There was still another obstacle, one that lurked in her own character: a boundary that Marusya would not have been able to cross. She was essentially bohemian in nature, and any kind of orthodox discipline, strict Party discipline in particular, was anathema to her. It was Jacob who had reported dutifully to work from a young age; until the end of her life, Marusya was never willing or able to tie herself down with routine work. Her worst fear, the greatest bugaboo to her, was punching in and out—that is, showing up on time for work every day, and leaving at a certain hour, and registering one’s arrival and departure on the time clock.
There was one other thought that alarmed Jacob. He knew Marusya’s susceptibility and suspected that she might have fallen under the spell of a new, different kind of infatuation. With a man. Jacob was not jealous, although when they were young Marusya had unconsciously provoked him with stories of important, interesting men who had sought her out. She conveyed this primarily in letters. Yet Jacob had actually been inclined to feel some pride in these reports. He completely understood the men who showed an interest in his fiancée, then his wife. Her attractions were such that Jacob could not even imagine comparing her to other women. She surpassed all others in her charms. Even in the fits of jealousy to which she was prone, she never lost her fascinating appeal.
Her jealousy was unfounded: Jacob never betrayed his wife. That is not to say that Jacob didn’t like other women. He did; he liked them very much. When he was young, he had been desperately in love with a fellow student named Lydia, but she preferred another to him. Back then, at seventeen, he went through the experience of rejection. Even before that, he had liked very much the daughter of the family’s neighbor, the architect Kovalenko; he had been attracted to the sister of one of his friends, and another girl he knew, who attended college. Later, when he was already married to Marusya, he was enamored with a nurse, Valentina Beloglazova, who had given him glucose injections when he was stationed in Kharkov; he also liked Nadezhda Belskaya, secretary at the People’s Commissariat of Labor, where he often found himself. She liked him very much, too, and she gave him to understand this. It was not his eyes, but another organ greedy for pleasure that gave him a signal, which he immediately refused. He kept his own body under control, and didn’t let its demands overmaster him. All in all, accepting the postulate about the primacy of matter and the subordination of the spirit to it, the couple made wonderful mutual use of the body for promoting conjugal happiness, while still considering the Seventh Commandment to be sacrosanct.
Yet, on this particular issue, Marusya experienced some sort of psychological or emotional malfunction. For some reason, it was terribly painful for her to feel that her husband was attracted to another woman. He never betrayed her, or gave in to his desires—this he swore to her—but if he was attracted to another woman, and only refused to give in to his desires out of moral considerations, what was this morality, then? Was it not purely spiritual? Was it not higher than the flesh in that case? At this point Marusya grew weary, and began to cry. But, at the same time, she insisted on complete honesty in their relations, and constantly tormented herself with the confessions she forced from her husband about how his body reacted to this, that, or the other woman.
Now this had all receded into a realm of Jacob’s memory that only called up a sad smile in him. Since he could not change his wife’s mood, he postponed the clarification and restoration of their good relations until such time as he could put his arms around her thin shoulders, and chased away the jealous suspicion that someone else was occupying Marusya’s feelings and thoughts, embracing her small shoulders, and doing with her all the mundane things in which there was no beauty, no mystery, but only mutually coordinated movements. Small details seared his imagination—her head thrown back, the blue vein in her neck, the grayish mother-of-pearl of her eyes looking out from under the half-closed lids, and the elongated dimple in her chin. Jacob chased away these thoughts and memories and devoted all his energies toward what he called “productive life.” He went to work, invented all kinds of extra sources of income for himself, such as private language and music lessons; he arranged and settled his life, and sent money and parcels to Moscow, though it was customary for such “care packages” to travel in the other direction—from Moscow to Biysk, to those in exile.
The letters from home were not comforting. Marusya dredged up all their disputes, artistic or political, and invested them with new energy. Jacob tried to explain himself, which added fuel to the fire; everything became a pretext for new reproaches, until Jacob understood that Marusya simply wanted to pick a fight, no matter the reason. His replies became more reserved, and the intervals between letters grew longer.
At the same time, his eczema flared up again. His hands and feet were covered with a dry crust that erupted in tiny wet pustules, and it itched, burned, and made him generally miserable. During the day, he kept himself in check, but at night, when he was asleep, he scratched himself until he bled. He would wake up from the pain, then fall asleep again, reaching some strange state of semiconsciousness in which he came to an agreement with the unbearable itching: I’m sleeping, and in my sleep I can scratch the wounds …
The subject of health became one of the safest in their correspondence. He once wrote his wife that the eczema was playing up to such a degree that it freed him from all the sad thoughts that would otherwise preoccupy him.
A few days after she received this letter, Marusya’s wrists began itching. The connection between herself and her husband turned out to be much stronger and deeper than she would have liked. Jacob was to a certain degree correct in his surmises. She wanted to free herself from him, but was unable to do so, and she was unconsciously seeking masculine authority and power.
She was no longer the young, bewitching actress with an undefined and exciting future ahead of her; older men no longer turned around to look at her. But she was not seeking a man so much as an idea that would free her. The ideas about emancipation that had long preoccupied her stalled at this point: the bearers of ideas, Marusya’s protests and objections notwithstanding, were men.
Jacob, with his intelligent love, knew how to quell the mixture of pride and uncertainty that created a room-sized hell in her soul, but she was not alone. Their son, Genrikh, was also in need of support. Like Marusya, he, too, was preparing for flight, but in the most concrete terms: gliders, airplanes, air, the sky … Yet life had deposited him in a place that was the polar opposite of his dreams: the Metrostroi, construction of the subway system. Yet even underground he managed to find the communist romanticism that was so dear to him. Marusya supported him in any way she could, but she had her own problems to deal with.
Then Ivan Belousov reappeared. A person from the past, from her Kiev youth, a friend of her brother’s, who once was desperately and hopelessly in love with her. He had spent summer evenings in the courtyard of her family’s home, at a long wooden table with a small table adjoining it for the samovar. Incidents seemed to follow Ivan all the time: He would burn his fingers on the samovar, or overturn a glass of tea on her father’s duck-cloth trousers. Once he stepped on an old dog lying beneath the table, and it bit him. It was probably the first time in its entire life that this dog had bitten anyone, and more out of fright than pain. Everyone laughed at Belousov constantly, and there was no person on earth who was more good-natured about the jokes and jibes leveled at him by Marusya’s brother Mikhail.