And off she ran.
Finally, it was over …
On the kitchen table were three shiny, clean bottles. The baby had drunk twenty ounces. Nora peeped into his room. He was sleeping on his tummy, his legs tucked under him. His little face was hidden; all she could see was a round cheek with an earlobe stuck to it. Without taking off her hat, Nora took a piece of paper and a pencil and, in several deft motions, made a sketch that came out just right the first time. It was a good drawing. For many years, this was how Nora had lived. Something would catch her eye and gladden it, and she would immediately reach for the pencil and paper. They would pile up and pile up, those sheets of paper, until she would throw them all away. But her memory seemed to require this method of taking a snapshot of a moment with the physical movement of her hand.
The pencil moved mindlessly, automatically …
Then she looked at the big pile of books by the front door and realized she wouldn’t be able to sleep until she had found a place for them and put them away. The smell of dust bothered her most of all. She took a damp rag and began wiping off the books, one at a time, not even looking at their spines or covers. She recognized them just by touch—they were so familiar to her. She filled up the gaps in two large bookcases, then started to make piles in the walk-through room that served as her studio. By four in the morning, she had finished putting the books away; now only the chest remained. But she was exhausted. She perched on a creaky bentwood chair to catch her breath. Then Yurik turned over. She took off her dusty clothes, got into the shower, and while he was fussing indignantly, unable to comprehend why his food hadn’t appeared, she dried herself and ran to him naked, her breasts overflowing with milk. He smiled at her with his bright eyes and opened his mouth. While he sucked, she drowsed, and when he fell asleep, she woke up. She put on her pajamas, then collapsed onto the divan in the next room.
She fell asleep like a stone—and started awake, feeling as if she were on fire. She looked down to see a line of bedbugs marching across her, leaving in their wake marks where they had bitten her. She shook her head and looked at the clock; it was just after seven. She hadn’t even slept for two hours. She leapt up, rushed to the door, and realized what had happened—the bedbugs had warmed up and emerged from the cracks between the branches of the chest to go out hunting. Nora pulled off the top of the chest. It was full of paper, and there were nests of many generations of the insects. She recognized the familiar bedbug stink. What an inheritance she had received! Disgusting.
She grabbed hold of the chest by one of the two remaining handles on its sides. The balcony was in Yurik’s room. She lugged it past his little white crib, opened the balcony door, and, letting in a bracing stream of cold air, shoved the chest outside. Let the bastards freeze to death! Then she locked the balcony door behind her.
Yurik woke up, smiled blissfully, and stretched. On the child’s blanket, a bedbug, parched from lack of nourishment, sat meditatively. Nora brushed it to the floor in horror, then picked it up and flung it out onto the balcony. The baby laughed. He was already learning to play and have fun, and his mother’s sweeping gestures seemed to be an invitation for a game. He began to wave his arms around, too.
Nora rubbed kerosene along the entire path from the door to the balcony, shook out her bedding, and waited to see whether reinforcements would arrive. But the bedbugs, it would later become clear, had all met their death on the balcony. For a time, Nora forgot about both the chest and the bedbugs.
The next day, there was a late hard frost, followed by torrential rains. In May, Nora moved to a rented dacha in Tishkovo and lived there for the next three months with hardly a break.
When she returned and began cleaning the apartment, grown dusty during those months, she noticed the abandoned chest out on the balcony. The woven surface had swollen up with water. Washed by many rains, the chest now looked much cleaner than it had been immediately after the rescue. She removed the top and discovered a solid mass of limp paper, covered in smeary traces of ink. The notes in pencil had washed away completely.
It’s for the best, she thought. Now I won’t have to dig around in that maudlin past. She brought a garbage pail out from the kitchen and began stuffing the foul-smelling paper mush into it. Only after taking four loads of the stuff out to the dumpster did she discover, at the very bottom of the chest, a parcel, carefully wrapped in pink oilcloth. She opened it up and found bundles of letters bound together with ribbon. She pulled out the first letter. The address on the envelope read 22 Mariinsko-Blagoveshchenskaya Street, Kiev. It was postmarked March 16, 1911. The addressee was one Maria Kerns. The sender was Jacob Ossetsky, 23 Kuznechnaya Street, Kiev. It was a very bulky correspondence, carefully arranged by year. Interesting, very interesting. There were several notebooks, filled with diminutive old-fashioned script. She examined the package carefully—she didn’t want to encourage another bedbug infestation of the house—but everything was clean. Marusya had put the bundles of letters, together with the oilcloth, in her theater archives, which had already existed by then. And forgot about them for many years.
The papers lay ripening in darkness year after year, until all the people who could have answered any questions prompted by reading the old letters had died …
2 The Watchmaker’s Shop on Mariinsko-Blagoveshchenskaya Street
(1905–1907)
Maria, later known as Marusya, was born in Kiev. Her father, Pinchas Kerns, had moved there in 1873, seventeen years before her birth, from a small town in western Switzerland called La Chaux-de-Fonds. Her father was a third-generation watchmaker, and he intended to open his own branch of a Swiss watch works that by that time had already begun its victory march around the world. Pinchas was on good terms with Louis Brandt, his employer and the owner of the watch works that would later become known as the Omega Company. Pinchas was a first-rate watchmaker, and, given his assiduity and conscientiousness, he could have begun importing Swiss watch parts to Kiev and reaped a rich harvest and hard cash in his new home. Louis Brandt even contributed to financing the initiative.
His noble mission as one of the promoters of Western capitalism gradually fell apart, although he put down roots in the new place, marrying a local Jewish girl and fathering three sons and his daughter, Marusya. In time, he learned both of the official Slavic languages (Russian and Ukrainian). He was used to such linguistic pairings, since in his native La Chaux-de-Fonds German was also spoken, along with French and nearly on equal footing with it. To this bilingual mix were added the two reigning tongues of his Jewish community—Yiddish, which was spoken at home, and Hebrew, which every educated Jew knew how to read.
The Swiss money he invested in the move and in basic amenities did not slip entirely through his fingers, however. Quickly realizing that commerce did not come to him as easily as craftsmanship, Kerns started a watchmaking-and-repair shop that dealt primarily in homegrown, nonpedigreed specimens on Mariinsko-Blagoveshchenskaya Street. He placed a high value on his craft, and viewed commerce almost with contempt, considering it to be a variety of swindling. Although Marx’s Das Kapital had already been written by this time, and the soon-to-be world-renowned genius mentioned Pinchas’s birthplace, La Chaux-de-Fonds, in a flattering light, considering it to be an exemplar of capitalist specialized production, the watchmaker never read this bible of communism. He remained a craftsman all his life, and never quite grasped the finer, or even cruder, points of communism, much less capitalism. His children, however, assimilated from an early age the progressive ideas of humanity, and, though adoring their kind, cheerful father, with his multifaceted goodness, they continually teased him about his archaic habits, his French accent, and his old-fashioned Swiss frock coats, which he had been wearing upward of forty years.