The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

5

ILYA IOSIFOVICH’S WORK GREW LIKE A TREE: THE OLD AT the roots, the new in the branches. With many, many new offshoots. Anthropology, evolutionary genetics, demography, statistics, and even history all came in handy, everything went into the mix, and everything was made to work. Ilya Iosifovich was both plowman and poet. Sometimes in the evenings, having spent ten hours straight at his desk, he experienced the pleasant muscular fatigue that occurs after a mountain hike or skiing. Besides its sixteen staffers, his laboratory had a whole troop of volunteers—students, librarians, pensioners—who helped him assemble huge amounts of information that he tallied and built into a system similar to Mendeleev’s periodic table that explained not the structure and properties of elements, but the structure and properties of nations.

He cast his nets so broadly that the most varied fish—from the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary to The Gulag Archipelago, from Anaximander of Miletus to Theodosius Dobzhansky—were part of his catch. The grandness of his designs made his bald head spin, and he was constantly giving papers for various research societies, at institutions of higher education, and at the private seminars that blossomed in those days through an oversight of, and in part overseen by, the organs of state security, which had slightly relaxed during the Thaw. It was here he performed as an inspired poet in the Romantic sense of the word. Pavel Alekseevich, who happened to be present at one of his performances, gave him a rather sharp review.

“Ilya, you may have some important points, but you get too carried away, like some David Garrick . . .”

Goldberg could not contain his passion: he had made an earthshaking discovery and hastened to share it with his contemporaries: politics absolutely had to be considered as one of the most significant components in the evolutionary process. In the slice of time he had studied, from 1917 until 1956, in a concrete geographic region—within the territory of the USSR—this factor had exerted a negative influence on the evolutionary process. A convinced Darwinist, Goldberg considered evolution as a phenomenon having a moral aspect: positive evolution, in his opinion, was directed at the preservation, improvement, and expansion of the habitat of a species, while negative evolution aimed at the weakening and degeneration of a species. At its core Soviet power, in Goldberg’s opinion, was progressive, but in the concrete historical situation it functioned as a negative factor.

His fundamental treatise, something like “Political and Genetic Foundations of Population Theory,” had not yet been written, but “Essays on the Genetic Ethnography of the Soviet Nation” already existed on paper.

Other papers also existed, collected in a tidy green folder with a two-digit number: numbered, bound sheets of paper bearing the reports of regular and nonstaff employees, copies of book requests from the Lenin Library and the Library of Foreign Literature, and tape recordings of Goldberg’s impassioned presentations. Filed under its own separate number was the typescript of “Essays on Genetic Ethnography” with the author’s own notations: it had been lost accidentally by one of the especially talented staffers in his laboratory on the No. 110 bus . . . Likely owing to the same accident, the thick folder also contained Valentina II’s report on her trip to Novosibirsk. The graduate student had reported on the work of Novosibirsk geneticist B on the “domestication” of silver foxes, animals that were both aggressive and dangerous. It turned out that with consecutive selection and crossbreeding, by generation X the most obedient animals evidenced a sharp decline in the quality of their fur, and having become obedient and trusting, the foxes began to bark like dogs. Thus, the only foxes suited to adorn the collars of generals’ wives were those who failed to conform to good relations with human beings. Foxes that behaved badly. Those that learned to lick the hands that fed them were no good for any other purpose.

Captain Seslavin, who was conducting detailed research on Goldberg’s own behavior, was an outsider: after graduating from the Institute of Veterinary Medicine, having already become a specialist, he was invited to serve in the security system in the section that oversaw the sciences. The work of the Novosibirsk scientist made perfect sense to him, but there was something suspicious about it.

Considered on its own, this amusing fact from the life of the animal kingdom perhaps might not have attracted the attention of the vigilant Seslavin, but the attached protocol on Goldberg’s presentations contained the following statements made by him: “I ask you to note that what we have here is a reverse correlation between acquiescence and fur quality. Which we also observe in our own society: the more acquiescent a person, the less valuable he is as an individual . . .”

This Jew with three prison terms rubbed Seslavin the wrong way. At one time there had been Weissmanites and Morganites at his veterinary institute, who had been dealt with accordingly, and the students were taught Marxist-Leninist biology, with its grass-rotation system and without any of that bourgeois heredity stuff. Because existence, as they say, determines consciousness. Had Seslavin had his way, he would have hauled this estimable personage off for a fourth term to let life in the camps straighten out his crooked consciousness. But there were no orders from above . . . Ilya Iosifovich energetically compiled his dossier on the Soviet people, while Captain Seslavin in the duty of his office resourcefully and painstakingly compiled his dossier on Goldberg.

Both turned out to be hardworking and systematic, and both hoped to achieve their desired results. For this reason Ilya Iosifovich contrived to deliver the manuscript of his “Essays” to a visiting American scientist by passing it through a long chain of friends, acquaintances, and sympathizers indirectly to a performance of Swan Lake, where its transmission for eventual publication in a scientific journal took place to the accompaniment of Tchaikovsky’s music and the synchronized movement of the muscular legs of the world’s best corps de ballet.

Captain Seslavin, knowing nothing about this ideological diversion, had a gut sense for his ward’s maleficence, and aspiring no less than Ilya Iosifovich to achieve effective results, approached his administration with a report on the wrongheadedness and overall unreliability of this frigging philosopher. His superiors scratched their collective head and promised to think about it. The first thing they thought up was to summon Ilya Iosifovich for a conversation, which privilege they accorded Seslavin. An experienced hand, Ilya Iosifovich should have demonstrated great restraint in his intercourse with the captain. But the demon of scientific garrulity overcame him, and he blathered the entire two and a half hours almost without interruption. The sheer mass of Goldberg’s loquacity made it almost impossible for Seslavin to insert any questions. Goldberg was extraordinarily pleased with himself, and it seemed to him that he had managed to interest the inspector in his ideas and now, like the clever Odysseus, he was already figuring what a stroke of luck it would be if he were able to attract this powerful organization to his side . . . His three terms in the camps had taught Ilya Iosifovich nothing, absolutely nothing.

At 9:30 P.M. Seslavin interrupted Goldberg with unanticipated rudeness, and, contrary to his first impression, it turned out that Goldberg had not succeeded in acquiring a new ally. Just the opposite: Seslavin suddenly stopped nodding understandingly and snarled.

“Here’s the deal. You can work with flies as much as you want: that’s none of our business. But all those ideas you have about the population—you’re going to bring them here first,” he knocked on his desk, “and if you don’t, you’re going to be in major trouble . . . You’re better off not arguing with us, Ilya Iosifovich . . .”

As Goldberg deliberated how best to react to the unanticipated situation that had evolved, the secret search and not-so-secret robbery of his apartment was drawing to an end. Arriving close to midnight at the new apartment on Profsoiuznaya Street he had received last year from the Academy of Sciences, he found the door jimmied and the apartment replete with evidence of crude pilfering—the TV, the tape recorder, and the coffee grinder were missing—and vulgar hooliganism: a pile of shit lay in the middle of a room . . .

It looked like Goldberg, with his innate uncontrollable optimism, had grossly overestimated the temperature of the Thaw. But because he had already received news that his essays would be published by a well-known American press, he called Seslavin the next day, met him near the KGB club on Derzhinskaya Street, and handed him the next-to-the-last remaining copy of his “Essays.” For all intents and purposes his “Essays” were of no interest to anyone since they were already recorded with their own number; what was important was Goldberg’s willingness to cooperate, and Goldberg had demonstrated it: he had brought them what they had told him to.

This time the attack on Goldberg came from an unexpected direction: an audit of the laboratory’s financial records was to be carried out. Over the past two years of its existence the laboratory had acquired no small quantity of equipment and various other technology including, for example, raisins for fly food, alcohol for histological work, paper for writing maleficent essays, glassware, chemical reactants, et cetera, et cetera . . . Officially, Goldberg figured as the laboratory’s head, but to economize on appointments in favor of research personnel, he had charged an experienced elderly laboratory assistant, Natalia Ivanovna, with keeping the books, while he himself bore legal financial responsibility . . . An Academy audit elicited no emotions except irritation: two drones showed up and dug around in useless paperwork, getting in everyone’s way. For two weeks this pair—a fat woman bookkeeper and her skinny assistant with a soldier’s posture—dug through papers. And dug up enough for a laughable accusation of embezzlement. Frightened out of her wits, Natalia Ivanovna quickly submitted her resignation, and disappeared without a trace. While Ilya Iosifovich and the staff joked about the affair, the case was handed over to the prosecutor’s office. Ilya Iosifovich, with his extensive past, should have taken a moment to reflect, but his recklessness was so great that he realized what hit him only on the day of the hearing when he found a delayed summons in his mailbox in the morning. Even then he failed to realize what sort of threat hung over him. The hearing was set for 3:00 P.M., but all that Ilya Iosifovich succeeded in accomplishing in the fast-ticking hours before lunch was to speak over the phone with a famous lawyer who had just recently acquired the reputation of a human-rights advocate. The lawyer fretted, having recognized the enemy’s trademark.

“Under no circumstances should you go to that hearing today,” the perceptive lawyer advised. “Your best bet is to go to the polyclinic and get permission to take a sick leave, and then we’ll think. They are obliged to reschedule the hearing . . .”

Ilya Iosifovich did not go to court, but he also had no intention of going to the clinic: he felt uncomfortable taking sick leave when he was healthy. However, the morning of the next day, at 9:00 A.M., a visitor with the unmistakable look of a gumshoe awaited him at the lab and introduced himself as an investigator. The embezzlement case quickly took a new turn, the hired lawyer who quickly became a friend at first laughed, then pondered, and finally, following extensive mental effort, decided that the best strategy would be a scrupulous defense on each of the eighteen charges of financial irregularity layered at Goldberg with an insignificant admission of financial wrongdoing, such as an unrecorded check, for propriety’s sake, that is, for public censure . . .

The scheme was clever, but failed. Pale and teary-eyed, Natalia Ivanovna gave phantasmal testimony, and Ilya Iosifovich received—as befit the gravity of the financial crime—a full three years in corrective-labor camps. He was taken under guard directly from the courtroom before the eyes of his stunned and indignant staff.

Goldberg’s book was already at the typesetter’s, but neither the author nor Seslavin’s organization knew anything about it. For Goldberg, who had managed yet one more time to outsmart his own fate, a trip north to all-too-familiar territory lay ahead . . .