Uncertain Weights and Measures Read online

  Though there were many lessons to learn by comparing the structure of a musician’s brain with a scientist’s, I never once saw a visitor view the brains in anything other than the order specified.

  Except for Sasha, who never did anything in the order specified.

  Sasha said that the beauty of the institute’s collection was its repetition. Back then, he rarely came to visit, and then only when he knew everyone else would be gone. He didn’t believe in what we were doing, but he didn’t want to fight about it with anyone but me. It’s so hypocritical, he’d say. It’s scientific, I’d say. Where is the science? he’d ask, and I’d walk away because I’d already explained it a thousand times. Sometimes I thought it would just take time. That, as with people, Sasha needed to hate the place for a while, piss on it in a way, and then he’d come around and see it the way I saw it, which was basically how Bekhterev saw it: as one of the remaining places one could, in the modern world, come to sit in the presence of genius. What Bekhterev meant wasn’t only that the institute was providing something important but also that the universities no longer were. Group examinations? Bekhterev had asked derisively, after hearing about the education reforms. On this point I was wrong about Sasha. He didn’t believe in geniuses, he said, or at least, if such a thing as genius did exist, these guys weren’t examples of it. But he did believe in transcendence and suggested that maybe genius was simply our word for that.

  Anushka often brought the children’s drawings back into the kitchen. She would tack them to the wall above the sink — it was the only one without cabinets — and they would stay there until the wet seeped into them, making the images rot away into indistinct shadows and not constructivist-like recordings of the architectonics of the brain.

  When the general public started to visit more and more regularly, I worked in the back. Much of what Bekhterev had collected over the years would be put on display one day, but in the meantime, it had to be stored in the back rooms. Organizing it was solitary work, but I was happy, deeply involved in the details required by the paperwork and the care of preparing the glass jars for their specimens. I loved the wavy thick vapour of the chemicals I used for cleaning, how they shimmered as if in a haze of heat. I loved the way the catalogue accumulated, specimen by specimen, line by line.

  Each item required its own jar and its own kind of display. The bones of the wrist, for example, needed a small platform and tiny pins. Sometimes glue. The bones themselves needed to be prepared with a lacquer. Once I had placed the platform in the jar, I would use tweezers to arrange the bones, which, with glue already on them, had to be placed quickly in order for them to fuse together. On the jar I would write the type of bones, human wrist, the name and age of the donor, Victor Oshanko, age forty-three, his profession, baker, thief, the date of the donation, November 1927, and, written in red ink, a catalogue number. Then, in the book, the corresponding information.

  Later I had a typewriter equipped with a specialized ribbon, the top half was black and the bottom half was red, for this task. Sometimes I dyed the specimens with indigo dyes we imported from Berlin. Once, in the laboratory, the tiniest drop escaped the dropper. I cleaned it up without removing my wedding ring. Later, when my finger was itching, I removed the band to find a deep purple circle around my ring finger, as if I’d been permanently bruised in just that spot. I always removed my ring after that. Throughout November and December, I spent my days this way.

  All that time, I was wishing I were older. It was on my mind that if I’d been born just a few years earlier, I would have been a real revolutionary instead of someone who came around after the fact. Bekhterev was at his desk, hunched over a book, pencil in hand. I had brought him a cup of tea.

  When I appeared in the doorway, he laid his hand across his book and put down his pencil.

  Were you there in 1917? I asked.

  I’d been asking Bekhterev about his life for weeks then, and now it seemed like the conversation we were having never ended, just paused for a while. Sasha always said that the people he liked best were the old guys who’d seen everything, and I was starting to see what he meant. Sometimes you could see the young man in the eyes of the old.

  Bekhterev smiled, Where?

  In Leningrad.

  Yes to 1917, and yes to 1905.

  What was it like? I asked.

  I saw a moment of impatience flash across his face, and then he flipped the book over so he wouldn’t lose his place.

  I set his tea on his desk and sat down.

  It was war, he said. And on both fronts, at least in 1917 it was like that. And we’d just had Nikolai. And I’d taken over at the ministry. So there were many demands.

  But did you believe in the Revolution?

  Yes, he said, bringing the cup closer. Of course I did. Of course I do.

  But did you believe in the materialist idea of history? Have you read Marx and do you agree that a proletariat revolution was inevitable?

  What is the title of my last book, Tatiana?

  I had to think about it for a moment. It was called Something, Something, and Marxism but I couldn’t remember the somethings.

  What I am sure of, he said carefully, is that there is such a thing as a conditioned reflex, and that there is such a thing as mental disorder, and that this new materialism adds to, rather than obliterates, our other modes of inquiry, so that now, in addition to hypnosis and psychology, we have neurological surgery and the possibility of intervening in the material substrate of our consciousness. And yes, perhaps this is best understood as a sort of materialism.

  Yes, I thought, the institute was part of the new history.

  He turned back to his book then and resumed reading as if nothing had come between the page he’d finished and the next. It absorbed him entirely, so that I could look at him and never risk him noticing my gaze.

  I might participate in one of Bogdanov’s transfusions.

  That got his attention.

  Absolutely not.

  Why not?

  Because, said Bekhterev, standing up, what Bogdanov does is not science.

  Bogdanov wasn’t a scientist, according to Bekhterev. But he was a scientist according to someone. The People’s Commissar for Health thought he was a scientist because Stalin thought he was a scientist. And Stalin took it from Krasin.

  It’s not science, said Bekhterev again, as if reading my thoughts.

  Luria often passed by mid-afternoon. He always said he was looking for Bekhterev. Inevitably, he found only me. Bekhterev spent afternoons at the hospital, but Luria didn’t know, and I didn’t tell him. By mid-afternoon, I always wanted a break, so I would walk with him out into the city on one errand or another. Bekhterev was hoping to increase the collection and so, on one of those days, I decided to get us some stationery for the letters we would write to the families of those recently deceased.

  The first afternoon Luria came by, I’d thought to turn him away, but then found myself suggesting we walk. I was curious. Curious about him, but also curious about why he made me feel so sick inside; excited but also like I might vomit at any moment. He talked so fast.

  What he was trying to get to, he told me, was an understanding of people’s motivations. What brings people to love, to hate, to involve themselves in activities in the street, or to hide away behind books or in the darkness of theatres.

  Do you ever surprise yourself? he asked me.

  Asking him to walk with me on a Tuesday afternoon in early November 1927 was a moment I surprised myself, but I didn’t say that.

  There was the time Rima and I met Marko, I said, trailing off.

  Luria stopped me, saying he wanted to know who Rima was, how long had we known each other, and why were we friends. I had to think about it, really think about it, because no one had ever asked me such questions before.

  I guess because whenever I’m with Rima, I can meet someone like Marko.

  Okay, so, Marko then. Who was he?

  Ultimately, no one, I guess,
but that night he was someone, because he was the first bad person I’d ever met. It was early in the summer; the sun had just set. Rima and I had been sitting by the riverbank all afternoon, and I think we were starting to get bored. Marko seemed to appear out of nowhere. You know those trees down there, how their branches hang so low?

  Luria nodded.

  Anyway, he told us he’d just gotten out of prison, and I think because he told us, unsolicited, just like that, we trusted him and we asked how long he’d been in. Five years, he said, and Rima asked, What were you in prison for? and he said, Scrapping, and Rima said, Must have been some kind of scrap, and he said, Yeah. We stayed out with him until dawn, drinking and walking and telling stories, and when the sun rose, he left, just like that.

  I didn’t tell Luria that I let Marko kiss me, nor that Rima did, too.

  What surprised you about this? asked Luria.

  I thought we were more careful than that. We were only eighteen. He could have been dangerous.

  Were you wrong about Marko? asked Luria. Was he dangerous?

  Yes, but not to us.

  So you were right about him, and you were curious.

  Yes, I said, pleased because it explained the fact of both the evening and the kiss.

  We made our way to the stationer’s after that. The cost of paper had gone up, which meant I had to resort to the poorest quality. I argued with the lady over the price, but she wouldn’t budge, and so I only bought a small package of twenty-five sheets. I could have bought more but didn’t think she deserved it.

  November progressed in this way. My mornings were taken up with cataloguing the human specimens, my afternoons with errands outside of the institute, after which I would return to help Bekhterev prepare for the talks at Congress. It was on those errands, often in the company of Luria, that I noticed how daily life was becoming more difficult. Everything took more time than it had. Buying bread could mean being in line for hours. Beating the system meant getting up earlier and earlier, but there was no way to beat the system, not really, since everyone else got up earlier, too. All the same, I saw it as a brave and visionary time.

  Despite Bekhterev’s dismissal of it, Bogdanov’s institute looked like real science to me.

  It must have been early December when I found myself wandering down the hall towards the blood institute. It was early enough in the morning that I’d come to work when the sun was just making its way back into the world and the institute seemed empty.

  I knocked on their door and when no one answered,I walked in. All was silent as I made my way down the hall to the waiting room, then into another corridor and then to the other side where I found the ten-bed room, and lying on top of one of the beds in the middle of the room was Bogdanov, dressed in a hospital gown, his eyes closed so peacefully he looked as if he were dead. The gown made him look especially vulnerable, but then he had a certain vulnerability about him always, something that suggested innocence, or hope, which is a kind of innocence.

  The upper section of his bed had been slightly raised. All the colour had drained from his face. Even his skin looked tired.

  I should have left, but I wanted to look at him, to be alone with him. I shut the door gently behind me and approached him. At the click of the latch, his eyes slowly opened. His pupils were the biggest and blackest I’d ever seen on anyone, but they slowly contracted.

  Hello to the curator-technician, he said, his speech slowed. Time was ticking by at a different rate for him than it was for me.

  Hello, I said.

  If you’d been here just an hour earlier, he said, you would have caught us making love.

  Excuse me?

  He smiled and said, I mean we just had our tenth successful transfusion. Oleg is asleep in the back room, but I like the light from here, don’t you?

  The room had a small window that faced south. The sun had come up, its pink lighting up the frost on the window, the top of which was starting to melt away.

  How much blood? I asked.

  Eight hundred cubic millilitres. It’s about one-seventh of my total volume. Our most yet.

  I looked around the room for evidence of the exchange, but everything had been cleaned. On a counter by the door lay a series of freshly washed tubes, scalpels, and metal trays. I turned back to face Bogdanov.

  Aren’t you tired? I mean, you must be.

  This is the hump, he said. The body reacts this way as it tries to incorporate the new blood.

  He lifted his arm ever so slightly so I could see the bandages.

  The top one is where the blood came in. The bottom is where it went out. He shut his eyes in a blink that went on too long.

  Should I leave? I asked.

  Oh no, no. Stay and keep me company.

  How long will it take to recover?

  About a week or two. Then you’ll see. You’ll see how rejuvenating it is. How good for the mind.

  He was tired but lucid.

  You following Frenkel? he asked.

  Sorry?

  Do you have time to read? You should make time. You have to know something about freedom, said Bogdanov. Frenkel talks a lot about freedom. When do you feel most free?

  When I am alone?

  Think of it this way, he said. You are your most free with people. That is when real exchange happens. That is when you can be emancipated from yourself. Why hold on to yourself? Why stay stuck in the trap of your own consciousness when you could escape yourself like electrons do, skipping from you to him to you to her to you to him? Frenkel said molecules, atoms, and electrons are microscopic inhabitants of the animate universe. Atoms experience a collectivist freedom. Like land plots that pass from one owner to another, Tatiana. Or, in the end, that have no owners at all. Electrons pass from one atom to the next in a chain. This one, then that one, then the next. Forever. It’s so beautiful, don’t you think? That’s freedom. Collective excitations he calls it.

  He closed his eyes again. I wondered about that, about what it would feel like to think I was my most free with people. Bogdanov described freedom as action and exchange, but acting and exchanging was when I felt my least free.

  His head dipped to one side. I looked towards the window, looked for the light he liked so much, but the sun had clouded over.

  I don’t know why he talks like that, said a voice from behind me.

  I turned, and there was his wife, standing in the doorway.

  Like what?

  About freedom as if it had something to do with atoms. It’s some kind of psychological trick he’s playing on himself. Trying to get himself to forget that he’s seen the inside of Lubyanka.

  She stepped into the room and leaned against the counter, appraising me. You didn’t know that, did you?

  I guess it was clear from my face that I didn’t.

  For two months. It terrified him. He almost died in there. They knew he was innocent, but bureaucracy, you know — it’s terrible even there. I think they forgot about him. He got so stressed he had a heart attack. If it weren’t for these transfusions, I think he’d be dead.

  I didn’t know, I said. What did they accuse him of?

  I guess they’d have called it treason or apostasy. It was because his philosophical writings had garnered some attention, especially from an opposition group called Workers’ Truth. You know of them?

  No, I said.

  He didn’t either, she said, pushing herself away from the counter to approach me.

  I’m Nataliaa, she said. Nataliaa Bogdanovna Korsak.

  He took your name? I whispered.

  She smiled. Yes.

  That the two of them were getting younger as they aged showed up not just in their heart rates and skin tone. They thought young, too. Youth explained the difference between how Bekhterev and Bogdanov ran their institutes. Even if they shared the building, their approaches couldn’t have been more different.

  As we got closer and closer to Congress, Bekhterev and I started staying at the institute much later. I was p
hotographing sections of slides that Bekhterev would use in his talk. He’d say, What can you get me that shows the occipital fold, and I would go through our files and look in the drawers of the exhibits until I found the perfect image, or I’d find the right specimen and take its photograph. On one of those evenings, when we had stayed too late to be productive but were too energized to go to sleep, we went out for a drink. He walked quickly, so that even though we had no set destination, he was always just ahead of me, no matter how hard I tried to catch up. Blackbirds flying overhead signalled our proximity to the river.

  When the wind began to gust and the birds disappeared into the darkening sky, we stopped in a bar. It was late, and the room was near empty. We sat at a table from which we could see the river. Perhaps it was the walking or perhaps I had mentioned Berlin by way of Dr. Vogt’s findings, but one thing or another led to Bekhterev recalling a time he walked through the streets of that city. It was before the cities were overrun with cars, as they are now, he said. He was walking with a woman, a mathematician named Sofia K— and her friend, a man whose position had become suddenly precarious in Germany, as he was French and the war had broken out. The story unfolded with remarkable precision. I had the feeling that Bekhterev had allowed me into the hidden recesses of his mind so that I might see all of its working parts and some of its hidden hopes, too.

  The Frenchman had once been the director of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and had thus been a key figure at Breteuil on 28 September 1889 for the deposition of the metre and the kilogram — referred to thereafter as the international prototypes M and K — in a secret vault that concluded an underground network of rooms. The series of rooms was strung like a chain of pearls beneath the surface of the earth, each room lay deeper than the one previous, each door locked with a key unlike the last, so that access to the deepest room at the end of the series required not one key, but seven. It was there, in the final room, that the vaults and the Universal Comparator (which had been used to cut the metre to a previously unimagined precision) were to be found. What had led to this achievement was the critical capacity of a single man, a chemist named Monsieur André Dumas, who had determined that the revolutionary metre, conceived of at the height of the Jacobins’ Reign of Terror, was neither strong enough nor sufficiently invariable to serve as the prototype for the world’s measures. Further to that, the revolutionary metre was based upon a fantastical ratio that imagined the length of the metre to be the equivalent of one ten-millionth of the distance between Paris and the North Pole or one ten-millionth of a quarter of the earth’s circumference — Bekhterev couldn’t remember which — but in any case it was a measurement that we could not deign to approximate in 1889, a century after its creation, nor even now, in this modern age. His eyes glistened, and I could not tell if they watered from sentimentality or the weariness of age, or both.