Soon Nora knew precisely which horses she needed. And which Yahoos.
Tengiz, who had gone to Tbilisi to sort out some domestic affairs, returned, and announced that rehearsals would begin in a week.
Nora placed a stack of sketches in front of him. He took the first one and examined it. Gulliver occupied one side of the page, an observer, and in the center were two trusslike horses that appeared to be constructed out of the metal rods and bars of a child’s construction set, held together by crude bolts, articulate, hinged, with huge bellies that contained a small platform for the actors. Their faces were vaguely human, smiling, with bared teeth—but fearsome nonetheless.
“You’re a genius, Nora! You did it.”
In the second sketch, Gulliver was crawling out of a tiny house with a ring on the roof, squeezing through a swing door. All around, hairy, unkempt creatures with wild but recognizably human faces were frolicking. All of them were bound together with a single net.
“Excellent. The masses,” Tengiz said. Then he took the next drawing.
He was sitting down, and she was standing in front of him; they were at eye level with each other. He scratched the gray stubble on his cheek, smacked his lips now and then, frowned, and said, in a mock mournful tone, “You’ve thought of everything. The whole thing can be staged without me.”
“Without me, Tengiz. Without me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t go with you. I have no one to leave Yurik with.”
“We’re not leaving him; we’re taking him with us. I rented a two-bedroom apartment. There weren’t any three-bedroom apartments in the entire town. It’s spacious, though. We’ll all fit.”
Nora shook her head. “No, I’m not going.”
“You’ve lost your mind! I can’t work without you! I know it! I’ve tried! How can you abandon me like this? Our flight is in three days, and the boy’s going, too. They already bought us the tickets.”
At that moment, Yurik shuffled up and held out his hand to Tengiz. Nora realized that she would go. She would fly and she would crawl on her hands and knees. Anywhere. Anywhere at all. To Altai. To the back of beyond. To hell and back.
“Want to go for a walk?” Tengiz said. Yurik hurried into his room to fetch the two teddy bears.
“What about a shop to work in there? Even here the construction would be fairly difficult. I consulted one of the best Moscow puppeteers, and he said that not every craftsman would be up to it.”
“They’ve shut down some sort of military factory there. Two of the craftsmen used to work there. Not only can they build you a horse—they’ll build you a rocket if you need one!”
Then Amalia came over. She said that she would take Yurik to the nature reserve. Fresh, clean air, goat’s milk, homegrown vegetables … Andrei Ivanovich, too, thought it would be a mistake to drag the child off to such a remote region.
She should never have mentioned Andrei Ivanovich and the “mistake.” More than once, tempers had flared on this subject.
“Mama, please let me make my own mistakes. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t make them. I’d be you.”
“But think of the child! Who has ever shown you such … cruelty?” The question was rhetorical and should have been left hanging, but a quick retort followed: “You.”
At this point, Amalia began to cry, and Nora got upset: she could have kept her mouth shut. Nora put her arms around her mother and whispered in her ear: “Mama, I’m sorry, I won’t say that anymore. But don’t pressure me. Please don’t try to make me do things I don’t want to.”
By the time they parted, they had made peace. Things were even better than before; each of them felt she was guilty.
And another happy chapter in her life began—in a provincial Altai town with a large river, doing work that felt like a celebration. Nora discovered that puppeteers were a special breed of actor, who hadn’t veered very far from the old Punch and Judy shows in market squares of yore. Such playful, entertaining folks could never be satisfied with ordinary theater. The director of the puppet theater, a former Party official, turned out to be a marvelous woman, exceptionally so, for which she was subsequently fired from her job—luckily, not for Gulliver, but for the next one. For Gulliver she only got a reprimand.
The Altai episode in their lives turned out to be very important for Yurik, too. He was late learning to talk, but here he began speaking in complex sentences that were both striking and funny. Many years later, it became evident that his prodigious memory had begun working here as well. His earliest memories were about the theater, the construction workshop, and Tengiz, whom he decided to adopt as his father.
The opening night was September 15. On the morning of that day, Tengiz received a telegram that his mother had died. He left for home the moment the play reached the end. The premiere went off without a hitch. The audience was in raptures, but Tengiz was not present to take a bow. He was already flying on a flimsy local airplane to the big city of Novosibirsk, from where he would fly to Moscow, then on to Tbilisi.
Nora hardly had time to say goodbye to him. She stayed on at the theater for three days, and even managed to catch a thrillingly scathing review by the deputy head of the local department of culture, someone by the name of Shortbread (you couldn’t make it up if you tried!), who detected in the play “bourgeois avant-gardism and Picassoism.” The second critical notice took a more substantive approach: “From whence this disregard for the human being? Does the director really imply that people are worse than animals? Does this not cast aspersions on the Soviet people?”
Nora and Yurik returned to Moscow in the second half of September. It had rained all July and August, and now, by way of compensation, a true Indian summer had set in. Tengiz didn’t call. He had told her that he had plans to go to Wrocław in the fall to work in Jerzy Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre. Poland was the most liberal of the socialist countries, and Georgia was the most liberal of the Soviet Republics, and Tengiz received ideologically supportive permission from the Georgian Ministry of Culture for the trip. He sent no letters, either about Grotowski or about anyone else. Nora had to go through a final parting with him yet again. This time it was easier for her, though—perhaps because of Yurik?
The three of them had spent half a year together, the happiest half year of her life thus far. After that, another life began, in which she had to get used to Tengiz’s absence and fill up the yawning hole. Now, however, she had the feeling that he might show up at any time, walk in with his duffel bag and his sheepskin coat, wearing a hand-knit sweater or a baggy T-shirt, and the holiday would start all over again.
Taisia, who had remained “on call” to help out and was now almost a member of the family, thought that Yurik was behind in his development. But when Yurik met her after the two-month sojourn in Altai with the words “Hairy Taisia came to see Yurik, and brought him candy,” she stopped insisting for a time that Nora take him to a neurologist, a speech therapist, or a child psychologist.