When her brothers scattered and went their separate ways, Marusya, spoiled by the attentions of the numerous boys and young men, and used to stormy discussions and to domestic amusements, joking, and games, discovered that she had been feeding on other people’s lives. She herself had meant nothing to them, and now no one visited their house except rather boring distant relations, Mikhail’s friend Ivan Belousov, his former classmate, and Bogdan Kosarkovsky, the erstwhile music teacher, who was now a clarinetist at the opera theater.
Ennui, ennui … Music was no longer heard in their house. The old piano had been smashed to smithereens by the pogrom thugs, and there could be no thought of buying another. In place of lively shared meals, there were infrequent letters from her older brothers, and many postcards from Mikhail, describing the colorful, exciting life of the capital. Marusya only felt more despondent after reading them.
Her father replaced the shattered windows in the shop and in the apartment, whitewashed the walls, and repaired his box of watch parts, full of wonderful little rods and springs. Then he attached it to the wall next to his desk. Her father spent most of his time here in the shop, though there weren’t any customers to speak of. Instead, he busied himself with repairing the music box. Pinchas lovingly restored the crumpled cylinder that played the roll of sheet music. The task was finicky and arduous: he had to replace the missing pins on the cylinder and align it with the tuned teeth of the comb, which had sustained damage.
Marusya, who had always preferred the silent company of her father to that of her constantly fretting mother, made herself a little nest in a corner of her father’s workroom and, drawing herself up into a ball in an armchair, read, one after another, the books her brother Mikhail had miraculously acquired. This gift, an entire library of two hundred tomes, had been sent to their home by the writer Korolenko when he learned that all the books that belonged to the Jewish student had been destroyed during the pogrom.
Who could have imagined that these very books would accompany Mikhail to the end of his life, and form the basis of the collection that to this day has been preserved by his granddaughter Lyuba, Nora Ossetsky’s third cousin, in the apartment on Tverskaya Street in Moscow?
Marusya, grown thin, with large blue moons under her eyes, had buried her nose in an issue of The New Journal for Everyone from the year 1903 with a blue stamp on the cover: “From the library of Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko.” For the third time in a row she was reading Chekhov’s story “The Betrothed.” How could he understand so much, not only about the main character, who had escaped the wretched dullness of provincial life into a new, elevated form of existence, but about her, Marusya, who also wanted to break out of this boredom and ennui, into a life of freedom, meaningfulness, and inchoate beauty?
Her mother called her to dinner. Marusya refused to budge. Her father, wiping the metal dust off his hands with a clean rag, called her, too, but she shook her head. Just looking at the chicken soup brought on nausea. The smell alone, which wafted in from the back room, made her feel sick.
“Fine, just stay here, then. If someone stops in, call me.” Her father sat in the shop nearly without a break, afraid to miss a customer.
As soon as her father left, the bell over the door tinkled. Marusya put her journal down on the pile of books that had amassed around the armchair over the past week and opened the door. A woman in a heavy wool coat trimmed with velvet stripes entered. She wore an elegant hat that looked like a cylinder with wings, something that wasn’t worn in Kiev, or in any other city as far as Marusya knew. Marusya let the woman in and invited her to sit down and wait for a moment so she could call her father.
While Marusya was gone and her father was washing his hands, the lady examined the pile of books lying on the floor next to the chair. She wasn’t interested in The New Journal for Everyone; but the cover of another book caught her eye. Was it possible that this frail young girl was reading, in French, the recently published book by the fashionable author Romain Rolland, La Vie de Beethoven?
The woman directed this question to the aging watchmaker, who appeared a few minutes later.
“That is my daughter, a book lover.”
The clock the woman had brought in for repair was of course that round gold Omega, one of the first models, so familiar to the watchmaker. They struck up a conversation. Madame Leroux turned out to be Swiss herself. Her parents were from the Upper Jura. Like Pinchas, she had left her native parts long ago; but just the mention of the names of rivers and valleys gave them both pleasure. During their lively conversation, the watchmaker opened the back panel of the clock and, placing a round piece of glass in a frame made of bone on his eye, like a monocle, extracted a trifling screw with his tweezers. Then he rummaged through his desk drawer and found one just like it. The watch face was missing a single tiny stone. Pinchas asked what color the stone had been.
“It was red,” the woman said. “They’re all red.”
Pinchas nodded. He’d have to order the stone from Switzerland; he didn’t have a supply of ruby splinters on hand.
The book lover who had shunned chicken soup glided into the workroom like a silent shadow. The visitor, losing all interest in her clock, turned to the young lady.
“Do you read French? Do you like the book?” she asked in French.
“Yes, very much.”
“Do you like Beethoven?”
Marusya nodded.
From this moment began that new life Marusya had been longing for. After conversing with her for ten minutes, Madame Leroux, secretary of the local Froebel Society, director of a public kindergarten under the society’s guidance, invited her to visit their exclusive organization. In January, a week after her birthday, Maria (Marusya) Kerns started her first job—as an assistant teacher in a recently opened school for children of poor parents and domestic workers. In the autumn of the same year, she entered the newly opened Froebel Courses at Kiev University. She became a Froebel Miss, a “children’s gardener,” as they were called.
3 From the Willow Chest
The Diary of Jacob Ossetsky
(1910)
JANUARY 6
I was sick for more than a week, sicker than I’ve ever been in my life. For several days it felt like it was all a dream. Suddenly Mama would show up with a cup of tea, and Dr. Vladimirsky and some others I didn’t recognize, some of them very nice. But always, in back of them, was someone very dangerous, even terrifying. I can’t describe it; even recalling it is unpleasant. From time to time, I felt like I was in some sort of dark, flat space, and I realized I had died. I feel that if I don’t write this down it will all evaporate, disappear into oblivion. But there was something enormously important there—about my life in the very distant future. I envy writers; I just can’t find the words.
JANUARY 10
I’ve started reading again. Voraciously. I was starving for books the whole time I was sick. Now I’m reading the biologists. I’ve read all the Darwin that Yura brought over for me.
(Karl Snyder, Picture of the World in Light of the Natural Sciences.
Troels-Lund, Cosmology and Worldview.)
Thoughts on Darwinism: The theory of the evolution of organic life suggests to me a kind of fundamental axis, surrounded by myriad bifurcated branches. Representatives of the existing animal world are arranged around the tips of the branches. We don’t know all of them from the central axis, since the transitional species don’t live long. Having fulfilled their purpose (so to speak)—i.e., having served as a phase toward another species—they disappear.