Uncertain Weights and Measures Read online

  Monsieur André Dumas proclaimed that the modern metre escaped the romanticism of the revolutionary metre; it was, he said, neutral, decimal, international. According to the Frenchman’s description, the international prototypes M and K were ceremoniously laid upon beds of red velvet after which the metres were sheathed in protective tubes and the kilograms nestled under three glass bell jars, each slightly larger than the one before. With the layering of the bell jars, the gleam of light they reflected got ever brighter, and by the third jar, the dark figure of the kilogram beneath them was lost as though it were, already, a relic of a lost age of certainty. This was the last the Frenchman saw of the original international prototypes.

  After that they were encased in large brass cylinders, and nobody has seen them since. The Frenchman did say the originals were buried alongside six witnesses, six identical international prototypes, and it was against these witnesses that a further thirty standard bars were measured, one bar being produced for each of the international delegates in attendance. Once the international prototypes had been laid in their vault, the Frenchman was handed the two keys needed to lock the brass cylinders, then a third to bolt the inner basement door, and then a fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh for locks on the subsequent doors, each of which was handed to him in a separate sealed envelope and which, upon its use, was taken by a deputy to be dispersed among three of them — the Frenchman himself, as Director of the International Weights and Measures, and two other men, the General Guard of the National Archives and the President of the International Committee, thus ensuring those rooms would never again be opened but in the presence of all three.

  Remarkably, said Bekhterev, the very same technology used to cut the metre to a precision never before imaginable is now used by neurologists to microtome the brain. That night in Berlin, he said, was darker than any I’ve since experienced, due to the blackout blinds mandated in wartime, but as in Moscow in that very moment, nothing could be done to prevent the river from reflecting the stars.

  What a truly sad story, I said.

  Why? said Bekhterev.

  But I couldn’t say why, exactly. I sat there, looking out at the black river and the even blacker city, and could not shake the feeling that the weights and measures hadn’t been protected; they had been buried alive. My mind’s eye stepped down into those secret vaults and opened each subsequent room and left each door behind me open so that something of the surface — sounds, breezes — could penetrate those hidden chambers in a way akin to rescue.

  It seemed to me then, as it does now, that Bekhterev knew something he could not tell me. What else could explain his lamentable emphasis on that lost age of certainty? Perhaps I am reading too deeply — loss has a tendency to colour things, as we know — but it occurs to me now that Bekhterev wanted me to know just how much we stood to lose. Perhaps he wanted me to know that there was something I needed to protect, to store, as it were, in a hidden repository where no single soul held every single key. But what was it that needed my protection? Bekhterev, for all his wisdom and brilliance, was not a political creature, so he could not have foreseen what would happen to him, for if he could have, surely he would have tried to prevent it.

  Sasha was like me in that, upon finishing his studies, he’d started working for one of his professors. By the end of 1927, he’d been working for Rodchenko for over three years at his studio in the centre of the city; only they didn’t call it a studio, they called it a workshop. Rodchenko was one of the first artists hired on to teach at the art school that had been founded by Lenin in 1920. Sasha had studied there, almost since the start. If he’d had a choice, he would have gone to the traditional school, but as it no longer existed, it was Lenin’s school or nothing.

  I’d heard about the school and Rodchenko even before I met Sasha because of Osorgin’s. Rodchenko was one of the artists who’d appeared on the blackboard. His line drawings were roughly replicated there, along with his philosophy: Both in painting and in any construction in general, line is the first and last thing. Line is the path of advancement, it is movement, collision, it is facetation, conjunction, combination. Rodchenko used the term architectonics to describe his approach to form, and I liked that because it was a word Bekhterev used, too. The architectonics of the brain, the architectonics of art — once again, art and science were one. When I first met Sasha and his friends, I had an idea that I would belong because of that word, but Rodchenko wasn’t popular. His counterpoint in my world wasn’t Bekhterev, but Bogdanov. Unpopular, but hand-picked by the Kremlin.

  At Osorgin’s, books had gotten pulled off the shelves and held up as evidence that Rodchenko’s work was destructive, the speaker shaking the book on high, quoting a memorized passage, and then throwing it down on the table, as if the idea were a weight whose import had to be heard in the way it thudded, book on table. The revolutionary aesthetic rejected the old idea of art for art’s sake and replaced it with the idea of art as production. This was Lenin’s actual idea — that art should be useful as opposed to beautifully, defiantly useless.

  Sasha thought everything about the school was absurd. Absurd that a politician would dictate to artists, absurd that art would be subject to a controlling idea, absurd that the controlling idea would reject all the old masters and all the old media. But he’d had no choice, and he wasn’t alone. For most of the years that he studied there, the majority of the students continued in the pre-revolutionary arts, which meant they were painters and sculptors, and the most exquisite thing was still the human form and how it eluded all attempts to represent it.

  Only those studying under Rodchenko joined the Metalwork Factory, and they came to be known as the MetFak cadre. For a long time, the MetFak cadre was the object of ridicule for all the rest, since Rodchenko’s dream of the artist-craftsman or the artist-constructor had little obvious practicality for anyone in the arts, or not. At MetFak, the students produced revolutionary products rather than objets d’art. By 1922 Rodchenko had declared that painting was dead. This was a war cry. Art for art’s sake was a bourgeois preoccupation, he said. When Sasha and his friends talked about Rodchenko, they made fun of his aviator outfits and his portraits of his mother. Mama, mama! they’d said. Nevertheless, for all their criticism, every last one of them worked for him. MetFak provided jobs, and with that, the MetFak cadre stopped being ridiculed. Colouring, Sasha had called it. So that was where our similarity ended: although we both worked for our former professors, Sasha hated his.

  When I first fell in love with Sasha, I’d imagined that our coming together would bring our separate worlds together, too. Instead, Sasha asked his brusque questions of my professors and I hung back with his friends, always watching, rarely daring to say anything at all. Sasha’s friends talked about art: the sublime, the lines, the depth of the black acrylics they’d gotten imported from France, and so on. Because I had nothing to say about colour — black was just black to me — I couldn’t participate in these conversations. But I observed them intently.

  If they weren’t talking about art, they were talking about “the game.” At parties, Sasha, Jack, and Elisa, a friend of theirs I despised, would pile on top of one another — three of them, sitting on one single armchair! — and they’d watch everyone else at the party to decide who played and who didn’t. When they were playing the game, they adopted a singular look of disdain, looking everyone else up and down. In the summer, Elisa wore dresses that did not fit and no undergarments. When she leaned forward, which she did often, you could see the little points of her breasts trying to hide themselves in the cloth of her gaping dress. In winter, she wore stockings. I still don’t know how she got them. She had long black hair and hardly ever spoke. When she did speak, it wasn’t to me. I thought all the men were in love with her. She was that kind of beautiful.

  Sasha said I didn’t play the game. He said that was why he loved me. He and Jack did play the game, and, it seemed, so did every other person they wanted to fuck. He never explained it to me, but
I figured it out. It was about desire. It was about being able to enter a room and make everyone there want you. It was about believing you could do that. Believing they (whoever they were) wanted you. And then it was about how they couldn’t have you, no matter how hard they tried.

  I play the game, I said.

  No you don’t, said Jack.

  As 1927 wound down, I continued my work at the institute, while Sasha was at the workshop. Jack called us the prototypical Soviet couple, which made us laugh. Winter was in its first stage, which was more absence than presence: bare trees, clean streets, a cold that seemed more like a lack of warmth than the thing it would become, a cold that could give you frostbite or freeze you to death. Winter never felt real to me until it became something: snow piled up high and icicles so heavy and sharp that they threatened anyone who stood below.

  Sasha had been working on a new piece he wanted me to see. Having left school, he no longer had his own studio, and though a friend had let him keep some stuff at the old studio, it was just a place we went socially now, not somewhere he could work. These days he stayed late at his job, and when the workday was over, he’d start drawing again.

  On this night, I’d come by after work. I’d come to the workshop before, but it was only recently that he’d started painting again, and he was showing it to me for the first time.

  It’s just a sketch, he was saying to me as we walked down the hall towards the end of the workshop.

  I’m not proud of it, I mean it’s not finished, so don’t think of it in your critical way, because it’s not ready for that but I thought you might like to see the process because all art begins somewhere — even if this won’t actually be art — every idea begins with a sketch, you know? I mean I’m not looking for criticism or anything, so don’t be critical.

  He looked over his shoulder at me, holding the door open.

  I didn’t know I had a critical way.

  The workshop had everything any other workspace would have, except that each object — the chair, the table, the hanging light, the vase of flowers — was supposed to be both useful and a piece of art. Here a chair was a lined, triangle thing. Instead of four legs, a triangular prism supported the seat, and instead of a simple wooden seat and back, both were made of metal and painted with a thick black line running through the centre, something which made it look two dimensional even as it was obviously a three-dimensional object sitting right before me. Every shape was something even I could draw. Triangles, cylinders, squares. The human figure was reduced to geometry too, even in the photographs that hung on the walls.

  This is Rodchenko’s? I asked, referring to a photograph of an older woman, her face cast in deep shadow, but Sasha had gone ahead.

  Are you coming? he called from the other side of the workshop, peering out from behind a bunch of wood boards stacked against each other. Hanging from nails were what looked like carpenter’s tools, cut-outs of circles, squares, and triangles of varying sizes.

  This place is kind of—

  I followed him behind the stack of wood, around the corner to where there was a small workspace I recognized as his. He wasn’t methodical like I was. Not orderly. I would have placed all of my pens in one place, and at the end of the day would have squared up my papers, bookmarked my books. But his materials all lay on top of each other — books opened and placed like flattened tents, one on top of the other, pens and pencils everywhere.

  Sterile? said Sasha. He clicked on a light and twisted its head so that its bright beam circled out over his desk, then onto the floor, until it found its resting place on a large canvas on an easel. Beside the easel was his jar of brushes, as clean and dry as always, so that the bristles wouldn’t split apart.

  Amazing, I said, taking the whole scene in — the cramped workspace, the disordered desk, the ordered brushes, the smell of wood, oil, and dust, the feeling that the whole workshop was a labyrinth and we were hidden away at one dead end.

  Huh, he said, surprised.

  It’s called Stream, he said, taking out a stool for me to sit on and gesturing for me to sit while he talked. Or maybe The Race, I don’t know, I mean I haven’t decided, because the title can come last, or it can come first, it really depends on your approach — on one’s approach — and so I haven’t really decided on my approach; I mean I haven’t decided whether to name it first or name it later, but probably it will be later —

  I’m sorry, I said, sitting down to focus on him. I’m paying attention now.

  Okay, he said.

  Most of the canvas was blacked in, as Sasha described it, except for a figure of a young boy standing before what appeared to be either a dark box or a dark hole; I couldn’t tell whether the points of the shape came towards me or receded.

  Why Stream? I asked.

  Or The Race, or something I haven’t thought of yet; actually, I don’t really like either of those.

  What is the boy looking at? I asked.

  I don’t know yet, he said. I’m waiting for him to tell me. I know that might sound weird. But I haven’t finished his face, so I don’t know how he feels about it.

  I looked more closely at the child’s face. I don’t think he wants to get too close to whatever the thing is or maybe he wishes he could get closer, but knows he won’t.

  Sasha let out a contented, quick, Hmm.

  It’s nice here, I said turning to look up at him, being here with you, in your space.

  Yeah, he said.

  I looked over to his desk again and noticed two small cups.

  Have you shown it to anyone else? I asked.

  Not really, he said. Just Jack.

  I nodded, jealous but not saying it.

  It’s him, said Sasha. I needed a model.

  I looked at the boy again and there was Jack.

  It is Jack, I said. And it impressively, convincingly, was, but it was a Jack I didn’t know so well. It was the Jack that Sasha knew.

  You’re next, he said, which filled me with a warm and good feeling that I couldn’t quite name. I don’t know if he really meant it or not because I didn’t ask.

  Sasha swivelled the light away from the painting — its bright orb retracing the path from easel back to the desk —and clicked it off.

  We walked back past the slats of wood and out into the workshop he thought of as so sterile. First editions of the posters they made were tacked all over the walls. Bold, primary colours, with a strong emphasis on red, white, and black. All of the lettering was crisp and strong, and I wondered how Sasha could produce posters so bold in his little nook of workspace.

  We do the posters out here, he said. They need a lot of space.

  I hadn’t met any of the other people Sasha worked with, because he never saw them socially. On this night, we were back drinking in Sasha’s old studio, a place we’d spent so much time it felt like a second home.

  Jack had brought a bottle of spiced vodka. Unlike the others, he had managed to keep his studio down the hall, but as far as I could tell, making and bottling moonshine was all he did in there. He was stingy in every way but this: he kept his friends drunk. Those were the dry years when we couldn’t buy alcohol except in restaurants and couldn’t buy vodka anywhere. I think Jack knew his moonshine got him invited. That was why he was so petulant about it, like he resented the moonshine for guaranteeing his friendships because he knew nothing else would. When he showed up somewhere things were always awkward at first, because he took his time bringing it out. We couldn’t ask and he’d take his time, testing us to see if we would. That night, we’d borrowed chairs and crates from the other studios, so everyone had a place to sit. At first there were only four of us: Sasha and I, Elisa and Jack, but it was early; more were bound to arrive.

  Elisa sat alone on Sasha’s old cot, picking balls of lint off her sweater and placing them in a small mountain.

  I sat on a crate that was low to the ground so everyone seemed a little taller than me. Sasha didn’t sit. Jack watched him as he lit a cigarette and
exhaled into the night.

  Jack lit a cigarette, too, but then rested it low on the shelf where I watched it smoke itself out.

  Elisa pulled a compact and a tube of lipstick out of her satchel. Their metal containers snapping open made the sound of femininity. She bared her teeth for a second, looking in the mirror for food, then began with the methodical application of colour.

  Abruptly, Jack sat down next to her, making the springs complain under their combined weight.

  She knew how to predict him, though, and held the lipstick away from herself while he settled. The mirror from the compact caught the light from the lampshade and reflected an oval flash on the ceiling. I wondered if the cot would collapse. Thinking that it might made me smile.