Before leaving the house, Nora said something that mothers rarely have occasion to say to their sons: “Yurik, you do understand that we’re going without heroin, don’t you?”
“But I’ll go into withdrawal.”
“I know. So go to the bathroom and shoot up one last time.”
But he shook his head and said he didn’t need to yet. He would take his last fix at the airport, just before they took off.
“Are you crazy? What if they catch you?”
“Mama, I know what I’m doing. I have it hidden in my sock. And I’ll already be clean when we board the plane.”
Nora was the one losing it, not Yurik. Tengiz gripped her by the shoulder and said, “Be quiet.”
They were traveling lightly—Nora with a small suitcase, Tengiz with a backpack, and Yurik with the guitar, with which he quietly carried on a conversation. Nora felt they had already made it to the last leg of their journey, but another surprise was waiting for them at the entrance to the airport. The baggage check took place not in the terminal, as she had come to expect, but right at the entrance. There were two policemen with a sniffer dog standing right behind the baggage conveyor belt. The dog wasn’t a ferocious German shepherd, but a friendly setter that she immediately wanted to pet.
They stopped.
“Yurik, go outside and throw your junk away, into the first garbage can you find,” Nora said quietly.
“I can’t. I’ll go into withdrawal in two hours if I do. You have no idea what it’s like,” Yurik said morosely.
“Have you lost your mind? Toss it out,” Tengiz ordered sharply, the first time in all these days, and perhaps in their whole life together, that he spoke in such a tone.
Yurik’s lips trembled, the corners of his mouth drew downward, and Nora understood that it was not a twenty-five-year-old man standing before her, but a fifteen-year-old boy who was gripped with fear. She hugged him tight, and whispered in his ear, “Don’t be afraid. I have a sedative with me that would put an elephant to sleep. If you take it, you won’t wake up for nine hours. Come on, throw the stuff away.”
“You don’t understand—once the withdrawal pains start, there’s no way to stop them.”
While they were negotiating, the dog fixed his intelligent eyes on his master and growled softly: he needed to relieve himself. The policeman with the dog left. Tengiz placed his things on the conveyor belt. Yurik was reluctant to part with the guitar and didn’t want to put it under the X-ray, but he finally did. Nora thought again—fifteen years old, fourteen years old … Vitya, Vitya … The X-ray didn’t reveal anything dangerous, and they walked briskly toward the terminal.
They had a bit of time for a snack, and sat down at a table.
“Well, it’s time. Go to the bathroom and take what you’ve prepared,” Nora said. And she thought, It’s like a bad dream. Is this really happening to me? Like some B-movie …
“You know, I don’t think I need to yet. I’ll know when it’s time. I’m okay for now.”
They ate some sort of rubbery salad in a little plastic trough, and some plastic bread, and drank some American coffee that resembled dishwater in a paper cup. Nora recalled how she had liked all of this the first time she visited America. Where have we ended up as a result? This hasty, catastrophic departure from America, and his departure from Moscow to America nine years earlier, suddenly seemed to blend into a single event—damn, it was all her own doing. It’s because she was so headstrong, it’s because she wanted to take life into her own hands and mold it, organize the process to meet her needs and demands, to stage her own play …
A voice announced that their plane was boarding. They entered the plane, and there were no more checks. The plane was enormous and half empty. They sat down in the middle row—Yurik sitting between Tengiz and Nora. The plane took off. Nora, leaning over Yurik, took Tengiz’s hand and kissed it. Tengiz didn’t take it away, and even held it still for a moment; then he pulled her nose sharply … She laughed. A director indeed. He couldn’t stand pathos. But she knew that, without Tengiz, she would never have been able to save Yurik.
It seemed to her that the worst was already behind them, and she fell asleep even before the plane finished its ascent.
An hour later, Yurik poked her in the side: “Now, Mama.” She let him go, and he went to the bathroom. Five minutes later, there was an announcement that they had encountered some turbulence, and they requested passengers to stay seated and to fasten their seat belts again. The plane did begin to rock and shudder. Nora did, too—for her own reasons. Fifteen minutes later, Nora began to feel alarmed that Yurik was taking so long in the bathroom. Ten minutes later, she got up and went to the bathroom, then started to pound on the door, calling: “Yurik! Yurik!”
Silence … At that moment, Nora was gripped by panic. She banged on the door. A moment later, she heard him say: “Just a minute…”
He emerged, soaking wet from head to toe, as white as a sheet, enormous black eyes staring out—his pupils were so enlarged that there was no blue around them.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I’m okay. The plane was shaking so hard it knocked the syringe out of my hand and the vein burst. Blood was spurting everywhere. I washed everything, and I had to rinse my clothes. I was covered with blood.”
Much later, after a year or two, Yurik told his mother the details of what had happened, which she would otherwise never have known. “My brain had already switched off, and I didn’t know what I was doing, Nora. I didn’t have just one fix—I had four. I wanted to get good and high. If it hadn’t been for that turbulence, I wouldn’t have made it to Moscow alive.”
He told her many things about his tenure in America, but the primary account of that experience was a thick notebook that he had filled almost completely during his six weeks in a clinic and then put away in his desk. Nora had opened it and wanted to read it, but she couldn’t make out a single word. The handwriting was the same childish, uneven, crooked scrawl he had always written. This was part of the therapy: the patient had to disgorge everything he remembered about his past of drug addiction, not only in conversation with the psychologist, but also in written form. He had to reconstruct the whole history of his lethal experience. It was a text that had to be written and then excised from his life. Nora leafed through the notebook and put it back in its place—as part of the family archive.
40 From the Willow Chest—Biysk
Jacob’s Letters
(1934–1936) BARABINSK STATION–MOSCOW JACOB TO MARUSYA (En route to Novosibirsk)
APRIL 3, 1934
Dear Marusya! I’m not sure this note will reach you. A good man I met along the way promised to send it. For the last four days and nights, I have been full of the memories of our brief Moscow reunion—after two and a half years! I cannot begin to describe to you the joy it gave me—seeing your lovely but exhausted face—and how it grieved me to feel the estrangement and tension that emanates from you now. I will never forget our meeting in Moscow—I’ll remember it till the very last. There was much I could not say to you in front of other people. They arrested and took away six of us, one of whom turned out to be a provocateur—Dr. Efim Goldberg, a convict like the rest. Half a year in a Stalingrad prison, heavy interrogation. The charge was anti-Soviet conspiracy. They accused me of being the most active member of a Trotsky-inspired anti-Soviet gang. This despite my lifelong aversion to Trotsky! I was sentenced to three years in exile by the Special Council—the most lenient sentence possible.