The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

19

DURING HIS LAST PRISON TERM LUCKY GOLDBERG SPENT not a single day doing general labor: they immediately put him to work as an attendant in the camp’s sick bay. The head doctor—an elderly, real shit, Lord forgive, of a woman who had lazed herself into a lump—drowsily dumped half her work on him. For all of her rottenness—having logged twenty years doing prison camp medicine, which less than any other branch had the right to call itself medicine—the head doctor lazily defended before the administration her right to keep Ilya Iosifovich on, and at least twice she managed to spare him from getting transferred to general labor . . .

Had there been a male doctor in her stead, Ilya Iosifovich would not have tolerated—even in spite of her protection—her sleepy indifference toward the patients, her thievery, and her petty underhandedness. What reconciled him with the head was compassion, which went beyond all his principles: perpetually grazing at the doctor’s side was her twenty-year-old mentally disabled daughter whom she was afraid to leave at home alone. This woman’s biography—bitter, Soviet, and as ineluctable as an unburied corpse—tagged behind her . . .

Perhaps for the first time in his life, Goldberg’s public insistence on the truth—as indecent as a patch on the seat of one’s pants—held its tongue. Over the past two-plus years he had drudged away as attendant in name and assistant chief physician in fact, he never once bothered her with stormy discussions, never called her on anything, never tossed a mug at her, and never yelled . . . When they were saying their good-byes, she uttered to Goldberg words that amazed and even shamed him: she turned out to be smarter and better than he had thought. But perhaps the matter lay precisely in the fact that Ilya Iosifovich’s presence, his old-fashioned magnanimity and comical gentility—usually taken for impracticable ridiculousness—had for a brief moment elevated the doctor to his level, and she clumsily pronounced her unprepossessing words, worthy of a dying man’s last confession, then asked how she could help him . . . After which she sat her fat ass down on her red plush upholstered chair to spend another twenty full years at her boring job, because somehow she had to feed her impaired daughter and send money to her widowed sister, with a house full of kids, whose husband had long ago been swallowed up by the same system she worked for . . .

In a word, Ilya Iosifovich said good-bye to Elizaveta Georgievna Witte (there it is again, the unburied corpse!) and marched toward the gate. It closed behind him, and he marched farther toward the train station, a small bit of money and his release papers with him . . . The local train stopped at this station—to be found nowhere on any map—in the evenings, rather, did not even come to a full halt, but slowed down, and just at the moment when it should have stopped, it picked up steam again . . . An hour before the train was to arrive, Elizaveta Georgievna Witte—“the lump,” as Goldberg had come to call her to himself—dropped into the plywood pavilion and gave Ilya Iosifovich a parcel of food. A notebook of sheets of paper sewn together lay between a loaf of bread and two cans of stew meat . . .

“All moral foundations have been undermined, Pasha. The moral foundations of life, the moral foundations of science . . . But the human being is alive.” Goldberg held his bony palm on the notebook of pieces of paper that had been kept separately and bound together only on the eve of his release.

Once again, three years later, they sat in Pavel Alekseevich’s study, friends turned relatives by the whim of their children whom there was no figuring out, except that baby Evgenia, their granddaughter in common, was alive and well and living in Leningrad with Tanya and the long-haired jazz player who had enthusiastically assumed the not insubstantial cares of paternity . . . The old men drank, first with toasts, then simply after raising their glasses slightly higher than their noses and stopping the motion of their arms for a second . . .

“Your health . . .”

“The hole of holes, Pasha, the hole of holes . . . But the head doctor ordered journals for me from Novosibirsk University. American, German, French . . . From the 1930s forward. I think, Pasha, that I’ve closed the gap that opened when the Center for Medical Genetics was shut down. This book is not so much for scholars as it is for doctors specializing in what is not yet a specialization . . . A textbook that’s not a textbook . . . An introduction to medical genetics . . .”

Pavel Alekseevich reached for the bottle, which was already light . . . What a wreck I’ve turned into . . . Ilyusha’s as strong as an ox: thin with a neck like a plucked rooster’s, even his bald spot has wrinkles, and where does he get the strength, the energy . . .

More than two weeks had passed since Goldberg had shown up in Moscow. In that period of time he had managed to meet with a dozen colleagues, caught up with what was going on in the scientific world, delighted at the serious level of thinking taking place—although he saw no new great achievements—visited two publishing houses, presented a project description of the book he had already written, and realized that there was no hope of publishing it soon. Khrushchev’s fall, which had occurred while Goldberg was doing his last term in prison, interested him only insofar as it signified the final defeat of Lysenko and his henchmen. The most significant event that had taken place in his absence was the formation of the Institute of Genetics. Naturally, he rushed off first thing to visit the new director, whom he had known since before the war, a well-trained geneticist nicknamed Bonya, short for Bonaparte . . .

The first forty minutes of their meeting Goldberg sang like a nightingale, generously casting his pearls hardly before swine . . . The beast who sat before him looked at him with stern blue eyes; it had jaws of steel, an iron grip, and a diamond-hard fortress of ambition to match his nickname . . . But the two of them also had a lot in common: great mentors, a flawed family background—if a Jewish lumber dealer can be compared to a Siberian factory owner—experience in the camps, and top-quality brains . . . The director listened with the highest degree of attentiveness, but gave no indication of his thoughts either in word or with movement of his eyebrows.

Only forty minutes later did Goldberg sense the ice-age frost creeping toward him across the long, T-shaped desk from the direction of the bald podge ensconced at the head of the desk in Buddha-like fixity in the center of his large office at the epicenter of rejuvenated genetic science. Goldberg fell silent, stunned by a grim presentiment. The director also was silent. He knew how to hold a pause. Goldberg did not.

Ilya Iosifovich halted the stream of his outpourings, all of them concerning medical genetics—from general assertions on the need for structural reorganization connected with Pavel Alekseevich’s project for creating a center for genetic consulting to the most abstract of ideas, the realization of which would require about thirty years . . . Interrupting himself, he got straight to the point.

“Kolya, are you going to give me a laboratory or not?”

The director’s face did have something of Napoleon’s about it: diminutive facial features, a chubby chin that flowed softly into a massive short neck. The insignificant face of exceptional significance . . . His brain was hard at work, but the look on his face said nothing. Should he stave off saying no, and leave it to this cocked fool to figure out for himself with time that in some cases yes signifies nothing more than a variation of no, or cut him to shreds immediately . . . They were already enemies anyway, and they would become even more bitter enemies, that the director understood for certain. There was nothing to calculate here whatsoever; it was merely a matter of personal satisfaction. For that reason he maintained his absolutely neutral pause for a while longer—in moments like this his graduate students would be struck by spasms of diarrhea—and, having tried on in his mind several variations with differing degrees of derogation, he bared a pseudosmile of new, too-white plastic teeth, and answered.

“No, Ilya. I have absolutely no need for you . . .”

All of this Ilya Iosifovich related to his friend.

“It turns out, Pashenka, that he has no need for me, or Sidorov, or Sokolov, or Sakharov. He doesn’t need Shurochka Prokofieva, Belgovsky, or Rappoport. Timofeev-Resovsky he especially has no need for. Instead he’s hiring small fry, Landsknechts, and starry-eyed kids hatched only yesterday. And now, my friend, I return to the beginning of our conversation: all moral foundations have been undermined. Immoral science turns out to be worse and more dangerous than immoral ignorance . . .”

At this juncture Pavel Alekseevich perked up.

“There you go again, your usual tendency to lump everything into one big heap. You’re confusing concepts. There is no such thing as moral ignorance. A semiliterate can be moral. And an entirely illiterate person, like our Vasilisa, can be moral. What follows from your words is that science is the antithesis of ignorance. That’s mistaken. Science is a way of organizing knowledge, while ignorance is the rejection of knowledge. Ignorance is not a lack of learning, but a position. Paracelsus, for example, knew less about the workings of the human body than the average doctor today, but there’s no way you could call him an ignoramus. He knew about the relativity of knowledge. Ignorance knows nothing, except its own level, and precisely for that reason there can be no such thing as moral ignorance. Ignorance despises everything that it cannot access. It rejects everything that demands intensity, effort, and changing one’s point of view. And, by the way, as far as science is concerned, I don’t think that science has a moral dimension. Knowledge does not have moral nuances, only people can be immoral, not physics or chemistry, and especially not mathematics . . .”

Goldberg chuckled, and the last of his surviving premolars peeked out of the corners of his mouth.

“Pashka, maybe you’re right, but that kind of rightness is not for me. If there is progress, the good of humankind, it means that science directed at achieving a certain conditional good is moral, while that which has no good in mind can go to the devil. It’s a reliquary.”

“I’m sorry.” Pavel Alekseevich made a helpless gesture. “By your logic science can be Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist, bourgeois, and even workers’-and-peasants’! Give me a break!”

They started in for what would be half the night, picking apart science in general, theory and practice in particular, the not-so-distant past, and the bright future. They cracked jokes, swore, chuckled, and drank a second bottle. Toward daybreak Ilya Iosifovich slapped himself on his bald spot and cursed.

“What an old fool I am! I forgot to call Valentina.”

So he called Valentina, who all this time had been sitting on the edge of her chair, hugging her high belly, which had been growing since the time of her three-day visit to her husband in the camp. She had already constructed a detailed plan of what she would do tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and had intended first thing in the morning to go to Pavel Alekseevich’s, where no one was picking up the phone—which meant a search was under way and they were not allowed to pick up the phone—and from there to the regional KGB office, and then to the lawyer’s. Or first to the lawyer . . . The main thing was to pick up the main manuscript of the book at the typist’s and hide it in a safe place . . .

Ilya Iosifovich picked up the phone: there was no dial tone.

“Your phone’s broken: there’s no dial tone. Valentina is going crazy. She, Pasha, is in her seventh month, you know . . .” Goldberg seemed to be apologizing.

Pavel Alekseevich attempted to dissuade Ilya Iosifovich from going home. It was almost five in the morning. And only after his intractable comrade had slammed the door behind him did Pavel Alekseevich realize at long last that dear awkward Valentina was giving birth to a baby from no one other than old, stooped, and withered Ilya, and that—say what you will but—the real question had nothing to do with science or with whether it was moral or not very. The main thing lay in the infant—its little nose tucked inside its crossed palms, covered with lanugo, slippery with vernix, and not yet having acquired full pigmentation and for that reason yellowish-colorless—that floated, concentrated and totally complete in and of itself, in the crammed space of its first home, in Valentina’s uterus, the child of old age, but also of love, with all its physiological accoutrements—kisses, embraces, erection, friction, and ejaculation . . . Pavel Alekseevich sighed: the seminal glands, the adrenal cortex . . . and androgens, several varieties of steroids . . . He tried to remember the formula for testosterone . . . And for this very reason, because of the activeness of his endocrinal system, Ilya Iosifovich was smitten by global interest in the moral foundations of gnosiology, while he, Pavel Alekseevich, having suppressed forever his hormonal surges, was tormented solely by his worries about Tanya, about his granddaughter Zhenya, and about his wife Elena, whom he would leave with Toma and Vasilisa when he left that Saturday for Piter to visit his dear little girls . . .