The end of Jacob’s term of exile was approaching, and Marusya thought with anguish about how he would soon return home—and again she would be racked with internal conflict, and would always lose out to him; and again her work would seem secondary and insignificant compared with his important scientific pursuits. Would they even give him a residence permit in Moscow? If they did, would he be able to find a job? And if they didn’t register him in Moscow, he would leave again for some far-off realm, and she would live in the same way, bearing the stigma of rejection, with papers in which every personnel officer, every cadre, could see her social stain. Divorce was the only thing that could save her from this.
But she had Genrikh to think about. He was twenty years old. The spoiled and capricious child had disappeared, and in his place had emerged a completely new person, practical and single-minded. He lived a difficult and demanding existence, and he coped with it well. He brought home his paycheck from work to his mother, leaving for himself only what he needed for transportation and a midday meal at work. He had been accepted into the Komsomol, and he was proud of this. When he finished at the Workers’ University, he entered the Technical College and was just as enthusiastic about his studies as he had been about his construction set when he was a child. He had spent the most difficult years of his adolescence without his father, consciously turning away from his father’s precepts and admonitions and cultural values, and even feeling a certain degree of contempt for them. The sole thing that interested him was science and technology.
Genrikh was the only one with whom Marusya shared her new thoughts. She was nervous before the conversation, but, much to her surprise, her son encouraged her to decide on that course of action. “I think you’re right, Mama. Perhaps you should have done it sooner. In Stalingrad.”
And so she made the decision to carry out her intention. She didn’t have to appear in court; it was very quick. In the hallway were three other women waiting for the same decision. The court dissolved all the marriages, and all it took was fifteen minutes for the four of them together. This was a common practice during those years. Although the NKVD memorandum about divorce from imprisoned spouses had not yet been published, the employees of the Marriage Bureaus had already been acquainted with the directive concerning the granting of one-sided divorce of spouses who were incarcerated or in exile; it was not necessary for the absent spouse to fill out any forms or sign any papers. Marusya received the document granting her divorce in August 1936. Only two people knew about this: she herself and Genrikh.
Marusya did not write to Jacob about the divorce; she kept postponing it. Their correspondence continued, though it was rather strained. The nearer the time for her husband’s release, the more certain Marusya was that she wanted to live alone. It had been Marusya’s fate to live her entire youth as the wife of her “one-and-only husband.” Emotionally and intellectually, she was a free woman in a new era, emancipated, though outwardly she adhered to established bourgeois expectations. This was the way it had happened. Jacob completely occupied her feelings, and she had never longed for anyone else’s embrace. Theoretically, she completely subscribed to the “glass of water” theory of absolute sexual freedom, which had been propagated by Aurore Dudevant (George Sand), Alexandra Kollontai, and Inessa Armand. In practice, something had always stopped her. Marusya even kept her open admirer at a distance, though they were already on the verge of intimacy. Ivan was either noble or perhaps timid, or else he was waiting for an overt sign from her. Everything came down to the fact that the time had come to free herself from the unbearable authority of an old love. Cast it off! Cast it off!
At the end of November, Marusya received a letter from Jacob with a list of official papers he would need to get a residence permit. He didn’t know that there were already papers that would doom all his efforts to failure—the divorce papers. Marusya was filled with confusion, but the divorce had been finalized, and she had decided. She would not allow Jacob to be registered as her husband, so that she could keep … no, not her apartment, but her independence, her individuality.
Ivan also made an important decision. After all, he was no Mr. Greenhorn. He had been courting her for so long, it was time to resolve the matter. Marusya never invited him to her home; indeed, it wouldn’t have been possible, since she had a grown son. Ivan also hesitated to invite her to his tiny room in a communal apartment, stuffed with boxes overflowing with file cards, quotations, alphabetically ordered clippings—an enormous collection of Lenin’s excerpts and dicta about everything under the sun. Ivan was an acknowledged expert on the texts of the leader, and not even the card catalogue in the Lenin Library was as abundant as his collection. But he could hardly invite Marusya to his dusty lair, to share a soldier’s iron cot, on torn sheets …
Ivan found the solution: he called the Central Commission for the Betterment of Living Conditions of Scholars and requested two vouchers to the sanatorium in Uzkoye, a wonderful spot just outside of Moscow. The great scholars and scientists all vacationed there. The academics who ran the sanatorium did not particularly like the Red Professorate, but the Academy of Sciences had not long before merged with the Communist Academy, and spots had been allocated to them. They promised a place to Belousov as of December 1.
“Marusya, we’re going to a sanatorium. We need a vacation,” the soft-spoken Ivan announced firmly.
“When?”
“The first of December.”
This offered the best possible resolution of Marusya’s agitation and disquiet. She simply wouldn’t be in Moscow when Jacob returned. In this way, she could at least put off a tormenting, painful explanation. As for Ivan, she would just have to see how things panned out. Radical? Yes! It was a desperate, mad act.
The December morning was damp and seemed darker than usual. Marusya rocked back and forth in the automobile and felt slightly sick to her stomach. She almost always suffered from motion sickness, and berated herself for agreeing to come on this trip. By the time they reached Uzkoye, it was already light. They entered the tall entrance gates, and an avenue of old trees opened up before them. Beyond was a house with a portico and columns, and a church, with a service in progress. When they entered the main building, her heart skipped a beat. Everything was orderly, formal, restrained, and refined. Her back seemed to straighten up of its own accord. Her chin lifted higher, and her former posture and gait, which had been lost in the humiliations of life, were restored in a single moment. The noble furnishings inspired equanimity and confidence in her, and a sense of her own dignity and worth. A lady with gray curls gathered on top of her head led them along the corridor and showed them their rooms.
“We usually settle most of our guests in the wing, but this room happened to be unoccupied. If you please…”
They didn’t attend lunch, but they did go down for dinner. There were few people in the dining room, primarily elderly and even aged men, with vaguely familiar faces. They were most likely all academics. Marusya recognized one of them—Fersman, a geochemist.
Marusya was wearing a dark-blue suit and a modest but brightly colored blouse decorated with an Egyptian motif on the sleeves. She immediately felt that she was in her element, and thus felt perfectly at ease. Besides the waitress, there was only one other woman among the guests in the dining room. She was large, with a birthmark that covered half her face, probably also an academic. She was eating and reading a newspaper at the same time.
After dinner, Marusya settled down on an uncomfortable Voltaire armchair in the small dining room with Céline’s novel Journey to the End of the Night. The novel had been published a few years before. She was reading, not the French original, but a translation by Elsa Triolet. Marusya picked it up after reading a recent scathing review in Pravda. The author of the piece railed at Céline for his “aesthetic of filth,” which was, moreover, the filth of capitalistic society, the filth of the bourgeoisie. Marusya enjoyed both the novel and the translation, and at the same time she admired the paintings, the maho
gany furniture, and the view onto the park. She perceived the advantages of aristocratic life over grasping bourgeois decadence.
The first three days, they walked through the huge park after breakfast: ponds, tree-lined avenues, a birch grove, lime trees. It was very pleasant, but a bit wearisome: as they talked about social and political subjects, the conversation was strained. Ivan, tired of walking around in circles, lost his self-confidence. Too bad. He left Marusya, intending to sit down to work on his never-ending Bulletin of the Institute of the Red Professorate, which he had maintained almost single-handedly for the past five years.
On Sunday morning, December 6, the papers arrived bearing news of the Stalin Constitution. Ivan had already known for a long time that the great event was in the offing, and here it was. The newspaper announced that socialism had been built, and that the dictatorship of the proletariat had accomplished its mission. Professor Belousov would now have to modify his syllabus to accommodate these new achievements. To celebrate this remarkable turn of events, Ivan took a bottle of Kagor, monastery wine from Moldavia, out of his suitcase. He had been keeping the wine for just such an occasion, and he invited Marusya to spend the rest of the evening in an intimate setting, in his room.
Ivan succeeded in luring Marusya into his love net in the short interim between the second and third glasses. She was not aware of much, since alcohol, even such a pious variety, had a rapid and violent effect on her. She smiled, and laughed; then the walls started reeling, and she clutched Ivan’s sleeve so she wouldn’t collapse. Belousov grabbed her and did not waste any time—and five minutes later exulted over his blitz victory, while Marusya ran off to the next room, where she threw up the thick red wine. She felt very sick.
When Ivan knocked on her door about twenty minutes later, she was lying on top of the covers, pale, in her decorated blouse, her chest all wet. Ivan ministered to her gently, carrying out her every wish. He put a hot compress on her head and made some tea; she asked for more sugar. Then she vomited again. Ivan nearly cried from tender sympathy: sweet, fragile girl … He took care of her as he had taken care of his own daughter when she was sick with scarlet fever. Marusya was touched. He was a warm person—a caring, warm person. And the most important thing was that he had clear positions, solid and benign, with no intellectually refined twists and turns of thought.
* * *
Jacob sent a telegram when he was leaving Novosibirsk. Neither Marusya nor Genrikh was there to meet him when he arrived. On December 4, he went to Povarskaya Street. The neighbors opened the door of the communal apartment. The door of their room was locked; he didn’t have a key. He went to his sister’s.
In the evening, he managed to get through to Genrikh by phone. His son said, “Congratulations on your release. Mama’s in a sanatorium. I’m not sure which one.”
Jacob found out about the divorce that had already been officialized when Marusya returned from her holiday. By this time, he already understood that he would have no Moscow residence permit; nor would he have a wife or a son. He would have nothing that he had been counting on. He did find a job, however, outside Moscow, in the Yegoryevsky District, in the planning department of a paltry little factory.
Before he left to start his new job, he sought out Asya. They met by the Novokuznetskaya metro station. Pink, touching, wearing a little beret, with an expectant expression in her eyes, Asya asked him how his eczema was. “My eczema is feeling just fine,” he joked. She invited him to her house—she lived nearby, on Pyatnitskaya Street. Jacob declined. They walked down Ordynka Street. When they were saying goodbye to each other, Jacob, in an old-fashioned, gallant gesture, kissed her hand.
Marusya and Ivan did not continue to see each other much longer. He was straightforward and reliable—politically competent, and morally steadfast. But in April he was arrested. The trial was carried out quietly, drowned out by other, more celebrated cases of that fateful year. When Ivan’s house was searched, among the catalogued drawers and boxes full of quotations from Lenin, excerpts from the French newspaper L’Écho de Paris, with a review of Trotsky’s last book, The Revolution Betrayed, were found. Marusya, whom Ivan had asked to translate the article, had underlined in red pencil this shocking phrase: “Without wanting it himself, the Georgian with the low forehead has become the direct heir of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine II. He destroys his opponents—revolutionaries, true to their infernal faith, who are consumed by a constant neurotic thirst for destruction.”
Ivan honestly denied having a knowledge of French during the interrogation. He did not name the person who had marked the passage—firing-squad words—with a red pencil.
Two months later, all those involved in the case were executed as Trotskyites. Ivan had never been a Trotskyite. Though he was a true Leninist, this had no bearing on the matter. It was 1937. Surviving the year would be difficult. But people survived. Some of them.
44
Variations on a Theme
Fiddler on the Roof
(1992)
Tusya was aging beautifully. She thinned out, became smaller. Although her back, which had been disfigured in childhood by osseous tuberculosis, became still more bent, her hands were not affected, and her wrinkles lay on her face like a beautiful geometric grid. Her vision gave out, but she had acquired a large magnifying glass, which she became adept at using, and assured Nora that reading this way had its advantages: you missed nothing, as though not only the letters were magnified, but their meaning as well. She was pushing eighty. Physically, she had grown decrepit, but her clarity of mind and her wit had remained intact. Nora occasionally took her to theaters. She came to pick her up in the car, sat her in the back seat, and led her to the staff entrance of the theater. Leaning on a polished black cane with a silver sheep’s head as a knob, Tusya waited while Nora parked the car. Then they walked arm in arm, two genuine leading lights of the theater world, venerable connoisseurs, and visitors to all the significant theatrical events.
Tusya’s students didn’t forget her, and invited her to all the premières and guest performances that were worthy of attention. She attended with pleasure, dressing up theatrically, piling big Asian rings with turquoises and cornelians onto her thin fingers. For Nora, every such outing was a holiday. The years had not been able to dim the excitement of a première for her, and Tusya’s presence always heightened this feeling, independent of whether the play was good or just so-so.
The theater they went to on this occasion was not a favorite of theirs. Although the director enjoyed acclaim far and wide, he was, in Tusya’s opinion, mediocre. The playwright, who had adapted the voluble Sholem Aleichem’s works for the stage, was talented and much sought after, but his work still carried the aura of the student skit. One of Tusya’s best students, a set-and-production designer, had invited them. They were staging the story of Tevye the Dairyman, and Tusya didn’t have very high expectations of it. She still remembered when Mikhoels played the role in 1938.
In the audience, the air was charged with happy anticipation. When the comedic actor—an actor beloved by all, who specialized in playing bewitchingly honest simpletons—took the stage, for some reason against the background of a looming eight-armed cross, the audience howled with delight. To begin, the actor announced: “Here, in our village, Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews live side by side…” What followed was a mixture of nauseating gobbledygook about the friendship of the peoples, presented with the intonations of a Jewish joke, good-natured and bittersweet, and lowbrow literary clownery, which made Tusya ever more dismal and gloomy, and the audience ever more giddy and cheerful. At the end of the first act, the Jewish wedding gave way to a pogrom, carried out by the peaceable Russian neighbors on the convincing grounds that “it’s either thrash them, or get slapped with a fine by the authorities ourselves!”
The Cossack sergeant was torn by the contradiction between a sense of duty—enforcing the pogrom ordered from on high by the powers-that-be—and a neighborly compassion for the sim
ple Jewish peasants, sympathy toward the Jewish dairyman. According to the playwright’s view, the pogrom was instigated by one villain, a kind of local Ilse Koch, anticipating by many years the gas chambers organized by other bad people of German extraction.
The pogrom was successful. Tevye walked out onto the proscenium carrying his bleeding youngest daughter in his arms, and then left a red imprint of his enormous bloodied workingman’s hand on a white wall. The bells started tolling; the pogrom thugs broke into a Cossack dance; the well-intentioned sergeant asked him to stay calm; the good priest opened his arms; Tevye howled to his Jewish God, who had failed to intervene, thereby awakening the young and enlightened Jews to revolutionary action. Sholem Aleichem had already been laid to rest in his grave in a Jewish cemetery in Queens more than seventy years before, and his soul spoke the long-buried language of Yiddish with the souls of six million European Jews who had formerly occupied a country with indefinite borders that was called Yiddishland.
Thunderous applause.
“Unbelievably base and trite,” Tusya whispered to Nora.
“Base? Why?” Nora was surprised.
“If you don’t understand, I’ll explain later.”
They stayed until the end of the play. Then they left to go home, in the middle of a stormy ovation, repeated bows from the actors, the director, the playwright. Nora hadn’t seen Tusya in such a despondent state in a long time.
The elevator in the apartment building was broken, so they had to climb up four flights of stairs. They wended their way up slowly, stopping to rest on every landing. Tusya was silent. Nora refrained from asking any questions.
They ate whatever there was on hand—pasta, served with grated cheese. Tusya found a bottle of wine in the cupboard. She drank in the European way, without toasting. Several times she seemed to be on the verge of saying something, then decided against it. It was already after one in the morning, and their conversation still hadn’t gotten off the ground. Nora went home, the unsaid words still hanging in the air. Tusya usually came up with such brilliant analyses …
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