Uncertain Weights and Measures Read online

  He shared his studio with three other students. The room was dark, so I couldn’t quite make out the dimensions of the space, but the echo of it told me the room was large. When Sasha turned on a few small lamps in his corner, the other corners snagged some light, too, and revealed their own distinct shapes and textures. Rusting machinery sulked in one corner, mounds of fabric in another, and the third was a jumble of paper, more archive than studio space. Sasha’s was a mix: piles of books — open and closed, dog-eared and bookmarked — and various jars of pens, pencils, and brushes, though with the brushes he was evidently more careful. All of the bristles faced upwards, and every last brush was clean. He had one blank canvas on an easel, a small cot pushed up against the room’s only window, and a small desk upon which sat a hotplate, a kettle, and two teacups without saucers. Outside, the night sky was indigo.

  I’m sorry I don’t have any chairs, he said.

  I don’t mind, I said, and sat down on the cot.

  Where are your paintings?

  They’re in a show.

  Why didn’t you tell me?

  Shy, I guess, but I was going to, he said. I was going to tell you about it tonight.

  He set out the teacups, filling them halfway with vodka. Then he fetched something from behind the hotplate, hiding it behind his back impishly as he came closer to present me with two pieces of marzipan.

  Take one, he said.

  At one point, we heard voices in the hallway, and then someone went into a studio across the hall.

  Who is it? I whispered.

  Jack, whispered Sasha. You met him.

  I remember.

  He sleeps in his studio.

  He sat next to me so we almost touched, and by being so quiet and so close, knowing we shouldn’t be loud, it was like we were in the theatre again.

  What is his real name?

  Sasha didn’t know what Jack’s real name was. No one did, not even his professors. The two of them had been best friends since their second year at art school. In his first year, Jack had read every Jack London novel ever written, and by the end of that year Jack was his name. If he could have, Jack would have told people he had been raised by wolves. He was brusque, sharp, and solitary, but not loyal, not like a real wolf. He didn’t think of the pack. Jack,I would soon realize, loved Sasha as if he were an extension of himself. When Jack looked at Sasha, he saw what he wanted to be. If anyone had been raised by wolves, it was Sasha, not Jack. I didn’t like Jack because I didn’t like fake wolves. I didn’t like fake anything.

  That night was the first time Sasha and I slept together. We lay on his cot, his inspiration cot, he called it, because he lay there whenever he couldn’t figure out what to do next. A painter can’t remove a brush stroke, he said. So he would lie down and close his eyes until some feeling, a niggling thing, would say it was time, and then he’d get up and tackle the painting again. What else did he do while he was lying there? I asked, but he just smiled and kissed me, his lips still boozy and sweet. The cot was like one they might’ve had in the army — metal piping made up the frame and a cross-hatch of coiled wires supported the discoloured mattress. It whined with our weight. If we wanted to lie on our sides, there could be no space between us, which meant we couldn’t look at each other. With me on top or him on top, we could see each other’s mouths, open and wanting. When we moved against each other, there was the sweet risk that we might fall. At points, I had the sure impression that when my hand touched his chest, it somehow melted into him, as if I’d been inside him for a moment. We kept a playful balance because we were young and our bodies were taut and strong and quick. When I straddled him and he sat up a little so that I could pull off his sweater, I pulled too hard and the cot gave up, collapsing to the floor. Then we really could do anything and Sasha said, If we’re going to fuck things up, we might as well fuck everything up, and so we fucked all night and came away the next morning with cuts and scratches from where the springs had come unhinged.

  From that night on, we started spending all of our time together. Falling in love with him seemed like the easiest thing that had ever happened to me. Love had been a total mystery before — something that happened to other, luckier people. When we fell in love, it suddenly seemed like the most natural, inevitable, universal experience in the world. It had to be happening to everyone, every day.

  Sasha seemed to understand me like no one else ever had. It wasn’t anything I’ve ever tried to articulate and certainly not a thing I could explain to someone who hadn’t seen us together, because it was a feeling, a complicity, an understanding of each other that preceded who we became. We’d sit in his studio, or lie under a tree, both of us reading or trying to, and he’d say, My love, and I’d look up at him and he’d have nothing more to add. Then I’d keep working, but smiling, too. He’d say, Your hair is five of my favourite colours, and I knew from that that he loved me because my hair is just black. He’d notice things about me that I’d never known: that I walk with my head down, watching the street, that when I read, I say some of the words out loud, that I laugh to myself. What? he’d ask. What did you read? And I would tell him some small, simplified thing: the structure of the atom is like the planets, all the little pieces orbit around the nucleus, as if around the sun. Beautiful, he would say. And then I could think of it that way, as an aesthetic object, and not as I had, as a scientific fact.

  It was that tendency of his, to see beauty everywhere, that might have made me love him initially, or perhaps it was his sensitivity, which made him so unlike anyone I’d ever met. Not like my parents, or Rima, not like my classmates, or Bekhterev. When he talked, he told stories. Sometimes they made me laugh, and sometimes they made me cry; always they made me know a world I’d never known before. Where I had studied science, he had studied art. I had only ever had one close friend, he had had so many. I spoke in facts; he spoke in wonder. I grew up in the city; he on the farm.

  One day when he was still a boy, a cat on the farm gave birth to a litter of kittens. Sasha spent the whole afternoon with them, watching them move blindly to the nipple and then curl away into deep sleep, and then back to the nipple to suckle again. When his father found out about the kittens, he took Sasha for a walk out to the fields. His father said nothing, but when they were at the outer edge of their land, he handed his son a shovel.

  Dig the deepest hole you know how, he said, and walked back towards the family home.

  Sasha was only seven at the time; the hole he dug was less than half a metre deep. He was worried his father would be angry with him for being slow, weak, so he didn’t stop digging until his father returned.

  This will do, his father said approvingly, and Sasha felt relieved.

  His father had returned with a satchel in hand.

  Sasha heard a tiny mew.

  His father opened up the satchel and poured the kittens into the hole. Sasha looked down at their furry helpless bodies, saw the confusion in their eyes, and then the image blurred as tears welled in his.

  Now cover them up with that dirt, his father said. Sasha willed his tears not to fall.

  That was Pyotr, the man who left for war and never returned, and though I had never met him, I hated him.

  When we decided to get married, we did it because we couldn’t imagine our lives without each other, and we did it with the family we’d chosen, not the families we’d been born into — only Rima and Jack had witnessed the ceremony — and it hadn’t been the ceremony that mattered to either of us. What mattered was what he’d said to me before, when it was just the two of us riding the tram on the way to the commissioner’s office. An old couple were sitting in silence opposite us, and the man looked terribly ill. He started coughing a dry, raspy cough. The woman reached into her bag and pulled out a candy and unwrapped it for him. His hand trembled badly as he reached for it. That’s how long I want to know you, said Sasha, and I said, Me, too.

  When I woke the morning after the opening, I was alone. Before we lived together, I�
�d fall asleep thinking about Sasha and wake up thinking about him. Every part of my body fantasized about what he’d do if he were there, as if the space around my body was thick with the memory of how his hand could slip past my waist and crawl up between my arms to intertwine with my hands and, like that, envelop me. Now that we’d become permanent to each other, waking up alone seemed like the most luxurious thing in the world. It seemed to me that the luxury of this must be universally felt. The bed, normally annexed by the body of another, is, on such a morning, a vast expanse that is all yours. You may stretch out any which way. The blankets are yours alone. Your lover is seen, from this angle, in his very best light, which is the light of theory, abstraction, or reminiscence. So it was that morning, I woke up alone for the first time in months, maybe years, the sun already soaring towards noon, and me with nothing to do but take in our apartment as I almost never did, in the light of day.

  I had no commitments, so my time would be like the bed, luxuriously open from start to finish. Yet as I lay there contemplating my freedom, an unexpected feeling arose. The solitude, which, days before, I might have said I craved more than anything, now felt lonely, and my freedom weighed upon me; I felt pressured to do something thrilling and wonderful with the day, not squander it, not have nothing to say for myself upon returning to work. And so, because whatever excitement I’d had in my life had always involved her, I decided to see Rima.

  My first love, in some ways, was Rima. Our friendship wasn’t sexual, but in every other way, becoming friends with her had been like falling in love. We’d admired each other from afar, and once we met, we plunged immediately into a world of intimacy that excluded everyone else. We talked about ideas more than anything, and everything Rima thought inspired me, because it seemed so instantaneously right and, also, just ahead of me.

  At night, after we’d finished with our studies, Rima and I would read pamphlets to each other and remind ourselves that we didn’t need anyone, not even each other. We said to ourselves that all we needed was the idea, and by the idea we would mean history. History was progressing and we were a part of it. Circumstances beyond us buoyed us up, and it was up to us to ride the wave. Loyalty, said the pamphlets, was weaker than Unity. Unity was shared belief. Loyalty was shared feeling. Belief was more important than feeling. Thinking that way helped us get over the constant, low-level hunger, helped us say that being hungry made life feel taut somehow, as though we were living right on the edge. We didn’t know anything about how the world worked, but we were constantly trying to behave as if we did. Whereas before the Revolution people had been looking for something to believe in, now we’d found it. Nothing was easy, but we were too young to really think of deprivation as hard. We were making a new world. Tomorrow was going to be better. Living on food rations, having cold dirty water dribble from our taps, well, we were young enough to think of privation as a test. Proving to ourselves that we could survive it — without complaint! — was a way of saying we deserved the future. At least, that’s how I saw it. Eventually, years later, Sasha would say to me that being hungry didn’t make us better people, and I would respond, saying, Yes, yes it did.

  In those years, I could push against the city and it would push back. The cats in the alleys screamed all night long. Rima was powerful. In some ways, Sasha was her opposite because his power wasn’t performative; he could sit back and watch, a quiet king.

  I went down the hall to call her, huddling myself in the small nook for the phone, because I’d gone in my nightdress on the assumption that our neighbours were working. The phone’s distance from our apartment was normally an advantage since it meant we didn’t hear the phone ring, nor did we hear the conversations that took place on the phone or around the phone as people fought about whose turn it was to use it. Just as I was hanging up, I saw Sasha coming up the stairs, a bag in hand.

  Hello, sleepy, he said, his hand slipping under my dress and between my legs. How is my sleeper?

  I smiled and scooted out of his reach.

  He’d been to the store and come back to eat with me, and to hear more about the opening. In the kitchen, we lit the samovar to make a pot of tea, and when that was done, we brought the tea, the jam, the bread he’d been in line for since before dawn, and the smallest glob of butter to our apartment. We sat at our table, revelling in the luxury of fresh bread, the sun in our apartment and time together in the middle of the day, all of it feeling stolen, as precious as the clementines we’d suckled that night at the theatre so long ago.

  Our conversation turned to the night before, and suddenly I was aware of competing desires within myself. Sasha’s disdain for the institute was, by then, already so great that I despaired at the thought of admitting to him how little seemed to have been discovered by that ridiculous man from Germany. Yet that was the truth and rather than admit it to Sasha, I wanted to lie. Lying, however, would build a wall between us that I would then have to maintain. Telling the truth, on the other hand, would make me vulnerable, would make the institute vulnerable. As I looked at Sasha, I could see he was ready to accept that some great advance had been made, and so I began, slowly, with a description of the pyramidal cells, their great size, their great number. Sasha encouraged me, widening his eyes, looking impressed, and I felt a part of me soften, and that softening only served to highlight the resentment that had built up in me ever since he’d first voiced his suspicions about the work we did. But now he was listening closely. I went on, describing the ten thousand slices of Lenin’s brain and the indigo stains, all of it amounting to an objective appraisal of genius, an appraisal that would be incontrovertible because it would be measurable in centimetres, percentages, and so on.

  I got up from the table and moved to the couch, saying come over here, and Sasha followed, the two of us sitting at opposite ends, facing each other.

  But is it obvious, he asked, that a centimetre more or less of this, or a percentage more or less of that means anything? How does this Vogt know that those centimetres mean more smarts and not something else, like a better capacity to detect tones in music or distinguish between flavours of horseradish, or even something else, like a tendency to good or to evil?

  Well, Lenin wasn’t a musician, I said.

  But that isn’t an answer, he said, and I knew he was right. I could feel a hollow right at the centre of the idea, a hollowness which was really a gap between one side of the thinking, about the measurements, and the other side of the thinking, about genius. Genius exceeded measurements, yes, but was also identifiable, recognizable, and unmistakably there in the life, work, and thoughts of certain individuals. So I described it that way, saying that we were crossing a chasm, building a bridge, but that like any bridge it had to be built in steps, and the steps were made of accumulated knowledge on one side and accumulated knowledge on the other, and one day, the two would meet in the middle. In this way, I invited Sasha into our vulnerability, into our great question about what final piece would connect one side to the other.

  Sasha was quiet for a moment, taking this in. Then he said, with some admiration, that the project was tremendously ambitious, more ambitious than he’d realized, and I asked how so. And he said that the chasm we were trying to cross was the very thing that divides life from death. One side of the bridge depended on life and the other side depended on death. Wouldn’t life have to reach into the world of death and death into the realm of life in order for the chasm to be breached?

  And so he turned the conversation beautiful, as was his custom, and I followed him there into that world of philosophical questions, because although I believed in objective truths, in the idea of something being knowable, in this instance, and with Sasha who felt his way to things rather than thought his way to things, centimetres would never mean much. I crawled over to his end of the couch and opened his arms up to make space for me, him smiling and allowing his body to follow my orders, and I nestled in, pulling first one arm and then another around me, like a blanket, and said maybe one day the g
ap between death and life wouldn’t seem so far after all. One day, he said, one day.

  By early afternoon, Sasha had gone to work, and I had made it to Rima’s and had convinced her to see, for the third time, the only film either of us had ever seen, Bed and Sofa. The cinema was in the city centre, right next to the café that served Moscow’s best meringues. We got there in time for the afternoon screening, just as the sky was starting to darken. In the theatre, we found our past selves. The storyline when we were eighteen had been about the mysteries of falling in love. At twenty-one, when Rima was training to be a nurse and I was training to be a lab technician, it was about predicting the future. And on that afternoon in 1927, it was about the trials of communal living. After Rima and Yuri married, they moved into one of the buildings that housed party members, because Yuri was one. Sasha and I lived at a lower standard, though my scientific work granted us the right to a semi-regular food basket and some extra space. All the same, for all of us, life in the communal apartments was defined by one’s relations with one’s neighbours, and in every block, it seemed, there were the cheats, the liars, the tattlers. As we sat in the near-empty theatre, the two of us together again, reliving our earlier lives, I had suddenly had enough.