by Jocelyn Parr
Alex, he said to Luria, which struck me as oddly familiar.
Luria nodded, then looked down at his watch.
Who wasn’t a Soviet hero? asked Sarkisov.
Luria was already standing, saying that he needed to leave immediately, that he hadn’t realized the time, time flew so quickly these days, it just snuck up on you. He was late.
Oh? said Sarkisov.
Luria pulled his coat over his shoulders. He put his hat on before his scarf, so when he tried to wrap the scarf the hat fell into the puddle his boots had left. He cursed and apologized and was gone.
Sarkisov and I stood at the door, watching him fumble with his belongings as he negotiated with the ice and snow.
Such a nervous man, said Sarkisov.
Yes, I said. I could feel him looking at me, but I trained my eyes outside, watching Luria a moment longer before stepping back into the kitchen to take up my tea.
He followed me in, saying he’d been contacted by the “higher-ups,” who wanted to know when the exhibit would be ready.
It’s been months, said Sarkisov, we ought to have something to show by now.
The namelessness of those higher-ups signalled that a shift had occurred not just in our institute, where the change could be attributed to grief, but beyond it, where the change would more be precisely attributed to Stalin, whose whims were beginning to be acted upon as though they were the commands of a god, which they were. There was no particular scientific imperative that said the exhibit should be up sooner rather than later, and Bekhterev would have wanted us to produce a perfect exhibit for him, one that was meticulous and enlightening. But Stalin wanted the display done quickly, and like all gods, Stalin inspired awe, obedience, and fear. Stories would circulate of a particular kindness displayed by our Stalin, and they would be relayed as illustrations of a warmth and humanity whose expansiveness matched his great strength. Within that paradigm, when Stalin forgave a wrongdoer, it was described as a miracle.
When I managed to leave later that afternoon, I saw from the imprint of a body in the snow, that Luria had slipped and fallen on his way down the path.
In his writings on suggestion, Bekhterev had explained the directive function, saying that disobedience was unlikely in cases where fear had been effectively instilled. Fear was suggestive. Fear suggested that the deadline Sarkisov proposed — Labour Day, which would be upon us in less than two months — was not negotiable. Meanwhile, Luria’s question dug itself into me the way a tick insinuates itself into the skin. Why hadn’t there been a funeral?
Outside, winter stretched on.
As March progressed, the days lengthened perceptibly, so that even if the cold was as bitter as ever, the sun blazed off the snow for more of the day, glittering the upper edges of the frost leaves on a window here and there. Occasionally the frost leaves would melt completely, unveiling a glorious patch of blue sky for a moment that was always too fleeting. Then the sun would be gone, and the window would freeze over again. It was around then — when Sasha regained his footing and Luria’s questions meant I was starting to lose mine — that I saw Bogdanov again, for the first time since the blood exchange. By then, the exhibit deadline was looming. Every day that I put it off meant a sleepless night and 3:00 a.m. resolutions — I’m tempted to call them deals I made with God, even if by day I didn’t believe in God — to begin the following morning.
By the middle of the month, Sasha said, Enough, just get started already. I didn’t eat that morning. Many years ago, I had instructed Sasha not to speak to me in such moments. Over the years, he’d learned to stay quiet. That he’d broken with our tradition told me I was being impossible.
Fine, I said, enjoying the feeling of him taking charge.
So it was that on the morning I saw Bogdanov again, I was sleep deprived, anxious, and determined to get started. He strode into the lab with his shoulders back, walking as though he were twenty. I’d been prepared to be impressed, but in the context of that silent place and my own desperation, his recovery seemed gauche — an affront to Bekhterev and those of us who were grieving.
Anushka came over to take a look at him. She was probably in her thirties by then, but youthful, too. Sergei had even said she’d posed for the erotic alphabet, but everyone wanted to know someone who’d posed for it, Sergei more than anyone.
Did the other guy age as much as you got younger? she asked.
What? he asked, as though he’d not been waiting for a statement of the sort. No, no, of course not!
Anushka smiled, then glanced at the clock.
But he’ll have better immunity because of me, and other things besides, said Bogdanov, as she walked back to her station. Maybe it was gauche that he was doing so well, but it was cheering, too.
What’s on the docket today? I asked.
Writing, said Bogdanov. Ignoramuses everywhere.
In a past life, he’d written fiction, but now it was the scientific literature that kept him busy. Before meeting Bogdanov, I would have said the fictional world and the scientific were totally separate, but now I knew they were the same, that one could test out ideas for the other. His Red Star had featured male-female blood exchanges on Mars, resulting in a future on the red planet where gender had been obliterated. His was a future of absolute equality. I hadn’t read the book, but I’d heard Jack and Elisa making fun of it one night at the studio. They could make fun all they liked, but at least Bogdanov had a vision. Some of it was going to work out.
Who’s an ignoramus? asked Anush from her station.
Zavadovksky, he said, projecting his voice for all to hear. He’s a biologist lecturing a physician, but he has no idea what has been done on the question of blood transfusions in medicine.
Lecturing you, I presume, I said, surprising even myself at my audacity. On the few occasions that we’d talked, there always came a moment in the conversation when I would say something I’d regret immediately, and he’d always surprise me by not being offended, for enjoying a gentle teasing, as if it indicated friendship rather than preventing it. Bogdanov was grinning gleefully at me.
He’s an opportunist. Your age, he said, but not so smart.
I tried to hide my smile.
So, he said, quietly now, shall we figure out what blood type you are?
Even if he impressed me, by then, I wasn’t so sure.
When Bogdanov left us, I pushed a stool against the bench and climbed up so that I could reach the top shelf. Get going. Despite my weeks of cleaning, the box that housed the tub with Bekhterev’s brain in it had remained stowed behind a row of bottles. They were clear and brown, full and empty, labelled use gloves and not, dated and not. I parted them as though dividing the seas, clearing a path for the box. The first strange thing about the box was the address of origin: there was none, even though originating and destination addresses were by then required by law. The box hadn’t been delivered by any official body, just dropped off, as one might drop off a house key or a note of thanks.
I opened the box to reveal the tub. When I pulled it out, the liquid inside began to slosh to and fro. Bekhterev was scrawled across its side, which seemed at once absurd, but also reassuring that a label had been put to it to say that this brain was certainly his, and not like the heart whose origin would never be known. Removing the lid, I stared at the brain floating in the swirling preserving solution. It was the epitome, it seemed, of an alienated object. It was human; it was not. When I finally lifted it from the liquid, the weight of it shocked me, and I dropped it back into the fluid which splashed up against the sides of the bucket in a noxious wave. Across the lab, Anush shifted at her station to peer over at me.
In the moments after death, when the blood still fills our veins and arteries, our organs and tissues hold on to their living colours. It is only once two small incisions are made in the heart, and it is pumped full first of saline solution and then of fixative, that their hues begin to fade. The deep burgundy of the liver washes away. The heart, the stomach, the
intestines, all of varying shades in life, fade. The fleshy pink of the brain pales. It was this lack of colour that allowed me to continue. Life has colour and death has none. Keep going.
I picked the brain up again. Because it had been fixed in formalin, the tissue had hardened to the point that each of the sulci had the feel and consistency of hard rubber or cold wax. The various white-grey folds of the brain glistened in the harsh light of the overhead lamp. I turned it over, feeling its weight first in my left hand and then in my right. Whoever had removed it had been very careful: only low on the temporal lobe did I find any damage. That the cut was smooth told me that the damage had happened in the very moment of extraction, when the brain was unfixed, that is, when its tissues were soft, gelatinous, and easily scarred. Had something frightened the person who removed the brain?
I was thinking about this when Sarkisov appeared, as if out of nowhere.
I thought you might need some help getting started, he said. His urgency clashed with the contemplative pace I was trying to establish for myself.
He took the brain from me then and laid it on the table top. He opened the drawers and fumbled around for a minute, looking for something. Out came a knife. He positioned it neatly between the two hemispheres, then cut straight through. The two sides rolled apart like two halves of a cabbage. I heard myself gasp and looked up at the windows. Over at her station, Anushka dropped a glass. Shit, I heard her say, under her breath.
The windows let in a dull, foggy light.
Sarkisov was speaking quickly, explaining things I already damn well knew. All of our large specimens had come from other labs. German labs. Socialist labs. Labs so well equipped they could microtome an elephant’s brain if they wanted. We weren’t so fortunate, which meant our specimens had to be divided before being sliced. Yet, in exchange for the problem of needing to divide a brain into its hemispheres, we could count ourselves lucky because our modest little microtome rewarded us with a perfectly plane slice, something other models, such as the Cambridge Rocker, couldn’t manage. I was nodding as he spoke, aiming for the blankest expression I could muster, which wasn’t so hard, since shock has that very effect. Slices needed to be plane he was telling me, not convex; the equipment needed to be kept clean and organized; microtomes were only as good as their blade. I know, I heard myself whisper. It was winter, commented Sarkisov, in what seemed an aside, so keep the blade warm. I know.
When he walked away, Anush looked over and mouthed, You okay? And I couldn’t say.
Keep going.
I didn’t let myself feel anything then, except the urgency Sarkisov had impressed upon me. I found the manuals we had on microscopy and thumbed through them, looking for the protocols I’d need to create the block, prepare the fixative, and mix the dye. The manuals were basically recipe books; they had no advice for my own rapidly beating heart. I continued.
By that afternoon, I was ready to prepare the block. I began by soaking it in cedar-wood oil, which served to dehydrate the brain completely. I knew it was done when the brain sank to the bottom of the tank. Then I placed it in a paraffin-filled mould. Each step was a palliative, in a way, because with every step the brain looked more and more like every other specimen I had ever worked with, and less and less like an organ that had once been pumped full of blood and words and memories and the most original thoughts in the world.
I’m coming with you, said Sasha the next day.
I told myself he needed the company, but I was as desperate, probably more so. The gallery opening had been pushed back and his questions about the Osorgins had returned, mushrooming into questions about everyone. He worried about old friends he hadn’t seen for ages, was resentful of me because I could keep working even under conditions that ought to have broken my heart. It is hard for me I’d said, and he’d conceded, saying I know, I know. His questions about the Osorgins had led to questions about Bekhterev, and his questions about Bekhterev aligned with Luria’s questions about Bekhterev, which had insidiously become mine, too. Why hadn’t there been a funeral? My heart sped up when I thought about it.
Work is how I make it make sense, I declared, to myself or to Sasha, I wasn’t sure.
That morning we rode in on the tram together. It rumbled toward the city centre, moving between white patches of light at the intersections and the dark shadows cast by the buildings. Even on the tram it was so cold I could see my breath. Neither of us found a seat, so we hung on to whatever pole or seat back we could find, swinging erratically when the driver braked too suddenly or took a corner too fast. I felt sick to my stomach and irritated with the smallest thing — even the children licking their dirty kopeks and pressing them into the tram’s still frozen windows disgusted me as I thought about the spit circles their peepholes would leave on the windows for months afterwards, even once the ice had melted. The tram emptied as we neared the Kremlin and then veered right to cross the bridge. On the other side was the institute.
Though we’d come in together, I insisted Sasha go to the library for a few hours before coming to the institute, so that his coming by would seem more adult and less like he were a sick child I couldn’t leave at home alone.
We parted ways at the corner.
That afternoon, he joined me.
For the rest of that week, we sat side by side in a room on the second floor of the institute, repeating the same series of movements. We kept the room warm as per Sarkisov’s instructions. A cold draft could lead to a poor cut. Time became hard to measure, as though we were swimming in time, pushing up against time, resisting time, expanding time, telling time we didn’t believe in its measurements anymore. The room was small and warmer than the rest of the building, so on what could have been weeks into the project, but on what was probably only our second or third day, we took to stripping down to our first layer of underclothes, leaving everything else in a pile at the door. It wasn’t sensual exactly, but it was a new kind of intimacy.
Mechanically speaking, the microtome resembled a sewing machine. Executing a cut meant that the right hand brought down the rotating handle as a tailor would bring a sewing needle down to nudge it into the cloth, but here, it was the specimen that was lowered onto a blade edge and then through it, so that every section that fluttered up once the cut was done was a thickness of precisely eighty micrometres. We were silent mostly, side by side at the table, one sitting, the other standing, the first one lowering the block over the edge of the blade, the second one holding the paintbrush, ready to lift up the cut section. At the bottom of every cycle, the microtome landed with a kind of chunk sound. If I was lowering the block, this was Sasha’s cue to dampen the paintbrush and then brush it against the glass to take up the papery section and any stray pieces of wax. On the tray beside, he would lay the section out on a sheet of white paper. No one disturbed us; even the slightest gust of air caused, say, by the opening of the door, could have caused all the sections to go flying. I found myself able to relax for the first time that winter and realized that it was Sarkisov’s capacity to appear without warning that had put me on edge. In that room, no one could disturb us.
Sometimes one of us would break the silence, remembering a story one or the other had wanted to tell, and like that, I started to see how the years had changed us both. When he was younger, he’d wanted to be a baker, then later, someone who worked in a fruit shop or a bookstore. What he’d wanted was regular customers — the kind of people who would need him every day and whose needs he could predictably satisfy. But his mother insisted on an education. Their compromise was art school.
When we’d first met, we found each other foreign, compelling, and we called that love. But now, sitting in that hot room in our underwear, not talking for hours on end, I saw that my definition of love had changed. Sasha turned out to be a perfect assistant: nervous and careful.
When we tired, we would swap tasks and after we’d collected enough sections, we would turn to mounting them on slides. The sheer size of the sections made the task espe
cially cumbersome. Paraffin sections almost always wrinkle or fold when cutting, but one advantage of the paraffin was its tendency to expand when warmed. For each section, I would drop the smallest amount of albumen fixative on the middle of a slide, spread it around with the tip of my finger to make the thinnest layer possible. Sasha would pipette the tiniest drops of water on the slide, and then we’d lay out the section as evenly as possible. More water afterwards and then I would hold the slide over the copper heating plate to warm, but not melt, the paraffin. The remaining steps required less care. Once dried, the sections would be de-paraffined using the xylene that we had at the beginning, though we ran out and had to rely on benzine at the end. I’d heard that a similar effect can be achieved using gasoline, but then there’s the potential for fire. When Sasha took in the threat of fire, his eyes lit up, and in that second he was the boy-man I’d met in a bookstore, ready to run out into the night and to take me with him. Some parts of our character are more or less permanent.
On the Friday of that week, the gallery called Sasha to tell him that he would be starting on Sunday. By then, we were getting really good at the work, which also meant we got a little distracted. Sasha stopped needing to be so alert to the mechanics of the thing and started to look more carefully at the slices themselves as they relaxed onto the slides.
In the manual, what we were doing was supposed to look like this:
But what we got, when we held up a slide against the backdrop of a window thick with melting snow, was this:
I mention the watery melting snow because it’s visible in the image. That’s Sasha’s handwriting, there, on the note along the bottom. The photograph we took of the slide is shoddy, but not that shoddy. We didn’t include the brain stem on the slide. We were using the manual as a guide, and the authors hadn’t included the brain stem either. As I mentioned, in Bekhterev’s case, the brain stem was the only sign of damage, the only sign that whoever had removed the brain had slipped.