Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  The brusque Igor Olegovich probed the surface of her belly, then put on a glove and poked his iron finger into her soft, fleshy depths. He told Liza to come back when the labor pains were so intense that she wanted to “tear the radiator from the wall.” Besides, according to the calendar, she wasn’t due until the 9th, and disturbing doctors without good reason was bad manners.

  Liza meekly submitted to his orders. Her pregnancy had so softened her that she held her tongue, and didn’t respond with the kind of reply the doctor deserved. To be honest, the labor pains had stopped of their own accord. Tired out by the expectations and the results of the false alarm, the couple slowly wended their way along the banks of the Moscow River. They were both thinking only about the upcoming events, but they talked about everything else except that.

  “It’s nice when a city has a lot of water. The windows of my favorite apartment in New York faced the East River. There were three of us renting it, and each of us had our own little room. But I was the only one with a view of the river. And I liked Staten Island a lot, too. There’s so little water in Moscow. In New York, I always tried to live close to the water.”

  “Tell me about it,” Liza said.

  “Ask Nora. She loves telling people how she came to see me in about ’94 or ’95. I don’t remember exactly. I was living in my first apartment. Not alone—with a whole group of people. There was a black guy who played sax; an English girl, the granddaughter of some famous writer, either Iris Murdoch or Muriel Spark, I don’t remember. The place was so trashed that it took Nora two days just to clean the kitchen. And after that she threw out four garbage bags of rubbish from my room alone. She never said a word. Well, she asked only one question: ‘Yurik, how did you end up with two left shoes, both of them worn out?’”

  “Yes, Nora’s amazing, of course. I would have raised such a stink if I had been in her place!”

  “No, that’s not her style.”

  “Were you already hooked by then?”

  “No. Just a bit. But not like later. I mean, I didn’t realize I was already hooked yet. I thought I was just experimenting. Nora was staying at her friend’s house in Manhattan, a wonderful lady. I borrowed money from her the first year. I tried to pay it back, but I didn’t always manage. Her nickname was Chipa. I forget her real name. She had a window that overlooked the water, too—a view of the Hudson. I tried so hard to throw away that piece of my life that it seems I’ve even forgotten what I never intended to forget.”

  A taxi approached, and Yurik pulled Liza into the back seat. They went home and started waiting until January 9, which they referred to as “Day X.” On the morning of the 9th, Liza called the doctor and asked whether it was now time to give birth. The doctor casually told her to wait another week.

  “Doctor,” Liza said, “I’ve had labor pains for a whole week. I mean, they’re not evenly spaced, true; they come and go, sometimes often, sometimes less so. But they’re absolutely real. Shouldn’t we do an ultrasound, at least, to see what the little one is up to in there?”

  “Fine. Go pay to have an ultrasound, if you so desire,” the brusque doctor said.

  They traveled to the outskirts of the city for the ultrasound, and sat waiting their turn for an hour. A woman with greasy hair examined the sonogram and diagnosed a double nuchal cord. Liza’s spirits sank; she felt she had run out of strength. The children whined all evening, squabbled, and howled before bed in two-part harmony. Yurik picked up his guitar to play, but even this tried-and-true calmative was ineffectual.

  In the evening, Pasha, Liza’s former lover, called and asked whether they needed his help. They certainly did. Their angel-nanny Victoria had come down with the flu and gone away to stay with her relatives for several days to convalesce. Pasha came over an hour later. The children clambered all over him. Yurik, with whom they had long been on the best of terms, asked Pasha to put them to bed for him, and he sat with Liza. She just wanted everything to be over as soon as possible, and she drank some sedative—to keep from crying, and to keep from thinking about anything. The sedative had very little effect on the labor pains, and she simply couldn’t sleep. Toward six in the morning, Liza made the decision that it was time to give birth. Immediately. Yurik tried to joke: “Are you thinking about the radiator?”

  But the labor pains, which were not evenly spaced but coming as nature deemed fit, now turned into one long corridor of pain. Pasha was sleeping in the nursery, on a cot. At a quarter to seven, Liza and Yurik closed the door quietly behind them and got into a taxi. Two traffic lights later, Liza realized that the baby was on the way. At just after seven, they arrived at the maternity hospital. The entrance gate was closed. The guard’s booth looked deserted. There was no time to see whether the guard was inside. It was easier to go on foot to the reception desk.

  Liza climbed out of the taxi and stepped right into an icy puddle. But she was unable to walk. Not a single step. Everything was like in a bad movie, the only difference being that it was impossible to slow it down or stop it. Standing nearly up to her knees in the icy puddle, Liza gripped the handle of the taxi door tightly; the taxi driver shouted that it was time for him to leave and that they needed to pay up immediately. Uncoupling herself from the door with difficulty, Liza gave Yurik precise instructions about what to do next: “Run to the reception desk and tell them that you need a doctor and a gurney—your wife is having a baby. Tell them I’ve gone into labor!”

  Yurik hadn’t experienced such fear, and such a complete break with reality, since his dangerous narcotic trips. Nevertheless, he behaved very reasonably. Nearby, a small, frightened Tajik streetcleaner was trying to break up the ice on the frozen sidewalk with a crowbar. Yurik grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and said to him sternly, “Hold her up.” And he ran off to the reception desk.

  The Tajik knew only two words in Russian that might be appropriate in this situation: “girl,” and “fuuuuuck…”

  “Girl, fuuuuuuck,” he said to Liza, stroking her back.

  Liza leaned against the crowbar, which in some unknown way had ended up in her hands. The pain, which had already been powerful, now overmastered her, so that nothing was left of her but pain. At that moment, she seemed to turn into an animal, operating only on instinct. And her instinct told her: lie down and give birth.

  Liza threw her coat off onto the snow and said firmly to the Tajik, “Right now!” And she got down on all fours.

  “Girl … fuuuuuck…” the Tajik whispered. Crouching down beside her on his haunches, he began praying, quietly and rapidly. Then Yurik came back.

  “Liza! Liza, wait—they’re on their way. Stand up—what are you doing?” he cried in horror.

  This was the most terrifying scene he had ever witnessed in his life. He bent over to help his wife up, but when he saw her up close, her teeth bared, he started reeling. At that moment, a blonde woman in a faded green lab coat ran up to them.

  “Stand up. Come on, try to stand up,” she said.

  Liza answered her with a sound that resembled “RRRuunnhhh.”

  “Come on, now, stand up,” the midwife commanded, and tried to lift Liza up by her shoulders.

  “I won’t make it,” Liza insisted.

  The midwife let her go, and thrust her hand into Liza’s trousers, where she fished around, and, simultaneously with the Tajik, said, “Fuuuuck…” Then she added: “Totally fucked.”

  Then, for some reason, they all got distracted and looked over at the guard’s booth. Meanwhile, the baby made one last sprint for the finish.

  “Help me, for God’s sake, the baby’s coming out!” Liza commanded all of a sudden, very soberly. Apparently the child had given her a breather, and was building up his strength for the next onslaught.

  All of them—Yurik, the Tajik, and the midwife—after looking around, raised Liza up and led her to the booth. The gurney had gotten stuck somewhere along the way.

  Lyuda, the midwife, threw open the door of the booth; the guard was there, having sex with
a naked woman.

  “What the hell!” the midwife said, dumbfounded.

  The naked woman didn’t take her words too seriously. She simply dressed herself rapidly and freed up the little booth, grumbling: “Big deal, she’s having a baby. Everyone does.”

  “Please, just don’t have your baby on my bed!” said the fastidious guard, although it was too late to do anything about it: Liza was already in his bed. Yurik was taking off her shoes.

  Then the waylaid gurney rolled up. They dragged Liza onto it. Half naked, wearing only her sweatshirt, her hips and nether regions bared, their paleness gleaming festively for all the world to see, no shoes on her feet, her hair damp and matted, fastened by her daughter Olga’s brightly colored hair clips, Liza was wheeled toward the reception hall on the ramshackle, hobbled gurney by the Tajik, the guard, the midwife, and the random person who had brought the gurney out of nowhere, with Yurik at the head of this crazy procession. They pushed it along through the melting ice puddles, over the hummocks and potholes, up the stairs, along the tiled floor. “The baby’s coming!” While they were rolling along, Liza tried to explain to the midwife about the double nuchal cord.

  “That’s the least of our worries right now,” the midwife said gloomily.

  They finally made it to the delivery room.

  Yurik had absolutely no desire to attend the birth, but he ended up there anyway. There were three people present: the midwife Lyuda; the nurse on duty, who had managed to get hold of the gurney, and who rushed up with a cup of tea in her hands; and Yurik. Neither the brusque doctor nor any other doctor of any description was anywhere to be seen. They were all, apparently, still celebrating the New Year.

  In the delivery room, Lyuda asked Liza to be patient and to keep the baby in for another minute, at least giving her time to prepare the medical equipment. The metal instruments clinked, and liquid burbled. The nurse pulled on her gloves, with rubbery squeeches and sharp snaps. The pain was now too much for Liza to bear.

  “Scream out, then, scream!” Lyuda told her. Liza wanted very much to scream, but wouldn’t allow herself to let go. Somewhere in the distance, Yurik hovered, very pale, on the brink of fainting.

  “Okay, now push like hell!” Lyuda commanded gaily.

  The baby boy slipped right into her hands—en caul, in his bubblelike amniotic sac. The first thing she did, even before taking him out of the bubble, was to unwind the umbilical cord from his neck. She said, her voice now soft and low, “Here he is. A frisky little man! And he’s already wearing a shirt!”

  She offered to let Yurik cut the cord. But he didn’t even hear her. He just kept repeating: “Liza! Liza! Jacob is born! All the terrible things are behind us!”

  It was January 10, 2011. Marusya’s birthday. A day Jacob Ossetsky honored and observed his whole life. The centenary of the correspondence, preserved in the willow chest.

  50

  The Archives

  (2011)

  In 2011, unexpectedly, old age caught up with her. No, it wasn’t that she was in her dotage. It would be more accurate to say that youth ended, never to return. She had managed to overcome her congenital cancer, at least temporarily. Yurik and Liza made her happy, with the equanimity and delight that radiated from them. Nora had never experienced this kind of familial happiness. Even Amalia and Andrei Ivanovich, with all their enveloping mutual affection, suffered from a lack of fulfillment—they left no direct progeny. Yurik and Liza had a son, Nora’s grandson, who brought with him a completely new kind of happiness. Nora scrutinized the little fellow and was able to descry the intermingled legacy of previous lives, of his predecessors—Amalia’s rounded eyebrows, Genrikh’s small, neat mouth, Vitya’s fingers, and Liza’s light-brown Asiatic eyes—a gift from her Buryat grandmother. All of this went deep down, far and wide, back to a time when the depiction of faces with the help of silver salts had not been invented, in the pre-photography Mesozoic Era, when only artists—with varying exactitude of vision, varying gifts and habits of the imagination—were able to leave lasting images. There were no portraits of forebears in Nora’s family. After Genrikh’s death, what remained was a sheaf of photographs.

  The haste in which Nora had lived her entire conscious life ceased. Her journey to Tbilisi had helped her to arrange things in her mind and heart, to put everything in its proper place. She had not been mistaken; she had not gone astray. Not only did Tengiz not disappoint her, but he ultimately turned out to be the very person who pushed her, who led her, in just the way she needed to be led in order to arrive at this quiet and meaningful point. The storms of love that she had experienced with him left neither bitterness nor pain—only vivid and rich memories, and slight perplexity: Why had these hormonal surges, these flashes and flickers, taken up such a great part of her life? Was it just the way the female body worked? Ultimatums of her genome? Laws of biology that ensured the propagation of the species?

  By this time, Nora had written a book about the Russian avant-garde in theater. The very same year, it was translated into English and French. She devoted herself more and more to teaching—seminars on the history of theater and stage design in the theater school, the same seminars that Tusya had once taught. And, just as Tusya had been, Nora was now the idol of her students.

  She was happier than she had ever been in her life. The only thing that worried her was a number of unfulfilled tasks. She made a list of things to do in the near future, beginning with the household affairs. She replaced the bathtub with a shower stall; bought a new stove; acquired two antique Swedish bookcases at the antiques store on Malaya Nikitskaya; and got rid of the old, warped homemade shelves. She weeded out her overgrown library. And when, finally, all the entries on that to-do list had been crossed out, she took the bundle of letters that had been passed down to her from her grandmother Marusya out of the desk drawer. She hadn’t opened the bundle since her grandmother’s death, but she remembered that on the top were letters from her grandfather Jacob, dating from 1911. She unfolded the oilcloth in which they were wrapped, now disintegrating with age. The delicate letters had survived for a century, and Nora realized that she was the only person on earth who remembered these long-dead people: Marusya Kerns, whom she had so loved when she was a child and then fallen out of love with, and Jacob Ossetsky, whom she had seen only once in her life, when she was a girl, not long before his death, when he visited them on Nikitsky Boulevard after one term of exile was over and before the next one began.

  The letters were neatly arranged by year, all of them still in their envelopes, with stamps, dates, addresses, and inscriptions in the sort of handwriting that no letter on earth would ever be written in again.

  It took her a week to read all of them, almost without a break. She cried, she laughed, she was perplexed. She was filled with delight. In the same bundle, she discovered several notebooks that Jacob had begun keeping as an adolescent. The story of a great love, the story of a search for meaning, creativity as a way of life, and an unquenchable passion for knowledge, for trying to understand an unruly, disheveled, mad world. Many family secrets came to light, but questions arose as well—questions for which there were no answers.

  Nora arranged the old photographs—Genrikh’s legacy. There were quite a few of them. Some of them were signed, and these Nora put aside. Many photographs depicted people she didn’t know: relatives and friends whose names it was no longer possible to recover. At the turn of the twentieth century, amateur photography was virtually nonexistent; all of these were taken in a studio by a professional, and affixed to a piece of cardboard bearing the address of the studio, and often the name of the photographer. The earliest photograph was dated 1861. It was a picture of an old man with a large beard, in a yarmulke. Most likely Marusya’s grandfather.

  A strange, powerful feeling gripped her, as though she, Nora, the one and only Nora, were floating down a river, and behind her, like a fan opening up, were her ancestors, three generations of them, imprinted on pieces of cardboard, with familiar n
ames. Behind them, in the depths of these waters, was an endless line of nameless predecessors, men and women who had chosen one another through love, through passion, through convenience, or by arrangement of their parents. They produced and protected their progeny, great multitudes of them, and they settled the entire earth, and the shores of all the rivers. They had propagated and multiplied, in order to produce her, Nora; and she to bring forth her only son, Yurik; and he to produce still another little boy, Jacob. It is an endless story, the meaning of which is so hard to discern, though it always beckons, as the most fragile of threads.

  All the work of generations, all the games of chance—all so that a new child, Jacob, would be born and become part of this eternally meaningless, meaningful current. This play has been performed for thousands of years, with insignificant variations: birth-life-death, birth-life-death … So why is it still interesting and exciting to float down this river, watching the landscape change? Is it not because someone, at some time, dreamed up an intricate little bubble, the sheerest of membranes, to enclose within delimited boundaries each living being, each “I” floating down the river—until it bursts, with a dull moan, and pours back into the waters of eternity? These ancient letters, preserved by some miracle, are the everlasting contents of this “I,” the trace of existence …

  Why did I wait so long to read these letters? Nora asked herself. Out of fear. I was afraid to discover something terrible about Jacob, who lived in exile and in labor camps for at least thirteen years; and about Marusya, who was always hiding something, and constantly almost revealing secrets, and then maintaining a deafening silence again. I was afraid to find out about the fears and passions that devoured them, and about those base acts that fear pushes people to. But the letters explained a great deal.