From exotic esoteric beliefs, Varvara Vasilievna moved on to the more traditional Russian Orthodoxy. She no longer drove off evil spirits or purified her karma. When Yurik returned to Moscow, Nora’s problem—what to do with the weekly pies—was easily resolved: he ate them whole. Nora was used to spending Saturday mornings at home. She never made any appointments for then. She received her mother-in-law precisely at ten, took the still-warm pie from her hands, and woke up Yurik, so that his grandmother could see him take the first bite. After this, Nora handed her fifty dollars; Varvara Vasilievna preferred the U.S. currency to that of her homeland. Then, more than satisfied, she took her leave. Although Nora continually emphasized that Vitya was the one sending the money, Varvara was absolutely certain that it was Nora’s beneficence she was receiving. Her reasoning was simple: if Nora gave her the money and didn’t keep it for herself, it was a mark of her virtue.
This financial-gastronomic interaction continued for several years, until Nora noticed that for two Saturdays running her mother-in-law had not shown up. She didn’t answer the telephone, either. Nora decided to go to her house. No one answered the door, but the neighbor told her that Varvara Vasilievna was in the hospital. Through the district clinic, Nora soon found out that her former mother-in-law had been hospitalized after suffering a stroke. Nora and Yurik took turns visiting her, first in the hospital, then, after a month, in a rehabilitation center outside the city. Nora smiled wryly to herself. Who would have thought fate had such wit? The elderly woman who had hated her for so many years had fallen under her care.
Nora was sorry for the old woman, naturally, but she had no idea what past transgression she was paying for. Perhaps she was making a down payment for a future transgression, just in case?
Unlike Nora, Yurik fulfilled this filial duty without protest or complaint. He came to see his grandmother and took her for walks in the park in her wheelchair. Then he sat beside her on a bench and played the guitar. What did he play? The Beatles, of course. Varvara Vasilievna’s speech was slurred, but from her mumbling it was clear that she was very pleased with Yurik and his music. Nora did not catch the moment when Varvara Vasilievna had ceased to doubt Vitya’s paternity. Perhaps during the years when Yurik began playing chess with his father …
Varvara Vasilievna returned home two months later. She had become a complete invalid, though it was hard to distinguish between the symptoms of her senile dementia, her damaged speech, and her physical infirmity. The neighbor, who was a pensioner, agreed to look after the sick woman. Nora compensated her for these services, and put a checkmark next to the box: “Varvara—care.”
Yurik made a convenient ramp leading from the room onto the balcony. For half the day, Varvara dozed outside on the balcony, and the neighbor fed her and changed her diapers. A year and a half later, at the beginning of July, a few weeks before her eightieth birthday, Varvara fell asleep on the balcony and didn’t wake up.
Vitya and Martha, who had planned to visit Moscow for her birthday, ended up at her funeral instead.
Three years had gone by since Yurik left America. For three years, he hadn’t seen his father or Martha. For Nora it was longer. The last trip, when she and Tengiz had evacuated Yurik, she had never made it to Long Island. Vitya had not seen his mother in more than fifteen years. He hardly recognized her in the deceased woman with the crumpled stranger’s face, and began to cry. Then Nora, who had competently, without any fuss or bother, taken care of all the funeral arrangements—the visit to the morgue, the requiem service in the church, the gravesite at the cemetery—was so moved that she began to cry, too. For so many years, she had considered Vitya to be devoid of normal human emotions, but either she had been mistaken or he had stopped being completely self-absorbed. Martha must have removed the spell from him. Huge, hulking Martha, as big as a house, who was pouring out tears on Vitya’s shoulder.
They all got into Nora’s car and went to her house, the four of them. Nora drove, and didn’t try to enter the conversation. They all spoke English in Martha’s presence. Just as they were entering the apartment, the phone rang. Nora didn’t make it to the phone before the answering machine picked up. She heard: “Nora! It’s Grisha Lieber. I’m here for a few days, to see my granddaughter. Kirill had a daughter. I wanted to see you. Give me a call.”
He didn’t have time to say the number before Nora grabbed the receiver, exclaiming: “Grisha! Grisha! Vitya and Martha are in Moscow. Come over!”
Half an hour later, the doorbell rang. Grisha was staying in his childhood apartment on Malaya Nikitskaya, a ten-minute walk from Nora’s. At one time, it had been the grand residence of a famous surgeon. Then it had been occupied by Grisha’s parents, physicists, and now Grisha’s first wife, Lucy, who had never agreed to go to Israel with him, lived in it. The apartment was stuffed full of new residents—Lucy’s second husband, their small daughter, Grisha’s son Kirill, with his wife and newborn granddaughter, as yet nameless. Grisha, the former legal occupant of the grand apartment, was relegated to the kitchen, where he slept on a folding cot. The whole family was very amused by this, especially Grisha. In Israel, he had fathered another five children; one son lived in Australia, another in America, and all of them estimated how many folding cots in various parts of the world he would be sleeping on when he was an old man.
A little old adolescent man, with a tanned bald pate resembling an acorn and a scraggly beard, in a black yarmulke, wearing shorts, and holding a bottle of vodka in his hand. Nora, hardly able to suppress her laughter, announced as she greeted him: “We’re just back from a funeral. We buried Varvara Vasilievna today.”
“Oy oy oy! Baruch dayan emet, as they say in Israel. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. May she rest in peace.”
Grisha put his bottle down in the middle of the table and stood next to Vitya. They no longer resembled Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Vitya had expanded in width, and therefore seemed shorter, and Grisha had turned into a scrawny little old man, with not a hint of his former rotundity and paunchiness. No one was in a position to judge this but Nora, however.
I have changed less than anyone, Nora thought. But no one notices.
Suddenly Vitya said, “Grisha, look at Nora! She’s the one who hasn’t changed a bit.”
Unbelievable. What’s happened to Vitya? He never even noticed people before, Nora mused.
“It’s no surprise, Vitya. It’s no surprise. Because of our metabolism, you and I long ago exchanged all our material composition—you consist completely of matter of the New World, and I of matter of the Holy Land. And Nora renews her body by virtue of the molecular structure of local matter. That’s why she doesn’t change,” Grisha said, laughing heartily.
“I doubt that atoms carry that kind of information,” Vitya said, translating what Grisha had said to Martha, and asking everyone to speak English so Martha could understand. Self-absorbed no more.
“All right, but let me say one more thing. There is a DNA program that arranges molecules and atoms in a certain order, and this order includes—”
Here Nora interrupted him and invited him to sit down at the table. Yurik poured them each a shot of vodka. They poured the ritual glass for the deceased and covered it with a piece of brown bread. Only Grisha drank the vodka. Nora took a sip, for propriety’s sake, then drank no more. Vitya, Martha, and Yurik didn’t touch alcohol. They raised their glasses, filled to the brim, and set them back down on the table. With this the funeral rites came to an end. And the duet between Grisha and Vitya, which had lasted fifty years, with frequent interruptions, began again.