After the lecture, Yurik went up to Liza, who was clearly moved, and thanked her for being there so he could talk “to her” during the presentation, because her face was so intelligent, and also empathic.
“I don’t think we say that in Russian—an ‘empathic face,’ but I like it. It was a wonderful lecture. Incredible!” And Yurik took Liza by the hand and they went to the bar, where they drank a glass of orange juice each, because they both had their own reasons for avoiding alcohol.
Then they got into the car and left. Each of them was thinking at that moment: Where are we going?
And they simultaneously answered the question. Liza said, “Your place?” Yurik said, “My place?” And they went back to Nikitsky Boulevard. Nora, very conveniently, was in Chelyabinsk, or Perm …
The windows of the old apartment building on Nikitsky Boulevard looked out on Liza’s office, if rather obliquely. Yurik’s family had lived here for four generations already, more than one hundred years. This apartment remembered the blind precentor, his unhappy wife, the unhappy marriage between Amalia and Genrikh, the happy love of Amalia and Andrei Ivanovich, Vitya and his school notebook with literature notes, and Nora and Tengiz, who had been locked in a lovers’ struggle for the better part of their lives. The apartment had accepted them all and accommodated them graciously. It was good here, and no ghosts haunted the premises.
A long conjugal life lay in store for Yurik and Liza, which they both immediately sensed. It was foolish to ask which was more important, the spirit or the flesh—and, indeed, it never occurred to them to ask that question. Their intimacy was full and boundless, a kind rarely encountered in anyone’s life.
They took a hot shower together. Yurik admired Liza, and Liza Yurik, as if they were seeing with the eyes of Adam and Eve in the garden, who had just come to know … what was it again? They were both about the same height. He was skinny, his shoulders sloped, and his legs were slightly bowed. She was fleshy by today’s standards, with breasts that sagged slightly under their own generous weight, and curvy hips somewhat resembling jodhpurs. In the thick, steamy heat, their bodies turned pink, and the shower stand rose up between them like the Biblical Tree of Life.
Then they sat in the kitchen, eating red apples. There was no other food in the house. Liza bit off an entire half of a small apple and said, “I like green apples best, though red ones will do.”
“I’ll have to disappoint you. It’s unlikely I’ll be able to buy you green ones. I’m color-blind.”
“No matter. I can buy as many as I need for myself.”
He was thirty-four, and she was thirty-two. They had both been in love before, had had relationships, both happy and unhappy; but both of them had the same feeling, that the past had receded and was no longer significant. They were like the only two people in the world. They didn’t know each other well yet, but the most meaningful thing was resolved without words. She accepted his past as a drug addict—although there are no former drug addicts or KGB agents, as they say. She accepted the artistic chaos of his life and his rejection of that stability that Liza herself valued and maintained. And he accepted her—with her children, her family problems, Pasha and his indeterminate status in her life, her Aunt Rita, and the travel bureau.
43 Family Secrets
(1936–1937)
“A marriage will not survive on postage stamps alone. Come!” Jacob had written to Marusya. He was probably right. During his six years of exile, she came to see him only once, at the beginning of his ordeal, in Stalingrad. That was in 1932. His second reunion with his wife took place at the train station in Moscow just over two years later. This time, he was on his way from the Stalingrad prison to Novosibirsk, via Moscow. His sister and her husband had come to see him off, too, but they had presented no obstacle to renewed declarations of love. Jacob had only thirty minutes in which to change trains. Jacob and Marusya had to run from the Kazan station to the Kursk station, and talk in the presence of an elderly, weary captain of the local Ministry of State Security, who issued Jacob his ticket to Novosibirsk. One of the dubious privileges of exiles and prisoners was a free ticket from their place of residence to the destination where they would serve their term. The words Jacob and Marusya exchanged in haste, literally on the run, were insignificant, but the eye saw more than words could say. Marusya looked tired and depressed. She had dark circles under her eyes, and her usual leanness—she always complained of losing weight—inspired in Jacob a sense of guilt for inadvertently causing his wife to suffer.
It wasn’t only these visible signs of suffering that oppressed Jacob. He felt much more deeply Marusya’s disappointment—in him, her husband, who had promised her so much in life and who had constantly let her down. She looked very unhappy. The differences in their inward dispositions were clearly manifested here. To be happy, Marusya needed constant external signs of success and recognition. When Marusya was able to admire Jacob, to be confident in their brilliant future together, her own strength was amplified. But her strong, passionate temperament went hand in hand with an inner fragility and weakness, and the vividness of her desires with volatility. Her soul balked when it had to cope with the blows that life dealt. She grumbled, blamed the circumstances, and fell into despondency.
The sense of being unhappy was alien to Jacob. He did not permit himself the luxury of such feelings, and was ashamed when such thoughts occurred to him. Even in the most vexing circumstances, he tried to derive joy from the small, quotidian gifts of life: the sun peeping out, a green branch outside the window, a pleasant person he met along the way and chatted with about this and that; and, most important, good books. Marusya also knew how to derive joy from small things, but for this she needed Jacob to be beside her. Joy did not come easily to her if there was no spectator to witness it. An actress always needs an audience.
Jacob was certain that he could conquer Marusya’s despondency with his masculine authority and power, with that rare and wonderful intimacy that had always enhanced their conjugal life: to smooth away, caress, kiss, and bring her to the peak of mutual pleasure, and even beyond, into a realm of pure bliss that left the joys of the flesh behind.
But, despite his virtuosity with the pen, and however deep and tender his letters to his wife may have been, his physical absence was an insurmountable obstacle for them. He felt this in her letters to him, in the irritation that broke through, in the jabs and reproaches, and, mainly, in the increasing expressions of ideological protest on her part. She called herself a “nonpartisan Bolshevik,” and accused Jacob of political myopia, of floundering in a petit-bourgeois swamp. She had become irreversibly alienated from him.
He knew Marusya’s impressionability and the enthusiasm with which she always adopted new projects—her infatuation with pedagogy during her studies at the Froebel Institute; pedology, the rejected sister of pedagogy; the new religion of “movement” in the Rabenek studio; followed by theater, then journalism … He was moved by her touching conviction about the “higher good” when one infatuation replaced another, and then hoped that her enthusiasm about Bolshevism, in its nonpartisan variety, would not give way to Party membership. In fact, they would not have accepted her, anyway—the wife of a “wrecker,” an enemy of the people.