What to do? This is what we must do: end it. My blood runs cold when I say this. But it is unavoidable. You can and will live freely and happily. The world is open for you. It is full of beauties and joys. With me your life becomes duller, because that which brings you joy is outside of me.
I know you feel unrestrained pity for me, and that my unhappiness causes you suffering. But there is nothing I can do about it. One can’t allow sympathy and pity to govern one’s life. And listen, know, that death is not a disaster. It is happiness. To sever one’s dependence on form, color, sensations—that is happiness. Do not be alarmed, though. That won’t happen now, or anytime soon. The small, not yet fully fledged life of our child will not allow it. Perhaps the torment of life will become easier to bear with time. Perhaps these images of finality and departure will fall away.
Last night, I dreamed of you, too. An enormous bed. I was hiding away pathetically in a corner. You were standing on the bed, embracing a tall, naked woman. She had small breasts, but they began to grow, to fill out. You caressed her hips tenderly. Under your hands, her breasts were full and ripe. Quietly, with supple grace, you eased your bodies down, locked in an embrace. I woke up.
You see—my thoughts have been affected with malaise. It’s not my imagination, not some unraveling of my nerves, but the cruel, insurmountable truth of life. Your daydreams have become mine. Do not blame me, as I don’t blame you. And believe that I reproach you with nothing, nothing at all. There are laws of life, and we both suffer because of them. Both of us in our own ways, more or less, but no one is at fault here. Do not come here. Forgive me. If it is too difficult for you, I will do as you wish. Forgive me, my dear one, my good one, my loving one, my Jacob. I cannot tear myself away from this letter—I must tell you the truth.
I just got your letter. My dearest. You so want to help me. To behave “well.” To make heroic efforts. My Jacob. But we cannot recover the past, as we cannot recover my youth. Love is possible only where there is youth and beauty. Love is a huge but primitive feeling. Its demands are primitive. A woman’s most decisive value is her aesthetic value. I no longer have this—no, no, and again no. Literature, art, life—everything speaks of this. I feel the world is suffocating me. Genrikh whines and cries all day long. I am trying to make myself smaller, exerting myself. I want to overmaster myself—and am unable to. I must help him—but I have no strength. I overexert myself, and then feel weak with the effort. My head is spinning. Genrikh is as lonely as I am. There is no one by our side. I wander alone. No, I do not want your pity. I am shattered, and so I seem to demand pity. No, everything will pass. We must break with each other, no matter what the cost. It’s unavoidable. Goodbye, my love.
Mar. Postcard
AUGUST 28
The train arrives on the morning of the 30th. You will go from the station to your work, and I to Ugryumova, on errands. If you can’t meet us at the station, don’t worry. Send Manya to meet us. I kiss you and send you a strong hug, my dearest and sweetest one.
36 Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District
(EARLY 1999–2000)
The thought of Yurik never left her. Her previous visit to New York had been a failure. Nora saw Yurik only four times in the space of two weeks. He had a cold and a red, sniffly nose, and he was constantly rushing off somewhere or other. He was underdressed for the cold weather. She bought him a warm jacket. She couldn’t figure out where he was living. He said he lived with Tom, but asked her not to call him there. He said he had lost his cell phone, along with his passport and green card. Or, rather, that he had been mugged. Nora insisted that he apply for a replacement of his Russian passport. Together they went to the embassy and filled out the forms for a new one.
He was always late for their rendezvous. One time he didn’t show up at all, and she waited for two hours at Dante in the West Village, where he had agreed to meet her. She never made it to Long Island to see Martha and Vitya. Martha had gone to Ireland to attend the wedding of some cousin, eight times removed. Vitya spoke to her over the phone in monosyllables—yes and no—and she couldn’t get any information from him.
She returned to Moscow. She felt wretched, her mood was lousy; but she had long since decided that the best mood she could expect for herself was none at all. At least that was better than a bad mood.
Nora taught in the theater college, having taken over Tusya’s old position. She was constantly aware that she couldn’t possibly fill Tusya’s shoes—she didn’t have her freedom, her command of the cultural sphere. The old guard of teachers was passing away, and the new generation couldn’t measure up to the precedents of the old one. It seemed that the next generation of students would take another step down on the ladder. There were no interesting offers from the theater, either. Tengiz had been lying low for almost two years.
The mythical era of reconstruction, or “perestroika,” seemed to have ended with the 1998 default of the ruble. Both Tengiz and Nora had understood, of course, from the very beginning, that perestroika had no relation to them at all. It turned out that neither of them had anything to “reconstruct” in order to achieve a correspondence between the newly permitted freedom of thought and their own matured thinking about the world, and their own place in it.
Since her high-school years, Nora had felt a high-minded contempt for collectivism, and she rejected the false dichotomy of a “social good” superior to the “personal good.” In his patriarchal homeland of Georgia—from the age of thirteen, when his father went to fight on the battlefront during the Second World War—Tengiz had had to support his entire family by the sweat of his brow. He provided for his sister, his mother, his grandmother and grandfather, and his grandmother’s blind sister, who lived with them her whole life. This early burden of responsibility shielded him from all kinds of foolishness and idiocy. His schooling was constantly interrupted, and only after his father returned was he able to make up for lost time, grasping at all the opportunities he was deprived of in childhood. He went to live with an uncle in Kutaisi, and attended the Institute of Culture. He transferred to acting school, quit, served in the military construction battalion, then worked evenings and nights—as a nude model, a cobbler, even as a cook—until he decided to become a theater director. He had had no time for being either Soviet or anti-Soviet.
The officially authorized freedom, or its shadow, made no impression on him. Nora didn’t really notice it, either. She had always been so headstrong that willfulness had supplanted freedom for her from her earliest years. It was likely that Tengiz’s independence and Nora’s willfulness had struck a mutual chord in them. Somehow or other, both of them responded to the freedom they found in each other. It was a joy for them to work together. But their mutual endeavors—Nora had almost reconciled herself to this—had ended.
By the end of the 1990s, they had about two dozen joint stage productions under their belts. Even though the plays had not all enjoyed the same degree of popular success, they had received well-deserved professional and critical acclaim, a few prizes, and some international recognition. They had found friends in the Eastern European theater world, with whom they shared common views: a dismissively skeptical attitude toward politics, and an aversion to the coarser, cruder forms it took, such as the invasion of Prague in 1968 by Soviet troops and the recent American bombing of Yugoslavia, not to mention the secret killings, poisonings, and cloak-and-dagger intrigues.