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One day, on her way back from the special store,69 Nadya found the postman outside their door. In his hand was a triangular letter addressed to Ludmila.70 Tolya wrote proudly that he had, at last, completed military school and was now being sent to an active unit, probably not far from the city where his grandmother lived.
Ludmila stayed awake half the night, clutching the letter. Again and again she relit the candle and slowly reread each word, as if these brief, hurriedly written lines contained the secret of her son’s fate.
30
A TELEGRAM came for Viktor, summoning him to Moscow. One of his colleagues, Academician Postoev, received a similar telegram. Viktor felt unsettled, assuming this summons had to do with his work plan, which had yet to be granted official approval.
This work plan was ambitious, focusing on theoretical problems that could be investigated only at considerable expense.
In the morning Viktor showed the telegram to his friend and colleague Pyotr Lavrentievich Sokolov. Fair-haired and stocky, with a massive head, Sokolov could hardly have looked more different from Viktor. Sitting in a small office beside the lecture theatre, the two men went through the pros and cons of the work plan they had drawn up the previous winter.
Sokolov was eight years the younger. He had been awarded his higher doctorate shortly before the war and his first publications had attracted interest throughout the Soviet Union and even abroad.
A French journal had published a short article about him, along with a photograph. The author had expressed surprise that someone who, as a young man, had worked as a stoker on a Volga steamer, should have completed a degree at Moscow University and gone on to explore the theoretical foundations of one of the most complex areas of physics.
“Our plan’s unlikely to be approved in full,” Sokolov said. “I’m sure you can remember our conversation with Sukhov. Anyway, who’s going to develop the steel we need when every high-quality producer is struggling to meet the demands of the war? Our steel would require trial melts—and every furnace in the country has been turned over to producing steel for tanks and guns. How could anyone approve a plan like ours? Who’s going to set up a furnace to make a mere few hundred kilograms of steel?”
“Yes,” said Viktor. “I know all this. But Sukhov’s no longer our director. He’s been gone for two months now. As for the steel, no doubt you’re right, but that’s just a general consideration. What’s more, Chepyzhin has approved the general thrust of our work. I read you his letter. You do have a way, Pyotr Lavrentievich, of forgetting about concrete details.”
“Excuse me, Viktor Pavlovich!” replied Sokolov. “But it’s you who’s forgetting concrete details. Is the war not concrete enough for you?”
Both men were agitated. They were unable to agree how Viktor should respond if their plan met with opposition.
“It’s not for me to give you advice,” said Sokolov. “But there are many doors in Moscow, and I’m not sure you’ll be knocking at the right one.”
“We all know your worldly wisdom,” Viktor retorted. “That’s why you’re still without a residence permit and why you somehow managed to register for the worst special store in the city.”
Seeing this as a compliment, each liked to accuse the other of being impractical, of being above worldly matters.
Sokolov considered it the administration’s duty to sort out his residence permit. But he didn’t intend to remind them; he was too proud. Nor, of course, did he say any of this to Viktor. He just shook his head nonchalantly and said, “As you know, I’m really not bothered about things like that.”
Next, they discussed what Sokolov should work on in Viktor’s absence.
Late in the afternoon a pockmarked clerk in blue riding breeches came round from the city soviet. He looked Viktor up and down in mistrustful surprise and handed him a pass and a ticket for the next day’s Moscow express. Thin and round-shouldered, with dishevelled hair, Viktor did not in the least look like a professor of theoretical physics; he looked more like a composer of gypsy romances. Viktor put the ticket in his pocket and, without asking what time the train left, began saying goodbye to his colleagues.
He promised to convey both collective and individual greetings to Anna Stepanovna, the senior laboratory assistant who had stayed on in Moscow to look after the equipment they couldn’t take to Kazan. He heard repeated feminine exclamations of “Oh, Viktor Pavlovich, how I envy you. The day after tomorrow you’ll be in Moscow!” And then, to a chorus of “Good luck!,” “Come back soon!” and “Bon voyage!” he set off home for his evening meal.
As he walked back, Viktor went on thinking about the work plan and wondering whether or not it would receive official approval. He remembered his meeting with Ivan Dmitrievich Sukhov, the institute’s former director, who had come to visit them the previous December.
Sukhov had been extraordinarily affable. He had held both Viktor’s hands and asked him about his health, his family and their living conditions. From his tone, one would have thought he had come not from Kuibyshev but from the front line, straight from the trenches, and that he was talking to a frail and timid civilian.
But he had nothing good to say about the work plan.
Sukhov seldom took much interest in what lay at the heart of a scientific question; what usually concerned him far more were its political ramifications. He was endowed with an accurate sense, honed by experience, of what a particular circle of people would consider most important to the state. And there had been occasions when he had been fiercely critical of something that, only the previous day, he had appeared to support wholeheartedly.
When people like Viktor got foolishly worked up, when they argued about some issue from a purely subjective point of view, seemingly unaware of its broader implications, he saw them as ignorant of the ways of the world.
In conversation he liked to point out that there was nothing personal in his attitude to someone, or to the question under discussion: his only concern was to do what was in the collective interest. But he never appeared to notice how very harmoniously his opinions, and their sudden shifts, always dovetailed with the interests of his career.
“Ivan Dmitrievich,” Viktor had said as he and Sukhov began to argue, “how can mere mortals like ourselves know which areas of research will matter most to the Soviet people? The entire history of science . . . And anyway I can hardly change the beliefs I’ve lived by since I was a child. Let me tell you how once, when I was little, I was given an aquarium . . .”
Glimpsing Sukhov’s condescending smile, he had faltered and said, “This has nothing to do with the matter at hand, and yet, really it has everything to do with it—however strange that may seem.”
“I understand,” Sukhov had replied. “But you too must try to understand. Your childhood aquarium is neither here nor there. We’re talking about something a great deal more important than any aquarium. Now is not the time to be working on theory.”
This had upset Viktor. He had realized he was about to lose his temper.
Which he did. “For better or worse,” he had burst out, “I’m the one here who knows about physics. How is it that a bureaucrat like you thinks he has the right to give me lessons? Doesn’t really make sense, does it?”
Sukhov had gone red in the face and everyone present had frowned. “Well,” Viktor had said to himself, “no more hope of him requesting a better apartment for me. I certainly can’t ask him for anything now.” To his astonishment, Sukhov had not shown the least indignation. On the contrary, he had looked rather guilty. And his eyelids had trembled, like those of a little boy about to burst into tears. But only for a second. Then Sukhov had said, “I think you need a rest. It seems your nerves are on edge.” And he had added, “As for your work plan, I can only repeat what I have already said. I do not consider that it answers the needs of the day. I shall speak against it.”
From Kazan, Sukhov had gone back to Kuibyshev, and then to Moscow. After another six weeks, he had se
nt a telegram to say he’d be coming to Kazan again soon.
But instead of going to Kazan, he had been summoned to the Central Committee, harshly criticized, removed from his position and sent off to Barnaul—to teach at a local agricultural-machinery construction institute. His acting replacement was a young scientist by the name of Pimenov, whom Viktor had once supervised. It was his imminent meeting with Pimenov that Viktor was thinking about as he walked down the street.
31
LUDMILA greeted Viktor just inside the front door. As she got to work with her brush, removing the Kazan dust from the shoulders of his jacket, she questioned him about his coming trip to Moscow. Every detail was important to her, concerned as she was that her husband’s greatness should be duly acknowledged.
She wanted to know who had sent the telegram, whether a car was being sent to take Viktor to the station, whether his train ticket was for an open-plan carriage or for one with compartments. With a little smile, she told him that Professor Podkopaev, whose wife she disliked, had not been called to Moscow. Then, as if dismissing these thoughts with a brusque wave of the hand, she said, “But this is all nonsense. I can’t stop worrying. Day and night, my heart just keeps pounding away: ‘Tolya, Tolya, Tolya . . .’”
Nadya was late coming home; she had been to see her friend Alla Postoeva.
Recognizing Nadya’s light, careful tread, Viktor thought, “She really is very skinny indeed. The sofa’s springs are in a bad way, but she can sit down without it giving even the least little squeak.” Not looking round, he said, “Good evening, my girl!” And he went on with his work; he was writing fast.
After a long silence, still not looking round, Viktor asked, “Well, how’s Postoev? Is he packing his suitcase?”
Nadya still didn’t say anything. Viktor tapped on his desk, as if calling for silence. There was a mathematical problem he wanted to solve before leaving. If he didn’t, it was sure to trouble him all the time he was away—he wouldn’t be able to give it the concentration it demanded. He seemed to have completely forgotten about Nadya, but then he turned round and said, “What’s the matter, my little sniffler?”
Nadya looked at him angrily, then burst out, “I don’t want to go to the kolkhoz in August to work on the fields. Alla Postoeva isn’t going anywhere, but Mama’s put me down without even telling me. She went into school and volunteered me just like that. I won’t come home till the end of the month and then it’ll be straight back to lessons. And the girls say you hardly get anything to eat and they work you so hard there’s barely even time to bathe in the river.”
“All right, all right, but go to bed now,” said Viktor. “Worse things happen.”
“I know very well they do,” said Nadya. After shrugging first one shoulder, then the other, she went on, “But I don’t think you’ll be going to a kolkhoz, will you?” And then, “My dear papa’s very politically conscious, that’s why he’s obliged to go to Moscow.”
She got to her feet. As she was leaving the room, she stopped and said, “Oh yes, Olga Yakovlevna told us she went to the station to take presents to the wounded. And there, in one of the hospital trains, she saw Maximov. He’d been wounded twice and was being taken to Sverdlovsk. When he’s discharged from hospital, he’ll be going back to his chair at Moscow University.”
“Which Maximov?” asked Viktor. “The sociologist?”
“No, no, no! The biochemist, the man from the dacha next door. The man who came and had tea with us the day before the war began . . . Remember?”
“Is there a chance the train might still be in the station?” asked Viktor, upset by this news. “Mama and I could go straightaway.”
“No, it’s too late,” said Nadya. “Olga Yakovlevna was in his carriage when the bell went. He hardly had time to tell her anything at all.”
Later that evening, just before going to bed, Viktor and Ludmila quarrelled. It began with Viktor pointing to the sleeping Nadya’s thin little arms and telling Ludmila she’d been wrong to insist that Nadya go to the kolkhoz. It would be better, he said, to let her have a good rest before what was sure to be a difficult winter.
Ludmila said that girls Nadya’s age were always thin, that she’d been a great deal thinner herself at that age, and that there were any number of families with children who’d be spending the summer in factories or doing heavy work out in the fields.
To which Viktor replied, “I tell you that our daughter’s getting thinner and thinner and you just spout nonsense. Look at her collarbones. Look at her pale, anaemic lips. What’s got into you? You seem to want both our children to have to suffer. Is that really going to make you any happier?”
Ludmila looked at him in pain, began to cry and said, “You don’t sound too worried about what may happen to Tolya. Sometimes I need your heart, not your logic. I want you to care.”
Slowly, with emphasis, Viktor replied, “Ludmila, you too often seem not to care.”
“You’re right,” said Ludmila. “As always, you’re right.” And she left the room, slamming the door behind her.
What lay behind Viktor’s last remark was his belief that Ludmila had little love for his mother. This was the main cause of their quarrels and disagreements.
In other respects, Viktor gave little conscious thought to his marriage. He and Ludmila had reached the stage when long years of habit can make a relationship seem unimportant, when its meaning has been obscured by daily routine, when only some sudden shock can make a husband and wife realize that these long years of habit and daily closeness are the most important, most truly poetic thing of all, the force that binds two people together as they move side by side from youth to white-haired old age. And Viktor was entirely unaware of how often he made Tolya and Nadya laugh by asking, the moment he walked through the door, “Is Mama at home? . . . What do you mean, she’s not here? . . . Where is she? . . . Will she be back soon?”
And if Ludmila got delayed somewhere, he would abandon his work and start wandering about the apartment, either complaining loudly or threatening to go out and search for her. “Where on earth is the woman? Which way did she go? Was she feeling all right when she left? And why does she have to go out at a time when there’s so much traffic?”
But the moment Ludmila appeared, he would calm down, return to his desk and answer all her questions with a preoccupied “What is it? No, please don’t disturb me. I’m working.”
Like many young people prone to melancholy, Nadya was also capable of infectious gaiety and she could act out scenes like this with consummate skill. Her impromptu kitchen performances would make Tolya explode with laughter while Varya, their domestic worker, exclaimed, “No, no, I can’t bear it—it’s Viktor Pavlovich to a T!”
32
LUDMILA did not like Viktor’s relatives and she saw them only if she could not avoid it. They were divided into those who were still flourishing—of whom there were very few—and those who were spoken about only in the past tense: “He was a famous lawyer, his wife was the town beauty”; “He had a wonderful voice, in the south he was a real celebrity.” Viktor always appeared interested in family events of every kind and he treated his elderly relatives with warmth and affection—even though, when they began to reminisce, they would speak not about their own long-ago youth but about times still more mythical, when the members of some still more distant generation had been young.
Ludmila was incapable of unravelling this complex web of relationships: cousins, second cousins, aged aunts and uncles. Viktor would say, “But what could be simpler? Maria Borisovna is the second wife of Osip Semyonovich, and Osip Semyonovich is the son of my late Uncle Ilya—I’ve already told you about him, my father’s brother, he loved cards and he was a terrible gambler. And Veronika Grigorievna is Maria Borisovna’s niece—the daughter of her sister Anna Borisovna. Now she’s married to Pyotr Grigorievich Motylyov. What don’t you understand?”
Ludmila would reply, “No, I’m sorry. You may be able to understand all this. And maybe Einstein co
uld understand some of it. But not me—I’m far too stupid.”
Viktor Pavlovich was the only son of Anna Semyonovna Shtrum.
As a young woman, Anna Semyonovna had been bright and boisterous. She had adored the theatre. Still a schoolgirl, she had more than once queued all night for tickets when Stanislavsky and his company came to Odessa. Then she had lived abroad for several years, graduating in medicine from the University of Bern and also spending time in Geneva. She had worked with renowned eye specialists in Italy. She had lived for two years in Paris. In 1903 Alexandra Vladimirovna had stayed with her for a month while her husband, along with other revolutionaries, attended the Party Congress in London; Anna Semyonovna had given her the little brooch—two enamel violets—that Alexandra still often wore.
Anna Semyonovna had been widowed when Viktor was only three. After spending the summer of 1914 on the Baltic coast, for Viktor’s health, she had moved to Kiev. Her friends had marvelled at the single-minded devotion she then showed to her young son. She became a homebody, seldom going out and always taking Viktor along with her when she did. And she only visited people who had children the same age as Viktor.
One of the friends she visited most often was Olga Ignatievna, the widow of a merchant-navy captain. The captain had brought his wife a great many presents from distant countries: collections of butterflies and shells and little ivory or stone figurines. Anna Semyonovna probably never realized that these evening visits meant more to her son than any of his lessons, either at school or with his private language and music tutors.
Viktor had been especially taken with a collection of little shells from the shores of the Sea of Japan: gold and orange, like miniature sunsets; pale blue and green, milky pink, like dawn over a miniature sea. They were unusual shapes: fine, delicate swords; lace bonnets; petals of cherry blossom; stars and snowflakes made from plaster. Next to the shells was a display cabinet of tropical butterflies whose colours were still more brilliant, as if their vast chiselled wings had somehow captured tongues of red flame and puffs of violet smoke. The little boy had imagined that the shells were similar to the butterflies, that they flew through the seaweed, in the light of an underwater sun that was sometimes green and sometimes light blue.
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