The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

3

PAVEL SENSED MORE THAN KNEW: CALL IT STARS OR whatever, but there was something beyond human beings themselves that guided human life. He was convinced of this most of all by the “Abraham’s” children, brought into this life through his, Pavel Alekseevich’s, hunch about a connection between cosmic time and the innermost cell responsible for the production of progeny . . . He allowed that other aspects of human life could be influenced by the cosmic clock—that bursts, as well as slumps, of creative energy were governed by this same mechanism. Determinism—so obvious in the development of, say, an embryo from a fertilized egg—satisfied him entirely; what was more, he regarded it as the principal law of life. But he was unable to extend this strictly predetermined movement beyond the physical course of ontogeny. His freedom-loving spirit protested. However, a human being was formed not just from certain more- or less-known physiological processes; many other completely chaotic factors interfered, as a result of which identical seven-pound sucklings developed into spiritually diverse human beings, some of whom achieved great deeds, others—crimes, while some died in birth of scarlet fever and others on the field of battle . . . Had a plan been preprogrammed for each of these innumerable millions? Or was fate a grain of sand on the seashore? What unknown law dictated that two out of three Russian soldiers would fall under fire during the war, and of those who remained a part would perish in prison camps and another part drink itself to death . . . One in ten had survived . . . Who regulated this mechanism?

As far as he himself was concerned, Pavel Alekseevich knew that his fate was headed downhill. He still worked, and taught, and operated, but gone from his life was the intense pleasure of the incipient moment, the sensation of being one with the times, with which he had existed for many years. His home life too preserved only its general designs, an empty shell of their former family happiness . . . Gone was the feeling that had overcome them in evacuation during the war and had lasted a whole decade, until 1953, that like a sunken ship with stolen gold had descended to the bottom of memory to be replaced by a monastic and laconic union built without touching and almost entirely on understanding glances alone . . . Something was happening to Elena: her eyes were covered over with a thin film of ice; if they expressed anything at all, it was an anxious and strained lack of understanding, like that of a small child still unable to speak just before it is about to start crying for some inexplicable reason.

His relationship with Tanya had fallen apart. Just as before, she was rarely at home, but earlier her absence had signified a kind of accumulative activity, a nutritional acquisition of skill, whereas now, after she had abandoned everything, Pavel Alekseevich wondered with what sort of activities she filled her day, evening, and—not infrequently—nighttime hours spent away from home. He was chagrined by what he suspected to be an empty waste of time mostly because he so valued the special quality of each young person’s time, before fatal automatism had set in and when each youthful minute was muscular, capacious, and commensurate with the acquisition of knowledge and experience in their purest form . . . As opposed to his—an old-man’s—time, which slid by, weightless and even more worthless . . .

What had once been the burning content of life—those birth mothers transparent as aquarium guppies with all their pathologies and complications, and his teaching, through which Pavel Alekseevich passed on to his students not just techniques but that tiny unnamable entity that comprises the heart of every profession—was becoming more and more automatic and losing its value, if not for those around him, then for Pavel Alekseevich himself.

“The relative weight of time decreases with age” was Pavel Alekseevich’s diagnosis.

Fatigued, he returned from work and first thing headed for his study, drank three quarters of a glass of vodka, and only after that emerged for supper. Elena, who had been waiting for him, also came out of her room. She sat down at the table Vasilisa had set, placed her thin hands with their enlarged joints alongside her eating utensils, and sat, her head lowered, as Vasilisa recited the appropriate prayer—to herself, on her own behalf as well as for all those present, repeating it as many times as there were people at the table. Pavel Alekseevich, who knew nothing about this ritual of hers, also hesitated, waiting for the wave of alcohol to spread through his body, and on feeling its warmth, he uttered his usual “bon appétit” and started in on Vasilisa’s thin soup. Tanya rarely ate supper at home. Toma, who had embarked on further studies, came home after eleven four times a week, and if she ate with the family, she was silent most of the time. They exchanged the most insignificant and necessary words: pass the salt, thank you, very delicious . . .

After supper Pavel Alekseevich retired to his study and over the course of the evening drank the remainder of the bottle, leaving two fingers at the bottom for his morning dose. This was now his way of fighting with time: his sad attempt to kill it.

Ilya Iosifovich, by contrast, had entered the happiest streak of his life. In the beginning of the 1960s his life had taken a turn: he was given a laboratory that operated as an independent research institute, and the lab had attracted several young people who were committed to the sciences to their last drop of blood. For his monograph on the nature of genius he was awarded a doctorate in biological science without having to defend. True, many years later Ilya Iosifovich acknowledged that those two dissertations he had been unable to defend owing to yet more arrests more aptly fulfilled the requirements of a doctorate. But at this particular moment he was enamored of his own work and had not yet reconsidered his hardly genial achievements in the field of genius research. Ilya Iosifovich existed in a state of euphoria: genetics had been allowed, Lysenko was done, and the same people who earlier had not let him in the door now flatteringly shook his hand and smiled phony smiles at this former foot soldier from the front lines who out of the blue had entered the ranks of heroes.

The main event in Ilya Iosifovich’s life—long kept secret from everyone—was named Valentina II. A graduate student from Novosibirsk, Valentina Moiseevna Gryzkina, an athletic type of girl, the complete opposite of the deceased Valentina, had fallen in love with her dissertation adviser with the singularity of purpose of a basketball forward. In point of fact she was the best shooter on her university women’s basketball team, and her athletic vigor benefited from the inner resolve of an Old Believer: she was descended from a family of schismatics. One of her ancestors had accompanied Archpriest Avvakum on his famous journey, and since that time for more than two hundred years now, the family had settled in Siberia, and in the face of all sorts of persecution, persisted in its faith and produced strong and numerous offspring. It was to these folk, tempered by centuries of struggle, that Valentina, in the sixth grade or so, had announced that humans had evolved from apes. For starters her parents thrashed her with all their patriarchal ferocity and forbade her from going to school. But the little girl turned out to be worthy of her parents: they had met their own match. One faith against the other . . . Following two years of devastating struggle for the dignity of humankind descended from apes, Valentina left home, bearing on her already broadened shoulders her grandfather’s curse. Next came boarding school, evening school, and university—who knew on what money, with no financial aid whatsoever, living only on her paltry stipend. In her last year she read several articles by Goldberg in the journal Genetics and chose him to be her mentor. She arrived in Moscow with a recommendation to graduate school—she’d graduated with honors after all!—sought out Ilya Iosifovich, and passed her entrance exams.

To Goldberg’s credit, a long time would pass before he noticed the amorous charge emanating from his new graduate student. He did, however, note her self-discipline, resourcefulness, and excellent knack for work: she deftly maneuvered heavy crates filled with test tubes and quickly taught herself all the techniques for working with flies, which were the principal object of the laboratory’s investigations.

The main thing was that Valentina had no idea that Ilya Iosifovich measured female attractiveness by one single criterion: the extent to which the subject under consideration approximated the image of his late wife. It needs to be noted as well that during her life Valentina I had never struck him as the ideal, but after her death, over the course of the years, he idealized her more and more in his memory.

The broad-shouldered, droll graduate student with two sharp bumps under her sweater in place of the massive soft hills expected in this broad expanse, in her men’s shoes and dark-blue lab coat, in no way inclined Ilya Iosifovich to thoughts of his inveterate loneliness, his unsettled bachelor life, or, even less likely, of the youthful frivolity of falling in love or of sexual conviviality . . .

Valentina endured and endured, and then confessed her feelings. Ilya Iosifovich was perplexed and flattered, but with Onegin-like craftiness he mumbled something appropriate to this classic declaration against the background of a maidens’ chorus: “When old enough to be a father, my pleasant destiny dictated I become a spouse . . .”

After which they both started thinking. Valentina—about transferring back to Novosibirsk; and Ilya Iosifovich about the sweet girl who had avalanched on his bald head like Siberian snow . . . And the more he thought, the more he liked her. The first symptoms of lovesickness occurred simultaneously with the arousing thought of the obscenity of having relations with a) a graduate student in general, and b) a graduate student who was almost forty years his junior . . .

Gansovsky, of course, would have just smirked and backed the hussy into the corner of his bookshelves on a specially designed device . . . But Gansovsky would never have cause to experience but a shadow of the happiness that Goldberg achieved following a half-year of semiromantic torment when, on a trip to the biology school in the semisecret city of Obninsk, following a long cross-country ski trip, Valentina remained with him in his cold hotel room . . . For all her awkwardness to disappear without a trace, Valentina needed only to get on her skis; in her dark-blue Olympic ski suit and ski cap pulled down to her shining eyes and wedging at the bridge of her nose she was for Ilya Iosifovich a streak of amazing lightning. (She was ranked nationally in skiing as well as in basketball.) His joyous amazement was fated to be long-lived—the first few years in great, but poorly kept, secrecy . . .

Pavel Alekseevich, had he known, might have reflected on the hormonal nature of creative inspiration. He and his friend saw each other not very often, but no less than once a month. Usually Goldberg arrived at Novoslobodskaya Street at around ten in the evening, and Pavel Alekseevich would pull out a bottle of vodka, and they would carry on their purely man-to-man conversation until the wee hours of the night. Not about war, or horses, or drinking exploits, but about population genetics, the gene pool, genetic drift, and problems Ilya Iosifovich would label with the previously unknown term sociogenetics . . . Although Goldberg loved abstract, philosophical-biological conversations, he also knew how to formulate an experiment both competently and cleverly, as well as how to extract with maximum economy a direct answer to a precisely formulated question. His students worked productively, at a state-of-the-art level, and many of them were publishing articles in international journals. Everyone knows that Russians always do well in those fields of science where it’s possible to do the work in your head, on your fingers, and without serious financing.

For all their disagreements—which over the course of the many years of their conversations constantly, like a cat in a bag, made themselves known—Pavel Alekseevich and Ilya Iosifovich coincided unconditionally in one regard. They shared a clear sense of the hierarchy of knowledge, of which raw data collection (weight, shape, color, number of chromosomes or legs or veins on the wing) was the most primitive but also formed the very foundation. In the ancient and descriptive science of data collection, approximation was not allowed, and answers had to be unequivocal: yes or no . . . Speculation of a theoretical nature—about the cosmic clock or the evolution of some biological species—had to build precisely on reliable knowledge measured with a ruler, a thermometer, or a hydrometer . . . And so, Goldberg based his calculations and speculation about genius on levels of uric acid in blood. Goldberg’s new ideas struck Pavel Alekseevich as interesting, but completely unfounded. Goldberg insisted that the construction of a model of a process was also in many cases its proof. Pavel Alekseevich did not want to hear anything of the sort.

After three terms in the camps, having lost the intelligentsia’s innate sense of guilt before nation, society, and Soviet power, Goldberg had arrived at his latest idea: that over the course of fifty years of Soviet power the sociogenetic unit formerly, before the revolution, known as the “Russian people” had ceased to exist as a reality, and the current population of the Soviet Union that bore the proud name of the “Soviet people” was in fact a new sociogenetic unit that differed profoundly from its predecessor in a variety of parameters—physically, psychophysically, and morally . . .

“Okay, Ilya, I am prepared to agree that in physical appearance great changes really have occurred: hunger, wars, the massive displacement of peoples, miscegenation . . . Ultimately, it is possible to conduct anthropometric research. But how can you measure moral qualities? No, that’s rubbish. I’m sorry, but it’s unprofessional . . .”

“I assure you, there are ways. They’re indirect still, but they exist.” Ilya Iosifovich defended his theory. “Suppose the human genome consists of one hundred thousand genes; that’s a plausible figure. They are distributed across twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, right? Although we know a lot about the various mechanisms of intrachromosomal exchange, we still have grounds for dividing all genes into twenty-three groups by chromosome affiliation. Well, of course, that’s impossible to do today, but a hundred years from now, I assure you, it will be doable. And just imagine: the gene responsibility for, say, the blue color of the iris is located in direct proximity to the gene that determines cowardice or bravery! There’s a good chance that they will be inherited together.”

“One gene for one quality, you’re saying?” Pavel Alekseevich objected. “It seems unlikely that such a powerful and diverse quality as courage would be determined by a single gene.”

“What difference does it make: let it be ten genes! That’s not the point! The point is simply that eye color could turn out to be linked to another gene. Crudely put, a blue-eyed person has a greater chance of turning out to be heroic,” Ilya Iosifovich raised his index finger.

“Great idea, Ilya,” Pavel guffawed. “A blue-eyed blond is brave, while a black-eyed brunet is a coward. And if the black-eyed fellow also has a hook nose, then he’s a Judas, for sure! Genetically speaking . . .”

“You’re a typical provocateur, Pasha!” Ilya Iosifovich wailed. “I had something totally different in mind. Listen! In 1918 the White Army—nearly three hundred thousand healthy young men of reproductive age—left Russia. The aristocratic, select part of society—the more educated, the more honest, and unwilling to compromise with Bolshevik power!”

“Where are you going with that? Ilyusha, that’s going to get you a fourth term!”

“Don’t interrupt!” Ilya Iosifovich dismissed him. “Nineteen twenty-two. The year they deported all the professors. Not that many, around six hundred, it seems. But again: the select! The best of the best! With their families! The country’s intellectual potential. Further: the anti-kulak campaigns claim millions of peasants, also the best, the hardest working. And their children. And their unborn children as well. People disappear and take their genes with them. They remove them from the gene pool. Party repressions knock out whom? Those who have the courage to express their own opinion, to object, to defend their own point of view! The honest ones, that is! The most honest! Priests were systematically exterminated over the entire period . . . The bearers of moral values, teachers and educators . . .”

“But at the same time, Ilya, they were also the most conservative people, no?”

“I won’t deny that. But allow me to point out that nowadays conditions in Russia are such that a conservative—traditional, that is—mentality presents less danger than a revolutionary one,” Goldberg noted with a haughty smile. “Let’s keep going. World War II. Exemption from military service is granted to the elderly and the infirm. They’re the ones given an extra chance of surviving. Prisons and camps consume the larger part of the male population, depriving them of the chance to leave offspring. Do you sense the degree of deformation? Now let’s add to that Russia’s famous alcoholism. But that’s not all. There is one more extremely important consideration. We’re constantly discussing whether or not evolution is a directed process, whether it has its own goals. Within the current time span, a very short one from the point of view of evolution, we can observe an exceptionally effective mechanism of directed evolution. Insofar as the evolution of a species is aimed at survival, we are within our rights to put the question as follows: which qualities offer the individual greater chances of surviving? Brains? Talent? Honor? A sense of self-esteem? Moral resolve? No! All of these qualities have impeded survival. The carriers of these qualities either left the country or were systematically exterminated. And which qualities facilitated survival? Caution. Caginess. Hypocrisy. Moral irresolution. Lack of self-esteem. Overall, any illustrious quality made a person conspicuous and immediately put him at risk. Gray, average, C students, so to speak, found themselves at an advantage. Take a Gaussian distribution. Remove the center, the area of more pronounced carriers of any quality. Now, taking all these factors into consideration, you can construct a map of the gene pool that claims to be the Soviet people. And you say?”

“In view of the general atmosphere these days—five to seven years,” Pavel Alekseevich commented.

Ilya Iosifovich laughed. “That’s what I’ve been saying: the nation has become flatter, the chimney lower, the smoke thinner . . . Before it would have been worth ten to fifteen . . .”

Pavel Alekseevich always liked his friend’s wit and fearlessness, although inside he often disagreed with the results of his high-keyed mental work. The brutal picture of national degeneration Ilya Iosifovich had drawn demanded verification. Pavel remembered perfectly his father’s social circle in the last years before the revolution. In a certain sense, Ilya was right: the doctors of the highest rank, university professors, and leading clinicians at the time were people with European educations and broad interests extending beyond the bounds of their profession. Among the people who visited their house there had been military men, lawyers, and writers . . . He had to admit: it had been a long time since Pavel Alekseevich had encountered people of the same intellectual level . . . But that didn’t mean that they didn’t exist . . . They could exist—in secret, without announcing their existence . . . “No, no, that’s nonsense,” Pavel Alekseevich cut himself short. That only supports Ilyusha’s idea: don’t stick out, hide in a corner, and that means denying your own identity . . . A serious objection lies somewhere else . . . Of course, with children. In newborn children. Each is marvelous and unfathomable, like a sealed book. Goldberg’s ideas are too mechanistic. According to him, if you subtract a couple dozen genetic letters from a hundred thousand, new children—the daughters and sons of informers, murderers, thieves, and perjurers—who carry their parents’ qualities alone, will populate the world . . . Rubbish! Each infant holds enormous potential; it represents the entire human race. When you come down to it, Goldberg himself wrote a whole book about genius and should have noticed that genius, that rare miracle, can be born of a fisherman, a watchmaker, or a dishwasher . . .

The natural greatness of mountains and oceans with all that they contain—their fish, their birds, their mushrooms, and their people—stands above Ilyusha’s reasoning, and the wisdom of the world surpasses all, even the most outstanding, human discoveries. You can sweat, pant, stand on your toes, and strain yourself to the limit, but all you’ll get is a mere reflection of the true law. Of course, those hundred thousand genes are a great puzzle. But that puzzle does not contain the whole truth, just an insignificant portion of it. Its entirety lies inside the newborn still slippery with vernix, and even if each of them bears all one hundred thousand potentials, it cannot, it must not be, that nature intended some massive aberration that would turn an entire nation into an experimental herd . . .

Pavel Alekseevich said something of the sort, in short, to Goldberg, but the latter resisted.

“Pavel, human beings stopped being governed by the laws of nature long ago. A very long time ago! Already today certain natural processes are regulated by humans, and within a hundred years, I assure you, humans will learn how to change the climate, control heredity, and discover new forms of energy . . . Soviet man will also be reshaped, the lost genes reintroduced. And, in general, imagine: a young couple have decided to have a child—that’s your field—and they are able to designate in advance their child’s genetic makeup, combining the parents’ best qualities with desired qualities absent in the parents’ genome!”

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea to ask the child.” Pavel Alekseevich frowned.

Ilya Iosifovich was angry: Why couldn’t the old gynecologist understand such simple things? Why didn’t he share his joy for the inevitable beauty of a future world enhanced through science with precise calculation and without all the pesky imperfections of a marvelous design?

“When are you going to resurrect the dead?” Pavel Alekseevich quipped.

“Not yet, but life expectancy will increase at least twofold. And people will be twice as happy,” Ilya Iosifovich claimed with exaggerated passion. All his discoveries and ideas required a dispute; without polemics they lacked something . . .

“Maybe twice as unhappy? No, no, that kind of world is not for me. Then like Ivan Karamazov, I’ll return my ticket . . .”

Father and daughter, stepfather and stepdaughter, had not grown so far apart from each other after all.