by Jocelyn Parr
I leaned forward, lifting my hips up ever so slightly higher on the railing and then edging them even higher and higher with the resulting effect that my head and upper body pitched lower and lower on the other side. My own true weight surprised me as I gripped the railings from the other side of the bridge — the wrong side — and felt the exhilarating question of how far I might go.
Beneath me, far beneath me, the river’s frozen surface could have been the moon. Patches of grey and black stood out upon an uneven wash of white, and even with my blurred vision, I could see that it was hard and I was looking down, not up, but what difference did it make.
My hands were protected in thick gloves, given to me so long ago I couldn’t even remember their origin. The leather’s once sticky pile had long since worn smooth. As for the rails, they were not so cold as to be tacky, and so I slipped farther and farther still, and it was a pleasure. The powdery snow fluttered off the grating; down I slipped. Blood rushed into my head in a satisfying way — thick and heavy.
But then, through the grating, I saw a mess of legs and boots approach and felt myself violently yanked back to the other side of the rail — the right side — and all around me the voices, yelling. I saw their mouths open and close, saw them look at each other and at me with eyes full of fear, but I could not understand their words and had none of my own. My head felt as suspended as the flakes of snow. The people seemed to be swirling all around me, and while they spun, they yelled more words that I did not understand. When they stopped spinning, I walked away. Then the snow that had been suspended in the sky, buzzing ever so faintly the way summer’s dragonflies do, suddenly started to fall. The yelling stopped, and again the city was silent.
When I got home, I came up to the door and pulled it as I did every other night, but it was locked. I looked at my watch and saw that it had stopped. It had been cold walking home, but now that I had stopped moving, it was colder still. I breathed into my gloves, steaming them up a little with my hot breath. A temporary solution. I thought of how Sasha and I always used to let each other in. And I thought of how, leaving Russia, I would be locked out of the country forever. No one comes back.
When I was finally let inside, I stayed awake all night. I wanted to leave and I wanted to stay. I wanted to write the history of the institute and I wanted to forget it had ever happened, because I didn’t know, even after having worked there for years, what exactly we had accomplished. Had the institute been a scientific effort, as Bekhterev had claimed, or had it been a commemorative project, like the statue, where the idea of a Soviet science was nothing more or less than that of a mental athlete, metaphorical and inspirational, sure, but impossible to measure and impossible to prove? I pulled my chair to the window, and like that passed the night staring out at the city, at all of its rooftops and its bright white lights and the spirals of St. Basil’s and the room across the way into which Dimitri entered somewhere around midnight. He stripped down to his underthings, turned off the light, and went to sleep. Goodbye, Dimitri. At some point, I stood before my wash table, turning my faucet on and off, just to produce a sound. I wished I’d saved something of the exhibit for myself. Wished I could look through the lantern slides with the backdrop of the bright Moscow night and see the familiar outline of the dead tissue we’d spent so many years hiding, so artfully, in the angle of Lenin’s brain. I was waiting for morning, but the night was unrelenting.
Eventually, I lay down on top of my bed. I thought I wouldn’t sleep but I must have because I dreamt of Sasha. I dreamt of Berlin’s streets, black the way they’d been described to me in Bekhterev’s description of the city and smelling of linden flower, though that was how Moscow smelled in springtime, too. I walked through the streets and came, in what seemed a most obvious or natural way, to an apartment building. The front panel was obscured by ivy and I pushed it aside to find his name. Alexandr Pavlovich. I managed my way into the building and knew, somehow, which wing, which floor, which apartment to go to. The hof was filled with bikes and overgrown bushes, and the building reached high into the square patch of blue-black sky. The city was so bright that the sky looked painted there — no stars. His door was unlocked because everything in the dream was as it should be, and I got into bed with him, his body in the familiar shape I’d known for so long. He was sleeping on his stomach, his left knee drawn up towards his chest. He didn’t wake when I lay down next to him, and now it was my arm slipping around him and up to his chest and it was he who was cradled, not me. I was aware of sleeping. I was aware that this was not quite real, but was. I was aware of the unbelievable possibility that this might become real and also of the absolute hollow I felt at not having Sasha there with me then. I heard myself moan. I pulled my pillow tighter in my arms and fell into a deeper sleep than I had had in years.
In the morning, I awoke heartbroken and determined to find Sasha wherever he was. I arrived at the Foreign Ministry at dawn, expecting a line there as everywhere, but the street was deserted. I stood outside the office in the cold, waiting for it to open, watching the rest of the city waken. Cats that appeared from around a corner seemed not to have turned a corner but, rather, to have come from within the corner itself. The sun had risen and was casting its long shadows, their long black reaches retreating swiftly, as it rose higher, then disappearing altogether once the fog rolled in.
Get your photo taken, said the man at the ministry who reminded me, faintly, of Trotsky.
On Strastnoy Boulevard I found a photographer who did rush passport photos; I paid him all I could and still he said it would take hours. Leaving his shop, I caught my face in the store window. Hollow cheeks and tired eyes: I was getting old.
Later, when I returned to the passport office with my photo in hand, a woman had gotten into an altercation with Trotsky. I knew her situation. Her train ticket was already purchased for that night, using the last of her money, for some ennobling purpose. Only the passport held her back. That morning, the Trotsky man had been kind, she said. He had recommended the Strastnoy photographer saying that, if need be, he could be made to work very quickly. She had returned within the hour.
Trotsky was still working, and the waiting room was now full. As she sat in her chair, she drummed her fingers impatiently on the pile of papers in her lap but knew better than to ask to be seen immediately. When, finally, she did make it up to the window, she presented the small envelope of photographs.
He waved them away, saying, It’s too late.
But less than two hours ago, you said it was possible! she cried.
He shook his head at her, as if in resignation. Slowly and deliberately, he responded: Two hours ago it was possible, but now it is not. He shuffled some papers from one side of his desk to the other. Now, he said, it is impossible.
But what has changed in the last few hours? she asked.
Then it was possible; now it is not.
But my train leaves tonight, she wailed.
I understand, he said, sighing, as if that concluded the matter.
She looked around the office in the hopes of finding some kind of ally. I looked away. When it was my turn to see him, everything was possible. I had benefitted from coming after her. In order to prove to himself that he was still a good man, a reasonable man, he’d had to demonstrate it with someone, and that someone had been me. Within a matter of minutes, I had my passport and papers in hand and I walked back out into the city.
If I was leaving everything, I wanted someone to know about the exhibits. Not just someone. Luria. I wanted him to know I hadn’t taken them. I wanted him to find them. But not right away. S— was easy to find. People like S— like routines.
Always in the same café. Always in the afternoon.
A waitress came over.
Tea with jam, we said.
I felt jealous of the simplicity of him. Luria had thought S— lacked something, but nothing about him suggested lack to me. The tea arrived.
He spooned the jam into his tea and stirred it thorough
ly.
The Northern Corridor, I began, on the other side of a broom closet.
He set down the spoon and let his gaze sweep across the entire café before looking at me directly. Give me a minute, said S—. You must pause between items.
Did you get that? I asked.
Yes.
I looked around the café, too, realizing for the first time that apart from us and the waitress, who was presumably in the back, it was empty.
Four lantern slides, I said, of necrotic tissue.
He looked at me intently and said, Go on.
A wet specimen of the parietal lobe, I said.
What colour? asked S—.
Grey, I said.
Go on.
Sixteen journals published between 1925 and 1928.
S— paused, and I could tell that he was ordering things, placing them on the walk to Torskok. Go on, he said.
An autopsy report.
Go on.
There isn’t anything more, I said. Outside, the street brightened suddenly and then dimmed, so I had the feeling that I knew the shape of the clouds overhead — a fast-moving network of thick, grey clouds with white gauzy strands between.
There must be, he said, looking at me intently.
What do you mean? I asked, aware now that whatever was said would be permanent.
I mean that the exhibit had many more specimens than you mentioned.
Luria had been wrong about S—. It wasn’t that S— couldn’t make meaning out of things, but that he often didn’t make meaning out of things. But he was interested in the institute. Eight times he had been there.
Outside it got almost black.
S— tipped his hat when he left, the way they did in the country, so I saw he hadn’t fully adapted to life in the city, which was probably a good thing.
He didn’t close the door.
The waitress crossed the room to shut it.
Grew up on a boat, that one, she said to me.
Once he was gone, I realized that the list would not do what I’d thought. It wouldn’t prove that I hadn’t taken the exhibits, only that I hadn’t taken them with me.
I left the café.
Across the street, in a black huddle that, from up high, might plausibly have been described as a swarm, ravens gathered for something official, a fight or a conference. I was used to seeing them lined up on the tops of buildings, but this gathering seemed more ominous, as if they’d come in cawing from all parts of the city, warned perhaps that one of theirs was dead.
On a balcony up above, a woman was smoking. Behind her, someone was singing a cabaret song I’d heard before. I thought of Rima. Something brushed the side of my cheek as I walked and I considered the small insects of summer and how easily we forget them over the winter and wondered what else we forgot so easily.
One thing we always forgot about was the sleigh drivers. In the summer, we never saw them, but in the winter they were everywhere, long rows of them, lined up to cart off the snow. Also, the temperature. Nothing more impossible to recall than the exhausting heat of summer in the dead of winter. I tried to focus my attention, tried to really see the city so that I would be able to remember it, but soon enough I was thinking of Sasha, and then, again, of nothing at all. I tried to remember the summer’s heat, and tugged at my scarf as I might in the summer, wanting to allow my skin to breathe, but then the cold rushed in, and I pulled it tight.
All that day I followed the course of the ring road, through the various districts of watchmakers, remont shops, garment districts. The ravens I’d seen earlier seemed to meet me at every turn — here at a public fountain, there in that empty lot, and later again in Pushkinskaya Square. I kept looking overhead to see if I could spot them in their migration, but I never did. In the familiarity of the streets I knew best, I again found myself walking without seeing. Whole blocks would pass, and I would find myself looking for this or that statue, only to realize I must have passed it on a street corner many blocks back. My fingers would close on the new edges of my passport, and I would worry a corner, wanting to make its pages as used and familiar as the streets. When I willed myself to pay attention, I would see the Mongol faces and the stray dogs and cats. There were animals everywhere.
I wished that Sasha would appear, that he could be walking alongside me as he had been so often this past year, but Sasha had never been one to do what I wanted and he didn’t then, either.
Up along this part of the ring road, the buildings were farther apart and more generally residential. Construction was taking place for the new metro system, which would dig down deep under the marshy land of Moscow to where the rock hardened, and there they’d begun a vast network of tunnels that would connect people from all over the city, making us rivals with London and Buenos Aires and New York, or so Pravda had said, or so Sergei said that Pravda said, because I’d stopped reading it by then.
Night had fallen. Outside the Cheka office, a single man stood in the glare of a streetlight with a fixed bayonet at his side. The carbide lights of the cars came on, floating through the city in their own private world. It was hunger, probably, that suddenly turned my feeling of familiarity with the streets to an overwhelming sense of loss. When I neared the station, perhaps it was that feeling of loss that made me walk faster, fearfully, until finally, I boarded a ring-road tram that could whisk me away on that circular path once again. Just one more pass, I thought.
I wasn’t ready to leave. From inside the tram I revisited my whole day, and not just once. I passed the gateway to the country, the ravens, and the vendors. Kitay-gorod, and Pushkinskaya, the bright lights and the dark tunnels. I stayed on the tram for what seemed like hours, passing again the ravens and vendors, the statues and everything familiar, until it became meaningless, actually, until I couldn’t see it at all, until I started to feel that whatever had been so intoxicating about the city years before was now the very thing that could make me sick.
When the tram approached October station once again, I got off.
I made my way into the station, bought a ticket to Leningrad, and went into the waiting room that had as many potted plants as it did weary travellers, so it looked something like a jungle. I sat amongst them, looking at their tired faces, wondering if they were former people, if they were leaving for good. A man and woman sat side by side, their child sprawled across them, fast asleep. At their feet sat a single suitcase. An old man in the corner was reading a book. Another solitary traveller had covered himself in sweaters and coats, only his shoes identified him as a man. The room smelled like sleep. I pulled out my passport and slid my ticket into its pages. A nervous thrill quivered in me. I was leaving with nothing.
When the train pulled into the station, people roused themselves ever so slightly, turning their eyes to the slats on the departure board, which started to flip. We all watched the slats as they cycled through the numbers, settling finally on the number three, the platform from which we would depart.
Everyone stood up and started to gather their things. The parents gingerly transferred their child into the father’s arms, trying not to wake her. She moaned quietly, moving her fists to her eyes. Most of the passengers had the same idea: sleepwalk to the train. I stood with them.
They floated towards the train.
I floated back outside.
I’d tried to leave, but I couldn’t, not yet. I wasn’t ready for exile, wasn’t ready to be a former person, when I’d only just started to feel like myself.
On the tram ride home, a man sat down heavily next to me, and I knew without looking that it was Sasha. I turned to look out the window. When we passed through patches of darkness — under bridges or anywhere without city lights — the window became a mirror.
How is your somewhere else? I asked, looking at our reflections.
I’m right here, he said.
Yes, I said, I suppose you are.
I didn’t want to be one of those women who handed out name tags, made the soup, had babies named Oktober a
nd dogs named Marx. Staying to write the history was a way to leave my own mark and I did it, writing Historya Institut Mozga and publishing it in an abridged format, a white pamphlet of no more than forty pages. It sits before me now. If that slim pamphlet is the official history, this book is its shadow history, and like a shadow at the end of day, it is an elongated version of the original. Over the years, the mansion on Bolshaya Yakimanka changed hands, becoming home to a workers’ club first and then what it is now, the home to France’s ambassador who, it is said, dreams inexplicable dreams where language is blood and all the world’s measures keep falling short, the space of a millimetre being infinitely divisible, after all.
As I wrote, I visited Asja often, and I saw the way time’s passage soothed her.
You were once so afraid, I reminded her.
And she said, Yes, yes, I was then, but I’m not now.
Why is that? I asked.
She said that she had realized the fear would follow her wherever she went, that it was dependent on her.
What did you do with it then? Are you saying you were wrong?
No, no, she said. Of course I was right. There are things to fear everywhere. When the Revolution started, the aim was total transformation. The Soviet project would transform our state into a revolutionary heaven, and what we’ve got instead is something far less transcendent.
A dim heaven, I said.
Yes, just so, she said, but it is ours.
A Note on the History
While Tatiana, Sasha, and their close friends are products of my imagination, several characters in Uncertain Weights and Measures are historical figures. The Osorgins were among the first round of intellectuals to be persecuted while Lenin was still alive. Along with about two hundred others, they were sent off in 1922 on what was later called the Philosophy Steamer, the history of which I found in Lesley Chamberlain’s haunting book Lenin’s Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia. The doctors — Dr. Vogt, Dr. Bekhterev, Dr. Bogdanov, and their wives — are all real, as is Dr. Luria, though the trajectory of his academic work — especially his research on S—, whom Luria referred to as S.—, has been substantially altered. The deaths of Drs. Bekhterev and Bogdanov are both true to their causes, and while I have maintained the speculation and timing of the former’s death, I’ve altered that of the latter. The personalities, of course, are all my invention (from all accounts, Luria was a kinder man than he appears here) as is the notion that Sofia K— had a daughter named Asja and that her father would be Bekhterev. That the Igumnov mansion housed both Bogdanov’s Institute of Blood Transfusion and Bekhterev’s Institute Mozga is historical fact, though the dates of occupancy seem to be a point of disagreement among historians, and of course the layout of the building and of the respective institutes is entirely my invention. The Igumnov mansion stills stands at its location on Bolshaya Yakimanka in Yakimanka district in Moscow and is the present home of the French ambassador to Russia. The images of the brains are taken by the author from collections at the Musée Dupuytren in Paris, with the kind permission of its curator, Patrice Josset.