“Help me, for God’s sake, the baby’s coming out!” Liza commanded all of a sudden, very soberly. Apparently the child had given her a breather, and was building up his strength for the next onslaught.
All of them—Yurik, the Tajik, and the midwife—after looking around, raised Liza up and led her to the booth. The gurney had gotten stuck somewhere along the way.
Lyuda, the midwife, threw open the door of the booth; the guard was there, having sex with a naked woman.
“What the hell!” the midwife said, dumbfounded.
The naked woman didn’t take her words too seriously. She simply dressed herself rapidly and freed up the little booth, grumbling: “Big deal, she’s having a baby. Everyone does.”
“Please, just don’t have your baby on my bed!” said the fastidious guard, although it was too late to do anything about it: Liza was already in his bed. Yurik was taking off her shoes.
Then the waylaid gurney rolled up. They dragged Liza onto it. Half naked, wearing only her sweatshirt, her hips and nether regions bared, their paleness gleaming festively for all the world to see, no shoes on her feet, her hair damp and matted, fastened by her daughter Olga’s brightly colored hair clips, Liza was wheeled toward the reception hall on the ramshackle, hobbled gurney by the Tajik, the guard, the midwife, and the random person who had brought the gurney out of nowhere, with Yurik at the head of this crazy procession. They pushed it along through the melting ice puddles, over the hummocks and potholes, up the stairs, along the tiled floor. “The baby’s coming!” While they were rolling along, Liza tried to explain to the midwife about the double nuchal cord.
“That’s the least of our worries right now,” the midwife said gloomily.
They finally made it to the delivery room.
Yurik had absolutely no desire to attend the birth, but he ended up there anyway. There were three people present: the midwife Lyuda; the nurse on duty, who had managed to get hold of the gurney, and who rushed up with a cup of tea in her hands; and Yurik. Neither the brusque doctor nor any other doctor of any description was anywhere to be seen. They were all, apparently, still celebrating the New Year.
In the delivery room, Lyuda asked Liza to be patient and to keep the baby in for another minute, at least giving her time to prepare the medical equipment. The metal instruments clinked, and liquid burbled. The nurse pulled on her gloves, with rubbery squeeches and sharp snaps. The pain was now too much for Liza to bear.
“Scream out, then, scream!” Lyuda told her. Liza wanted very much to scream, but wouldn’t allow herself to let go. Somewhere in the distance, Yurik hovered, very pale, on the brink of fainting.
“Okay, now push like hell!” Lyuda commanded gaily.
The baby boy slipped right into her hands—en caul, in his bubblelike amniotic sac. The first thing she did, even before taking him out of the bubble, was to unwind the umbilical cord from his neck. She said, her voice now soft and low, “Here he is. A frisky little man! And he’s already wearing a shirt!”
She offered to let Yurik cut the cord. But he didn’t even hear her. He just kept repeating: “Liza! Liza! Jacob is born! All the terrible things are behind us!”
It was January 10, 2011. Marusya’s birthday. A day Jacob Ossetsky honored and observed his whole life. The centenary of the correspondence, preserved in the willow chest.
50 The Archives
(2011)
In 2011, unexpectedly, old age caught up with her. No, it wasn’t that she was in her dotage. It would be more accurate to say that youth ended, never to return. She had managed to overcome her congenital cancer, at least temporarily. Yurik and Liza made her happy, with the equanimity and delight that radiated from them. Nora had never experienced this kind of familial happiness. Even Amalia and Andrei Ivanovich, with all their enveloping mutual affection, suffered from a lack of fulfillment—they left no direct progeny. Yurik and Liza had a son, Nora’s grandson, who brought with him a completely new kind of happiness. Nora scrutinized the little fellow and was able to descry the intermingled legacy of previous lives, of his predecessors—Amalia’s rounded eyebrows, Genrikh’s small, neat mouth, Vitya’s fingers, and Liza’s light-brown Asiatic eyes—a gift from her Buryat grandmother. All of this went deep down, far and wide, back to a time when the depiction of faces with the help of silver salts had not been invented, in the pre-photography Mesozoic Era, when only artists—with varying exactitude of vision, varying gifts and habits of the imagination—were able to leave lasting images. There were no portraits of forebears in Nora’s family. After Genrikh’s death, what remained was a sheaf of photographs.
The haste in which Nora had lived her entire conscious life ceased. Her journey to Tbilisi had helped her to arrange things in her mind and heart, to put everything in its proper place. She had not been mistaken; she had not gone astray. Not only did Tengiz not disappoint her, but he ultimately turned out to be the very person who pushed her, who led her, in just the way she needed to be led in order to arrive at this quiet and meaningful point. The storms of love that she had experienced with him left neither bitterness nor pain—only vivid and rich memories, and slight perplexity: Why had these hormonal surges, these flashes and flickers, taken up such a great part of her life? Was it just the way the female body worked? Ultimatums of her genome? Laws of biology that ensured the propagation of the species?
By this time, Nora had written a book about the Russian avant-garde in theater. The very same year, it was translated into English and French. She devoted herself more and more to teaching—seminars on the history of theater and stage design in the theater school, the same seminars that Tusya had once taught. And, just as Tusya had been, Nora was now the idol of her students.
She was happier than she had ever been in her life. The only thing that worried her was a number of unfulfilled tasks. She made a list of things to do in the near future, beginning with the household affairs. She replaced the bathtub with a shower stall; bought a new stove; acquired two antique Swedish bookcases at the antiques store on Malaya Nikitskaya; and got rid of the old, warped homemade shelves. She weeded out her overgrown library. And when, finally, all the entries on that to-do list had been crossed out, she took the bundle of letters that had been passed down to her from her grandmother Marusya out of the desk drawer. She hadn’t opened the bundle since her grandmother’s death, but she remembered that on the top were letters from her grandfather Jacob, dating from 1911. She unfolded the oilcloth in which they were wrapped, now disintegrating with age. The delicate letters had survived for a century, and Nora realized that she was the only person on earth who remembered these long-dead people: Marusya Kerns, whom she had so loved when she was a child and then fallen out of love with, and Jacob Ossetsky, whom she had seen only once in her life, when she was a girl, not long before his death, when he visited them on Nikitsky Boulevard after one term of exile was over and before the next one began.
The letters were neatly arranged by year, all of them still in their envelopes, with stamps, dates, addresses, and inscriptions in the sort of handwriting that no letter on earth would ever be written in again.
It took her a week to read all of them, almost without a break. She cried, she laughed, she was perplexed. She was filled with delight. In the same bundle, she discovered several notebooks that Jacob had begun keeping as an adolescent. The story of a great love, the story of a search for meaning, creativity as a way of life, and an unquenchable passion for knowledge, for trying to understand an unruly, disheveled, mad world. Many family secrets came to light, but questions arose as well—questions for which there were no answers.