He placed his fork on the empty plate and said, “Let’s start on a new project, Nora. Puppets—this time we’re going to work with puppets. They will be large. Architectural. With actors inside, and they’ll be able to emerge from them. A real actor will play Gulliver.”
“Wait, wait, I’ve never worked with puppets. What’s the play? And where will we perform it?”
“Oh, Nora, Swift, of course!”
“Gulliver in the Land of the Lilliputians?”
“Yes, only now it will be about the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms. About people who’ve lost the semblance of humans, and the horses that are superior to the people. And Gulliver is also an instrument for taking temperatures by this standard of measure.”
“And the play?”
“What play? There isn’t one.”
“But some sort of script?”
“We have to come up with the idea first; and I know someone I can ask to write it.” Tengiz was in top working form, in a white heat of excitement and inspiration, and this enthusiasm was already communicating itself to Nora, though she had only read Swift as a child, in an adapted, abridged version, and didn’t remember it very well.
Tengiz took a dilapidated book out of his duffel bag. “Here!”
Nora held the tome in her hands and began glancing through it. The book was in Russian, with a blue library stamp in Georgian script. It was a 1947 edition.
“Did you steal this from the library?”
“I took it for business purposes.”
“I’ll have to reread it.”
“Well, sit down and read.”
“I have to walk Yurik before it gets dark.”
“No problem. Get him dressed, and I’ll take him out for a walk. You read. Read!”
While Nora was getting Yurik dressed, he made a bit of a fuss, because he wanted to take both bears with him on the walk. Nora tried to distract him by giving him a little shovel.
“What’s the big deal? We’ll take the bears for a walk, too. Come on, little fellow! Let’s get going,” Tengiz said.
Nora was absolutely sure that Yurik would refuse to go with Tengiz, but he went willingly. When they were already on their way out the door, Tengiz was still pulling on his sheepskin coat. Yurik hugged his stuffed animals to his chest. Nora watched as they slowly shuffled to the elevator, half a flight of stairs down, and felt an unprecedented churning in her heart—here were the two men, the most important men in her life, together; but it was impossible for that to last longer than an hour’s walk down Nikitsky Boulevard.
In the evening, after Yurik was in bed, they continued their conversation.
“Okay, I like the premise, but why puppets? All our puppet theaters are for children. Who will we perform the play for? Plus, you haven’t said a word about where you plan to perform it.”
Tengiz brushed her objections aside.
“For children? What gave you that idea? As you know, in the seventeenth century, when Shakespeare was already gone, the British Parliament outlawed dramatic theater. A bill, an edict, whatever it was called—I don’t remember. But that was when puppet theater started flourishing. They performed in markets, on city squares. It was theater of the highest order. Nothing childish about it. So—any objections? Look, there’s this Yahoo, a lumpen, a boor, and next to him a noble animal, the horse. Have you ever ridden on horseback? Do you know anything at all about horses? And the theater is a good one! In the provinces, as usual. In Altai. They’ve made me an offer. I haven’t signed on to it yet. If we can agree on it, you and I, I’ll fly out there right away. Generally speaking, I have to tell you that puppet theater is where the most interesting things are happening right now. That’s where there is freedom. Well, for the puppets, anyway.”
Nora shook her head. Tengiz was waiting for her response, her objections. This was their little game: it was precisely on the foundation of her queries, her objections, that he would construct his directorial arguments. No one knew how to play this role better than she did.
“I don’t know anything about horses. We didn’t have horses. We didn’t even have cats. We have allergies. And I don’t know anything about puppet theater. I need to finish the book. I can’t commit to it just like that, out of the blue.”
Nora finished reading toward morning. She read quickly—but not all of her time had been spent with Swift. Afterward, Tengiz embraced her and said, “Now, read, read. Don’t get distracted.”
But distracted she was. Then Yurik woke up and started crying. It seemed to Nora that he had a bit of a fever, but he went back to sleep very quickly, before she had time to give him any medicine.
The men slept late. Nora finished Swift and closed the book. It contained so much, it required contemplation. She cooked some porridge and put the pan under a pillow to keep it warm, then took a soft pencil and began sketching a horse. The first horse in her life. She kept thinking about how the Houyhnhnms differed from horses, and the Yahoos from people. Yurik woke up completely healthy. He ate his porridge. And Nora said yes.
As soon as Nora agreed, Tengiz hopped on a plane to Altai to sign the contract and discuss details. The general director of the theater had studied with him at the Moscow Art Theatre school, where he had spent two years in the now-distant past. Everything was falling into place. Three days later, he returned, happy; he had found an actor who was, in his word, brilliant.
The happiest time in Nora’s life now began—the three of them together, Nora, Yurik, and Tengiz.
The play was born out of wrangling over sketches and hashing out the basic question posed by the piece: What was the point at which a human being becomes an animal, and an animal a human being? What does this distinction consist in, and how can it be expressed in dramatic form? When she read the book more attentively, Nora concluded that the society of Houyhnhnms was hardly exemplary; they were rather dull, limited, and overall boring beasts. Here Nora became a bit despondent, because her thoughts about the society of horses and humans were hard to translate into the idiom of puppet theater. In time, however, this sorted itself out. Tengiz set her mind at rest: for their work, it was enough to recall Swift’s/Gulliver’s pronouncement about humanity, “Upon the whole, I never beheld, in all my travels, so disagreeable an animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong an antipathy.”
“To work with this material, we just have to set aside our surmise that the noble Houyhnhnms are dullards with no emotional intelligence. They don’t know love or friendship, anxiety, or sadness. The hatred and wrath they experience is reserved for the Yahoos, who in their world occupy about the same position as Jews did in Nazi Germany.”
Nora accepted these premises. The boundaries had been laid out. Tengiz and Nora went to pay a visit to an elderly playwright, the widow of an avant-garde director who died before the war in a lucky accident that saved him from being arrested. The widow, a faded butterfly of the Silver Age, lived in a dilapidated one-story house on Mansurovsky Lane. She served them weak tea and was abundantly kind and sympathetic to them, immediately understanding what they needed from her. She wrote the script in a week. It worked very well, and required only a few adjustments during the rehearsals. Unfortunately, she never managed to collect the fee for her work. The theater had negotiated the contract with her, and had submitted the request for approval from the Ministry of Culture, but while they were awaiting a decision she died.
Nora worked conscientiously. By way of beginning her project, she decided to spend time with living nature, and she took Yurik to the zoo to see all sorts of ungulates. Yurik showed most interest in the sparrows and pigeons roaming at large, which were not exhibits at all, but were, if anything, service workers. Even the elephant himself failed to impress him: the scale of the creature was simply too large for Yurik to notice it. Nora made several sketches in her notebook, and realized she was pursuing the wrong path. She rejected the idea of studying from nature, and immersed herself in visual art. She sat in libraries and contemplated all kinds of artists’ depictions of horses. The library of the All-Russian Theater Association allowed her to bring Yurik along; she had known the librarians there for nearly twenty years and was on good terms with them. She had to enlist Taisia’s help when she went to the other libraries. Sometimes her friend Natasha Vlasov took Yurik under her wing and brought him home with her, where her son, Fedya, was happy to look after and amuse the little fellow.