by Jocelyn Parr
But then Sasha noticed something I hadn’t seen before. There was a strange degradation in some of the tissues that didn’t appear elsewhere in the brain. Looking closely at one of the slices, he described the edge as jagged.
What does this mean? he asked me.
But I didn’t know if a jagged edge was normal or not, or if a jagged edge was not normal, what kind of not normal it was.
But you’ll try to find out, said Sasha.
Of course, I said, but I was lying. The only person I could have asked about the jagged edge was the one whose edge had become so jagged.
The next step was staining the slices.
To this day, no one quite understands the mysterious workings of the Golgi stain, which is, perhaps, unsurprising, given the mystical qualities of silver nitrate, with which the staining process begins. Once called lunar caustic because the ancient alchemists associated silver’s strange properties with the moon, silver nitrate is both miraculously antiseptic — diluted drops in a newborn’s eyes can prevent an infant from contracting disease — and imbued with the capacity to permanently blacken the skin. Over time, minute quantities of the substance can accumulate in the organs, creating in the population of a whole town who drink from the same source, say, a skin tone that is unmistakably blue-grey. Alternatively, a splash of more concentrated silver nitrate can immediately, and permanently, render the skin black. That such a substance could unlock the yet unknown workings of the neuron is, perhaps, also unsurprising.
Once a slide has been prepared with the silver nitrate, a chromate is added, and after some minutes, though sometimes over a period of hours, an unpredictable number of neurons transform from their indistinct grey to China-ink black, and suddenly their arms and legs snake out like the receivers and messengers they are, and the whole structure of the spindly little neuron is revealed.
We got to see it happen. Sasha said it was as if the neurons were trying, right there before our very eyes, to find something else like them, another neuron, with which they could communicate. This rarely happened. I mean, it rarely happened that the synapse between one neuron and another would be revealed. It was more typical for one neuron to be dyed black and all of its neighbours to stay grey.
No one knows why, I said.
How random, said Sasha. And, in any case, they were not communicating with one another. They were dead.
But still, they were beautiful. Sasha would draw them, and somehow these drawings would bring us back to a feeling that something we were doing was right, and something we were doing would lead to a knowledge that was new and elegant.
When I looked at the drawings later — some of them had been left in the room and others of them turned up elsewhere — their aspect seemed to change right before my eyes. They stopped looking beautiful and started to look, instead, like the shaky sketches of a cowed man. The spindles looked not like the hopeful upward reach of slender arms, but rather like the legs of spiders all tangled up.
Once Sasha had left, I started to obsess over the jagged edges he had noticed. They looked like putrification. Like heat blisters. Like disease. Now that the brain had been microtomed, I could examine the edges of the cells under the microscope and see that they were bloated and puffy, as if they’d been injected with something or tricked into superhydrating themselves, but beyond that I didn’t know what this meant, nor, as I said, if it meant anything at all.
I completed the microtoming in just a few days, though without Sasha there to keep me company, time passed much more slowly. While the process had initially been fascinating and challenging, alone it was merely exhausting. I started to obsess about my technique, certain that the results of my labour were bound to be scrutinized by generations of scientists to come. Of course the opposite turned out to be true: no one would look carefully at these because they would be hidden away like every other trace of Bekhterev.
Under the pressure to be exacting, sooner or later my hands would rebel. I would will my right hand to pull the rotating handle slowly and continuously toward me, and it would refuse, jerking sharply. The resulting haggard slices charted my emotional state much as the polygraph diagrams the sweats and rapid heartbeat of a liar.
I tried to overcome the mental and physical exhaustion, but eventually a sample would fall to the floor or into the muck between the samples, and I would know it was time to stop. Sometimes I didn’t even notice the thing fallen. Sometimes nothing fell. But my mind had drifted so far away that it was my thoughts that disturbed me, not my errors. Luria and I had never talked again about that murdered boy. I hadn’t cared about him, or his family. I’d only cared about Bekhterev. But what had happened to the boy in the end, then? Had the thieves tried to imply a ritual murder? Had they been that clever? Was Vera that clever? Then I’d look up and see what a mess I’d made.
At the end of every day, I always turned off every light but one. The remaining light would shine over top one of the display cases, and I would stand in front of them. At that time of day, I could forget that what we displayed were models and not the brains themselves. When Lenin’s brain was first extracted, it had been squishy, like dense black bread that had been soaked in water. Kozhevnikov’s had been more solid, the consistency of cooked squash. By the time they were analyzed, microtomed, or sectioned they were all hard, like beets. When I stood in front of the displays like that, late at night, the defining characteristics resounded in my head like words from a foreign language: the sulci of the third category, a complicated convoluted aspect, the gyrus temporalis. Like a kind of proverb, I repeated to myself, Our research would result in the victory of materialism in the area where metaphysics and dualism were still strong. I rarely thought of the specimens as men and women who had lived lives, because I had not known them. The only woman’s brain we had, as it turned out, was that of Sofia K — the mathematician who had befriended a Frenchman who had buried the international prototypes M and K, which had never been seen again.
When Luria didn’t come back to see me, I decided I had to go to him. From the outside, the neurology building at the university was white and clean. Inside, it was filthy. Beyond the initial set of double doors, two guards sat smoking. One was sitting on top of the desk, the other behind it. Hundreds of empty coat hangers hung from three long iron rods that spanned the foyer behind them. Only two coats were hung there. The guard who had been sitting on top of the desk stuck his cigarette in his mouth and took my jacket, hanging it by the others, so that now there were three.
Is no one here? I asked the guards.
Just you and Professor Luria, said the one behind the desk.
And the lab technicians, said the other.
Oh, and the doctors’ assistants, said the first.
But they don’t leave their coats with us, clarified the second.
The one sitting on the desk indicated the general direction I was to walk. Over there and up the stairs, you’ll find him.
The halls, by their echo and by the lighting, which was oddly greenish and lost intensity as I moved towards the back of the building, seemed like caves or tunnels bound for the centre of the earth. Signs tacked to the walls had arrows pointing in the direction of auditoriums, offices, and laboratories.
Luria’s office was at the end of the hall on the third floor.
So was it Vera’s trial? I asked Luria from the doorway.
God, Tatiana. What are you doing here? Can’t you say hello?
He’d been standing there, staring out the small window behind his desk.
Shouldn’t you shut the door if you’re going to have your back to it like that?
Out that window, all he could see was another wing of the university, its grey walls and its dark windows, a few old pigeons, and the leaves and litter that escaped the cleaners’ reach.
He turned to face his desk, as if he were about to sit, but then he squinted his eyes at me and said all right, so I knew he’d tell me the rest of the story, just not there.
We walked shoulder t
o shoulder down the green hall to the stairwell, toward where the windows let in dismal squares of light. As we were walking, he told me about the building. Despite its orderly exterior, he said the interior was a mess.
I can see that, I said.
I don’t mean dirty, though it is that, too, he said. I mean that no one knows, exactly, how many rooms there are in this building. Down there, he said, pointing to a dark corridor, is what appears to be a broom closet. But at the back of the closet is a door, and if you open it, you’ll find an empty auditorium that no one can use because there’s no other entrance, and anyway most people don’t know about it. The lecture hall is small, though fully functional. At one time, it did get used, but that was years ago, when it had a proper entrance. When the university was expanded and it got closed in by accident, no one wanted to take responsibility for the mistake and then the medical staff were turning over so quickly — change was so constant in those first years after the Revolution — that before long, those who had given or attended a lecture there were no longer around to tell of it and it was basically forgotten. Too many architects, summarized Luria, looking at me, and none of them talking to each other.
We’d come to the end of the hall and descended the stairs in silence. I wondered how many other rooms in the building had been locked away and forgotten forever.
At the bottom of the stairs, in a voice so quiet he didn’t seem to be speaking to me any more, Luria muttered, All of them dead by now, every last one.
At the entrance, the security guards gave me my coat and asked, Leaving so quickly? They didn’t say anything to Luria. He had never had much to say to people he didn’t know.
We walked on the side of the street that was still getting the last rays of sunlight. For a moment the street was bathed in red and gold, but then the sun dipped behind a building, and the sidewalk was cast back into the monochrome of late winter. The drop in temperature got right into my bones. We walked down to the river. I thought we’d stop at the benches where we might have found some protection from the wind, but Luria took me by the elbow, pulling me towards the bridge. As we crossed the bridge, we could see the sun again, catching it just before it would sink behind the farthest reaches of the city where the rivers meet.
No, he said, stopping. No, it wasn’t her trial, but it should have been.
We were at the peak of the bridge. The winds were fierce, so it was as though all his words raced past me and then disappeared into the night. Even someone walking right by us had no chance of overhearing him, though he had begun to yell. My cheeks burned with cold.
The authorities had dismissed the evidence the police gathered and went looking for an alternate explanation, asking any locals who would talk if they had any evidence as to the fate of the boy. One day they happened upon two key witnesses: a lamplighter who said he’d seen a man with a black beard speaking with the boy and a Catholic priest who professed to be an expert on local Jewish practices, including ritual murder. The lamplighter’s evidence led the authorities to Mendel Beilis — it didn’t matter to anyone that he was a non-practising Jew — and the Catholic priest’s evidence aligned the thirteen wounds on the boy’s right temple with a mystical text, the Zohar, that “required” ritual murders to be executed using twelve plus one stab wounds and that the victim’s mouth be closed.
Why was a Catholic priest called in as the expert on Jewish rituals? I asked.
Exactly, he said.
A further witness, a local member of the Decadents or Symbolists — they alternated from one name to the other — had testified that the shape and distribution of the wounds revealed a code of letters and that each letter stood for a word, and the words taken together formed a magical sentence that identified the boy as a sacrificial victim to God.
The prosecutors argued, on the strength of all of their research, that Beilis had committed an act of magic in accordance with secret Jewish rituals from which he could expect to gain power, and through the inscription of each of the letters, the release of God’s emanations. Another witness was brought to the stand, this time a poet-philosopher who explained that the blood, which would have been harvested from the boy’s body, was necessary to Jewish spiritual practices in the way that vowels are necessary to the living, breathing language. Without blood, the ritual has no power. Without vowels, the Hebrew consonants are but bones on a page. And without mysticism, transrational poetry has no meaning.
That’s absolutely mad! I yelled.
Of course it is! he exclaimed, then leaned in and said, but the whole charade had a purpose.
Which was? I asked, but I already had a sense because the word Luria had used — charade — was the same word people were just starting to use to describe the trial of some engineers brought in from the Ukraine to face prosecution in Moscow. The prominence of the trial had made judge and jury of the whole city.
The Tzar had lost control of the region and needed an enemy. Those witnesses were a farce. The priest had a criminal record, the lamplighter had been pressured by the prosecutors, and the philosopher was more interested in aesthetics than in justice — he’d even written about it.
I looked out over Moscow then, taking in the near-black sky, the cold bright halos that had formed above the lights on Hunter’s Row, the red of the Kremlin walls spot lit, and then below me, the black river and the occasional ripple. I can’t say why, but I thought of the girl with the gold under her fingernail, saw her small frame crouched beneath a tree, her finger in her mouth, and thought of what it might feel like to slowly poison oneself, how the hallucinations would have blurred with reality, how there must have been some comfort in the idea that she had conjured the surreal rather than passively witnessing its arrival.
It was the Black Hundreds; maybe you’ve heard of them, said Luria. They target Jews, and they were at the height of their power in those years.
I turned to look at Luria. I hadn’t known that he was Jewish, but then I realized I had. He stood up to face me and pulled his scarf tighter around his neck.
There was another reason, too. The Tzar was worried about the Revolution, which was, by then, a legitimate concern.
What did it have to do with Bekhterev? I asked.
He conducted a psychiatric examination of Mendel Beilis that established his innocence and led to his release. Beilis, by that point, had been in jail for two years for a crime he hadn’t committed. His release made the state look bad.
I took a deep breath. The cold of the bridge’s railing pressed into my side.
The story doesn’t end there, said Luria. Bekhterev was, then, the president of the Psychoneurological Institute, but immediately following the trial, the Minister of Public Education informed him that his appointment could not be renewed, and that same day, he was fired from the Military Medical Academy and the Geneva Medical Institute.
So he was punished for it, I said.
And for years, said Luria. It was only recently that he seemed to be coming out of it.
We walked on in silence then, crossing the remainder of the bridge, and for several blocks farther. We passed the Kremlin. In the history lessons we’d had as young Pioneers, we’d heard all about the violence of the Tzars, how Peter the Great would string up the bodies of his political enemies outside his palace so that they could rot publicly in a diabolical display of power.
Does Sarkisov know about this? I asked.
I don’t know, he said.
Our path took us to Hunter’s Row. We heard the music first. The kiosks were bright orange, green, and blue. Roasting meats and hot steam warmed the air. Luria held me at my elbow to keep me close.
It will happen again.
What’s that? I asked.
Bekhterev wasn’t even the first.
Our voices rose to compete with a man playing a balalaika. A woman I took to be his wife was leaning out the window, yelling at him to stop, yelling at him to come home.
The first what?
The kids hold their own trials. On playg
rounds, they denounce each other. Kids with parents in the Party rule everything. Children denounce their teachers. You need to be careful at work, Tatiana, be careful with your words.
Looking back on it and all the life lessons Luria had said he wanted to teach me, I realize there was only ever one lesson he wanted me to learn, and it was that one — be careful with what I say.
This is your last chance! yelled the wife.
The music stopped. A balalaika can sound like every single feeling in the world and then thud like an ordinary box of wood when it’s set down. I couldn’t tell if Luria was right. Had Bekhterev said too much? Were today’s children so clever, so much wilier than I had been?
At the intersection near the obelisk, we parted, barely saying goodbye. As I walked home, I thought about what Bekhterev might have said on the night that he suddenly turned so ill. I began to wonder how he might have explained to himself the sudden diarrhea, the weakness, the vomiting and fever that plagued him that whole night, and how might he have interpreted the faces of those men who attended to him, men who, I now realize, would have been unknown faces, unknown doctors to our country’s most well-known doctor.
This is when the new feeling started, though at the time I wouldn’t have described it as such. It wasn’t fear exactly, but fear’s beginning: a stranger seen once too often.
The work at the gallery finally got underway, and whatever melancholy had taken hold of Sasha in the first few months of the year drifted away, as I’d known it would. Yet, as though we were trapped in a closed system whereby darkness must always counteract the light, just as Sasha re-emerged, I began to feel myself being pulled under. I tried to ignore the feeling, but every once in a while my chest would feel so tight that I couldn’t get a breath. The feeling would pass, sometimes quickly, and sometimes more slowly, but it always did go away.