Uncertain Weights and Measures Read online

  Dimitri’s line snaked out of view and I forgot about him.

  My strongest memories of my mother were of the walks we’d taken on nights when my father attended the English Gentlemen’s Club, when the streets became ours, our boots clopping against the cobblestones taking us down alleys, through small doorways and down dark steps to rooms guarded by men who recognized us and pinched my cheeks, ushering us in to smoky halls where people spoke in unison at a fever pitch. After the recitations and the speeches, the formality of the gatherings were abandoned and the adults would greet each other fervently. As they made plans whose details always escaped me, I would feel myself disappear. The less I understood, the more I resented being there. Eventually I would beg for us to leave, if only to have the opportunity to have my mother to myself again. The goodbyes went on forever. Finally, we’d leave, and then we’d be out in the streets again and they were ours. As we walked, my mother would explain something of the plans that had been made. By being included, I would be filled again with idealism, as though a new future were just around the corner. The spell was broken at the sight of our home, which was larger than most. We entered the cozy candle-lit halls with embarrassment, though none of this was ever said aloud, only communicated in the changing way my mother’s hand gripped mine, then slackened, and then, at the entrance to our home, let go altogether, so I went in first, as if alone. The way we lived — our wealth — had always bothered my mother, though its comforts were hers as well. Those evenings were the result of a hard-won truce between my parents, the stipulations of which were obeyed at home and which included no pontification, no pamphleting, no proselytizing — on either side. The silence that resulted was anything but peaceful. Perhaps my parents called it a truce, but really it was a war put on hold. She would be old by now, if she’s alive at all.

  When it got dark on Nikitskaya, I stopped looking for her. The sun sets so early in January; we were in darkness by four o’clock. The crowd had stopped singing. The conversations around me turned intimate, exclusive. Our eyes adjusted to the dusk, and when the oil lamps were lit, they seemed brighter, almost, than the sun. We were walking in the middle of the street, passing in and out of the orbs of light.

  The noise seemed louder in the dark, but I know this was just because we could see less. What snow there had been on the ground had been cleared away by the thousands of feet filing through the streets. What remained were slick patches of ice and gravel. Despite this, children were being pulled in wooden sleds over the gritty surface. On snow, the sound of a sled in tow is peaceful, lulling. On ice and grit, it is a vexing sound. A mausoleum was under twenty-four-hour construction; dynamite was being used to loosen the frozen ground. The explosions reverberated across Red Square and into the city streets.

  Tatiana! someone called out.

  I turned to where the voice had originated, but the lights had made silhouettes of everyone. I saw two heads moving towards me, the outline of a familiar ushanka.

  You came! I said when I saw Sasha’s grinning face, his cheeks flushed with cold. He kissed me and put his hand in my pocket so that he could find mine, and Dimitri stood there with him, smiling at us in a stupid kind of way, so I knew I looked happy.

  You left your spot, I said to Dimitri.

  You’re closer, he said.

  When we got to the boulevard in front of the House of Unions, the line bled into a crowd. All around us, there was the shifting black of the moving crowd and the singularity of the place we were moving towards, the bright entrance and the pitchy silhouette of the guard who granted access to the mourners. We moved together, us three, inseparable. Soon enough, a new pattern was imposed upon the crowd, and we were directed into lines that traversed the boulevard in single-file loops like film that had sprung from its canister.

  Sasha stood behind me. Dimitri stood behind him.

  I thought you weren’t going to come, I whispered to Sasha.

  I know you thought that, he whispered back. His fingers were working hard at the seam of my coat pocket. Every time we stood like this, he dexterously tried to force the seam apart, but still the thread held tight.

  The rhythm of our waiting changed. We moved steadily in order to keep warm; if we could not step forward, we rocked from side to side. We cupped our hands and blew into them. Wshooooooo. The folk songs rumbled low and melancholic. When the wind whipped up or a sled passed by, I couldn’t hear the songs at all.

  Will you come inside? I asked Sasha.

  I wasn’t going to, he said.

  But you just got here.

  No, he corrected me. I just found you, but I’ve been looking for you for hours.

  I hated to ask him to do something he didn’t want to, hated to ask him to do something for me, hated to need him.

  Please? I whispered.

  Okay, he said.

  Outside the House of Unions everything was sound and activity and movement. When we stepped inside it was suddenly so quiet I felt as if I must have gone deaf. The plush red carpet at our feet, damp at the entrance, but then increasingly dry. The light so white we couldn’t at first see. And the smell, like a forest. Boughs and wreaths of pine hung from every column we passed. The columns reached up high to shoulder the clean, vaulted ceiling. In the subsequent room was Lenin’s bier.

  At each column, guards in khaki uniforms directed us further down the corridor, as if we might otherwise lose ourselves. I went in first. Sasha followed me. Dimitri followed him.

  Through the door, it was like the darkness inside a wardrobe on a bright day. I reached back for Sasha’s hand, but he was out of step with me and just beyond any subtle reach. I kept moving.

  Walking towards a corpse makes you enormously conscious of time. What is the feeling of that time? It must be something like hope, not hope itself but its relative. It’s a wish that the thing one needs to feel and consider and share will surface at the precise moment one comes to stand in front of the dead body. As much as possible, the hope is for an alignment of the fullness of your feeling with the appearance — for one last time — of that person’s face. This is even truer if you’ve never stood so close to that person before. I was afraid that when I saw him I might feel nothing, even though what I truly felt was everything. This was a problem I had, my feelings always out of step; too early sometimes, but usually too late.

  If others cried, I did not hear them.

  When it was my turn to stand before the bier what I felt wasn’t grief or sadness, not exactly, or not the way I thought grief or sadness ought to feel, but just the most gaping emptiness, a feeling so familiar with abandonment that even feeling itself was gone.

  Sasha had stepped past me, so now Dimitri was there.

  Lenin looked less dead than any dead person I had ever seen. Peaceful. He lay under a glass coffin, which was so clean it was as if it were not there at all. A red woollen blanket covered the lower half of his body. Both arms were bent at the elbow, his hands — one in a fist, the other palm-down — lay across his belly.

  I wiped my tears away from under my eyes and tried to see Sasha, but he had gone on ahead, too quickly. Dimitri’s hand on my shoulder reminded me what Sasha wasn’t.

  Behind me, I heard a young voice ask, Can he breathe in there?

  No, said an older woman, he doesn’t need to anymore.

  I stepped forward so that Dimitri’s hand dropped away. I could feel him looking at me, but I didn’t look back.

  The slight change in perspective made his death real. I was looking back at a dead man now. I had moved from one era into another as one does from childhood into adulthood, imperceptibly in the moment, but sudden on reflection.

  This, I thought, this very moment, is mourning.

  Dimitri stood there a minute longer, then walked on as well.

  The three of us streamed out of the building past the throngs of people still waiting to go in. I looked at how the light of the entrance cast their faces in deep contrasts like masks from ancient theatres that reduced the complexity
of all human experience to the purified, the singular. An expressionless woman was the stoic, the teary peasant was the mourner.

  What was the expression on Sasha’s face? Was it pity? Was it confusion? He was staring at me with his soft eyes; but what he was feeling was for me and what I was feeling was for our country, and those were not the same. Having Sasha there had made me more sad, not less. More alone, not less. Where could we go from there? I wondered, but then the question drifted away like the morning mist once the sun has risen.

  In the red entrance hall of the institute that evening, the front door swung shut. It was for the best that Sasha hadn’t come, I thought. I’d anticipated the night of the opening for so long, thinking it would replicate the energy of that night three years ago when it seemed as if the whole world had gathered to mourn. Now, instead, we would gather to learn. More and more people poured into the entrance, but none were peasants. I watched the women on the arms of their men. Their faces were flushed from the cold. They wore trim dresses and had their hair cut in bobs. The men wore tunics. A few women wore garish lipstick. The coat racks disappeared beneath the coats. The institute had never been so full, nor so loud. Women’s voices rang out. The men laughed and joked. Some paused to see the portraits, creating the kind of bottleneck you would expect at any good event. Triads gossiped and looked everyone else up and down. A young girl tried to go up the stairs, but I called out to her and placed a cordon between the balustrades after that. How could Bekhterev’s remarks address a crowd such as this? What small thing might the foreigners, the women, the politicians be able to grasp? Eventually, the crowd gathered in the grand salon.

  Sergei assumed my place at the entrance, and I walked down the hall.

  In the grand salon, the plinths towered over the people, some of whom had already taken their seats. So many people had come! I hadn’t noticed the arrival of Tsiolkovsky, the conjurer of the birdlike flying machine and other fantastical devices, but he had emerged from his hermetic life just for this. He had attached himself to Dr. Segalin, who was, in those days, making a name for himself by studying what he called the pathology of genius. I hadn’t thought about it like that before, how genius was like any other abnormality, a problem because it signalled you were different, but that was what Segalin said, that genius caused certain vulnerabilities. And there was Alexandr Bogdanov, the activist turned writer turned scientist. In those men you could see how art and science were the same thing. Some scientists were as untethered as any artist I’d ever met.

  On the other hand, there was Luria. He sat with them, but he was nothing like them. Even as a student, he had been so orderly, so aware of the correct path, knowing which professors to get on his side, what specialties to acquire, and it was this, as much as any purely scientific talent, that had made his advancement so predictable. If Luria was composed, Bogdanov, Tsiolkovsky, and Segalin all had something mad about them. Segalin, especially, seemed to move around the room like a wasp at a late summer dinner. His laugh was loud and unapologetic, out of proportion to the otherwise tame conversations of the rest of the crowd. Everything about Segalin drew you in, then pushed you away.

  Dr. Vogt went to stand at the podium, clearing his throat. He wore a dark grey, three-piece suit, his glasses hung on a chain around his neck. Something about him made me tense. The group quieted, taking their seats. Some sat in chairs in front of the podium, others stood beside the exhibits, forming a perimeter. I was surprised to see Bekhterev make his way behind the chairs to where I was standing.

  Welcome, Comrades, to the opening of the Institut Mozga, said Vogt.

  Despite his small stature and his almost comical foreignness, his voice dominated the room. He was a man accustomed to attention. When he spoke, he leaned on the podium so that its pedestal cocked forward. He looked athletic, as if speaking in public demanded so little of him that he needed something else, some small or big object to manipulate while he spoke.

  Whereas bourgeois education is based on abstract knowledge and sedentary book learning without any connection to practical experience, he said, our pedagogy fuses together scholarship, praxis, and the most advanced forms of production in order to provide new forms of embodied knowledge and thought.

  The reporters, scientists, and wives nodded and whispered back and forth.

  We have microtomed ten thousand slices of Lenin’s brain, said Dr. Vogt, every tenth of which has been treated with an indigo stain and studied using methodologies developed by Drs. Bets, Rossolimo, Bekhterev — and here he nodded in Bekhterev’s direction, causing a few heads to turn to look back at us. Our research, he went on, has led to seminal victories concerning the material substrate of Lenin’s genius.

  I couldn’t tell if Vogt was being honest, since I’d never heard of anyone being able to cut any brain, no matter how large, into ten thousand slices, or if he was telling the truth and that was how far the science in Germany had advanced. I felt Bekhterev tense up beside me, and I knew that Bekhterev’s problem with Vogt was that he served the state, not the science. Basically, he was lying.

  Standing behind the last row of chairs as I was, I could observe all the reactions all at once. Segalin reacted to the announcement by laughing his hyena laugh, but Luria nudged him and he quieted. The journalists translated for each other. Some people stared off into the dark recesses of the room, trying to make out the detail in the mouldings — the angels, the bare-breasted women, historical figures like Pushkin that had been carved into the walls themselves.

  Vogt went on, saying that unlike the subjective whims of individual psychological assessment, cytoarchitectonics was superior because it was metrical and, therefore, objective. The mental substrate of Lenin’s genius had already been proven in incontrovertible terms: in layer three of the cortex and in many cortical regions deep in this layer were pyramidal cells of a size and number we’d never before seen.

  I stood to the right of Bekhterev, whose arms were tightly crossed over his thick chest, and as I heard the announcements about the discoveries in the third layer of the cerebral cortex of pyramidal cells of a size never before observed and in a number never before observed, all I could see was the way the fat flesh of Bekhterev’s right elbow bulged in the unforgiving folds of his navy wool tunic that was too small and too hot for a man of his temperament.

  Aren’t you going to say anything? I whispered to Bekhterev.

  No, he said gruffly.

  Because of their metrical character, Dr. Vogt said, brain architectonics has an advantage over methods like individual psychology, which is based primarily on subjective assessments. Since architectonics can ascertain the size of the cortical regions involved in certain mental capabilities, in cubic 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.

  Why not? I whispered.

  It wasn’t his night, he said. He’d speak when it actually mattered, in front of a scientific community, not a group with such superficial interest.

  The podium was still rocking back and forth. Vogt was fidgeting, like an athlete, yes, but now he seemed nervous.

  As such, our findings with regard to V.I. Lenin are at once conclusive, in that there can be no disputing the measurements thus far obtained, and introductory, as without a doubt there is so much more to be discovered.

  Those who spoke Russian recognized the conclusive tone and clapped.

  Spasiba, danke, merci, thank you, and now, enjoy! he said overtop the initial applause, which had cued the others, so that the whole room was politely tapping their hands together in uneven recognition of what, exactly, the institute had accomplished.

  If the lecture said very little, for the reporters and the Party members it was enough to make them experts. They stood before the specimens again. Armed with cortex, architectonics, pyramidal cells, they misidentified with confidence. The drawers slid open and shut. I wished they would ask questions
of me but knew they wouldn’t see me as an expert, being a woman and an assistant. In theory, the role of women had changed with the Revolution, but that was only in theory. Instead of speaking to anyone directly, I drifted through, overhearing snippets of conversation, some about the exhibit, but most moved on to other topics quickly enough. The journalists were in a tête-à-tête about whether or not to go to another party, as if this had been one. Bogdanov was surrounded by a small group and seemed to be giving tips on how to rob a bank: step one, act as if it were yours already. Segalin was egging him on, laughing his too-loud laugh. Vogt was surveying the room, his arm resting casually on the podium as if it were a bar and he a regular.

  I made my way to the other side of the room, ending up between the Borodin specimen and Lenin’s. From there, I could see the crowd, then the row of musician specimens, and then the crowd again, reflected in the mirrors. The first crowd was lit up by the chandelier. Their faces radiated warmth and happiness. They chatted convivially. Behind them, the liquid around the specimens glowed. Behind the specimens, reflected in the mirrors, I saw the other side of the crowd: they were dark silhouettes and moved like puppets on invisible strings.

  When Vogt left the room, this signalled the end of the evening, and the crowd began to filter back out the way they’d come. I drifted after them, as far as the front entrance, then I unhooked the cordon I’d set up to block off the stairs, and went up so I could sit out of sight, watching the end of the evening from there.

  After everyone had left and we’d closed the institute for the evening, Bekhterev, Luria, and I stopped in at a nearby alehouse. Bekhterev should have been with the senior scientists and professors, but as the last of us were gathering our coats and discussing where we should go, he had muttered under his breath something about the pretensions of his colleagues and then stated with a forced elation that he would close the evening by catching up with his former students. Speaking about Luria and me in such a way set us apart from anyone else our age, marking us as permanently his, as opposed to Vogt’s or Sarkisov’s.