Uncertain Weights and Measures Page 21

  She began to chatter immediately, saying she had heard so much about me, that Bekhterev had thought of me as a daughter, and all this on the assumption that I knew as much of her, which I was embarrassed to admit, when finally she paused to take a sip of water, that I didn’t.

  Who are you? I asked.

  She threw back her head in laughter at the absurdity of it, of the lopsidedness of what we knew, and her hair — a coppery shade with streaks of a blond that was almost white — caught the light from the window behind her, the shimmer of it almost like liquid.

  I am his first daughter, she said, and I almost choked as I laughed out of bewilderment and wonder.

  I surprised myself, not only because my first instinct was to hug her again, but also because that was what I did. And so we held each other, laughing and so strangely happy to be together, and then the feeling shifted and we held on tighter, crying, too, so relieved were we to have found each other and to no longer feel so alone with our grief.

  You saw him every week, I said.

  Yes, he kept close tabs on me. He was worried about my health.

  Are you healthy?

  Not very, she said.

  Bekhterev had married late, and before that had had only one lover, a woman who’d loved him but had refused to marry him, a mathematician who had never wanted the trap of marital life, not even once she fell pregnant with Asja. He had pursued her, and more than that, he’d loved her and devoted money and time to her, but she’d never allowed him to become a significant or permanent part of her life, not even after the birth of their girl. For Asja, it had meant a cosmopolitan life, because she had spent it in Sweden and Berlin, and when she mentioned Berlin, I had to shake my head at the improbability of it all.

  Was your mother Sofia?

  Yes, she said, her eyes tearing up ever so slightly.

  Fuck, I said.

  I guess, she said.

  Her mother had died when she was a young child, less than ten, and it was for this reason that Bekhterev had been able to maintain such steady contact. She spoke at length about her mother’s research and her time in Sweden, how unhappy it had been, the controversy that had surrounded her mother’s appointment to the academy and how quickly the honour was retracted, the disappointment it had caused, disappointment being too soft a word, for her mother had plunged into a depression that had lasted years. Even once the darkest periods seemed to be over, they had recurred at the onset of winter every year, a phenomenon that seemed to have been passed on to Asja, who, at the beginning of December, would find herself similarly transported into a melancholy from which she couldn’t escape until solstice had passed and the days had begun, again, to lengthen. Asja spoke so quickly and with such a brightness that it was immediately evident to me that she had inherited not just the melancholy of her parents but also their fierce intelligence, and it struck me again that intelligence might truly be more burden than gift.

  I asked her if she’d ever known anything of Bekhterev’s political activities, and she answered in riddles, or what sounded like riddles to me. I heard many names I recognized and some I didn’t. Some were party members, some were scrappy specialists who had made their way without party connections. He was a good man, she said repeatedly.

  We talked so long about the past — hers and mine and what we knew of Bekhterev’s — sharing what we knew, marvelling at what we didn’t, and then we turned to the one that seemed to be occupying everyone, which was the Shakhty trial, the judge and jury having been recently selected and just as soon thrown out, by then for the third time. We speculated about the severity of the accusations and what the consequences of a guilty verdict would be, concluding that all the men would die because the accusations levied against them included treason. They were wreckers, after all, accused of sabotaging industrial equipment and therefore our industrial future.

  Asja was troubled by it, though it wasn’t the trial that bothered her as much as the media circus that surrounded it; the way it turned people against each other. They became like wolves, she said, ready to devour each other, rip each other to shreds. Her face drained of colour as she spoke. I imagined a snow-covered field, a group of poorly dressed engineers huddled in a circle, their backs to each other, their arms alternating between clutching their necks to protect themselves from the cold and thrusting out a desperate hand to ward off the pack of wolves that was circling, ever narrower, coming in for the kill. It was pointless the way they tried to defend themselves, and the scene turned bloody as I tried to redirect my attention to Asja and our present circumstances: did she want water perhaps? I heard myself weakly assert that the trial would be just, that even if the trial had become a kind of cockfight for some of the workers, it would be conducted with dignity and justice; only the guilty would be convicted.

  I feel afraid, she said.

  When the nurse came to say that I had to leave, we hugged fiercely, and I left, walking towards the train station, intending to cut through it because it would be shorter and safer, I thought, by virtue of its public nature. The station was almost totally empty but for the occasional person sleeping on a bench, and a few families who seemed out of place, given the hour. They were clearly waiting for one of the last trains out of the city, and their children were either bundled up and sleeping or running about in circles, their small, singular cries echoing up to the ceilings and back down, piercing the nests of the sleeping birds, who, irritated, flapped their wings and flew across the station to somewhere more peaceful. My steps echoed back at me as I walked. The sound of the space was lonely and timeless. But then, out from nowhere it seemed, three uniformed men turned a corner and approached me swiftly, fanning out into a V so that I was suddenly caught, suddenly surrounded.

  The middle one struck a friendly but firm tone, saying good evening, miss, and asking to see my papers. What papers, I asked, and they said don’t you follow the news, and I said apparently not, regretting my insolence almost immediately. Time to get with the times said the short one, and the officious one said where are you from, and I said don’t you hear my accent, and he said not really, and I said Moscow.

  The short one said you never know, but I didn’t know what he meant.

  The third one, who had been silent the whole time, said that this was a warning, but it would be the only one, and I said, but how will you know I’ve already been warned, and he said, I won’t. I’m just saying that the warnings will be happening this week and starting next week, either you’ll have your papers in order or you won’t. What will they prove? I asked. What you said, he replied, that you’re a Muscovite true and true. Everyone else has to leave. Everyone, he said, gesturing to the near-empty station, suggesting that the process had already begun and that those remaining today wouldn’t remain tomorrow.

  The next morning, I went early to the library because one of the names Asja had mentioned had floated around in my head as I slept, or didn’t sleep, next to Sasha. I realized that I recognized it from a dedication of Bekhterev’s, the book he’d written after the Revolution but before Lenin died, the one whose title I could never remember, On Materialism or something of the sort. The library was downtown, and on that morning, the newspaper boys were hanging out at the top of the steps, smoking and chatting after having done their morning work. I had spent so many of my hours as a student in one or another library. I’d always been impressed, almost inspired, by the order imposed in some collections and by the complete lack in others (though it was merely that some collections had an order that appealed to me — by subject or last name, say — and others were totally pointless, such those ordered by date of acquisition, which resulted in a history of the Great War sitting alongside a tome about marine animals in the Black Sea, alongside a book which described itself as a meditation and addressed a theological concept such as grace.

  Thankfully, the main library was ordered by last name, which made me independent. On the second floor, I found the stacks and proceeded to where Bekhterev’s books ought to have
been, though try as I might, I couldn’t find them anywhere. I asked a librarian who dutifully pulled out the call cards that should have surrounded his name, and she, too, could find only a reference to an Arkady Bekhterev, a distant and unimportant relative. I tried not to react, asking in a mild enough tone if there happened to be any books by the one to whom Bekhterev had dedicated his book, and there were none, a thing which was so improbable as to be impossible, and this was how I saw the way that libraries themselves wrote history and that history was forever being rewritten.

  I later heard that in those first days after Congress, when Bekhterev was supposed to speak to the pedologists and psychologists, questions about his sudden death had permeated conversations in the city’s bars, hospitals, and universities, but such conversations had come to a halt by the time Sasha and I had returned. As I walked around the city in the week after meeting Asja, one comrade after another admitted that the mood that had surrounded Bekhterev’s death was one of “embarrassment.” Despite his celebrity, his death had barely been noted in the newspapers. It had been easy for some to assume they’d simply not been invited to his funeral, but those who thought about it knew there hadn’t been one. It wasn’t long after that that his books had started to disappear from the libraries and bookstores. It embarrassed the librarians to claim they’d misplaced all of his works, but they did so, allowing that embarrassment to stand in for the more pervasive shame of their complicity in this union-wide betrayal. Later, his research contributions started to disappear from reprints of scientific articles. Monographs that drew on his research were also reprinted without mention of his participation or were permanently shelved, which was a different kind of death.

  Within a week, my papers were checked again, this time on Arbatskaya, on the corner where I’d grown up, the absurdity of it absurd only to me, because by then I already knew not to make any extraneous commentary with these men — not to say anything for the sake of friendliness — because the more I said, the more various the ways it could be interpreted. All this led, of course, to a new industry developing, an industry around fake papers. But you had to have money for those.

  I had missed the Labour Day deadline, but by June the new exhibit was up. It looked like all the rest and just like Bekhterev would have wanted: professional, scientific, informative, and enlightening. Like the other exhibits, in addition to the model of the brain, we had a few original slices and copies of some of his most well-known articles. Excerpts from Reflexology and Materialism and Objective Psychology. We placed the exhibit where he’d envisioned: at the end of the semicircle. By our logic, this wasn’t a high point, but it wasn’t a low point either; it was just another gap that had been filled.

  I wrote the report that Sarkisov had asked for. In it, I said, There’s nothing to report. This was true, especially once I’d erased the faint markings in the diary, eliminating all reference to Asja.

  Astonishing how lucky one gets if one works hard enough, said my father. Plunge in, said my mother. Don’t be an outsider, said Bekhterev.

  Over the course of the summer, Stalin became First Secretary, and the trial concluded with either the worst possible outcome or the best possible outcome, depending on who one was, the city having divided itself along those lines — for or against the engineers — though in truth no one would admit to being for the engineers since that could easily be understood as being against the country, even if one didn’t mean it as such. Decisiveness and transparency started to matter more than nuanced thought or creative interpretations, for the latter could too easily be misunderstood and misunderstandings had become dangerous. On the one hand, that summer people were judged with a new moral clarity; on the other, some people were lying.

  At the time, no one really understood how drastically our lives had changed, but the tone that was set then would stay with us for decades. News circulated via official and unofficial channels. In the unofficial channels we heard of civilian attacks and a renewed class war — priests targeted, kulaks disenfranchised, the old bourgeois experts coming under assault, all things my father had predicted. The official channels reported on unprecedented growth in our industries, the promise of agricultural yields that would surpass any from recent history, and on the wisdom and charity of our First Secretary whom children were invited to refer to, should they so desire, as Papa Stalin. In increasingly private spaces, and only among those who could be trusted, a new term was coined and adopted which referred to the targeted people: we called them former people, and they could be seen moving throughout the city like ghosts — no voice, no future. The wise among them accepted their fate, seeing clearly that the change was irreversible, but many seemed to say, over their shoulders, as they departed, I’m leaving, don’t throw dirt at my back as I go! I’d see them from time to time, waiting for a tram to come, a small case at their side, and I’d scrutinize their faces, looking for some sign that they did or did not deserve their exile. But there was none. I never left home without my identification anymore.

  The summer was the hottest on record. Forest fires threatened the countryside, demanding extreme caution from anyone who dared to venture beyond the city limits.

  Meanwhile, Sasha was happy. His next install was mostly sculpture, and the sculptures were mostly bronze. Heavy, in other words. On Sasha’s suggestion, the gallery hired Jack to help because they had less than a week to bring the pieces in from the loading area, up a staircase, and into the gallery space whose sloping ceiling and easily chipped walls exacerbated the delicacy of the operation. The size and weight of the pieces made them both cumbersome and dangerous. They’d arrived with a rumour attached: someone said they’d crushed a man’s hand in the previous gallery.

  The technicality of the install made Lukas the authority, something Sasha could see, even from the outset, was going to be a problem. Lukas could be charming when he wanted, in his Southern European way, but he was annoyingly self-sufficient, which often left the old trio of Sasha, Dimitri, and Jack on their own, waiting for Lukas to come back.

  That was the week that the nurse called me at the institute. It’s not serious, she said, but he can’t walk, so you’ll have to pick him up.

  It so happened that the morning the pieces arrived, Lukas had run off to do an errand, leaving the triumvirate to their own devices. The pieces were still sitting in the loading bay in four large crates.

  Where’re they from? asked Jack.

  Sasha walked around one of the crates, looking for some kind of indication. On top of the crate was a requisition sheet.

  Leningrad, he said.

  Dimitri walked to the end of the loading bay and pulled the large doors shut. They’d learned with the paintings that the cold could affect the art, and that morning the temperature had dropped substantially. Bronze seemed like it should be immune, but what did Dimitri know?

  Because of the weight, they would have to rig up a special system for moving the work around. The gantry was a kind of pulley system that could hoist up very heavy pieces and roll them slowly from one side of the room to the other, but only across a single axis. An elegant solution, but it wasn’t perfect. Because they couldn’t have all the pieces of art lined up along that one axis, they needed to have a way to lower the pieces onto plinths that didn’t sit right beneath the pulley. On the first day, they set the system up. A block and tackle would hoist the work and this would be held by a pulley connected to a crane.

  On the second day, Lukas wanted them to call the architect. They had to know how much weight each panel could hold. The pieces were so big their weight might damage the structure of the building itself. That much was obvious when they’d seen the forklift almost tip over with every crate it took off the truck. They would have called the architect in if they had found him. But they didn’t.

  On the third day, with Lukas off doing who knows what, Jack and Sasha started prying open the crates in the loading bay. A thin knife wedged between the front of the crate and the frame got them started. Once they had tha
t sliver of space, they found a sturdy piece of metal to widen the gap until finally the staples popped out of the frame. The crate’s front panel fell off all at once, slamming loudly against the concrete floor. Jack let out a whoop and Sasha felt, he later said, like he had in art school, free. They pulled the crumpled-up newspapers away from the structure, revealing the moody, discoloured bronze. It appeared to be part of a circle.

  The architect was dead, reported Lukas when he returned.

  That night, I met the four of them at Max’s. All the tables were full, the crowd was lively. We were sitting in Sasha’s favourite corner. A group of Pioneers had gathered in another. While Sasha, Lukas, Jack, and Dimitri talked about the next step, I watched the Pioneers. They were young, the oldest not more than twenty. One of them was hanging from a pipe that ran parallel to the ceiling. The waitress didn’t notice because she had her back to them, flirting with a table of old men. I watched him pull himself up and do one, two, three, and four chin-ups before dropping to the ground. One of the girls watched him, but the other girl was slumped over, holding her head in her hands. The guy did a few more, jumping down from the bar when a cook came out of the back to yell at him, and our waitress turned around to see him land. The slumped-over girl was looking sick. The chin-up guy started singing to her. The waitress could see what was about to happen and kicked them all out. The sick girl puked as soon as they got outside. I knew its colourful spray would be waiting for us when we left.

  Dimitri was talking. They’d abandoned logistics and were onto ideas again. Sasha looked like he was thinking about the ideas, Jack was watching Sasha, and Lukas was taking in the whole scene: the artists, the Pioneers, maybe even the way the place was steaming up, everyone removing whatever clothing they could. More and more skin was revealed, Lukas was still taking it all in. When Sasha laughed, Jack laughed. When Sasha leaned forward, so did Jack.