Then Nora turned into Stoleshnikov Lane. Before, there had been people she knew living in almost every house, but many of them had been resettled, had moved, or were already dead. When you live your whole life in one city, it is filled with points of memory, as though ineradicable memories are nailed to every gateway, to every corner.
In the Church of Cosmas and Damian, the bells started ringing. Before, this building had housed the printing press of the Ministry of Culture. Once, Nora had come here on business—to print some playbills or performance notices, she could no longer remember.
Walking past, she heard wonderful singing coming from the open window of the church. She stopped to listen. Beggars swarmed around the entrance. Inside, it smelled of apples and candles. There was a long table on the side where apples, grapes, and other fruits were arranged. The singing mingled with the air perfumed by the apples, and the sound was sublime. Nora sat on a bench right by the entrance. Next to her sat two old women and a mother with a sleeping child, a little girl of about two. It was impossible to make out the words that the choir was singing, but it didn’t matter.
All of a sudden, Nora started to cry. She was not at all religious. Russian Orthodoxy had no special meaning for her; nor did any other religion. But her heart responded to the sounds. My God, she thought, this is my other grandfather, Alexander Kotenko, the precentor, sending me a sign—this is his music, his life. I know nothing about him, absolutely nothing; he tormented his wife, he was evil and blind, as Amalia told it.
Why did this music move her so? Was it really a signal of some kind? They had all been so musical—both her grandfathers, Alexander and Jacob—and Genrikh … Genrikh … And from her heart a deep lament rose up and choked her, and it was as though it wasn’t she crying, but Genrikh in her. Little Genrikh, intolerable little child who threw himself on the floor and thrashed his arms and legs, who wanted to fly a glider or an airplane, whom they barred from his beloved profession of aviation—yes, of course, because his father, Jacob, was an enemy of the people and ruined everything. He was robbed of his dreams, his hopes, his shining, beckoning future. Oh, poor Genrikh!
Nora cried together with him, this boy, her future and former father, who had not been given the chance to live the life he dreamed about. He sobbed and gasped for air, then grew tired and moaned quietly, then howled again, and started throwing a tantrum. Nora just wiped away the tears. How awful! Would his grief never end? Would it never burn out, never die? Would it torment him, and Nora, and the newborn Jacob, who had only just arrived and was not guilty of anything at all? Is it possible that the evil we commit never dissipates, but hangs above the head of every new child that emerges out of this river of time?
She left the church. It was the eve of the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord. “As always, a light without flame shines on this day from Mount Tabor…” Yes, of course! The light without flame … The light has already waned, but the holiday has not yet ended. Suddenly she felt buoyant and weightless, as though someone had taken from her the whole burden of this day. She had crossed a frontier.
Almost next door was Aragvi, a restaurant that Nora and Tengiz used to frequent. She smiled, remembering this. The theater of shadows, which he had shown her without knowing it himself, was an intimation that what was beyond their corporeal existence, so full of fear and shame, was something else, something that, from here, was visible only as beautiful dim shadows.
Nora crossed Tverskaya Street through the underpass, then came out on Tverskoy Boulevard, which she saw with a kind of double vision—the way it looked today, and the way it looked after the war, lined with old trees, with the Pushkin statue at the head of the boulevard, a drugstore on Novopushkinsky Square, the wall, visible from here, of the ruined Strastnoy Monastery, and the long-gone music school in the courtyard of a long-gone building, where they had taken her in childhood to tap on the keys, in the spot where the present-day box of a building of the Izvestia newspaper was located.
She walked along Tverskoy Boulevard, remembering people she knew who had lived in the surrounding houses—her mother’s and her own classmates and friends. She passed the house where Taisia, who had died long ago in Argentina, had once lived. She crossed Tverskoy to Nikitsky, making a small detour around the rerun movie theater where she had received her introduction to art without being aware of it. She glanced in passing at the House of Polar Explorers, at the final refuge of Gogol, and Vitya’s first apartment, on the semi-basement floor, from where he came to see her, running across the boulevard—Vitya, her lawful husband and the father of her only son …
It grew dark, but the light without flame still warmed the sky. “Poor Genrikh!” Nora sighed one last time, and entered the house where she had lived her whole life. She didn’t bother taking the lift, but walked up to the fourth floor, glad that she could make it without undue weariness. And all the way up to her apartment, she thought about how everything had in fact worked out for the best; she still had time to take care of all the loose ends, and to think some things through about which she had a vague suspicion, but certainly could not be said to know. Perhaps she would arrange old letters and write a book, the sort of book that either her grandfather had not had time to write, or, if it had been written, had been burned in the Internal Prison of the Lubyanka.
But who is he, my protagonist? Jacob? Marusya? Genrikh? Me? Yurik? No. No one, in fact, who is conscious of an individual existence, of birth and an anticipated, and unavoidable, death.
Not a person at all, one might say, but a substance with a certain chemical makeup. And is it possible to call a “substance” something that, being immortal, has the capacity to transform itself, to change all its fine, subtle little planes and angles, its crooks and crevices, its radicals? It is more likely an essence that belongs neither to being nor to nonbeing. It wanders through generations, from person to person, and creates the very illusion of personality. It is the immortal essence, written in code, that organized the mortal bodies of Pythagoras and Aristotle, Parmenides and Plato, as well as the random person one encounters on the road, in the streetcar, on the metro, or in the seat next to you in an airplane. Who suddenly appears before you, and calls up a familiar, dim sensation of a previously glimpsed outline, a bend or a curve, a likeness—perhaps of a great-grandfather, a fellow villager, or even someone from the other side of the world. Thus, my protagonist is essence itself. The bearer of everything that defines a human being—the high and the low, courage and cowardice, cruelty and gentleness, and the hunger for knowledge.
One hundred thousand essences, united in a certain pattern and order, form a human being, a temporary abode for each and every person. This is, in fact, immortality. And you, a human being—a white man, a black woman, an idiot, a genius, a Nigerian pirate, a Parisian baker, a transvestite from Rio de Janeiro, an old rabbi from Bnei Brak—you, too, are just a temporary abode.
Jacob! Is this the book you wished to write, and could not?
Epilogue
Everything ends welclass="underline" death follows the happy ending. Everything, at long last, is accepted—the destruction of a people; the funeral of one’s only child, who has died of leukemia. The old Jacob is reading otherworldly books in otherworldly libraries, and listening to otherworldly music. The little Jacob is learning to read, pecking on the piano keyboard, and attending to the clear sounds.
Marusya has finally found herself—look how the clouds move, changing their aspect from moment to moment, at will, not submitting to any logic. She moves in concert with clouds, and with sounds; and this is joy …