“This structure, this set, can serve as a house, the police station, the prison, and the barge, without any transformation. We just have to decide about the water. The Volga River,” Nora said, showing a sketch.
“Fewer words, fewer words,” Tengiz said. “Incoherent, disconnected cries, cursing, fragments of musical phrases. We’ll bring in some Shostakovich, I’ll ask Gia … Or we’ll find a composer in Budapest. Forget about Leskov’s original text. We’ve thought everything through. We’ll weave fate ourselves. And let Katerina be knitting some little socks—well, some large ones, even huge ones! With a red arrow up the sides. And in the first love scene, let her wind the yarn into … I don’t know what it’s called, you wind them on your hands.”
“Skeins,” Nora prompted.
“Yes, skeins. Skeins. The hands wind them and approach one another … I don’t know, I don’t know. You think up something,” Tengiz said.
“Good, good. Winding the yarn is right. I think the entire first love scene is like a cocoon. The spider’s thread winds around them. Let it be red, and the old man Izmailov comes and flings open the door, and the door breaks the thread.”
“Now, that I’m not so sure about. But let’s move along. I need the old man to be wrapped up in a shroud, and let’s put him not in the basement but, rather, in the attic. We’ll have this mummy hanging in the spiderweb up there on high. And some evil spirit or vermin, like a cat or a werewolf, is walking there above, and not below. How did Leskov manage to forget about witches? My God, it’s unforgivable! They’d be perfect. They could hang from the hairy black ropes, and drop down.”
“The attic—that means we need a third level. That’s too much. There should just be two,” Nora insisted.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. We can tackle the technicalities later. I need the dead—all four of them—to be wrapped in shrouds, in black shrouds.”
“Wait a minute—why four? The old man Izmailov, Zinovy, and Fedya—”
“And the baby? Four! No, five! We forgot Sonyetka. She drags her into the water.”
“Tengiz, this is frightening. Terrifying, even.”
“And rightly so! It must be terrifying. This is not your everyday Ukrainian Viy! It’s Russian. It is terrifying!”
“No, no. I can’t do this. I don’t want to!” Nora objected.
“Did you want a light at the end of the tunnel? Well, there’s no light there. Everything is dark and dismal.”
“And the boy? Fedya? The innocent boy, Fedya?” Nora said, grasping for some ray of hope.
“Fine, the finale is yours. Go ahead and do it. I’ll watch and see what kind of heavenly kingdom you salvage out of this story,” Tengiz said, agitated. “Come on! Do you remember Shostakovich’s finale? You can’t outdo him.”
“That has no bearing on what we do. We’re not staging an opera. Besides, I’m against the idea of using Shostakovich’s music. Also, if you take three minutes of music, there will be no end of trouble over copyright issues. It would be far better to commission some up-and-coming young composer.”
They argued for a long time over the finale. Right up until the moment when they had to submit the play, they couldn’t agree on an ending. Their creative kinship had never been put to such a test before. Ultimately, they had to call upon the artistic director to make the final decision. And Nora’s idea for a finale, with butterflies, won out. Tengiz accepted it, after much resistance. From a two-story structure—at Nora’s insistence—the convicts emerge, into real water poured into flat zinc troughs. They wend their way down to the shore, all linked together by hairy black threads from the legs of the invisible spider, and, like black dirigibles, four cigar-shaped figures shrouded in black hang in the air from above.
The people look up, craning their necks, to see an enormous, iridescent black metal spider with a gleaming cross in the middle of its belly and dangling bent legs, each with three claws on the end. Everyone freezes, attending to some faint, modulating sounds. One of the figures begins to crack. The sound grows louder. Out of the crack flits an enormous white butterfly … And another … A flute begins to play a tentative Eastern melody …
They stayed in Budapest for three months. The technical side of the play proved to be difficult. Tengiz rehearsed with a translator, pretty Tanya, the Russian wife of a Hungarian journalist. They ate together in a café during the breaks. Nora was jealous but refused to show it. From morning till night, she was in the workshops, making miracles. The head of the set construction department came to hate her. Old, conceited, hailing from some aristocratic family or other, not used to being prevailed upon like an inexperienced novice—first she needed this, then she needed that … But after the opening night, he went up to Nora and kissed her hand. Success. A great success.
Tengiz also went up to her afterward and told her to stop being an idiot: “You can’t fool fate.” And everything returned to the way it had been. In mid-December, they went back to Moscow. Nora didn’t make up the bed in Yurik’s room anymore.
He decided to spend the New Year—the year 2000—with Nora. The Second Chechen War was in full swing. The siege of Grozny began on December 26. Nora had not been able to get through to Yurik on the phone for three months. Tom kept telling her Yurik wasn’t home. She got the impression that he didn’t live there anymore. Martha, whom she called about once a week, had heard no word from Yurik, either.
Nora and Tengiz spent the New Year with a boisterous group of actors. The Vlasovs, who had never really recovered from their son Fedya’s death—they carried their sorrow inside of them—were there as well. Every time Natasha Vlasov saw Nora, she seized the opportunity to whisper in her ear: “Don’t let Yurik come back. I beg you, don’t bring Yurik back here.”
In the beginning, everyone made merry. Then the merriment gave way to political prognostication. Yeltsin, sitting in front of the Christmas tree, announced he was retiring. They argued about whether that was bad or good. They argued about when the war in Chechnya might end, and whether a war in Georgia would begin. They argued about whether the twenty-first century had already begun, or whether they had to hold out for another year. The new millennium had begun, but no one expected any good to come of it.
37 Uzun-Syrt—Stalingrad Tractor Plant
(1925–1933)
The boy forgot everything. The sea’s elemental might, the ruins of the ancient Genoese fortress, the unprecedented taste of fruit and the shish kebab he would love for the rest of his life, the cypress trees, cheburek mutton pies, Tatars, Greeks, boats, horse carts—all of it paled in comparison with the vision of gliders floating above the long mountain of Uzun-Syrt in Koktebel. They didn’t take Genrikh to see the gliders, however. Instead, they went to visit someone named Max. They all sat in a big room around a fat, bearded old man wearing a white sheet, his head bound up with a rope. They had a long, incomprehensible conversation. Another old man, gaunt, with a large nose, spoke about psychoanalysis, and the first fellow, the fat one, remained silent, sometimes nodding his head and smiling. Genrikh grew faint with impatience, because he had noticed the wonderful flying machines when they were entering the village, and now he wanted only one thing—to run as fast as his legs would carry him to the mountain that released them into the atmosphere. He tugged on the hem of Marusya’s skirt, grabbed her by the hand, and, finally, crumpling over and wrinkling his face up like a little monkey, broke into silent sobs. Marusya stood up, excused herself, and, taking him by the hand, followed behind him.