Ivan also made an important decision. After all, he was no Mr. Greenhorn. He had been courting her for so long, it was time to resolve the matter. Marusya never invited him to her home; indeed, it wouldn’t have been possible, since she had a grown son. Ivan also hesitated to invite her to his tiny room in a communal apartment, stuffed with boxes overflowing with file cards, quotations, alphabetically ordered clippings—an enormous collection of Lenin’s excerpts and dicta about everything under the sun. Ivan was an acknowledged expert on the texts of the leader, and not even the card catalogue in the Lenin Library was as abundant as his collection. But he could hardly invite Marusya to his dusty lair, to share a soldier’s iron cot, on torn sheets …
Ivan found the solution: he called the Central Commission for the Betterment of Living Conditions of Scholars and requested two vouchers to the sanatorium in Uzkoye, a wonderful spot just outside of Moscow. The great scholars and scientists all vacationed there. The academics who ran the sanatorium did not particularly like the Red Professorate, but the Academy of Sciences had not long before merged with the Communist Academy, and spots had been allocated to them. They promised a place to Belousov as of December 1.
“Marusya, we’re going to a sanatorium. We need a vacation,” the soft-spoken Ivan announced firmly.
“When?”
“The first of December.”
This offered the best possible resolution of Marusya’s agitation and disquiet. She simply wouldn’t be in Moscow when Jacob returned. In this way, she could at least put off a tormenting, painful explanation. As for Ivan, she would just have to see how things panned out. Radical? Yes! It was a desperate, mad act.
The December morning was damp and seemed darker than usual. Marusya rocked back and forth in the automobile and felt slightly sick to her stomach. She almost always suffered from motion sickness, and berated herself for agreeing to come on this trip. By the time they reached Uzkoye, it was already light. They entered the tall entrance gates, and an avenue of old trees opened up before them. Beyond was a house with a portico and columns, and a church, with a service in progress. When they entered the main building, her heart skipped a beat. Everything was orderly, formal, restrained, and refined. Her back seemed to straighten up of its own accord. Her chin lifted higher, and her former posture and gait, which had been lost in the humiliations of life, were restored in a single moment. The noble furnishings inspired equanimity and confidence in her, and a sense of her own dignity and worth. A lady with gray curls gathered on top of her head led them along the corridor and showed them their rooms.
“We usually settle most of our guests in the wing, but this room happened to be unoccupied. If you please…”
They didn’t attend lunch, but they did go down for dinner. There were few people in the dining room, primarily elderly and even aged men, with vaguely familiar faces. They were most likely all academics. Marusya recognized one of them—Fersman, a geochemist.
Marusya was wearing a dark-blue suit and a modest but brightly colored blouse decorated with an Egyptian motif on the sleeves. She immediately felt that she was in her element, and thus felt perfectly at ease. Besides the waitress, there was only one other woman among the guests in the dining room. She was large, with a birthmark that covered half her face, probably also an academic. She was eating and reading a newspaper at the same time.
After dinner, Marusya settled down on an uncomfortable Voltaire armchair in the small dining room with Céline’s novel Journey to the End of the Night. The novel had been published a few years before. She was reading, not the French original, but a translation by Elsa Triolet. Marusya picked it up after reading a recent scathing review in Pravda. The author of the piece railed at Céline for his “aesthetic of filth,” which was, moreover, the filth of capitalistic society, the filth of the bourgeoisie. Marusya enjoyed both the novel and the translation, and at the same time she admired the paintings, the mahogany furniture, and the view onto the park. She perceived the advantages of aristocratic life over grasping bourgeois decadence.
The first three days, they walked through the huge park after breakfast: ponds, tree-lined avenues, a birch grove, lime trees. It was very pleasant, but a bit wearisome: as they talked about social and political subjects, the conversation was strained. Ivan, tired of walking around in circles, lost his self-confidence. Too bad. He left Marusya, intending to sit down to work on his never-ending Bulletin of the Institute of the Red Professorate, which he had maintained almost single-handedly for the past five years.
On Sunday morning, December 6, the papers arrived bearing news of the Stalin Constitution. Ivan had already known for a long time that the great event was in the offing, and here it was. The newspaper announced that socialism had been built, and that the dictatorship of the proletariat had accomplished its mission. Professor Belousov would now have to modify his syllabus to accommodate these new achievements. To celebrate this remarkable turn of events, Ivan took a bottle of Kagor, monastery wine from Moldavia, out of his suitcase. He had been keeping the wine for just such an occasion, and he invited Marusya to spend the rest of the evening in an intimate setting, in his room.
Ivan succeeded in luring Marusya into his love net in the short interim between the second and third glasses. She was not aware of much, since alcohol, even such a pious variety, had a rapid and violent effect on her. She smiled, and laughed; then the walls started reeling, and she clutched Ivan’s sleeve so she wouldn’t collapse. Belousov grabbed her and did not waste any time—and five minutes later exulted over his blitz victory, while Marusya ran off to the next room, where she threw up the thick red wine. She felt very sick.
When Ivan knocked on her door about twenty minutes later, she was lying on top of the covers, pale, in her decorated blouse, her chest all wet. Ivan ministered to her gently, carrying out her every wish. He put a hot compress on her head and made some tea; she asked for more sugar. Then she vomited again. Ivan nearly cried from tender sympathy: sweet, fragile girl … He took care of her as he had taken care of his own daughter when she was sick with scarlet fever. Marusya was touched. He was a warm person—a caring, warm person. And the most important thing was that he had clear positions, solid and benign, with no intellectually refined twists and turns of thought.
Jacob sent a telegram when he was leaving Novosibirsk. Neither Marusya nor Genrikh was there to meet him when he arrived. On December 4, he went to Povarskaya Street. The neighbors opened the door of the communal apartment. The door of their room was locked; he didn’t have a key. He went to his sister’s.
In the evening, he managed to get through to Genrikh by phone. His son said, “Congratulations on your release. Mama’s in a sanatorium. I’m not sure which one.”
Jacob found out about the divorce that had already been officialized when Marusya returned from her holiday. By this time, he already understood that he would have no Moscow residence permit; nor would he have a wife or a son. He would have nothing that he had been counting on. He did find a job, however, outside Moscow, in the Yegoryevsky District, in the planning department of a paltry little factory.
Before he left to start his new job, he sought out Asya. They met by the Novokuznetskaya metro station. Pink, touching, wearing a little beret, with an expectant expression in her eyes, Asya asked him how his eczema was. “My eczema is feeling just fine,” he joked. She invited him to her house—she lived nearby, on Pyatnitskaya Street. Jacob declined. They walked down Ordynka Street. When they were saying goodbye to each other, Jacob, in an old-fashioned, gallant gesture, kissed her hand.