Nora decided not to move the boat bed. She changed the curtains, replacing the dark-green linen curtains with a piece of unbleached canvas she had taken from the theater. She dragged Yurik’s larger bookcase into the room, and put the desk in Yurik’s room. Irina had left the negotiations about the move to Nora: “It will be easier for you.”
Nora visited her father in the hospital. He was in a good academic hospital, and was rather proud of his privileged situation. When Nora came, he was walking down the corridor with a squat, rotund man wearing silk pajamas and a ski cap. Her father introduced him to her. “This is my daughter, Nora, a theater set designer and artist. Nora, this is Boris Grigorievich, a well-known physicist, winner of the Stalin Prize,” and the ski cap rolled away down the corridor.
“Do you know who that is?” Genrikh whispered to her conspiratorially.
Nora had been preparing herself for this meeting with her father the whole way—cancer, cancer, not certain how far it had gone, control yourself, the situation is hopeless, he’s vain, garrulous, but he’s a good man, he’s good, and so certain that everyone will like him, that everyone loves him … He’s not to blame, it’s not his fault, I know that, I know that … Nevertheless, she could hardly restrain her irritation with him.
“Who, then?”
“The director of an academic research institute, the big boss! An inveterate bastard, they say,” he told her in a cheerful voice, and she laughed. Still, there was something charming about him, the old blabbermouth.
“Well, how are you?”
“Wonderful, dear, wonderful! The food is good. Well, Irina does her bit, too—yesterday she brought over a whole bucket of borscht. There’s a fridge in the ward. Would you like some? There’s even a kitchen here for the patients. And the staff is simply exceptional. Oh, the nurses!” And he clicked with his tongue, as though he intended to enjoy their charms without delay. Nora was very sensitive to nuance and intonation, and his response made her shudder. It’s horrible, how distasteful he is to me. Still, I can’t do anything about it.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” Nora suggested.
“Gladly. I took a walk the day before yesterday, too.”
Nora helped him get dressed—it was hard for him to move his left arm. His left lung had been removed. The doctors didn’t tell him what they had told his wife and daughter: with lung cancer, you had about five years to live, at most. Judging by the X-rays, four of those years had already elapsed. “You can have an operation, or you can choose not to. Makes no difference,” a famous surgeon had told them. “The operation is difficult for the patient, and rather pointless, since the second lung has already been affected. But miracles do happen. The disease does sometimes stop on its own.”
Irina took the decision upon herself: operate. She didn’t consult Nora about it.
Now they walked around the hospital grounds. He had been here five weeks already, and already knew half the hospital. He greeted everyone.
Sociable, Nora thought, wincing inwardly. Then she steeled herself and said, “Dad, I have a suggestion. You know that Ninka and her children have moved in with you for a while.”
“Yes, yes. Ninka’s a great girl; I can’t see any problem. Let them stay until they have an apartment of their own. They promised to give it to them soon.”
“Right, but you know yourself … A small baby will cry at night. And after your operation … Why don’t you move in with me for a while? Until the apartment issue gets sorted out.”
And then something she never could have imagined happened. Genrikh’s mouth twisted, his face crumpled, and he began to cry.
“Daughter, my dear daughter … I didn’t expect … Do you mean it? For this … For this it was worth getting ill. My good daughter … I … I don’t deserve it.” He wiped his eyes with a soiled handkerchief, and Nora looked at him, looked at him for a long time, then kissed his forehead.
My God, she thought, but he’s really very unhappy, and all the cheerful camaraderie, the jokes and funny stories, his clowning, are a front. They’re the mask of an unhappy man. My God, how could I not have seen it? I’m such an idiot.
Four days later, Nora moved Genrikh to Nikitsky Boulevard, and prepared to take up her sorrowful duty for a second time.
Several days before he died, his exhausting cough disappeared. He stopped talking about how they would all go to the Crimea in the spring. He couldn’t smoke anymore, but from time to time he took a cigarette between his yellowed fingers, rolled it back and forth gently, then set it aside. Just before he slipped into unconsciousness, he asked Nora to bury him with Mama. He spoke so softly she had to ask him to repeat himself, just to make sure.
“With your mother,” he said, very clearly. “With Amalia.”
Nora was unable to carry out his wishes because of Andrei Ivanovich, who rushed to the cemetery nearly every weekend to sit with her by her grave. But Nora didn’t say anything.
After he was cremated, Nora placed the urn with her father’s ashes in the columbarium niche reserved for the ashes of his parents, Jacob Ossetsky and Marusya Kerns. While the attendant removed the marble slab in front of the boxlike niche in order to squeeze the new urn into the narrow space, Nora recalled Marusya’s wish, which she had expressed to Genrikh not long before her death: “You can bury me anywhere, as long as it’s not with Jacob.” Genrikh hadn’t wished to remain for all time in intimate physical proximity with his parents after his death, either. What complex, confused feelings and relations they had …
Not long before Genrikh’s death, when he only had a few weeks to live, Nora asked him to write down the family tree and to describe what he remembered from his Kiev childhood and relatives. Resting his elbows on the desk, his muffled cough coming and going, he wrote something down for her.
When Nora opened the desk drawer after his death, she found a single sheet of paper covered with her father’s right-leaning handwriting. It read:
I, Genrikh Ossetsky, was born on March 11, 1916, in Kiev. I moved to Moscow in 1923 with my parents. I graduated from the eighth grade at the United Labor School No. 110. I worked as a tunneler in the Metro Construction Project. In 1933, I entered the instrument-making technical school. I graduated in 1936. In 1938, I entered the Machine Tool Institute, from which I graduated in 1944. In 1945, I became a member of the Party (crossed out). In 1948, I defended my Candidate’s Degree thesis and became head of a laboratory at the same Institute.
Here the report ended. Nora read it with sadness. He was just the candidate any personnel department was seeking—but why hadn’t he recorded a single true memory about his own family? What had happened that prevented him from recalling anyone? It was an enigma. A mystery.
Now they would have to tolerate one another in death till the end of time … or love one another.
31 A Boat to the Other Shore
(1988–1991)
The war in Afghanistan, which lasted for years and then burned itself out, hardly touched the lives of Muscovites who were not involved in politics, in particular artists and nonconformists, who had their own reasons not to see eye to eye with the government. The radio droned on and on about the duty to internationalism and the dangers of American imperialism. After a short stint in a training unit, eighteen-year-old conscripts were sent to Afghanistan, where they fought; and then came back—though not all of them. Some of those who did come back were badly crippled. But all of these soldier-internationalists without exception were knocked off balance, traumatized; they carried monstrous memories inside them, which they would have to outgrow in order to return to a normal life.
Yurik’s friend Fedya couldn’t cope. He was unrecognizable when he got out of the army. Yurik rushed over to the Vlasovs’ during the first week after Fedya was demobilized. He wanted to invite Fedya to a New Year’s Eve party where he had been asked to play, but Fedya refused to get up off the divan. He answered Yurik’s questions with inarticulate mumbling, and Yurik left feeling angry and hurt, thinking that Fedya no longer wanted to spend time with him. But Fedya didn’t want to spend time with anyone, even his parents. He lay on the divan for two and a half months without speaking, his face turned to the wall. Suddenly, while his parents were temporizing, wondering whether it was time to consult a psychiatrist or a psychologist, he disappeared. Without saying a single coherent word … They found him a week later in the attic of their dacha. He had hanged himself.