Uncertain Weights and Measures Page 2

  That year, I had started to lose my eyesight. Nothing cataclysmic. Indeed, the loss occurred so imperceptibly that I hardly noticed it at all. I mention it now because it correlated with the period in which I started to sit closer and closer to the front of the lecture hall, as if being drawn in by a stronger and stronger gravitational pull. Month by month, ring by ring, I approached the front of the room, until one day, I was sitting in the very front row. When Bekhterev spoke, he spat.

  I don’t remember the name of the course I took with him, nor even what the university thought we were studying. The discipline was yet to be named, meaning it had no rules. Bekhterev explained the novelty of the discipline metaphorically, that is, by way of the telescope.

  We know nothing! he said.

  Bekhterev used the word neuropsychology and compared the field to that of seventeenth-century astronomy when Kepler’s observations of the universe, which had been made with the naked eye, led to a revolution in our understanding of the solar system and our place in it.

  When he lectured, Bekhterev paced back and forth. Kepler had deduced from what little he could observe (his eyesight had been severely damaged by a case of childhood smallpox) that the solar system was heliocentric, thus contradicting centuries of astronomy that placed the earth at the centre. A man with blunted sight, said Bekhterev, looking at us with a fierce intensity, think on that.

  We are, said Bekhterev, at that very same threshold. Kepler had no telescope to speak of. We have no telescope. He had reason and imagination. We have reason and imagination. To date, about the brain, we know nothing.

  The way he talked about what we were doing had its effect: his pursuits became mine.

  During Bekhterev’s lifetime, we started to think we knew something, but now, I’m not so sure. A little bit more than nothing is still, essentially, nothing. The mathematicians would disagree. They would say that the difference between nothing and a little bit more than nothing was like that between night and day. But I am not a mathematician.

  Science was a raised skirt or a missing button, concluded Bekhterev in one of his lectures. You always hope for a nipple, but even its suggestion will hold your attention for a very long time.

  It became legendary among Bekhterev’s colleagues that after his first year of marriage his wife banished him from their bedroom because he didn’t sleep. If his office at the university was any indication, his home must have been a landscape of paper. I imagined him falling asleep reading manuscripts. In the morning, on waking, he’d only have to dig around in his sheets for a pencil before starting to work again. Every lab assignment he ever handed back to me looked as if it had been to war.

  Bekhterev never linked our studies with revolution, never drew comparisons, even, to the questions we, his students, were asking ourselves about what it meant to be a comrade, what it meant to be in love, what it meant to touch another and be touched, and what it meant to go out into the street and scream until you had no voice. He’d never been a thirteen-year-old girl living atop an illegal printing press, wishing that she could print pamphlets, too. No. In his class, we talked only about the brain. But he believed in the leap. The leap from one idea to another, from one neuron to another, from one stage of development to another. I could go from his class to a rally and see the same fundamental logic at work. Bekhterev talked about evolutionary leaps; Leontiev talked about societal leaps. They were the same. They were about risk taking and experimenting and moving forward. One thing, then its opposite, then the fight between the two, then a kind of combustion, and then something new. In this way, my commitments to science gradually became political. In neuropsychology, it wasn’t even that we were free to make mistakes; it was that we were called upon to make them. Mistakes were inevitable in the political world, too. In science, the most ambitious took their time, waiting, they said, getting ready for a really big failure, which meant they were doing something totally new. It’s not an exaggeration to say neuropsychology seduced me. I remember the ache in my hand at the end of each lecture, how it suffered from trying to keep up.

  While the link between the Revolution and the science was mostly meant metaphorically, in the oral exams the link was explicit: I studied for my first exam for weeks, but it wasn’t until the night before that my roommate — her name was Rima and she became one of my best friends — told me I’d been studying the wrong thing.

  Dummy, she said, shaking her head as she looked over my notes.

  My desk was covered in diagrams I’d copied and recopied and copied again. When I closed my eyes, anatomical diagrams floated before me as visions. The new words slipped into my speech, replacing my everyday vocabulary with the specialized lexicon of the new science: sulci and gyri and neural pathways. It had been weeks since I had slept a full night without a pressing question waking me before dawn. I’d flip on the lights and scour my notes for an answer. This was what I thought it meant to be an aspirantura. I was aspiring. This was what it looked like. The bags under my eyes were proof of how much it mattered to me.

  Which meant I almost cried when she told me I’d made a mistake.

  They know you are good; that’s why you’re sitting the exam, she said.

  Then what? I asked.

  It’s about you, she said.

  The examiners had been sent over from the nearby Marxist-Leninist Institute. Two old guys and a young one, all sitting behind a long wooden table, all of them wearing wire-rimmed glasses. From the rumpled look of them, they’d been sitting there for hours. Behind them was a blackboard, wiped clean. I sat in front of them. Because it was something all the students did in those days, I’d eaten extra sugar in the days before the exam. My palms were sticky with what I imagined was sweet, sugary sweat.

  The youngest examiner began. His face was pockmarked, though he was handsome. He asked a few easy questions about brain anatomy and the nervous system, but I saw the way his eyes went glassy when I responded. Rima had been right. The exam wasn’t about science. We were waiting for what really mattered.

  The political exam.

  You may be aware, said the older one, that some have started to recognize that certain advantages might accrue to those who profess allegiance to the goals of the Bolshevik party, whether it be in terms of career or political advancement or even housing. We’re not accusing you of this — we’re not in the business of accusations, by any means. You should think of this examination as an opportunity to refresh not only your scientific knowledge but your political theory, particularly as we move forward into the demands of revolutionary life. What our society needs is true comrades, people who are not aligned with the bourgeoisie, here or elsewhere.

  No one likes an opportunist, I said.

  Precisely, he said.

  So, said the young one.

  Their questions, new to me then, were standard. They wanted to know about my family: how my mother had been a card-carrier and had abandoned us to devote herself to the cause, and how, out of grief, my father had left me just as soon as I was of age. Officially my caregiver became my uncle, but I never lived with him. Not that I said this. I wasn’t much of a political creature, but I had learned enough to know that sometimes a vague suggestion — the word caregiver for example — could create the image of my uncle’s participation in my life even if I mightn’t have recognized him on the street had our paths crossed by chance. One of the examiners wrote something down. Perhaps the word grief had been too much. I wiped my sugary hands against my lap, pushing hard into my legs.

  The uncle who got you into school here?

  Yes, I said. My uncle’s connections must have been very good: none of this was pressed.

  They wanted to know what I knew about the West, about capitalism. Things I knew about capitalism and the West, the two being one and the same, were that they relied upon exploitation. They were colonizers; their societies were marred by slavery and poverty, by lineups for the most basic services, by people living on the street. I knew slavery hadn’t ended, no matter wha
t the officials said. The reports from the Pullman porters were clear: slavery was everywhere. I knew about the income gap and the basic idea, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and Christianity justifies the disparity.

  How’s that? the young one asked.

  As an opiate, sure, but more than that. It casts the whole system as a moral one, I said. Rich capitalists still want to believe they are good. Christianity helps, but Christianity can be bought. And that thing they believe: pulling up your boots. They explain poverty by laziness and laziness as a sin. Capitalists confuse the choice to buy with the freedom to think — they only have the former.

  Right, they said. And the Tzar?

  He enslaved the press. He punished political discontent and political protest. Shooting ranges, and absolute power. Literature was censored. But Marxist thought burst through the lines of the censored literature.

  What about Engels? they asked.

  Socialism is a science and it must be pursued as such. It must be studied.

  I passed.

  What I’d said was what I believed, but somehow being tested on my beliefs made them come out strange, foreign, as if they were a second language and not something I’d been born into. I was so young — barely twenty years old — when I had that first exam. In truth, I was the perfect age for such a thing: the thoughts we have then are the purest ideologies we’ll ever hold, even if the ideology is to question everything, which mine wasn’t. Not exactly. The way I thought about things, when I did think about them, was that everything was a science; questioning was thought. Socialism was a science. Historical materialism explained the mystical religions at the time of kings and queens and the rise of Protestantism under capitalism. The dialectic was what would free the West from capitalism. Dialectical thinking meant first you discovered an atom, then you asked that atom a question: how small are you? The atom said, I am this small, no smaller, and you said, Come on…, and it replied, Okay, smaller than that. It is A meets opposition in B, and they combust and become C (and C was better than either A or B ever were). I was living at the start of the new age in the city that was at the centre of it all. We’d left behind the mystical age and finally begun the inquiry into what really governed everything: our material conditions, our material bodies.

  But the examiners didn’t speak science.

  It was spring when I saw Sasha again. I’d wanted to find him myself, but I realized only after he’d dropped me off that first night I didn’t know where he lived or studied. He was one of those people who preferred asking questions to answering them, a characteristic that was rare in those days. When I saw him next, he was waiting for me out front of my residence. I don’t know how many nights he sat on the bench like that, waiting. When I saw him, I laughed out loud because he looked so much the part of an art student in his fedora and an ill-fitting overcoat. He’d gotten an idea into his head, he said, and hadn’t let go of it all winter long. The idea was me.

  He wanted us to go back to Osorgin’s. I hadn’t returned since the explosion. Winter and my schoolwork reduced my radius. I felt nervous, but I couldn’t tell if it was the thought of returning to the bookstore or the idea of Sasha himself that created the feeling, so I said sure. We didn’t speak on the tram ride in. He was different than the men I’d known before. They’d all been students, studying science, like me, or politics, like Rima. I’d met Nikolai in the Pioneers, Pavel at school, Pyotr at a rally, but all of them seemed like boys in comparison to Sasha. They drank competitively with their friends, they kissed with over-big, over-wet tongues. How did Sasha kiss? I wondered.

  The tram stopped and we got out. At a cigarette stand, Sasha asked for Gitanes. The cigarette girl looked at him, taken aback, and offered him a different brand, which he refused. We walked on.

  No one sells French cigarettes, I said.

  She does, he said, just not tonight.

  She didn’t look like she does, I said.

  He pulled out a near-empty pack of Gitanes and offered me one.

  The Gitanes smoked cleaner than other cigarettes I’d tried, like the difference between brandy and cognac I said to myself, as if I knew.

  From the level of the street, we looked down at the entrance to Osorgin’s. The front window had been blown out and left that way for months. In the blackened interior we spied charred and sodden books and I wondered what it meant, or if it meant anything at all. The green lamp was broken, its glass mingled with other debris from the tobacconist’s. Where had the Osorgins gone? I walked down a few of the steps to peer through the broken window. Lying against the chalkboard wall, under remnants of the last image that Osorgin had sketched, I made out the shape of a body, the slow rise and fall of its back as it slept. Sasha and I looked at each other, trying to read one another’s reaction, trying to know if what the other’s face said meant it was better to go in to investigate or better to leave well enough alone. The figure shifted under our gaze.

  Should we go? I whispered to Sasha. He nodded yes.

  On the wall that week, Osorgin had sketched this image:

  It is Husserl’s conception of time, memory, and the pressure the past puts upon our present. Had Osorgin anticipated the explosion? I wondered. Had the bomb — we later found out it was a bomb — been intended for the bookshop, or was it, as others said, intended for the synagogue down the street? The diagram seemed to capture every question I had about what had happened to the Osorgins, what was happening to Sasha and me that night, and what all of it would mean for the future we had, just then, started to hope for. In the diagram, a line moves from A to E thus capturing an idea we have about time — that it is linear. Husserl is telling us something, saying, hang on a second, time isn’t so linear after all. It gets punctuated from beneath the surface as P surges up: P is a sound from the past, like that of an explosion (or sound’s absence, the silence of the million-strong crowd gathered before the poet Mayakovsky), or a scent (like the lime trees that once lined the streets in Moscow), or an impression as vague as summer’s timeless heat. The scent of lime wafts by and suddenly we’ve forgotten what season we’re in, what year. Yet we keep thinking of time as progressive, forward moving. The future is a line that stretches out ahead of us, captured in the diagram by the arrow that follows the E. The arrow is anticipation, what we project for our future, our imaginations moving forward at more or less the same rate as our memories move back until suddenly, again unbidden, the movement is broken by a memory, say, of a loved one, and then we exist for a moment in no time and no place. The timelessness and placelessness of a scent or a sound: it exploded my heart just to think of it.

  That night, Sasha took my hand again, and again we walked away, slowly this time.

  The exams taught me one thing and one thing only: everything I needed to know I’d learned from that blackboard in the bookstore, from the clandestine meetings at the hand of my mother, from the pamphlets and speeches, from the all-night conversations in a bar. I’d learned it from hearing Kollontai and Mayakovsky lose their voices reciting poems to thousands of people, from the way a woman could sell Gitanes one night and not the next, from the timelessness of a first kiss.

  Over the course of the next three years, Sasha and I would fall in love. The way we came to know each other was so intimate that I spent those years adapting to feeling I had been cracked wide open, feeling another person in the world knew me better than I knew myself. When we would look back on our encounter at Osorgin’s, we’d say on that night we found each other, and so our lives were divided into the period before, when we were looking, and the period after, when we had been found.

  In January 1924, Lenin would die. That same year I would marry Sasha, and I would start working for Bekhterev at the Institut Mozga, an institute he referred to in private as the Pantheon of Brains. My life seemed to have found its right shape. Then, suddenly, both Sasha and Bekhterev would be gone, and I would need to find them. This story is about that. I call it a story, but it’s not fictional. Everything I have written
here is true.

  1927

  On October 27, 1927, the Institut Mozga opened to the public for the first time. We chose that date so that the opening could coincide with the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, and therefore with the parades, the arrival of fellow travellers from around the world, and the general euphoria some of us felt at how far we had come. The institute fulfilled Bekhterev’s lifelong vision of a pantheon like the one in Paris but, in his words, ours would be better because our brains were elite and our aim was to enlighten. The Parisians had been indiscriminate, displaying the brains of criminals and degenerates with the same care they bestowed on their men of science. We were different. They had put together their collection so easily by way of theft, since no one had asked the permission of the criminals and degenerates, whereas our collection was the result of careful solicitation — letters to the living geniuses, letters to their bereaved. Bekhterev had been slowly collecting this way for years, but it took Lenin’s death and the politburo’s desire to have his brain on display for the institute to get the political support it needed. Crass as it is to say, Lenin’s death had come at a good time for Bekhterev. Lenin’s brain allowed Bekhterev’s scientific enterprise to align with the revolutionary, and so the institute was born.

  Nevertheless, it had taken over two years for any significant research to be done on Lenin’s brain, this because the politburo had determined the brain had to be sent out of the country, to the laboratory of a certain Dr. Oskar Vogt, whose techniques were considered the best in the Communist world. The institute was, by virtue of Vogt’s involvement, a joint German-Russian venture, a collaboration that had allowed us access to research, technical advances, and equipment that would otherwise have remained beyond our grasp. Vogt’s deadline for any initial results had always been October 1927 because of the anniversary, so there we were, ready to open the doors for the first time to a public that wanted to know how Lenin’s brain could explain Lenin’s genius. We wanted to know, too. Ten years after the Revolution, Lenin’s genius would be revealed once again. Our expectations were high.