The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

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 influenced 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.

Two weeks later the director of the institute, Solomon Levit, a foremost specialist in genetics, and several leading members of the institute were arrested, among them Goldberg’s sparring partner with the knocked-out tooth. Both Levit and Goldberg’s enemy were shot in 1937, while Goldberg—one more example of the ridiculous absurdity of Soviet life!—was released exactly one year later . . . Soviet power had a soft spot for hooliganism . . .

In the same lucky way Ilya Iosifovich dodged his next inevitable arrest. Released from prison, he left for Central Asia, where he took up an entirely new field of study—genetics and cotton selection. Although the witch hunt in the sciences was already in full swing—genetics laboratories had been closed down and many scientists arrested, but it was still unknown how many of them were shot—cotton production stood apart, because cotton was raw material for the war industry. The laboratory Ilya joined turned out to be semiclassified, and either out of negligence or error or as a result of the administration’s dimwittedness, Ilya went unscathed . . . During this short, relatively calm period of his life, Ilya succeeded in marrying his lab assistant, pretty Valya Popkova, and in 1939—through an ironic joke of the heavens!—they gave birth to identical twins, the classic object of genetic research, to whom Ilya gave the significant names Vitaly and Gennady.

The family resided several years in the secure zone of the classified laboratory, until the war began. Then, the impassioned Goldberg—who had graduated from medical school in the early 1920s together with Pavel Alekseevich but unlike his friend had never practiced—registered for accelerated retraining and wound up in a military hospital as the head of a clinical laboratory. As a military doctor he made it through the whole war, from start to finish, without a scratch and was even awarded the Red Star (no trifle) for evacuating a medical transport carrying the wounded from a town captured by the Germans. What was most comical, but typical for Goldberg, was that owing to an altercation with the head of the hospital, he had loaded the laboratory inventory last, when the city was already captured, which he did not know, and the only wounded he evacuated was a staff colonel for whom a car had been ordered but which had not arrived because the road was already cut off.

When Goldberg finished loading, he saw a column of German tanks and, waiting till twilight, got behind the wheel of the covered truck with the inventory and the colonel and drove out of the town unobstructed, demonstrating not his customary garrulous heroism, but, on the contrary, exceptional composure totally out of character for frenzied, hotheaded Ilya . . .

Through the mercy of fate he was not arrested even when, at the very end of the war, he wrote an enraged letter to a member of the Supreme High Command about marauding and mass rapes of German women—behavior unbefitting Soviet soldiers, officers even, who bore the lofty title of soldier-liberators . . . On learning about the letter from its ingenuous, fuming author himself, the head of the hospital had a captain acquaintance in the SMERSH fish the letter from the mail stream and, once he had it in hand, destroy it immediately, after which he processed Goldberg for expedited demobilization and ordered him to go wherever he damn well pleased, preferably as far away as possible. Conscientious Goldberg, knowing nothing of his commander’s noble maneuver, sent an inquiry to the Supreme High Command demanding an answer to the expropriated letter.

Goldberg, however, did not intend to bury himself in some backwater. He went to Moscow, extricated his family from Fergana, and began looking for a job in his area of specialization. After a while he discovered that the field of science that so fascinated him was almost nonexistent. He knocked about for a while without a job, then found shelter under the wing of a great woman, Margarita Ivanovna Rudomino, who hired the unemployed geneticist as senior bibliographer at the Library of Foreign Literature, where he spent almost three years among reference books and card catalogues in German, English, Polish, Lithuanian, and Latin, the last language having been acquired by him at the Peter-Paul Schule, the Lutheran school he had graduated from. Miraculously the school survived in Moscow until the middle of the 1920s.

Ilya Iosifovich’s tenure at the library’s staff offices on Razin Street, five minutes from the Kremlin, in the bowels of a collection almost untouched by censorship, modified somewhat his research aspirations. He reread tons of books on history: what now interested him was genius as a phenomenon and its inheritability. Genius itself, however, lent itself poorly to definition or formularization, while genetics was a strict science that studied qualitative phenomena, not quantitative. Where along the spectrum did one draw the line between good abilities, brilliant abilities, and genius? Goldberg scoured the encyclopedias of all epochs and nations and, as a starting point, compiled a verifiable list of geniuses based on the frequency with which they appeared in encyclopedias. Applying some clever statistical formula, he demonstrated the validity of this method of selection. Next, he worked on his selectees, which totaled about one hundred per century. He had cast his nets wide enough to encompass the Golden Age of Athens, the Italian Renaissance, and the period of the nobility in Russian literature.

The next stage of his work involved finding some sort of characteristic or marker connected with genius. He was absolutely confident that such markers existed, and the question he faced was how to find them. He searched for something like farsightedness in combination with a birthmark on the right shoulder, or left-handedness combined with diabetes . . . He painstakingly combed the biographies of great people, searching meticulously for mention of the diseases that had afflicted geniuses, their parents; their physical features, defects, and deviations . . .

He could have finished this unusually crackpot book ten years earlier if he had not, of his own bizarre will, lashed out in an unintelligible roar against Comrade Stalin’s favorite, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, at the VASKhNIL assembly. After growling out his accusations—replete with serviceman obscenities he never used before or after—he was carted straight from the historic assembly to Kashchenko Psychiatric Hospital . . . It was there, his geniuses temporarily left to their own devices, that he wrote his denunciation—with detailed justifications, clear and precise argumentation, and absolutely devastating criticism of Academician Lysenko—to be sent to the science division of the Central Committee with a separate copy for Comrade Stalin personally . . .

Once again, luck was with him: the director of the ward they had delivered him to by ambulance, an old psychiatrist named Shubnikov, took an interest in and sympathized with this unlikely hero, issued him the life-saving diagnosis of “schizophrenic,” and released him with group III disability status.

Several months had already passed since Ilya Iosifovich had sent his three-hundred-page masterpiece to its addressees in the upper echelons; he had returned to his geniuses and their hereditary diseases and was awaiting an answer to his missive. Or arrest. This was the comrade that Pavel Alekseevich had chosen to advise him on “the current situation.”

GOLDBERG AND HIS FAMILY LIVED IN A TWO-STORY wooden barracks-like structure. At one time it had been a factory dormitory, then the factory was closed, the workers were evicted, and the building sold as apartments. One of the apartments had been purchased by Goldberg after he returned from the front. In fact, Pavel Alekseevich had bought it. Ilya Iosifovich, who was incredibly punctilious when it came to money, made an exception for his friend, permitting him this philanthropic act, because unlike everyone else, Pavel Alekseevich had to understand that helping him, Ilya, he was helping all humankind—Goldberg attributed enormous significance to his research. It was his profound belief that science was charged with saving the world.

“The great materialist idealist,” Pavel Alekseevich teased him in the rare hours of their peaceful conversations. But those hours of peace were sufficiently rare. Ilya Iosifovich did not tolerate objections and defended his most crackpot ideas with great passion, quickly overstepping the bounds of proper scientific argument. He was capable of infuriating even Pavel Alekseevich, and their meetings usually ended in quarrels, shouting, and door-slamming. Ilya Iosifovich reproached Pavel Alekseevich for knuckling under, while the latter attempted to justify himself: he was trying to save not the world, but just a few dozen, at best, hundred, pregnant broads and their spawn, which, in his opinion, was worth the effort.

For Ilya Iosifovich this was not enough: his ideas were so lofty they squeaked, and he prophesied that with the help of sound genetic theory the world order could be restructured entirely. In twenty years genes could be used as the building blocks for a new world of plants and animals with their beneficial qualities multiplied, and man himself could be redesigned by introducing new genes and endowing him with new qualities.

“What qualities?” Pavel Alekseevich inquired stiffly.

“You name it!” Ilya Iosifovich flung out his arms, and the thin vestiges of hair on his head stood on end. “We will learn to isolate from the genome individual genes responsible for genius, which will make it possible to create mathematicians, musicians, and artists in quantities unknown even during the Renaissance!”

“Hold on,” Pavel Alekseevich stopped him. “That’s called eugenics. We don’t need large quantities of geniuses. They’ll just wind up arrested and shot.”

“Pasha, we’re living the Inquisition right now. This has to pass, just like the Spanish Inquisition passed. The future belongs to us, to science. There is no other force capable of saving the world!” His long thin hands thrashed the air, and his bulging gray eyes shone with a sickly fire. With his yellowed hawkish nose, the enormous Adam’s apple on his wrinkled neck, and his slouched, bony figure he was going to save the world!

Pavel Alekseevich shook his head, blinked, and tried to hold his tongue: he’s mad, a holy madman! All that’s missing is the helmet of Mambrino . . .

THIS TIME THERE WAS NO NEED FOR A LONG DISCUSSION. Ilya was gloomy. After the first bottle of vodka he fell into a monologue.

“We’re losing time. We’re losing our advantage! In the last few years several works of paramount importance have been published in the United States. Alfred Sturtevant is on the path to explaining the emergence of new genes! Where is Koltsov? Chetverikov? Zavadovsky? Vavilov! The genius Lev Ferri? Don’t you understand that this is sabotage by enemies from within? The entire Lysenko campaign is sabotage! This campaign against cosmopolitanism is playing into the hands of imperialism, Pasha! It’s their clever way of destroying Soviet science . . . Science should serve mankind, but the imperialists would have it serve bare profit, the golden calf . . .”

His voice first rumbled, then lowered, as if it had dried up. Moisture filled his light, red-vein-streaked eyes, then trickled from under his glasses . . .

This silly pathos made Pavel Alekseevich feel terribly awkward, and he twirled his empty glass, unable to get a word in edgewise. Finally, when Ilya Iosifovich fell silent for a moment as he rummaged in his pockets for a handkerchief, Pavel quietly spoke.

“Ilyusha, I think you’re exaggerating, as always. Cosmopolitanism doesn’t interest them. I think it’s all a lot simpler: our Master simply wants to wring the Jews’ necks.”

Valya—once a skinny girl, then a fat matron, now having lost a lot of weight again—from time to time poked her curly head into her husband’s narrow little study, which resembled a prison cell, where the friendly conversation was taking place, and whispered imploringly, “Ilyusha, the children . . . ,” or “Ilyusha, the neighbors . . . ,” or simply “I’m begging you: keep it down . . .” They drank one more bottle and, as always, had a complete falling-out before parting. Ilya Iosifovich stood one hundred percent for global justice, beginning with science, and was ready to lay down his life for it. Pavel Alekseevich did not believe one iota in justice; what interested him were trifles—pregnant dishwashers and the vile operations about which Cicero had once addressed the Senate. Ilya Iosifovich brought up that last point. Pavel Alekseevich perked up—he had always valued his friend’s inexhaustible erudition.

“And what did Cicero say?”

“That,” Ilya Iosifovich shouted, “these women should be executed, because they were stealing soldiers from the state! He was right a thousand times over!”

At this point Pavel Alekseevich paled and got up, pulling on his coat angrily.

“You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, Ilya. Too bad it wound up on a fool. So, in your opinion, women are supposed to give birth so that the bastards can send them into the meat grinder?”

He slammed the door on his way out. “Devil take him, the fool!” But he remembered about Cicero, even though he was pretty well sloshed.

THE NEXT DAY THEY SEARCHED GOLDBERG’S APARTMENT and arrested him. His denunciation of Lysenko had reached its destination.

Pavel Alekseevich learned of the arrest only a week later, when Valya, after much hesitation, decided to call him.

THAT LAST EVENING IN MALAKHOVKA A DRUNKEN PAVEL Alekseevich searched a long time for the train station, arrived home after midnight, and barely remembered what had happened. The next morning he felt so miserable that he diluted a half-glass of spirit alcohol and chased the hair of the dog. That brought some relief; in fact, it gave rise to a certain—for him atypical—devil-may-care attitude, like that of the sun, uninformed of the bloodthirsty nonsense of newspaper articles and of the people who wrote and read them.

In the entranceway, Elena, unnerved by the late-night return of her drunk husband and not having slept half the night, was pulling felt boots over her old shoes, getting ready to leave for work. Pavel Alekseevich, dressed in the military long johns he had worn since the war, came out into the corridor, flung open his arms, and shouted.

“My little girl! Let’s go to the stables! To see the horses!”

Realizing that her husband was drunk, Elena was at a loss. She had never seen him in such dissolute condition, in the morning no less.

“Pashenka, what’s with you?”

Tanya, who had already put on her school uniform and brushed her hair, squealed happily, “Hurrah for Daddy!”

And flung herself on his arm. He picked her up.

“We’re playing hooky today!” he winked at his daughter.

“Call work, Lenochka, and tell them you’re not coming in today. That you’re sick. Leave without pay. Whatever!”

Something out of the ordinary was going on, something new. He was so reliable, there was never an ounce of doubt about his constant and invariable probity, and it was a joyous pleasure to comply with his wishes . . . With a perplexed smile Elena objected weakly.

“What stable . . . ? What horses . . . ? That’s an unauthorized leave . . .” But she was already reaching for the telephone to call a colleague and warn that she was not coming to work today . . .

Pavel Alekseevich pulled off her gray goat-fur coat and explained, “We’re going to the Institute of Horse Breeding. Prokudin has been calling me for ages to come and look at the horses. Let’s go! Let’s go! Tanya, put on your ski suit!”

“Really, Daddy?” Tanya still could not believe it. Vasilisa, on hearing the tumult in the corridor, peeked out of the kitchen doorway.

“Gavrilovna! Fried eggs! King-style!” Pavel Alekseevich ordered in a loud cheerful voice. Thoroughly perplexed, she went to carry out orders. King-style fried eggs were in fact country-style fried eggs, with fried onion and potatoes, which he ate only on Sundays; on weekdays, as in the past, he went without breakfast . . .

“And king-style for me too,” Tanya piped in, thrilled by the new adventure.

They sat down and ate breakfast Sunday-style even though it was just an ordinary Monday. Pavel Alekseevich also drank a shot of vodka, and Elena looked at him in bewilderment: this had never happened before, drinking in the morning . . .

Something disturbing loomed in this morning adventure, she sensed, and following her intuition, without giving it a second thought, she asked: “Pash, you’ve got that meeting at the Academy today . . . You’re obligated to . . .”

“I’m not obligated to!” Pavel Alekseevich bellowed. “I’m not obligated to anyone! Let them all get . . . !”

The vulgarism that had dropped from his large lips was forceful and weighty, like everything about him. The cloth covering the aluminum buttons of his shirt was washed out, exposing dull metal; gray chest hair like lamb’s wool issued from his open collar, and the enlarged veins on his bull neck darkened . . .

Elena embraced his neck.

“Calm down, darling . . .”

And he calmed down, pressing her to his chest.

“Forgive me.”

When they were all warmly dressed and already standing in the doorway with a sled for Tanya, Pavel Alekseevich issued instructions to Vasilisa Gavrilovna.

“If they call, say he’s gone on a drinking binge.”

She looked at him with an uncomprehending eye.

“Say it just like that: ‘He’s gone off on a binge.’”

Vasilisa was clueless, but fulfilled her assignment to the letter.

The impromptu tactic was ingenious. Pavel Alekseevich was not the only one who affected illness that day. But he was the only one who got away with it. He did not go to his clinic for two weeks and did not appear at the Academy for four months, not until he had established his reputation as a habitual binge drinker.

Whereas before he had drunk readily only at dissertation defense parties, family celebrations, or funeral banquets, now he began to drink on yet another occasion: every time passions started to run high and he was required to issue assurances, or sign something, or make a public address. He would conscientiously drink himself under the table, and Elena, who had figured out the real cause of his sudden alcoholism, would call the Presidium herself and in a sweet little voice inform them that Pavel Alekseevich could not attend because he had another one of his attacks, you understand . . .

At particularly vile times Pavel Alekseevich stayed at home, drank a glass of vodka in the morning, played with Tanya, taught Vasilisa how to make meat dumplings, or just slouched around the apartment, where he constantly found the little notes his wife Elena wrote to herself. Touching little notes that began with one and the same words, “don’t forget . . . ,” followed by: “buy apples,” “take linen to the laundry,” “take your purse to the repair shop . . .” What was funny was that there were so many of these notes, all of them with one and the same list: apples, laundry, repair shop . . .

He knew that Elena was not good at household chores, and her efforts not to forget anything, to get everything done on time, touched Pavel Alekseevich. His wife’s virtues delighted him and her shortcomings endeared her to him. That’s what’s called marriage. Their marriage was happy both night and day, and their mutual understanding seemed especially full because, being reserved and silent by nature as well as by upbringing, neither of them required the kinds of verbal confirmations that get worn out so quickly by people who like to talk.

Pavel Alekseevich’s drinking binges, despite their initially diplomatic character, were hardly staged. But Elena, although worried about the health of her not-so-young husband, made no attempt to put an end to them. Women’s intuition, not reason, as always, guided her. She knew nothing about the nature of alcoholism, especially Russian alcoholism, when the soul, finding no other outlet, finds easy and available consolation without lies or shame.

When binges occurred, Elena sometimes took vacation time, and she and Pavel Alekseevich would head out to the dacha. One of these short holidays occurred in the autumn, two others in the winter. There were no better days in her life than these drunken holidays when he cast off all of his numerous cares and belonged entirely to her. It was the fever of youth that they had both missed, the uncomplicated revelations of seeming bottomlessness, where everything climaxed—about this Pavel Alekseevich longed to forget, and sometimes he managed to—with a few milligrams of a secret and measured dose of a mysterious substance inside the tunica albuginea . . . And when he no longer had the strength to extend his arm for a glass of water, everything at the bottom went cold: all of it was in vain, in vain, for there remained that insurmountable boundary they were unable to cross together . . . The only medicine was to try again and again . . .

By his third binge Elena knew that the ensuing period of sobriety would be an ordeal for her. She both feared and deep in her heart awaited the morning when Pavel Alekseevich, having drunk his first liberating glass, would say to her:

“Get your things, dear, we’re going to the countryside . . .”

AT THE ACADEMY IN THE MEANTIME THEY HAD STOPPED bothering him. The reputation of a drunkard was a peculiar sort of reprieve. No single other vice elicits nearly as much compassion in our country as alcoholism. Everybody drinks: tsars, archbishops, academicians, even trained parrots . . .