Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  “Not much has survived, Nora. Even I have had to destroy my theater archives, twice over. I’ll take a look, though; maybe I still have something at the dacha.”

  Nora knew that Tusya had singled her out among the many who clamored for her attention, accepting her as an intimate. Her mood improved. She went home and made herself comfortable on the divan—to read. She knew that this was how the process began: you read, you go for a walk, then you start to draw. That was just what happened this time, too. It was a strange time, unprecedented—no Yurik, no work, the children’s art class she taught on summer break, her theater friends gone, some on tour, some on holiday trips—a void. Happiness. Even thoughts about Tengiz didn’t disturb her. He had arrived this time with King Lear, and Lear turned out to be more important … It was a question of “unaccommodated man.” As Tengiz said, half your life you accumulate things, and then you begin to cast them off. It wasn’t just about Lear. It was about everyone. You start going backward, to finish the cycle: You’re born, you acquire a multitude of qualities and traits, possessions, fame, knowledge, habits. You become a person, and then you slough it all off. And, finally, you abandon personhood itself. You reach absolute, primordial nakedness, the condition of a newborn baby, the aboriginal state.

  Tengiz had put in a brief appearance, then left. Nora quickly threw a few things together and went to Prioksky. Yurik was glad to see her, but five minutes later he was fussing around the puppies again. Their mother was weak, and the pups had to be bottle-fed. It was impossible to drag Yurik away from them; he held the bottle for hours on end. Nora went for a walk in the neighboring forest, a bit apprehensive, since it was a real forest, where you might lose your way. She spent two days with her mother. Amalia had positively bloomed from country life, and she laughed constantly, a high, ringing laugh, about everything and nothing. Andrei Ivanovich walked around with a contented smile on his face.

  “What are you smiling about?” Nora asked.

  “About everything,” Amalia answered, suddenly very serious, her smile gone. “Learn how, Nora, before it’s too late.”

  “Learn what?”

  “How to be happy.”

  “To be happy about what?” Nora said sternly, sensing all of a sudden that her mother was trying to tell her something important.

  “Oh, come on,” Amalia said, with a wave of her hand. “There’s every reason to be happy! I can’t explain it, and I can’t teach it to you. You just have to be happy.” Her face looked very young—perhaps not so much young as childlike.

  “Mama, what age do you feel?” Amalia was already past sixty.

  “You’d laugh if I told you,” said Amalia, laughing herself.

  “Don’t be coy with me—I’m not Andrei. Tell me the truth. We all have our own sense of how old we are.”

  Amalia stopped laughing. She thought hard, as though weighing something in her mind.

  “I can’t say exactly. But not more than twenty-three. Maybe a bit less. Between eighteen and twenty-three. What about you, Nora? How old do you feel?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll think about it. But definitely not twenty-three.”

  It’s a good question, Nora thought. Sometimes maybe even thirteen. On the other hand, she had always felt that she was older than her peers, until she was at least thirty. Then she discovered that they had become older, and she had remained young. Her friends became boring and put on weight. By forty, they had acquired a stolid respectability. I most likely stopped developing, Nora thought. Forty is certainly not the age I feel. But it’s just around the corner. Yes, maybe thirty is what I feel. I was always thirty. And then it’s understandable why at a certain moment I discovered I was older than Mama. She’s between eighteen and twenty-three.

  “You’re so intelligent and wise, Nora. How did I ever manage to give birth to such a brilliant daughter?” And again her girlish laughter rang out.

  Andrei Ivanovich drove Nora to the station, but this time Yurik came with them. He sat in the front seat, next to the driver. They talked together quietly, so quietly Nora could hardly hear. She had the unpleasant suspicion that they were talking about her. And, indeed, they were. When they got out of the car, Yurik went up to Nora to say goodbye, and handed her a little man made of wood chips. His hat was three tiny pinecones stuck together, and he had large feet and pawlike hands.

  “Nora, I made this myself. Sort of. He’s a jester. Grandpa helped just a little. He’s funny, isn’t he? It’s for you.”

  So that’s what they were whispering about. The jester. Very apropos … And that silly conversation with Amalia was very much to the point. It was also connected to what Tengiz had said.

  The whole way home, she dozed, dreaming lightly, feeling the rocking of the train, which sped along sometimes, then slowed down, and sometimes halted altogether. She had that strange feeling of suspension, of being in some indeterminate temporal dimension. She held the wooden jester in her hands, and from time to time he ended up in her dream. This was how her work on the project began.

  She still had to read a bit more—about the Transfiguration. First, Mount Tabor. The disciples fall down in a faint, because they can’t bear the light of Transfiguration; it plunges them into a sleeping dream. Not a dream, of course, but a sort of narcosis. It’s impossible for a human being to withstand, like leaping into the fourth dimension. That’s what I need. This is the finale, when Lear emerges into another dimension, beyond human cares and concerns, but is not yet dead—he’s in another, transformed state. The people who surround him, still alive, cannot perceive this state. They, and the audience with them, are agitated and shaken, and cannot comprehend what has happened.

  Then Tusya gave her a book by the philosopher Berdyaev. There, too, Nora found what she needed. It was articulated in somewhat complex language, but, simplified to the level that suited Nora’s needs, it came down to the idea that everything is infused with spirit, though the spiritual content of human beings is more capacious than that of animals; trees and other plants also partake of the spiritual principle, but to a still lesser degree. Even inert matter, such as a rock, is not completely dead; it also contains a trace of spirit. Which is very important in this case, since the storm in Lear is a mutiny of living elements—water, wind, fire. This is where Lear has his epiphany about naked man. Precisely here. And with this insight he begins to grow younger and younger as the play progresses. It begins as a story of an old man, and ends—through Transfiguration—with Lear casting everything off. Well, he begins to divest himself even before. And the first thing he casts off is power. But he still doesn’t understand what will follow from this.

  The first drawing that Nora made was Lear in the first act. He is dressed in multilayered garments. They hang from him as though on a standing coatrack, with extended hooks and arms, and over all the layers is draped his royal mantle. He takes it off, announcing that he is ceding his power to his daughters. His gnarled, emaciated hands, with their enormous swollen joints, are, possibly, trembling. His face is covered with deep wrinkles, folds of sagging skin, with hanging lips and jowls, and two tendons in his neck, between which a flaccid sack of skin hangs down under his chin.

  I’ll make a mask out of latex, Nora thought. I can try, at least. And old-man’s warts with tufts of hair growing from them. And overgrown shaggy eyebrows that hang down, nearly covering his eyes. After his rejection of Goneril and his flight to take refuge with Regan, he is wearing less clothing. Part of it he threw off in rage. His face looks younger, sterner, and more defined—let’s say he looked ninety before, and now he has become younger by twenty years. And after the storm—we’ll simply rely on good old-man’s makeup, without any of the extras. We’ll remove all the facial molding … And now he’s wearing only his undergarments. And in the final act, at the very end, he’s a young man, with the young Cordelia in his arms—they are the same age. No makeup at all. A young face, a young body. And let Lear be played by a young actor, in his early thirties. So here there must be complete tra
nsformation—no clothes whatsoever, absolutely naked. Well, in a flesh-colored bodysuit, without any hair, without any visible sexual traits—because sex is also cast off. Denuded man!

  The set will be spare in the extreme. Only the cliffs. But in the first act, the cliffs are covered with rugs, priceless tapestries, and fabrics; then, with the first banishment, and the second, the rugs and tapestries disappear. During the storm, only rags blow across the stage. And in the finale, there is not a scrap of anything left. Corpses, the sentries pressed against the cliffs, are strewn somewhere below. Lear carries the dead Cordelia in his arms and climbs up one of the cliffs. Naked, without any covering at all.

  Edgar, the Jester, and Kent watch them from below, like Jesus’ disciples at the moment of his Transfiguration. The light is unbearable. The cliffs begin to light up. That’s what we’ll do. And Lear and Cordelia remain, standing in the rays of light. The End. Applause.

  16

  A Secret Marriage

  (1911)

  Marusya spent just a few days in Moscow, but when she returned home, it seemed to Jacob that she was now older than he was. She was, indeed, older than he was—by eleven days. Jacob, with all his inclination to philosophize, had not yet stumbled on this notion—the incommensurability of the flow of time and age, and, especially, the disparate rhythms and cycles of age in men and women. That note of condescending tenderness that he had acquired through the years of interacting with his younger sisters, and which he at first transferred to Marusya, seemed misplaced or insufficient. Marusya’s unexpected maturation forced him to grow up, too. He wrote an entry about it in his diary soon after her return:

  Everything that has happened to me up until today was simply a puppy’s ecstasy at the sight of a pretty young woman. Even our wonderful conversations are meaningless, because they are just the dreams of underdeveloped, puerile young people. Now I understand that only manly behavior, powerful masculine action, can correct this. If not, I’m lost. I remember with shame how we stood by the ravine in the Royal Garden, and the moment was perfect, but even then I didn’t dare kiss her. Even writing the word “her” makes me uncomfortable. Our relationship has formed on the basis of interests we share, and the fact that we belong to different sexes, that there is something between us that is purely “sexual,” should not be that important. It’s almost a kind of captivity, and it can only be overcome through unity, through wholeness and integration. Indeed, if I understand Plato correctly, this is the idea behind the “androgyne”—to be such an integrated being that sex doesn’t undermine the unity.

  Jacob, following his tried-and-true custom of sharing his deepest thoughts with Marusya, outlined his notions for her in a less coherent form. Yes, she also thought about the subject of sex, and the biology lectures in her studies had made a strong impression on her. From them, Marusya had gleaned that women pay a high price for their childbearing capacity, and the inequality of the sexes derives directly from the divergent biological functions of the male and the female. But this view led her in the opposite direction—not toward androgyny, but in the direction of the authentic emancipation of women in the psychological, intellectual, and spiritual realms. There could never be any equality on the level of biology, since nature had assigned women the role of the continuation of the species, the birth and nurturing of children. This inhibits the full development of her capacities. Jacob completely shared Marusya’s views on emancipation, and even pointed out to her that men were obliged to share these views; otherwise, an intelligent, rational partnership would become a competition, and no good would come of it.

  These conversations brought them closer and closer together, and Marusya’s thoughts in some way fed his courage. They finished their exams in June. Jacob qualified to enter the second year of the Commercial Institute, he passed his in absentia exams in the program of music theory at the conservatory, and Marusya received a certificate of completion of the Froebel Courses. Jacqueline Osipovna offered her the chance to work in the Froebel Society as an assistant until autumn. Now Marusya and Jacob met nearly every day; he came to see her at home, and got to know her parents and her brother Mikhail, who had just arrived from St. Petersburg. On July 12, having been detained in town for two weeks because Rayechka was ill, the Ossetsky family left for a dacha in Lustdorf, near Odessa, where they had rented a spacious house for many years running.

  Jacob stayed in town. Both he and Marusya understood that it was written in the stars—the ineluctable, long-desired, and frightening moment of reckoning had arrived. The day after his parents’ departure, Jacob brought Marusya, trembling with horror and determination, home with him. On that day, her own parents were traveling to Poltava, to the funeral of a distant relative on her mother’s side. This only intensified the sense of criminality about what they were doing. The Ossetsky apartment was on the third floor of one of the most beautiful homes on Kuznechnaya Street. In the entrance hall, Marusya already felt oppressed and irritated by the dark-red carpet runner on the stairs and the gleaming chandelier on the landing.

  “What a bourgeois house,” Marusya said with marked disapproval.

  “Yes, I know,” Jacob said absentmindedly.

  “I could never live in a house like this!” She felt like arguing a bit with Jacob; she was scared to go inside.

  “Of course, Marusya, you and I would choose a very different kind of apartment to live in.”

  “You can be sure of that,” Marusya said.

  Jacob opened the door with his key, slammed it behind them, then pressed Marusya against the door in a rough and awkward embrace.

  She knew why they had come to this empty apartment. Now his strength and passion, his urgency, his insistent embraces, the smell of his man’s cologne, the smoothness of his shaven cheeks, and the brushlike mustache he had recently grown left her no escape. It could not have been called capitulation, and it was uncertain whose victory it was over whom.

  The details of this night were unforgettable. For many years, they smiled when they recalled their first fumbling attempt and their mutual disappointment, and how they wept, burying their heads in each other’s necks in shame for what didn’t happen. How they fell asleep hugging each other, having cried out all their tears over their unfulfilled lovemaking, and how, toward morning, waking up together at the same time, they discovered that everything had happened for the best, just as they had imagined it, and even better.

  “My wife,” Jacob said, placing her small foot on his head.

  “My husband,” Marusya answered, trying to kiss his hand. When he tried to pull the hand away, she quickly turned it over and kissed his palm. “Jacob, dear heart, my Jacob!”

  Then they kissed for a long time.

  “Let’s go take a bath,” Jacob said, and she followed him down the long hallway to the bathroom. It was only the second bathroom—after the one in Moscow—that Marusya had ever seen. Luxury upon luxury—a white bathtub on cast-iron legs. A bourgeois bathtub, a bourgeois life, but—devil take it—how lovely it was! The water was cold, because the boiler had been turned off while the family was away. They splashed around in the frigid water until they couldn’t take the cold anymore, feeling like young animals, puppies or beavers, completely unashamed of their nakedness. Then Marusya washed the sheet, on which there was a small oval patch of blood. It didn’t hurt—she just stung a bit inside.

  Morning came. They were terribly hungry.

  “What do you eat for breakfast?” he said.

  “Bread and butter. With milk.”

  “There’s no milk. Shall I prepare tea?”

  He went to the kitchen. A loaf of white bread wrapped up in a kitchen towel, slightly stale, lay in the bread basket. He took some butter out of salted water and put it in the butter dish. Wanting everything to be nice, he fetched two of the best china teacups from the cupboard, boiled water on the kerosene burner, and prepared the tea in a teapot, which he placed on a tray with the two cups. Then he took it to his room.

  Marusya, wearing a
light-blue blouse, her hair gathered up in a velvet ribbon, was standing by the window. Jacob nearly dropped the tray in surprise—a stranger, a completely unfamiliar young lady, turned around to look when the door to the room opened. But she smiled, and became herself again.

  They breakfasted at Jacob’s desk—the only table in the room—moving the books and papers aside to make room for the tray in the middle.

  “What beautiful cups,” Marusya said, raising hers.

  “Papa gave them to Mama when their first son was born. He died of diphtheria when he was only two. Grandmother says that Mama nearly lost her mind from grief, and even tried to drown herself.”

  Marusya was quiet, holding her tongue though there were words clamoring to be said.

  “She was already pregnant with me at the time, and her depression went away when I was born. Papa sent her to a sanatorium in Germany, and I was with her when she came back. And she was all better.”

  Here Marusya couldn’t restrain herself, and she said what was on her mind. “Rich people can afford to take cures abroad. You should see how simple women laborers live. If a child dies, they go to the factory the next day after the funeral and work ten hours—no depression or sanatorium for them. Rich people don’t even want to know this.”

  Jacob spread some butter on a piece of bread with a blunt knife, then put it on a small plate with fluted edges and placed it in front of Marusya. “Well, we didn’t invent social inequality. That’s just how the world is made,” he said in a conciliatory manner.