Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  But I am an optimist, Mrs. Ossetsky, and I know that you are, too, more so than many, and for that reason we will hope that very soon we will all be together in Moscow, and we will raise a toast in honor of the victorious finish of the war and all the good that lies ahead.

  I send you my warmest, warmest greetings,

  Egor Gavrilin

  GENRIKH TO MARUSYA

  Postcard

  FEBRUARY 15, 1942

  Mama! Sasha Figner has not heard anything from his parents in more than one and a half months. He asks you to call phone number D2-24-47, or inquire at his parents’ address: 6 Novinsky Boulevard, apartment 13, to find out whether everything is all right.

  * * *

  Some marriages are made in heaven, but the war made Amalia and Genrikh’s. They were never friends during high school. Genrikh looked at Amalia from afar, but she was surrounded by an impenetrable wall of friends, both boys and girls, and at the time when Genrikh left school, Tisha Golovanov, who was in love with her, was always by her side. Amalia and Tisha married right after they finished tenth grade and graduated, and the whole class celebrated the first wedding among their classmates. Genrikh didn’t attend the wedding—by that time he was already living the life of an adult, working and studying, and he rarely saw his former classmates.

  He and Amalia didn’t meet again until December 1941, in Sverdlovsk, at the bazaar. Both of them had been evacuated—Genrikh with students of the Institute from which he was supposed to graduate that year, and Amalia from the design bureau where she worked. They both worked for Uralmash, which at that time was launching self-propelled guns. Genrikh worked in the project design department, and Amalia in Design Bureau 9, on the other side of town.

  They delighted in each other’s company—as fellow Muscovites, neighbors, former classmates, with a great many common memories and common friends. During the first months of the war, four boys from their class perished. The first “killed in battle” notice was about Amalia’s husband, Tisha Golovanov, at the end of July 1941. Amalia took her bereavement very hard. The last stage of their relationship had been difficult: Tisha had begun to drink heavily, Amalia was ashamed about his drunkenness, they quarreled for an entire year, and Amalia’s mother, Zinaida, having suffered enough from the drunken behavior of men, lit a match to the fire so Amalia would kick Tisha out. He went to live with his mother; but now, after his death, Amalia couldn’t forgive herself for the falling out. Why couldn’t she simply have put up with it? It was especially painful to her that she and her husband hadn’t even managed to say goodbye, she had never written to him, and she hadn’t received a single letter from him. Amalia, as his wife, was given the news first, and had to go inform Tisha’s mother, who wailed and keened and then chased Amalia out of the house.

  Amalia suffered not only the loss of her husband, but the loss of herself. She was used to living in peace with herself. The world smiled at her, and she liked herself well enough—what she didn’t like, she just didn’t look at. Instinctively, she preferred to avoid complications, not to multiply them. After Tisha’s death, she couldn’t return to her old habits of mind and her peaceable accommodation with the world. She was haunted by a feeling of guilt toward him, and tormented by what she thought was her own sinfulness, overcome by despair and loneliness, without a shadow of hope. Her own life seemed doomed and worthless to her.

  She was happy to be evacuated—Moscow had become unbearable—but Sverdlovsk turned out to be worse.

  Work was hard. It began at eight in the morning, and ended at various times, but never before eight in the evening. She left work every day with a swollen face and blue-tinged fingers, shivering with cold. In the room where the drafting boards were set up, where she worked, the temperature never rose above fifty degrees Fahrenheit.

  The food supply in the city was meager. Food rations had not yet been introduced, and people lined up at the stores from early morning to buy a portion. A single person with a job had no time to stand in line. If it hadn’t been for the cafeteria at her workplace, she would have starved. On the last weekend before the New Year’s celebration, Amalia made her way to the market to buy some food—potatoes and rutabagas. Right in the middle of the vegetable stands, Genrikh appeared. She didn’t recognize him at first. Genrikh recognized her right away, by her blue eyes and her white fur hat—which she had worn since high school—with two earflaps and a pompom on the top.

  They grabbed each other’s hands and embraced warmly. Genrikh picked up her bag and carried it for her—two kilograms of potatoes and a kilogram of rutabagas. Amalia also wanted to buy milk, but she didn’t have enough money; it had already become very expensive. Genrikh had a bottle of vodka to barter. They exchanged it for two loaves of bread. He gave one of them to Amalia. People were already hungry, but that was only the beginning of the deprivations they would experience in the coming year.

  They celebrated the New Year in Genrikh’s dormitory, with his fellow students. Amalia was acknowledged to be the prettiest girl there. The contestants were few: Dilyara, a typist from the dean’s office, sweet, with slightly bulging eyes caused by Graves’ disease; and Sonya, the librarian, with an elongated nose, narrow face, and slightly protruding ears. From that evening on, Amalia became Genrikh’s girlfriend.

  Genrikh met Amalia after work to accompany her to her dormitory, and then returned to his own, an hour’s walk through the dark, deserted city.

  They got married in the spring of 1942. Now they lived not in dormitories but in a room in the family barracks. It was partitioned by a curtain; the second half of the room was occupied by a couple that had also been evacuated—engineers from Minsk, reticent and unfriendly. It was easier, and warmer for the two of them, to live together in the luxury of half a room. Still, they were hungry.

  At the same time, Marusya was rushing around Moscow, which was becoming empty of residents, trying to find a decent job. She had been dogged by disappointment for a long time now: after the high hopes and expectations of her youth, the star that had lured her had begun to set. She had not become an actress, or a pedagogue; and she had not been able to break into journalism, either. The apex of her career was an occasional publication in the newspaper The Factory Whistle. It was comforting to know that wonderful writers appeared in the publication—Ilf and Petrov, Yuri Olesha, Paustovsky … and Marusya. There was also Pioneers’ Pravda, where Marusya managed to publish her articles devoted to children’s arts, gesturing subtly toward the Froebel principles of pedagogy. Her favorite journal, Soviet Toys and Games, to which she had been recommended by Nadezhda Krupskaya herself, had already closed down before the war. How interesting it had been to work there! They created new Soviet games and toys with new ideological content … But it was in the past, it was all in the past.

  Marusya did not give up, however. She wrote, and ran around from one editorial office to another, offering them her work, and suddenly her efforts were met with unexpected success. A chance meeting, an offer that it would have been impossible even to contemplate—she was invited to work at the Moscow Theater of Drama as assistant to the artistic director in the Literary Section, and, if the occasion arose, to work with the actors. The other theaters had all been evacuated, but this one, organized by a director named Gorchakov, had elected to stay in Moscow in 1941.

  Oh, joy! Marusya again breathed in the air of the theater and the dust of the footlights. They staged a play the public needed—Russian People, by Konstantin Simonov. It didn’t matter that the play was somewhat clumsy, and that daily life was hard, and shortages unavoidable. Marusya had the luxury of creative work, which was dearer to her than that most essential thing, bread. She flew through the darkened streets of Moscow, reborn, and dead tired. She wrote Genrikh occasional cheery letters and worked unflaggingly for the welfare of the country.

  Amalia and Genrikh worked quietly behind their curtain, and their silent lovemaking brought forth fruit. What had not happened in five years of married life with Tisha came about now: Ama
lia was pregnant. She didn’t realize it for the first few months. Her period stopped, but during that hungry year, many young women stopped menstruating. Nature resisted conception. Amalia attributed her symptoms to exhaustion and malnourishment. She visited the doctor for the first time during the sixth month of her pregnancy, when the baby had begun to kick, announcing its existence. Her belly had begun to round out a little, some yellow spots had appeared on her face, and her lips were swollen. But she didn’t need to adjust a single button on her clothing—she herself lost weight, and all her nourishment went to the child. Her gait changed; she rocked as she walked, leaning back a bit like a duck, in her fear of falling.

  The summer was unusually cold and rainy that year. It passed by almost unnoticed, and an early winter set in. The biggest trial was not the constant hunger, but the outhouse, which one had to visit every day, whether one wanted to or not. A long trench was dug, with rough boards resting on top like the walls of a temporary shed. Inside, by the wall, was a kind of battered platform covered with frozen urine and steadily increasing piles of excrement. Every trip to the outhouse was like a double balancing act. The natural boundaries of shame collapsed. Gripping her husband’s arms, in the darkness cut by the light of Genrikh’s flashlight, Amalia planted herself above a terrifying hole. Tears flowed down her face as blood squeezed out of the hemorrhoidal knots in her rectum. Genrikh could hardly keep from crying himself, seeing his wife’s suffering. With passion that surpassed that of the three Prozorov sisters by many degrees, the couple echoed Chekhov’s words: “To Moscow! To Moscow!” Because of the war, this was virtually impossible.

  At the beginning of 1943, the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, well known to Genrikh from his visit to his father, was closed down. Uralmash increased its production of tanks at an expedited pace. Genrikh worked on a design project that facilitated one of the most labor-intensive processes in high-precision metalworking. After finishing his work ahead of schedule, he received a prize. On the basis of this achievement, he asked the chief of his department, Abuzarov, to write him a letter of reference for an appointment with the director of the plant, Muzrukov. The director’s secretary, Dina, toward whom he was kindly disposed, was Abuzarov’s sister … Abuzarov laughed and refused, saying that it was impossible to make an appointment with the Lord God Himself. There had never been a case when the director agreed to receive a paltry engineer. Genrikh refused to back down, however.

  “But why is it so urgent for you to see the big boss?” Abuzarov said. “You received a prize; what more do you want? They still won’t give you a room to live in.”

  “Ask Dina. As a personal favor. I have to send my wife to Moscow,” Genrikh told him. “She’s been driven to exhaustion, and she’s going to give birth soon.”

  Abuzarov scratched his scaly cheek with his scaly hand. “I’ll ask Dina, but it isn’t likely to work. If it does, you owe me one.”

  “Three, if you want!” Genrikh said.

  The meeting did take place, and the results were very positive. The director assumed that the greenhorn would request a separate room in a dormitory—but the housing issue was very tense. The scrawny-necked youth, who didn’t look a day over eighteen, asked for a permit for his pregnant wife to return to Moscow. This took Muzrukov by surprise—he’s not asking for housing?—and he called Design Bureau 9, where Amalia worked. Though they were even more surprised to receive a call from the big boss, they agreed to let Amalia leave for Moscow under the circumstances.

  During the entire conversation, Genrikh stood at attention before the director’s desk, astonished at the ease with which decisions were made about issues that were insoluble for ordinary people.

  The entrance permit into Moscow was wangled in a particular way, by a complex procedure. Muzrukov called the first secretary of the Sverdlovsk Regional Party Committee, Andrianov, and the issue was resolved definitively—a permit to go to Moscow to reside was ordered and duly received.

  Three bottles of vodka, purchased on the black market at half the sum Genrikh earned from his prize, were given to Abuzarov. Abuzarov was happy. His father was trying to finish rebuilding a cowshed that had fallen into disrepair. Building materials were hard to come by, and vodka had been used as a currency of exchange for any goods since time immemorial.

  The second half of the prize money was sent to Marusya. At first, Amalia was offended that Genrikh had sent the rest of it to his mother, but then she reconsidered and realized that he had not yet quite grown used to being a husband.

  In the beginning of 1943, during a raging blizzard, Genrikh took his wife, who was heavily pregnant, to the station. He had to search and search to find the train, which was standing half a mile from the platform, and he propelled Amalia in that direction. He managed to stuff her suitcase into the car of the train, but the bag with scanty provisions for the trip stayed behind. The train started moving away. Thus, Amalia traveled for nearly four days and nights almost without eating. She was ill with flu, racked by pain, and bleeding. Her mother met her at the station with their lame neighbor, Pustygin, whom Zinaida had asked to carry the suitcase.

  It was cold and dark at the station in Moscow. A blizzard was raging there, too, but not of such prodigious proportions as the one that had seen Amalia off in the Urals.

  A few days later, Marusya, Amalia’s mother-in-law, visited. The first visit was very cordial. Her mother-in-law talked about Genrikh; she was cheerful and witty. Amalia recalled their classmates, whom Marusya remembered, too; she even mentioned Tisha. They counted the dead. They grieved, and they found reasons to be glad as well.

  “It would be good if the baby were a girl,” Marusya said before she left.

  “Everyone says that it will be a girl. Mama says that girls suck away the mother’s good looks, and I’ve become so unattractive since I got pregnant.”

  “It will pass, it will pass,” Marusya said magnanimously.

  In the beginning of March, in the Grauerman Maternity Hospital, where she herself had been born, Amalia brought into the world a four-pound-four-ounce girl. They called her Nora, on Marusya’s insistence. Amalia would have preferred “Lenochka,” but it was not Nora’s fate to be a Lenochka. The doctor delivered the baby and tied up the hemorrhoids that had plagued Amalia the entire second half of her pregnancy. They never troubled her again.

  At the end of 1944, Genrikh returned to Moscow. The war had turned into victory—Stalin’s Ten Blows ushered the Red Army into Europe. Victory was already hanging in the air, but the “killed in battle” notices kept coming.

  Of all the boys in their class, only two remained alive after the war: Genrikh himself, and Jack Rubin. Jack came home with no legs. From the class of ’41, there were also only two who survived. One of them was Daniel Mitlyansky, who subsequently became a sculptor. In front of their school, a statue commemorating these boys still stands, a statue made by Daniel at the beginning of the 1970s. But that time was still a long way off.

  42

  Fifth Try

  (2000–2009)

  Liza and Yurik saw each other for the first time in the rehabilitation clinic, on the day Yurik was discharged. Liza came to pick up her cousin Marfa, who had finished her rehab treatment on the same day. A group of people who had been waiting for more than an hour for official stamps on their documents, which had been locked in the desk drawer by a secretary who had gone to lunch, consisted of Nora, Tengiz, and Yurik in one cluster, and, in the other, Liza, Marfa, and Liza’s fat aunt Rita, as crushed by the misfortune of it all as a 250-pound hulk, holding a tiny infant encased in a towel—Marfa’s three-month-old son—could possibly be. Marfa, who could hardly be said to exist at all if not for the evidence of her penciled-on eyebrows and large, brown-painted lips outlined in a darker-brown lipstick, had somehow managed to give birth, having barely been aware of her pregnancy or the labor itself. For the whole previous year, Marfa had been in a constant drug-induced stupor, and had only a fragmentary recollection of what had happened. Marfa and Yurik were the
only ones in the group who talked to each other. All the other relatives of those who had finished their six-week treatment were cautiously silent. They were used to living with a shameful secret that demanded nondisclosure by all concerned. Yurik and Marfa discussed a fellow who was staying behind in the clinic, and even censured him for his overbearing behavior.

  Liza, who had spent a great deal of effort trying to drag her cousin out of her narcotic haze, regarded with sympathy another family who were fighting for the life of their child. Nora and Tengiz left to smoke every ten minutes. The first time they went out, Tengiz motioned to Yurik to come with them to smoke.

  “No, no, Tengiz. I don’t smoke … for the time being,” said the curly-haired drug addict, laughing. “Just give me two or three days.”

  “Damn, you’re one tough dude, Yurik!” Marfa praised him.

  “If you had brought the guitar, I’d sit down to play right now…”

  “Your guitar is in the car. I brought it,” his mother said.

  “Nora, you’re amazing.”

  Maybe they’re not his parents, since he calls them by name, Liza thought to herself. But the fellow called after Nora as she went out, “Mama, the six-string, I hope?”

  “Naturally,” she said, nodding.

  Nora brought in the guitar. Yurik took it out of the case and stroked the strings with his hand. They responded the way a dog responds to the touch of its master—with eager warmth and devotion. And he played something familiar, tender, and cheerful. His face changed: he pressed his lips together, and his eyes stared in front of him with intense concentration, seeing clearly what was inaccessible to others. His head nodded slightly in time with the music.