“Write, Nora, write!” Tengiz said. “We’ve already hammered everything out. We just need to write the play.”
“I’m not a writer,” Nora said.
“How do you know? Have you ever tried it? A writer is someone who takes up a pencil and writes.”
Nora took a pencil and Yurik’s cast-off notebook. After two pages of her son’s childlike scrawl, a new text started to emerge, written in Nora’s certain hand—perpendicular, occasionally left-leaning letters. She wrote down snatches of conversation, dialogues, repartees, conjectures.
They agreed on the lines of demarcation. They’d forget about Bizet, forget about Shchedrin. No musical allusions whatsoever. They’d sound the death knell for the entire surface layer of the narrative, anchored firmly in the history of opera.
“Well, first off, I’d put Mérimée on the stage, making him a character in the play. The author is of course present—the author himself, or the Englishman, or the traveler, but in any case a scholar, an observer. It creates so many possibilities.”
“It’s crucial to decide on the point of departure, as well as the ending.”
“The line of tension runs between Mérimée and Carmen, you understand? Not between Carmen and José.”
They interrupted each other, and got rid of the ballast, and put on the table everything that was indispensable.
“Right, but it’s Carmen who holds sway over the other characters. She makes the Cigarette Girls and the men, and all the others, dance to her tune.”
“Exactly! Mérimée, the author and god of this story, holds the thread of life and death in his hands.”
“No, Carmen is the one who’s in control of everything!”
“But Carmen vanquishes Mérimée’s logic…”
“I don’t know. She’s the one José kills, out in the bushes, or by the side of the road.”
“No, she kills him!”
“I would want there to be objects. Objects that play a role in themselves.”
“You don’t have to look too far to find them; they’re right there for the taking. Gold watches, playing cards—no, cards are rubbish, a garrote is better.”
“Yes, what does it look like, this strangulation wire? We’ll have to look it up. It can’t be just some plain old wire. It must have handles of some sort, right? Or an entire mechanism?”
“I so love the cabbage she doesn’t want to plant! And if there are flowers and little nosegays, we have to think of how to make those work, too.”
“Okay, the cabbage might come in handy. But I somehow don’t want to nod in that direction. I wouldn’t put a flower in her teeth, but a big gold coin.”
“No, it should be a cigar.”
“Hey, she could have gold teeth! Nowadays all Gypsies are supposed to have gold teeth; but back then?”
“No actress is going to agree to come out onstage with gold teeth.”
“What about Fellini? Remember the scene in Fellini when the Gypsy laughs, reading some lady’s palm?”
“Oh, fortune-telling! Yes, of course. A fortune-teller! Obscure, portentous words. An old woman tells Carmen’s fortune: Beware of the soldier. ‘To fear a soldier—in our trade?… What nonsense!’ ‘The soldier will kill you! Beware of the soldier.’ And Carmen knows beforehand that he will kill her. She makes him kill her! To fulfill the designs of fate.”
“Dangerous, very dangerous. We’re straying into the domain of the opera again. And we have to strip away that layer of associations. So there is no trace of that perfumed surface.”
“We could introduce Death as a character, too. We should! An affinity between Carmen and Death. The other side of her freedom is—Death.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You will, though.”
“Our Carmencita isn’t really interested in love at all. She doesn’t even want to hear about it. For her, love is just the manifestation of her will—her willfulness, as it were. And an instrument.”
“And what about him? Who is he?”
“José? He’s nobody. A nobleman who has a fiancée in the village. He became a robber, a brigand, out of stupidity. He’s actually a stupid fellow. Well, not stupid—just a simpleton. There could even be a scene with his fiancée. A conversation between them about ‘our beloved village.’ A tête-à-tête between idiots. He’s a victim, of course, but ultimately his behavior is not too shabby. He just ended up in someone else’s story. When all is said and done, his fate is to plant cabbages; and Carmen glanced his way quite by chance.”
“He would be difficult to love. Except for his ideals—a pure, clean life, white curtains that open onto a white garden—and, in fact, he dreams in white. But he ends up in a life of black-and-red.”
“We’ll have to think about the toreador. Although I’m more interested in the bull, to be honest. The story here would be that whoever she looks at follows her obediently—resisting at first, of course, but ultimately giving in. And in this respect, all the men are the same: José, Matteo, the toreador—even the bull. Not to mention the Englishman. Like they’ve drunk a love potion.”
While Nora was writing the play, trying to cleave to Mérimée and avoid falling into the gravitational field of the opera, Tengiz was negotiating the staging of Carmen in a theater nestled in one of Moscow’s old clubs, the beating heart of the city. Tengiz didn’t work very often in Moscow, but people knew him and held him in high esteem. Moreover, their names were now often yoked together.
Carmen was written over the course of two weeks. Tengiz was responsible for much of how it came to life and cohered internally, but the finale was Nora’s handiwork: the author—Mérimée, that is—brings a cigar into the cell of the hero, José, and José is led off to be garroted with a cigar between his teeth. A long, slow procession follows behind him … The executioner, wrapped in a cloak and wearing the mask of Death, carries out the execution by strangling. The mask falls away. The executioner is Carmen.
On the cover of the notebook, Nora wrote in large, plain script: “Mérimée. Carmen, José, and Death,” and prepared to place the notebook in the desk drawer “until further notice.” At that moment, Tengiz announced that he had already reached an agreement with the theater. The play was included in the repertoire for the following year.
25 The Diamond Door
(1986)
Years passed. His mother aged. His son was growing up. Summer replaced winter. Vitya ate bread and sausage for breakfast. His mother traveled by metro from the Molodezhnaya station, where they had been resettled, to the Arbat, to buy her son his favorite kind of sausage. Once a month, Vitya visited Yurik, and they played chess together. Political events happened in the world that Vitya didn’t so much as notice. He didn’t see any connection between the computer modeling of cells and the placement of mid-range missiles in Europe, meetings between Gorbachev and Reagan in Reykjavik, or negotiations in Geneva. The prospect of nuclear war had been temporarily suspended, but Vitya failed to notice even this. He was unable to comprehend the degree to which the fate of the scientific developments carried out in the lab, with its brilliant laboratory head and researchers passionately committed to science, as well as his own personal fate, depended on whether the Russians and Americans would come to an agreement.
Vitya didn’t even notice something that was happening right under his nose, in his own apartment. Varvara Vasilievna had been carried away by cheap esoteric teachings and preachings. She visited various underground meetings of like-minded enthusiasts, groups of healers and magicians. She was determined to improve her karma, which she imagined as something hefty and substantial, like a piece of meat or a new armoire. This was accompanied, of course, by spiritually charged water and a burning interest in UFOs, mixed in with a fear of devils and all manner of unclean spirits.