Dear Marusya! I am full of faith and hope that we can recover that fullness we knew with one another during the time of our marriage. Believe me, I am not given to complaining, but my only source of regret is that I have caused you and Genrikh so much difficulty. On the other hand, thanks to my exile, characteristics have shown themselves in Genrikh that afford me real joy. I never expected such courage, dedication, and self-sacrifice from him. His going to work in the Metro Construction Project is also evidence of the seriousness of his attitude to life. It is already not only a boyish enthusiasm and revolutionary romanticism, familiar to us from our own youth, but a real presence and involvement on the construction site. He is deeper than I imagined him to be two years ago. This is truly the path of intellectual labor of the proletariat: the Workers’ University, the technical college, and I’m certain he’ll enter an institute with a good engineering program. And your affairs will improve, Marusya, I’m sure of it. Think—only eighty-four days left! And we will live happily ever after, forever and ever!
39 Yurik Comes Home
(EARLY 2000)
Nora recognized the chirping little voice immediately—she could have picked it out of a thousand others. It was Martha. As shapeless as a hayrick, as kind as a St. Bernard, with a voice like a windup toy.
“Nora! So glad I managed to get through to you. Come over as soon as you can. Yurik is on drugs; he’s in a terrible state. Vitya and I don’t know what to do about him.” Martha spoke in English, but Nora understood every word she said.
“Where is he now?”
“In New York. He was here. Just left. He came to get money. He looks awful. It must be heroin or something like that. Hard drugs. Vitya is crying. He told me to call you. Please come as soon as you can!”
Tengiz was drowsing on the couch. He woke up and looked at her in alarm.
Vitya was crying? Unbelievable. Nora immediately dialed the last phone number she had for Yurik. It was Tom Drew’s place, where she hadn’t been able to reach him. But the stars were so kindly disposed toward her that Yurik had just stopped over at Tom’s.
Without asking any diplomatic questions, Nora laid it all out for him: “Yurik, listen to me. Martha called me and told me you’re on drugs. Listen carefully. This is what we’re going to do. Here, in Moscow, there’s a clinic. It’s private, a very good one. The doctors are good friends of mine. I’ve already made arrangements. They’ll get you out of this. No withdrawal—you won’t have to suffer. You’re going to be fine. I’m coming to get you, very soon, as soon as I buy the tickets. I have a visa already. There’s just one thing you have to do—be careful. Be very, very careful. Stay strong until I get there. Don’t give up. Maybe you should live with your father for the time being?… All right, all right, I understand. I’ll let you know when I have the ticket. In the meantime, stay in touch with me yourself. Please.”
Of course, there was no clinic where she had good doctor friends; but within three days, she had found one.
Nora didn’t even ask him whether he wanted to return to Moscow or to escape the trap of addiction. They had never entertained the thought of his return until now. Nora had visited him once a year—she couldn’t manage more than that. During her last visit, Marina, with whom she always stayed when she was in New York, had remarked that things seemed to be somewhat amiss with her son—his behavior was erratic, questionable. At that time, Nora had not wanted to hear it. She just shrugged it off, saying, “You just don’t know him. He has always been a bit … different. Off in his own world.” What had she done? She was the one who had sent him there.
Marina just nodded. She didn’t try to explain to her friend that she was living in another time, in another country. In America, the rules of the game were different; there were other problems, other perils.
“I’ll come with you. All right?” Tengiz said.
“Thank you,” Nora said. She was glad.
But they weren’t able to fly together. Tengiz made his visa arrangements in Tbilisi, and flew to New York three days later. Nora, as usual, stayed with Marina, who was rattled by all of this. She had long ago realized what was going on.
Marina Chipkovskaya’s children, who had all been born in America and didn’t speak Russian, were not thrilled about her mother’s strange guests from Moscow. Her mother’s friends, even the ones who lived here, émigrés, spoke English poorly, were not terribly successful, and generally irritated them. They didn’t try to hide this. When she was still a child, her daughter had asked Marina, “Why do Russians have such bad teeth and greasy hair?”
Marina could have answered this question, but she chose to remain silent; there would have been just too much to explain, about how every culture has its own habits: Americans change their T-shirts twice a day and wash every time they come near a shower. But a Russian, from one generation to the next, washed once a week in the bathhouse, on Saturdays, and changed his underwear at the same time. Many of them lived in communal housing, where there was no bathroom at all. And she would also have had to talk about how every shabbily dressed Russian child at their age read as many books in a year as she and her brother were likely to read in a lifetime. And how every decent Russian adult knew as many poems by heart as a professor of philology in this country had ever known.
Marina said none of this to her children, because she wanted them to be 100 percent American, so that the cloying air of the immigrant would disperse as quickly as possible, in the first generation. Those newly arrived from Russia fell into two categories: the ones who taught their children Russian, so that they could read Pushkin and Tolstoy in the original and wouldn’t lose touch with Russian culture; and the others, like Marina, who did not. What held true for both groups was that emigration brought enormous losses in social status, and very few were able to achieve the positions they had occupied in their homeland.
Vitya Chebotarev was one of the few who had managed to adjust painlessly to his new country. In Russia he had been an original, a unique talent, with no status whatsoever, and such he remained in America. Moreover, he had been overtaken by luck in the form of Martha, who had taken Varvara Vasilievna’s place in running his household, and at the same time had become his truest friend, and later his wife.
In New York, it was some time before Nora could find her son. For two days, Tom answered the phone and told her Yurik wasn’t there. On the third day, Yurik called her himself, and went over to Marina’s apartment. Nora had prepared herself for the meeting with her son—she had to keep herself in check, not cast blame or reproach, suppress the horror that welled up in her. Yurik looked terrible. He was bedraggled and seemed very, very weary. They hugged. A stench of old clothes, rotting teeth, and death clung to him.
“Tired, old man?” Nora said.
Yurik looked at his mother in surprise. “Yes, that’s exactly it. Tired.”
“Well, I got here in time, then. We’ll discuss everything later; it will all work out. Let’s go into the city. We’ll grab something to eat and buy our tickets.”