffel bag that he always traveled with.

  “You won’t send me packing?” Tengiz said, sloughing off the sheepskin.

  You bet I will, Nora thought to herself; but out loud she said, “Come right in!”

  The shivering stopped. Nora realized that, in the space of one moment, she had re-entered the basic condition of her existence—being together with Tengiz. This was, perhaps, the best thing she knew—talking to him, sitting with him at the table, sleeping and sharing her silences with him.

  “I want to chase you away and go to bed with you, both at the same time, Tengiz. I’m a Capricorn. For a Capricorn, the world ceases to exist when she is doing what she most loves. And what I love most in the world is you.”

  “I adore you, Nora. And I, as it turns out, am a Dragon! Natella has grown keen on astrology, and it’s the best madness she’s ever suffered from.”

  “Wait a minute—the Dragon is from another astrological calendar. According to the Chinese, I’m not a Fish … a Goat, I think.”

  “For Dragons everything is good! They’re brilliant and wise, and lucky in everything! Like me!”

  The dialogue continued, but their clothes already lay in a heap on the floor next to the coatrack. Nora breathed in his smell, the only one in the world that all her receptors were attuned to—sheepskin, the crude country tobacco he liked to smoke, and Tengiz’s body. He noisily expelled a breath of air, like a runner coming in to the finish line.

  “Don’t pay any attention to me; it’s just that I haven’t been here for a while.”

  But now he was back, and he was still the same, whole and undamaged. Was such a coincidence possible? Inhale, exhale, pulse, blood type, what have you … Nora spat out a piece of the wool that had immediately found its way into her mouth. Tengiz laughed and removed it from her lip. The last time he was in Moscow, it was also winter, and the sheepskin coat had served them trustily in all kinds of unpredictable adventures.

  One-and-a-half-year-old Yurik woke up, crawled out of his crib, and toddled up to them. Right away he noticed the bear lying next to the door and grabbed hold of it. He paid no attention to Tengiz. Nora, hopping on one foot, struggled to put on her trousers, which had turned inside out. Tengiz shook out the sheepskin, releasing a cloud of the acrid fragrance, and hung it on a hook on the coatrack.

  “Now, where were we?” he asked Nora, and took out a handful of tangerines and a bottle of Cognac from his duffel bag.

  “Right here, at this very place,” Nora said, laughing. No, they hadn’t parted ways. They hadn’t parted in any sense whatsoever.

  Nora picked up Yurik along with the bear and started dressing him.

  While Yurik was introducing the new bear to the old one, Nora went out to the kitchen. “Are you hungry?”

  Tengiz nodded. “I haven’t had a bite to eat since yesterday.”

  “Buckwheat porridge. Sauerkraut. That’s all there is.”

  “Excellent.”

  He ate slowly, almost reluctantly, as though he wasn’t even hungry, like all well-mannered Georgians. Nora sat across from him, her chin resting on her interlocking fingers, not feeling anything but his nearness, while he ate silently; but her entire body, still full of his presence, glowed with happiness.

  He placed his fork on the empty plate and said, “Let’s start on a new project, Nora. Puppets—this time we’re going to work with puppets. They will be large. Architectural. With actors inside, and they’ll be able to emerge from them. A real actor will play Gulliver.”

  “Wait, wait, I’ve never worked with puppets. What’s the play? And where will we perform it?”

  “Oh, Nora, Swift, of course!”

  “Gulliver in the Land of the Lilliputians?”

  “Yes, only now it will be about the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms. About people who’ve lost the semblance of humans, and the horses that are superior to the people. And Gulliver is also an instrument for taking temperatures by this standard of measure.”

  “And the play?”

  “What play? There isn’t one.”

  “But some sort of script?”

  “We have to come up with the idea first; and I know someone I can ask to write it.” Tengiz was in top working form, in a white heat of excitement and inspiration, and this enthusiasm was already communicating itself to Nora, though she had only read Swift as a child, in an adapted, abridged version, and didn’t remember it very well.

  Tengiz took a dilapidated book out of his duffel bag. “Here!”

  Nora held the tome in her hands and began glancing through it. The book was in Russian, with a blue library stamp in Georgian script. It was a 1947 edition.

  “Did you steal this from the library?”

  “I took it for business purposes.”

  “I’ll have to reread it.”

  “Well, sit down and read.”

  “I have to walk Yurik before it gets dark.”

  “No problem. Get him dressed, and I’ll take him out for a walk. You read. Read!”

  While Nora was getting Yurik dressed, he made a bit of a fuss, because he wanted to take both bears with him on the walk. Nora tried to distract him by giving him a little shovel.

  “What’s the big deal? We’ll take the bears for a walk, too. Come on, little fellow! Let’s get going,” Tengiz said.

  Nora was absolutely sure that Yurik would refuse to go with Tengiz, but he went willingly. When they were already on their way out the door, Tengiz was still pulling on his sheepskin coat. Yurik hugged his stuffed animals to his chest. Nora watched as they slowly shuffled to the elevator, half a flight of stairs down, and felt an unprecedented churning in her heart—here were the two men, the most important men in her life, together; but it was impossible for that to last longer than an hour’s walk down Nikitsky Boulevard.

  In the evening, after Yurik was in bed, they continued their conversation.

  “Okay, I like the premise, but why puppets? All our puppet theaters are for children. Who will we perform the play for? Plus, you haven’t said a word about where you plan to perform it.”

  Tengiz brushed her objections aside.

  “For children? What gave you that idea? As you know, in the seventeenth century, when Shakespeare was already gone, the British Parliament outlawed dramatic theater. A bill, an edict, whatever it was called—I don’t remember. But that was when puppet theater started flourishing. They performed in markets, on city squares. It was theater of the highest order. Nothing childish about it. So—any objections? Look, there’s this Yahoo, a lumpen, a boor, and next to him a noble animal, the horse. Have you ever ridden on horseback? Do you know anything at all about horses? And the theater is a good one! In the provinces, as usual. In Altai. They’ve made me an offer. I haven’t signed on to it yet. If we can agree on it, you and I, I’ll fly out there right away. Generally speaking, I have to tell you that puppet theater is where the most interesting things are happening right now. That’s where there is freedom. Well, for the puppets, anyway.”

  Nora shook her head. Tengiz was waiting for her response, her objections. This was their little game: it was precisely on the foundation of her queries, her objections, that he would construct his directorial arguments. No one knew how to play this role better than she did.

  “I don’t know anything about horses. We didn’t have horses. We didn’t even have cats. We have allergies. And I don’t know anything about puppet theater. I need to finish the book. I can’t commit to it just like that, out of the blue.”

  Nora finished reading toward morning. She read quickly—but not all of her time had been spent with Swift. Afterward, Tengiz embraced her and said, “Now, r
ead, read. Don’t get distracted.”

  But distracted she was. Then Yurik woke up and started crying. It seemed to Nora that he had a bit of a fever, but he went back to sleep very quickly, before she had time to give him any medicine.

  The men slept late. Nora finished Swift and closed the book. It contained so much, it required contemplation. She cooked some porridge and put the pan under a pillow to keep it warm, then took a soft pencil and began sketching a horse. The first horse in her life. She kept thinking about how the Houyhnhnms differed from horses, and the Yahoos from people. Yurik woke up completely healthy. He ate his porridge. And Nora said yes.

  As soon as Nora agreed, Tengiz hopped on a plane to Altai to sign the contract and discuss details. The general director of the theater had studied with him at the Moscow Art Theatre school, where he had spent two years in the now-distant past. Everything was falling into place. Three days later, he returned, happy; he had found an actor who was, in his word, brilliant.

  The happiest time in Nora’s life now began—the three of them together, Nora, Yurik, and Tengiz.

  The play was born out of wrangling over sketches and hashing out the basic question posed by the piece: What was the point at which a human being becomes an animal, and an animal a human being? What does this distinction consist in, and how can it be expressed in dramatic form? When she read the book more attentively, Nora concluded that the society of Houyhnhnms was hardly exemplary; they were rather dull, limited, and overall boring beasts. Here Nora became a bit despondent, because her thoughts about the society of horses and humans were hard to translate into the idiom of puppet theater. In time, however, this sorted itself out. Tengiz set her mind at rest: for their work, it was enough to recall Swift’s/Gulliver’s pronouncement about humanity, “Upon the whole, I never beheld, in all my travels, so disagreeable an animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an antipathy.”

  “To work with this material, we just have to set aside our surmise that the noble Houyhnhnms are dullards with no emotional intelligence. They don’t know love or friendship, anxiety, or sadness. The hatred and wrath they experience is reserved for the Yahoos, who in their world occupy about the same position as Jews did in Nazi Germany.”

  Nora accepted these premises. The boundaries had been laid out. Tengiz and Nora went to pay a visit to an elderly playwright, the widow of an avant-garde director who died before the war in a lucky accident that saved him from being arrested. The widow, a faded butterfly of the Silver Age, lived in a dilapidated one-story house on Mansurovsky Lane. She served them weak tea and was abundantly kind and sympathetic to them, immediately understanding what they needed from her. She wrote the script in a week. It worked very well, and required only a few adjustments during the rehearsals. Unfortunately, she never managed to collect the fee for her work. The theater had negotiated the contract with her, and had submitted the request for approval from the Ministry of Culture, but while they were awaiting a decision she died.

  Nora worked conscientiously. By way of beginning her project, she decided to spend time with living nature, and she took Yurik to the zoo to see all sorts of ungulates. Yurik showed most interest in the sparrows and pigeons roaming at large, which were not exhibits at all, but were, if anything, service workers. Even the elephant himself failed to impress him: the scale of the creature was simply too large for Yurik to notice it. Nora made several sketches in her notebook, and realized she was pursuing the wrong path. She rejected the idea of studying from nature, and immersed herself in visual art. She sat in libraries and contemplated all kinds of artists’ depictions of horses. The library of the All-Russian Theater Association allowed her to bring Yurik along; she had known the librarians there for nearly twenty years and was on good terms with them. She had to enlist Taisia’s help when she went to the other libraries. Sometimes her friend Natasha Vlasov took Yurik under her wing and brought him home with her, where her son, Fedya, was happy to look after and amuse the little fellow.

  Soon Nora knew precisely which horses she needed. And which Yahoos.

  Tengiz, who had gone to Tbilisi to sort out some domestic affairs, returned, and announced that rehearsals would begin in a week.

  Nora placed a stack of sketches in front of him. He took the first one and examined it. Gulliver occupied one side of the page, an observer, and in the center were two trusslike horses that appeared to be constructed out of the metal rods and bars of a child’s construction set, held together by crude bolts, articulate, hinged, with huge bellies that contained a small platform for the actors. Their faces were vaguely human, smiling, with bared teeth—but fearsome nonetheless.

  “You’re a genius, Nora! You did it.”

  In the second sketch, Gulliver was crawling out of a tiny house with a ring on the roof, squeezing through a swing door. All around, hairy, unkempt creatures with wild but recognizably human faces were frolicking. All of them were bound together with a single net.

  “Excellent. The masses,” Tengiz said. Then he took the next drawing.

  He was sitting down, and she was standing in front of him; they were at eye level with each other. He scratched the gray stubble on his cheek, smacked his lips now and then, frowned, and said, in a mock mournful tone, “You’ve thought of everything. The whole thing can be staged without me.”

  “Without me, Tengiz. Without me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t go with you. I have no one to leave Yurik with.”

  “We’re not leaving him; we’re taking him with us. I rented a two-bedroom apartment. There weren’t any three-bedroom apartments in the entire town. It’s spacious, though. We’ll all fit.”

  Nora shook her head. “No, I’m not going.”

  “You’ve lost your mind! I can’t work without you! I know it! I’ve tried! How can you abandon me like this? Our flight is in three days, and the boy’s going, too. They already bought us the tickets.”

  At that moment, Yurik shuffled up and held out his hand to Tengiz. Nora realized that she would go. She would fly and she would crawl on her hands and knees. Anywhere. Anywhere at all. To Altai. To the back of beyond. To hell and back.

  “Want to go for a walk?” Tengiz said. Yurik hurried into his room to fetch the two teddy bears.

  “What about a shop to work in there? Even here the construction would be fairly difficult. I consulted one of the best Moscow puppeteers, and he said that not every craftsman would be up to it.”

  “They’ve shut down some sort of military factory there. Two of the craftsmen used to work there. Not only can they build you a horse—they’ll build you a rocket if you need one!”

  Then Amalia came over. She said that she would take Yurik to the nature reserve. Fresh, clean air, goat’s milk, homegrown vegetables … Andrei Ivanovich, too, thought it would be a mistake to drag the child off to such a remote region.

  She should never have mentioned Andrei Ivanovich and the “mistake.” More than once, tempers had flared on this subject.

  “Mama, please let me make my own mistakes. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t make them. I’d be you.”

  “But think of the child! Who has ever shown you such … cruelty?” The question was rhetorical and should have been left hanging, but a quick retort followed: “You.”

  At this point, Amalia began to cry, and Nora got upset: she could have kept her mouth shut. Nora put her arms around her mother and whispered in her ear: “Mama, I’m sorry, I won’t say that anymore. But don’t pressure me. Please don’t try to make me do things I don’t want to.”

  By the time they parted, they had made peace. Things were even better than before; each of them felt she was guilty.

  And another happy chapter in her life began—in a provincial Altai town with a large river, doing work that felt like a celebration. Nora discovered that puppeteers were a special breed of actor, who hadn’t veered very far from the old Punch and Judy shows in market squares of yore. Such playful, entertaining folks could never be s
atisfied with ordinary theater. The director of the puppet theater, a former Party official, turned out to be a marvelous woman, exceptionally so, for which she was subsequently fired from her job—luckily, not for Gulliver, but for the next one. For Gulliver she only got a reprimand.

  The Altai episode in their lives turned out to be very important for Yurik, too. He was late learning to talk, but here he began speaking in complex sentences that were both striking and funny. Many years later, it became evident that his prodigious memory had begun working here as well. His earliest memories were about the theater, the construction workshop, and Tengiz, whom he decided to adopt as his father.

  The opening night was September 15. On the morning of that day, Tengiz received a telegram that his mother had died. He left for home the moment the play reached the end. The premiere went off without a hitch. The audience was in raptures, but Tengiz was not present to take a bow. He was already flying on a flimsy local airplane to the big city of Novosibirsk, from where he would fly to Moscow, then on to Tbilisi.

  Nora hardly had time to say goodbye to him. She stayed on at the theater for three days, and even managed to catch a thrillingly scathing review by the deputy head of the local department of culture, someone by the name of Shortbread (you couldn’t make it up if you tried!), who detected in the play “bourgeois avant-gardism and Picassoism.” The second critical notice took a more substantive approach: “From whence this disregard for the human being? Does the director really imply that people are worse than animals? Does this not cast aspersions on the Soviet people?”

  Nora and Yurik returned to Moscow in the second half of September. It had rained all July and August, and now, by way of compensation, a true Indian summer had set in. Tengiz didn’t call. He had told her that he had plans to go to Wrocław in the fall to work in Jerzy Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre. Poland was the most liberal of the socialist countries, and Georgia was the most liberal of the Soviet Republics, and Tengiz received ideologically supportive permission from the Georgian Ministry of Culture for the trip. He sent no letters, either about Grotowski or about anyone else. Nora had to go through a final parting with him yet again. This time it was easier for her, though—perhaps because of Yurik?