Jacob's Ladder by Ludmila Ulitskaya

Author:Ludmila Ulitskaya
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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.

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.

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