This happened during that same “lethal” year when Nora buried her parents and discovered that, with their deaths, the wall separating her from her own demise had collapsed. She had to grow accustomed to a new sense of her own personal chronology—I’m next in line. The fact that this chronological order could be broken, and that children could die first, Nora realized only now.
All the friends of the Vlasovs knew Fedya. From the time he was a young child, his parents had taken him everywhere with them, beginning with the Bulldozer Exhibition* during the Khrushchev era, where he was probably the youngest witness of the infamous battle between tractors and paintings; the Izmailovo exhibit; and all the exhibits in private apartments and in the basements of the Municipal Committee for Graphics on Malaya Gruzinskaya. Sweet-natured Fedya, emotionally attached to his parents, charming, rather sickly and physically stunted, and not yet matured into manhood. The war in Afghanistan destroyed him from within. For Yurik, who had just been forced to accept the deaths of his grandparents and become reconciled to the idea that old people ultimately die, the death of Fedya, his friend and nearly his peer, was unbearable. Moreover, it was suicide, which left all those who had been close to him with a sense of guilt.
The funeral was attended by a large crowd of people, and was particularly gloomy. The entire Moscow underground art scene, and other friends and acquaintances of the Vlasovs, gathered at the Khovanskoye Cemetery, which was forlorn and desolate, like all the new cemeteries surrounding the city.
Tengiz, who had arrived in Moscow at just this time with indefinite plans, would not let Nora go to the cemetery alone; he accompanied her. Yurik didn’t go to the funeral. He stayed in his room, weeping. He was badly shaken. Nora didn’t try to persuade him to change his mind. She saw terrible confusion and despair in his eyes.
Tengiz stood by the grave, behind Nora, with his hand on her shoulder. His brow was furrowed. It was painful to look at the Vlasovs—they looked like two black shadows. Natasha’s head was shaking … and in the past few days Lyonchik had aged visibly, and was so bent over that he looked older than his own father, who was holding him by the arm.
On the way home, Tengiz drove. They were silent the whole way. When they were approaching their house, he said, “The boy was murdered.”
Two days later, Tengiz flew back to Tbilisi.
Nora couldn’t stop thinking about Fedya Vlasov.
Yurik was already fifteen. His grades were poor. Getting into college, which would exempt him from the draft, was out of the question. It was very unlikely he would even be accepted at the conservatory, since he didn’t have a certificate of completion from an ordinary music school. In any case, a music college wouldn’t disqualify him from military service. The concussion that was described in his medical records provided no guarantee of exemption, either.
It was strange, but the recent deaths of her parents were less devastating to Nora than Fedya’s. She lived in a state of quiet, unrelenting, veiled horror. The image of his closed coffin haunted her during the daytime, and she dreamed about it at night. She looked at Yurik, and she saw Fedya, as she remembered him long before his death, when he was probably fourteen—a stooping posture, with a sweet, pimply face and a side part in his sleek hair.
She had to get Yurik away, before he got snatched by the army. One war had ended, but they could easily start another one.
There were two possibilities. One, the less realistic, was Israel. But what would she do, a half-blood, in a foreign country, with a son who didn’t even know he was one-fourth Jewish? The other one, more reliable but even less acceptable to Nora, was to send Yurik to America to live with his father. At this point, Nora fell into a stupor, paralyzed with indecision.
There were still two more years, but she needed to sort the problem out now. She couldn’t stop thinking about it. Soon she took the first step: she wrote a long letter to Vitya, expressing her worries about Yurik’s future. A reply came two months later. And it was written not by Vitya but by Martha, in English. This rather absurd woman—or so she had seemed to Nora, after their only meeting—was thrilled about the idea of Yurik’s coming to live with them. She wrote: “We will be happy … We will do everything we can for him … We await Yurik’s arrival, today or any day.”
Huge, shapeless, wearing a jogging suit and sneakers, with a pink face and unrefined features, and a smile that stretched from ear to ear … She moved as though she were carved out of wood—not a log, however, but a huge trunk of soft linden. And her squeaky voice, like that of a cartoon character … And madly in love with Vitya. Martha seemed to see merits and qualities in him that were invisible to Nora. Nora pondered the matter.
Vitya’s life was evidently undergoing a profound shift. Now it was not Varvara Vasilievna who governed his behavior, but Martha. Whether Vitya himself had changed, whether he was ready to take on day-to-day decisions, whether any emotional movement was under way in his heart, was unclear from the letter. What was clear, however, was that there was a good woman at his side. She loved him. From the moment Nora received the letter from Martha, her soul felt less heavy. Her plan to send Yurik to live with his father had taken on weight and definition. Nora answered the letter. They struck up a correspondence. Martha had clear handwriting and a straightforward style.
When Yurik entered the tenth grade, Nora asked Martha to send Yurik a “visitor’s” invitation for a visa. It arrived fairly soon. Only at this point did she ask Yurik whether he would like to go visit his father and stay there to study, if it all worked out.
“To America? Really, to America? To live with Vitya? Hooray!”
During the years when they hadn’t seen each other, Yurik had thought about his father about as much as his father had thought about him. But he was over the moon about the idea of going to America to live with him. Music! American music!
Nora covered her face with her hands and shook her head. How old was her son, judging by this behavior? Six? Ten, at most? They were both immature—like father, like son. Infantile …
“Yurik, you understand that it might be for a long time. I’m worried about the army.”
“Well, sure, I understand. But you don’t. America is where it’s at! I can learn a kind of music there that they don’t even teach here.”
Thereafter, things unfolded at a fevered pace—and, as it turned out, none too soon. From January 1, boys who were born in 1975, Yurik’s year of birth, were to be registered for the draft. After this date, it would be mandatory to ask permission from the draft board to travel abroad. But for Yurik, acquiring documents, a visa from the consulate, and the departure itself—all fell into place with remarkable, almost magical ease.
The final step—buying the ticket—happened with lightning speed. There were no plane tickets available; they were sold out for the next two months. It was always difficult to come by tickets of any kind—to the skating rink, to the theater, or to the conservatory. Everything was in short supply; but people learned the art of procuring things by hook or by crook. The well-trained Soviet citizen used circuitous means, and if he didn’t know how, he wouldn’t be able to make it to Leningrad, say, to attend his grandmother’s funeral. Nora had her own resources, her own currency of exchange—her connections in the theater. People approached her for tickets, and her connections were such that she could get tickets to the Bolshoi, to the Theater on Malaya Bronnaya, or to the Taganka.