Butonov for his part used no words other than the most elementary: “Come here … move … wait … I need to smoke.” He didn’t even once say he would come the next day.
One evening he visited Medea in the kitchen. He drank tea and talked to Georgii, who had been putting off his departure from one day to the next but had finally packed his bags. Masha tried to catch Butonov’s eye from the dark corner of the kitchen, but the air hung motionless around his beloved face and his motionless shoulders, and no indications of intimacy were forthcoming. Masha was in despair: could this be the same man who came to her in the night? She speculated briefly on the possibility of an incubus.
Saying goodbye to Georgii and not saying the least word to her, he left, but came again that night, secretly, and everything was as it had been, only when they were resting on the shore after their passion had receded, he said, “My first real lover was like you. She was a horse-rider.”
Masha asked him to tell her about the horse-rider. He smiled. “What is there to tell? She was a good horsewoman, thin, bowlegged. Before I met her, I thought making babies was just so unbelievably boring. She disappeared, although my guess is that her husband killed her.”
“Was she beautiful?” Masha asked, almost reverently.
“Of course she was.” He put his hand on her face, touching the cheekbones and her chin, which narrowed lower down. “All my women are beautiful, Masha. Except my wife.”
For a long time after he left, she pictured first the horsewoman, then his wife, then herself—as a horsewoman.
Three vast nights passed, as long as three lives, and three ghostly days, and on the fourth day Butonov arrived unexpectedly, while Aldona was washing the dinner dishes in the kitchen and Masha was hanging up the children’s laundry by the well. He came down and sat silently on a flat rock.
“What’s wrong?” Masha asked, frightened, and threw some pajamas she had just wrung out back into the bowl.
“I’m leaving, Masha. I’ve come to say goodbye,” he said levelly.
She was horrified.
“Forever?”
He laughed.
“Will you never come to me again?”
“Well, perhaps you’ll come to see me some time in Rastorguevo, eh?” He slowly got up, brushed off his white trousers, and kissed her tight-lipped mouth. “What is it? Are you upset?”
She was silent. He glanced at his watch and said, “Okay, let’s go. I’ve got fifteen minutes to fill.”
For the first time they went into Samuel’s room by the light of day, successfully avoiding Aldona, who was intently scrubbing plates, and fifteen minutes later he left for real.
“The way gods depart. As if he had never existed,” Masha thought, hugging the striped floor covering which had skidded right across the room with her. “I just hope Alik comes soon.”
Now, when everything had ended just as suddenly as it had begun, and all she had left was a thin pile of coarse grey half-sheets of paper written all over with a blotchy ballpoint pen, she wanted to read Alik her new poems as soon as possible and tell him, just him, about how the roof had fallen in on her.
At this moment Alik was approaching Sudak, and Butonov, heading toward him, was being driven to Simferopol in Mikhail Stepanovich’s old Moskvich in order to catch the same plane Alik had arrived on and return to Moscow that evening. Medea was on her way back from work and was the first to see Alik walking up from the Lower Village—wearing a navy-blue peaked cap and sunglasses on his town dweller’s untanned face. Shortly afterward Alik was spotted also by Masha, who was walking with the children in the high grass of the Hub.
With shrieks of “Alik! Alik! Daddy’s come!” they rushed down the road. He stopped, cast the small tightly packed rucksack from his shoulders, and threw his arms wide open for a communal hug. Masha got there first and threw her arms around his neck with the sincerest joy. Liza and Little Alik were jumping up and down with shrieks of delight.
By the time Medea came up to them, half the rucksack had been turned out. Masha had opened one of the letters he had brought her. Liza was pressing to her person a bag of toffees and a pale-looking doll the size of a mouse, a present from Nike, and little Alik was pulling open a box with a new game. Big Alik was trying to stuff everything that had been pulled out of the rucksack back into it.
He kissed Medea three times and immediately pressed a cardboard box into her hands, his usual professional contribution: “An aid package from our Red Cross to your Red Cross.”
There were various medicines which were in short supply, a couple of packs of plasters, and some standard rubber gloves which it had been impossible to obtain in Sudak last year.
“Thank you, Alik. I’m glad you’ve come.”
“Oh, Medea Georgievna, I’ve brought you such a wonderful book!” he interrupted her. “It’s a surprise! You’re looking really well.” He put his hand on top of his son’s head: “Alik, you’ve grown a whole head higher.” He opened his fingers a thimble’s breadth: “A mosquito’s head.”
Masha was shifting impatiently from one foot to the other and jumping up and down: “Let’s go now, Alik. At last!”
Medea went on ahead. “How strange. Masha really is glad her husband has come. She’s not embarrassed, she doesn’t look guilty. Does marital fidelity mean nothing at all to them? As if this athlete didn’t come to her every night. And I, old poker that I am,” Medea smiled to herself. “Well, what business is it of mine? It’s just I like Alik. He’s like Sam: not his facial features, but the quickness of his dark eyes, his liveliness, and the same unhurtful quick wit. I must be susceptible to Jews, the way other people are susceptible to colds or constipation. Especially to the grasshopper kind, thin and agile. It is interesting, though: how is Masha going to get out of her romance now?”
Medea did not know that Butonov had already left, and supposed ruefully that she would again have to watch other people’s comings and goings in the night, their love trysts and their lying.
“How lucky I am that I was completely blind to all this side of things when it involved me. And now thirty years have passed, thank God, since that summer. There now, they forgot to say it in the Beatitudes: Blessed are the idiots.”
Medea looked around: Alik was carrying Liza on his back and the rucksack in his hand, his white teeth gleaming in a broad smile. He didn’t look at all like an idiot.
CHAPTER 14
Alik the Husband was called Big Alik to distinguish him from Alik the Son. Big, however, he wasn’t. He and Masha, husband and wife, were the same height, and given that Masha was the smallest in her family, size was not one of Alik’s strong points. He bought his clothes in the Children’s World department store and in thirty years had never had a decent pair of shoes, because only very basic blunt-nosed boys’ shoes came in his size.
For all his diminutiveness, however, he was well proportioned and good-looking. He was one of those Jewish boys who take off intellectually at an early age, magically becoming literate and amazing their parents with the fluency of their reading just as the latter are wondering whether to introduce their child to the alphabet.
At seven he was plowing his way through the weighty tomes of the World History series; at ten he was fascinated by astronomy, then mathematics. He was already setting his sights on big science. He went to the Mathematics Club at Moscow University’s Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, and his brain revved at such high rates that the leader of the club could only groan at the thought of how difficult it would be for this young genius to break through the percentage quota for Jews at the university.
The unexpected death of his much loved father, which resulted from an absurd succession of medical mishaps in the course of a few days, deflected Alik to a different course. His father had been through the war and been wounded three times, but died from an incompetently performed appendectomy. While his father was dying of peritonitis, Alik gained insights into suffering and compassion which rarely figure in the curriculum of a child prodigy.
After his father’s hurried funeral, with a military band and the wailing of his grief-crazed mother beneath the pestilential December drizzle, his father’s former regimental friends and present-day colleagues returned from the slushy quagmire of the Vostryakovsky Cemetery to the large room on Myasnitsky Street, drank their way through a crate of vodka, and departed. That same evening the impressionable Alik underwent a conversion, turning his back on his ambitious plans and the biography he had planned for himself—a hybrid of the lives of his favorite heroes, Evariste Galois and René Descartes—in favor of medicine.
From that day on, his vigilant mind began to assimilate the disciplines in which he would have to pass examinations: physics, which after his mathematical vaccination struck him as an eclectic science lacking in rigor; and biology, which disconcerted him because of the weakness of its overall theoretical foundations, the multilayered nature of its processes, and its lack of a consistent terminology. In the secondhand bookshop next to his apartment block, he bought by good fortune a practical course on genetics by Thomas Morgan which had been published in the 1930s, and privately noted that genetics, currently being excoriated and crucified along with its practitioners, was the only area of biology in which it was possible to pose a clearly formulated question and receive an unambiguous answer.
Since he received not a gold but merely a silver medal on graduating from secondary school, getting into university meant going into battle against a five-headed dragon. The only top grade he gained without a fight was for an essay in which Alexander Pushkin gave him a helping hand: the topic of “Pushkin’s early lyric” was a gift from heaven.
The other exam grades he had to appeal against: he knew full well that he deserved nothing less than a Five, while his teachers knew equally well who it was they weren’t allowed to award Fives to. He first appealed against a Four for mathematics. The members of the commission were hirelings from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, since there was no separate mathematics department at the medical institute. The postgraduates were far from stupid and quickly recognized that this was a very clever boy. He also displayed exceptional stamina, answering their questions for four hours until, when they finally asked him one he couldn’t answer, he laughed and said to the five-member commission: “The question is incorrectly formulated, but I beg to draw your attention also to the fact that none of the questions I have been asked falls within the school syllabus.” He knew he had nothing to lose and decided to go for broke: “Something tells me that the next question is going to be on Fermat’s Last Theorem.”
The examiners exchanged glances, and one asked, “Well, can you formulate it?”
Alik wrote a simple equation and sighed. “Where n is greater than two, there are no whole positive solutions, but I will not attempt to give a general proof of that.”
The chairman of the subject board, with a feeling of profound distaste for the boy, for himself, and for the situation in which they had been placed, entered a Five in the register.
The procedure for his chemistry and biology results was the same, but with less éclat. For English he also received a Four, but this was the last exam, and as it was clear that he had accumulated enough points to matriculate, he didn’t bother appealing. He was worn-out.
The tale of his matriculation became a legend at the institute, and bore more than a passing resemblance to the tale of Cinderella. His school years had been poisoned by his physical insubstantiality: he was the smallest pupil in his class; the youngest too, as it happened. His intellectual distinction, if indeed anybody noticed it, did nothing to save him from the humiliations of physical education. In fact, his childhood was laden with humiliations: the maid who accompanied him and who tied the sheepskin earflaps of his girlish fur hat under his chin; the fear of going home alone, when he himself had insisted that the maid should no longer escort him; the main break as a major unpleasantness, with the impossibility of going to the school toilets. If he was desperate, he would go to the doctor complaining of a headache, be excused lessons, and, shoving the slip of paper with the letters “Exc.” into the hands of his beloved teacher, rush home for a pee.
He was acutely aware of his pariah status, vaguely intuiting that it had more to do with his strengths than with his weaknesses. His father was an editor at the Military Publishing House and all his life had been embarrassed by his Jewish second-class status; he could do nothing to help his son, beyond giving him valuable guidance on what to read. Isaak Aaronovich was a well-educated philologist, but life had driven him into a corner where he was only too glad to edit memoirs of the late military campaign written by semiliterate marshals.
The merging of the boys’ and girls’ schools did oddly enough alleviate Alik’s fate. His first friends were girls, and when he was a grown man, he would constantly declare his belief that women undoubtedly comprised the better part of humanity.
In the medical institute the better part of humanity was also numerically dominant. From the very first months of his studies, he was surrounded by an atmosphere of respectful admiration. Half his classmates were from other towns, had worked in medicine for two years already, and had a varied experience of life. They crowded into the big room on Myasnitsky Street. At the end of the year Alik’s mother was allocated a two-room apartment in New Cheryomushki. It was in this new apartment, still unfurnished and heaped with bundles of as-yet-unpacked books, that two of Alik’s fellow students, Vera Voronova from Sormovo and Olga Anikina from Kryukovo, skillful, agreeable nurses with distinctions on their diplomas, deprived Alik of his romantic illusions and simultaneously relieved him of his burdensome virginity.
From about his third year, when it was time for practical work and being on duty in the wards, quick, easy copulation in the laundry room, the house doctor’s office, or the examining room was as casual as the cups of tea they drank at night, and even had a suggestion of medical practicality about it. Alik did not ascribe any great significance to coition performed on the state’s laundry: he was much more interested in those years in science— natural science and philosophy.
His daily journey from New Cheryomushki to the Pirogov Institute was a real Göttingen for him. He started with the works of Comrade Lenin, compulsory reading for the course on the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Then he dipped into Marx, raided Hegel and Kant, reversed back to the sources— and took greatly to Plato.
He read quickly, in a special way of his own, snaking up and down so that several lines simultaneously comprised one larger line which was being read. Many years later he tried to explain to Masha that what mattered was the reaction time of the perceptual systems, and even drew her a diagram.
Giving his agile brain its rein, he constructed a syllabus for a universal man, and in addition to the medical institute, started attending the university, taking specialist courses in biochemistry in Belozersky’s department and in biophysics with Tarusov. He was fascinated by the problem of biological aging. He was no madman in pursuit of immortality but calculated from certain biological parameters that 150 years was the natural limit for human life. In the fourth year of his course he published his first scientific article, coauthored with a respected scholar and another whiz kid like himself.
After a further year he came to the conclusion that research at the cellular level was too crude, but that he had insufficient knowledge for working at the molecular level. He gained what he needed from the foreign scientific literature. Many years later, occupying an extremely high position in American science, Alik said that intellectually the most intense period of his life had been precisely these years as an undergraduate, and that all his life he had been exploiting ideas which came to him in his final year of study.
It was in the same year that he met Masha. His former classmate Lyuda Linder, a lover of unofficial poetry, occasionally dragged him to apartments and literary clubs where samizdat flourished and where even Brodsky, when he was in Moscow, sometimes did not disdain to recite the poetry whi
ch in the fullness of time was to earn him the Nobel Prize.
On this occasion Lyuda had taken him to a party where several young authors would be reading their poetry, including one exceptionally promising young man who had discovered hard drugs earlier than the rest and died shortly afterward. Masha read first, as the youngest young author. There were not many people present; as people say of such occasions, just a few friends plus the KGB informer on duty that day, who was simultaneously responsible for maintaining public order.
The times were changing as never before. It was 1967. Bread cost nothing, but words, spoken and printed, acquired an unheard-of weight. Samizdat was already covertly undermining the System, Sinyavsky and Daniel had been found guilty of publishing their works abroad, “physicists” were distancing themselves from “lyricists,” and the only areas which were off limits were to be found in the zoo. Alik was not drawn into this process: he always preferred theoretical problems to practical, philosophy to politics.
Masha, blue-eyed, with slender hands which lived a slightly absurd life of their own in the air beside her dark, cropped head, read her poems with quiet pathos. Alik did not take his eyes off her the whole thirty minutes allotted to her, and when she finished reading and went out into the corridor, he whispered in Lyuda’s ear, “I’ll be right back.”
But he didn’t reappear. He stopped Masha halfway to the toilet.
“Don’t you recognize me?”
Masha looked at him closely but did not recognize him.
“It’s not surprising. We don’t know each other yet. My name is Alik Schwartz. I wish to propose to you.”
Masha looked at him questioningly.
“My hand and my heart,” he elaborated in all seriousness.
Masha laughed merrily. Something was beginning which she had heard so much about from Nike. An affair. She was more than ready for it.
“ ‘Maria Miller-Schwartz’ sounds pretty awful, but let’s think about it,” she replied airily, terribly pleased by the inconsequential tone of their conversation.
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