Uncertain Weights and Measures Read online

  A vampire who hates blood, I said.

  Hadn’t even thought of that, he said, nodding at me, like I wasn’t so bad after all. Or maybe it was just I who felt that way about him.

  Really? I said. That was a true story?

  True enough, he said.

  I don’t like true enough.

  No? Isn’t true enough sometimes better for everyone than true?

  My boss died, I said.

  I know, Jack said. I’m sorry.

  When the hour got close to midnight, we gathered around my pocket watch and counted down as its little hands ticked towards twelve. At midnight, we shouted from the top of our lungs that it was 1928, and soon after that we tired. The six of us melted down into a warm little puddle in the middle of the studio, wrapped up in whatever blankets we could find, each of us carrying our own patch of weariness into the new year. When before I’d felt alienated at the sight of Sasha piled into a ball with Elisa and Jack, now I felt included, like I understood what that kind of touch meant, the way it was safe and not safe, but safe overall, and the way it satisfied an ongoing need to touch and be touched. No, not even that — the way it stoked that need, like we were being fed, and every touch made us hunger all the more. Even if I still wasn’t sure about Jack, I could rest my head on his stomach and feel like at least in this way, this physical way, I could appreciate the flatness of his stomach, the slow rise and fall of his breathing, and I didn’t have to love him for this to feel good. Sasha had closed his eyes, and Elisa was tracing letters along his arm.

  A, he said.

  Then Jack would describe a couple leaning towards each other, a woman in between, her mouth sucking the man off.

  Elisa would say they were disgusting, but she found it funny too, this way of remembering the erotic alphabet, the new politics of sex.

  Outside the streets were loud with car horns and people partying, but inside we were our own little puddle of bodies, breathing together, our gazes lazy and drifting from the hazy ceiling to the taxidermied creatures to the flickering of the candles as they got caught and twirled in the drafts. Every once in a while I’d think of Bekhterev and the emptiness would threaten to pour in, threaten to make my whole body a container for loss. Then I’d move closer to Sasha, and his touch was consolation, not just comfort, and then another body would slide against mine and I’d be back to the group and the taste of the summer sky.

  Sometime after one in the morning, we were about to go to sleep when the door flung open and a gigantic man came in, yelling, Where’s Tova!

  He went into the city, said Sasha, sitting up. He went out with Oleg.

  But the guy had come with ten other friends, and they knew two things: one, Oleg had a phonograph none of us knew about, and two, Oleg made vodka and kept it in the studio. (One thing we knew: Jack’s vodka was gone.) The music got turned up and the glasses were filled and there was no question of sleeping then. One of the new arrivals tried to have a conversation with Elisa. She didn’t seem to be aware that they were having a conversation. The guy wanted everyone to know that he’d met the Mexican artist.

  Diga someone, he said, not knowing how to pronounce Diego Rivera but knowing, nevertheless, that he was famous.

  The city had been full of fellow travellers from the West for months now. They’d all come for the anniversary and many had stayed on. I wanted to know about the Mexican artist, but I also wanted to already know, so I didn’t ask.

  Now Jack was telling the chicken story. I’d never seen him animated this way. The students who had been out in the hall and part of a different party had followed the new arrivals in, and were now sitting on the counter by the sink. They looked proud of themselves — they’d infiltrated an older, more refined group, if only for the night.

  Jack had been in an accident. He’d gotten on a tram without paying and was spotted, almost immediately, by a policeman. So he jumped off just as a woman was about to get on, and they’d collided, landing in a puddle, while the tram pulled away. The problem was, she’d been carrying a chicken in her bag and the chicken had jumped out. It started squawking and running around in all directions. He didn’t want the chicken to escape, so he had grabbed it and wrenched its neck like his mother showed him once, and the chicken died. When he put it down on the ground, it kept running around for a bit. He realized when he looked at the girl that she was hurt, and she laid into him yelling bloody murder. But even as she was yelling at him and he was hating her for it because it wasn’t his fault — you can never see anything out those windows anyway, they’re so goddamn filthy! — he could see this intensity in her eyes. She was staring at him with total clarity, and suddenly they were kissing, right there in the middle of the street. And then he was taking her home with him, back to his room and they spent the whole day together and then the whole night and only the following day, when she woke up screaming, did they realize that her arm had broken in the fall, and then he’d taken her to the hospital.

  Elisa and Sasha were watching Jack, too, but they were different than the rest of his audience: they knew which parts were true. I was wondering if it was the chicken lady who had made him happy, up until the moment that Elisa glided away from Sasha towards Jack. That was the change — the way she slipped into his arms told me that what had happened between them was new, but also, probably, permanent.

  At some point, someone suggested a drinking game: enter the dragon. This is how it went. Everyone began the game sitting at the table. Elisa was the game leader, because everyone knew she couldn’t hold her alcohol. Everyone put a few kopeks into the pot. Oleg’s vodka filled our glasses. One of Tova’s rats was also drinking.

  Elisa yelled, Enter the dragon! and we obeyed, drinking and then ducking under the table until she said the dragon was gone. Falling out of one’s chair signalled elimination. I gave up early, positioning myself under the table to watch how green the faces got as they hid from the dragon. When they resurfaced to pitch in another kopek, the coins bounced on the table just above my head. Jack was next to be eliminated, so the two of us sat beside each other, a good level of drunk, by which I mean functioning.

  He hates to lose, Jack whispered, pointing to Sasha’s legs. I knew Sasha would drink until he couldn’t function anymore.

  Enter the dragon, Elisa called out again, and everyone was under the table, breathing fast, in and out, a sluice of breath so saturated with alcohol that it alone could get you drunk. The dragon was gone, and everyone was back up, but not all at once, and the rules changed to whoever was last to sit upright back at the table was out. There was a momentary debate about what constituted upright. More and more of us gathered under the table. It was a hot, sweaty world under there, people folded up into one another as knees and elbows multiplied. Suddenly the heat got too much. I crawled out from under the table and realized that the only ones still up top were Sasha and Elisa, the two of them passed out with their heads resting on their folded up arms. I unfolded Sasha and said it was time for bed.

  We pulled the mattress from Sasha’s old cot into an empty studio across the hall. These studios had no windows, so the heat made them absurdly hot. We stripped down to go to sleep. The party across the hall kept going, but the sound was muted, and we were bone tired. Maybe we’d slept for an hour when Sasha got up to pee, leaving the door open behind him. I sensed someone in the doorway too quickly after Sasha had left and opened my eyes to see that the figure in the doorway wasn’t Sasha, but the pudgy student, just standing there, staring.

  Hey, I said, propping myself up to look at him. The pudgy student was very drunk. Could barely talk, it seemed. Sasha came back to bed, both of us naked, but the guy just stood there, staring.

  Aren’t you guys going to have sex or something? he asked.

  No, Comrade. We’re sleeping now, said Sasha, using the word comrade because the student wasn’t a friend.

  Come on. Just kiss her! he said to Sasha. She’s exquisite!

  It was funny, having him stand there like that, the pa
rty going on and he, like a lost dog, looking for something exciting, but in the wrong place.

  Yeah, not tonight, we’re just going to sleep, said Sasha.

  I mean, we’re here, he said. When are we ever going to be here again? He said it as if fate had presented us with a miraculous gift, and all we needed to do was to take full advantage of it.

  I think we forgot he was there and laid back down, we were that tired. The student pulled our door shut, and I could tell from the sound of the studio door being opened and the rush of music and laughter that poured out that he’d gone back to the party.

  Eventually, the music quieted and we fell into a really deep sleep, something you don’t notice or remember unless it’s interrupted, which it was, sometime later, when the student opened the door again and waited for us to notice him, standing there in his socks, underwear, and a tunic.

  I just need a bed. I just thought I’d crawl in with you guys. There’s nowhere else to sleep.

  Whatever, we said.

  He had been kind of cute just standing there. But then he was on my side with his hands, just gently first, wanting to find their way around my waist, which was okay.

  And I said, Sure but we’re just going to sleep, okay.

  He mumbled, Yeah, yeah, I just want to sleep, I’m so tired, but then his hands groped their way to between my legs. I yelled out and Sasha hopped between us and said in a sleepy but stern way that all we wanted to do was sleep.

  He agreed wholeheartedly, saying, Yeah, no problem. Really, I just want to sleep, too.

  A few moments passed and I drifted off, until Sasha suddenly jerked into me, away from the guy, and that was the end of him. The poor thing basically didn’t care where his hands landed, whether on female parts or male; he just wanted something that night, anything.

  So that was the first day of 1928; Sasha and I having to fight off a guy who looked like a bear and wanted sex so bad he’d try to get it from anywhere.

  When we walked home the next morning, the city felt as if it were a place I’d never been. I can’t say for sure if Sasha felt the same way, but as we walked he smoked one cigarette after the other, pausing on street corners to light the next one from the previous, so I knew he was nervous and I worried he’d make himself sick. We’d barely slept. Somehow, the city had shifted just enough to make us dizzy. As if the streets and buildings and parks had been lifted up off their grid and then given a sharp kick before being laid back down, so that they were now ever so slightly askew — north not so north anymore.

  Give it a few days, I said to myself as I walked just ahead of Sasha, trying to stay out of his haze. I wanted to tell him I’d never go back to the dacha again. I wanted to say I didn’t care if his mother hated me. I wanted to say that the family unit was bullshit and that she could go fuck herself. When we got to the park and I saw the mean group of kids and Tobias huddling with a woman I’d never seen, I wanted to kick them all in the shins because something had to hurt real bad and it might as well be them, since they were accustomed to hurting and might as well hurt some more. But I walked past, and so did Sasha. If Tobias saw me, he didn’t show it. The truth was that what had changed was Moscow itself, and the change was because Bekhterev was gone, and we both knew it.

  1928

  When I returned to the institute on that first Monday after the break, I knew from the fresh blanket of snow between the gate and the back entrance that I would be alone. The lock had frozen over and at first resisted my key.

  Inside, I looked around the kitchen for signs that anyone had been there, but there were none. The light filtering into the kitchen was diffuse and grey, made so by the layers of frost that had accumulated on the windows while the heat had been off. The frost always came in delicately at first, in fine, fern-like formations, but in our absence, it had thickened into a solid sheet, effectively cutting the institute off from the outside world. This small change was enough to make the whole institute feel abandoned, yet it had been hardly more than a week since Congress had closed.

  I pulled on my slippers and lit the stove. While the kettle started up, I drifted down the hall to the lab. A lamp had been left on in Bekhterev’s office. Its pale light reflected off the shiny surfaces of the lab tables and followed me around, just as the sun’s last rays strike out across a surface of water, following the walker on the shore. I wove in and out of the tables, in and out of the light, passing the glass cabinets, but not seeing inside them, as I saw only myself.

  In the doorway of his office I lingered for a moment, but it was inevitable that I would go in and sit down, as I always had, in the chair facing his desk, and, in doing so, begin to adapt to his being gone. His death seemed to have slowed time down, fucked with it somehow. It seemed simultaneously possible that it had been years since I’d last sat there but also that I’d sat there minutes ago, that Bekhterev had died years ago, or had left on a train bound for Leningrad just that morning. I had no words for how I felt. I wasn’t numb exactly, but nothing raced inside me, no feeling I could name, nothing as clear as fear, or sadness.

  Maybe he had left the light on because he’d planned to return.

  His desk was as it had always been: beside the lamp, there was a cup full of pencils, a ragged pile of papers, and, towards the outer edge of the light’s beam, a mortified hand floating in a glass jar. On the other side of the desk, a small framed photo faced Bekhterev’s chair, an image that had always existed in my imagination, since I’d never sat where he did, never crossed to his side of the desk. I’d always assumed it was a family portrait. It had been so real to me that I’d even conceived of how they had posed: Bekhterev standing behind his wife, his hand on her shoulder, and she, with the youngest baby in her arms, flanked on either side by the older siblings, two boys and a girl. And behind this image of domesticity, Bekhterev, staring straight into the camera, stiff and unyielding, a patriarch, an old man.

  Just then, I heard a door close. A slight draft grazed the back of my neck between the edge of my hair and the collar of my dress. I’d imagined the closing door, I thought. Again the ghost-like draft, but I didn’t believe in ghosts.

  It seemed to me that there might be a good way to do this, to adapt to his being gone, and that it might begin with my making it more real. I went to the other side of the desk. Being where I normally wouldn’t have been might be a place to start. Being different would make me think differently.

  It turned out the framed photograph was not an image of his family at all, just the same portrait of Lenin that could be found everywhere, a portrait so ubiquitous it was invisible. I felt some small disappointment not to have known that this was what he’d looked at every day. It galled me to discover something about him now that he was gone, as though I were betraying him rather than just wishing he would come back. I’d actually never really been close to anyone who had died. If my parents were dead I didn’t officially know, which kept them alive, in a way. I’d known Bekhterev was old, but he’d always seemed invincible to me. His death seemed to come out of a cruel nowhere. I didn’t know what to do with the fact of it. Yes, death was inevitable, but Bekhterev had been exceptional in all cases, so why not this one? What was I supposed to do with the sadness of it? With the emptiness?

  What is there to be done? That was Lenin. Get going. That was Bekhterev.

  It was towards the end of that first week that I started to understand how the institute would change. Initially, even once everyone had returned from the holiday, no one spoke of Bekhterev. Our silence on the matter seemed to prevent all other conversation. Anushka was the type to talk about such things; Zhanna would do anything to avoid it. The one time Anush said she couldn’t understand how he’d died, whispered it, really, into her teacup, when we were all sitting in the kitchen, Zhanna stated loudly that he was old, and then, strangely, segued into a discussion about a painting they’d both liked and then on to a history of that painter who she said had an unbelievable capacity for capturing the sad eyes of horses. The painter was
born in Samara she said, and in that way, she led the conversation south, then east and away.

  In part, we were able to go on in his absence because we were so accustomed to it. It wasn’t so different, after all, from him being in Leningrad with his family, or away at a conference. I tried not to think about it too much, tried to keep busy. Bekhterev had always been the person who pushed us, and so even when he was away, he was there, in an expectation or a deadline. Now, with his death, the danger was that we would not only be quiet, but aimless, too.

  Sarkisov saw to it that we wouldn’t stay aimless.

  Late one afternoon, I found myself walking towards the doors at the end of the laboratory that led to the grand salon. I thought I was alone. At the doors, I exhaled, then pulled them open.

  The exhibits were silhouettes, their dark, floating shapes backlit by the pale grey murkiness that seeped in from the entrance hall. The grand salon was as we had left it, and yet it was not the same. I stood still to let my eyes adjust, waiting for something, a movement maybe, or some kind of sign. Not even the dust in the air shifted. The light was so grey it barely deserved to be called light.

  I took a chair from the side of the wall and set it beneath the chandelier, facing Lenin’s brain. The chair scraped against the floor when I sat, the sound echoing for but a moment. Then the room fell, again, into silence.

  I remembered the work that had been done on Lenin’s brain, how the autopsy report had described some parts as showing a pronounced collapse of the cerebral surface, and then elsewhere, two adjacent spots of collapse, and then elsewhere, additional signs of decay. The amateurs described him as having water on the brain, and I wondered about the links between water and melancholy, melancholy and collapse.

  Sitting there, I had the feeling of a question in me. The feeling that, if I sat still for long enough, a clear question might form, and then I’d be closer to an answer. Yes, I was waiting for a thing to happen. The chair creaked ever so slightly as I shifted. It seemed absurd and a little dramatic to be sitting alone in the room like that, thinking about melancholy and collapse, but life was different without Bekhterev. I felt unhinged. I leaned back in my chair, looked up at the chandelier, at the scraps of light shivering there, trapped in the prisms.