I want to sleep. I hardly slept at all last night. Good night, Jacob, my love. Oh, how tired I am! And I always feel this exhaustion lately.
Still, it’s hard to make myself stop writing. There’s so much I need to tell you.
Once, Mikhail said to me, “If you write Jacob, don’t forget to send him my greetings—double greetings, in fact.” That’s what he said. Yes, Jacob, we already have a big family. You already have three new brothers. Well, goodbye, then, my dear. And now I’ll go to sleep and kiss you all night long.
Telegram
APRIL 15, 1913
ILL DETAILS TO FOLLOW IN LETTER YOURS
YURYUZAN–MOSCOW JACOB TO MARUSYA
APRIL 16, 1913
What kind of illness is it? Are you confined to bed? It’s almost impossible for me to imagine you sick; sometimes I don’t want to believe anything. You have too much theoretical health to fall ill! Get well, Marusya! If I were there I would make you some tea with lemon and Cognac, and it would take all your exhaustion away, just like that. But I’m going to bed. It’s evening here, and already late for me (ten o’clock). I did some domestic chores before bed. I laid out my linen, sprinkling it with the cyclamen you love. Why did I do it? You’re not here! I also washed a handkerchief.
I’m going to get undressed. But you’re not here.
APRIL 18, 1913
Good day, Marusya! Are you feeling better today?
It’s evening here, and my eyelids feel heavy and want to stick together. I’ve said hello to you, kissed your hands, and now I’m bidding you good night again.
I’m going off to dreamland.
“My wife is ill, her bed is two thousand versts away.”
How terrible it sounds. I can’t imagine you ill.
Goodbye, little one, be a good girl and get well soon!
APRIL 23, 1913
It’s so strange, and just not right—you are sick, and I want to talk to you more than ever, but I can only write about myself. You are sick, and I’m writing about my worries, my thoughts, my hopes.
Well, never mind. Let it be this way, then. Please refrain from writing me, or at least don’t send me anything longer than a postcard, so as not to exhaust yourself.
Telegram
APRIL 25, 1913
TELEGRAPH ME HOW IS HEALTH I’M WORRIED JACOB
MOSCOW–YURYUZAN MARUSYA TO JACOB
MAY 4, 1913
My sweet husband! My Jacob! I am beside myself. I have real reason to suspect that my life is going to change, in such a way that your secret wish—that I leave the stage—will come true. And our dreams that we spun and believed were still far away are already here, now, when I am not at all ready to change my life, to abandon the theater and become the respectable wife of a respectable husband. It’s terrible. And this is what constitutes the tragedy of a woman’s existence, her slavery to nature. You and I have talked about how we will have a big family and many children, and how our children will be happy, with parents who raise them to be free and well-adjusted people. But this will mean that my artistic life must end before it has really begun. Now I can’t help seeing my mother in myself—buried in her humdrum everyday existence, frying pans, collars, sewing, and anxieties. I hate all of that! And my mother (you don’t know this) wrote poetry in her youth, and has kept her journal with lyrical jottings commemorating her unfulfilled life.
YURYUZAN–MOSCOW JACOB TO MARUSYA
MAY 12, 1913
My little one! Pride, and fear, and ecstasy, and much more I can’t name! I found out about the possibility of getting married officially here, although you would have to travel for four days by train again. Perhaps I could try to talk them into granting me furlough? But try to find out, in any case, if among your “high-society” friends there is a lawyer who can tell you about the consequences of having a child out of wedlock. Also about children out of wedlock who are legally assigned to the mother and then adopted by the father. I have some thoughts about this myself. I studied all of this at one point, and passed an exam on it, but I’ve forgotten it all. I have no volume ten of the Legal Code here.
Do not feel anxious and overwhelmed by all of this. You have a husband, and he will take all the burdens onto his own shoulders.
23
A New Direction
(1976–1982)
It wasn’t the doctors who finally healed Vitya’s psychological ailment, or whatever one might call it, but Grisha Lieber, his former schoolmate. Rotund, bald, and satisfied with life, Grisha resurfaced out of the oblivion of the past, after a long absence. He was married, had a son, and was brimming with plans, including that of emigration. But this was something he did not share with Vitya.
During the year when Vitya entered the Department of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering, Grisha was admitted to a chemistry institute, where there was a strong mathematics department and a relatively lax policy on accepting clever Jewish students. He graduated with high marks, and began working as a junior researcher in a laboratory that practiced and researched a real science whose precise name had not yet been determined.
The researchers in the laboratory were reluctant to describe to outsiders what they were doing. In particular, they were trying to establish the difference between living and nonliving matter, to grab the elusive secret of the structure of the world by the tail. Discussions about this subject inspired perplexity and doubt among the majority of scholars who were not involved in these audacious speculations. Their activities concerned the quivering, volatile forefront of scientific knowledge, a frontier whose existence most people didn’t even suspect. But those who did suspect—who acknowledged that it was precisely here that a new breakthrough in science was under way, a stunning flowering of consciousness—numbered only ten or so on the planet, roughly half of them in Russia: Kolmogorov, the world-renowned academician; the underrated Gelfand, who was highly regarded in narrow circles; and two or three others.
Scientific thought of truly global significance boiled and seethed around these chosen few. Grisha was lucky enough to be stewed in this remarkable cauldron, and it was Gelfand who tended the fire. Grisha was among the devotees, but devotees of the very lowest degree. He accepted with resignation that the level of his devotion was determined by nothing more than the speed of neurons, the capacity of the brain to acquire and process information—that is, measurable biological parameters still to be discovered and named. Grisha guessed that, because of his ethnic origins, Gelfand had had to have read the Bible at some point; but he had been barred from the right to secular higher education. It was unbelievable, but he didn’t even have a higher degree. Still, Grisha was sure for some reason that Gelfand’s origins alone predisposed him to share the idea that so preoccupied Grisha: in science, modern man was doing the same thing that Adam had done long ago when he bestowed names on nameless creatures; he was calling by name the first things he encountered and took to be living facts of life. Grisha was canny and gifted enough to appreciate this project, and the proximity to genius was the source of happiness and meaning of his life.
Grisha spent three hours with Vitya, telling him about his work. Vitya listened rather listlessly at first, but when he heard the words “universal language,” he sat up and took notice.
“What do you mean by that?” Vitya said. Grisha gave him an answer that amounted to a whole lecture on the subject: from Darwin to Mendel to Pasteur to Mechnikov to Koltsov, Timofeyev-Resovsky, and Morgan. He finished with Watson and Crick. “The double helix of the DNA is the alphabet on which the entire history of the world is written. And it’s not only a collection of genes, but a program for molecular computers of the living cell.”
“Fascinating,” Vitya said, nodding. “I’ve never thought about that. You’re saying that this chemical molecule, as you call it, can be a program?”
Grisha opened the battered briefcase of his late grandfather, a famous doctor, with a silver clasp that read “Für liebe Isaak Lieber,” and, with a mysterious expression, took a book out
of it. Vitya looked at the book attentively. Grisha’s expression was the same one he had worn fifteen years ago when he gave Vitya Hausdorff’s Set Theory, which changed the course of his life. The book he was holding now was dog-eared, rather small, and was called What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. The author’s name on the cover he didn’t read until the next morning, after he had read the whole book from start to finish: Schrödinger.
The simple, mundane law of duplexity, by which similar events occur twice in succession—first roughly, approximately, and next, definitively—familiar to all observant people, especially women, was unknown to Vitya. For the second time in his life, Grisha was the bearer of news of such magnitude it could alter Vitya’s fate. This little book, though unprepossessing in appearance, gripped Vitya and held him fast. That night, his usual insomnia was transformed from tormenting bondage into complete bliss. His clear head delighted in its activity. It was as though a veil had fallen from his vision, and the world was transfigured, illuminated by a thought that was absolutely novel to him: mathematics, the highest stage of human reason, did not exist separately from the rest of the world, but was itself an auxiliary science, a part of a whole, a part of a more general and higher stage. A part of what, though? The word “Creation,” which slipped off Grisha’s tongue so easily, was not a notion that Vitya was conversant with, and Vitya felt a combination of envy, desire, and haste. He wanted to enter this world which only the day before he had had no inkling of, and no interest in discovering. The vestiges of his depression lifted, as though it had never been.
The next morning, Vitya set out for the Lenin Library and started reviewing all the material about those things of which he had no inkling. Quantum mechanics and calculus posed no problem; their language of description was self-evident. With chemistry and biology he was on shaky ground—he had to begin with the high-school textbooks. Three days later he was delving into the college-level textbooks. This was far more interesting stuff. Like most mathematicians, he took a rather dim view of physics. Biology he didn’t consider to be a science at all; rather, he saw it as a refuse heap of facts. It was all like unplowed land, experiments performed higgledy-piggledy, uncoordinated data that demonstrated the researchers’ inability to manage and process the results it yielded. On top of all this, there was the complete absence of a mathematical foundation. Chemistry, about which he had the vaguest notions of all, seemed to him a somewhat more rigorous science than biology.
Schrödinger looked at this plethora of disparate facts and decided that Darwin’s theory of evolution was the only structure capable of maintaining and organizing this avalanche of information. Most important, he noted that the phenomena connected to space and time, which physicists observe, also apply to living organisms. Thanks to Schrödinger’s book, Vitya discovered that mathematics is not the highest achievement of human reason, but only an instrument for grasping the workings of the world, a world that is far greater than mathematics. This was a revelation to him.
From that point on, Vitya started to revive. Within the space of three months, he lost ten kilograms. He spent every day in the library, from the time the doors opened to when they closed again, in a state of eager impatience. At a certain moment, he realized that his English, adequate for reading articles on mathematics, was completely insufficient for reading articles on biology. He called Nora to ask her whether she could help him study English, as she used to help him in Russian. Nora refused, but recommended a good teacher she knew, whose rates were reasonable. Vitya had no money at all at this time; but he didn’t really need it, either. Meals were always on the table, ready for him. The library was ten minutes away by foot, and the one ruble he needed for a lunch snack with tea at the library he took from his mother’s wallet, with no feeling of compunction whatsoever. It was only through conversations with Nora that he came to understand that money might come in handy. It remained unclear, however, how he would get it. Certainly not by teaching mathematics: his inability to communicate with other human beings rendered that impossible. He asked Nora, “How does one earn money?” She just laughed and said she’d like to know the answer to that question, too. Their relations had solidified with time. Vitya even graced her with his presence for an overnight stay a few times; they remained an unconventional family.
To give this out-of-the-ordinary family its due, the idea of alimony never entered the minds of either one partner or the other. Vitya had to scrap the English lessons because of financial insolvency, but he began to study independently, with the help of an old English textbook that had been languishing on Nora’s bookshelf since the time when Genrikh had still lived with his first family. This was a slim volume published before the war for rapid acquisition of “basic” English—Step by Step, by Ivy Litvinov.
Three months after Grisha’s visit, Vitya called him. They met. Vitya returned to him Schrödinger, about which he had a number of questions. Grisha answered them to the best of his ability. But—and it was essential to keep this in mind, he told Vitya—the book was published in 1943, the year they were born. Science had advanced so much since then that Schrödinger himself was no longer as relevant as he had once been.
Grisha told him fascinating things about the cell membranes he had been studying for several years. He shared with Vitya his brilliant (in his own estimation) idea that the future generation of computers would be quantum computers—maybe not tomorrow, but in fifty years—and that this was the main current in scientific development. Vitya understood everything almost intuitively, and began asking such sophisticated questions that Grisha felt a bit flustered: Vitya was able to grasp the essence of matters that it had taken Grisha five years to get to the bottom of. But Grisha was a creature of preternatural nobility, and, shrugging off the petty jealousy that stirred in the depths of his soul, he invited Vitya to have a conversation with the head of the laboratory a week later. The conversation lasted for four hours, and at the end of it, Vitya had been offered a staff position. True, it was the lowliest position in the laboratory—senior lab assistant—but it came with special privileges for him. He wasn’t required to come in to work, and he would have a weekly meeting with the head of the lab to discuss concrete problems assigned to him. He was now occupied with building a model of a living cell as a computer. It was connected to what he knew best of all—computer programming.
Vitya’s trained mind worked in overdrive, and the pleasure his work gave him spurred him on still more. He was completely consumed by his task, and had no interest in any events or processes that didn’t feed the fires of his devotion. He simply didn’t notice them. He attentively followed the computer revolution that was advancing day by day before his eyes, and understood the degree to which the creation of a computer model of the living cell depended on the development of the general idea of the computer and on new technologies, and that the idea of a cell computer was a function of technological progress.
Grisha, who didn’t know much about programming, assured Vitya that from the stuff of our world (atoms, molecules, the entire periodic table) it was impossible to create a more perfect computational machine than the living cell. And he kept harping on quantum computers—the possibility of which was oh so remote.
Artificial intelligence was still in its infancy at the end of the seventies. Vitya’s finely honed mind lived at its usual fevered pace, but the tasks that confronted him compelled him to examine, in a not yet formally described manner, the chaos of biological life and yoke it to the strict order of mathematics. But is it possible to construct a computer on the basis of biological analogues?
The deeper Vitya delved into his work, the closer he came to answers to the particular questions, the more he felt he was on a treadmill and not getting anywhere. It seemed he was nowhere near a definitive answer, and that finding one was in fact impossible. But nothing in the world was more important. Grisha more and more often took him aside to assure him that it was mandatory to concentrate on studying the living computers of the cell.
Vitya believed that Grisha was veering off into the realm of science fiction, and that the practical and realizable goal of contemporary scientists was to create “thinking” computers that would be more intelligent than their creators. This was to be a source of profound disagreement between himself and Grisha.
24
Carmen
(1985)
After the Knight fiasco, Tengiz went around gloomy and depressed for several days, slept on a pallet on the floor, and ate almost nothing. He didn’t hit the bottle, as one would expect a Russian man to do in such a situation. They had already discussed the matter of drink and concluded that a Russian drinks from grief and joy, a European with meals, and a Georgian from the pleasure of company. On about the fifth day, bright and early, he woke up and started whistling that most famous of all melodies from Bizet’s opera Carmen. He reached up to Nora’s bed and pulled her down onto the floor with him, saying, “Tell me, woman, why are you in the bed while I’m down here on the floor?”
On the floor, in bed, on a park bench, on a train, on the damp ground—many were the places they had found themselves in each other’s arms over the years.
Tengiz leaned back slightly so he could look at her face. “I’ll say one thing. I’ve had many women. Actresses love directors—they gravitate to you like bees to honey. But afterward you always feel shame and raw regret. A kind of deadly boredom, Nora. It was always that way with me. You’re the only one I’ve never felt this deadly boredom with after copulation. Do you know this feeling, or is it unique to men?”
Jacob's Ladder Page 27