“You don’t know how to read it,” Grisha bellowed. “Jews are the models or exemplars of the human being. As with any exemplars, there were simplifications. All people should, in a sense, strive to become Jews. Adam Kadmon, the original, the first, human being, was the spiritual appearance or manifestation of the human essence, the proto-image of the spiritual and material world. But today we understand that ‘spiritual’ is a synonym for ‘informational.’ And the human being is created, according to Rabbi Akiva (and I fully agree with him), in the image of Adam Kadmon. In other words, this was the model that was realized in the framework of the Creation.”
“Mama, I don’t think I understand any of this all of a sudden,” Yurik whispered to Nora.
“It is very interesting, nonetheless,” Nora said.
“That’s true,” Yurik agreed.
They sat there quietly, trying to follow the intellectual theater that was being played out before them by these two former schoolboys who didn’t seem to have grown up yet, though they were both already sixty. However surprising, Vitya seemed to be the older and more mature of the two.
Nora caught herself thinking that she actually liked Vitya. She had never liked him before, but now she did. He displayed a natural reserve, an economy with words, even a gentle tact in coping with Grisha’s verbal onslaughts.
It’s strange, but I never thought about it before, Nora thought. We really have ended up in a completely different world. Vitya is probably right—yes, they both are. Humanity has crossed some invisible boundary that the majority of people simply aren’t aware of. We were taught that there is a material world, that the human being is the crown of Creation; but he’s not a crown, not a ruler—he’s a child. A child of nature. Two hundred years ago, the theory of evolution was a scandalous idea. Today the human being has not only discovered the mechanics behind it, but has himself become not only its product, but its engineer. What a good thing it was that they told me this; I would never have suspected it myself. And how great—and what a coincidence—that Vitya is the father of my child. It might have been better if it had been Tengiz; but nature saw the matter differently.
Grisha still argued with Vitya for a long time. Yurik ran off to attend to his own affairs. Nora was tired of their conversation and stopped trying to understand it. Martha was dozing in an armchair; she should put her to bed.
Nora opened her appointment book. There was a to-do list for the week—go to Varvara Vasilievna’s apartment with Vitya and Yurik to find out whether there was a will, meet with a lawyer, go to the bank to pay the bills—so that she could mark it all as finished and get on with her own life.
47 Theater of Shadows
(2010)
It was the same disease that killed Amalia. Many years had passed since her death, and although they had not found a cure, they had learned how to prolong life. Sometimes the patient lived long enough to die of another illness, with a more pleasant name, or even of old age.
Nora had already survived Amalia by twenty-odd years. Each time she celebrated another birthday, she remembered to add another year to that number. In the sixty-eighth year of Nora’s life, the defect, hidden away in some gene, handed down to her from her mother, manifested, and the diagnosis was the same. Ironically enough, the Theater Workers Polyclinic, which was renowned for its otolaryngology and its phoniatrics departments, but not for its oncology, managed nonetheless to diagnose Nora’s illness at a fairly early stage. They sent off a urine sample to be tested, found some sort of protein, and immediately got on the ball. She underwent the usual course of treatment, and after a year and a half the quality of her blood was restored. They discharged her and recommended regular checkups, blood tests, and testing for markers of the cancer cells.
After six months of treatment, Nora had become reconciled to the idea of her untimely death. Now that she had received a respite for an indefinite period, she experienced an unprecedented surge of vitality. All her senses were sharply honed. Life, which she had never before experienced as a gift, now became a moment-by-moment celebration. Each tiny detail, all the inconsequential trifles, seemed to glow from within and afford her delight—her morning cup of coffee, water spurting out in the shower in a powerful stream, a line drawn in pencil across a piece of paper, a glimpse of a clump of grass working its way out from under a rock. Music that was once merely pleasant became an event, as though she were having a personal conversation with Bach or Beethoven. Trivial things that had once annoyed her—banal talk, foolish disputes—now ceased to bother her at all.
She felt sheer joy at living, with an intensity that had suddenly increased a thousandfold. Even telephone conversations that had once distracted her, which she had felt to be a waste of time, gave her pleasure—the voices of friends, not necessarily terribly close ones, suddenly surfaced out of the distant past: a classmate she had nearly forgotten; a dressmaker from the sewing workshop of a Siberian theater in which she had staged a play twenty years before; a call out of the blue from Nikita Tregubsky, her first devastating heartthrob in the eighth grade … What did he want? He was visiting from Canada, where he had been living for a long time, and wanted to see his old friends. He realized that, more than anyone else, he wanted to see Nora. Funny, absurd, and completely unnecessary. David, a Georgian actor who had left Moscow to settle back in his historical homeland, called from Tbilisi, and asked her to come for a visit.
“I’ll think about it,” Nora said. “Leave me your number.”
She mulled it over for a while. Even before the phone call, she had been considering some sort of journey. A trip to Altai, or to Perm, perhaps to Irkutsk—to the cities where she had once worked. Tbilisi was the one place she hadn’t considered. The shadow of Tengiz, which had almost left her, seemed to stir again and come to life in the corners of her apartment. They hadn’t seen each other for ten years. He made the decision, and they parted. She hadn’t heard anything about him in a long while. She had read that he was staging productions in France and in Portugal, that he had received awards at various festivals, that he was teaching. Then he returned to Georgia, and the notices about him in theater publications ceased. He was fifteen years older than Nora. Eighty-three? Eighty-four? Is he even alive? Oh, what the hell, I’m going anyway, Nora decided. I’ve always loved traveling.
The war with Georgia had already become chronic. Everyone was used to it, the way one gets used to bad weather. The weather was, however, glorious. It was April, replete with all its promise. There were direct flights to Tbilisi about once a week. Nora bought a two-way ticket; she would spend a week there. As someone who was used to traveling on business trips, she packed her suitcase deftly, grabbed a book of reminiscences about Tusya (written by her students after her death), bought some chocolates to give as gifts, and flew off, with a long-forgotten feeling of ease and lightness, a readiness to encounter both difficulty and adventure.
The airplane landed. The design of the airport had changed, but the people looked the same. Even the customs officials smiled. The crowd waiting in the arrivals area was a sea of black headscarves on Caucasian widows and the ageless, ubiquitous flat black caps of the menfolk. David, now bald but still very youthful, stood just to the side, holding three blue irises for her. They embraced. He took her to the empty apartment of his aunt, who had also left on a trip. There was a loaf of bread wrapped in a napkin, a piece of Sulguni cheese, and a bowl full of raisins. There was also a bottle of wine. It was already late in the evening.