The music didn’t impress Marusya as being very good, but it wasn’t bad, either. It was strange music—in some places it was crude, in other places strains of folk music could be heard. One thing Marusya understood unequivocally: this was not Shostakovich. It didn’t have the power, the novelty. But Shostakovich had been hauled over the coals without mercy in Pravda for his Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. It would be interesting to see how And Quiet Flows the Don fared. And Jacob, who could have explained whether the music was good, and in what way, was not with her … The voices were marvelous, although Smolich’s staging seemed somewhat lacking.
Their evening at the Bolshoi Theater changed something in their relationship. All of the preliminaries had been taken care of. Jacob hardly existed anymore in her life—or so thought Ivan, gathering this from Marusya’s own words. He himself had long lived in a semi-divorced state from his wife, who had moved with their daughter to Kiev, and whom he seldom saw. Ivan considered the marriage, which had lasted about ten years, to have been a mistake, and he hinted to Marusya that he had loved only one woman in his life, and Marusya knew who she was. When he looked at her with his devoted eyes, her memory of that absurd Kievan Ivan Belousov was immediately awakened.
In the Institute of the Red Professorate, Ivan taught courses on the history of the workers’ movement, historical materialism, and Western European philosophy; he led study circles in factories, wrote brochures, read and remembered a great deal, studied German his entire life, but read Kant and Hegel only in translation.
Marusya recalled how Jacob disparaged these translations, claiming that translating the German philosophers into Russian was futile: since Russian had not developed philosophical terminology, the translations were unintelligible and abstruse. He also said that, strange as it might seem, Kant was more accessible in English. He spoke about the grammar of language, about how it was linked to the national character, and that it had not been determined whether the language conditioned the character of the people or the other way around. He knew everything, everything, and he had a theory about everything, Marusya thought with irritation. But he was never capable of a simple “yes” or “no.” It was all devilish nuance and complexity! Ivan is simple and straightforward, she thought, and how refreshing that is! A healthy proletarian foundation removes all the confusion, all the fruitless play of the mind that prevents one from achieving goals. Ivan’s goal is simple and noble—creating the new man, preparing cadres for the future, giving the youth what is necessary and sufficient. Jacob has always been interested only in what was superfluous. He doesn’t know how to cut away these superfluities. And this is his tragedy. Woe from Wit! And this is the source of his endless conflicts with the authorities, with the proletarian government, than which nothing better has ever been invented in history! And Ivan is right on this point, not Jacob. In a matter so grave and so grand, one needs to pay attention not to the mistakes, which are inevitable, but to the achievements. Here again, Ivan is right. We are tainted by our families. Ivan’s father is a railroad worker. Ivan forged his own road, but Jacob was educated by hired teachers—language teachers, music teachers. A bourgeois environment. And I so wanted to break away from my petit-bourgeois home, from the milieu of small craftsmen, storekeepers, the strictures of that airless Jewish stuffiness. And where did I end up? In a wealthy home, at a formal dining table with a bourgeois papa at the head and a white tablecloth and a pink-and-white dinner service with a cook and a chambermaid. And I wanted only simplicity, purity …
All these thoughts drew her closer to Ivan. No, there was nothing sensual in the attraction, but something upright, something enviably direct. Without any refined, intellectual moaning and groaning.
The end of Jacob’s term of exile was approaching, and Marusya thought with anguish about how he would soon return home—and again she would be racked with internal conflict, and would always lose out to him; and again her work would seem secondary and insignificant compared with his important scientific pursuits. Would they even give him a residence permit in Moscow? If they did, would he be able to find a job? And if they didn’t register him in Moscow, he would leave again for some far-off realm, and she would live in the same way, bearing the stigma of rejection, with papers in which every personnel officer, every cadre, could see her social stain. Divorce was the only thing that could save her from this.
But she had Genrikh to think about. He was twenty years old. The spoiled and capricious child had disappeared, and in his place had emerged a completely new person, practical and single-minded. He lived a difficult and demanding existence, and he coped with it well. He brought home his paycheck from work to his mother, leaving for himself only what he needed for transportation and a midday meal at work. He had been accepted into the Komsomol, and he was proud of this. When he finished at the Workers’ University, he entered the Technical College and was just as enthusiastic about his studies as he had been about his construction set when he was a child. He had spent the most difficult years of his adolescence without his father, consciously turning away from his father’s precepts and admonitions and cultural values, and even feeling a certain degree of contempt for them. The sole thing that interested him was science and technology.
Genrikh was the only one with whom Marusya shared her new thoughts. She was nervous before the conversation, but, much to her surprise, her son encouraged her to decide on that course of action. “I think you’re right, Mama. Perhaps you should have done it sooner. In Stalingrad.”
And so she made the decision to carry out her intention. She didn’t have to appear in court; it was very quick. In the hallway were three other women waiting for the same decision. The court dissolved all the marriages, and all it took was fifteen minutes for the four of them together. This was a common practice during those years. Although the NKVD memorandum about divorce from imprisoned spouses had not yet been published, the employees of the Marriage Bureaus had already been acquainted with the directive concerning the granting of one-sided divorce of spouses who were incarcerated or in exile; it was not necessary for the absent spouse to fill out any forms or sign any papers. Marusya received the document granting her divorce in August 1936. Only two people knew about this: she herself and Genrikh.
Marusya did not write to Jacob about the divorce; she kept postponing it. Their correspondence continued, though it was rather strained. The nearer the time for her husband’s release, the more certain Marusya was that she wanted to live alone. It had been Marusya’s fate to live her entire youth as the wife of her “one-and-only husband.” Emotionally and intellectually, she was a free woman in a new era, emancipated, though outwardly she adhered to established bourgeois expectations. This was the way it had happened. Jacob completely occupied her feelings, and she had never longed for anyone else’s embrace. Theoretically, she completely subscribed to the “glass of water” theory of absolute sexual freedom, which had been propagated by Aurore Dudevant (George Sand), Alexandra Kollontai, and Inessa Armand. In practice, something had always stopped her. Marusya even kept her open admirer at a distance, though they were already on the verge of intimacy. Ivan was either noble or perhaps timid, or else he was waiting for an overt sign from her. Everything came down to the fact that the time had come to free herself from the unbearable authority of an old love. Cast it off! Cast it off!
At the end of November, Marusya received a letter from Jacob with a list of official papers he would need to get a residence permit. He didn’t know that there were already papers that would doom all his efforts to failure—the divorce papers. Marusya was filled with confusion, but the divorce had been finalized, and she had decided. She would not allow Jacob to be registered as her husband, so that she could keep … no, not her apartment, but her independence, her individuality.