Uncertain Weights and Measures Page 8

  Let’s leave, I whispered to Rima, during the iconic fortune-telling scene. Rima looked at me, the whites of her eyes bright and flickering.

  Now? she asked.

  Yes! I said, almost frantic with my desire to escape.

  Okay, she said, away we go!

  And so we stood, grabbed our bags and ran out, as if pursued, and in this way caught the last light of the day, such that possibility still seemed to reign.

  When Rima and I got out onto the street, we made a rule, which was, Say yes to everything, and we proceeded that way for the evening, following her suggestions then mine, then eliciting suggestions from people we met on the street. She said yes to licking a pole. I said yes to a vodka. She said yes to a vodka. I said yes to reading the front page of Pravda aloud on a street corner. She said yes to asking a couple we saw whether or not they truly loved each other.I said yes to a vodka and then another. She said yes to a vodka and then another. I said yes to walking slowly along the river until I caught up with a man we’d seen, then slipping my hand into his as if I were his lover, and then walking that way for twenty seconds. (He played along.) She said yes to lying down in a park and telling me a story about a constellation. (She chose Cassiopeia, and the story made me cry.) I said yes to kissing her. She said yes to telling no one about it. I said yes, it was time to go home.

  And so my day off ended the same way as the night before, with me walking home along Pirogovskaya sober enough to walk but drunk enough to be dreamy. I walked through the park, stepping on every leaf I could find so that I could make that crackly, autumnal sound, then saw Tobias again and sat with him to smoke one last cigarette. We talked a bit, though his conversation was hard to follow. Every morning he saw the newspaper boys, and by evening he had internalized the news so deeply that the news pieces were about him or about those closest to him. By then I’d gotten used to the way the stories transformed, so I could listen to him as though he were a radio on the fritz, some of the story coming through as static and some of it clear as a bell. On that night, books written by his father had fallen into the category of ideologically harmful literature and been banned from the union’s libraries. I took this in and wondered if we’d miss his father’s contributions. After we finished our cigarettes, I crossed the street to our apartment building and whispered, Sasha! Sasha!

  The wind gusted through the trees louder than I could whisper, and so I found a pebble and tossed it up.

  It would have been disappointing to have come to the other side of the opening the way we did — with all the attention focused on Vogt and the German part of our German-Russian alliance — if the next big thing hadn’t been on the horizon. As it was, the opening ended and all of our energy turned to preparations for the first All-Union Congress of Neurologists and Psychiatrists. It was slated for December, and it was there that Bekhterev would present his version of the institute’s findings. As far as he was concerned, it was all that mattered, given that it was for an audience of scientists and specialists and not a spectacle put on to please the politburo, the reporters, and the pseudo-intellectuals. So we let the Pravda reporters come back to take a photograph of Vogt at a desk they called his and didn’t get worked up when Der Spiegel named him the lead scientist. When the New York Times ran a short piece on Bekhterev, I served tea, a quiet insider. I felt caught between wanting to rise above the whims of the reporters, as Bekhterev had, and a persistent desire to have my own photograph taken, my own name jotted down.

  But that wasn’t how we talked. About mine or his.

  One thing all the reporters got wrong had to do with the building: they wrote about our institute as if it were the only thing happening there. They didn’t know about Bogdanov’s Institute of Blood Transfusion. Our institute had a public presence and occupied the grand rooms at the front. Bogdanov’s institute was tucked away in the back, hidden, but it wasn’t small.

  By December 1927, the institute of Blood Transfusion had a ten-bed clinic, a laboratory for blood typing, and its own operating room. At first I didn’t know how to talk to Bogdanov because he seemed more legend than person — fearless bank robber, free thinker, revolutionary writer — and I didn’t know how to place him because he’d once been an enemy of the state and was now considered a friend. Meanwhile, I was just me. But the more I knew about his research, the more I realized I had something he wanted. I had youth.

  Just tell him some of your ideas, said Sasha.

  But I didn’t really have ideas per se. I just wanted to be involved. The ideas would come later.

  Well, then talk to him, said Sasha. Say you’re interested in what he’s doing.

  I’d done this before, with Bekhterev, but that was easier because I was his student and he already knew something of me. He knew my work, which he called meticulous. Bekhterev wasn’t like the university professors because he was in the realm of scientists that existed above all that. He didn’t need to know all about my politics, and I didn’t need to know his. All he had been worried about was having a competent Moscow team that he could trust; some of his students to balance out Vogt’s.

  In the end, Bogdanov addressed me first. We were in the kitchen, which was the only space the two institutes shared, and we were waiting for the kettle to boil.

  What do you do here? he asked.

  We hadn’t actually settled on a specific title for me and I was nervous, so I said a title I’d heard Sasha use that seemed fitting for the way I helped the institute make science public.

  I’m a curator.

  Don’t you work here?

  Well, I’m a lab technician, too. I meant I was a curator here.

  I like that, he said, a curator-technician.

  I liked it, too.

  I’m a writer-scientist, he said.

  It was always so endearing when someone like Bogdanov introduced himself, as if he weren’t already known by everyone. Yet there was being known and knowing someone, and those two things were different; the first seemed to block entry to the second. I knew he was a writer, I knew he had been a revolutionary and had broken with the Bolsheviks, and I knew that he’d somehow come to his institute in what I assumed was something like how we’d come to our institute, but as I pondered it more I realized that I didn’t quite know how even that had happened. Somehow, knowing the barest outline of a thing was almost worse than knowing nothing. If you knew the barest outline, you knew the answers to the questions that were easiest to formulate: when did you start work here? Where were you born? What is your name? Awful, almost bureaucratic questions, but without those questions as a bridge, the deeper questions seemed out of bounds. This was worse if you’d happened to have forgotten a basic answer, like a person’s name. Asking again would declare that we were strangers, just as we were becoming friends. Not that I’d forgotten his name.

  As I was tangling myself up in thoughts of what I could or could not ask, he plunged in, asking how I got into this business, by which he meant science, and somehow I found myself telling him about my father, about the dignity he’d had and the way he’d made science seem like the most noble thing one could study.

  You miss him, he observed.

  Yes.

  And your mother?

  I’d admired her, but she was an angry woman.

  They saw things differently.

  Very differently.

  Bogdanov said he knew a thing about shifting allegiances. What he’d discovered since his break with Lenin and his abandonment of active political commitments was nothing less than the secret to human rejuvenation. From the early 1920s on, he had been meeting with a few close friends he called his brothers in blood exchanges. He called these meetings gatherings of the organization of physiological collectivism. They met at a friend’s apartment, and initially, the group was a study group, nothing more. Bogdanov had a hunch that blood exchanges —the comradely exchange of life, he called it — would increase an organism’s vitality. He dreamed of direct, simultaneous, and mutual transfusion of blood between two i
ndividuals of the same species. Several apparatuses would be needed, so that the individuals’ corresponding veins could be linked. Young blood would infuse theaging with vitality; old blood would share experience by way of its advanced immune system. For years, his inquiry was purely theoretical.

  He leaned back against the sink. I’d taken a seat at the table. It had become common for some people to talk about themselves as if they’d been reborn with the Revolution — they’d say, I’m forty-five years old, but I’ve only been alive for ten — but Bogdanov was interested in rebirth for real.

  By 1925 he had successfully completed five blood exchanges, all involving himself. The first attempt had taken place just two weeks after Lenin died. The exchange was meant to occur between Bogdanov and a student of his — a twenty-year-old male.

  My companion — that was the student — and I had hoped to exchange 330 cubic millilitres of blood, but something failed. I got the 330 cubic millilitres, but he got nothing.

  He must have been so depleted, I said, feeling faint myself as I thought about losing all that blood. The kettle was about to boil.

  He was strong. If it had been the reverse, mind you, that might have been dangerous.

  So a blood transfusion but not a blood exchange.

  Exactly. A week later, we tried again. Again, transfusion instead of exchange. Bogdanov shrugged, a gesture that seemed to say that this was the way things worked sometimes, nothing to be done about it. Three months later, they tried it all again. It worked. The student received five hundred cubic millilitres; Bogdanov received seven hundred. In the months following, Bogdanov’s health, which had been ailing, improved. Dramatically. Then his wife joined in. By the end of that year, everyone agreed: Bogdanov and his wife looked younger if not by ten, then by seven or five years. Increased muscle tone! Expanded lung capacity!

  I stood up to face him, trying to evaluate his age without appearing to try to evaluate his age. I guessed late forties, then took the kettle off the stove to make the tea.

  I’m fifty-four, he said, smiling at the surprise I failed to hide.

  How he’d come to have keys to the Igumnov mansion had to do with something that happened in late 1925, when one of the top Soviet leaders had fallen seriously ill. His name was Leonid Krasin, and he was suffering from anemia. Krasin and Bogdanov were old friends — that bank robbery I’d heard Bogdanov talking about at the opening? He’d robbed it with Krasin. And Lenin. That was before they fell out.

  Prior to 1925, then, all of Bogdanov’s investigations into blood exchanges had been kept quiet.

  If I know one thing, said Bogdanov, it’s how to run a clandestine operation.

  He gave me a wink.

  So when Krasin fell ill, he turned to Bogdanov for help.

  Please, said Krasin.

  We didn’t want anyone to know what we were up to. This was experimental medicine. No one likes experiments.

  I gave him a look.

  People think they like experimentation, but they don’t; they only like successful experimentation. We were prepared for failure.

  Bogdanov told Krasin to go to London or Paris or even Berlin because that was where the science of blood was best.

  But Krasin was insistent; he knew he wouldn’t survive the trip. Bogdanov thought it over. He consulted his transfusion bible, as he called it, and decided he could do it. Krasin was fading. They found a donor who was a match and harvested seven hundred to eight hundred cubic millilitres from him. Krasin’s health improved dramatically. It was a miracle. Krasin went on vacation and that December, Bogdanov was summoned to the Kremlin.

  As it turned out, Krasin’s illness and his miraculous recovery put Bogdanov in the spotlight. This was because over at the Kremlin, an epidemic had hit: heart attacks, ulcers, and nervous disorders. The Soviet elite were burning out. They were dying young. The Party doctors called it revolutionary exhaustion. It was worse than tuberculosis. I’d read about it in Pravda and heard about it on the radio.

  Stalin said, We are suffering an epidemic.

  Trotsky said, Our leading workers must have individual physicians responsible for their health. Not another preventable death!

  An army of professionals were brought in to care for the array of strange illnesses that had so suddenly cropped up. The effort was another kind of grief. Beneath the health passports and the individual physicians, the sleeping institutes and the green spaces, what they were thinking was this: if we had taken better care, wouldn’t Lenin still be alive? If they didn’t deal with the health crisis now, the Revolution would crumble not because of external opposition, but because of a few persistent fevers and too many strange cancers. All these ailments were signs of a broader sickness: the revolutionary effort was flagging. A country’s history flows like a river whose path — the bends, the narrows, the rapids, and the stretches of calm — is one of the great constants, unchanging even when everything else does. Floods or landslides might violently and momentarily disrupt its route, but, over time, a return to the old path is practically inevitable. That the country wanted to return to the old ways revealed itself in workers’ protests, industrial sabotage, and Trotsky’s incessant criticism. Disloyal comrades had exhausted the Soviet elite, making them reckless, making them sick. Revolutionaries always think that the beginning is what matters, that momentum will build following the revolutionary moment, but it isn’t so. The Soviet elite were embarrassed by the critics, the terrorists, and the wreckers. No, they were more than embarrassed. Those people, the people the Revolution had fought for, were threatening to wreck it from within. They were the cancers; they were the parasites. Dealing with the fevers and the ulcers was a temporary solution, but a larger solution would need to address the root causes.

  As for Bogdanov, he wasn’t interested in the river; that is, he didn’t give a shit if the country went back to the violent old ways of the Tzar or moved on to the violent new ways of the new leadership. He just wanted a place to continue his research.

  All this to say that when Bogdanov left the Kremlin, he had been made Director of the Institute of Blood Transfusion. It helped that he’d been Lenin’s main opponent before Lenin led the Party, because the tides were shifting: Lenin was becoming the past and Stalin was becoming the future. Bogdanov had disagreed with Lenin on the question of the lumpenproletariat. He’d wanted to create an intellectual nucleus of workers and wanted them to receive the education they would need for them to be informed and active leaders rather than just ignorant workers. But, according to Bogdanov, Lenin preferred to leave them in their ignorance.

  Why would you say that? I asked, pouring us both a cup of tea.

  Because Lenin never really believed in the people. All that talk, said Bogdanov, but he was an elitist to the end.

  In March 1926 he got keys to the mansion, and started to set up shop. He began by hiring his brothers in blood exchanges.

  This was how the world changed, I thought. People took risks.

  Maybe if you ever need someone for your experiments, I said, my heart beating a little faster, you could ask me.

  Maybe, he said, taking a sip of tea. Maybe.

  He settled his cup on his saucer, topped up his tea, and then headed off down the hall. Visit us when you’d like, he said over his shoulder. I started to think of our two institutes as complementary. Bogdanov was keeping our heroes alive, and we were studying them once they were dead. How appropriate, then, that the two institutes would share a building.

  As for our Institute, once we’d gotten past the opening — that is, once we made the awkward transition from the private workings of research to the public display of discovery — the need to attend to both the public and private aspects of the institute forced us all into different duties. Visiting hours were irregular because we didn’t always have enough workers to place someone at the front. On most days, we averaged not more than fifteen or twenty visitors, unless a school group or worker’s club brought the numbers up.

  On those days, Sergei she
pherded the worker’s clubs around the semicircle of exhibits, entertaining them with anecdotes from the figure’s life, always placing emphasis on the political heroism of each. Anushka took care of the school groups, carefully pointing out visible attributes of the brains that even children could identify. She provided the children with pencils and paper so that they could draw on the floor beneath the exhibits. Over time, we acquired a collection of plastic letters that we could pull out when they arrived. This way, the children could remove their boots and have them labelled according to the letter that began their name, as they were accustomed to at school. Children always left things behind, though. Chewed-up pencils, dirt, fingerprints. Afterwards, Sergei would dust the exhibits, buff their metal bases, and wipe all the glass, in a never-ending effort to remove their marks. The point of the space was that it be clean, scientific, and timeless, but every visitor, no matter how old, sullied it. Anushka wanted every child who visited the institute to be inspired. Zhanna, on the rare occasions when she interacted with the children, only wanted them to behave. Children, stop! Children, sit still! she’d yell at them in a shrill voice reserved just for them.

  The wall of mirrors created a physical divide between the two sides of the institute. Approaching that wall, I often caught myself off guard. I could see the mirrors from everywhere in the room, and they gave the impression that the room was larger, that there were more exhibits on display, twice as many. But the mirrors lay in the dark, which meant even though they perfectly mirrored the exhibits, they did so from an unfamiliar side, the dark side. When one walked across the grand salon, then, one walked from the warm light of the chandelier past the glowing light of the exhibits towards the pools of dark that lay behind them. One needed to walk through the dark to get to the mirrors, and so, whenever one did, one became silhouetted against the brightness of the background, which was the foreground. I sometimes got caught off guard by my silhouette, by its indistinct shape, the prototypical shape of a woman, any woman, not me.