Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  Suddenly everything on the screen changed—there were easily identifiable bears and rabbits, giraffes and swans. As they played out funny little scenes, the audience began to smile, then laugh. Was he making fun of them? Was he putting the self-important spectator in his place, bringing him down a notch? Pulling the wool over his eyes? Indeed, just then, a shadowy goat (not a sheep) with horns and a fat udder appeared. Amusing … Nora didn’t even notice her own tears. They flowed freely down her sunken cheeks, and all the while she was smiling. Oh, Tengiz! We were young together, and I didn’t know then what you knew. Or perhaps you didn’t know it, either? Is this really the reason I suffered so because of you—so that in old age I would understand that only shadows remain? They are the only thing that is real, the only thing that can be said to exist …

  The lights came on. The room was rather small, and not all the seats were occupied. People clapped. There were many children in the audience, but still more adults. They spoke in Georgian, and she didn’t understand what they were saying. Then a heavyset old man with a crutch came out onstage. He had a large shaven head, a bright face. He waved his hand—and those who had created the shadows came out onstage, too. Nora smiled—the shadows of the shadows, seven young men and women.

  David pressed his hand lightly on Nora’s shoulder: Shall we go up to greet him?

  Tengiz gestured toward someone—a single, powerful gesture. A young woman joined him onstage. She was large, stout, with curly hair. He embraced her and patted her buoyant ringlets. She slightly resembled Natella, his late wife. She had a good smile. They looked at each other tenderly. No, Nora didn’t tremble inside. The shadow of love was stronger than love itself … And more pure. Shadows are not possessive.

  “Let’s go say hello. He’ll be happy,” David whispered. “Come on.”

  “No, David, let’s leave. Let’s go back to the car.” And Nora slipped out the door.

  David followed her to where the car was parked. They didn’t speak, just got in the car and drove to Tbilisi. It was shortly before sundown, the last hour of daylight, when the day reveals everything it is capable of, all the beauty and sadness and tenderness that it has accumulated in its brief span of life, from dawn to sunset.

  Darkness fell suddenly. The road was poor, but nearly empty. Once in a while, the sliding cones of headlights seemed to uproot sparse roadside bushes or occasional buildings from the darkness. Nora felt as if she were half asleep. When they were already getting near the city, she said, almost as though she were talking to herself, “Tengiz’s young wife is very pretty; they make a good couple.”

  “What wife, Nora? That’s his granddaughter, Nino’s youngest daughter. After Natella’s death he never remarried. He’s a widower. He never found another woman who could match him.”

  “Oh” was all Nora said.

  Why did he tell me he was going to get married, then? Nora thought. Did he decide to free me from himself? Or free himself from me? No, to set me free, of course. It doesn’t matter anymore.

  The next day, she flew back to Moscow. If anyone loved long-distance flights, it was Nora. She loved it when you found yourself nowhere at all—in a sort of abstract space and an indeterminate, vacillating time, when, all of a sudden, all obligations, all promises, cease. Everything is put on hold—telephone calls, the mail, requests, offers, and complaints—they all stop short, and you hover, you fly, you soar between heaven and earth, between the earth and the moon, between the earth and the sun. You fall out of your ordinary system of coordinates. You fly … as Tengiz, my soulmate, had; the only one I knew who had burst through all the boundaries of this world alive, and had learned to inhabit another world—the world of shadows … Tengiz … Love beyond touch, love outside of time.

  48

  Liberation

  (1955)

  Jacob’s final prison camp was a special one—the Abez camp, for invalids. It was the place they sent the sick and the weak, the convicts exhausted by work in the Inta mines, as well as the rest of the goners from all over the Komi Republic. It was a barracks settlement with whimsical, eccentric structures—workshops, barns, two retired steam engines whose boilers worked to heat only the administrative headquarters. From the hangar that had grown up around the steam engines, monstrous pipelines wrapped in hairy black insulating material loomed over the heads of people from all sides, like the malignant spiderweb of a concealed arachnid.

  At first, after the prison officials had glanced at his documents and determined his level of competency, they sent him to an elite technical department in the accounting office. But there he had a falling out with the boorish boss, also a convict, who wrote a memorandum with contents that Jacob was not privy to. First they threw him in the lockup for five days and nights, and then appointed him to work in the library in the Culture and Education Section, where he was more a watchman than a librarian.

  Prisoners convicted for espionage and slander against the touchy Soviet authorities settled in the town. Read: Russians from every part of the country, Lithuanians, Poles, Jews, and other people of every possible description. An enormous graveyard of nearly four hectares had grown up on the outskirts of the camp, beyond the drainage ditch, in a place that never dried out, either because a stream flowed through it, or because a swamp festered there. Makeshift bridges made of railroad ties were thrown over the ditch; beyond, stretching to the very horizon, were the same kinds of ditches, only they had been dug to serve as graves. In the winter, the snow mercifully covered the common graves, which had been dug in a timely manner before the first snowfall—each ditch to hold fifty corpses. In the spring, when the snow melted, earth was strewn over the thawing corpses. No pickax was capable of breaking up that earth after the frost set in, especially since the people who were still alive to perform the task were weak and sickly. Thousands and thousands of bodies of exhausted foes and admirers of the authorities, the illiterate and the highly educated, the stupid and the wise, the world-renowned and the completely obscure, lay side by side in these ditches. Under pegs to which numbers were affixed.

  Jacob knew a secret that a casual friend, the field doctor Kostya Govorunov, had divulged to him. Somewhere in these ditches, among thousands of others, lay the Orthodox philosopher Karsavin, until recently a professor at the University of Vilnius. A Lithuanian doctor, also one of the convicts, who had performed the autopsy, had secreted in the stomach of the deceased a small dark-glass flacon containing a piece of paper with the philosopher’s name written on it. Kostya was present during the procedure, and saw it with his own eyes. This doctor hoped that the time would come when the exhumation of bodies would begin, this note would be found among the remains of the nameless bodies left there to rot, and a monument would be erected to the philosopher.

  For a long time already, Jacob had been trying on for size the intolerable idea that he would be buried here, near the Arctic Circle, in a common grave under a peg. This had been the fate of many in his immediate and extended family, of his people. They lay in a common grave in Kiev, at Lukyanovo cemetery—his murdered younger brother, four of his girl cousins … Altogether, twenty-nine blood relatives. And all over Europe, many millions he was not directly related to.

  It was the second year that he had been living in Abez, after his left leg had refused to work and he had been able to walk only on crutches. The camp was the worst of all those he had been forced to live in, and he now recalled his previous years in exile as paradise. Meaningful, solid years, shot through with hope, full of plans, a variety of projects and ideas, work. The only thing that Jacob didn’t feel he was lacking here was company. Human interaction. The camp was populated with members of several generations who had been plucked out and earmarked for annihilation. Scholars, scientists, poets, artists—the flower of the Russian intelligentsia, branded by the founder of the Soviet government as the “shit of the nation.” Among this multinational “shit,” Jacob found several very precious acquaintances. His neighbor in the barracks was an elderly hydrogeograph
er, Richard Werner. Conversations with him were an inspiration and a pleasure. They read German poetry to each other. He introduced Jacob to Rilke, whom Jacob hadn’t known, or appreciated, before. After they had been acquainted for about three months, they began talking about Sudak, where Werner and his wife had vacationed earlier. Word by word, Marusya and little Genrikh were drawn out of the depths of Werner’s random recollections. In the camp, a fleeting moment or coincidence, a long-forgotten crossing of paths, acquires great significance. Richard suddenly became like a long-lost relative to Jacob, and was a source of joy. Half a year later, Richard Werner died of pneumonia. Then Jacob began to gather material for his future work. He had not thought of a title, but he had subject matter in abundance. It would be a demographic analysis of this labor-camp “shit”—the most erudite, highly educated members of society, whose lives ended in Abez.

  Being a librarian was very much in keeping with his scholarly interests. He had at his disposal not only the card catalogue, but also the personal library cards of all the readers, on which his predecessor had scrupulously written their professions and titles. He had finished the demographic analysis in two weeks and then ran out of material. He hit upon the idea of a special educational index and envisioned doing the same for the camp authorities and wards, but there was no material whatsoever on them. This demographic of the camp population did not visit the library; they read their own newspapers for political education.

  His post as librarian, which was in some sense the nadir of his life, was among the safest and most secure in the camp. The library holdings were more or less rubbish. They consisted primarily of books confiscated from convicts. The best of the collection was the second volume of Alpatov’s work, devoted to the Renaissance, and sent to the camp to Nikolai Nikolayevich Punin. The book survived with Punin for a year, but ultimately ended up in the library. Jacob put a stamp in it, appropriated the inventory number, and gave himself over to the Renaissance for several days, all the while lamenting that the Northern Renaissance was so poorly represented, and that the Italian Renaissance was so clearly valorized. He was already mentally developing an idea about the differences in perception of the human image in paintings of the Italian and the Northern Renaissance; but, recalling the death of the manuscript of his novel when he was convoyed to Abez from his previous camp, he stopped himself. In his heart, he had abdicated from his favorite pastime—writing.

  Since he didn’t know how to exist without big projects or tasks, he began studying Lithuanian. It proved easy for him; besides its being an Indo-European language, he was surrounded by many native speakers he could consult.

  He was already sixty-three years old, and old enough to start contemplating the years he had lived with the benefit of hindsight. The Boustrophedon of My Life—he laughed to himself. But there wasn’t even anyone to share this with. Marusya … He still wanted to write letters to her, but she had imposed a ban on correspondence, even one-sided, with him. Warming his frozen hands with his breath, by force of habit, he composed letters with no addressee, and categorized them under the empty term “Texts.”

  Everything changed in the space of a single day. The copy of Pravda that reported the Leader’s illness, dated March 4, 1953, reached the camp, as usual, one day late—on March 5, when the radio was already announcing his death. Kostya Govorunov rushed over from the dispensary to tell Jacob, “Stalin is dead!”

  A commotion started up, quiet but widespread. The workday was in progress, but people spilled out onto the street, hobbling out as though they had been called to a task.

  Agitated by the announcement, Jacob even limped over to see Samuil Galkin, a Jewish poet whom he had gotten to know in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1947. He had to discuss the astounding news. Galkin waved his hands. “Be quiet, Jacob—hold your tongue. Don’t jinx it.” And he commanded an interlude, as usual, by reading a poem in Yiddish. He valued Jacob as perhaps his only listener who didn’t need a translation.

  But Jacob was unable to listen: the prospect of return held him captive, tantalizing him. Was it really possible that he would make it back, that he would be able to see his sisters, his mother, his cousins—his heart quaked—perhaps even Genrikh, and his granddaughter, whom he had never met before? Here his thoughts faltered, and he was brought up short.

  He didn’t sleep that night. His leg, as usual, ached, as did all his joints. But his head felt as clear as a bell. Of course, he should begin writing letters to all the appropriate organizations, and he tried to go down the list, deciding whom to write, why, about what—a review of his case; rehabilitation; pardon? Then his thoughts turned in another direction. His demographic theory found a practical application. The death of Stalin should serve as a point of departure for the birth of a new generation. No matter how the history of the Soviet Union unfolded in the future, the era that began on this day would be known as “post-Stalinism,” and the children born in 1953, after the death of Stalin, would no longer be called “postwar,” but would be known as the “post-Stalin” generation. He wouldn’t live much longer, his days were numbered … but how fascinating it might be, what a turn things might take! Yes, I have an idea how this research project should be organized. I’ll ask Urlanis, Kopeishchikov, Zotov … Hold on, I’m getting carried away.

  On March 6, they were not marshaled to go to work. They sat in the barracks, expecting some sort of sea change in the routine of life—if not today, then tomorrow. They talked very little. At night, on the 7th, they erected a crude rostrum out of slabs of wood. The quartermaster, a former priest, whispered that all the black fabric from the depot had been commandeered, on the orders of Bondar, the camp’s warden. No one knew who sewed the banners that night—perhaps the officers’ wives—but in the morning, red cloth panels with black funeral lining were draped over the main gates and above the rostrum. Work was again called off, and all the inmates and residents of the camp were assembled on the parade grounds. Music started pouring out of the loudspeakers in the damp gloom of the dull northern morning.

  From the first notes, Jacob recognized the dear, familiar sounds of the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. He had not forgotten a single note: the main section of the fourth movement begins with the same theme as the secondary theme of the first … And it emerges and builds, and suffers, and threatens, then transforms itself into a requiem, into the adagio lamentoso …

  Jacob started weeping at the first sounds. How long it had been since he had heard music, how he had longed for it! Ibrahim, a mullah from Samarkand standing beside him, looked at him curiously. Valdis, a Lithuanian nationalist who was standing on his left, smirked. What was he crying about? But Jacob didn’t notice. His eyes were closed, and tears ran down his cheeks—the strangest tears of all the tears shed all over that huge country. But Jacob’s tears did not end here, because after a short pause, almost a splice, the seventh movement of Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, the Lacrimosa, started up.

  At the very same moment, Nora, Jacob’s twelve-year-old granddaughter, stood in her school’s auditorium before a plaster bust of the Leader, his head hardly visible above a mountain of flowers, suffering from a terrible sense of loneliness, alienation, and her inability to share in the common grief of her classmates and teachers. For the life of her, the tears just wouldn’t come.

  Meanwhile, on the camp rostrum, things were not going as planned. Captain Svinolup and Lieutenant Kunkin had taken their places long before, but the warden was nowhere to be seen. The middle of the rostrum, the traditional spot for the warden Bondar, remained vacant, and proceedings could not begin without him. It was cold, and the situation was alarming and incomprehensible. Everyone was already frozen stiff, but, apart from the music, nothing at all was happening. At this very moment, a doctor, shaking with fright, was administering drops of valerian to Bondar, who had suffered a mild heart attack. Forty minutes later, pale and bloated, Bondar appeared, and the music stopped. The event got under way.

  Stalin was dead, but on the su
rface it was as though nothing in life had changed. The camp, which was intended to hold five thousand people, in fact accommodated more than eleven thousand. All of them had a burning interest in politics. They followed the newspapers avidly in search of deeper changes. Strangely, the changes that promised to transform the country after Stalin’s death reached them only very slowly. Again, a circle of “clever ones,” people fond of political debates, of launching new concepts and ideas, developed around Jacob. The primary instincts and penchants of the intelligentsia were rekindled. They wrote letters to secure their release. And they waited.

  At the end of March, the Gulag was transferred from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice, and this reassured them. A year passed; the Gulag was again placed under the auspices of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Again the prisoners wrote all manner of letters to all possible addresses, and again they waited. Jacob sat up until late in the library of the Culture and Education Section. He had formulated for himself a plan of life again, with points, sub-points, and commentaries, and life took on new meaning, which had almost been extinguished in the “Abez Hole,” as he called his existence there. Along a circuitous route, through one of the camp’s hired civilian employees, and then through his sister Eva, he managed to send several letters to colleagues of his, conveying scholarly concerns and proposals. He wrote one other letter—to Marusya. He wrote this one after his discharge, when he was already wending his way back toward Moscow.