III

THE DAYS BECAME MONOTONOUS; there was absolutely nothing to do in the town, and it was quite stupid to drive to the city every day just to entertain themselves. Marina resigned herself to the fact that she wouldn’t be making any friends here, and was fine with it; when you can get around the whole town in fifteen minutes, any acquaintance can mutate into an intrusive, unwanted friendship. After a week, Marina went alone to have dinner with the same neighbor who had given Karpov the keys; from their first day there, Karpov had completely withdrawn into his laboratory work, which now took place not in the kitchen, as it had in Moscow, but rather in a special shack which had also been left to him by his grandfather. He didn’t invite Marina out to the shack, and she never asked to come; it wasn’t so much that she didn’t want to get in the way, she was afraid that she might find out her husband was placing unjustified expectations on something that was obvious folly. The neighbor, Auntie Katya Shustikova, turned out to be a sweet old lady who immediately told Marina everything she had already heard from Karpov—that at one time the town had been a military settlement, then Krushchev reduced the size of the army and then decided that agricultural science needed to be closer to the earth and, therefore, the Science Research Institute where Karpov’s deceased father and his Auntie Katya’s deceased husband had worked was transferred here to this boring land, and within ten years around this first building another dozen or so urban apartment buildings had popped up, entirely populated with senior and junior scientists, along with one academician from the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Science—Boris Prokopevich Goncharov, also deceased. Undoubtedly those really had been the good old days when everybody knew and loved one another, and the young obeyed their elders, and there were no drunks, and no one littered the streets; not like now, when nearly nothing remained of the institute, the bitch of a head manager was making money selling off the institute’s land, the first generation of the settlement’s inhabitants had died off, and now all sorts of outsiders living in the buildings had no clue about all of this good magic that now remained only in the form of Auntie Katya’s fond memories.

Auntie Katya, of course, was also interested in what Karpov was going to be doing, and when Marina answered that she herself didn’t know for sure, the old lady, of course, didn’t believe her, but she didn’t let on and instead talked about how Karpov’s grandfather had once been involved with something very mysterious—“petroleum growth substance,” which had actually been extracted from oil by a bunch of fraudulent Azeri Lysenkoist scientists, and his grandfather had really thought that if this petroleum product were fed to pigs then the pigs would put on weight faster than if they were fed normal food. But the pigs had a natural “human” reaction to the oil—they refused to eat it, and force-feeding led to massive deaths; and then Lysenko’s genetics project went out of fashion, the program was canceled, and Karpov’s grandfather, having come to terms with the fact that his career had been a failure, worked until retirement at the institute’s Department of Propaganda and Agitation, nursing a hatred for agriculture and any other science in any shape or form.

This cautionary tale certainly didn’t make Marina any more optimistic, and that evening, when Karpov returned from his shack, she demanded that her husband tell her, sparing no detail, what exactly he was up to and what was fueling his dreams of fame and fortune. Karpov was unexpectedly eager to explain it—Marina even related his lecture to me, but I, having only the vaguest notion about scientific terminology, am not going to risk a game of garbled “telephone” by trying to summarize Karpov’s explanations here. I will only say that Karpov is definitely not a biologist, nor a chemist, or even a pharmacist by education, but back in Moscow he had invented some kind of serum which, when injected into living creatures, would increase their growth potential many times and the rats, which the kind Gennady had trapped for a little money at Karpov’s request, had already grown to the size of large sheepdogs, and Karpov had begun serious efforts to kill them using an electric shock, because he had still not figured out how to get the test animals to stop growing once they reached the desired size, but all the same he would figure it out, and when he did he would be able to open his own business, which would bring their family the fortune they had come here to seek. Karpov burned the dead rats in a special vat, but he skinned the fur off to then stuff them, and he could even show Marina these hides, though he doubted that she would appreciate the sight. Sure enough, she refused to go and look at the rat hides; but her husband’s story, though it was entirely convincing, for some reason didn’t calm her—she already realized what she would dream about that night, and the prospect of seeing gigantic rats in her dreams quite understandably frightened her. As she lay in bed, she wanted to tell her husband, “Let’s just leave,” but Karpov was already asleep, and she couldn’t bring herself to wake him.

She dreamed that night, but not about rats. She dreamed of Karpov’s funeral in an old cemetery (might it be the same cemetery they had passed twice?), and she was there—young, as she was now, but somehow very different, a stranger to herself. She had been afraid to awaken Karpov, but he woke her up and showed her that her pillow was wet—it seems that she had been crying in her sleep. While Marina was thinking up something to say to her husband about the source of these tears, Karpov fell asleep. Marina wiped away her tears and fell back asleep herself, this time without any dreams.

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