She hadn’t had time to ask her brother how to find Maly Kharitonievsky Lane, so she asked the doorman downstairs. He told her it was nearby and explained how to get there. Marusya was not even surprised at the coincidence that her brother’s apartment was just a stone’s throw from the Courses. In five minutes, she had reached an imposing house with huge windows on the first two floors; that was where the Courses were held. She had arrived right on time—the students were getting ready for their class, and Ella Ivanovna herself was standing by the door to the room, dressed in a light-colored tunic, with her hair swept up, like Marusya’s. It was usually painful for Marusya to talk to people she didn’t know, but this time she approached the teacher without any timidity, surprising even herself. She mentioned the recommendation from Madame Leroux.
“Yes, yes, I remember.” Rabenek let Marusya go ahead of her into the room, and she followed. “You sit and watch the class for now. We’ll talk afterward.”
The room was fairly large, with a raised stage and enormous windows lining one entire wall. There was a rug on the floor, and the walls were covered with white fabric. A small black piano was pushed up almost against the wall. Then a young lady with a powerful build came in and moved the instrument out into the room. She pulled out the round swiveling stool, opened the piano, and began playing some quiet music that was unfamiliar to Marusya. Jacob would have recognized the piece and known the composer, of course.
Marusya looked around unsuccessfully for a chair, then went out into the hallway to search for one. She didn’t find one there, either. While she was wandering through the hallway, a flock of young girls appeared in the room, barefoot, wearing short tunics. Ella Ivanovna began to address them, but they seemed not to be listening to her. They milled aimlessly about, over the stage, stretching their arms and legs casually, spontaneously, without any coordination with one another. The musical accompaniment continued quietly.
“Now, then; here we are … Natasha, Natasha, I’m saying this again for your benefit—every movement is made with the least expenditure of energy. You lift your arms beginning from your wrists, from the elbows; you need only a slight tension of the shoulder muscle, and all the other muscles are completely relaxed. This is the foundation of all foundations. Free your arms from unnecessary tension and your movements will become fluid, natural. Stop. Freeze. You must feel the weight of your arms, of your body, the weight of its extremities … Natasha, look at Eliza … Yes, like that … In this way, the unity destroyed by our unnatural clothing and absurd customs is restored. The plastique that we observe on antique vases, in Greek sculpture, returns to us. We have lost it. Raise your arm, lift your knee, twist your torso! Better, that’s better already … Fine, now everyone stop. The rope, please!”
Marusya, who never found a chair, stood by the door at first. Then, so that she could better hear Ella Ivanovna’s words, which were muffled somewhat by the music, she moved along the wall and sat down on the floor, tucking her legs up under her. She already knew about antique sculpture from Ella Rabenek’s lecture, about bas-reliefs, and about the inner logic of gesture. Now her whole body ached, so urgently did her arms, her legs, and her back long to respond to the music, to skip and jump, to express themselves without words.
Meanwhile, they tugged on the rope, and Rabenek herself ascended the stage. She waved her hand at the accompanist and called out a single name, unfamiliar to Marusya: “Scriabin, please!” The pianist began to play some other music, different from any she had ever heard before. Ella Ivanovna jumped over the rope with a strange, slow movement, as though she were rolling over it. Then everyone began to jump, but not ignoring the still-resounding music. Now the teacher requested that the music cease, and each one carried on according to her inner rhythm.
“Search for your own rhythm, your very own rhythm.”
They all pranced about the stage, together, and individually, and Marusya took off her little boots and went up to prance with them.
“Excellent! Excellent! Here’s true artistic talent!” Ella Ivanovna said, praising Marusya. Marusya, filled with lightness and strength, galloped about with all the girls until the break.
During the break, Ella Ivanovna came up to Marusya.
“One of the girls will give you a tunic in the changing room, and you may continue the lesson with us.”
That evening, Marusya wrote a letter to Jacob. She told him that she had passed the test, that in the fall she would begin training in the Rabenek studio, and that they had to do everything possible to move to Moscow, because she was sure of it: their future life was bound up with this city.
This was the first letter of that long correspondence that continued for twenty-five years—the correspondence, carefully tied up in a bundle, that had lain on the bottom of the willow chest in the communal apartment on Povarskaya Street until Marusya’s death, and had then migrated to Nikitsky Boulevard, to the home of her granddaughter, Nora, where it waited to be read.
14 A Female Line
(1975–1980)
Yurik was growing up. Nora grew up with him, always aware how indebted she was to her son for so much. When the other “playground” mothers and grandmothers talked about child-raising in her presence, she only smiled. She understood early on that the child was raising her to a much greater degree than she was raising the child. The child demanded a patience that she was completely devoid of by nature; but each new day required her to exercise this indispensable ability. The hardness of her own character, her resistance to the imposition on her of someone else’s will, and even someone else’s opinion, had complicated her relations with her mother during her adolescence. Now she had learned to see everything from Yurik’s perspective, as a two-year-old, a five-year-old, a first-grader …
From his first days of life, Nora had shared hers with Yurik, which the baby sling that Marina Chipkovskaya had given her greatly facilitated. In it the baby traveled with Nora to exhibits, to the theater, to visit friends. At that time, this blue baby sling had been an imported novelty, but in later years, throughout the entire world, it became one of those objects that fostered a new relationship between mother and child. Now the child was not left at home with a babysitter, a grandmother, or a neighbor, but was brought along to places and events to which one would never have thought to bring a child in former days. The sling allowed for a certain freedom of movement, making the connection between mother and child yet more profound. Nora thought about this when Yurik started walking. Even after he was sure on his feet, he was still reluctant to stray too far from his mother. Nora devised a new strategy, diametrically opposed to her earlier practices: when Yurik took one step away from her, she would increase the distance between them by one step in the other direction. This was how she encouraged his independence. Fully aware of the dangers inherent in their double introversion, she made a conscious effort to establish some distance, baby step by baby step. It didn’t take long for him to develop a taste for freedom.
Taisia spent more and more time with Nora, to their mutual advantage. She had been working for time-and-a-half pay at the polyclinic, but Nora asked her to cut back her hours and to come to relieve her two days a week. Taisia agreed. Nora’s child-rearing methods seemed too harsh to Taisia, however, and she spoiled her charge with all the means at her disposal. Nonetheless, Yurik was learning to be very independent and self-reliant. Sometimes Nora detected signs of Vitya’s self-absorption, his introspective unwillingness to engage with his surroundings. Yurik had a hard time accepting new people. Sometimes it took him a long time to call by name another child he played with every day on the playground. He knew how to amuse himself, and didn’t necessarily need someone else to play with.