Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  Marusya asked her to send the remedy by mail. Asya was at a loss for words. When she recovered her composure, she said yes, she could send it by mail, but by the time it got there it wouldn’t work anymore. Besides, would they even allow her to send a bottle through the mail?

  Politely, without any spite, Marusya told Asya that she had no plans to go to Biysk in the near future, and that if Asya considered it necessary she was free to go herself—today, if need be.

  Asya, thrown off guard, and living up to her reputation, said, “But I don’t even know where Jacob lives.”

  “The town of Biysk, 27 Kvartalnaya Street. Please excuse me, Asya, I can’t talk right now.” And Marusya hung up the phone. My goodness, what an idiot, she thought to herself.

  Asya went to the train station and bought a ticket for the city of Novosibirsk. They told her that she could only reach Biysk by a local commuter train. By the evening of the next day, she was sitting on a train to Siberia, traveling to a place that Marusya would never make it to.

  In her suitcase, encased in a canvas covering, Asya was carrying a carefully wrapped half-liter bottle of a viscous dark-amber liquid, and, just as carefully wrapped, foodstuffs—two bottles of homemade jam, two kilograms of flour, and two kilograms of millet. She looked out the window, and enjoyed watching the fields and forests slip past; she hadn’t gone on vacation in three years, and everything she saw delighted her.

  Since her youth, she had spent the greater part of her time in hospitals and clinics, among doctors and the sick, and twice she had been called upon to assist famous surgeons. One of them was killed in a field hospital during the war, by a random shell. The second, an old country doctor, died of a heart attack while he was operating. Admiration was a requirement for her rapturous nature, and the surgeons she worked with now did not inspire respect. One of them accepted gifts from the patients—bribes, in other words. Another had a reputation as a ladies’ man, and surrounded himself with a flock of pretty nurses, with whom he amused himself in convenient nooks and corners of the clinic. For shame, for shame …

  Asya was unable to find her ideal in her immediate surroundings, but Jacob, to whom in her youth she had assigned the role of ideal man and human being, still existed in some far-off place. The dark-amber liquid in the bottle that she had brought from the back of beyond was intended to allay his suffering. This was her mission—it was not the ordinary journey of a distant relative to an exile banished to a remote realm, somewhere deep in Siberia. What a pity that it was she and not Marusya on that train—a visit from his wife would have brought Jacob far greater joy!

  While the crazy Asya was journeying toward the Altai Mountains with the miracle potion in her suitcase, Marusya was also thinking about Jacob. The reason for this was Ivan Belousov, with whom (not simply out of the blue) she had renewed her relations. The history of the Party was the main topic of discussion, and Marusya tenderly recalled the time when the curly-haired, clumsy Ivan had tried to take her by the arm.

  Ivan walked her home now after classes. He took her by the arm without any hesitation, was friendly but reserved, and did not transgress any boundaries. But their conversation, starting with the main topic, Party history, somehow flowed smoothly into the memories of their youth, and at one point he squeezed her arm above her elbow—not very firmly, but not too weakly, either; with just the right degree of pressure. At that moment, Marusya felt that she was betraying Jacob. Yes, she wanted to betray him … After she got home, she weighed every word that Ivan had said that evening and realized that she agreed with him. Jacob would not have agreed with him: he would have said something sharp and critical! And she experienced a surge of irritation toward her husband.

  She had to admit that Belousov, ridiculous and awkward in his youth, had now become a kindred spirit. He was educated, but in another way from Jacob; and, like Jacob, he was also a writer, but in a different vein. How easily his dyed-in-the-wool proletarian origins won out over Jacob’s bourgeois complexities!

  Their walks after classes lasted longer and longer, and Jacob was a constant presence, somewhere in the background. Marusya felt she was carrying on a conversation with two people: with Ivan out loud, and with Jacob in her head.

  Asya had to wait for the train to Biysk for three hours, and she managed to send a telegram to Jacob to let him know she was coming. He didn’t meet her at the station. Late in the evening, with a suitcase and a handbag, in boots with little heels that sank into a deep layer of freshly fallen snow, as soft and light as feathers, she wandered around for a long time in search of Jacob’s house, though he lived only ten minutes by foot from the station.

  The telegram was delivered while Asya was groping through the darkness next to the house where Jacob rented a room. She couldn’t imagine the intense surge of happiness Jacob felt when he took the telegram and read the words “Meet me.” For years now, these words had been connected with the dream of a visit from his wife. Nor could she have imagined how deep was his surprise and dismay when he saw that the signature on the telegram read “Asya.” He didn’t immediately understand who this Asya was that was coming to see him. It occurred to him it might have been some sort of mistake. He put on his overcoat and went out onto the porch, and a moment later was greeting his visitor. He pressed the frozen hand that she worked out of her sleeve, grabbed the suitcase, half buried in the snow, and led her into the house, nearly weeping from sad disappointment.

  After helping Asya take off her coat, her headscarf, her boots, he put the kettle on for tea. Asya smiled and began rubbing her red hands together—intelligent, skillful hands with fingernails clipped nearly to the quick, and with a permanent outline of iodine around the rims.

  Jacob didn’t even think to wonder why she had come. He assumed that she had affairs of her own to attend to, that she was on some sort of business trip, or whatever it was called in her line of work. While she tried to get warm, he placed a mug and a glass on the desk (he had no other table in the tiny room) and poured out the tea. They ate black bread and butter and drank bitter tea. Asya regretted that she had not thought to buy good tea (and would not have had time, anyway) at Eliseyevsky’s delicacy store. At first their conversation revolved around the family, but Asya had no information to convey about the daily affairs of Marusya and Genrikh. She saw them seldom, and couldn’t add anything to what Jacob already knew. He began to question Asya about her work, and she eagerly, even fervently, informed him about the hospital where she had been working for ten years. She told him about how she had gotten the job, and which prominent surgeons she had assisted, on which occasions.

  She glanced furtively at his hands; they looked terrible.

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll have a look,” Asya said.

  Jacob placed both hands on the top of the desk. They looked as if he were wearing crimson fingerless gloves. His long, white fingers, which bent slightly at the last joints, were clean, but from the knuckles upward, and running under the sleeve of his sweater, was one big scab. She turned his hands over and began examining his palms. The skin was healthy up to his wrists, but above them it looked like a sleeve made of some rough red fabric.

  Jacob smiled through his mustache and said, joking, “Asya, did you come here on account of this?”

  “Yes, of course! Didn’t Marusya write you about the wonder-working potion? My friend”—here the scrupulous Asya corrected herself—“the daughter of my friend, that is—was cured in two weeks. And she had already tried everything; they even took her to the Military Academy Hospital in Leningrad and gave her X-ray treatments, but nothing helped.”

  Asya rushed over to her suitcase, still in its canvas casing and standing in a puddle of melting snow. She started peeling off the soaking layer of heavy fabric. Jacob tried to help her, but she said no, no, she would do it herself. Finally, she pulled out the sacred bottle, removed an outer layer of newspaper, then the thick black paper in which it was wrapped, and plunked it down on the table.

  “There. For you.”


  How touching, how sweet this Asya is, thought Jacob. She’d carried this ridiculous bottle all the way from Moscow to Siberia.

  “Thank you, Asya, I will certainly give it a try. There have been times when the rash cleared up completely, but then it came back. I don’t think they have invented a medicament that will cure eczema once and for all. But I will definitely try it.”

  “Let’s try it right now, so as not to waste any more time. Annechka already saw a difference in her condition by the third day. You know, Jacob, I have a return ticket in only eight days. I took a leave of two weeks, but the traveling time takes nearly seven days. So let’s start right away. I’ll apply the poultice and then go to a hotel. Is there a hotel near the station?”

  “Asya,” Jacob said. A wild suspicion seized him. “Did you come to Biysk on a business trip, or…?”

  “No, no. Didn’t Marusya tell you? I got hold of the medicine, thinking that she would bring it to you herself, but she was busy, so she gave me the address, and … here I am.”

  This was some sort of madness. Asya here, and some old lady, a poultice … And this is why she came all the way to Biysk?

  Scratching his hand, Jacob suggested that they postpone the first treatment until the next day, but Asya insisted: Right now! No waiting. He firmly announced that it was too late today and that he needed to go to bed, because he had to go to work early the next morning. He settled Asya on his narrow cot and made a pallet on the floor for himself—a sheepskin coat covered with a sheet. There was no hotel to speak of in Biysk, but he’d have to go to the police to register her tomorrow.

  In the morning, Jacob went to work at the bank. When he returned, Asya was sitting at the desk, crocheting white lace with a tiny hook. She was embarrassed.

  “Everyone says it’s silly and bourgeois, but it’s so soothing.” She quickly folded away her handiwork in a knitted bag.

  In the evening, the first treatment took place. At the same time, there was a fall from grace. He didn’t even get the chance to start liking the woman. In all her forty years, no man had ever liked her, even in her youth. But her firm and gentle touch on his hands, and his legs, and his groin, which was also covered with the small, fiery-red spots of eczema, was so arousing that it happened in a flash, almost unconsciously. The prolonged male hunger and the professional sympathy of a woman’s hands came together and quickened the flame of passion.

  Asya had no wish to seduce someone else’s husband, especially the husband of her revered Marusya, but everything happened so fast, so spontaneously, for both of them.

  They lay on a white sheet spotted with brown herbs from the potion, themselves smeared with the herbal sludge, pressed closely together—and they both cried. It was an upheaval, and a great corporeal celebration, and a terrible shame, which receded when Jacob again entered the heart of the world, the depths of the body of a woman to whom he was not bound by anything except perhaps gratitude. And so, until morning, they both struggled with shame, and came out victors. Almost victors. Devastation, then tenderness, and again gratitude.

  They spent the whole week with hardly a break in their nighttime embraces. Then they parted—a decision they had made mutually—forever. Jacob accompanied Asya to the station. The March snow had not ceased falling since the day Asya arrived. She brushed the snow from her eyelashes, and lifted her boots out of the drifts, in which they kept getting stuck. Jacob carried her suitcase. With a certain sense of relief, Jacob kissed Asya, pushed his hand under her coat, and stroked her heavy breasts, destined for nourishing a multitude of children but preserved in barren virginity. They had decided between them that they were not guilty of anything, and that fate had presented them with a holiday they would keep secret for the rest of their lives. And Marusya had nothing to do with it. As for the main purpose of Asya’s visit, it had not been achieved. The wonder-working brew had absolutely no effect on Jacob’s eczema.

  Moscow had experienced the same heavy snowfall as there had been in Altai. Ivan Belousov waited for Marusya by the entrance on Povarskaya Street, and when she came downstairs—wearing a black coat with a lambskin collar and a lambskin muff, and with her slightly reddened eyelids lowered, Ivan suddenly embraced her and kissed her. Nothing like that had happened before between them, and the kiss was more like one of childish ecstasy than mature, masculine delight.

  Marusya had been spending a great deal of time with Professor Belousov for half a year already. They no longer limited their time together to walks down the boulevards. They attended lectures at the Polytechnic Museum together and went to various concerts and performances. This time, Ivan had invited Marusya to the première of the opera And Quiet Flows the Don.

  Marusya was agitated. For one thing, whatever would she wear? She had no appropriate garments for an opening night. Second, going to the opera like this was an open challenge, and an admission. A challenge to those acquaintances she might meet in the theater, and an admission that Professor Belousov had the sort of relationship with her that allowed him to invite her to the theater. In twenty-five years she had never been to the theater with any man other than her husband. In fact, though, Ivan had also invited her to the theater when they were even younger … But the main question was, what should she wear?

  When she was able to think more seriously about it, Marusya told herself that one’s attire, in this case, was completely insignificant. This was proletarian art, and it would actually have been awkward to dress in silk and velvet for such an event. Moreover, she didn’t have any fancy attire; she had only old dresses that had long since gone out of fashion and were completely worn out. So never mind!

  They took their place in the orchestra seats—Ivan in his everyday service jacket, and Marusya in her blue dress with a striped sash and striped cuffs, modest but stylish, and listened to the music of Dzerzhinsky—not the notorious founder of the Cheka, the secret police, who was already dead, but his namesake.

  The music didn’t impress Marusya as being very good, but it wasn’t bad, either. It was strange music—in some places it was crude, in other places strains of folk music could be heard. One thing Marusya understood unequivocally: this was not Shostakovich. It didn’t have the power, the novelty. But Shostakovich had been hauled over the coals without mercy in Pravda for his Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. It would be interesting to see how And Quiet Flows the Don fared. And Jacob, who could have explained whether the music was good, and in what way, was not with her … The voices were marvelous, although Smolich’s staging seemed somewhat lacking.

  Their evening at the Bolshoi Theater changed something in their relationship. All of the preliminaries had been taken care of. Jacob hardly existed anymore in her life—or so thought Ivan, gathering this from Marusya’s own words. He himself had long lived in a semi-divorced state from his wife, who had moved with their daughter to Kiev, and whom he seldom saw. Ivan considered the marriage, which had lasted about ten years, to have been a mistake, and he hinted to Marusya that he had loved only one woman in his life, and Marusya knew who she was. When he looked at her with his devoted eyes, her memory of that absurd Kievan Ivan Belousov was immediately awakened.

  In the Institute of the Red Professorate, Ivan taught courses on the history of the workers’ movement, historical materialism, and Western European philosophy; he led study circles in factories, wrote brochures, read and remembered a great deal, studied German his entire life, but read Kant and Hegel only in translation.

  Marusya recalled how Jacob disparaged these translations, claiming that translating the German philosophers into Russian was futile: since Russian had not developed philosophical terminology, the translations were unintelligible and abstruse. He also said that, strange as it might seem, Kant was more accessible in English. He spoke about the grammar of language, about how it was linked to the national character, and that it had not been determined whether the language conditioned the character of the people or the other way around. He knew everything, everything, and he had a th
eory about everything, Marusya thought with irritation. But he was never capable of a simple “yes” or “no.” It was all devilish nuance and complexity! Ivan is simple and straightforward, she thought, and how refreshing that is! A healthy proletarian foundation removes all the confusion, all the fruitless play of the mind that prevents one from achieving goals. Ivan’s goal is simple and noble—creating the new man, preparing cadres for the future, giving the youth what is necessary and sufficient. Jacob has always been interested only in what was superfluous. He doesn’t know how to cut away these superfluities. And this is his tragedy. Woe from Wit! And this is the source of his endless conflicts with the authorities, with the proletarian government, than which nothing better has ever been invented in history! And Ivan is right on this point, not Jacob. In a matter so grave and so grand, one needs to pay attention not to the mistakes, which are inevitable, but to the achievements. Here again, Ivan is right. We are tainted by our families. Ivan’s father is a railroad worker. Ivan forged his own road, but Jacob was educated by hired teachers—language teachers, music teachers. A bourgeois environment. And I so wanted to break away from my petit-bourgeois home, from the milieu of small craftsmen, storekeepers, the strictures of that airless Jewish stuffiness. And where did I end up? In a wealthy home, at a formal dining table with a bourgeois papa at the head and a white tablecloth and a pink-and-white dinner service with a cook and a chambermaid. And I wanted only simplicity, purity …

  All these thoughts drew her closer to Ivan. No, there was nothing sensual in the attraction, but something upright, something enviably direct. Without any refined, intellectual moaning and groaning.