The house was an old, dilapidated wooden structure, but the original porch with its finely turned wooden pillars, and the ornately carved window frames, had all been preserved. The room was large and clean, and the hospitable landlady was a quiet woman. The windows were too low, because the old house was sinking into the earth; but the four-poster bed, with metal knobs atop the posts, was too high. With his bad leg, it was difficult for Jacob to climb onto it. As soon as she arrived, he informed Asya that he had already found a carpenter who would hammer together a broad, low divan on which they could place a mattress.
In a wonderful notebook in a wooden binding, which he had bought in a stationer’s shop on his first day back in Moscow in December 1955, Jacob managed to fill up several pages with his beautiful, but somewhat characterless, script. He decided to begin this fresh notebook in the New Year, and the first page was dated January 1, 1956.
Below the date was a list of eighteen points. This was a to-do list for his professional affairs. On the second page, household matters, there were fewer points, and several of them were already checked off. Number one was a teakettle, and the kettle—sturdy, enameled in acid-green—was already standing on the table.
“What a splendid green!” Asya ventured to say, touching the gleaming side of the new teakettle and smiling.
“Asya, I’m color-blind. I was sure the color was a tranquil gray.”
The eighteen points laying out his professional goals represented the project to which he planned to devote the remainder of his life. He no longer wished to return to the manuscripts that had perished in the Lubyanka, the secret police headquarters. The Abez prison camp had given him the kind of experience that in part canceled out, in part simply devalued his prosaic exercises—it was good that nothing had been preserved. Whatever would he do with it now?
His scholarly research could have been continued. He felt it had a certain degree of social relevance—not today, not just now, but perhaps in ten years’ time. The only thing he was sure he wished to return to was music. The three-volume textbook on world musical culture, which he had begun to write in Altai, could even now be useful to a number of people—those trying to further their educations, or to broaden their culture horizons. Yes, yes, being a Kulturträger, a “culture bearer”—that was the right path for him now. But he decided to begin with that marvelous work that he had embarked on in the military, when he conducted the soldiers’ choir, an amateurs’ orchestra.
As was his custom, as a person who thrived on organization, he began carrying out his plans by investigating the local libraries (check), and visiting the local Houses of Culture (check, with the name of the director beside it: Morgachev, Pavel Nikanorovich). At the bottom of the page was a short list of sheet-music titles that he would have to order in the regional library. There was no check after that entry.
Jacob died eight months later, at the end of August, of a heart attack. Asya had gone to Moscow to pick up her pension, and when she returned, she found him lying on the mattress, dead. On his last desk there were two newspapers from the previous day, a pile of freshly written pages of cheap gray paper, and four library books: a Lithuanian language textbook; Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, the pages densely covered with penciled notes; Einstein and Infeld’s newly published The Evolution of Physics; and the prerevolutionary score of Händel’s oratorio The Messiah.
Written on a sheet of dull paper stuck between the pages of the book by Lenin were these words:
Always lags behind in his reading of scientific literature. Writes about the existence of matter in space and time in 1908, already after the discovery of the theory of relativity. Calls the transformation of matter into energy “idealism,” at the same time that, in 1884, John Henry Poynting demonstrated that energy, as well as the mass of matter, is localized, transferred by a field, and its flux has measurable density.
Such were the last happy months of Jacob’s life.
49 The Birth of a New Jacob
(2011)
This time, too, Liza demonstrated her abundant organizational skills. She found places for Timosha and Olga in nursery schools. She hired a housekeeper, a fifty-year-old Georgian woman named Victoria, who was the sole support of her family in Kutaisi and needed to supplement her earnings. She had bought (notwithstanding the Russian superstition that counseled against doing so before the birth) a newborn’s layette. Her children were so eager for the birth of a sibling that they were practically glued to her belly. They tapped on it gently and chatted with their little brother, who, to their delight, they could sometimes feel answering back.
The child’s first attempt to see the light of day occurred on New Year’s Day but he reconsidered. This was just as well, since it would have been most inconvenient. Victoria was off for the holidays, and dishes and pots and pans were piling up in the sink. Either because of the warmth in their home or the sense of impatience hanging in the air, the Christmas tree had prematurely shed half its needles. Yurik suffered from an allergy whose cause was unknown. He itched and scratched like a mangy mutt, and, out of the depths of his long-lost childhood, the panicky fear of infection that had gripped him at the age of five, when Nora drew him a picture of some germ-monsters, came back to haunt him. This time he was not afraid for himself, however, but for Liza and the children. For several nights in a row, he slept on a narrow couch in the kitchen. Liza’s belly, which after all these months had grown used to Yurik’s nighttime embraces, felt forlorn. Liza was perplexed. For the past two years, she had fallen asleep and woken up alongside her husband, like a single indivisible being.
Immediately after the New Year, the children also came down with Yurik’s inexplicable rash. Timosha was especially uncomfortable with it. Liza didn’t call the doctor, and she didn’t bother to take him to the polyclinic, since the holidays were still in progress. People hung around in their courtyards, exhausted from drinking, not knowing what to do with themselves; they were tired of the never-ending vacation. Buses seemed to be running at whim, the polyclinics were operating haphazardly, and it was not easy to reach them, since the roads were nearly impassable. Heavy snowfall alternated with thaws, and the Tajik migrant workers who usually cleaned them were idle, since they weren’t paid to work during holidays. Liza decided independently on a course of action—she gave everyone suffering from the condition antihistamine tablets—and the ghost of the evil germ vanished.
On the morning of January 4, the little one sounded the alarm that he was ready to make his appearance. Labor pains began. They went to the maternity hospital to see their obstetrician, Dr. Igor Olegovich, who was straightforward and brusque and didn’t suffer fools. This was how he had won Liza’s heart when they signed the contract with him for delivering the baby. Yurik didn’t like him, but Liza defended her preference, saying he was as sharp as a whip, not some wishy-washy pantywaist. She herself was inclined to be straightforward and brusque, so it was all fine with her.