Uncertain Weights and Measures Read online

  Elisa had finished the top lip and started in on the bottom.

  Do me! said Jack to Elisa.

  The ash on his cigarette curled like a long fingernail, almost touching the bottom of the saucer. A draft had kept it alight.

  In a second, she said distractedly, the compact now hiding the lower half of her face. Why don’t you pour us all a drink if you’ve nothing to do?

  Sasha watched Jack for a moment, appraising him, then took a bottle from Jack’s bag, opened it, filled our glasses, and, with his in hand, sauntered away to look out the window. As in all things, Elisa and Sasha were the exceptions — they could ask Jack for anything.

  Jack shoved himself back against the wall, leaving his legs hanging over the edge.

  He’d made her mess up. She dug her pinky finger into the errant line, trying to erase it, but the pigment was stubborn. Somehow she managed to fix it, maybe because she was a painter and they knew how to make strange things look normal.

  Now that Jack was sprawled across the whole cot, it was if he were performing some sort of feat — cot-covering — as if it were a display of strength or courage or something. His cigarette had smoked itself out. He picked up the butt and walked it over to the ashtray and, on recrossing the room, picked up the bottle Sasha had put down.

  I chose one of the glasses — it was the only one without a chip in the rim — and walked over to Sasha. I pressed my body into his, wrapped my free arm around his waist. He kissed my forehead, then took a drag and exhaled into the black.

  Read us some of your poetry, Jack, beseeched Elisa. I looked over at them. I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic.

  You’ve heard it all before, he said quietly, looking at Elisa only, as if they were alone.

  Tatiana’s never heard it, said Sasha, walking us back from the window.

  To friends, said Elisa. We emptied our glasses.

  Jack surveyed me for a moment. Why don’t you wear lipstick? he asked me, as if the question were penetrating.

  I thought you might have written some new poems, Elisa said, licking her lips for the last few drops of alcohol.

  Well, I haven’t, he said to her. Let’s play cards.

  He’d forgotten about me. He downed his drink and poured another glass for himself, downed it, and then filled all of our glasses, before filling his again. He got up to get another cigarette from Sasha and the two of them stood together, smoking, like real men.

  Elisa found the cards by the boxes of tea while I pulled a crate in front of the cot. She sat down to sort the cards by suit to see if any were missing.

  Elisa offered to do a reading of the cards, and in this way indicated that she’d decided to be kind.

  The modern deck comes from the tarot card deck, or they have the same root deck. The hearts are the same suit as the cups, the diamonds are the coins, the spades. Then she stopped sorting the cards. What were the spades, Jack?

  Oh, I don’t know, Lis, he said, exhaling a big puff of smoke.

  Swords, said Sasha.

  I looked at him, surprised.

  She used to read for us all the time, he said to me.

  But the future didn’t look like this, did it? said Jack.

  Elisa ignored him, shuffling the piles back together.

  We were all relieved when Dimitri showed up. The addition of a fifth body disrupted the awful symmetry of two men and two women.

  That was when Elisa said that the bookstore owner, Osorgin, had disappeared.

  What about his wife? I asked.

  Have you been there? she asked me, incredulously.

  That’s how we met, said Sasha.

  Yes, she said, getting past the shock of my belonging. Her, too. Yuly, Boris, everyone. They sent them to Leningrad. Then they put them on a boat, along with thousands of others, and off it went.

  Dimitri pulled up a crate next to the one I’d been sitting on and poured himself a drink. I watched the way his hand cradled and tipped the bottle, heard the slight clink when the bottle chanced against the glass. Who else had been on that boat, I wondered.

  Who were the other thousands? Dimitri asked.

  People like us, said Jack.

  What are we like? I asked.

  You’re not like us, said Jack, giving me a hard look.

  Elisa smiled to herself, then looked at Dimitri, and made a display of saying, Jaaaack, in a slow, admonishing tone. She had gathered up the cards and was spreading out the whole deck into a large fan. I was watching her hands again. I was looking down because looking down hid my eyes, hid the tears that threatened there, hid my incomprehension of exactly what had happened to the Osorgins.

  But who were they? said Dimitri.

  It had been years since I’d seen Dimitri, but still his presence calmed me.

  From behind the fan, Elisa said, They were on a list. Religious scholars, philosophers, scientists. Enemies of the state.

  Enemies of Lenin, corrected Jack.

  Same thing, said Sasha.

  Dimitri wanted to know where the boat had gone, and Elisa said that for a long time no one knew, but that lately news had trickled in that suggested they’d been sent to Germany. The boat had landed in Rostock, and most everyone had gone on to Berlin after that.

  I wondered if my father might have been on that very boat or one like it, years before. No doubt, if he wasn’t, he would have liked to have been. Dimitri asked how Elisa knew. Had she, for example, read about it in the newspapers?

  Don’t be naive, said Jack, looking at Dimitri first, then at me.

  Jack’s hair was the colour of dirt, I thought.

  Elisa presented the fan of cards to Dimitri, who knew what to do. He pulled a card and announced it to the group of us: king of diamonds.

  That’s you, she said to him.

  I got my sweater and went out into the hallway, just as one of the current studio-mates arrived with his friends. The marble steps continued upwards to another floor. I climbed up to the landing so I could sit there and think in the dark. I couldn’t believe the Osorgins were gone. It was one thing to know I hadn’t seen them, but quite another to know I’d never see them again. I always assumed they’d reopen. I thought of all the books I’d read in that little shop and of the wall and of Rachel, and even though I’d never liked her I didn’t want them gone. That they were gone meant that time had passed and I hadn’t even noticed. Jack had called us naive. Time at the studio always seem to pass steadily in this way, measured out by the steady rhythm of Jack’s recriminations and Elisa’s knowing commands. Sasha didn’t suffer their moods, but he knew that I did. You’re strong, he said, which was his way of saying he expected me to either fight my own battles, or opt out, which I preferred. I felt foolish, then, at how slowly I’d put it all together — the abundance of mystical texts in that store, their religious commitments, which I’d paid little attention to, the closing of churches in those years and the destruction of their building. Had they been enemies of the state?

  From my spot on the landing, I heard the door open and watched as Jack walked past the foot of the stairs. I thought about the word naive. I could dismiss it as merely another of Jack’s rash statements or I could take it seriously, separating the accusation from the accuser. I sucked myself back into the shadows of the landing, tucked my feet beneath my skirt. His shirt was rumpled and he walked in a slow, exhausted manner. His shoulders rolled forward as if protecting his concave chest. If I really were naive, I could strive to know more, or I could accept the limitations — one might say protections — of the world I inhabited. He continued down the hall. I heard him drop his keys, then pick them up, argue them into a lock, and then open his studio door, letting it slam shut behind him. The hall was quiet again, so I readjusted my legs and undid the top buttons on my boots. I pulled my cigarettes out of my skirt pocket. If someone saw me, I would seem like a person who wanted to smoke alone. The party spilled out into the hallway; I heard Elisa’s voice and then Dimitri’s.

  Let’s go, King of Sw
ords, she said.

  They walked in front of the steps and Dimitri looked up at me, a warm smile on his face. They went downstairs. Even after all the years I’d known these people, I still didn’t understand them. Couldn’t believe, for example, that they were together.

  I lit a cigarette.

  Sasha came out and stood at the foot of the stairs with his hands on his hips for a minute before he squinted up into the dark and saw me.

  Jack came out of his studio and yelled at Sasha, Why did you invite that asshole?

  Sasha had already taken a step up towards me, but he stepped back down to face Jack. Sasha’s back was to me now, and Jack, holding a new bottle, was facing him, which meant he also faced me. I tried to shift even further back into the shadows.

  Come on, Jack, take it easy, said Sasha.

  You know he’s with her, said Jack. The look on his face was almost that of the young boy in the painting.

  Stop worrying about it, said Sasha. They’ve left, anyway.

  But why’d you invite him?

  He was coming to pick her up, that’s it.

  He’s useful to you, said Jack.

  You’re drunk, said Sasha.

  He’ll help you move up. I’m just a drag.

  Right now you are, said Sasha.

  Jack looked down the hallway, towards his studio, then back at Sasha, which was when he let out a sob, collapsing in the hallway, letting the bottle slip, though Sasha caught it. I could hear the sharp intake of his breath and felt badly for witnessing a moment which so obviously ought to have been private. Sasha pulled him up and seemed about to embrace him, when Jack collected himself and got his anger back.

  I can’t believe you’re siding with those faggots.

  We’re not going to fight, Jack, said Sasha, because we have nothing to fight about. Go on back in there, bring them a drink and pour yourself another.

  They were standing almost side by side, looking down towards where a party had gotten underway, Sasha looking at Jack to see whether or not he’d do what he’d been told. Jack straightened up, and Sasha slapped him on the back, as if to send him on his way, but Jack turned back to him and hugged him, whispering something I couldn’t hear.

  That was the only time I ever saw them come close to arguing, and the only time I ever saw Jack’s anger lift to reveal the sadness beneath.

  Sasha turned to face me then and took a few of the steps up before turning back to Jack. You’ll be fine, he said, and then took the steps two at a time until he was beside me.

  Jack raised his eyes up to me, and in their flash I saw that the return to anger was complete. I smirked at him, then immediately wished I hadn’t. He walked back along the hall to the studio and cheered loudly as he walked in.

  After Elisa reported that the Osorgins and the others had gone missing, Sasha started to get afraid. After that, the game they talked about changed. For a while, I still thought it was about sex, but eventually I realized it must have been something else.

  December passed quickly and all of a sudden, Congress was upon us, bringing together 750 participants, 288 neuropathologists, and 475 psychiatrists from all over the country. Such gatherings had happened before, but this was the first of its kind since the Revolution. The truth was we called everything first in those years. In the foyer, tables had been set up and covered with pamphlets, treatises, scientific journals, and books. Behind the tables, men adopted a variety of positions: if alone and if they did not have a belly, they leaned over their table and read; if alone and with a big belly, they leaned back in their chairs to give their bellies room; if they were the active types and not alone, they were huddled in vigorous conversation with colleagues; if they were active types and alone, they stood and shouted witticisms across the room to someone they thought they recognized; and if they were women, they were at the one table everyone visited at some point, handing out name tags to all the participants at the Congress, and they were never alone. When I went to pick up my name tag, therefore, there was a moment of interspecies recognition where the eyes of a mousy young academician met mine and hers said, You are one of us, why aren’t you on this side of the table? And my eyes said, You are mistaken: I am not one of you.

  Within hours, the place smelled like a neglected boys’ change room.

  As I drifted back out of the foyer and down one of the halls towards the largest lecture hall, I had the clear impression, as one does at events of this sort, that the universe had begun to revolve around the busy hive that was Congress on that day. It was impossible to think otherwise: where else could such a maniacally productive exchange of ideas and knowledge be taking place but in that busy network of stairwells, corridors, rooms, nooks, and lecture halls, all of which swarmed with scientists rushing from one idea to the next. This was an opinion I kept to myself. Bekhterev would have disapproved, thinking me young. Solipsism, pure solipsism, he would have said. Yet I knew something he didn’t: where he could see the universe continuing to spin on its course, I could see that the universe continued to spin around him. Now that I think about it, Bekhterev might have approved heartily of this second opinion — whether in reality or merely in appearance, no one gets to be the centre of it all by accident. Bekhterev was no wallflower.

  In the back of my mind, however, I was aware of a competing universe across town: the Congress of Pedologists and Psychologists overlapped by a day or so with our own. Indeed, many would participate in both congresses, and though Bekhterev had privately referred to their approach to human personality as a crime, he, too, would give a paper there. You have to know your enemies, he said, though he was wrong about who his enemies really were.

  The hall was lined with official pamphlets and posters that had been printed the day before. They outlined the locations, subjects, panellists, and distinguished speakers for each session, but before anything had even started, the posters were already obsolete. Nevertheless, they remained on the walls, remnants of what we’d hoped for just days before, now edited and cross-hatched with Updates! and Important Changes! that made them into nearly indecipherable yet thrilling palimpsests of the new upon the new upon the new. It was a matter of etiquette that Congress participants ought to choose one session and stick with it for its ninety-minute duration. No matter what field, the brightest always imagine themselves above etiquette and thus, in this case, prided themselves on their ability to slip into and out of two or even three sessions during one ninety-minute session. The hallways evidenced this misbehaviour: lecture doors creeped open and were silently shut as participants prepared to dash from one session to another, always in the direction of whatever seemed most promising. Sessions took place in rooms as grand as a lecture hall and as humble as a bedroom closet. If one of the spaces happened to be free for a session, it would be filled instead with people eating, conducting interviews, or, as the day went on, sleeping.

  That morning, I snuck from Astvatsaturov’s presentation on linguo-statistical studies of aphasia (where amnesia for nouns was blamed on motor centre disturbances, while amnesia for verbs was due to Wernicke’s area lesions) to Pavlov’s homage to Claude Bernard, before sitting down to absorb what I could of the technical sessions on the histological methods of Ehrlich and Golgi, the famed discovery of the sensitive terminal apparatus in the electric skate, and the pioneering experiments by Sherrington on muscle spindles and cut nerves. Neurosurgery was then still in its infancy. It was at that first Congress that Pussep bravely admitted that his clinic in Leningrad had produced what could only be called horrendous results. We applauded his honesty; some even got a little teary over it, imagining it might pose a risk for his career. His party credentials were unimpeachable, however, so any notion of risk was an exaggeration.

  Over lunch, we caught up on what we missed in other sessions. Of those I remember by name, there was Luria and Anushka, Segalin, Sarkisov, and eventually, though not for long, Bogdanov. I can hardly remember what we ate that day, but I do remember the endless pots of tea. That and the sour cherry
jam, which I and others took to eating by the spoonful, as much for the sugary surge as for the flavour we all associated with childhood. This was fitting because we were, all of us, like children — overstimulated and tired, cocksure and ignorant — and it was these qualities in combination that led Segalin to his speech and Bekhterev to his mistake.

  Segalin had by then been publishing his journal the Clinical Archive of Genius and Talent (of Europathology) for several years. Segalin had always struck me as a man who was too sensitive for his surroundings, as though a sudden gust of cold could kill him. His proposed field of study, aesthetic medicine, was, as I saw it, a cry for help, an expression of the anguish he felt in adapting to the pace and demands of revolutionary society. In every issue of the Clinical Archive, Segalin would diagnose a famous person. Dostoyevsky had hysterical epilepsy. Nikolai Tikhonov was a psychopath; Alexandr Blok, an epileptic. Because of Pushkin’s irony, Segalin waffled: was he a cycloid who suffered hypomaniacal states or an erotoman with hypertrophied gonads? With others, he was more certain. Gogol was also hypogonadal and schizophrenic; Jesus Christ, paranoic with an asthenic constitution due, perhaps, to his petty bourgeois background.

  He didn’t see it this way, of course. Sitting on a low table, surrounded by the most accomplished scientists of the union, he seemed to be almost pleading with them to understand the special class of people he called geniuses.

  I mean, he said into his hands, that geniuses suffer persecution whenever their creative innovations contradict the tastes and wishes of the powerful. Editors, resellers, agents: these are the exploiters! Geniuses die early, and they die in poverty.

  He looked up and reassured himself that we were listening.

  He went on: You must see how this poses a serious threat to Soviet society. Geniuses end up clowning, prostituting themselves to the bourgeois demands of pseudo-art and performative acts, without which they would starve. The state must protect them! Without such protection the abuse of wunderkinds will continue!