This network offered her the possibility to barter, and when she needed a ticket to New York—before the New Year; it had to be before January 1—Nora issued a call, and it worked. A day later, armed with Yurik’s passport and the American visa, she went to meet a cashier from the Aeroflot office, who charged her exactly two times the normal price for a ticket to New York. Nora hadn’t counted on having to pay such a steep rate, but, out of habit, she had taken with her every last bit of money she had before she left home. After she paid, there was just enough left, not a kopeck extra, to pay for a ticket on public transportation to get home. Nora took this as a good omen.
Yurik, an adolescent whom it was nearly impossible to consider a young man by any stretch of the imagination, had slipped out of the clutches of the army, skipped out, flown the coop: he was on a plane headed for New York on December 29. Just under the gun.
Nora was approaching fifty, an age at which it was similarly not possible to consider a woman young by any stretch of the imagination. She stayed behind, alone. However things worked out in America with Vitya and Martha, there would be no Afghanistan in his life.
A time to stop and reflect had arrived for Nora. She returned in her thoughts to the depths of despair she had felt, dragging herself back to her empty apartment after her sojourn in the strange, wonderful home of Mziya, Tengiz’s aunt. After parting from Tengiz again, after countless such partings—when she had understood that only a child would save her. And he was born—kind, amusing, with a wonderful sense of humor, a supremely original human being, with difficulties. And now he had grown up and gone to live with his father, another original human being, with difficulties of his own. Perhaps he had gone there forever. Perhaps it was for the best if it was forever. And she remained alone.
Maybe it was even worse for her now. She was in the same place, with the same Tengiz, who was again far away from her. Yurik hadn’t solved any of her big problems. For so many years, she had been going round and round in circles, along the very same path. Maybe she had been gaining altitude? Maybe she was falling down deeper each time? How could she live without Yurik? No, that was the wrong question. Forget about yourself. Yurik will get along fine without me. There’s no need to live under illusions: Yurik loves me very much, when I’m right there in front of him. But when I’m not there—I’m not so sure.
Nora boiled coffee for one in a small long-handled Turkish pot, as she had learned to do long ago from Tusya. She spread out a cloth napkin, got a blue Chinese ashtray, and put her cigarettes and lighter next to it. She fetched a coffee cup from the shelf. She got everything ready for her morning ritual. The way it turned out, after Yurik’s departure she resumed her old life. And what was that?
She had always done what she wanted to do. She had wanted a child—there he was. He grew up and left home. She hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly. But, fine, this was what she wanted. All right. But I remember Fedya Vlasov, she thought. And that won’t happen in this case. It’s so obvious that Yurik doesn’t fit into the mold of life here; he’s more likely to find himself elsewhere. Yurik’s music is all from over there. He can stay there if he wants to; if he doesn’t, he can come back here. In any case, he has a choice. I didn’t want to send him away. Yes, I did. I’m afraid for him. It’s not selfishness on my part. He never got in my way; on the contrary, he deepened and broadened my life. Motherhood. I haven’t been the best mother, of course. But I’m afraid for him here. Now I have to fill up the emptiness. I have to try to arrange my life without Tengiz, without Yurik. Look at Tusya. Now, there’s a wise older woman. She’s an inspiring example of both freedom and female virtue. No, that’s a silly thought. What do I know of her younger years? A pregnant silence. An all-encompassing silence.
Nora hadn’t seen Tusya in more than a month. She hadn’t even called her. Actually, Tusya didn’t like the telephone, and trained all her close friends to use the phone like a telegraph—for short messages, not for lengthy conversations.
After her coffee ritual was over (her version of morning meditation: Everything is fine, Nora, all is well, above, below, here and now), she called Tusya to agree on a time to meet.
“So—did you send the boy off?” Tusya said, greeting her in the doorway to her studio. Tusya had two homes—one in the country, a dacha, in a settlement of old Bolsheviks, most of whom had died out, and this studio, in the center of the city, rather small, with an alcove in which she could sleep if she wished.
“Yes.” Nora nodded. “I feel empty, somehow.”
“What do you think about that folkloric play? It’s not really drama—more like an experimental piece,” Tusya said.
Just then, Nora remembered that at their last meeting Tusya had suggested she work with some choral ensemble. In all the confusion surrounding Yurik’s departure, Nora had completely forgotten about it. Besides, the idea of a folklore ensemble was itself rather dubious.
“To be honest, it completely slipped my mind. Tusya, I just don’t like musicals. I don’t like taking on music—music is so much larger than theater, it makes it hard for theater to compete. Impossible, in fact.”
“Yes, I know. But in this case it’s just about assistance. The director of the ensemble is very talented, maybe even a genius. He deserves our support. He wants to get away from the folkloric-costume kitsch. He wants minimalist set design. Perhaps you know him? No? Go talk to him, listen to what he has to say. It will be interesting, I guarantee you.”
Nora and Tusya sat talking for hours, until well after midnight. There had been many such evenings over the past thirty years of their friendship. Tusya’s unique gift was that she treated her students as equals, and, in some wonderful way, this elevated her interlocutors above themselves. These interactions inspired them to grow into their future selves, and afterward they felt more confident and certain.
When Nora left Tusya’s, she had a large volume of Frazer’s The Golden Bough under her arm. This book, which she had been unaware of, pushed her thinking in new directions, and not just because of its study of magic, its myriad facts about the development of religion and the byways of human thinking; the book confronted her with the abyss of her own ignorance. She had missed so much during those years when she was blindly following all Tengiz’s initiatives.
Now she sat in the Theater Society library from the moment the doors opened until it closed, researching the aquatic spaces that appeared before the human soul just after death in the mythologies of all peoples. They were small rivers or streams, sometimes underground, sometimes oceans, enormous, bleak waters of all peoples, extinct and still living: the ancient Egyptians, Scandinavians, Indians, Native Americans, Mongols. But for Nora it was important to figure out how the Slavs envisioned this river. The practical task of set design was only a pretext for this captivating reading. Although Nora had a prodigious memory, she made small notebooks in which she jotted down the names of rivers and the names of ferrymen, sometimes even the names of the vessels that were charged with enacting this great passage, as well as vestiges of rituals that had been preserved. The boats themselves were extremely diverse—from rickety rowboats to winged sailing ships.