“Do you want to go up to the top?” Vitya said. Martha again said something Nora didn’t quite catch.
“Martha’s not going up; her legs hurt,” Vitya interpreted.
Next to the lighthouse was a museum, but they didn’t go inside. There were very few people around. The tourist season was over, though it was still warm at the end of October. At the entrance to the lighthouse was an exhibit of lamps and lenses of some sort. They passed these antique technologies without investigating them, and instead started the long climb up the narrow stairway. The ascent was long and exhausting, and even Nora, agile and light on her feet, got winded. But when they reached the observation deck at the top, they were rewarded with a view worth any amount of strain and effort.
“This is Montauk. They say it’s the oldest lighthouse in New York State,” Vitya told her. “I’ve been here before with Martha.”
The ocean was enormous, and the edges curved in such a way that even the naked eye could see that the earth was round. Whether it was a disc or a sphere was another question. Most likely a sphere, judging by how the shore of Rhode Island sank away in the distance. And there was no perspective—linear, reverse, or curvilinear—that could depict this vision, because space organized itself by a law completely unknown to the human eye or reason. The wind at this height moved in circles, too. Nora felt she was standing on the top of the world, and it surrounded her, as if she were a kernel hidden in its fleshy fruit.
“Nora,” Vitya said, touching her shoulder, “I need a divorce. Could you divorce me, you know, without me, so I won’t have to go to Moscow?”
“What? What do you mean?” Nora didn’t understand immediately.
“Martha doesn’t know I’m married. She knows I have a son, but she doesn’t know I’m married.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That you were my classmate, a friend.”
Nora forgot about the ocean all of a sudden. She forgot about the round world, in which she had just now been a tiny seed buried in the middle.
“You lied, Vitya? You? Lied? The first time in your life?”
Vitya smiled slowly. Vitya laughed. Then he bent down to Nora.
“Nora, you know what Grisha Lieber says? He says that women force men to lie. He reads the Torah now, you know, what we call the Bible, and he tries to reconcile modern science and the God of the Old Testament. And he says that lies were invented by woman.”
“And there I was, thinking my whole life you were openhearted and simple,” Nora said, with what was almost a moan.
“You never knew Martha before. That’s who is openhearted and simple.”
“Are you thinking of getting married?”
Vitya didn’t say anything. He rubbed the railing with his finger. He scratched his ear. He sighed.
“I think Martha wants it. You know how Catholics are. She’ll feel more comfortable. Well, and, frankly speaking, it wouldn’t get in my way, either.”
Wouldn’t get in your way! Oh, Vitya, Nora thought. They were still standing on the observation deck, and Nora had already stopped noticing all the beauty around her, as though it had never been. Vitya, always a paragon of equanimity, a man without expectations, as upright as a column, as honest as wood … Or was I mistaken about him? Has he changed so much in the last year and a half?
“All right, all right. I’ll send you the divorce papers. Only, you must tell Martha that I’m your wife, not a classmate.”
“But you are a classmate,” he insisted.
They descended a few more steps, and entered the glass room from which the light was beamed. A gigantic lens, about the size of a hefty watermelon, sent out its light nonstop. By the light of day it didn’t seem so powerful, however. The lighthouse had ceased to interest Nora, and they went out of the glass room and began the long descent down the steep staircase.
“Will you tell her yourself, or do you want me to?” Nora said.
“It’s all the same,” Vitya mumbled.
Martha was waiting for them at the bottom. They went down to the ocean shore. Huge stone slabs were piled up around the lighthouse. A powerful surf washed over the pebbles on the shore.
“You know, Martha, I was his first wife,” Nora said, poking Vitya with her finger.
“I guessed.” Martha smiled and blushed, making her already red face even redder. “I’ve seen a picture of Yurik. He looks a lot like you.”
“Looks like you’ve just proposed on my behalf,” Vitya said.
“How do you mean?”
“Well, you said ‘first wife.’ She can count to two. She’ll be the second.”
“You said yourself that it wouldn’t get in your way.”
“You’re very decisive. I only started thinking about it.”
“What’s there to think about? She’s a very good match for you.”
They got in the car and drove to Vitya’s house. It was a little three-room rental, shabby and comfortable. Two bedrooms and a large dining room. In the dining room there was a portrait of James Joyce and some old mustached policeman, who turned out to be Martha’s grandfather. So she had already put down roots here some time ago. For dinner, Martha had made Irish stew, slippery pieces of overdone meat with potatoes and onion; it stuck in Nora’s throat.
Martha and Vitya resembled each other—both of them large and rosy, and both of them with an appetite for fatty meat, washed down with sweet beer. Moreover, Martha never took her eyes off Vitya.
“Well, come on, come on. Propose!” Nora urged, trying to hurry along Vitya’s still half-baked decision. “Right now, while I’m here. I’ll send the divorce papers as soon as I can.”
After dinner, Martha took Nora to the station. Nora smiled all the way to New York, as though something very good had happened. She had been in this ridiculous platonic marriage for twenty-six years, and it was unclear why she hadn’t divorced him earlier. It hadn’t meant anything at all. They were already at Penn Station when she realized that she had forgotten the records Martha had bought, which Yurik had ordered from his father.
The next day, sitting in the plane waiting for takeoff, Nora said to Tengiz, “I think I have just given my husband away in marriage.”
Tengiz lowered his glasses down to the end of his nose and stared at her over the rims. “Is that a threat?”
“Take it easy, Tengiz. You’re not in any danger.”
As for Viy, it never made it to Broadway.
28 The Left Hand
(1988–1989)
Nora, who had chosen the profession of theater set designer and artist at the age of fifteen, was aware that she could have done other things—directing, perhaps scriptwriting, she could even have acted or become a teacher—but never could she have become a doctor or an engineer or a mathematician. Tengiz? Tengiz could have been anything—a winemaker, a psychologist, even a hawker at the market. Anything at all, except for a profession that demanded strict discipline—a soldier, for example, or an electric-locomotive driver. Vitya could never have been anything but a mathematician. With Yurik, however, from early childhood, it was unclear. He could do anything at all, as long as he was inspired to do it, but as soon as the inspiration left him, he abandoned the pursuit. It was impossible to make him do anything he didn’t want to. Something had to occupy him fully, heart and soul. The interest had to consume him completely. As mathematics consumed Vitya.
By the time Yurik was twelve years old, such an all-consuming interest had taken root in him. It was music. Not music in general, but a particular kind—the music of the Beatles. He learned how to play song after song by ear, and Nora was exhausted by his maniacal commitment. She made several attempts to pull Yurik out of his Beatlemania—she tried to enroll him in a regular music school, where scales, Goedicke’s études, ear training, and choir practice reigned, but nothing came of it. Each time he started taking lessons, he dropped them soon after for a variety of reasons: either the teacher was mean, or he didn’t like the instrument anymore, or he objected so strongly to the other pupils that he refused to attend the class.