Uncertain Weights and Measures Read online

  Aligning our scientific aims with the revolutionary aims was facilitated by the language of Marx, who saw history as the result of material conditions just as scientists looked to the physical (rather than the metaphysical) for explanations. We said we were looking for the material substrate of genius. Genius was a term loosely defined back then, there being no particular test nor any clear physical characteristic that could be discovered post-mortem. In the absence of clear measurables, our only evidence was a lifetime of achievements. Let me try to clarify. In the two years since the institute’s establishment we had not yet succeeded in correlating the physical attributes of a certain brain with the excellence displayed in an individual’s life. That there must be some link between the physical and the mental, between the folds of the cerebral cortex and the intellectual range of capability it exhibited, was hardly an original hypothesis. Our aim was to prove not only that there was a link but also how that link might work. We wanted to see genius, not just believe in it. Where, precisely, did music and poetry come from? What about military strategy, plans for space travel, or visions of a life unending? How could a brain’s physical attributes explain the order of one mind and the chaos of another?

  The People’s Commissar for Health, Nikolai Semashko, praised our efforts, saying the institute’s work would result in the victory of materialism in an area where metaphysics and dualism were still strong. No god, no mystical order, and certainly not the stuff of dreams could explain how one person delivered perfect speeches while another strained to tell a house guest where he’d hidden a key. All our talents, all our traits, all our truths: they were physical, they were material. For Semashko and for others, what made our research so important wasn’t merely that it could explain why the titans of our past had been so powerful. No, our work promised an even greater though more illusory end: the project of remaking man. Change the physical and you change the mind. Change the mind and you change the world.

  By then, Sasha had developed a hypothesis about Bekhterev and the institute that meant we’d agreed he should stay at home. His hypothesis was that the institute wasn’t doing research; my hypothesis was that Sasha didn’t know anything about research. Three years into our marriage this much had become clear: I believed that physical and economic truths lay behind the different fates of people and countries, whereas Sasha believed in the beauty of ideas you couldn’t quite pin down, in feelings so powerful they dodged precise description. For me, words captured the essence of things; for Sasha words caught only the most fleeting impressions. Before we married, this difference might have been what made us so compelling to each other, but three years on, its charms were wearing off.

  The morning of the opening was cold and the wind scraped against my cheeks, suggesting an early winter. Walking up the hill towards the building, I looked at it as if for the first time. There was nothing else like it in Moscow. A visiting scholar from Yaroslavl once told me it was the spitting image of that city’s Orthodox cathedral.

  Strange, he’d said, for a scientific institute to look so…religious.

  The original architect came from Yaroslavl, I told him, and he hung himself in the attic.

  Yes, he’d responded, I heard.

  Over the years, I’d stopped seeing the idiosyncrasies of its design. The turrets and archways, the hand-carved wooden doors, even the red, gold, and azure fleurs-de-lys of the interior, it all disappeared in the haze of the everyday. Besides, it was what happened inside that was truly strange.

  While Vogt had been hard at work on Lenin’s brain in his Das Neurologische Zentralstation, we’d been perfecting our methods for comparing the brains we did have, which involved microtoming certain sections so a cellular study could be undertaken, and leaving other sections whole so a macroscopic examination could also take place. The process was painstaking and still inconclusive. Our hope was that Vogt’s analysis would establish irrefutable correlations. In this way, brain analysis could finally become explanatory as opposed to merely descriptive. This hope meant I was just like everyone else that night: desperate to know what he had discovered.

  The rumours about Vogt had been good and not good. Good: he was a Communist. Not good: he’d been thrown out of the German university system for “unprofessional conduct.”’ On the good side: even before Lenin died, as he was suffering the result of his 1923 stroke, he had wanted Vogt among his medical team. On the bad: everyone, including Bekhterev, especially Bekhterev, hated him. Bekhterev hadn’t said this exactly, but by then I knew him well enough to identify a deep animosity in the way he crossed his arms and bit his lip at any mention of Vogt. For my part, Vogt’s expulsion from the university suggested he thought like a revolutionary.

  If Vogt were successful, his work would bring our institute to the forefront of all the other scientific institutes across the union, all of which aimed to advance the revolutionary science. Collectively, they would transform our people from backward peasants into efficient workers whose lifespans would be extended, whose energies would never wane, whose collective intellectual capacities would make a triumph of the Soviet system.

  It was late afternoon when I made my way to the front entrance of the institute and stood, huddled against the open door, looking out onto Bolshaya Yakimanka. The boulevard had calmed for the night. A taxi idled by the bakery across the way. Denuded, lonely trees lined the street, their naked branches reaching up like supplicant hands. The setting sun snuck under the clouds and hovered a moment above the shops. Its golden light shone directly into my eyes, so I had to squint and look away. The institute’s brick exterior glowed bright red and then dulled as the sun descended behind the shops. A car door slammed and the taxi pulled away.

  I propped the first door open, then returned through the second set of doors to where it was darker and warmer. Sergei, our custodian, was sitting at the front desk, talking in a low voice with Anushka, one of our technicians.(I liked to think of her as one of “our” technicians because of the way it suggested a hierarchy, but the truth was I was one of our technicians, too). They both looked up as I entered. Sergei winked at me, then resumed the conversation. At a bar once I’d seen him feign a drunken stumble in order to collapse, hands forward, onto Anushka’s chest, and I’d seen her let him. She was only a few years younger than me, but in that time the entire university system had changed. No more lectures, and the exams were taken in teams. Everything was designed to encourage collaboration as opposed to competition. It sounded good in theory. Sergei, on the other hand, was ten years older, a puffy thirty-something, prematurely aged by drinking, and one of those activist-types who, when he was younger, had espoused all the typical values — anti-church, anti-ownership, free marriage, easy divorce — right up until his lover announced she wanted an abortion and he refused outright. Now they were married with two children between them, though I guessed he’d fathered others. I walked slowly past them, past the portraits — mostly scientists, save Lenin — and into the grand salon.

  It was empty. The glowing chandelier warmed the salon’s ivory walls and gold-tipped mouldings. Underneath the chandelier, the brains were arranged in a perfect semicircle. I went to find Bekhterev, just to have something to do. During the day, the podium had been set and the seats had been cleaned, but now the lights were dimmed and the excitement would be about watching and listening, not doing. I crossed the salon between the exhibit and the wall of mirrors, which disguised doors to the laboratory, back offices, and kitchen. There, too, the lights had been dimmed, but I heard voices arguing in the offices, one of which was Bekhterev’s. I zigzagged between the lab tables without turning on the light.

  Forget it, said Sarkisov, just as I appeared at the door. Sarkisov was probably just a few years older than me, but he’d trained under Vogt, using the German equipment and Vogt’s techniques, so that, despite his young age, he had returned to Moscow as our superior. He had other tricks up his sleeve, alliances only he knew about, debts owed, blow jobs given, as Sasha would have put it. Bekhterev
and Vogt were standing at opposite sides of the room, with Sarkisov between them, as if he were trying to bring them to agreement or prevent them from coming to blows. Sarkisov’s presence was awkward for Bekhterev because on paper, Sarkisov was everyone’s superior, but by reputation no scientist in the country got close to Bekhterev. Everywhere in the country, the newly established power structures butted up against the traditional hierarchies in just this way. Vogt, looking smug, nodded at me, then sat down in a chair, crossing one leg over the other before daintily pulling down on the pant leg that had risen to reveal his hairless leg. He lit a cigar. Bekhterev faced the two men with his arms crossed, leaning heavily against the wall. He stood up straight when he saw me.

  The doors are open, I said.

  Vogt and Sarkisov started to speak German, which meant the conversation was over, since Bekhterev didn’t speak German. He nodded at them and left. I followed him out. I’d interrupted something, but Bekhterev said nothing and I didn’t ask. Their voices and then their laughter trailed after us as we walked back through the dark laboratory and into the grand salon that seemed, with its ivory light and its promise of order, a different world altogether.

  Having closed the mirrored door, Bekhterev and I stood for a moment, looking at the room. The room demanded a certain sobriety, a reverence, even. Bekhterev put his hands in his pockets and pulled his shoulders back.

  It looks good, he said.

  Yes, I said.

  I could see he was upset, but there was a limit to our closeness, and that was it: I couldn’t ask what was wrong.

  We stood quietly in the dark, as if not quite ready to set the evening in motion. The room’s periphery was dark because the room’s only source of light was the chandelier at the centre, whose glow got caught up in the liquid of the displays, so that they, too, emanated a golden glow. Standing against the doors as we were, I realized that from this angle the exhibits lost their singularity and became elements of a collective formation that resembled the ancient ruins of Stonehenge, images of which I’d marvelled at as a child. Suspended in formaldehyde, all the brains appeared to float in their glass displays. Because the clear liquid was viscous, the brains did not rotate once placed inside, meaning there was a distinct front and back to the exhibit, a feeling that was exacerbated by the way the light faded, and so we were, in fact, looking at the shadowed side of everything.

  The stillness of the room created a sense of awe.

  That is, until, to our surprise, a lone figure moved from one of the plinths to the other, the way museum patrons do between paintings, with a slow, thoughtful step. The figure disappeared again behind the exhibit of Rubinstein’s brain.

  Each case sat on a plinth, and each plinth was labelled with the name of the brain’s owner and a description, detailing its distinctive characteristics. Certain plinths had shelves that held documents or objects illustrative of the owner’s life: musical scores for Borodin and Rubinstein, poems for the writers, decrees and speeches for the politicians. Even if my contribution had been more of the exhibiting than the analysis, I still had the sense that the alignment between the musical scores and the thickness of the folds were obvious, as if the folds were etched with notes or the frontal lobe with decrees.

  Bekhterev and I listened to the sound of a drawer opening. Some of the drawers contained photographs, and, in the case of brains whose key aspects were more visible on a cellular rather than a structural level, microphotographs of pertinent histological sections. Lenin’s brain, housed at the top of the semicircle, had been damaged by a shooting or by his strokes or by something else — we weren’t sure just what had been the cause — and so it needed to be displayed on a specific angle to hide the dead, black tissue. The other brains were displayed on the same angle — the right frontal lobe protruding — so that the choice appeared aesthetic. What very few knew, but many should have suspected, was that the display cases held only models.

  We heard the drawer slide shut and the figure drifted on to Borodin.

  Luria! called Bekhterev. With a sudden gestalt-like shift, the drifting figure became Alexandr Luria. He slipped between the plinths and walked over to us, squinting as his eyes adjusted to the dark. It had been years since we’d seen each other, yet he seemed the same. Same wire-rimmed glasses, same coal-black eyebrows, like an angry God had gashed his face with them, same jagged teeth too big for his mouth, same skinny body more wiry than that of a ballet dancer. Physically unattractive but so brilliant it didn’t matter. Since completing our studies we’d gone in different directions, mine ever aligned with Bekhterev’s, and his dedicated to his own research and further study.

  Seeing him again that evening reminded me of our last encounter. We were still both students then, both working with Bekhterev in what I imagined was the same sort of relationship, both protégés. Luria had taken me aside, though, and said there were rumours that my relationship with Bekhterev went beyond the professional. I’d known from his tone that he was asking me to clarify, but I refused on principle, knowing no man would ever be asked to do such a thing. The memory of that question and my refusal to provide a clear answer made me blush, as we do, looking back on the errors we made when we were young. I excused myself to attend to the others whose voices I could hear from the entrance.

  As I was walking away, I heard Luria ask Bekhterev if he would introduce the exhibit.

  In the entrance, I stationed myself close enough to the door so I could feel the cold air when it opened and closed. My greetings and instructions became a kind of litany that, in its repetition, allowed me to think. We had invited scientists, party members, and newspaper reporters. Some had brought their wives.

  I surveyed the gathering crowd as an outsider might, curious about why they had come and what the evening would mean to them. The journalists who wrote for Meditsinksi Rabotnik, Der Tagesspiegel, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the New York Times, and Pravda spoke varying degrees of Russian, ranging from the requisite spasiba to complete nuanced sentences and accomplished swearing, the truest test of literacy. Those who spoke well demonstrated it for those who spoke poorly, so that when they gathered around Sergei they were communicating not with him but with each other, establishing a linguistic pecking order they thought also mirrored their authorial rank. I’d seen this before. Capitalism breeds such manners. The foreign journalists always arrived together. They moved around the city in packs, staying in the same hotels, having sex with the same circle of women, and forming singular, neat opinions for export to their countries.

  I’d met one of the journalists several years before in the lineup to see Lenin’s body in the dark winter of 1924. That was the winter we remembered for its strikes and famines and peasant revolts. It was also the year I’d married Sasha, against the wishes of both our families, and the year I’d started to work for Bekhterev, against the wishes of Sasha.

  In the very faces of the lineup that winter’s day, I saw an entire world mourning. I remembered a peasant and his two young sons who had walked all the way from their farm near the western steppe, having left home just as soon as they heard the news. Diplomats from France. Whole orphanages. Groups of workers. Residents in communal apartments had come as a group, bringing their petty arguments with them. Reporters from the United States, Great Britain, France, Denmark, Switzerland. Nurses. Young Pioneers. Priests. People from the Caucasus. Secretaries’ unions. Teachers. At one point a girl my very same age sat down on the cobblestones and started to weep. A part of me wanted so much to embrace her, but I was at a loss as to how I could. Then an older woman walked up to her, knelt down, and put her hand gently on the weeping girl’s crossed arms. Their eyes met and soon after they were holding each other, though they had been strangers just minutes before.

  All that day, the line had advanced slowly. Though the boulevards were wide by the university, once we rounded the northeastern corner of the Kremlin walls, the streets narrowed. At points, the noise seemed too much. The Pioneers had begun to sing songs and, because by that
point we’d all started attending schools with the same curriculums, the same songs, and the same traditions, the words escaped our mouths without a single thought. Many from the crowd joined in. At one point, we began a folk song, the title of which I forget, but I remember the words And the Red Sea seethes and how our voices were suddenly doubled when another crowd that was as large and as diverse, joined in for the next lyric. That was how we realized there was not one line, but two. Our line came from the southern part of the city, theirs came from the east. The lines merged at the intersection of Nikitskaya and Rewoljuzzi.

  All that day, I had been looking for my mother. If she were anywhere in Moscow, she would be here, I thought. Strange settings make familiar faces unrecognizable. That was why, when I saw Dimitri waving at me from the other line, I didn’t, at first, wave back. I puzzled for a moment, and then knew I knew him, so I waved. And then I knew him as Dimitri, and so I smiled. Dimitri was Sasha’s friend, not mine.

  I had been wondering what my mother might look like; almost a decade had passed since I’d seen her. By the time she left, I’d reached my full height, though not my full figure. I was taller than her then but had no breasts to speak of, nor hips. She, on the other hand, was petite, yet full-figured. I only knew this because at night we bathed together and I took in her body, wondering in what ways we might, one day, be the same. Her clothes masked the soft curves of her breasts and hips.