The bowl and snake. The Bowl of Hygeia.
Kalitin sometimes thought this emblem, inconspicuous and familiar, was persecuting him.
Pharmacy signs. Ubiquitous ambulances. Labels on medicines. Hospital reception areas. Badges on medical personnel. He had almost learned to not be bothered, to pay no attention, not take it personally.
But not right now.
The doctors’ suspicions raised his own suspicions, which the doctors must not know. What was happening to his body could be the delayed reaction to long-ago experiments, the surf from yesterday’s wave. He had always followed safety measures exactingly, but his substances were too unpredictable, unmanageable to be fully understood. His children. His legacy.
Some of the medical procedures required local anesthesia.
The drug the anesthesiologist used had a hidden and harmless side effect, something like a weak, amateur truth serum. Kalitin experienced vivid and clear—almost digital—memories, sentimental dreams about the past, things he had not thought about for years.
He was a child again, a schoolboy, an obedient son, who had not yet found his calling and his mentor. He was at the stage of development where a child’s ability to fill the world with great mysteries and to experience horror and joy in the face of the inexplicable mixed with the beginnings of a rational autobiography; it is in this living contradiction—sometimes, and not in every life—that attractions, desires, symbols, and profound predeterminations of destiny are born.
…Every Easter his parents take him to visit Uncle Igor.
Actually, the boy does not know what Easter is. They make blini during the week before Lent. For Easter they dye eggs in onion peel water and bake kulich bread. Is that a holiday? It’s not listed on the wall calendar. They don’t mention it at school. His parents don’t seem to know why Easter should be celebrated. They wouldn’t do it on their own, he thinks. But if Uncle Igor invites you, you can’t say no. He calls on the telephone and names the day; not a word about Easter over the telephone, it is understood.
Who was Uncle Igor? The boy senses that he is not his real uncle. Or, rather, not quite an uncle—there was a blood tie, but it was complicated, requiring a meticulous, apothecary-like examination of units of relatedness, going through the old photo albums, which are kept in a distant corner and cannot be viewed without an adult. There, among the unfamiliar faces, unknown places, landscapes, houses, and idyllic backdrops used by provincial photography studios, a woman will appear in a white dress, sitting at the gigantic anthracite grand piano, looking at the cryptic musical notation. She would be the beginning of a mysterious chain of corporeal transformations from thin to fat, tall to short, dark to blond and back again, with the final link being Uncle Igor.
The boy had already learned that it was better not to ask about some people in the photographs. They wouldn’t tell him or they would make up some nonsense. However, it was all right to ask about the people around them, the neighbors, his father’s coworkers.
About all of them except Uncle Igor.
They lived in the new City. Ten years earlier it had been unpopulated taiga here. So they are all new settlers, enthusiasts; that’s how they are honored in official speeches. The City is surrounded by a Wall: a gray concrete fence with barbed wire. The Wall was built with room to grow: dug-up empty lots lie between it and the residential areas. Because of the Wall, they can’t be called on a home phone. Or get mail at home. Or have visitors. Their City does not exist on maps, in reference books, or in atlases. Passenger trains do not go there. Ordinary planes do not fly there. The newspapers don’t write about the City. The radio does not mention it. It is not shown on television. It is called Sovetsk-22. For the residents, it is simply the City.
The boy has no memory of being beyond the Wall. But he does know where he and his parents came from—his mother often misses the capital, where his parents were born, where they studied and met, where his grandmothers and aunt live.
Uncle Igor seems to have been born here. Appearing together with the City. Right in the six-room apartment on the third floor of a building that everyone in the City calls the House.
When someone says, “We’re moving into the House soon,” everyone knows with envy which house they mean. The one on Revolution Street. The most famous one in the City. Nine stories. With columns at the entrance and molding under the cornices. With handles on the doors that lead into lobbies, where visitors are met by the guard. With high ceilings and enormous apartments. With two elevators in every entry.
The rumors say there were supposed to be several such houses. But for some reason, only one was built. It was a big honor to live there. Father sometimes says that maybe one day they would get an apartment there. Mother turns her head and smiles sadly, ironically.
None of the boy’s classmates has ever been in the House. But he has. The House itself is not very interesting. It’s only a shell—in fact, molded shells support the cornices of the House—that surrounds the secrets of Uncle Igor’s life.
His parents seem to feel it. His father doesn’t like it. He would rather not bring him there. A different circle, he says. But Uncle Igor invites all three of them. His otherwise intractable father can’t disobey. Why? The boy wants to know.
His mother… Once, when his father was out, the boy secretly watched her trying on a robe, a birthday present from Uncle Igor. Not from here, unearthly, thin burgundy silk, embroidered with birds, flowers, and dragons. She looked in the mirror, pulling it tighter to show her figure then letting the robe’s long skirts open freely. May light splashed from the mirror. The yellow lotus leaves trembled. Twisting passionately and hugging her hips, the silver-and-gold dragons with emerald eyes breathed bead and pearl smoke from their broad violet nostrils. Dressed, she was so naked about her feelings that the boy grew embarrassed and shut the door. It was not shame that guided him, it was stung passion; he wanted to share the closeness to Uncle Igor that came through the gift.
Breathless from the double taboo of what he was doing, violating boundaries and wearing women’s clothes, he tried on the robe—and immediately threw it off, stunned by a nasty, longing sensation instigated by the vulgar deliberateness of transformation. However, the boy remembered the incident, the action, putting it away into a piggy bank as it were, with a premonition that it could come in handy.
The boy already understood how life worked in the City and had categorized all the people he knew. Fortunately the City’s organization made it easy. In the center, behind a second Wall, was the Institute where his father worked. All the residents—guards, cleaning women, carpenters, drivers, scientists, shop clerks, teachers, doctors at the hospital, like his mother—served the Institute directly or indirectly.
Only Uncle Igor’s role was unclear.
Not military, not civilian; none of the recognizable, tested types. Separate. Sui generis.
He was the only one who lived as if there were no City, Institute, Wall, commandant’s office; no red flags, banners, demonstrations, posters calling for vigilance, or watchtowers.
The boy guessed that he did not see, did not know the main truth about Uncle Igor, which explained his special position. The boy could assume that Uncle Igor’s work was secret, like his father’s, for example. Or even more secret. But the point was that all the adults privy to secrets shared habits, jokes, and little words that Uncle Igor did not. Most important, they lived, like his father, with a sense of borrowed significance that gave them access, and they were afraid of losing it. Uncle Igor was on his own. The boy wanted that kind of unencumbered, independent fate for himself.
For Easter, Uncle Igor’s table was laid with a long linen cloth embroidered with proverbs written in an old-fashioned script. On it stood a candelabrum for twelve candles and dark green shot glasses rimmed in gold. Uncle Igor took down an old guitar from the wall: the maker’s mark glittered gold in a circle beneath the strings.
Uncle Igor, as small as a child—he needed a cushion on the chair—thin, with long gray hair, as luxurious as a woman’s, in a gray jacket of fine wool and a white shirt, looked like an actor, a bit of a magician, who knew how to enliven things. The glasses and cutlery in the hands of his guests seemed to be drawing a design, creating something that they were unaware of, not realizing that they were merely stand-ins for another gathering.
Uncle Igor orchestrated the flow of conversation without any effort. The boy noticed how his father, usually unsociable, sat straighter and grew animated, how his mother grew lovelier, how the other guests relaxed, as if Uncle Igor were brushing them with a cheery gloss, an exciting glow, teaching them to appreciate once again the taste of food, the spiciness of spice and the saltiness of salt. Not a word about laboratories, state commissions, tests, aggregates, bonuses, formulas, equations, military acceptance, subcontractors—the adults didn’t really know what else they could talk about, so their embarrassment was amusing, and they drank more wine or vodka. Uncle Igor played the guitar and sang songs that the boy had never encountered anywhere else, and then he turned on the record player, and dance melodies flew from the black lacquer records and spun in the air, so foreign that he thought he was hearing not music but the voice of the record itself composed of an unnatural, implausible substance.
Once the dancing began the children were sent off to play. That was what the boy had been waiting for. They played hide-and-seek, ever since he was little: only Uncle Igor’s apartment had enough hiding places for them truly to hide and seek, for a long time and without giveaways.
The children were older now and kept up the old custom reluctantly, seemingly out of boredom. However, in fact, the game had a new meaning now: the boys listened to the girls’ breathing, the girls hidden behind drapes, sometimes hopping in order to be found. In the dimly lit rooms, their first feelings arose. Only one room, at the far end of the corridor, was always locked.
The boy liked these hours of play. He hid better than the others, he could remain unnoticed in full view. The girls’ silhouettes did not excite him; his lust was for something different.
The person hiding sees space inside out, with the eyes of subjects, walls, photographs. He tries to merge with the place, become part of it. For him, hide-and-seek was merely the prologue to a voyage, immersion in the attractive otherness, the life of and space inhabited by Uncle Igor.
He held his breath, surrounded by things that had lost their corporeality, had turned into velvet ghosts, that might speak in the dark, convey something tactile. The distant locked room did not interest him; he did not think that Uncle Igor could have literal secrets hidden behind the door. Besides, he did not want to uncover some part of his hidden life; he wanted to know his everyday existence, his dashing, undisguised freedom of action and opinion, his ability to live without fear, treat everyone independently and at the same time be needed and universally respected.
They played for a long time that evening. The thrill was gone. Hiding one more time, the boy noticed that the usually locked door was ajar, weak light coming through the crack.
The sudden sense that this was no accident made him catch his breath.
“I’ll just peek in,” the boy told himself. “Just a peek, that’s all.”
The desk lamp was on. Probably Uncle Igor or the help left it on and forgot to come back in the flurry of holiday preparations. Its light, so personal, secret, the setting of Uncle Igor’s solitude and thoughts, beckoned irresistibly.
“I wasn’t told not to go in here,” thought the boy. “I’ll say we were playing hide-and-seek. The door was ajar.”
He walked around the room slowly, attentively looking at the cupboards, bookshelves, desk. A grandfather clock ticked loudly in the corner, marking the brief time he could spend here unnoticed.
He wanted to leave and took three steps toward the door; he grew anxious. He realized that all the books here were about chemistry. The same ones that his father had. But Uncle Igor had more books; his father knew only German and here there were volumes in English and French. The boy took one off the shelf—yes, the same stamp of the Institute library.
His father, when he worked at home, cleared his desk when he was done. If the boy needed to come into his room, he knocked first, and his father turned the work pages over. Uncle Igor left his desk as if he had walked out for a minute: tea in a glass, a viciously sharpened pencil on top of the pages. Typed pages, heavy honeycombs of formulas speckled with corrections.
The boy turned away. He felt a mix of disappointment and vague hope. Uncle Igor could not be his father’s colleague. Yet he was. The books were evidence that he was merely a civil scientist, one of hundreds in the City.
Suddenly the boy noticed a small triangle of fabric that stuck out of the doors of the clothes closet, like the corner of a bookmark. Military green. With embroidered gold leaves. A sleeve, probably.
The boy pulled on the end but the doors were shut tight.
“I’ll say that I wanted to hide in the closet,” he decided. “They didn’t forbid it.”
The boy slowly opened the doors.
The bulb in the closet glowed like a treasure hunter’s torch in a cave.
The gold embroidery blazed. The buttons were golden flashes. The orders shimmered in gold, scarlet, steel, and silver; the orders and stars made of blood-red enamel, the gray steel hammers and sickles, plows and bayonets, a soldier with a rifle; gold sheaves and leaves, the gold letters of LENIN.
A uniform hung in the closet. Covered in the heavy, round, scalelike discs of orders and medals from chest to navel. A major general’s lonely big stars sparkled on the shoulder boards.
The uniform was small, almost a child’s, just right for Uncle Igor. Without the awards it might have looked comical. But the golden, ruby, and sapphire reflections imbued it with supernatural might. The boy could not imagine what a man had to do to earn so many awards. Was he even a man? A hero? A higher being?
A cap on the shelf. Belt. A pair of boots.
A different Uncle Igor. The true one. Who had the right to a special life.
The boy had never seen such precious things up close. He ran his fingers over the gold, silver, and ruby scales, cold and heavy. The mirror on the inside of the door reflected a face made strange by confusion.
The uniform, hung with medals that seemed an integral part of it, radiated pure, absolute power. The boy could not control himself. He didn’t think about being caught, punished, banished from Uncle Igor’s house. He so wanted to commune with that power, feel himself inside it, that he took the uniform off the hanger and with an unexpected, agile move, as if stolen from the owner, slipped his arms into the sleeves.
His shoulders bent under the weight. You had to stand under the uniform as if under barbells at the gym. But the weight was inexpressibly pleasant, it both burdened and protected, it clad you in its thin silk lining.
The boy stood and did not recognize himself, as if he had put on not someone else’s clothing but someone else’s features and character. The embossed symbols he had internalized in childhood made him part of something immeasurably bigger, as vast as the starry sky.
He took a step toward the mirror. Blinded by the dazzling sparkle, he noticed the military emblems on the lapels almost accidentally.
Not tanks.
Not propellers.
Not crisscrossed artillery barrels.
Bowl and snake.
A golden bowl with a snake wrapped around it, its head raised as if to take a sip or to protect the forbidden vessel.
He had never seen an emblem like that. He didn’t know what it meant.
In the midst of stars, sickles, hammers, and bayonets, the weapons of war and the weapons of labor welded into one, he thought, by the history of his country and therefore embossed on medals, the bowl and snake came from another, most ancient world when man was just beginning to name constellations. The boy suddenly understood that this inconspicuous and obscure symbol was the key; hidden, secret, it explained the orders, the general’s rank, Uncle Igor’s scientific path, combined it all into the secret of exclusivity, power, and strength.
The boy carefully took off the uniform and hung it back in the closet, leaving a corner of the sleeve sticking out between the doors. The obsession did not go away. Blessed heaviness. Complete protection.
He had found his idol. His path to becoming like Uncle Igor.
The bowl and snake.
Four years later the boy was the top student in chemistry. They were starting the last year of school. His father said that they would go see Uncle Igor to talk about the future. The boy guessed that his father, his kind father, milksop as his mother called him when she was angry, did not want him to repeat his path as the eternal number two, the reserve. His mother certainly did not want him to become a copy of her husband. They were prepared to give him to someone who knew how to forge destinies, change them for the better, higher, unattainable. The boy felt both rejection and joy. Their sacrifice was sweet to him. He knew now that the bowl and snake, the emblem of military medics, was just camouflage on Uncle Igor’s uniform. He was not a physician. He did not invent medicines. Much in their City was not what it seemed, and as he grew up, the boy accepted it without embarrassment, with a readiness that surprised his parents.
He had expected a thorough interrogation and he was prepared to display his knowledge. But Uncle Igor asked a dozen rather simple questions, nodded, and said, “Fine, all right.”
The boy felt Uncle Igor studying him. Looking at him absently, indifferently, weighing things that the boy did not know and could not imagine.
As they said good-bye in the hallways, Uncle Igor said casually, “I’ll write a recommendation to the special faculty. But on one condition. Have him come tomorrow morning to the third entrance. I’ll write a pass.”
The parents and the boy were stunned.
The Institute’s third entrance!
There were only three. Everyone in the City knew them.
The First had the wide gates for vehicles and battered turnstiles for the workers. There was a line of people waiting for passes, someone trying to use the hard-to-hear internal telephone. Documents were checked by fat-bellied paramilitary guards, revolvers in scuffed holsters, and it was all redolent of boredom, sweat, and cabbage soup from the canteen.
His father went through the Second entrance to go to work. Heavy billowing blinds covered the Institute’s glass vestibule, and it was only when the doors opened for an instant that you could see the gray marble lobby and the guards in gray suit jackets. The cardboard passes accepted at the First were not valid here. They had to be like his father’s: with a photograph and in a dark leatherette case.
The Third… The Third was a metal door with a bell. A door in the brick end of the building without windows. Somehow everyone knew that it led to the same place as the other two: into the inner perimeter of the Institute, a city in the City. No parking was allowed opposite the Third, a traffic officer came over instantly. No buildings over two stories could be built next to it.
But no one knew to whom the Third entrance belonged, who met visitors at the door. The ones who did know didn’t talk.
“The Second,” his father either asked or corrected.
“No. The Third,” Uncle Igor replied with a gentle smile. “At eleven.”
The boy felt that answer cut the ties that connected him to his parents. His father had not been past the door of the Third. He couldn’t dream of being there. But he would be.
Tomorrow.
At eleven.
In the morning, his father gave him his watch. The boy wanted the whole world to know where he was going. But there weren’t many pedestrians, and the street was completely empty by the Third entrance. If only someone would look out a window or out of the passing bus!
The second hand made him hurry. The boy put his finger on the bell. Pressed. The button was rigid and immobile. Silence. Suddenly he imagined that he could still turn around and go; back to his mother and father, to his previous life. He looked around. A dusty street. A tall tramp in a dirty, black padded jacket stopped on the corner and was looking at him; where did he come from, this was the City, there were no tramps here! The boy pushed the bell as hard as he could. A harsh ring like an alarm sounded inside.
A grumpy and surprised ensign took his new passport and copied his name. He moved a yellow notebook with curling edges toward him: Sign in. He called on the phone, dialing two numbers: 2-8.
Another ensign came and said, Follow me. He had the bowl and snake in his buttonhole. The boy’s heart pounded at the discreet proximity of the secret. Hallway. A door padded with oilcloth. A narrow passage through the courtyard with a brick wall; whining behind it. Could it be dogs? The next door. Worn linoleum on the floor. The smell of a classroom not cleaned after vacation. Windows with a view of high brick walls. A labyrinth. He felt a chill. He was lost in space, he could no longer figure out where the street was.
A safe door. A big empty room. Marks on the wallpaper showed where shelves had been. The boy was confused and depressed. Where was the equipment, where was the laboratory, where was the secret?
Uncle Igor in a plain blue lab coat came through the door opposite. Yet another different Uncle Igor. He beckoned with two fingers: Follow me. A long, dark, dusty corridor brought them to the dressing room with wide metal lockers for clothing and to one side, a shower room, the showerheads the size of sunflowers.
“Once, we used to change here,” Uncle Igor said. “The clean zone begins from here. Now this place no longer exists. On paper this wing has been razed to build a new one. But the builders are late. This place does not exist, understand? That’s why I could bring you here.”
The boy stood listening to every word.
“Your father is a good chemist,” Uncle Igor said. “But he is afraid of what he’s researching. Afraid. That’s why I will never take him into my laboratory. Are you afraid?”
“No,” he replied without thinking.
“Open the end one,” Uncle Igor said pointing to the lockers.
The boy opened it. Something lay inside, squashed between the locker walls: a green rubber skin grafted to a gas mask. He pulled it out, extremely heavy, slippery with talcum powder, resembling the scales of a snakeskin shed years ago.
“Put it on,” Uncle Igor said.
He managed to get his legs into the rubber pants and pulled on the suit. The tight stiff collar constricted his throat. The cuffs were tight on his wrists. Breathing was hard and a fog appeared before his eyes. Uncle Igor’s hands straightened his back and closed the seam along the spine, tied the straps on his ankles—and he found himself inside a rubber womb, a live infant in the body of a dead reptile.
“Turn around. Look in the mirror.” Uncle Igor’s voice seemed far away.
He moved clumsily, as if learning to walk, shuffling the unwieldy boots. He desperately wanted to be out of the rubber womb and its slippery, deadening embrace.
“Look at yourself,” Uncle Igor repeated out of the depths.
Through the fogged lenses of the mask he made out the mirror.
A monster looked at him. A horrible swamp creature with dull round eyes, mouthless, faceless, alien to every living thing, with no resemblance or relation to anything.
It was him. A different him.
Special. Unrecognizable.
Suddenly the boy felt the unknown peace, the highest protection that the suit bestowed on him.
The rubber folds no longer squeezed him. His throat got used to the collar’s hold. The boy stood without sensing the many kilograms of rubber weight, he seemed to be floating. The thing in the mirror was he, and he did not want the merging to end. This was more thrilling than Uncle Igor’s medal-laden uniform, more exciting than anything he had ever felt.
In that outfit he feared nothing. Like Uncle Igor.
When the boy climbed out, sweaty, reddened, smeared with talcum and a slippery paste, completely happy, Uncle Igor smiled broadly and slapped him on the shoulder.
“That’s our old suit. We began with those. Go now, they’ll see you out. I’ll write the recommendation. If you graduate with honors, I’ll hire you.”
He froze, he couldn’t believe it. Uncle Igor gently shoved his wet back: Go, go.