Nora felt that she had finished her work on Yurik’s babyhood. She still drew him, but now, on the same large pieces of Whatman paper, she wrote down his little utterances. She had to jot them down immediately. Sometimes they were so strange and unintelligible that Nora had a hard time decoding them.
One day, when he was washing his hands in the bathroom, he turned on the faucets over and over again—first the cold, then the hot, then again the cold. Nora waited patiently.
“Nora, why does the cold water have a man’s voice, and the hot water a woman’s voice?”
Nora thought for a bit. She didn’t hear any difference, she told him. Then he waved his hand as if to brush off his disappointment, and said, “Well, tell me where the very middle of the water is, then.”
Nora felt that she was the one who was lagging behind her son in his magical absorption in the world, his unfolding within it.
“There’s a little bit of fire in each thing,” the boy said while he was playing with a piece of twine.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” Nora said, leaning over him.
He clutched the twine in one hand and pulled hard on it with the other. “See? There’s a little bit of fire in the rope, and it stings.”
He unclenched his fist. There was a red mark on his palm.
“Mama, does the twine have a round face?”
When he was about five, Yurik developed a new infatuation. A friend of Nora’s, the puppeteer Sergei Nikolayev, gave him a real African drum, a djembe, and tapped out a simple rhythm: “Baby Avocado, Baby Avocado, Baby Avocado went to bed.” This straightforward, no-frills toy became his favorite for months to come. Yurik would beat on the drum for hours—with his palm, with a spoon, with a stick, with his fingertips—galloping around it in a circle all the while. Nora was exhausted by the constant pounding and tried to distract him with less noisy activities. Once, she complained to Sergei that he had ruined her life. Sergei brushed her comment aside, but took it to heart—his next present, a xylophone, rectified the situation somewhat. Now Yurik was captivated by a new musical instrument—and the sound was considerably less jarring than the pounding of the djembe, it must be said.
I should have taken Grandmother’s piano, Nora thought. Maybe he has an ear for music? It’s too bad I left the piano behind with the neighbors. She remembered perfectly how her grandmother had tried to give her piano lessons, and what a torment it was to her. And for her grandmother as well … She had no inclinations in that direction whatsoever. Maybe her hearing wasn’t sharp enough? Genrikh had a wonderful ear for music, and Nora remembered how he used to sing long operatic arias at any holiday gathering, after downing his first glass. Amalia was always humming some Soviet song or other under her breath. Nora’s maternal grandfather had been a precentor, so he must have been musical, too. Perhaps Yurik took after Genrikh or after that great-grandfather …
When he gets a little older I’ll send him to music school, Nora decided.
Then he learned to read. All by himself. Nora discovered it by chance. He couldn’t get to sleep, so he asked her to read to him. When it was already after eleven, and Nora was getting tired herself, she closed the book. “That’s all. Now go to sleep.”
He resisted, saying, “Okay, then. I’ll read myself.”
Nora always tried not to contradict him. She agreed to his demand. “All right, only you have to read out loud. I read to you, now you read to me.”
And he started reading—not very confidently, stopping here and there, but reading whole words, not just sounding out the letters. It was a story about a rejuvenating apple tree, and he couldn’t have memorized it, since it was the first time they were reading it. Nora didn’t say anything; she didn’t ask him how he had learned to read. But she thought: Well, that’s that. Another childhood milestone passed. He’s got Vitya’s head. He’ll probably be a mathematician. Or a physicist. And she didn’t believe any good would come of it.
Yurik constantly surprised Nora. Once, he sat on his haunches for a long time, studying the grass.
“What do you see there?” Nora said. Without taking his eyes off the grass, he said, “Nora, am I growing headfirst or feet-down?”
Then, suddenly, he hugged a tree, pressing his ear to the trunk and caressing the bark. He made a fist and pounded softly on the bark, still listening. When Nora asked whether he heard something, he shook his head. “I don’t hear anything. I’m wondering why people don’t have such nice shapes as trees. You don’t know? It’s because they stand still and be pretty. But people are always running and running and running.” And he stood next to the tree again, threw out his arms, and froze. A little boy in a red jacket with a pocket on the front.
Tengiz didn’t stay away for long. Now he would summon Nora to collaborate with him, sometimes in the Baltic Republics, or in Siberia. The country was huge, stretching from Brest to Vladivostok. They began to get invitations as a team. The couple enjoyed great success, sometimes even notoriety. They received awards and warnings in turns. Tengiz was offered a theater in Kutaisi. He considered it, then rejected the offer, primarily because of Nora. The position of head director would not allow him to travel about the country so freely, and he couldn’t invite Nora to Georgia. And she wouldn’t have gone, anyway. He visited Nora at home now and then, but tried not to stay overnight, preferring to check into a hotel. The boy had chosen him to be his father, would cling to his leg every time he saw him, and it was cruel to create the illusion that they were a family. And things were getting harder and harder for Tengiz.
When he was nearly six, Yurik started asking about his father. Nora had prepared for this question beforehand. Vitya, who had only seen Yurik once, when he was a year old, had completely disappeared from the child’s memory. Vitya had visited Nora two or three times since, but each time the boy had been asleep. Vitya had already grown used to the idea that Nora had deceived him in giving birth to a child without consulting him about it, and was reconciled to the fact of the child’s existence. This was why, when Nora called him and asked if he wanted to see his son, he agreed, albeit without much enthusiasm. Without taking his mother’s point of view into consideration, he agreed with Nora that she and Yurik would visit him at his house.
Nora, yet again, smiling to herself, bought a cake and set out to visit the relatives. Vitya and his mother had moved from Nikitsky Boulevard to an apartment near the Molodezhnaya metro station, and this shift in geography added another dot to the long ellipsis of their sporadic and artificial relations.
The visit was a short one. Varvara, torn by conflicting feelings—hatred of Nora and curiosity—went to see the neighbors. Vitya set up the chessboard and showed Yurik how the pieces moved.
“Is this a game of war?” Yurik said. Vitya thought for a while and said that it was.
“Why are there so many pawns? They’re all the same.”
“Well, they’re like the foot soldiers. They need to protect the king and queen, and to attack.” Vitya moved first. “The first moves of the game are called the opening.”
“Can you do it another way?” Yurik asked.
Fifteen minutes in, Yurik got the hang of the game, and said that he wanted to start again. Vitya refused, saying that it wasn’t fair to stop a game in the middle, and very quickly won. They began another game. In the middle of the third game between her son and her half-acknowledged grandson, Varvara returned. Curiosity had triumphed. She pretended she hadn’t expected to see them, but the ingenuous and uncompromisingly honest Vitya unmasked her with his blue-eyed astonishment: “But I told you they were coming, Mama.”
She waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, Vitya, I never know what you mean.”