Uncertain Weights and Measures Read online

  How long do the ants stay away? I asked.

  It only works for a few hours. After that they all start coming back. They see the dead bodies, but without the smell, the bodies don’t seem to mean anything.

  If I could have made the room bright again for one last time, it would have been later that year, when Dr. Vogt returned to Moscow to hold his last press conference. The summer had come and gone, Rima had given birth to a girl, I’d been round to wish them well — despite the estrangement I felt from their life — and had started to settle in my sparse apartment, started to see how the way the city had shifted so suddenly when Bekhterev died could become normal, the way everything does, with time. In the months since Sasha left, I had become accustomed to my life without him, though this is only partially true because he was with me all the time, everywhere I went, a more constant companion in his absence than he’d ever been in his presence. In his absence, I loved him still. Had he stayed, I might not. My solitary life was not so lonely. Only when I forced myself to be with others did I feel the cold sting of friendlessness. Vogt’s visit marked two years since the institute had opened. By then, the lights on the chandelier were virtually ornamental. If two or three lit up, we were lucky. Sometimes we took the bulbs out and rattled them around, hoping, somehow, to reconnect the filaments, but mostly we left them as they were. It looked better that way: the bulbs with a grey sheen of dust reminded me of a time when promise was in the air.

  Dr. Vogt had arrived on an overnight train and was early to the institute, arriving before me. His trip had been a nightmare. Border guards had confiscated his equipment. Boxes of slides, microcopies of exhibits, indigo dyes, his best paraffin. All of it, gone.

  The loss of those precious supplies was a loss to us as well, since it had recently been announced that the agreement with the Germans would be terminated, and this would be Vogt’s last visit. He’d been met at the station by Sarkisov, who hadn’t had the sense to delay the news. Instead, he’d sat Vogt down to tell him that his position as co-director of the Russian-German Brain Research Institute or the German-Russian Brain Research Institute — i.e., our institute, whatever it was called — had been withdrawn. News from on high was how Sarkisov had put it. It was a Soviet institute now. By the time I arrived, the two of them were seated in one of the back offices, well into the cognac. There was an air of regret about them, as though nostalgia had set in and was there to stay.

  On the bright side, Sarkisov was saying to Vogt, you won’t have to deal with any more guards.

  Maybe I won’t go back, Vogt responded. Or haven’t you heard about the crisis we’re facing?

  We had heard, of course. The official presses wanted nothing more than reports like those that were coming out of Germany in those days, and for a change, the unofficial presses were publishing similar stories. Everywhere we looked, news of capitalism’s latest crisis was on the front pages with images of the wheelbarrows full of money, the depreciation of it hour by hour. It made our lineups for shampoo and shoes look good.

  I lingered in the doorway for some time, feeling like a child watching the adults, until Vogt tottered to his feet and said he wanted to be caught up on the collection.

  Start from the top, he instructed me, but I wasn’t sure what that meant and had a feeling I’d be following him rather than him following me, no matter where I started. The question of what to say if he asked about the missing specimens — especially the lantern slides of Lenin’s brain — was all I could think about as we traipsed around.

  Thankfully, Luria arrived just then, which meant that he accompanied the two of us around the space. Luria had come to hear Vogt’s findings, which would be announced later that day.

  We ushered Vogt into the grand salon to begin, and Vogt stood before the Bekhterev exhibit.

  Arrogant old bastard, don’t you think, said Vogt to us. Reserving a place for himself amongst the geniuses?

  We smiled meekly.

  He never made Distinguished Scientist, now did he?

  Luria squirmed a little.

  The room had been set up as it had been two years previous, with a podium and rows of seats awaiting an audience. Luria asked about Vogt’s work since we’d seen him last, which elicited a vague response before Vogt changed the subject.

  What about those lantern slides? he asked me.

  Did you say they’d been taken to the university? said Luria to me. For cleaning?

  Vogt looked at Luria, then at me, but said nothing.

  Yes, I said. Vogt waved it off and set off for the lab, so I realized his curiosity was not scientific but egotistic. He was interested in the exhibit only to the extent that he could remind us what part of it had been his. We walked around some more, and then Vogt announced that he’d go back to his hotel to freshen up before the afternoon. Luria also announced that he was leaving.

  I caught him just as he was going out the door.

  Why did you do that? I asked.

  I don’t know where those exhibits are, he said. And as far as I know, you don’t know either.

  He paused and then turned back to me. But I won’t do it again, he said. Here’s another life lesson you seem to need, Tatiana: don’t get involved in other people’s mess. You need to know how to spot it, and then you should stay the hell away from it.

  Am I that mess? I asked.

  That you need to ask should tell you something.

  He was such a prick sometimes.

  Aren’t you staying for the talk? I asked.

  No, he said, I’m going home.

  It had never even occurred to me to wonder about his home. I think I’d assumed his life was like every other solitary life I knew — like Bekhterev’s had been in the end, like mine had become.

  I looked at him then heard myself ask, If I had an opportunity to leave, to go study in Berlin like Sarkisov, maybe even with Vogt, would you suggest I go?

  No, he said.

  Later that afternoon, Vogt spoke to a sparse gathering of reporters. There were no politicians and no scientists beyond those immediately connected with the institute, which is to say, myself, our two technicians, and one or two people I didn’t recognize. At most, there were ten people sitting, all of them towards the back rows, as though they, too, had expected more people to arrive to fill out the front rows. Nothing like two years prior.

  With the chandelier almost completely burned out, the brain exhibits were the main source of light. The evolution exhibits we’d set up on the back wall hung in the dark.

  Our research has led to seminal victories concerning the material substrate of Lenin’s genius, Vogt began, gamely speaking past the empty front rows. Unlike the subjective whims of individual psychological assessment, he said, cytoarchitectonics is superior because it is metrical and, therefore, objective. The mental substrate of Lenin’s genius has already been proven in incontrovertible terms: in layer three of the cortex and in many cortical regions deep in this layer, I have seen pyramidal cells of a size and number I’ve never before seen.

  I stood at the back, as I had in Vogt’s first speech, alone this time.

  Pyramidal cells? said Sasha. You’d think it was 1927.

  I know, I know, I said.

  Since architectonics can ascertain the size of the cortical regions involved in certain mental capabilities, in square centimetres, and their relative share of the total available cortex, in percentage, it provides objective criteria for evaluating, though only post-mortem, the individual characteristics of a brain. As such, Vogt said, our findings with regards to V.I. Lenin are at once conclusive, in that there can be no disputing the measurements thus far obtained, and introductory, as it is without doubt that there is much more to be discovered. In conclusion, the anatomical results show Lenin’s associative powers made him nothing less than, he leaned towards his meagre audience, a mental athlete.

  It was a moment Vogt had hoped would be triumphant, but the room was too empty, his announcement too vague. A few people applauded half-heartedly.
When scientists resort to metaphor, they are hiding something. Or imagining something. This was an experiment that had failed.

  After I thought everyone had left, I returned to the grand salon to find a woman sitting on a chair immediately in front of the Bekhterev exhibit. I hadn’t noticed her earlier. Seeing her there, I realized that I had seen her at the institute many times in the past months, but tonight was the first time I saw her sitting in a position that resembled, so closely, that of prayer. She didn’t notice me, and I didn’t make my presence known. She sat like that for several minutes, her head slightly bowed. I imagined her eyes as closed, or at least staring at the floor, which was something like staring at nothing. Then she abruptly raised her head and stood. I walked towards her, about to say something, when she turned to walk towards me. That was when I recognized her as Asja. At first she didn’t see me. Her eyes seemed to register me as an obstacle, a moving one, not as a person, not as someone she knew, but then I saw her break free from her reverie. She looked right into my eyes. She came close, whispered my name, and grabbed my hands to take me in.

  He would have been so happy with what you did here, she said quietly.

  And then she left. I turned to watch her go. Drifting was the way to describe her movements. I followed her out the salon, into the front entrance, and out to the street. It was dusk. I held onto the silhouette of her for as long as I could, but then she was gone, black against black.

  It was only once she was really gone that I realized she might have been like Sasha, spiriting away small pieces of the exhibit on every visit. I could have been angry, but now I felt relieved to think that small pieces of our work would outlive the institute, which seemed so blatantly destined for obscurity. It had seemed eerie at first, the way she’d stood there, but then I wondered if this wasn’t the way to understand what we’d been doing all along. That Vogt’s great discoveries had been delivered in metaphor seemed to illustrate that he didn’t think the institute was doing science, either. A place of enlightenment, yes, but not so scientific after all.

  After Asja had left, I was alone but not alone.

  You have never seen a circle, said Sasha.

  Yes, I have, I protested, as I closed and locked the front door.

  No, he said. You haven’t. That girl might have, he said. But you haven’t.

  He followed me through the institute as I turned off the lights for the night, and out the back door. We crossed the courtyard, crossed Yakimanka, and turned onto Zhitnaya to follow it as it sloped down to the river. The city had become so bright over the years. Blazing, was how I’d heard tourists describe it, and I’d been proud of our electrified city. But now it seemed sad how the light obscured the night sky as we’d once seen it, so black and so full of stars.

  This is our cumulative knowledge about circles, Sasha said. One: a circle is a symmetrical shape with no beginning and no end. Two: a circle has a centre. When a circle is rotated through any angle about its centre, its orientation remains the same. Three: a straight line drawn through the centre of a circle divides it into two identical semicircles. We call that line the diameter. The distance from a circle’s centre to its periphery never changes. We call that line the radius. Can you think of anything else?

  You haven’t mentioned chords, I said.

  The diameter being a circle’s longest chord, he said.

  When did you get so mathematical? I asked.

  And a tangent is a line that just grazes the circle at one point, practically missing it.

  You’re going on a bit, I said, and I know you didn’t come here to talk about circles. We were crossing the Ironworkers’ bridge by then. The lights at the Kremlin flickered on.

  That’s true, he said. I came to talk about God.

  Go on, I said.

  I began by saying you’d never seen a circle, he said.

  I haven’t forgotten, I said.

  You say you have seen a circle, and I say you haven’t.

  We had come to the bridge’s high point.

  I say that seeing a true circle is quite impossible.

  A different question then, I said. When did you become so philosophical?

  Our minds cannot see circles, though we can imagine them quite well. How is this possible? Circles on earth always involve sides. We don’t see the sides, or, in the case of a poorly drawn circle, we forgive that circle its sloppy sides and call it a circle anyway. But the real circle is a form that exists only in our minds and is applied, generously, to the lamentable approximations we find here on earth.

  Lamentable?

  Yes, he said. Lamentable.

  Neither Sasha nor Bekhterev believed in perception. I realize this now. Bekhterev thought the real, objective thing existed out there in the world, but we just couldn’t see it. Our only protection from the way our subjective views deceived us, distorting the world, lay in the certainty of a measure such as M and K. M and K were the only source of true meaning, the only thing we could really know, the only access we had to the other.

  Sasha, on the other hand, thought something quite different. Sasha thought we saw a thing in the world and that the way we saw it was better than it actually was. A circle for a line. A multitude of hues in a colour called black. As artists, we could be realistic, and render a thing as it was — flawed and asymmetrical. Or, we could use our imaginations. See a thing as it was meant to be. Dostoyevsky said that when we love someone we must see them as God intended them. This is what it means to love the world. It is to see a circle where a microscope sees only lines.

  This is how I see you, Sasha said, but you prefer M and K.

  I did prefer M and K, I said, but they are ideals just as much as anything else.

  How so? he asked.

  They aren’t transcendent ideals, like yours, they don’t exist in the starry ether, but they’re as out of reach as any other perfect thing, hidden as they are, so deep in the earth and behind so many locked doors. They might as well be imagined; maybe they are.

  Bekhterev had believed that everything hinged on a micrometer. Progress, such as it is, depends on our increasing capacity to measure. Time has been measured using the sun’s rays, the swing of pendulums, barometric compensation, and now we have the quartz clock. But can we truly say that these sundry devices have actually measured the same thing? We want to speak to others, and we want what we say to mean something, but even words betray us. We are caught by the impossibility of communicating the colour blue.

  A few days after Sarkisov told Vogt that things were changing — that the days of the Soviet-German or German-Soviet, whatever, partnership was over — he also told me he had another job in mind for me. I thought of the secretary who spent her days banging away on her typewriter in the former blood institute and wanted to tell him to forget it.

  A bigger one, he said. Actually, it wasn’t my idea.

  I don’t need a job, I said. I have one.

  Well, that’s the other thing, said Sarkisov. The institute is shutting down. Relocating. I meant to tell you that first.

  I didn’t know.

  Funds are being reallocated, now that Vogt has finished his research.

  What research? I asked. That wasn’t research.

  As I said, we have another position for you.

  So then it’s not about funds, I said.

  Do you want to know what to do next or not?

  Let me think about it.

  I turned away.

  I turned back.

  Okay, I want to know.

  The institute was going to be relocated to the university. It wouldn’t be open to the public anymore. But if I wanted it, a position there could be mine.

  What’s the position? I asked.

  Someone needs to write a history of this place. I suggested you.

  This could be my S—, I thought. This could be my starting again.

  We liked your report, he said.

  All right, I said, which wasn’t an answer.

  Historians and archeologis
ts know this: war, natural disaster, and sudden regime changes are the best thing that can happen when it comes to preservation of the past. A volcano erupts and sends its lava flowing. In its path, everything is captured exactly as it was. How else would we ever have known about Pompeii?

  Then I left the institute. Across the street a statue was being erected, a monument to Soviet science, or so the workers told me, though they bickered amongst themselves about who, exactly, the commemorated scientist had been. I didn’t recognize the name.

  I didn’t know what I wanted to do, didn’t know if I wanted to be one of those who left or one of those who stayed. Everyone was in exile now. Those who stayed behind experienced an inner exile, afraid to speak to one another except in metaphor, suspicious of intimacy, wary of informers. And those who left were exiles, too, idealists who believed the myth of somewhere else: that someplace else would be better, or at the very least, different from here.

  Outside, all of Moscow was white. Blank. The snow had started in drifts that morning, softly that is, so that the rail along the bridge was lightly dusted while the walkway had stayed mostly clear. I knew that my position at the institute would make it possible for me to travel and that, once the institute closed and once Vogt left the city, that window would close. The snowflakes seemed to hover in the sky, not falling or rising, just hanging there, fluttering in a suspended, anxious state. Where people had stopped to rest or had trailed their gloved hands along the rail for a while, cupping the snow in their curved palm until it filled up and they saw fit to shovel it over the edge, only there was the blanket of snow disturbed. At the middle of the bridge, I stopped, too, pausing to take in the whole of the white city, and there I recalled that moment years before, when Luria had told me about the boy from Kiev, about the fatal punctures to his head and of the strangely parallel notions of blood and vowels as the special elixirs that keep a language, or a body, breathing, alive.