Yurik invited Nora to his favorite hangouts—Performance Space 122 and Collective Unconscious. There were almost no people around when they stopped by at Collective Unconscious, only empty Coca-Cola bottles, bags, old bicycle parts, a dirty mattress, a sleeping bag, and a broken umbrella that represented the eponymous “collective unconscious” of the club. This was the very epicenter of lowlife revels and mad freedom, a place where people sang, drank, played, and shot up, all through the late evenings and into the night. She began feeling uncomfortable. They went around to several other, similar places. Yurik knew a few people, whom he greeted. He clearly felt proud of his connection to this underground world. Several fellows were sound asleep, wrapped up in sleeping bags. One old man, obviously drunk, woke up and crawled out of a pile of rags, asking for money. A human wreck.
“Give him a dollar, Mama.” Nora gave it to him.
Yurik led Nora through town along a sinuous, meandering route. Although she had a map, she didn’t want to refer to it, and she only approximately understood which way they were going. In this city, more than all others she was familiar with, there was an invisible compass pointing one toward the north, or toward the south … But they were in fact headed east, to the East River.
On Avenue A between East Seventh Street and St. Mark’s Place, Yurik ducked into a place that was little more than a hole in the wall.
“Now we’re going to have falafel. The cheapest in the whole city—a dollar twenty-five,” he said. “All the Russians in town come here. The falafel is excellent. Akhmed the Cripple runs it.”
Akhmed proffered Nora the thin dough pocket with its steaming-hot filling. She took a nibble and thought: If I were eighteen years old, I’d get stranded here for the rest of my life. I don’t think I’d ever want to leave. It’s a dangerous place, though. It’s as though the sirens sing and call out, but don’t devour you all at once; they suck you up gradually. But for now the shadow of danger only added to the charm of the place. Like a huge elephant, the city showed the inquisitive spectator first one side, then the other: now the tail, now the trunk.
Then Yurik took Nora to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. At this late-afternoon hour, there were still not many visitors. The walls were plastered with photographs of famous people, of whom Nora could recognize only Che Guevara. For the first time in his life, Yurik turned out to be better informed than she was. “Look! It’s Allen Ginsberg.” Under the photograph (his face was unprepossessing, to put it mildly) was a quote from the poet, in white letters on a black background: “The most integrated place on the planet.”
Well put, but impossible to translate into Russian. An integrated place … But you could make sense of it—it was a place where people were equal, there was no segregation, freedom of expression was pushed to its utmost limits; a place where boundaries and limits of all kinds were suspended. Nora’s literary imagination immediately started roaming to all the celebrated fin-de-siècle cafés she had read about: Les Deux Magots and the Café de la Rotonde in Paris; The Stray Dog in a Petersburg cellar; Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona. All of those places were the forebears, three generations removed, of this contemporary magnet for artists and literati; but this place was redolent not of Decadence or Futurism, not of Dada, but of social protest, revolution, and terrorism. Here was the modern-day, and even slightly dated, avant-garde. It was the front line of progress, of breaking with convention. There was music, and poetry, and performance, and none of it had anything to do with mainstream culture, with commerce. They were playing the music of some fantastic opera singer, and Nora stopped to listen. Yurik was quick to tell her that it was a countertenor. Such high male voices had been popular in Italy, and music was composed especially for the castrati. Now these voices were popular again. Yurik explained all of this, then said brightly, “You weren’t aware of this before?”
“Yes, I knew about it, of course. But I had never heard it.”
My word, Yurik. What an amazing place! she mused. Then she thought: I need to get him enrolled in some school or program as soon as possible. He could easily get stuck here for good.
She herself was completely enamored with it: a Rastafarian with a mass of intricate dreadlocks, and a parrot sitting on his shoulder; an anorexic-looking girl, bound up from head to foot like an Egyptian mummy. There was also a guitarist whom Yurik recognized. He almost fainted: “Mama, do you know who that is? It’s John McLaughlin!”
The group sitting at the table next to theirs seemed to be playing cards. In fact, it wasn’t a card game at all. A well-known fortune-teller was reading the tarot. In one dark corner of the room, a six-foot-five strikingly white person in an orange cape was sitting in the lotus position. An albino.
They walked to Bleecker Street. Nora was tired. The day was fast turning into evening. At the entrance to the subway, Nora went to buy a ticket. Yurik glanced into the cashier’s window and struck up an animated conversation with an elderly black man in a subway employee’s uniform. Nora couldn’t understand a word of their conversation. She walked away. The cashier opened up a side door and walked out of his little cage, pumped Yurik’s hand, and clapped him on the back. Yurik told Nora that this aging fellow was a marvelous guitarist, an erstwhile hippie, who had taken on a steady job when the years started to overtake him. Everyone called him Gnome Poem. Yurik couldn’t remember his real name.
They agreed that Nora would return to Marina’s house in northern Manhattan by herself, and that he would hang out here for a while. He said he’d come back around eleven. He showed up at three. Marina had already gone to bed, and Nora was sitting in the kitchen, worrying about what she should do in these circumstances. Go looking for him? But where? Call him? Whom could she call? And, generally speaking, what should she do now, tomorrow, in a year?
Nora didn’t make it to Long Island the following year. By this time, Yurik had left Long Island completely and put down roots in New York. It was a soft landing, however. Martha kept trying to persuade him to continue his studies, but Yurik considered that life in New York offered a better education than anything he could get at a university. By the middle of the summer, he had become so much at home in the Big Apple that it was no more possible to lure him away than it was to lure a worm out of the hard flesh of the sweet fruit. A few months later, he already knew dozens of other guitarists and drummers and horn players who had burrowed into the heart of the Apple, and they were all on a first-name basis with one another.
When he went to Long Island to take a bath and get clean underwear, Martha would lend him a few twenties and fifties. In the evening, sitting at the computer, Vitya showed his son new programs, marveling slightly at his slowness. Then they called Nora. The calls were expensive. Yurik couldn’t allow himself such luxuries, and Nora could never find him at home when she called. Her strong and enduring connection with her son, which she had once feared might be a problem in itself, became more and more attenuated, and finally threatened to disappear altogether.
Vitya had never taken much interest in Yurik, and had no idea how he made a living. Martha took the burden of these trivial matters in life onto her own shoulders—she paid all the bills, bought all the food and clothing. Vitya had only the vaguest notions of what it took to get by in life.