Toward evening, he arrived at Houston Street, and dropped in on old Tom Drew, the proprietor of a store and workshop that manufactured bar counters and other club furnishings. Tom Drew offered him a job. It was an excellent opportunity. Tom was an old hippie who had long since become a model citizen. His daughter Agnes, who had been born with severe hypothalamus syndrome, had set him on the straight and narrow. The mother abandoned them when the little girl was not yet a year old; from that time on, though still a hippie in his heart of hearts, he had worked like one possessed; he never drank or used drugs, and didn’t even smoke. He was ready to do anything for his now grown daughter, who had turned into an unhappy, tyrannical hellcat. Still, Tom cherished a feeling of tenderness and disguised envy for hippies and musicians—his unfulfilled destiny.
Yurik stayed overnight in the utility room. He dreamed about Grisha, who talked about the Divine, then he turned into Mickey, wearing a stretched-out red T-shirt, cussing a mile a minute in Spanish, which was incomprehensible and for some reason very funny.
Life started rolling along as usual. Yurik moved heavy bar counters around, composed music, played with various bands, listened to world music of every variety, smoked weed, and for a while avoided all hard drugs. He changed jobs, lived here and there, but had managed to reform and become a decent young man before Nora’s next visit. Every time, it was more and more difficult.
The drugs became a habitual and necessary condition of life for him—overdue credit that he would ultimately have to pay back. He understood this very well.
He wasn’t able to keep a single job. He became a dealer, a drug peddler. And he was hooked on the stuff himself—there was already no turning back. Spike, a seasoned worker in the heroin trade, gave him one dose for every ten he delivered to various other addresses. At night, he cruised the city looking for a bonus dose of junk. During the evening, he played music wherever he could, sometimes on the street. Once, in a small square, he heard a busker playing his music. He sat down next to him and listened. The guy wasn’t really any good. Still, it was amazing how the music came to life, independent of him.
Yurik was arrested twice for possession of narcotics. They let him go. The police understood perfectly well how the business was set up—that all the small-fry dealers were victims of a truly pitiless gang of big-time dealers, who reaped money from the deaths of young idiots. The judges were for the most part humane. They had one undeclared rule: they wouldn’t nail a dealer until the third time he was caught. After being detained a second time, Yurik was getting used to the thought that, in his situation, prison wasn’t the worst alternative.
The third time he was caught was at the end of 1999, right before the New Year. They busted him in the evening, he spent the night at the police department, and they took him before the judge the next morning. Everything happened very quickly. In the courtroom, he was with a group of young black men, half of whom Yurik knew by sight; one, a bass player, was someone he had played with about three years before. They were all looking at five or six years behind bars, and Yurik was trying to estimate how old he would be when he got out. He figured he would be at least thirty.
The cases were being handled individually at a rapid clip—ten minutes for each of them. Yurik was saved by the computer. When they typed in his last name, the prior offenses didn’t show up. Dumbfounded by this stroke of luck, Yurik puzzled for a long time over the computer god that had intervened in his fate. Then he understood what had happened: he was saved by the alphabet. Or, rather, the transcription of Russian into English. He bore the surname of his mother, Ossetsky. There were a couple of spelling variants in English: Osetsky, Osezky … At the time of his last arrest, he hadn’t been carrying any ID, and the officer wrote his name down as he’d heard it, not as it was officially spelled. So now they let him go. He left the building and sat down on the steps of the courthouse, without the strength to walk. And where would he go?
With great effort, he made it to Long Island. Martha grew terribly alarmed when she saw him, and called Nora in Moscow. Two weeks later, Nora flew back to New York.
35 Letters from Marusya to Jacob
Sudak
(JULY–AUGUST 1925)
JULY 24
Jacob, dearest! I’m writing you sitting on a suitcase on the floor. I’m in Tataria, as you well know—so the discomfort is easy to bear. But first about the trials and tribulations. And there have been not a few. Genrikh tormented me during the journey. He stuck his legs out of the train window, then hung out of it bodily. He ran to the platform at the end of the car and studied all the machinery, once almost managed to stop the train, etc., etc.
I got so worked up about him I nearly didn’t sleep at all—and, on top of that, he started running a temperature. We arrived in Feodosia in the driving rain, at three o’clock. I was already exhausted. Then we had to lug all our things, dragging them through pools of water, to get to the boat, hurrying as fast as our legs would carry us, because it was already about to leave. We forgot our linens in the train, and so ran back to look for them, and so on. I am terribly indebted to a German couple who literally saved me. They took Genrikh in hand, helped me carry our belongings, and showed us a great deal of concern. We finally made it onto the boat, with all our things in tow. The natural scenery, which was completely new to me, quite took my breath away. It’s almost impossible to describe. The only thing I know is that in the first few minutes, all the particles of my soul were transformed. A new blank space was filled out in its periodic table of elements. Through my own eyes, I saw the magnificence of the world. It was as though my hand had reached out to grasp it.
We arrived in Sudak at 11:00 p.m. (On the boat, Genrikh asked if there was anything to eat. I gave him a quarter of a chicken and some bread—he ate it all very quickly. The boat rocked quite a bit, and he grew very pale. But we made him put his head between his legs, and it passed.) A dark night.
At the mooring (just a small bridge, nothing more), we overheard rumors about a raid by bandits that had happened the night before. They cleaned out an entire boardinghouse—every last bit of it. My traveling companions and I began to look for shelter for the night. We wandered around Sudak in the dark. Every place we came to was already full; they wouldn’t agree to any terms. We spent the night on the seashore.
We put Genrikh (very cranky, demanding we go back to Moscow) to sleep on the bedroll, and the whole night I watched over him—afraid that he would kick off the covers. This means I didn’t sleep or change for three nights in a row.
The next day, we went searching again: NO ROOMS. Sudak is full up to the rafters. Many people are turning back, or going farther. I decided that it was impossible for me to drag myself from place to place with a child, without a destination. Toward evening, I found a room for thirty-five rubles. We went to fetch our things, and when we returned, this is what I find: “Apologies for mistake: room already let.” I almost wept. There is no manager for the dachas (the dacha pension is a collective), and I went back down to the seashore to beg to stay the night in the sea transport offices.
The next day, I sought out the manager, and told him that I intended to occupy a dacha. I would sit in the front hall until they gave me a room; otherwise, I would call him to account, as the official in charge, for exploiting the rooms for personal gain. I threatened to send a telegram to my husband in the People’s Commissariat. In short, I went on the warpath. The man turned out to be vainglorious and naïve. My voice was loud and commanding, my diction curt; but the main thing was that I was fully convinced I was in the right. In six days’ time, I will be in my own room (and a very good one, at that). Last night, we slept on the floor. I haven’t changed my clothes in all this time. Today a woman who is living here offered to let me live for a few days with her in her room, until her husband arrives.