There was no music in the conventional sense—only, from time to time, tentative ripples of sound that vaguely recalled music. Plants emerged out of nothing, out of nowhere, strange flowers bloomed and faded, and it was impossible to tell how this was accomplished until the hands appeared: a road, mountains, a landscape; a church on a mountain, a river. Absolutely unfathomable how it was done.
The shadows were thick but also completely transparent. Fish swam past—schools of them. Then, instead of a multitude of small fry, two of them loomed into view, enormous, one a real monster. It wasn’t a struggle, but a dance. The screen glittered; there was nothing except shadows—and strange animals—some very familiar, dogs and rabbits, bears and elephants, and others, walking octopuses and interlaced snakes … An intricate, perfect, eventful process of life was unfolding, only the events were indecipherable. There were only hints, gestures, surmises.
And mysterious sounds—a musical instrument, or a human voice, or an animal emitting some signals … They enchanted, bewildered, bewitched. Now the shadows clung to each other, they merged together and flowed over. And a baby appeared, a baby held on the palms of a pair of large hands … It was impossible to identify what sort of substance it was made of … There was no substance—it was a theater without matter, without substance. An Ideal Theater, in which there was nothing but shadows; neither was there music—just shadows of sound.
Tears streamed down her face. There had never before been such a space on earth, never. It was a world that Tengiz had created completely from shadows, and the content of the world could not be expressed in any language. There wasn’t a single word to accompany it. There was, in fact, nothing at all … It was Creation. Not a story about Creation, but Creation itself. It almost made sense: why he had rejected the corporeal and substantial theater, why during the past years he had become weary of the crudeness of theater, why he spoke about the hypocrisy and insincerity of the theater, the lies of words, the deception of theatrical décor and props, costumes, makeup, the constant overreaching of gestures, the inadequacy of the points of departure, and the impossibility of reaching a goal that in itself wasn’t worth the effort … How could he reject that which formed the sine qua non of the existence of the theater—the actor? How did he find a theater troupe in which the performers agreed to renounce their need to reveal themselves onstage? The anticlimactic finale … What a wholesale retreat from theater! What was the use of Stanislavsky, of Meyerhold? What did Brecht matter, who was Grotowski? Tengiz had transcended substance, taken flight to a place where nothing but shadows existed anymore.
Suddenly everything on the screen changed—there were easily identifiable bears and rabbits, giraffes and swans. As they played out funny little scenes, the audience began to smile, then laugh. Was he making fun of them? Was he putting the self-important spectator in his place, bringing him down a notch? Pulling the wool over his eyes? Indeed, just then, a shadowy goat (not a sheep) with horns and a fat udder appeared. Amusing … Nora didn’t even notice her own tears. They flowed freely down her sunken cheeks, and all the while she was smiling. Oh, Tengiz! We were young together, and I didn’t know then what you knew. Or perhaps you didn’t know it, either? Is this really the reason I suffered so because of you—so that in old age I would understand that only shadows remain? They are the only thing that is real, the only thing that can be said to exist …
The lights came on. The room was rather small, and not all the seats were occupied. People clapped. There were many children in the audience, but still more adults. They spoke in Georgian, and she didn’t understand what they were saying. Then a heavyset old man with a crutch came out onstage. He had a large shaven head, a bright face. He waved his hand—and those who had created the shadows came out onstage, too. Nora smiled—the shadows of the shadows, seven young men and women.
David pressed his hand lightly on Nora’s shoulder: Shall we go up to greet him?
Tengiz gestured toward someone—a single, powerful gesture. A young woman joined him onstage. She was large, stout, with curly hair. He embraced her and patted her buoyant ringlets. She slightly resembled Natella, his late wife. She had a good smile. They looked at each other tenderly. No, Nora didn’t tremble inside. The shadow of love was stronger than love itself … And more pure. Shadows are not possessive.
“Let’s go say hello. He’ll be happy,” David whispered. “Come on.”
“No, David, let’s leave. Let’s go back to the car.” And Nora slipped out the door.
David followed her to where the car was parked. They didn’t speak, just got in the car and drove to Tbilisi. It was shortly before sundown, the last hour of daylight, when the day reveals everything it is capable of, all the beauty and sadness and tenderness that it has accumulated in its brief span of life, from dawn to sunset.
Darkness fell suddenly. The road was poor, but nearly empty. Once in a while, the sliding cones of headlights seemed to uproot sparse roadside bushes or occasional buildings from the darkness. Nora felt as if she were half asleep. When they were already getting near the city, she said, almost as though she were talking to herself, “Tengiz’s young wife is very pretty; they make a good couple.”
“What wife, Nora? That’s his granddaughter, Nino’s youngest daughter. After Natella’s death he never remarried. He’s a widower. He never found another woman who could match him.”
“Oh” was all Nora said.
Why did he tell me he was going to get married, then? Nora thought. Did he decide to free me from himself? Or free himself from me? No, to set me free, of course. It doesn’t matter anymore.
The next day, she flew back to Moscow. If anyone loved long-distance flights, it was Nora. She loved it when you found yourself nowhere at all—in a sort of abstract space and an indeterminate, vacillating time, when, all of a sudden, all obligations, all promises, cease. Everything is put on hold—telephone calls, the mail, requests, offers, and complaints—they all stop short, and you hover, you fly, you soar between heaven and earth, between the earth and the moon, between the earth and the sun. You fall out of your ordinary system of coordinates. You fly … as Tengiz, my soulmate, had; the only one I knew who had burst through all the boundaries of this world alive, and had learned to inhabit another world—the world of shadows … Tengiz … Love beyond touch, love outside of time.
48 Liberation
(1955)
Jacob’s final prison camp was a special one—the Abez camp, for invalids. It was the place they sent the sick and the weak, the convicts exhausted by work in the Inta mines, as well as the rest of the goners from all over the Komi Republic. It was a barracks settlement with whimsical, eccentric structures—workshops, barns, two retired steam engines whose boilers worked to heat only the administrative headquarters. From the hangar that had grown up around the steam engines, monstrous pipelines wrapped in hairy black insulating material loomed over the heads of people from all sides, like the malignant spiderweb of a concealed arachnid.
At first, after the prison officials had glanced at his documents and determined his level of competency, they sent him to an elite technical department in the accounting office. But there he had a falling out with the boorish boss, also a convict, who wrote a memorandum with contents that Jacob was not privy to. First they threw him in the lockup for five days and nights, and then appointed him to work in the library in the Culture and Education Section, where he was more a watchman than a librarian.
Prisoners convicted for espionage and slander against the touchy Soviet authorities settled in the town. Read: Russians from every part of the country, Lithuanians, Poles, Jews, and other people of every possible description. An enormous graveyard of nearly four hectares had grown up on the outskirts of the camp, beyond the drainage ditch, in a place that never dried out, either because a stream flowed through it, or because a swamp festered there. Makeshift bridges made of railroad ties were thrown over the ditch; beyond, stretching to the very horizon, were the same kinds of ditches, only they had been dug to serve as graves. In the winter, the snow mercifully covered the common graves, which had been dug in a timely manner before the first snowfall—each ditch to hold fifty corpses. In the spring, when the snow melted, earth was strewn over the thawing corpses. No pickax was capable of breaking up that earth after the frost set in, especially since the people who were still alive to perform the task were weak and sickly. Thousands and thousands of bodies of exhausted foes and admirers of the authorities, the illiterate and the highly educated, the stupid and the wise, the world-renowned and the completely obscure, lay side by side in these ditches. Under pegs to which numbers were affixed.