Golubev entered the academician’s study. The tiny little study was dark and narrow, more like a pantry. It was made even smaller by the bookshelves on all four walls. A little, toylike carved mahogany desk seemed to be bending under the weight of an enormous marble inkwell with a cover of gilded bronze. Three walls of the library were given over to reference books and the fourth to the academician’s own works. Here too were the biographies and autobiographies with which Golubev was already acquainted. Into this same room a little black piano had been squeezed: it was gasping for air; next to it was a round desk for correspondence, covered with recent technical magazines. Golubev shifted a pile of magazines to the piano, moved up a chair, and put his pen and two pencils on the edge of the table. The academician had left the door to the lobby open.
“Just like ‘those’ offices,” Golubev thought idly.
Everywhere, on the black piano, on the bookshelves, there were little jugs and porcelain or pottery figurines. Golubev picked up an ashtray shaped like Mephistopheles’s head. A long time ago, he had been fond of porcelain and glass, he had been struck in the Hermitage by the miracles wrought by human hands, for instance a white porcelain figure called Sleep, where the face of a man sleeping in an armchair was covered with the finest of handkerchiefs, so it looked as if the museum curators had put a piece of muslin there to protect it from dust. But it wasn’t muslin, it was a fine covering of porcelain. Golubev could remember many other miracles of human skill. But the Mephistopheles head, heavy and provincial, made no sense. Pottery sheep, pressed against the spines of books as if the latter were trees, were trumpeting from the shelves; there were hares with leonine faces sitting there. Were these personal mementos?
By the door were two solid leather suitcases plastered with stickers from foreign hotels. There were a lot of stickers, but the suitcases were new.
The academician materialized on the threshold; he caught Golubev’s eye and immediately began to explain: “I am sorry. I’m flying off to Greece tomorrow. Please sit down.”
The academician squeezed past, reached his desk and made himself comfortable.
“I’ve been thinking about your editor’s proposal,” he said, looking at the skylight. The wind was blowing a yellowing five-fingered maple leaf into the room: it looked like an amputated human hand. The leaf spun in the air and fell on the floor. The academician bent down, crumpled up the leaf in his fingers, and threw it into a wastepaper basket that was pressed against a leg of his desk.
“And I have accepted it,” he went on. “I’ve made a note of three main points in my response, my reaction, my opinion, whatever you want to call it.”
He deftly extracted a tiny piece of paper from under the inkwell; a few words were scrawled over it.
“My first point runs like this—”
“Please,” said Golubev, turning pale. “Speak a little louder. I don’t hear very well. Do forgive me.”
“Of course, of course,” the academician responded politely. “My first point runs like this. . . . Loud enough?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“So, the first question. . . .”
The academician’s eyes, constantly moving, looked at Golubev’s hands. Golubev realized, or rather he didn’t realize, his whole body just sensed what the academician thought of him, namely that the journalist he’d been sent didn’t know shorthand. The academician was a little bit offended. Of course, there are journalists who don’t know shorthand, especially the older ones. The academician looked at the journalist’s dark, wrinkled face. Of course there were. But in cases like this the editor would send another person as well, a shorthand typist. Or they could just send a woman who knew shorthand and dispense with the journalist: that would have been even better. The magazine Nature and the Universe, for instance, always sent him just a shorthand typist. The editorial board couldn’t possibly think, after all, that by sending this aging journalist that the latter was capable of asking him, an academician, any crucial questions. Not that crucial questions were needed, and they had never been the point. Journalists are like diplomatic couriers, the academician thought, or just ordinary couriers. He, an academic, was wasting his time just because there was no shorthand typist. Sending a shorthand typist was the obvious thing to do, in fact politeness demanded the editorial board to do so. The editors had been rude to him.
In the West, on the other hand, every journalist knows shorthand and can type. But here things are no different from a century ago, you might as well be in Nekrasov’s study. What magazines did they have a hundred years ago? Apart from The Contemporary he couldn’t remember, but there must have been some.
The academician had a lot of self-esteem and was very sensitive. He sensed that the editorial board had acted disrespectfully. What’s more, as he knew by experience, recording an interview live can’t help changing the content. A lot of effort would have to be expended correcting the result. Now, for instance, an hour had been set aside for the interview; the academician couldn’t spare any more time, he had no right to, his time was more precious than the journalist’s or the editorial board’s.
That’s what he was thinking as he dictated his usual interview phrases. But he concealed his annoyance and amazement. “If you’ve poured the wine, you have to drink it,” was a French proverb he recalled. The academician could think in French; of all the languages he knew he loved French most, for the best scientific journals in his field and the best detective novels were in French. The academician pronounced the French phrase out loud, but a journalist who had no shorthand would, as the academician expected, be unable to react.
“Yes, the wine is poured,” the academician thought as he dictated, “the decision has been made, the job has been begun.” He wasn’t accustomed to stopping halfway, so he calmed down and went on talking.
When all was said and done, there was a peculiar technical problem: to fit everything into one hour without dictating too fast, so that the journalist had time to get it all down, and to speak loud enough, quieter than at a lectern in his institute, quieter than at a peace congress, but considerably louder than in his study, roughly at the same level as when working in the laboratory. Once he saw that these problems had been successfully resolved and that the annoying unexpected difficulties had been overcome, the academician cheered up.
“Excuse me,” he said. “You wouldn’t be the Golubev who used to publish a lot when I was a young man, when I was beginning my career in the early thirties? All the young scientists used to follow those articles at the time. I can remember as if it was yesterday the title of one Golubev article: ‘The Unity of Science and Literature.’ In those days,” the academician smiled, showing the fine dental work he had undergone, “that sort of topic was fashionable. That article would fit very nicely today for a discussion of physicists and lyrical poets with Poletayev, the cybernetics man. That was all a long time ago,” he said with a sigh.
“No,” said the journalist. “I’m a different Golubev. I know the one you have in mind. He died in 1938.”
Golubev stared unswervingly at the academician’s quick black eyes.
The academician emitted a vague sound that was meant to be interpreted as sympathy, understanding, regret.
Golubev wrote without a pause. He needed a little time to understand the French proverb. He had known French but then had forgotten it a long time ago, and now the unfamiliar words crawled over his weary, withered brain. This phrase of double Dutch crawled slowly, as if on all fours, down the dark alleys of his brain, stopping to gather strength until it crawled into a patch of light, and Golubev understood, with pain and fear, what it meant in Russian. It wasn’t the content but the fact that, by understanding it, he had been shown a new region of forgotten things, which also had to be reconstructed, strengthened, revived. But now he lacked the strength, moral or physical, and it seemed far easier not to remember anything new. His back broke out into a cold sweat. He badly wanted to smoke, but the doctors had forbidden him to do so, and he was som
eone who had smoked for forty years. Once they told him not to, he’d given it up: he had lost courage and he had decided to live. He didn’t need willpower to stop smoking; he needed it to ignore the doctors’ advice.
A woman poked her head, dressed in a hairdresser’s helmet, through the door. “They get serviced at home,” the journalist made a mental note.
“Excuse me,” said the academician, clambering past the piano and slipping out of the room. He shut the door firmly behind him.
Golubev waved his arm—it had pins and needles. Then he sharpened a pencil.
He could hear the academician’s voice in the lobby; it was energetic, brusque to a degree, not to be interrupted, brooking no objection.
“The driver,” the academician explained when he reappeared in the room, “is incapable of working out when to bring the car. . . . Let’s go on,” he said, passing behind the piano and bending over it so that Golubev could hear better. “The second section is the success of information theory, electronic, mathematical logic—in a nutshell, of everything we now call cybernetics.”
The inquisitive black eyes caught Golubev’s, but the journalist was imperturbable. The academician cheerfully went on: “At first this was a new science where we lagged behind the West a little, but we’ve quickly caught up and now we are in the lead. We’re thinking of setting up chairs of mathematical logic and game theory.”
“Game theory?”
“Quite. It’s still being called Monte Carlo theory,” the academician drawled rather affectedly. “We’re keeping up with the times. Though for you—”
“Journalists have never kept up with the times,” said Golubev, “unlike you scientists. . . .” Golubev moved the Mephistopheles head ashtray. “I’ve been very taken by this ashtray,” he said.
“Nothing special,” said the academician. “I happened to get it by chance. I’m no collector, no amateur, as the French say, I just find pottery relaxing to look at.”
“Of course, of course, you do, it’s an excellent pastime.” Golubev meant to say “enthusiasm” but was afraid of the u sound, in case his new denture fell out; the denture couldn’t stand the vowel u. “Well, many thanks,” said Golubev as he got up and assembled his sheets of paper. “Have a good journey. We’ll send proofs.”
“Well, in case anything happens,” said the academician, frowning, “the editors can add anything that needs to be added. I’m a scientist, I’m no judge of the matter.”
“Don’t worry. You’ll see a proof of everything.”
“All the best to you.”
The academician showed the journalist into the lobby, turned on the light, and looked sympathetically as Golubev tugged his new, excessively stiff coat onto his body. He had trouble getting his left arm into the left sleeve, and the effort made his face flush red.
“The war?” the academician asked, politely considerate.
“Something like it,” said Golubev. “Something like it.” And he went down the marble stairs.
Golubev’s shoulder joints had been torn apart under interrogation in 1938.
1961
THE DIAMONDS MAP
IN 1931 there were frequent thunderstorms on the Vishera River.
Straight, short flashes of lightning slashed the sky like swords. The rain glittered and rang out like chain mail; the rocks were like ruined castles.
“The Middle Ages,” said Vilemson as he leapt off his horse. “Boats, horses, rocks. . . . Let’s take a break at Robin Hood’s.”
On the hillside there was a mighty, two-trunked tree. Time and the wind had ripped the bark off two poplars that had grown into one: this barefoot giant in short trousers really did look like the English hero. Robin Hood was rustling as he waved his arms about.
“We’re exactly ten kilometers from home,” said Vilemson as he tied the horses to Robin Hood’s right leg. We took shelter from the rain in a little cavern under the tree trunk and lit up.
Vilemson, the head of the geological expedition, was not a geologist. He was a marine, a submarine commander. His boat had gone off course and surfaced by the Finnish shores. The crew was allowed to go, but Marshal Mannerheim detained the commander for all of six months in a cell walled with mirrors. In the end, Vilemson was released and arrived in Moscow. The neurologists and psychiatrists insisted that he be demobilized so that he could work somewhere in the open, in the forest, in the mountains. So he became the chief of a geological prospecting expedition.
After leaving the last docking point, we had spent ten days going up the mountain river, carrying our boat, an aspen dugout, on poles along the riverbanks. On the fifth day we had gone on horseback, since the river had disappeared and there was only a stony riverbed. We spent another day on horseback following a packhorse trail through the taiga. The journey seemed unending.
Everything is unexpected, and everything is phenomenal in the taiga: the moon, the stars, wild animals, birds, people, fish. The forest began to thin out imperceptibly, the bushes were spaced apart and the path turned into a road: we were suddenly faced with an enormous brick building, windowless and covered in moss. Its round, empty window holes looked like embrasures.
“Where did they get the bricks?” I asked. I was struck by this anomalous old building in the depths of the taiga.
“Good for you,” shouted Vilemson, reining in his horse. “You’ve spotted it! You’ll know all about it tomorrow.”
But the next day came and I still knew nothing. We were off again, galloping along a forest road that was surprisingly straight. Here and there young birch trees had sprouted in the road, and on either side fir trees were stretching out their shaggy old arms to each other. They had reddened with age, but at no point did their branches block out the blue sky. The axle of a railcar, rusted over time, was sticking out of the ground like a tree with no branches or leaves. We stopped the horses.
“This is the narrow-gauge line,” said Vilemson. “It went from the ore-processing plant to the warehouse, that brick building you saw. Now listen. There used to be a Belgian iron-ore concession here back in the tsar’s days. There was a plant with two furnaces, a light railway, a village, a school, women singers from Vienna. The concession ran out in 1912. Russian industrialists headed by Prince Lvov, who couldn’t rest until he got his hands on the fabulous profits the Belgians were making, asked the tsar to transfer the business to them. They got what they wanted: the Belgians’ concession wasn’t renewed. The Belgians refused compensation for their expenditure. They just left. But when they went they blew everything up: the plant and the furnaces. There wasn’t a stone left standing in the village. They even dismantled the light railway, down to the very last fishplate. Everything had to be rebuilt from scratch. Prince Lvov hadn’t anticipated all that. Before they’d managed to get things going, the war broke out. Then it was the revolution and the civil war. And now, in 1930, we’re here. Here are the furnaces.” Vilemson pointed to somewhere on the right where I could see nothing but luxuriant greenery. “And there is the plant,” said Vilemson.
We were standing opposite a large shallow ravine, fallen earth covered all over with young trees. There was a hump in the middle of the ravine: it reminded one vaguely of the skeleton of a destroyed building. The taiga had swallowed up the remains of the ore plant; a brown hawk was sitting on the stump of a chimney, as if it were the top of a rock.
“You have to know there was a plant here if you want to see it,” said Vilemson. “A plant with nobody around. Superb work. Just twenty years. Twenty generations of vegetation: of alliums, reeds, willow herb. . . . And that’s the end of civilization. With a hawk perched on the plant chimney.”
“That process takes far longer for a human being,” I said.
“Far shorter,” said Vilemson. “You don’t need so many generations of human beings.” Without knocking, he opened the door of the nearest cabin.
An enormous, silver-haired old man, wearing gold-framed spectacles and an old-style black beaver-fur jacket, was sitting at a table made fro
m rough-planed wood and scrubbed until it was white. His gouty bluish fingers were clutching the dark leather binding of a thick book with silver clasps. He was calmly looking at us with blue eyes, bloodshot with an old man’s red veins.
“How are you, Ivan Stepanovich?” said Vilemson, as he approached the old man. “You see, you’ve got visitors.”
I bowed.
“Still digging, are you?” rasped the bespectacled old man. “A waste of time, a waste of time. I’d offer you boys tea, but there’s nobody about. The women and the kids have gone to pick berries, my sons are out hunting. So kindly forgive me. This is my special time.” And Ivan Stepanovich tapped the thick book with his finger. “Not that you’re in my way.”
The clasp clicked and the book opened.
“What is the book?” I couldn’t help asking.
“The Bible, son. I haven’t had any other book in the house for the last twenty years. . . . I find it easier to listen than to read: my eyes are not what they were.”
I picked up his Bible. Ivan Stepanovich smiled. The Bible was in French.
“I don’t know French.”
“Quite,” said Ivan Stepanovich, crackling the pages as he flicked through them.
“Who is he?” I asked Vilemson.
“The bookkeeper, taking on the whole world. Ivan Stepanovich Bugreyev, who has decided to fight civilization. He’s the only man who’s stayed out here in the backwoods since 1912. He was the head bookkeeper for the Belgians. He was so shattered by the destruction of the ore plant that he became a follower of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. You can see what a patriarch he is. He must be about seventy. He’s got eight sons. He hasn’t got any daughters. His wife’s an old woman. He’s got grandchildren. His children can read and write; they learned while there was still a school here. The old man won’t let his grandchildren learn to read and write. Fishing, hunting, a sort of kitchen garden, bees, and the French Bible as retold by grandfather: that’s their life. There’s a settlement with a school and a shop about forty kilometers from here. I try to keep in with him: there are rumors that he has stashed away a geological map of these parts—it was left by the Belgians. The rumors may be true. They did do some prospecting. I myself have come across someone’s old prospecting shafts in the taiga. The old man won’t let me see the map. He refuses to make our job quicker. So we’ll have to do without it.”
Kolyma Stories Page 30
