Living her happy life in the countryside, Tanya missed first grade. She completed the first-grade program at home. She could read well and had mastered counting. Penmanship was more difficult. Tanya would get upset because her letters were not as beautiful as those in the practice books. Her recuperation was complete. Isaac Veniaminovich, who could have testified to the fact, was no longer among the living.
TOWARD AUTUMN TANYA WAS BROUGHT BACK TO THE Moscow apartment and started school, going straight into the second grade. Preparations for her first day at school were made with great labor and care. They had a school uniform sewn for her—a brown dress with a stand-up collar, attachable white collars and cuffs for dress occasions, black sleeve protectors, two black aprons, and a white apron with pleated ruffles on the shoulders, also for special occasions.
“Just like an angel.” Vasilisa sighed devoutly.
And in her childlike soul she began to look up to Tanya. She herself had never attended school, and that uniform had not been pieced together from some old dress, but cut from a whole piece of new wool cloth, which seemed to her a sign of particular distinction. She even thought to herself: “Beautiful enough to bury …” She did not mean anything bad.
They also bought her a stack of light-bluish notebooks with porous pink blotting paper inside, an aromatic wooden pencil box with precious contents: new pencils, erasers, pens … They even ordered new high shoes for Tanya at a special shoe atelier that no one in the family had ever been to.
Tanya had been dreaming about school for a long time: she had been promised that at school she would find all the girlfriends she so missed having during her happy tubercular childhood in Zvenigorod.
On the first of September, Elena brought her daughter to school. She found the teacher and left Tanya in the classroom, alone and confused, with a heavy schoolbag and a thick-stemmed bouquet of plump asters. There turned out to be too many girls to be friends with. They were noisy, but one could deal with that. What was most unpleasant was that they all touched Tanya, her braids, the ruffle of her apron. One even managed to grab her by her white sock …
The classroom turned out to be exactly as Tanya had pictured it. The teacher pointed to her seat next to a fat little girl with braids wound in little donuts around her ears. In the middle of the lesson Tanya’s neighbor bumped her elbow, and Tanya made a huge blot on the first page of her notebook. She froze. This had happened to her before when she filled out her lonely writing books in Zvenigorod, but now she was horrified. She had not yet recovered from her shock when her deskmate leaned over and pinched her painfully on the leg. That was when Tanya understood that the bump on the elbow had been on purpose, and she started to cry. The teacher walked up to her and asked what the matter was.
“May I go home?” Tanya whispered.
“You may go home after the fourth period,” the teacher said firmly.
For the first time in her life Tanya had bumped up against someone else’s will, against force in its mildest form. Until that moment the wishes of those around her had fortuitously coincided with her own; it had never occurred to her that life could be any other way … It turned out that’s what adult life was—submitting to someone else’s will … From that point on, it turned out, in order to be happy as before, you had to make sure that you yourself wanted exactly what adults expected of you … She, of course, did not think that; the idea, rather, had come upon her from above and begun to press itself on her …
Until the end of the fourth period she sat at her desk as if in a stupor, not getting up even for breaks. The girls whom she had expected to be her friends turned out to be malicious monkeys: they skipped round her, pulled her braids, pointed their fingers at her, and laughed meanly. Tanya tried to understand why they disliked her and could not imagine that they were just expressing their interest in her. She could not fathom that a few months later these same little girls would fight tooth and nail for the privilege of being her partner in line, doing class duty, or just walking down the corridor with her.
Tanya, as it turned out, possessed a rare quality difficult to define: no matter what she did—tied a bow, wrapped a notebook, shook drops of water from her hands with that distinctive upward sweeping gesture of hers, wrinkled her nose in a smile—each of her movements was immediately noticed and attracted the girls’ attention, and she became a model for emulation. Even the way she chewed on the fluffy end of her braid when she was lost in thought was imitated by all of the girls who had braids …
Despite the girls’ adulation, Tanya never took a liking to school. Surrounded by dozens of little girls competing for her attention and friendship, she felt more alone than she had been in Zvenigorod. The only person who felt more left out was Toma Polosukhina, a downtrodden D-student with a raspberry ring of peeling dry skin around her mouth who sat in the last row. A withdrawn, slouching little girl no one wanted to sit with …
Toma did not belong to the ranks of Tanya’s admirers: interstellar distances lay between them …
8
ELENA HAD CHOSEN A MODEST, VERY MODEST, PROFESsion. But she never regretted the choice. She liked everything about her work: the special illuminated desk, the drafting board, and the various sorts of paper with which she worked: cloudy, icelike tracing paper, fragile vellum, and slippery gray-blue blueprint paper. She liked both the smell of ink and the scrape of pencils. Even insignificant but necessary and skill-intensive tasks like sharpening pencils …
All these basic things she had come to understand while still an apprentice. Then, having worked a year or two, she fell in love with the more essential, very calming aspect of the draftsman’s wonderful trade: in displaying itself, every object turned about in three views, which was entirely sufficient for it to be described in its totality, leaving no secrets and no hidden spaces inside. Everything as it was …
At times it seemed to Elena that all phenomena, like all objects, could be described from three vantages: front, side, and top. Not just a part in a tank motor, but the wind, and stomach pain, and any uttered word.
Her teacher had been her first husband, Anton Ivanovich Flotov, a great master—of the art, one might say—of technical drawing. They met in an obscure, insignificant place where Elena was a student and he an instructor of drafting. He appeared old, well-kempt, and dull, although he was only twenty-nine. She had just turned seventeen and had recently escaped the Moscow region agricultural commune—an amazing and extremely strange place—where she had spent her childhood. This community was Tolstoyan and directed by her father, Georgy Ivanovich Miakotin.
This girl who had grown up in special, entirely unique circumstances—taught to read with Tolstoy’s children’s books, milking cows while still a child, working (not playing at working) in the fields and in the communal kitchen, silent witness to dinner-table discussions of Vivekananda and Karl Marx and of folk and folk-liberation songs sung in monophonic style—felt lonely in Moscow, surrounded by an alien and dangerous world. Her grandmother Evgenia Fedorovna was the only person Elena was not afraid of.
More than love, what united Elena with Anton Ivanovich, her future husband, was an underlying sense of irrational guilt for “standing apart” from, “not blending in” with, the merry and amicable company of innocent people. Both of them sensed their social inadequacy but made no attempt to disguise it with political activism, breast-beating, or damning their unfortunate parents. They belonged to another, meek breed of human beings who preferred to retreat unobtrusively to life’s sidelines, into the bushes, under a stone, into the shadows, not to be noticed.
Anton Ivanovich descended from a family of architects and builders—some of whom had emigrated, some of whom had been exterminated—and the entirety of his inheritance was his profession as a draftsman. Because of the revolution he did not manage to receive the German engineering training given to boys in their family. He was a first-class draftsman, worked at a large plant as a technical designer, and conducted courses in draftsmanship at the plant’s school for wor
kers.
Cautious and attentive, Anton Ivanovich studied Elena for a year before approaching her, then met with her on Sundays for another year, and married her only in the third year of their acquaintance—not out of ardent love, but with serious intent and after careful consideration, as with everything he did.
Elena’s parents did not attend the wedding: her father was busy planting and would not allow her mother to go. Georgy Ivanovich invited his daughter and son-in-law to join them in Altai. Things at the commune were not bad, and while there was a lot of friction with the authorities, the members of the commune could not have imagined that in a year or so they would all be arrested, put in prisons and camps, and sent to places where you couldn’t break the soil with a pickax.
Anton and Elena led a peaceful, quiet existence in Elena’s grandmother’s apartment. Their salaries sufficed for a modest life, and Elena had never known any other. In any case, after her childhood in the commune, life in Moscow seemed free and easy. The most interesting part of it was, perhaps, mechanical drawing.
Elena’s bosses praised her as a diligent and capable young woman. It was written in her papers that she was from a commune—which looked good only because of a misunderstanding: the fact that it was a Tolstoyan commune was not mentioned; for this reason it was even suggested to Elena that she continue her studies at the plant’s workers’ school, but she had no desire to do so. She was happy just to sit at her drawing table, and even Anton Ivanovich was surprised by her eagerness to work.
Once she dreamed that Anton Ivanovich had spoken some ordinary phrase to her and that she could see the phrase not in the usual way, frontally, but from the side, in profile: like a thin fish face, wavy and drawn-out towards the top in a pointed triangle. What a pity, though, that on waking she could not remember the phrase. But the dream itself remained and did not fade. Afterward she surmised that every phrase must have its own geometry and that one need only concentrate in order to see it.
There is something draftable to words, she reflected. There is “construable space” in everything that exists; it’s simply impossible to express.
She tried to talk to Anton Ivanovich about this, but he just shook his head.
“What fantasies you have, Elena …”
These dreams, however, occasionally recurred. They were perfectly senseless, containing nothing that could be retold, yet afterward she was always left with the vaguely pleasant sense of something new.
And now, when so many years had passed and Anton Ivanovich was no longer on this earth and Elena had even hidden away his photographs—so that her growing daughter would not accidentally discover that Pavel Alekseevich was not her natural father but her stepfather—every time she would sit down at her work table, she would open the antique German case of drawing instruments, a Flotov heirloom, and let out a sigh for the deceased Anton Ivanovich. She never forgot her guilt before him. And from time to time she still had those mechanical drawing dreams—why, what did they mean … ?
PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH DID NOT LIKE ELENA’S JOB: WHAT was the point of tiresome hours sitting at the design office? He was perplexed. Elena would defend herself.
“It’s a good job. It makes sense to me.”
“What’s so good about it?” Pavel Alekseevich asked with sincere surprise.
“I can’t explain it to you. It’s beautiful.”
“Whatever,” Pavel Alekseevich granted craftily. “It’s just very, very mindless,” he teased.
“Oh, Pasha, what are you saying?” Elena took offense. “There’s nothing mindless about it. Sometimes it’s even very complex.”
Pavel Alekseevich awaited this moment when her usually meek expression would change. She shook her head lightly, the fluffy curls at her temples that always resisted being pulled back into a bun fluttered, and her lips tightened into wrinkles at their corners.
“I mean that it’s all so mechanical, no mystery.” He raised a forefinger in front of her. “There is more mystery in a single human finger than in all of your drawings.”
She gathered his finger in her hand.
“Perhaps there’s mystery in your finger, but not in anyone else’s. Perhaps there isn’t any mystery in a drawing, but there is truth. The most indispensable truth. Maybe not the entire truth, just a part. One-tenth, or one one-thousandth. I know that everything has other content, not just the draftable … I can’t explain,” she said and put down his hand.
“It’s been said before you.” Pavel Alekseevich chuckled. “Plato said it. It’s called eidos. The idea of the thing. Its divine content. A divine template that gives form to all worldly things …”
“That’s not for me. That’s too intellectual.” Elena waved him off.
But she did not forget Pavel Alekseevich’s words. That was it, philosophy. They used to talk about similar things at the commune, but at the time she had been too little for such conversations and fell asleep during them.
Pavel Alekseevich looked at her with a tender pride. Such a wife he had: soft-spoken, prone to silence, talked only when she had to, but if you could get her to say what she thought, her ideas were intelligent and subtle, her understanding profound …
Elena frequently had the urge to tell her husband her ideas about the “draftableness” of the world, about the dreams she had from time to time with technical drawings of all sorts of things—words, illnesses, even music. But no, no, it was impossible to describe.
Two seers of the hidden lived side by side. For him all living matter was transparent; she perceived the transparency of some other, immaterial world. But both of them hid from the other, not for lack of trust, but out of pudicity and the protective interdiction placed on all secret knowledge, regardless of how acquired.
9
THE RESEARCH TOPICS THAT INTERESTED PAVEL ALEKseevich had always been connected to concrete medical issues, whether it be the fight against early miscarriages, treatments for infertility, or new surgical techniques for resecting the uterus or performing Cesarean sections in cases of incorrect presentation of the fetus.
The phrase “bourgeois science,” which appeared in the newspapers with increasing frequency, made him smirk with disgust. From his point of view, the field of science to which he had given so many years of his life had no class subtext.
Irreproachably honest in the everyday sense of the word, Pavel Alekseevich had lived his entire professional life under the Soviets and long ago had grown accustomed to using formulaic language in his articles and monographs, opening sentences with fixed turns of phrase like “in scientific circles of the Stalin era …” or “owing to the untiring concern of the party, the government, and Comrade Stalin personally …” He knew how to express his own practical observations within the limitations of this cant. For him it was the formula for politeness in the present era, like “Your Grace” in the past, and had no bearing on the content of his work.
At the beginning of 1949 the campaign against cosmopolitanism began, and with the very first newspaper publication Pavel Alekseevich woke up. This was a new assault against common sense, and the attack on genetics and eugenics at last year’s session at VASKhNIL no longer seemed to him just an ominous coincidence. As a member of the academy and director of an institute, Pavel Alekseevich found himself now at a level of service that required assurances of loyalty. He was supposed to speak out publicly and at least verbally demonstrate his support for the new campaign. The upper echelons were hinting insistently that now was the time. They also made highly suggestive reference to his project, which had been on hold for several years now …
A public speech of this sort was out of the question. For Pavel Alekseevich it would mean stripping himself of his self-respect, overstepping the bounds of ordinary, albeit bourgeois, decency.
For all his relatively free thinking Pavel Alekseevich had, after all, received a traditional education that copied the German model; his thought processes had been formed to fit a German mold. Historically, humanistic thought in Russia had been influenc
ed principally by the French, but in the fields of science and technology German influence had dominated since the time of Peter the Great. The very concept of universalism, in the Latin sense of the word, appealed to Pavel Alekseevich, so he saw no global evil in “cosmopolitanism” per se.
On the eve of the general assembly of the Academy of Sciences, on one of the last Sundays of spring, he set out for Malakhovka to see his friend Ilya Iosifovich Goldberg, a physician and geneticist, to seek his advice. A less suitable adviser would have been hard to find.
A JEWISH DON QUIXOTE WHO ALWAYS MANAGED TO GET sentenced for something other than what he was guilty of just before the campaign against what he was guilty of began, Goldberg by this time had managed to sit out two insignificant (by standards of the time) prison terms and was gearing up for his third. Between terms he got several unusual (for him) lucky breaks when he by chance happened not to be in the right place at the right time, and disaster passed him by.
He had done his first stint in 1932 for a presentation he had made three years prior, in 1929, at an in-house seminar, all that remained of the long-defunct Society of Free Philosophers. The subject of his presentation had nothing to do with genetics. Goldberg, who made a hobby of rummaging through Western journals, had dug out of Nature or Science an article by Albert Einstein on the relationship between space and time. The article’s mathematical austerity appealed to him enormously—before that he had never encountered works in which philosophical concepts were interpreted by mathematicians—and he did a presentation on it.
The affair was small change, and he got only three years. How many would he have got if they had had any inkling of what he was working on in those days—human population genetics?
After getting out, he worked for a while at the Medical Biological Institute, where he succeeded in publishing several articles on population genetics and gene drift. This time it was his unbearable personality that helped him avoid major unpleasantness: just before the institute was shut down he got into a verbal brawl with one of its leading researchers over, it goes without saying, some deeply fundamental scientific issues. Their quarrel was so heated that it ended in a fistfight. Witnesses to the incident said that a more comical sight than their fisticuffs would have been hard to imagine. In the heat of this scientific polemic Ilya Iosifovich knocked out his opponent’s tooth, and the latter—insulted and injured—took him to court. As a result, Goldberg got one year for petty hooliganism.
The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel Page 5
