He had indeed come in carrying a big box, which he left in the entrance hall. Nora hadn’t thought to ask him about it. She smiled—how funny! The bicycle had come to life, materialized out of the metaphor about reinventing the wheel, as soon as it had occurred to her.
“Look here.” Tengiz put his hands on his chest, showing her where to look—at him. “I can’t pull it off without you. Just listen. ‘Thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings!’”
Nora even winced, but she suppressed a smile. She didn’t know English very well, but what Tengiz had managed to pronounce was some sort of linguistic parody which had nothing to do with English. Nora caught three words: “art,” “man,” and “poor.”
“What is it in Russian?”
“In Russian, it goes like this…”
At that point, Nora covered her eyes with her hands. She knew these lines. She knew them perfectly well. But now the words “Off, off, you lendings,” seemed very significant to her. It always happened like this: you live, see, read something a hundred times, and suddenly, as though the scales have fallen from your eyes, you find right under your nose what you have been searching for all these years.
“I can’t do it, Tengiz. I’m not ready. Find another set designer.”
Tengiz struggled out of the deep armchair and rose to his full height, looking even taller than he really was.
“Nora, half our lives we spend accumulating things, and the other half of our lives we spend casting them away. Every year is like a brick. By the time you’re fifty, the burden is so heavy you have no strength to carry it. I get it! It’s a crisis! You have to cast things off. I looked through everything, and threw away half my life, half the people I knew and loved—relatives, teachers, everyone who was superfluous, not absolutely essential. But you—you’re a part of me. Perhaps the best part of me.”
The conversational prelude of the evening ended here, abruptly; only when it was near morning did they again pick up the conversation they had abandoned.
“Give me two weeks to think about it.”
Tengiz, as was his wont, disappeared. Nora didn’t waste a minute in her deliberations. She visited Tusya and laid out all her doubts. Tusya was her only older friend. Her virtues were many and varied, including the fact that she had been acquainted with Marusya even before Nora was born. Tusya was well aware of the story of Nora’s relations with Tengiz, and also of the history of stagings of Lear, in Russia and elsewhere.
With a toss of her head, Tusya whisked her gray bangs aside like a horse. “You have to separate one thing from the other, for heaven’s sake. What are we talking about here? Your relationship with Tengiz or with Lear?”
Nora pondered a bit. She wished she knew. Tusya went out to the kitchen and put the coffeepot on the burner. Neither of them spoke. Then Tusya took out two stained cups and poured the coffee. They drank, still not talking.
“First, I don’t see any basis for such a surge of emotions. You have several very successful pieces of work under your belt. Several adequate ones. You aren’t a novice. Lear has been poorly staged many times. It’s easy not to stage it well. And it can be done adequately. But at GOSET, the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, Mikhoels staged it with true genius. My father was a friend of Alexander Tischler’s—the set designer for Lear, among other things. And he knew Mikhoels, too. I thought I told you, I saw one of his last performances, in Moscow. I never told you? I thought I always regaled my students with this story. I was already working as a set designer, just starting out. I was twenty years old. Younger than you are. Mikhoels invited my father to the opening night at GOSET, on Malaya Bronnaya. My father was a lapsed Jew. He did everything in his power to distance himself from his Jewishness. He was a Soviet writer—and not completely without merit, or the basest of them.
“The play was performed in Yiddish. He had grown up speaking Yiddish, though he wanted to forget it … I was the one who didn’t understand a word. But I couldn’t tear my eyes from the stage. It turned out that the script wasn’t important. That’s when I realized it. Well, I only realized it once and for all much later, but at that moment I saw that the power of theater doesn’t lie in the script; it’s in the actor who is charged by the power of the script. Gesture, movement, mimicry … Marusya knew this very well. Did you know that Gordon Craig was in Moscow for one of the performances of Lear and said that in England there was no real Shakespeare in the theater, because there was no actor of Mikhoels’s stature? Imagine that! Gordon Craig, who knew every word of that play by heart, made that remark after watching it performed in Yiddish! It was an actors’ theater. Tischler worked there, a marvelous set designer; Chagall worked at GOSET, too. He didn’t understand the nature of theater—instead, he created his own theater, on canvas.
“It was Les Kurbas who was responsible for that play. He was a stellar director. A Ukrainian, but world-class … His theater had been forced to disband by that time. I think it was in 1933. And he rehearsed with Mikhoels for three months. During that production, Mikhoels had quarreled with Radlov, the official director. Mikhoels received his inspiration directly from Les Kurbas. It was Kurbas’s idea that Lear would become younger and younger onstage as the play progressed. And Mikhoels carried it off. But Kurbas wasn’t the director of the production, although I’m sure many of the ideas and decisions originated with him.
“The actors were, of course, brilliant: Mikhoels himself, Zuskin, the wonderful Sara Rotbaum. But nowadays theater doesn’t rest on its actors. To a far lesser degree, anyway … Now the director and the production artist have to conceive the play so that the script doesn’t just take over. Who doesn’t know those words? They’re familiar to every school-age child. All the responsibility rests with them these days, with the director and the artist. The actor today is more a performer than a creator. There are a few geniuses—but you can count them on the fingers of one hand. The directorial decisions are paramount in any production of a classic these days. You managed with Chekhov; you passed the exam ascertaining your professional skills. Lear requires the same abilities. If you and Tengiz can figure out what your play is about—beyond the commonplaces of the script, of course—it makes sense to undertake it. But Kurbas’s idea about living an inverse trajectory from old age to youth—that could be a point of departure. He has been forgotten, completely forgotten. He was imprisoned in 1933, and they killed him not long after. It was the time of the famine in Ukraine, you see. He staged King Lear during the famine, a genocide. Tischler was good, but he was no match for Kurbas. Tischler had his own theater. To make up for not having enough interesting projects for the stage, he created theater in painting, in sculpture.
“Something very funny happened to me with Tischler later on. I had known him since childhood; he was a friend of my father’s. Alexander Tischler was a wonderful, very unaffected, happy man. Everyone around him had been taken down, but by some miracle he remained alive. Very handsome, always wearing a cravat (which no one wore in those days). Once, at the beginning of the sixties, I visited him in his studio. I had some question to ask him; I can’t remember what it was. During those years, he liked to carve wood into sculptures—remarkable sculptures, it must be said. His entire small apartment was filled with them—figures of different dimensions, mainly of women. I guess that time I must have been visiting him at home, not far from his studio. The conversation was a long one, about everything—life, work, everything. Things weren’t going well for me at the time. My father had died; I had divorced my husband; my work was a failure, or so it seemed to me. I went to visit him, and he was so welcoming, so hospitable. His father was a joiner, a backwoods craftsman, and with these sculptures in wood he seemed to have returned home … The wood shavings, all the same smells … Well, he gave me one of the female figurines as a gift: a small figurine, about ten inches tall. I held it in my hands, warming my hands on it—it seemed to be a source of warmth.