How glad I am that I have a boy, Nora thought with satisfaction. At the same time, however, she realized that this perpetuation of familial female hostility had to be stopped. It seems that I know a thing or two about what Freud was saying … Actually, I need to find out more about the Oedipus complex. She recalled that among her grandmother’s books rescued from Povarskaya Street were some well-worn copies of Freud’s work, with notations in the margins. She would have to read them. What had he written about Oedipus? Who wanted to kill whom, and for what? The boy struggles with his father, and the girl—with the mother? Was that it? No, no, it was a horrible idea.
The practical result of these confused, inconclusive meditations was that Nora decided to invite Amalia and Andrei Ivanovich to share in her own narrow, cramped family life, in order to give Yurik the chance to develop emotionally. He was, beyond any doubt, emotionally immature. She would let him visit Prioksky. There were lots of animals and plants there, growing things, and other delights completely unknown to a city boy. Moreover, she imagined how wonderful Andrei Ivanovich would look in his sweatshirt, with an ax or a pitchfork in his hands, and how appealing that would be to a small boy. She already felt a bit jealous, scared that they might commandeer the boy and smother him to death with love.
In the summer after Yurik had just turned five, he was “set free” for the first time. Andrei Ivanovich came to pick them up. Amalia had stayed behind in the country, and was waiting for them with freshly baked pies and goat’s milk; there were still no berries at the beginning of June. Nora spent a day and a night there, then left, feeling a bit sad that Yurik was happy, and that he would now long to go see his grandparents. She admitted to herself that her mother’s happiness annoyed her—that she displayed a kind of inappropriate childishness, as though she were twelve years old and not sixty-four, that there were too many pies, and too many puppies, of some rare Chinese breed, by means of which the happy couple were trying to earn extra income. And there was too much kissing—they lavished kisses on each other when they were only parting for an hour and a half, while Andrei Ivanovich drove Nora to the train station, where she would catch the commuter train.
For half the journey back to Moscow, Nora contemplated her own intolerant temperament, her inability to forgive her mother her silly, girlish happiness. Then she opened a volume of Sukhovo-Kobylin.
The play Tarelkin’s Death had intrigued her for a long time. The device of a sham death offered a wealth of possibility. Last year, she had been the stage designer for Sleeping Beauty in a provincial children’s theater. She had turned the plot over and over in her mind, trying it out this way and that, finally coming up with what seemed to her to be a nice twist—at the end of the play, the Prince wakes up, and Sleeping Beauty turns out to be a dream within a dream. But Tarelkin’s Death—she could really do something unprecedented with it. If only she could find a director to work with. She would direct it herself, if they gave her half a chance. Tengiz, Tengiz … An empty summer, a completely empty summer, stretched out before her. It was the first time she hadn’t rented a dacha, the first summer she would spend without Yurik. She arrived home late in the evening. When she opened the door, she heard the last trills of the telephone, before it went silent. She undressed and took a bath. Just as she was getting out of the bath, the phone started ringing again. This time, she was able to answer it.
“Where on earth have you been, my dear? I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day.” A Georgian accent. Tengiz.
15 Unaccommodated Man
(1980–1981)
“Nora, today we’re starting a new life,” Tengiz said.
“I know. I took Yurik to Mama’s, and I was thinking it the whole time. Today’s the day.”
In fact, it was already night, and today was already yesterday. Tengiz was the same as always, and even better. Damn him. “Like antimony-washed iron,” to quote Pasternak. They hadn’t seen each other in two years. Not a single phone call. Nora knew from other sources that he had even been in Moscow, but hadn’t called her. She had a lump in her throat, which made it impossible for her to talk, so she swallowed hard and said nothing.
“You and I are going to Poland to stage Lear.”
Nora didn’t speak.
Tengiz went on. “King Lear. It’s the apex. The highest you can reach. For a year and a half, I read and reread it. I taught myself English so I could read it. I know it by heart now—almost. You and I are going to stage it. Before, I never understood what it meant to be satisfied with staging just one thing. How is that possible? A single author, a single play, a single thought. But now I understand—you need to do just one single thing, one thing alone. It’s very powerful when it’s the only thing in the world that exists. I understood—you have to stage it so that the world ends when your play ends. That’s what theater is. One thought, but played out in such a way that there is nothing else left. Do you understand me?”
Nora still couldn’t swallow the lump in her throat; moreover, there was nothing for her to say. The fire in her veins that had blazed up of its own accord had begun to go out. Deep sadness and perplexity: words, empty words. Were they on different wavelengths now? Were they so out of sync? She should probably have gone to bed with him first, and then let words follow. All the same, he touched her deeply, in some wild inner place. He was so … There was more talent in him than intellect. Yes, as though he were made of iron … scorching … hot. Was it all gone now?
“No, listen to me. You’re not really hearing me, are you? Lear has been staged a hundred times, a thousand times! But we’re going to stage it for the last time! We’ll do it so that there isn’t any point in staging it again. It will be about freedom, about happiness, about taking leave of the world, the world of the elements, passions, the flesh, about the transfiguration of the flesh—that’s what it will be. And I know how. Gordon Craig! You’ll see! Well, Nora? What? You still don’t hear what I’m saying?”
Nora heard every word. Everything Tengiz was telling her now she already knew. Certainly about Gordon Craig. Grandmother Marusya had managed to tell her quite a bit. And everything with a light touch, in a few powerful strokes. Marusya had adored Ella Rabenek, Isadora Duncan’s pupil, and Rabenek had told Marusya many things about her—about the terrible car accident in which Isadora’s two children perished. The older, a girl, was Gordon Craig’s daughter, and it was this particular detail, passed down by word of mouth, that had long ago made Gordon Craig almost a distant relative of the larger theater family, in which there was undoubtedly a system of transference of sacred knowledge. And Nora, recalling all Marusya’s rapturous stories about her youth, when she had first studied rhythm and movement, and then taught and practiced some new kind of pedagogy (which was later officially disavowed by the authorities, like genetics and cybernetics), felt that she was an active participant in world culture. And Tengiz was a provincial—that’s what he was. Reinventing the wheel. But I’m urbane, cosmopolitan. I already know about the wheel.
She swallowed the lump in her throat and said, “You know, it’s your business how you regard Gordon Craig’s theories, and what you do with them. But, as for Shakespeare, I won’t take him on. I personally don’t have the guts.”
Tengiz blinked at her like an A student who has just gotten a D.
“Nora! What’s happened to you? You would never have talked like that before. You can manage Chekhov? Goldoni? Swift? And what about Aeschylus? The important things that happen before death—that’s what’s at stake here. You can’t refuse, Nora. Lear! King Lear! It’s about the transfiguration of the flesh; that’s the question it poses. About metamorphosis! Just listen to me. Look here. What are you looking at? Yes, that’s a bicycle for Yurik; it’s first-rate,” he said, gesturing toward the big box by the door.