Vitya lay down on the divan again without a word. He did not intend to search for a new job, and he refused to answer his mother’s questions. Varvara Vasilievna, who still continued to hope that her son was a genius, began to doubt the wisdom of that elderly psychiatry professor who, shortly before his death, had predicted for Vitya a unique and outstanding role in life. Where was it, then? Where was it?
Vitya himself was completely oblivious to the idea of any unique mental endowments or gifts he might have had. After he was dismissed from the computing center, he continued, through inertia, to think up new programs. When he had been lying in bed for a long time, he realized that his initial program could be improved. He began elaborating something that he could no longer have presented to anyone. Such was the program that his own mind was running: his brain could not live without intellectual activity, just as an ordinary person cannot live without food. He would have been glad to do something else, to live in some other way, but he knew not how. He sank deeper and deeper into a sleepless depression, until Varvara Vasilievna realized it was time to call in the doctors. This was the same trap that had snared him before his defense of the ill-starred dissertation.
It was cold and rainy, an autumnal spring. Tengiz had gone away forever. Again. Nora intended to start a new life. She called Vitya and invited him over. He came. While he was eating frankfurters he told Nora about what a bastard his boss had turned out to be. He explained to her how a good computer program differed from a bad one. Nora listened to him with half an ear, then made a beeline for the bedroom.
Vitya fulfilled the task entrusted to him seriously and honestly. And a new life began: for Nora, a pregnancy; and for Vitya, ever deeper depression.
Yurik was born early in the year 1975.
9 Admirers
(1975–1976)
Andrei Ivanovich had been ill with pneumonia for the whole autumn and into the winter, and Amalia Alexandrovna spent that time nursing him back to health. Thus, it turned out that the first family member to visit the newborn was Genrikh. He came over with his wife, the kindly, talkative Irina. They came bearing presents and provisions. Irina’s name did not suit her in the least. In Nora’s estimation, an “Irina” should be fragile, slender, and slightly angular. This woman was a sort of gentle, unbridled bear, with a somewhat bulbous nose and a soft pouch instead of a chin. She could have been a Domna, or a Xavroniya—or so thought Nora.
This time, the presents were all the very things she needed: a miniature swing set, and a squishy, oversized teddy bear that resembled Irina just a bit. Yurik, in fact, adored the teddy bear, and two years later began calling it Bearfriend. It was one of his first words.
Nora’s father usually gave her things that were exceptional in their uselessness—a set of baking forms for making cookies of various shapes, or a set of knives that could only have been wielded by the market butcher. Once, completely out of the blue, he gave her a hat made of silver-fox fur, which Nora immediately donated to the theater.
The food that her father brought from the delicatessen shop at the Prague Restaurant was, as usual, delicious. Grandmother Marusya herself had loved to indulge in treats from this delicatessen, and surprised her granddaughter with pâté in tiny fluted pastry cups, or fish gleaming under a coat of aspic, transparent as ice. Irina desperately wanted to tickle and squeeze the baby, but she pulled back her hands under Nora’s cold gaze, and cooed at him from afar. Yurik looked at her, astonished, but Nora was glad: Clever boy! Blood is thicker than water.
Genrikh didn’t venture to touch, but examined the child attentively, with obvious approvaclass="underline" “He definitely takes after our side of the family—round head, big ears. And such a tiny little mouth.”
Nora, somewhat disappointed, was forced to agree. Some of Genrikh’s features revealed themselves like the play of shadows in Yurik’s tiny face.
Amalia showed up a month and a half after that—with Andrei Ivanovich, of course. Even before she had taken off her coat, she hugged Nora and immediately started crying. She wept openly, with childlike tears.
“Forgive me, daughter! I’m so sorry. We couldn’t make it until now. But I know you understand; you always do, my clever one.”
Nora understood. From the moment Andrei Ivanovich had appeared in their lives, Nora had understood, though she was not yet ten years old. When he visited them at home for the first time, she had felt that his face was already familiar. She had noticed him when he stood on Nikitsky Boulevard, observing her and her mother going out for a stroll, or when he was there to rush her to Filatov Hospital after an attack of appendicitis, or when he met her and Mama coming out of the theater and walked home behind them like a shadow, so that he could spend twenty fleeting minutes with his beloved Amalia. Her mother only rarely turned back and smiled at him—and for the sake of this brief smile, he would tell his wife a little lie, break free, and fly to the theater to catch a glimpse of them as they left to go home. What other lover was capable of such devotion?
Growing up, Nora experienced a multitude of emotions toward this stern, serious, wiry man—jealousy, deep irritation, admiration, and confused love. He stood behind her mother in his customary stance of protector, prepared to intervene at a moment’s notice, to beat off any attack, to fend off anyone who dared insult her. Even when she embraced her mother, Nora couldn’t shed her sense of having been betrayed, her feeling that her mother had abandoned her, her only daughter. Amalia so loved her Andrei that she damaged her other great love—her daughter.
And now Amalia was crying. So she, too, understood. It wasn’t right. Not during the last weeks of Nora’s pregnancy or during the first days after Nora brought the tiny creature home with her had Amalia been there. The old scores, never yet revealed, were poised in her mind as she stroked the back of her mother’s woolen coat. Andrei Ivanovich stood behind her with a look of guilt. Throughout his illness, he had urged Amalia to go to Moscow, but she couldn’t bear to leave him behind, alone and sick, in the country. Now Nora’s mother was shedding hot tears, and Nora passed her palm over her mother’s knitted cap again and again and felt sadness, and envy, and was filled with a sense of superiority, because she was not that way—she would not have cried.
Nora helped her mother unbutton her coat, but Andrei Ivanovich dashed over, grabbed the coat, and, crouching down on his knees, unbuckled her boots and placed house slippers on the floor in front of her. While he was doing this, Amalia mechanically smoothed down the sparse hairs on top of his bent, balding head. His hands moved up one of her calves and stroked her knee surreptitiously. Nora saw this out of the corner of her eye.
There were times when indignation at the impropriety of this constant fondling scorched Nora like fire. This attraction, this unwaning passion for each other of people no longer young, irritated her.
It’s jealousy speaking in me, Nora thought, bringing herself up short. I should be ashamed.
Nora was pitiless to everyone, not least to herself.
Her mother wiped off her tears with the back of her hand. “Well, then, show me my grandson.”
Nora led the way. From the doorway of the room they could see a little white crib and a baby, lying on his tummy, face turned toward the people entering.
“Oh my goodness! What a beautiful little boy,” Amalia said.
She lifted him deftly from the crib, pressed him to her chest, and began snuffling him, patting him gently on his little back.
“What sweetness, Nora! When you stop breast-feeding him, we’ll take him, won’t we, Andrei? Shall we? Clean air, goat’s milk, freshly picked berries from the forest. The new apple trees in the orchard have started bearing fruit,” she began exultantly, confidently, but then she slowed down, anticipating Nora’s reaction. “Well, Andrei, here we are, already old enough to have our own grandchildren.”