Uncertain Weights and Measures Read online

  In the alehouse, we ordered the only thing on offer — a carafe of vodka and a plate of herring topped with red onions. I found us a spot in a corner as far away from the bar and the stage as possible, so that we would still be able hear each other talk once the place filled up. It was early in the night, and the waiters were drifting between the empty tables or talking amongst themselves. On stage, a few men were pulling chairs out of the wings in preparation for the evening show. From their suits and white shoes and from the number and arrangement of the chairs, I guessed they played jazz. Two other men unfurled a red banner and hung it behind the chairs. At first, the one on the right lifted his side too high, then the one on the left did, and so the thing lolled back and forth as the two of them barked at each other about who was to blame. Eventually, a waitress stepped in and silently commanded them by waving her left hand up a little and up a little more until finally the banner was even. Then she continued through the room, clinking three glasses down on our table as she passed, not even saying a word.

  So, said Luria, are you pleased?

  Luria had sat with his back to the bar, which had the effect of focusing our attention on him because even if we were distracted by the events behind him, we still looked in his general direction. It was odd, really, that our paths hadn’t crossed more.

  With the opening? asked Bekhterev, who had also been looking over Luria’s shoulder, watching the activity on stage.

  Yes, said Luria, amused at the idea that he’d be asking about anything else. Were you pleased with the opening?

  I thought it went very well, I offered.

  The vodka and herring arrived.

  Luria poured the first round. The table tilted when Bekhterev leaned forward to reach for his glass, causing the liquid to spill over the rims. He ran his finger through the clear puddle and licked it clean.

  To the fruit of your labours, Luria said, raising his glass. The toast was a traditional one and pleasantly archaic. We cheered and emptied our glasses.

  I looked from the stage to the bar. The jazz players were hovering there now, waiting for an audience to arrive. For a while we were silent. The alcohol began to warm the back of my head. Bekhterev was folding and refolding a napkin.

  Luria poured another round.

  Bekhterev stabbed at a piece of herring with a fork and then tilted his head back so he could drop it whole into his mouth. Luria watched. A small bit of oil escaped the corner of Bekhterev’s mouth. The droplet caught the light from the stage, making a bright sheen that glistened visibly even as it tried to disappear in his beard. Something about this enfeebled him. Luria handed him a napkin.

  Again I was confronted with the unstated limits of our relationship. I felt too young to ask openly how he felt, but I could see a mixture of bitterness and disappointment, which I couldn’t address for fear of dismantling his dignity. If there was a way to pretend his feelings didn’t exist, I didn’t know it. But Luria did.

  So tell me, said Luria, why you ordered the specimens the way you did. Why the semicircle, and why not place Lenin at the end?

  Not you, too, said Bekhterev, his temper still raw. Everyone is so obsessed with order. Why is that? I think it’s because people want to know what to think. If I order these herring will it tell you what to think, too?

  This was Bekhterev warming up. He was angry about being brought into conversation, resentful of Luria prodding him, and yet, despite himself, drawn in.

  I know it wasn’t random, said Luria.

  How did Mendeleev order the periodic table, Tatiana? Tell Luria that much, said Bekhterev, looking to me.

  It was a guess, said Bekhterev, not letting me answer.

  It was more than a guess, said Luria.

  A good guess, said Bekhterev, and a few well-placed gaps.

  The right gaps, I said.

  Exactly!

  So there was a logic, said Luria.

  In truth, the order had been my doing, not Bekhterev’s. This was because the exhibition of the specimens involved some understanding of what the public would want to see, an understanding that Bekhterev thought was impossible for him to access. I don’t understand the public, he’d said. The exhibition required someone younger, someone who’d been through the revolutionary schooling, not one who’d taught in it. It was the students who understood the totality of their education and its place in a revolutionary society. The professors, on the other hand, understood only the smallest piece of what the students were learning, so much so that it could hardly even be said that the professors understood what their students in their own classes learned, since what they taught was the totality of their lives and what the students learned was the fraction of it that would apply to theirs.

  So it was me who decided to place Lenin roughly in the middle and me who decided to place his brain on the angle I did and me who decided to let that choice dictate the way the rest of the brains were angled, so that even if we all knew that the reason for the institute was to display Lenin’s genius, the exhibit would suggest he was a superman among many.

  Explain it to him, said Bekhterev, but again he spoke for me, saying the order was entirely arbitrary, that all order was arbitrary until it’s been around for long enough it starts to seem natural. He cited Rubinstein’s fifths, and the lines Poincaré had drawn across the globe, making time zones that now seemed irrefutable.

  Luria still wasn’t satisfied. What he really wanted to know was whether or not the collection was complete. Was our collection like the periodic table in that there were gaps we hoped would one day be filled, or was our collection complete now that Lenin was in it?

  I don’t know of a single true collector who would ever describe their collection as complete, said Bekhterev. Of course we have empty jars. We have a fair number.

  I sat back, looking at the two of them.

  We need them, said Bekhterev, because some of the Soviet geniuses are still living.

  Luria smiled.

  Me, for example, Bekhterev said, with a childlike grin.

  I shook my head, relieved that the mood had shifted.

  Thinking back on that night, after all these years, I realize that what Luria was really after was some sense of whether or not Bekhterev conceived of the collection as political or scientific. He could have asked directly and if he had, Bekhterev would have put him in his place: the institute was scientific and the only purpose it had was to educate. Yet if the scientific goals could align with the revolutionary, and if the revolutionary made the scientific possible, all the better. Bekhterev was of the generation that had grown up alongside the Revolution, and he was pragmatic about its role in his pursuits. I, on the other hand, was more idealistic about the Revolution, more inclined to believe Marx and Lenin. Perhaps it wasn’t possible to be idealistic about people you’d actually known; perhaps Bekhterev’s ease with the Revolution had to do with him having been one of Lenin’s doctors, with him having had so much contact with the Soviet elite, and this before they were elites at all.

  We stared at our drinks, alone in our thoughts, waiting for a new topic to emerge.

  I’ve never been to the Kremlin, I said.

  Me neither, said Luria.

  Never seen so many chess boards in all my life, said Bekhterev.

  So there was no real reason for the order you chose, said Luria.

  We had many reasons, Luria. Many. Too many to iterate now, he said, suddenly serious. He was getting bored. Underneath the table, his leg had started to shake.

  Each specimen is unique, I said. It’s not at all what I expected to find when we started out.

  You didn’t think they’d be the same? asked Luria.

  No, but they were very different, I said.

  And you could see, just by looking at them, how different they were? For example, if we took the brains out of their jars, jumbled them up, and then set them out in front of you, you’d be able to identify which was which?

  I don’t know if I could, but someone with more experien
ce could.

  Luria had a way of asking questions that unnerved me. With him around, I felt on the verge of being wrong about absolutely everything, my own name, for example. The precision that had led him to pronounce so carefully every syllable in his name had come to this — a predatory approach to knowledge, especially about the mechanics of brain function, and a specialization in language. He studied pedagogy, language, and conflict and soon his dissertation would be submitted.

  You could, said Bekhterev to me, his leg quiet again.

  Anyway, I said, pushing a piece of herring back and forth on the plate so that it left a wake in the oil, you know all this. And you know we had to be wise about how we displayed the exhibits. We didn’t want to suggest anything like a hierarchy, which is why Lenin isn’t at the beginning or the end.

  Very clever, said Luria, his attention focused on me now. So you could tell them apart?

  Well, I said slowly. Yes. The weight distinguishes them, for a start, I looked at Bekhterev, who was smiling a little, saying nothing so that I would be forced to.

  And we can observe things about the ways the sulci appear, whether they have deep convolutions, a lot of complexity — sometimes they’re hard to follow, like a jumble of fine thread, and sometimes their twists are easier to follow, like thick rope, which can’t bend around itself quite so much.

  But what do these differences mean? he asked me, his eyes appearing now below and now above the rim of his glasses as he bobbed his head up and down, in sync with his thoughts, which seemed to go first here, then there, then somewhere else, then back again. How do you know the differences aren’t arbitrary?

  Because they aren’t, I thought. Because of comparison.

  Well, because of all of the musicians? I said, trying not to sound so unsure. Because they show more development in the left gyrus temporal than we see in the scientists?

  Are you asking me? said Luria. How many musicians do you have?

  It’s early days, said Bekhterev, early days. The physical evidence is coming.

  That was the bald truth of the matter, but I wanted to cast the institute in better light, wanted it to have discovered more than it had.

  Bekhterev took over then, talking about the scientist’s brain versus the musician’s versus the poet’s. Our used glasses and plates became part of a miniature exhibit.

  Luria was watching us like a cat watches a bird, with a dangerous patience. There was something about the exhibit — or the institute or the science or Bekhterev or me, I wasn’t sure what — that he didn’t quite believe. There was something that he didn’t like.

  One of the musicians had returned to the stage and was running scales on his clarinet.

  Where is your husband? asked Luria, tipping the last drops of vodka into my glass. He’d changed his mind,I thought. He wasn’t going to pounce, not now.

  He’s out drinking with his friends, I said. I’d forgotten that Luria had met Sasha until that very instance, and then I suddenly recalled a meal we’d shared some years prior.

  To like minds, said Luria, raising his glass again.

  To like minds, we echoed.

  When was that dinner party? I asked them both.

  In another lifetime, said Bekhterev in a tone that sounded wistful, nostalgic. When you two were students.

  Were we married then? I asked.

  Yes, said Luria, but only just.

  Funny that you’d remember.

  Funny that you wouldn’t.

  That was the hypnotism argument.

  Not an argument per se, said Bekhterev.

  I remembered it as an argument. I remembered the small apartment Bekhterev kept, its walls bare, the shelves nearly empty, all signs that his real life was in Petrograd, as we called it then, not in Moscow. I remembered wanting Sasha to see Bekhterev the way I did, as a kind of father, a leader, as key to our future. Sasha had a sort of romantic attachment to being an outsider, but Bekhterev had always said if you want to change something, you had to be willing to belong. He meant you had to become an insider: press from the inside at something’s weak points, not from the outside, where it sees you coming. It sounded to me like a kind of philosophy, but later Luria pointed out that it was simple military strategy; flanking, I think he called it. Anyway, it meant to me that Bekhterev was both an outsider and an insider.

  Listen, Sasha had said to him that night, I’ve got a question for you.

  Anything! said Bekhterev. Ask me anything! We’ll ask each other everything!

  I remember feeling that the conversation might go wrong somehow. Sasha had this tendency to make bad first impressions. He came across as opinionated and cocky, supremely confident though nothing could be further from the truth. Introducing him to new people was something I thought about in terms of multiple events, not just one. Sasha needed to mark his territory in the first visit, and then he’d calm down on the second and third. Once people had met him a few times, they loved him. But if it was left to only one meeting, it didn’t turn out so well. Luria had looked miserable, as if he were constructing responses to the questions he most feared. Sasha was all seriousness, and Bekhterev, with nothing to fear, thought the whole thing was much fun. That was the Bekhterev I remember most fondly.

  Bekhterev went on. You’ll explain Rodchenko’s overalls, and Luria will tell us about growing up in Kazan, and you, Madame, you will tell us to stop our digressions for one single moment and concentrate, concentrate, concentrate. But we won’t, will we? And who will tell us about the dirigible flying over the eastern coast of the United States at this very moment? Did you know that it is dark there and dark here, and so we are, Americans and Russians, experiencing the same night?

  Why would it be the same night? asked Luria.

  Because the dirigible will block out the sun! It’s a man-made eclipse!

  I don’t believe it, said Luria.

  That it could block the sun? I asked.

  That they could experience the same sort of black, said Luria. Their cities are too bright, too electric. Everything is bright all day and all night.

  Constant light, I said. Like in Petrograd.

  It’s not natural, said Luria.

  Who will ask the first question? asked Bekhterev. Alexandr, sir. You begin!

  Well, said Sasha, what do you make of hypnotism?

  Why? Something else! I protested.

  Bekhterev took his time answering, emptying the carafe into Sasha’s glass first, then asking the servant to bring another.

  Now this is a healthy topic, said Bekhterev, smiling. Hypnotism can rouse suspicion, desire, hope of healing, fear of the mystical. Well done, Comrade! A perfect thing to discuss!

  Sasha flinched at being called comrade. Bekhterev didn’t notice, but Luria did.

  So? Sasha said.

  Well, hypnotism, has, unfortunately, become a derogatory word, Bekhterev said more slowly. The first step, as we well know, is to get our terms straight. Mental suggestion is more appropriate to the procedure we use today.

  But does it work? pressed Sasha.

  It is a diagnostic and curative tool. It’s been known to remedy diseases both physical and mental, diseases that the rest of pharmacopoeia has been ill equipped to address.

  But does it cure people? asked Sasha, leaning forward, his elbows on the table.

  That’s what he’s saying, I said to Sasha, willing him to lean back.

  That wasn’t a real answer, said Sasha to me.

  Very good, said Bekhterev. Let’s be more precise. Success or failure can be reduced to one single factor, and that single factor is motivation. The patients must be motivated. I know of a case where two hysterical married people were already well improved from the treatments they’d received, but they nagged each other with autosuggestions, and, in consequence, went away uncured.

  Even if Sasha knew he made bad impressions — I think he did it on purpose, or at least didn’t try very hard to stop himself — this didn’t prevent him from forming fully developed opinions
of others from the very first meeting. He was always perceptive and, often, even funny. That night, Luria had come away described as a kind of field mole, the kind that mates for life, though in his case the mate might be something more abstract, thought Sasha. Maybe an idea, or a project, but he’d do it until he died.

  And Bekhterev? I asked, loving him and his odd ways.

  Also as dedicated, said Sasha, but for slightly different reasons. Dedicated, I’d say, because something happened to him once that damaged him, and he doesn’t dwell on it, doesn’t even think about it, but something about that period of his life has made him totally dedicated to his projects even if their superficial completion lacks something. But —

  I know…, I said.

  But I don’t believe him about hypnotism.

  Yes, I think you made that clear, I said, loving him just that little bit less.

  I didn’t think of it as an argument either, said Luria, swirling the fish bones around in the oil, but I’ll tell you now that I thought you made a strange couple.

  It had been an argument, I thought, but they had seen only its beginning, the drops of rain before the storm. The true argument had happened after Sasha and I left, and it had been about Bekhterev, not about hypnotism.

  The saxophone player joined the clarinetist on stage. They made bird calls back and forth, trying to get in tune. The other tables were filling up.

  Well, we’re not, I said.

  Not a couple? he asked, looking up.

  Not strange, I said.

  I’m just saying, I wondered how you could have met.

  Didn’t you ever go to Osorgin’s bookshop? I asked.

  No, said Luria.

  That explained quite a bit.

  What Sasha hadn’t understood was that Bekhterev knew suggestion worked, but it worked unevenly, that is, on some minds, not all minds. Bekhterev also knew it wasn’t just doctors who knew about the power of suggestion. The Soviets knew as much, if not more. The red banner hanging behind the band, for example. That was suggestion. It worked best if you didn’t notice it happening.