Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  The three of them had spent half a year together, the happiest half year of her life thus far. After that, another life began, in which she had to get used to Tengiz’s absence and fill up the yawning hole. Now, however, she had the feeling that he might show up at any time, walk in with his duffel bag and his sheepskin coat, wearing a hand-knit sweater or a baggy T-shirt, and the holiday would start all over again.

  Taisia, who had remained “on call” to help out and was now almost a member of the family, thought that Yurik was behind in his development. But when Yurik met her after the two-month sojourn in Altai with the words “Hairy Taisia came to see Yurik, and brought him candy,” she stopped insisting for a time that Nora take him to a neurologist, a speech therapist, or a child psychologist.

  Nora felt that she had finished her work on Yurik’s babyhood. She still drew him, but now, on the same large pieces of Whatman paper, she wrote down his little utterances. She had to jot them down immediately. Sometimes they were so strange and unintelligible that Nora had a hard time decoding them.

  One day, when he was washing his hands in the bathroom, he turned on the faucets over and over again—first the cold, then the hot, then again the cold. Nora waited patiently.

  “Nora, why does the cold water have a man’s voice, and the hot water a woman’s voice?”

  Nora thought for a bit. She didn’t hear any difference, she told him. Then he waved his hand as if to brush off his disappointment, and said, “Well, tell me where the very middle of the water is, then.”

  Nora felt that she was the one who was lagging behind her son in his magical absorption in the world, his unfolding within it.

  “There’s a little bit of fire in each thing,” the boy said while he was playing with a piece of twine.

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” Nora said, leaning over him.

  He clutched the twine in one hand and pulled hard on it with the other. “See? There’s a little bit of fire in the rope, and it stings.”

  He unclenched his fist. There was a red mark on his palm.

  “Mama, does the twine have a round face?”

  When he was about five, Yurik developed a new infatuation. A friend of Nora’s, the puppeteer Sergei Nikolayev, gave him a real African drum, a djembe, and tapped out a simple rhythm: “Baby Avocado, Baby Avocado, Baby Avocado went to bed.” This straightforward, no-frills toy became his favorite for months to come. Yurik would beat on the drum for hours—with his palm, with a spoon, with a stick, with his fingertips—galloping around it in a circle all the while. Nora was exhausted by the constant pounding and tried to distract him with less noisy activities. Once, she complained to Sergei that he had ruined her life. Sergei brushed her comment aside, but took it to heart—his next present, a xylophone, rectified the situation somewhat. Now Yurik was captivated by a new musical instrument—and the sound was considerably less jarring than the pounding of the djembe, it must be said.

  I should have taken Grandmother’s piano, Nora thought. Maybe he has an ear for music? It’s too bad I left the piano behind with the neighbors. She remembered perfectly how her grandmother had tried to give her piano lessons, and what a torment it was to her. And for her grandmother as well … She had no inclinations in that direction whatsoever. Maybe her hearing wasn’t sharp enough? Genrikh had a wonderful ear for music, and Nora remembered how he used to sing long operatic arias at any holiday gathering, after downing his first glass. Amalia was always humming some Soviet song or other under her breath. Nora’s maternal grandfather had been a precentor, so he must have been musical, too. Perhaps Yurik took after Genrikh or after that great-grandfather …

  When he gets a little older I’ll send him to music school, Nora decided.

  Then he learned to read. All by himself. Nora discovered it by chance. He couldn’t get to sleep, so he asked her to read to him. When it was already after eleven, and Nora was getting tired herself, she closed the book. “That’s all. Now go to sleep.”

  He resisted, saying, “Okay, then. I’ll read myself.”

  Nora always tried not to contradict him. She agreed to his demand. “All right, only you have to read out loud. I read to you, now you read to me.”

  And he started reading—not very confidently, stopping here and there, but reading whole words, not just sounding out the letters. It was a story about a rejuvenating apple tree, and he couldn’t have memorized it, since it was the first time they were reading it. Nora didn’t say anything; she didn’t ask him how he had learned to read. But she thought: Well, that’s that. Another childhood milestone passed. He’s got Vitya’s head. He’ll probably be a mathematician. Or a physicist. And she didn’t believe any good would come of it.

  Yurik constantly surprised Nora. Once, he sat on his haunches for a long time, studying the grass.

  “What do you see there?” Nora said. Without taking his eyes off the grass, he said, “Nora, am I growing headfirst or feet-down?”

  Then, suddenly, he hugged a tree, pressing his ear to the trunk and caressing the bark. He made a fist and pounded softly on the bark, still listening. When Nora asked whether he heard something, he shook his head. “I don’t hear anything. I’m wondering why people don’t have such nice shapes as trees. You don’t know? It’s because they stand still and be pretty. But people are always running and running and running.” And he stood next to the tree again, threw out his arms, and froze. A little boy in a red jacket with a pocket on the front.

  Tengiz didn’t stay away for long. Now he would summon Nora to collaborate with him, sometimes in the Baltic Republics, or in Siberia. The country was huge, stretching from Brest to Vladivostok. They began to get invitations as a team. The couple enjoyed great success, sometimes even notoriety. They received awards and warnings in turns. Tengiz was offered a theater in Kutaisi. He considered it, then rejected the offer, primarily because of Nora. The position of head director would not allow him to travel about the country so freely, and he couldn’t invite Nora to Georgia. And she wouldn’t have gone, anyway. He visited Nora at home now and then, but tried not to stay overnight, preferring to check into a hotel. The boy had chosen him to be his father, would cling to his leg every time he saw him, and it was cruel to create the illusion that they were a family. And things were getting harder and harder for Tengiz.

  When he was nearly six, Yurik started asking about his father. Nora had prepared for this question beforehand. Vitya, who had only seen Yurik once, when he was a year old, had completely disappeared from the child’s memory. Vitya had visited Nora two or three times since, but each time the boy had been asleep. Vitya had already grown used to the idea that Nora had deceived him in giving birth to a child without consulting him about it, and was reconciled to the fact of the child’s existence. This was why, when Nora called him and asked if he wanted to see his son, he agreed, albeit without much enthusiasm. Without taking his mother’s point of view into consideration, he agreed with Nora that she and Yurik would visit him at his house.

  Nora, yet again, smiling to herself, bought a cake and set out to visit the relatives. Vitya and his mother had moved from Nikitsky Boulevard to an apartment near the Molodezhnaya metro station, and this shift in geography added another dot to the long ellipsis of their sporadic and artificial relations.

  The visit was a short one. Varvara, torn by conflicting feelings—hatred of Nora and curiosity—went to see the neighbors. Vitya set up the chessboard and showed Yurik how the pieces moved.

  “Is this a game of war?” Yurik said. Vitya thought for a while and said that it was.

  “Why are there so many pawns? They’re all the same.”

  “Well, they’re like the foot soldiers. They need to protect the king and queen, and to attack.” Vitya moved first. “The first moves of the game are called the opening.”

  “Can you do it another way?” Yurik asked.

  Fifteen minutes in, Yurik got the hang of the game, and said that he wanted to start again. Vitya refused, saying that it wasn’t fair
to stop a game in the middle, and very quickly won. They began another game. In the middle of the third game between her son and her half-acknowledged grandson, Varvara returned. Curiosity had triumphed. She pretended she hadn’t expected to see them, but the ingenuous and uncompromisingly honest Vitya unmasked her with his blue-eyed astonishment: “But I told you they were coming, Mama.”

  She waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, Vitya, I never know what you mean.”

  Yurik lost the third game in a row, and was about to start howling, but Vitya said, “My friend, you play very well. I couldn’t play as well as you do at your age. Now I’ll show you one more move, and no one will ever be able to beat you in the game again.”

  Vitya set out the pieces again in order to show Yurik a “fork.” Yurik caught on immediately and laughed, asking Vitya to show him another trick like that. After this, Vitya liked the boy so much that he had no objections to seeing him from time to time.

  “Wonderful!” Nora said. “You can come and see us. You can play chess together. Just call beforehand to let us know.”

  While they were riding on the metro to go home, Nora kept thinking about what she would say the next time Yurik asked about his father. She herself didn’t bring it up. A week and a half later, Yurik asked a question out of the blue, which, at the same time, prompted a satisfactory answer.

  “Mama, is there such a thing as a cousin-papa?”

  Which of Nora’s men was the papa-papa and which the cousin-papa was never determined with absolute certainty. Vitya began coming over now and then. He didn’t really stand out among the other numerous visitors to the “crossroads.” All Nora’s friends loved and spoiled Yurik—both those who considered him to be smart and wise beyond his years, and those who were wary of his eccentricities. Among the latter was Taisia, who continued to urge Nora to take the child to a children’s neurologist and other specialists. Nora, however, was reluctant to consult the specialists, until she realized that Yurik could distinguish colors only by their intensity. First she went to see an ophthalmologist. After studying a chart for ten minutes, the doctor announced that Yurik suffered from color blindness, and a rare form of it at that. They were referred to a neuropathologist, and from there made the rounds of all the specialists at the children’s polyclinic. Finally, they gave her a referral to the Institute of Defectology, where Yurik was examined by a whole brigade of doctors. Nora, who was present at this council of physicians, was astonished by the imprecision of the doctors’ questions, and the accuracy of Yurik’s answers. To begin, they asked whether he knew the names of the basic geometrical forms—triangle, circle, square. Then they asked, “What shape is a Christmas tree?”

  “Round,” Yurik said without missing a beat.

  They presented the geometric shapes again, and then asked the same question.

  “Round,” he said. Another explanation followed, and the question was put to him again.

  “But I’m looking at it from above!” Yurik said, agitated. Nora could hardly suppress a smile. She knew about his ability to look at things from his own perspective.

  The doctors exchanged glances and presented him with the next task. On a piece of paper divided into four sections, there were pictures of a horse’s head, a dog, a goose, and a sled.

  “Which picture doesn’t belong here?” an older woman with a braid encircling her head asked him in a sugary voice.

  “The horse.”

  “Why?” all the doctors said in a chorus.

  “Because the other ones are all whole, and there’s only one piece of the horse—his head.”

  “No, no, that’s wrong, think again,” the lady with the braid said.

  Yurik thought for a while, and examined the picture with great concentration.

  “The goose,” Yurik said confidently.

  And again they were taken by surprise.

  “Why?”

  “Because the horse and the dog can be hitched to the sled, but not the goose.”

  The women in the white robes exchanged significant glances again and requested the mother to leave. By now Nora had guessed that the correct answer was “sled,” since it was the only inanimate object in this menagerie. She left the room.

  When she was in the corridor, she no longer found it amusing, and felt angry at herself. Why had she dragged her bright child here to be examined by these idiots? They didn’t even realize how much better organized his mind was than their own. Nonetheless, they made a diagnosis: retardation of psychological development. In addition to giving Nora the paper with the diagnosis, they also directed her to a special live-in school for children with psychological aberrations.

  Not on your life! Next year, when he turned seven and was ready to go to first grade, she would enroll him in the same school that Nora’s parents had attended. She herself had not been able to attend because of new zoning rules requiring that she go to another school, which she still shuddered to remember. But there was still a year to go before he entered first grade, and Nora decided to start him in music school in the meantime.

  The closest one was the Central Music School, curated by the Moscow Conservatory. It was one of the best schools in the city, a rather refined and snobbish place that had been evacuated for a time for refurbishment but had just begun to function again in its home premises. Everything was institutional green-and-tan and smelled strongly of paint. Yurik inhaled the thick air through his nose. The interview was conducted by a plump middle-aged woman with an impressive tortoiseshell comb in her wispy gray hair, held back in a small bun.

  The woman first asked Yurik to sing, but he outright refused, and made a counteroffer to the woman—he suggested they play a game of chess. The lady raised her eyebrows slightly and declined the offer. She tapped her fingers on top of the piano and asked him to tap out the same rhythm. Yurik put his hands on the lid and beat out a rhythm that was long and complex, but in no way resembled what he had just heard; he was remembering his African djembe. The woman turned out to be needlessly persistent, and, bending over him, urged him to repeat the simple passage. Again he beat out a rhythm of his own. The teacher opened the lid of the piano and played do-re-mi. Yurik, standing next to her, held his nose and said, “It really stinks in here.”

  Perhaps if the woman had not doused herself with the old-fashioned Red Moscow scent, and had sprinkled the more modern Silver Lily-of-the-Valley or Carmen, Yurik’s life would have taken a different turn.

  They walked home. Yurik was quiet the whole way, contemplating something deeply. Next to their entranceway, he stopped, took his mother’s hand, and said, “Nora, why am I me?”

  Nora took in a gulp of air. How could she answer a question no one could answer?

  “Well, you know about yourself that you’re your own person, one of a kind, that you’re … ‘I.’ Other people are not you, but they all have their own ‘I.’”

  “But how do you know that I’m a one-of-a-kind person?” As they stood at the front door to the building, Yurik fiddled with Nora’s hand. She felt helpless with confusion. Then he said, “We’re all one-of-a-kind. Me, Grandmother Amalia, and Taisia. But I thought I was the only special one.”

  “Well, you were right,” Nora said, unsure what else to say.

  “And Vitya is also one-of-a-kind,” Yurik added, after thinking about it a bit.

  Nora froze. He’s right, she thought. They are both as different from other people as the Houyhnhnms are from the Yahoos.

  13

  A Major Year

  (1911)

  The year 1911 was wonderful from the start. Marusya spent Christmas with her brother Mikhail, who had arrived from Petersburg laden with presents and was dressed in the latest style of the urban capital, fashionably coiffed, with a small, neat beard and a waxed mustache. He had always been handsome, but now his appearance was almost provocative. Marusya felt a certain kind of ambivalence: It was exciting to walk down the boulevards with him. He piqued the interest of the ladies they encountered on their strolls. She foun
d it pleasant that they looked at him, and at the same time at her, but there was some discomfort mixed into it. Her overcoat was old, a cut that had long gone out of fashion, and, added to that, it was too big for her. What embarrassed her even more than the unfortunate overcoat, however, was that she, a sophisticated and educated young woman, suffered for such a banal, unworthy reason.

  Still, my hat is pretty, Marusya thought, brightening up—and then brought herself up short. What idiotic vulgarity! So the hat suits me. What does that matter? What significance does that have? What truly mattered was that Mikhail now talked to her about serious and weighty questions, as an equal, and not as if she were an empty-headed young lady.

  Their house was filled with Mikhail’s friends every evening. All of them admired Marusya’s beauty: her gray eyes fringed with thick lashes so dark they looked tinted—never! how trivial and coquettish it would be to paint them!—and her delicate, graceful hands. Her coat may have been old and ugly, but a new dress had just been made for her out of wonderful woolen cloth bought at the manufactory of Isaac Schwartzman. It was purchased at a reduced price because the cut was undersized—only enough for a girl. But it was just enough to make something for Marusya, and Mama accompanied her, not forgetting to bring the tape measure. They figured out how to lay the pattern just so, to use the least amount of fabric, and she said she would manage to cut it. Mother deliberated for a long time, afraid to cut into the expensive material, pinning it on Marusya this way and that, but at last it became a dress that was both elegant and modest, and not at all coquettish—with a tie! Marusya now lacked only one thing—her own ample bosom that would fill out the bodice a bit and be somewhat visible from above. Her solicitous mother, who was endowed with her own impressive bosom, suppressing a smile, made some gathers here, and some tucks there, concealing the faults and enhancing the virtues (a small, neat waist) of her figure.