It was already after one in the morning when Nora got home. Coming into the lobby, she noticed spattered blood by the entryway, and then in the elevator. She froze, anticipating disaster. The traces of blood led directly to the door of their apartment.
A note was hanging on the door: “Nora, drop by apartment 18.” Nora had a ticket to fly to Warsaw the next day, where she was supposed to meet Tengiz at a theater festival. They were performing a play by Alexander Gelman, a production-worker drama with a human face …
Yurik was operated on that very night. The signs and symptoms were such that sweet Dr. Medvedev insisted that the boy be transferred from the post-op to the neurology ward. When he examined the damage from the concussion, he determined that the trauma was mostly psychological. Yurik’s hearing began to return on the third day, but the young man wept without ceasing, and to all questions he replied: “Left. Why the left? If only it had been the right!” And he shook his bandaged hand in despair.
Tengiz called from Poland the following night. “Why didn’t you come? It’s a success!” Nora told him about the accident. Astonishingly, Tengiz cried out, “No, not the left one?!”
Dr. Medvedev called in a psychiatrist for consultation. The psychiatrist prescribed pills. Nora was shaken by this turn of events. Damn heredity!
Ten days later, the bandages were removed. His fingers looked like sausages. Yurik’s thumb was numb for several months. It was painful for him to play, but he managed. On his first day at home, he began exercising his hand so he could recover his guitar-playing skills and former agility.
“When does he turn seventeen?” Doctor Medvedev asked Nora when Yurik was being discharged.
“He’ll turn fifteen in a month. There are still two years,” Nora said, catching his drift immediately.
“I suggest you take care of his military service. He should be exempt from the draft. Guard this discharge paper carefully: it says ‘moderately severe concussion with partial loss of hearing.’ It may come in handy.”
The war in Afghanistan was already over by this time, but the fear of military conscription ran deep. Nora already knew that she would do everything in her power to prevent Yurik from having to serve in the army, and that trying to extricate him from the clutches of compulsory military service would be an ordeal. The draft board made a living from such pacifist parents, and Nora was prepared to offer all manner of bribes in a subtle, impeccably artistic manner. Suddenly the indispensable piece of paper seemed to fall from the heavens. The prospect of a legitimate exemption from military service beckoned.
Yurik had just been let out of the hospital when Tengiz showed up again.
“How’s the boy?” he asked from the doorway.
“He’s home.”
“Congratulations!”
From Yurik’s room, they heard the soft strumming of guitar strings. Tengiz hugged Nora. Then he hung his sheepskin coat on the coatrack. He had a present for Yurik in his duffel bag—the Beatles album Let It Be. After the album came out in 1970, Paul McCartney left, and the group ceased to exist. But Yurik continued to live in their world, and had no intention of leaving it.
29 The Birth of Genrikh
(1916)
In the spring of 1914, Marusya finished out the Moscow theater season and returned to Kiev. Living in Moscow had been difficult for her. Jacob did everything within his power to overtake time, trying to finish his work at the Institute a year ahead of schedule by taking early exams, but it was already clear that he would still be bound to the Institute in the coming year. He implored his wife to come back to Kiev.
War broke out in the summer, and the prospect of being parted was frightening. Marusya quickly found herself a job, though only part-time. The Froebel Institute opened up its arms to her. They gave her a class in dance movement for workers’ children, and she began teaching rhythm and movement in a theater studio not far from home. The work was poorly paid, but during wartime it wouldn’t do to set one’s sights too high.
They lived in Jacob’s room. Having their own lodgings was unthinkable, for a number of reasons: overcrowding in the city because of the war, the high cost of living, the difficulty of arranging an independent domestic life and household, which would have told on Marusya’s weak health. Yet, in the prosperous home of Jacob’s parents, in spite of the burdens imposed by the war, the level of comfort remained undiminished. In the bathroom, which appealed more to Marusya than all the other bourgeois niceties, there was still running water.
All conversations revolved around the war, its incompetent management, and the base ruses of the Allies. By this time, the losses of the Russian army were already so great that many families had suffered the loss of loved ones. The Ossetskys, too, were in mourning. Jacob’s elder brother, Genrikh, a student at Heidelberg University and his father’s pride and joy, was captured while trying to return to his homeland. He was interned by the authorities in a concentration camp for displaced persons in the village of Talerhof near Graz, where he died of dysentery in January of 1915.
A good friend of Genrikh’s sent his family news of his death, along with a murky photograph of an unattractive young man with large ears. For Jacob, it was a devastating loss. He had idolized his brother as a child, and when he was older, trusted Genrikh’s judgment, his opinions, and his views unquestioningly. Genrikh played the role of the older friend Jacob had dreamed of having in his youth.
In 1915, the situation on the front deteriorated day by day. There were fierce battles on the Western front, and on the Eastern front it was not much better: Russian troops were pulling out of Galicia, Poland. Just then, at this most inconvenient time, Marusya got pregnant. The first weeks of her pregnancy were very difficult. She was overcome with nausea and could hardly eat, and, in addition to this, was terribly fearful about the future. She had complicated feelings about being a mother of a newborn, whom she would have wished instantly to be five years old—a charming little girl or a handsome lad. Mixed in with these feelings was irritation that, even before the baby was born, it was already destroying many of her plans. She had to give up teaching and her classes in the studio. She couldn’t continue with her German classes, which she had begun at Jacob’s urging, because she felt so unwell all the time. He insisted that even now, during the war, Germans had the highest technological and scientific potential; and in the field of pedagogy and psychology, German was indispensable. And, generally speaking, a person had to strive continually to raise her level of cultural proficiency; otherwise, degeneracy would set in. But the future child demanded sacrifices, and she offered them.
Jacob spent all his free time with his wife. He didn’t have much of it, however: he had finished his coursework and was writing his thesis, and had been promised a position as a teaching assistant immediately upon completing it.
Marusya was made ill by her pregnancy, as though protecting herself from being overcome by a more general sense of grief. The Ossetsky family treated her with gentle reverence as her belly grew visible. Sofia Semyonovna smiled to herself at this kid-glove treatment. She was one of seventeen children, the last child of her prematurely old mother, and had herself given birth eight times, of which only five children had survived to grow up; and she had lost track of the number of miscarriages she had suffered. She didn’t know about Marusya’s miscarriage two years before, and was surprised by Jacob’s anxiousness; he seemed to consider Marusya’s pregnancy to be some sort of dangerous illness.