I am now a cripple, and I walk with a crutch. My life is approaching its end. My dream is to see you. We will not weigh old grievances and sorrows. I have never loved anyone, ever, but you.
I can imagine the bitter irony of your reaction. However, someone who took the decision to divorce in absentia, someone who did not wish to hear either a confession or a defense, has no right to irony. This is absolutely true. In my situation, neither disingenuous avowal nor belated pretense is of any use. I have made many attempts at reconciliation—all for naught. At first there was simply distance, then alienation …
If you agreed to meet me, or at least to send me a friendly word or two, it would afford me great relief. I would be able to shed a burden I have borne for many years. I would like to be able to kiss your hand in farewell. Or, if nothing else, a letter written in your hand.
Thank you for my past, our past.
I would be happy to see you when I am in Moscow. Eva lives in the same house on Ostozhenka where they came to arrest me six years ago. You know the address and telephone number. If you wish, you can get in touch with me through her.
Jacob
There was no reply to the letter.
Jacob arrived in Moscow at the end of December 1955. The room on Ostozhenka, which had been sealed on the day of his arrest, had been given to the yardman. Jacob decided not to stay at his sister’s. His situation was the same one the authorities always forced on him: he was banned from entering Moscow, but the paper that would assign him a new place of residence, which was almost like a sanitized form of exile, he could only receive in Moscow, from the public prosecutor’s office.
Asya, who still lived in her communal apartment on Ordynka—where there was no watchful yardman, and where other residents were few in number, beaten down, and disinclined to denounce people to the authorities—took Jacob in. In the apartment there was an elderly Jewish lady whose daughter was a famous poet, with a Stalin Prize under her belt and a note in her passport pointing to her ethnicity (the infamous “fifth paragraph”*). She had been trained by her daughter into weak-willed, approving silence. There was also a middle-aged couple who, for their entire lives, had concealed their aristocratic origins, their observance of their Orthodox faith, their education, which they had received abroad until 1917, as well as a new circumstance—their only son was in jail for robbery. These neighbors pretended not to be aware of the nighttime presence of a guest without proper registration papers or a residence permit in their apartment. They didn’t ask a single question.
Jacob held in his hands a wonder about which he had not even dared dream—a pair of large white breasts, youthful, silken, only a trifle pendulous—objects of Marusya’s jealousy and envy. He hid his face in them and breathed in the scent of a woman’s skin. Asya stroked his head with her small, skillful hands, which could lance a boil, puncture a vein with a fat needle, give blood transfusions, and many other things. It was exactly as it had been in ’36, when Asya had come to visit him in Biysk, even before the news of the in absentia divorce. And it was even better than after the war, the first three years before his next arrest, when they were together for the second time. This was the third and final time Jacob had been with the woman whose love had embarrassed him in his youth and later, in Biysk, had inspired him with a sense of awkwardness and guilt because he couldn’t respond to her feelings in kind. Now her lifelong love, which for decades had been unsolicited and inconvenient, turned out to be the only anchor in his broken, unmoored existence. She was prepared to abandon everything, to retire from her job in the polyclinic and follow him anywhere—to Vorkuta, to Chita, to Magadan …
Five days later, Jacob received the necessary papers and instructions to reside in the nearby city of Kalinin. Banished to the boondocks, the back of beyond. A day before his departure, he called his son’s apartment. Amalia, his son’s wife, answered the phone. She gasped when he said his name. She had never seen her father-in-law, even though she knew he was in the camps. Genrikh had hardly ever mentioned him, and she didn’t ask. Amalia invited him to visit on any day, though she asked that he warn her beforehand so she could prepare a festive meal. But it was now or never—he had to leave the next day for Kalinin, and today was his last day in Moscow.
When Jacob came out of the Arbat subway station, he was drawn, as though by a magnet, in the direction of Povarskaya, to Marusya’s, and his own, house. But this destination and the route to it were now closed to him forever. With a heavy heart, he turned toward Nikitsky Boulevard. He had never been to his son’s apartment—only ten minutes away from their former home.
Amalia was unable to warn Genrikh beforehand of his father’s arrival, and they converged at almost the same moment—Genrikh five minutes earlier. They embraced and kissed each other. The table was set in the larger room. Jacob was seated at the head of the table. He leaned his crutch on his chair. Nora emerged from the side room. It seemed to Jacob that the girl slightly resembled Marusya, though she was homelier. She sat down in her place without saying a word, and glanced furtively at her grandfather. Her glance alone told him she was a clever girl. He also guessed that Amalia didn’t love Genrikh. He didn’t sense that fleeting but deep eye-contact that fills the interaction of lovers; they didn’t address each other at all, as though they were quarreling. But they weren’t quarreling. This was simply their life—without commonality, without intimacy, and with Andrei Ivanovich waiting on the sidelines. They divorced a year later. The girl, gloomy and silent, sat looking down at her plate.
“What grade are you in?” her grandfather asked.
“Fourth,” she said, her eyes still lowered.
Reserved, unsociable. Not a very happy little girl, Jacob thought. “Do you like it?”
“What, school? No, I don’t like school,” said the girl, looking at him for the first time.
Her eyes were gray, circled with a dark fringe, like Marusya’s. Her neck was long, and her hair was light chestnut, parted at the top of her forehead and falling down in two waves, like Marusya’s. But her mouth and her cheekbones are mine, Jacob thought … Genes, genes …
Amalia was sweet and cordial, but she looked at him with abashed curiosity: he was one of the first “newly freed” ones, and her eyes were full of unasked questions. Genrikh was tense, and also reluctant to ask questions. Instead, he tried to joke. Nora blushed at his jokes, though they didn’t in the least merit this reaction. Genrikh laughed at his own attempts at humor, and Jacob felt anguish inside, knowing that he would never ask his son the question that had tormented him for so many years.
After tea, Jacob left. When they were saying goodbye, he stroked Nora’s head, patted Amalia’s shoulder, scratched the gray cat Murka behind the ears, and shook Genrikh’s hand. They never saw him again.
The next morning, Asya accompanied Jacob to the station. He carried a rucksack on his back. In his right hand he held his crutch; in his left he carried a small suitcase in a canvas casing. They kissed each other on the platform. Asya’s little face was homely. Her gray, unkempt hair stuck out from under her beret, but under her heavy black woolen coat, under a rough woolen vest, under her white blouse, in the two ample linen pouches of her women’s undergarments, lay her wondrous breasts, which had awakened in Jacob his slumbering sensuality, and her love—he knew—was firm and enduring, and was sufficient for all the days of his life that remained. A life without Marusya …
Two weeks after the New Year, and after finishing the matters she needed to attend to in Moscow, Asya arrived in Kalinin. He led her to a wooden house, relating to her the history of the city as they walked, telling her what a marvelous town it was, independent, recalcitrant. It had fought against the Golden Horde, had forged a friendship with the Lithuanians. The first generation had settled here before Moscow was founded, and the princes had been worthy and decent. He talked about the felicitous geographical situation of the city, about the river Tvertsa, which they simply must try to navigate in the summer, sailing from the mouth of the river to its source. About the wonderful local library, which they never seemed to weed out—he had discovered such remarkable ancient gems of literature behind its doors. About the possibility that he could continue his work, at last …