Jacob's Ladder

25 The Diamond Door

(1986)

Years passed. His mother aged. His son was growing up. Summer replaced winter. Vitya ate bread and sausage for breakfast. His mother traveled by metro from the Molodezhnaya station, where they had been resettled, to the Arbat, to buy her son his favorite kind of sausage. Once a month, Vitya visited Yurik, and they played chess together. Political events happened in the world that Vitya didn’t so much as notice. He didn’t see any connection between the computer modeling of cells and the placement of mid-range missiles in Europe, meetings between Gorbachev and Reagan in Reykjavik, or negotiations in Geneva. The prospect of nuclear war had been temporarily suspended, but Vitya failed to notice even this. He was unable to comprehend the degree to which the fate of the scientific developments carried out in the lab, with its brilliant laboratory head and researchers passionately committed to science, as well as his own personal fate, depended on whether the Russians and Americans would come to an agreement.

Vitya didn’t even notice something that was happening right under his nose, in his own apartment. Varvara Vasilievna had been carried away by cheap esoteric teachings and preachings. She visited various underground meetings of like-minded enthusiasts, groups of healers and magicians. She was determined to improve her karma, which she imagined as something hefty and substantial, like a piece of meat or a new armoire. This was accompanied, of course, by spiritually charged water and a burning interest in UFOs, mixed in with a fear of devils and all manner of unclean spirits.

Varvara Vasilievna began her activities by cleansing Vitya’s karma remotely, which she prudently refrained from informing him about. At around the same time—the rapprochement of the Soviet Union and the United States, and Vitya’s karmic cleansing—the laboratory received an invitation to a conference in the United States on the modeling of biological processes. The invitation was for the head of the laboratory, Vitya, and one other assistant, who was Jewish. The head of the laboratory was banned from leaving the country, because he had been required to take part in some secret military scientific councils or other; the Jew fell under suspicion by definition; and so the only more or less unsullied person was Vitya Chebotarev. By this time, Grisha was no longer associated with the laboratory. He had emigrated as early as 1982 to Israel, and Vitya’s interactions with him were limited to reading articles he published in the world’s leading scientific journals.

The invitation was examined in detail, and it was decided that Vitya Chebotarev should be sent to give a lengthy paper summarizing the work the laboratory had carried out during the past years.

The year 1986 was the year of political thaw. Flights from Moscow to New York were packed, and Vitya was lost in the crowd of Jewish émigrés leaving the Soviet Union for good. Vitya received permission to leave for his ten-day business trip to deliver his lecture. Before he left, Yurik gave him a list of LPs without which his life was incomplete. Varvara Vasilievna accompanied her son to the airport, filled with conflicting emotions that tore her apart from within: pride and fear. She was afraid that in America her son would be the victim of some horrific psychotropic attack perpetrated by the imperialists, but at the same time she felt a vain satisfaction that he was going on a business trip, not to some musty, fusty Hungary or Poland, but to the one and only U.S. of A.

Before they left home, she had put a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper into his suitcase. In the airport, she realized that the suitcase, along with the nourishment it contained, would be relinquished at the baggage check, and she began demanding that the suitcase be returned. Vitya couldn’t understand what she was so agitated about. Varvara sensed her profound impotence in the face of a world in which the suitcase was flying over the ocean with a sandwich inside it, and not a single one of the important problems in life was amenable to resolution, on either the material or the spiritual plane. She began to cry. Vitya comforted her vaguely.

“You are so heartless,” she told him, wiping away bitter tears, as they parted.

She still wasn’t sure whether her son was a genius or an ordinary guy down on his luck. True, a friend of hers who was a clairvoyant informed her that Vitya was now standing before three doors—one made of silver, one made of gold, and one made of diamonds—and that, whichever one he opened, it would all turn out well.

The plane took off. Varvara Vasilievna watched the airfield and murmured a prayer to herself: May it be the diamond door …

At Kennedy, Vitya was met by Grisha, who was wearing a brightly colored skullcap; Vitya didn’t recognize this as a yarmulke. They hadn’t seen each other in four years. Grisha had flown in from Israel two days earlier. By this time, he had begun working at the University of Haifa, doing research not only on cell membranes but also on the Bible. The meeting between the friends was the most cordial that Vitya was capable of.

They sat in a cramped hotel room—Vitya, who was dead on his feet after the nearly ten-hour flight, and the exuberant, freshly groomed Grisha, hungry for conversation. The question that had been exercising him for many years concerned what took precedence in the world—the idea of the living cell, or the computer?

“Computers emerged first. Every living cell is a computer, a quantum computer,” he said.

Vitya winced. Either his head had not completely shifted to American time, or Grisha was talking nonsense. “No, what you say is absurd. The molecular computer of the cell works with DNA. DNA programs its activity. What does a quantum computer have to do with it?”

“It results from considerations of energy; the capacity of a molecular computer is insufficient. Not only that, but the quantum computer must be acoustic. Enormous texts. Divine Writ is enormous! And biological computers must be very, very powerful.”

Vitya just shrugged and interrupted Grisha’s inspired religio-scientific pronouncements: “You’ve lost me. What divine texts? You want to read the entire process of evolution as a divine text? It’s unfalsifiable.”

Grisha was upset. He felt a bitter taste in his mouth, and started to perspire, but was unable to draft Vitya into the cause of his faith. Finally, their differences of opinion went so far that Vitya announced that he personally had in all these years of work never needed the concept of the Creator and Divine Writ. One could easily get by without them.

With the fervor characteristic of him, Grisha objected: “It’s self-evident that the original text is God-given, and that what we are in fact doing is decoding it in our research.”

“No, no, no. I am carrying out a concrete task—I write computer programs, and these are fairly simple texts, and the biochemists examine the degree to which they correspond to actual synthesis in the cell. It is completely unrelated to the plan or design of your Creator. Okay, I’m going to sleep now,” Vitya said, and, leaning his head back on the armchair, was out for the count.

The next two days were a whirl of activity. Vitya spoke English fairly fluently, but it was hard for him to understand his interlocutors, and Grisha was always by his side to assist. Even more now than during their school years, they resembled Cervantes’s heroes. Grisha was rosy and rotund, and Vitya was lanky and rather absurd-looking in his formal suit, its sleeves and trouser legs slightly too short: when she was shopping for the suit before his trip, Varvara Vasilievna couldn’t find the right size. The primitive shaving-bowl haircut had been replaced by a cap of shapeless curls that were also Varvara Vasilievna’s crude handiwork.

In spite of the technical shortcomings of his sartorial gear, however, Varvara Vasilievna’s prayers to the Lord God had evidently been heeded. After Vitya’s impressive lecture, the diamond door really did open before him.

It looked like an ordinary, unprepossessing wooden door at Stony Brook University, on Long Island, and led to a wonderful university laboratory, where he had been invited to work. He would most likely have declined such a risky offer, but Grisha, who had acted as translator during Vitya’s conversation with the famous American scientist, groaned, clapped his hands, and threw them heavenward. “Vitya, this is your chance! And what a chance! It’s amazing! What a lab! There are a hundred people waiting in line for this opportunity, all of them deserving. You’ll be up for a Nobel before you know it. Whereas in Moscow they’ll just sweep the floor with you.”

Grisha was more excited about his prospects than Vitya was. When he was leaving, he whispered to Vitya: “First I gave you the Old Testament in the form of Hausdorff, and then the New Testament in the form of Schrödinger. By now, you can’t fail to see that we are all engaged in a single common task—decoding the language without which no living thing would exist on earth. Holy Writ, Vitya! The Divine Text! There is nothing more important on earth.”

Vitya thought about the offer and accepted it. He had his reasons—the laboratory was state-of-the-art, and he understood that he would be able to work much more effectively here than in Moscow. It occurred to him that he wouldn’t see his mother for a long time, or his son, but this thought didn’t hold him back. At first they gave him a place to stay on campus; a month later, he found an apartment to rent that was a ten-minute walk from the campus. Someone from the university assisted him in finding it, an extremely large unmarried woman of Irish extraction named Martha.

In the Soviet Embassy, they were offended at first, and balked; then, by some miracle, they backtracked. They didn’t even stamp “unreturnable” in his passport. Instead, they retroactively granted him the status of participant in a “scholarly exchange.”