Definitely Maybe: A Manuscript Discovered Under Strange Circumstances

CHAPTER 11

Excerpt 21…. So you brought it anyway,” Vecherovsky said.

“Bobchik,” I said and put my envelope on the table.

He nodded and smeared the soot on his face with his dirty hand.

“I was expecting it,” he said. “But not so soon.”

“Who’s here?”

“No one,” he replied. “Just the two of us. Us and the universe.” He looked at his dirty hands and made a face. “Excuse me, I’ll wash up first.”

He left, and I sat on the arm of the chair and looked around. The room looked as if a cartridge of black gunpowder had exploded in it. Black soot spots on the walls. Thin strings of soot floating in the air. An unpleasant yellow tinge on the ceiling. And an unpleasant chemical smell—sour and acrid. The parquet floor was ruined by a round, charcoal-dirty depression. And there was another one on the windowsill, as though they had lit a campfire on it. Yes, they really had given it to Vecherovsky.

I looked at the desk. It was heaped with papers. One of Weingarten’s folders lay open in the center, and the other, still tied up, was next to it. And there was another one, an old-fashioned one with a marbleized cover and a label on which was typed: “USA-Japan. Cultural Interrelations. Materials.” And there were pages covered with what I took to be electronic schematic drawings, and one was signed in a scratchy, fuddy-duddy handwriting, “Gubar, Z. Z.,” and below it in block letters: “Fading.” My new white envelope was on the edge of the desk. I picked it up and put it on my lap.

The water in the bathroom stopped running, and a little later Vecherovsky called me.

“Dmitri, come in here. We’ll have some coffee.”

But when I came into the kitchen, there was no coffee; instead, there was a bottle of cognac and two exquisite crystal glasses. Vecherovsky had not only washed up, but he had changed his clothes. He had replaced his elegant jacket with the huge hole under the breast pocket and his cream pants with a soft suede lounging outfit. And no tie. His washed face was unusually pale, which made his freckles stand out even more, and a lock of wet red hair fell over his knobby forehead. There was something other than the paleness that was unusual about his face. And then I realized that his brows and lashes had been singed. Yes, they had really given it to Vecherovsky.

“A tranquilizer,” he said, pouring the cognac. “Probst!”

It was Akhtamar, a rare and legendary Armenian cognac. I took a sip and savored it. Marvelous cognac. I took another sip.

“You’re not asking any questions,” Vecherovsky said, looking at me through his glass. “That must be hard. Or is it?”

“No, I have no questions. For anybody.” I leaned an elbow on my white envelope. “I do have an answer. And it’s the only one. Listen, they’re going to kill you.”

He raised his singed eyebrows out of habit and took a sip from his glass.

“I don’t think so. They’ll miss.”

“Sooner or later they won’t miss.”

“A la guerre comme à la guerre,” he countered and stood up. “All right, now that my nerves are soothed, we can have some coffee and discuss the whole thing.”

I watched his rounded back and his mobile shoulder blades as he ministered to his coffee apparatus.

“There’s nothing for me to discuss. I have Bobchik.”

And my own words suddenly made something click for me. From the moment I read the telegram, all my thoughts and feelings had been anesthetized; now they suddenly defrosted and started working at full blast. The fear, loathing, despair, and feeling of impotence came back, and I realized with unbearable clarity that from that moment a line of fire and brimstone that could never be crossed was drawn between Vecherovsky and me. I would have to stop behind it for the rest of my life, while he went on through the land mines, dust, and mud of battles I would never know and disappeared in the flaming horizon. He and I would nod hello when we ran into each other on the stairs, but I would stay on this side of the line with Weingarten, Zakhar, and Glukhov—drinking tea or beer, or chasing vodka with beer, and gabbing about intrigues and promotions, saving up for a car, and eking out my existence over some dull, official project. And I would never see Weingarten and Zakhar either. We’d have nothing to say to each other; we’d be too embarrassed to meet, nauseated by the sight of each other, and we’d have to buy vodka or port wine to forget the embarrassment and nausea. Of course I’d still have Irina, and Bobchik would be alive and well, but he would never grow up to be the man I had wanted him to be. Because I would no longer have the right to want him to be that way. Because he would never be able to be proud of me. Because I would be that papa “who could have made a major discovery, too, but for your sake…” Damn that moment to hell when those stupid M cavities floated up in my brain!

Vecherovsky set the cup of coffee before me, sat down opposite me, and with a precise, elegant motion poured the rest of his cognac into his coffee.

“I’m planning to leave here,” he said. “I’ll probably leave the institute, too. I’ll hole up somewhere far away. In the Pamirs, maybe. I know they need meteorologists for the fall-winter period.”

“What do you know about meteorology?” I asked dully, while I thought: You won’t get away from it in any Pamirs; they’ll find you in the Pamirs, too.

“It’s not a difficult profession,” Vecherovsky countered. “There’s no special qualification for it.”

“It’s stupid,” I said.

“What is, precisely?”

“It’s a stupid idea,” I said. I did not look at him. “What good will it do if you become a routine technician instead of remaining a mathematician? Do you think they won’t find you? They will, and how!”

“And what do you suggest?”

“Throw it all in the incinerator,” I said, barely able to talk. “Weingarten’s revertase, and the Cultural Exchange, and this.” I pushed the envelope toward him across the smooth tabletop. “Throw it all away and concentrate on your own work.”

Vecherovsky looked at me in silence through his powerful lenses, blinking with his singed lashes, then knitted the remains of his brows and stared into his cup.

“You are a top-notch specialist,” I said. “You’re the best in Europe!”

Vecherovsky was silent.

“You have your work!” I shouted, feeling my throat constrict. “Work! Work, goddamn you! Why did you have to get mixed up with us?”

Vecherovsky gave a long, deep sigh, turned sideways to me, and leaned his head and back on the wall.

“So, you misunderstood,” he said slowly, and there was an unusual and totally out-of-place smugness and satisfaction in his voice. “My work…” Without moving, he squinted an eye in my direction. “They’ve been after me for two weeks because of my work. You have nothing to do with it, my little lambs. You must admit that I have remarkable self-control.”

“Drop dead,” I said, and stood up to leave.

“Sit down!” I sat.

“Pour the cognac in the coffee!” I poured.

“Drink.” I drained the cup, tasting nothing.

“You actor,” I said. “There’s a lot of Weingarten in you sometimes.”

“Yes, there is. And of you, and Zakhar, and Glukhov. There’s more of Glukhov in me than of anyone else.” He carefully poured some more coffee. “Glukhov. The desire for a quiet life, for irresponsibility. Let’s become the grass and the bushes, let’s become water and flowers. I’m probably irritating you?”

“Yes.”

He nodded: “That’s only natural. But there’s nothing you can do. I want to explain to you what’s going on. You seem to think that I’m going to face a tank empty-handed. Nothing of the sort. We are dealing with the laws of nature. It’s stupid to fight the laws of nature. It’s shameful to capitulate before them and, in the long run, stupid, too. The laws of nature must be studied and then put to use. That’s the only possible approach. And that’s what I plan to do.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will in a minute. This law did not manifest itself before our time. To put it more accurately, we had never heard of it. Though it may be no accident that Newton got caught up in interpreting the Apocalypse and Archimedes was cut down by a drunken soldier. Anyway, those are random thoughts. The problem is that the law manifests itself in only one way—through unbearable pressure. Pressure that threatens your mind and even your life. But nothing can be done here. After all, that’s not unique in the history of science. There was the same danger in researching radioactivity, defusing storms, in the theory that there are many inhabited worlds. Perhaps with time we will learn to channel this pressure into harmless areas, and maybe even to harness it for our own goals. But there’s nothing you can do now, the risk must be taken—I repeat, not for the first and not for the last time in the history of science. I want you to understand that there is basically nothing new or unusual in this situation.”

“Why do I have to understand that?” I asked grimly.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’ll make it easier for you. And then I would like you to know that this isn’t for a day or for a year. I think that it may be for more than a century. There’s no hurry,” he snorted. “There’s a billion years to go. But we can and must start now. And you… well, you’ll have to wait. Until Bobchik grows up. Until you get used to the idea. Ten years, twenty—it doesn’t matter.”

“It does, and how!” I said, feeling a disgusting crooked smirk on my face. “In ten years I won’t be good for anything. And in twenty I won’t give a damn about anything.”

He didn’t say anything; he shrugged and filled his pipe. We sat in silence. He was trying to help me. Paint some prospects for me, prove that I wasn’t such a coward and that he wasn’t such a hero. That we were just two scientists; we were offered a project, and due to circumstances, he could work on it now and I couldn’t. But it didn’t make it any easier for me. Because he was going to the Pamirs to struggle with Weingarten’s revertase, Zakhar’s fadings, with his own brilliant math, and all the rest. They would be aiming balls of fire at him, sending ghosts, frozen mountain climbers, especially female ones, dropping avalanches on him, tossing him in space and time, and they would finally get to him there. Or maybe not. Maybe he would determine the laws of the manifestations of fire and the invasions of frozen mountain climbers. And maybe none of this would happen. Maybe he’d just sit and pore over the work and try to discover the point of intersection of the theory of M cavities and the qualitative analysis of American cultural influence on Japan, and probably that will be a very strange point of intersection, and it’s also probable that he will find the key to the whole vicious mechanism in that point, and maybe even the key to controlling the mechanism. And I will stay home, meet my mother-in-law and Bobchik at the plane tomorrow, and we’ll all go out and buy the bookshelves together.

“They’ll kill you there,” I said hopelessly.

“Not necessarily,” he said. “And after all, I won’t be there alone… and not only there… and not only me.”

We looked into each other’s eyes. Behind the thick lenses there was no tension, no false fearlessness, no flaming martyrdom—only the reddish calmness and reddish confidence that everything should be just the way it was and no other way.

And he said nothing else, but I felt that he was still speaking. There’s no hurry, he was saying. There’s still a billion years to the end of the world, he was saying. There’s a lot, an awful lot, that can be done in a billion years if we don’t give up and we understand, understand and don’t give up. And I also thought that he said: “He knew how to scribble on paper under the candle’s crackle! He had something to die for by the Black River.” And his satisfied guffaws, like Wells’s Martian laughter, rang in my ears.

I lowered my eyes. I sat hunched up, clutching the white envelope to my stomach with both hands and repeated for the tenth time, the twentieth time: “Since then crooked, roundabout, godforsaken paths stretch out before me…”