But then the path she was following turned in among a denser group of trees, and delivered her, only a hundred metres on, into forest hush. Suddenly the path beneath her feet was carpeted with dry pine needles; suddenly the world was roofed with a speckled canopy of leaf and sky through which the sinking sun filtered only as a focus of greater brightness. Sounds were filtered too. Now and again she could still hear the grinding of construction machinery, but it had become as tiny and unimportant as the buzz of the occasional bees that cruised between the tree trunks. The wood was a mix of pine and silver birch. The pines rose straight and slender as ship’s masts, while the birches all tilted a few degrees away from the vertical, in different directions, like a vast game of spillikins. The pines’ bark was a creased ruddy brown. The birches were paper white, marked with endlessly varying squiggled lesions of black: cuneiform, to go with the mud-brick monuments of the town, or magnified chromosomes, the chromosomes whose existence the Lysenkoists denied. The air smelled cleanly of resin. Knee-high, the undergrowth of bracken glowed with chlorophyll in the evening light, each frond a complex green lamp. Oh, now this was something. This was really something, this tall place of birdcage delicacy on the doorstep of the termite mound. She would need to adjust her idea of the town, if this was here to refresh the spirit on the way to every day in the lab, on the way back from every workplace tussle in the grey corridors. She tilted her head back and let the speckled sieve above shake photons gently down on her face.
‘Excuse me,’ said a voice behind her, male, elderly, patient, amused. She was blocking the path.
‘Sorry,’ she said, moving to one side. He stepped courteously by, a thin-necked sage holding a cardboard map tube, then paused; two young men backed up behind him paused in turn. It really was a commuter route, this path.
‘Just arrived?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then, welcome,’ he said, with a bestowing nod.
‘Welcome to the island’ – and moved on. As the little column of three rounded the next corner of the path, one of the young men looked back over his shoulder and gave her an assessing stare. He was saying something to his friend as they went out of sight. ‘Island?’ she thought.
Beyond the wood, it turned out, lay the street with the town’s services on it. Hotel, post office, movie theatre, central stores offering MILK and MEAT and VEGETABLES on their shopfronts, all more or less finished. Little buses and delivery vans came and went; the occasional car. And over here, by some minor but definite adjustment the fall of the light, some invisible line ticked past on the clockface of the day, it was evening. The homeward stream of walking intellectuals had been joined by a contraflow of the intelligentsia coming back out again, combed and washed and in a fresh shirt, to take the air. Progulka, going for a wander: however much the government tried to fill up people’s leisure time with bicycle races and extension classes and boxing clubs, you couldn’t stop Russians heading out of doors in summer for a chat and a drink. Scientists were no different. Clusters of people had gathered around the noticeboards of the cinema, looking at the black-and-white stills from forthcoming attractions, and settling into the comfortable to-and-fro of colleagues off duty. She joined them. Somewhere around here there would be a cafeteria, the trick being to talk her way in without the institute pass.
‘What is that supposed to be?’ a man to her left was saying, pointing at a tacked-up glossy.
‘A woman, you ape. Dear, dear, has it been that long?’ said his friend.
‘No, idiot, the machine behind her. The thing they’re supposed to be working with in this, quote, “portrayal of the lives and hearts of our young scientists”.’
The group peered.
‘Part of an electricity sub-station?’
‘An automated milk steriliser?’
‘The illegitimate offspring of a cement mixer and your cyclotron.’
‘For shame! Our cyclotron is a good girl, and would never consort with a ruffian like that.’
‘And has she presented you with the plasma of your dreams yet?’
‘Well, no.’
‘Ah, you see, that’s because she’s sneaking out of the lab at night and having it away with agricultural equipment. She may say she cares for you and your tedious particles, but when it really comes down to it, she can’t resist the masculine dribble of concrete from his enormous bucket.’
‘You’re a sick, sick man, Pavel.’
‘Thank you.’
‘They’ll never make a movie about you.’
‘I know.’
‘Too disgusting.’
‘Quite.’
‘Actually, we did get some interesting results today. Budker thinks he may have found a way around the power fluctuations …’
‘Hello, beautiful.’ She assumed for a moment that this must be more of the physicists flirting with their experimental apparatus, but then a finger tapped her politely on the shoulder. She turned round. It was the two boys from the wood, spruced up slightly: one blond and bouffant, the speaker, and one dark, with his fringe lying on his forehead.
‘Yes?’ she said warily. ‘What?’
‘No offence,’ he said. ‘No offence, no problem, no difficulty at all –’ all this said as fast as he if were performing a tonguetwister, with a consciously charming smile pulling up the corners of the lips he was moving prestissimo – ‘don’t want to bother you,ut ularly if for some reason you’re not at ease with your own good looks’ – momentary pause, eyes wide with comical sympathy – ‘although you should know that we can help you with that –’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Nothing at all. Just that me and my friend, we overheard back there, and we thought, oh dear, new to town, doesn’t know anybody yet, we really ought to show you around. Maybe you’d like to come to a party?’
‘Valentin,’ said the dark one, warningly. Not being the one responsible for discharging this flood-tide of blether, he had been looking at her, and had started to smile; not, she got the impression, at her expense, but at his friend’s.
‘It’s a service’, went on Valentin regardless, ‘that we like to offer to new students; especially the pretty ones, I must confess, but there is, you know, real altruism in it too –’
‘New students?’ she said, beginning to laugh. ‘How old do you think I am, exactly?’
‘Er –’
‘Tried to tell you,’ put in the friend, helpfully.
‘I’m sure this works brilliantly on eighteen-year-olds,’ she said, ‘but I am in fact a thirty-one-year-old. A thirty-one-year-old fruit-fly biologist, exhausted by plane travel and bureaucrats. Got any lines that work on one of those?’
Touchingly, Valentin blushed: a proper pink sunrise in both cheeks.
‘Don’t mind us,’ said the friend, putting an arm round Valentin’s shoulders and rotating him gently. ‘We’ll just creep away, embarrassed. Welcome!’
She looked back at the glass box of photographs. It made a dim mirror. That refracted blur in there, with the dark bob and the bare arms, that was her, and it was, she realised, all that the boys had seen, a face and a body unconnected to anything else. The fine chain-links of her commitments were quite invisible. They had not perceived her in relation to Max, or to her chosen position of elusive scorn in the politics of biology. They had had nothing to go on but this. She frowned; the woman in the glass, the girl in the glass, frowned back. No, it was impossible to take her for eighteen, if you were paying attention at all. But what else might you guess about this face if you could only guess? Nothing it said about her was positively untrue, of course, but it only told partial truths, and she was out of practice at dealing with approaches that came unconditioned by knowledge of the rest of her. A couple of streetlamps had come on behind the mirror-woman’s head, two blobs of blue-white that instantly organised the fading light into proper twilight, and the leaves around them into pierced balls of green. They loomed at the reflection’s shoulders like will o’ the wisps, night spirits come to orbit
the black hair, the black eyes, the green dress. She’d be known here too, soon enough. This was only an interlude, and no time to make a fool of oneself. But the evening air was nice, cooler than the stale heat of the summertime city, and she was also, she discovered, suddenly very hungry.
The boys had not got very far up the sidewalk. Valentin’s humiliated droop was already straightening out: she suspected that it never lasted very long.
‘Wait!’ she called. ‘This party of yours – any food at it?’
‘Should be,’ said the friend. ‘It’s an official candidate-degree bash. Booze, dancing, banquet, the works. I’m Kostya, by the way.’
‘Zoya.’ They exchanged a comradely handshake.
‘And Valentin, you’ve met.’
‘Madame,’ said Valentin, with a sketch of a bow.
‘Hey, I’m not that old,’ she said.
*
They were economists, or graduate students in economics to be precise, twenty-three and twenty-four, one in the economics lab at the Institute of Mathematics, one in the mathematical research lab at the Institute of Economics, both members of a seminar intended to train up the economic and the mathematical alike into cyberneticians. On this subject if on no other Valentin, she was interested to see, became gravely enthusiastic; Kostya seemed to be quiet and ironic on all subjects. When they weren’t working, they hung out in their dorm rooms at the State University a little further along under the trees, playing records, listening to the jazz programmes on Radio Iran, and trying to impress young girls.
‘And what is your field?’ asked Valentin politely.
‘Mutagenesis,’ she said. It was one of her rules that she would always name her research honestly, when asked about it. But it was up to the hearer what they were able to make of it. She saw no obligation to make life easy for the world’s legion of fools.
‘Meaning … change? Change in –?’
‘In the units of hereditary information.’
Valentin smiled. ‘Around here, you know, you can just say “genes” and no one will faint with shock.’
‘Hardly anyone,’ corrected Kostya.
‘All right. Hardly anyone. But you’re mostly among friends. So, go on,’ he prompted, ‘change in the genes. What sort of change?’
Both of them were looking at her with an expression of sympathy she had sometimes encountered on the faces of senior physicists. It meant, dear colleague, your subject is afflicted by the plague, and I pity you. But was she really supposed to spill her guts to two complete strangers?
‘Get used to it,’ said Kostya. ‘This town chatters, and it expects chatter in return.’
‘I do not chatter,’ said Valentin indignantly. ‘I converse. I probe, I enquire; on occasion, I query –’
‘All right, all right,’ she said. ‘I work on the genes that determine the mutation rate when an organism is under environmental pressure. Happy now?’
‘I thought it was Lysenko’s mob who claim that environment affects heredity?’
‘They do. They say environmental influences rewrite the germline, which is rubbish. Changes always go from the genes to the body, not the other way around. But whether the body survives decides whether the genes survive, so the environment ultimately selects the genes, and it turns out that one thing a stressful environment selects for is a set of genes which encourage mutation.’
‘There,’ said Kostya. ‘Was that so bad?’
‘I don>
‘It’s a feedback loop, then?’ said Valentin.
‘If you like.’
‘And there are genes that, what, tell other genes what to do? A kind of higher-level control system?’
‘Yes. The mutator genes seem to turn mutation in other genes on and off.’
‘Do you realise that’s binary? This is great! You should come and tell us about it properly, the seminar I mean; give us some biological cybernetics to get our teeth into. I love the way this happens! Cybernetics as the universal language, translating between the sciences!’
‘Is he serious?’ she asked, glancing at Kostya.
‘Oh yes.’
‘Well, get me an invitation, and I’ll give you a paper.’
‘Done,’ said Valentin. ‘We’ll get you invited before the evening’s out.’
‘And what do you work on, then?’ she said to Kostya.
‘Oh, you know,’ he said, ‘saving the world. Bringing about the golden age. Building the material-technical basis of full communism. The usual things. And here we are.’
The party, it seemed, was being held in the restaurant of the hotel. She expected that her deficit in ID would become a problem at the door, and require some fast talking, but no one asked for passes.
‘On the whole, people don’t,’ said Kostya. ‘It’s fairly free and easy. Even in the institutes, if your face looks familiar you can come and go pretty much as you please.’
The tables had been pushed back against the walls to create a dancefloor. There was a crowd around the buffet, and another one in front of the gleaming battalion of bottles and glasses. Here, she saw, getting on for half the company were female, but if her experience of scientific life back in the city was anything to go by, the women would almost all fall into the species-categories wife or girlfriend, not colleague. If they worked in the institutes, it would be as secretaries or junior lab staff; otherwise, they’d be low-status riffraff like primary-school teachers or medical doctors. The green dress, she was glad to confirm from a rapid eye-gulp at the room, more than held up in comparison to the rose-print outfits favoured here by the middle-aged, and the predictable plumage of youth, innocence and availability adopted by the rest; as well it should, considering its painstaking relationship to a copy of Italian Vogue which had floated out of Moscow in the wake of the Party Congress last autumn and been captured by her circle of friends. Not that she had had many occasions till now to wear it; not that this wasn’t the first evening in four years that she had spent out of reach of the sound of Max breathing; but a little sneer can be a comfort on the threshold of a roomful of strangers, in a strange town far from home. A blue roof of smoke was already thickening overhead, fed by the separate spires of many cigarettes. A jazz band was tuning up in the corner. Probably not professionals, honking and parping and twanging over there. They were the same age as Valentin and Kostya, and had the same look of seriousness at play.
‘Why don’t you grab yourself a plateful before the good stuff goes?’ said Kostya. ‘We’ll get the drinks.’
Sliced beef, pickles, black bread, a hardboiled egg, a pyramidal salad of tinned peas and diced apple held together with mayonnaise. Manoeuvring clear of the queue she stuck a mixed forkful into her mouth, and was startled by her body’s gratitude. The boys were still over by the bottles, arguing. She could guess the problem. If she had been one of the impressionable students they were used to moving in on, the protocol for the evening would have been to stick to her like glue, while steadily getting her drunk. But now they were in unknown territory. Should they release her into the company of other elderly people, should they do the whole Dr-X-meet-Dr-Y thing, or was there still a faint possibility of Plan A left in the air? They were coming back. Kostya had three glasses precariously held in front of him.
‘We weren’t sure what you wanted,’ said Valentin, ‘so we got you some of everything.’ Everything was a shot glass of vodka, a wine glass of something red and a tumbler containing a soft drink of a sinister yellow.
‘That’s a question in liquid form, if ever I saw one,’ she said.
‘Ouch!’ said Valentin.
‘Come on, now,’ said Kostya. ‘We don’t know you. Really, that’s all. We’re trying to be good guys here.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said, rubbing her face. ‘I’m a little rusty at this. Look, I will say yes please to the vodka, as a chaser for the pickles –’
‘– and not in any sense as an indicator of floozy-hood –’ put in Valentin helpfully.
‘– and also
yes please to the wine, because, as a matter of fact, that is what I like. Thank you.’
‘Think nothing of it.’
She drank off the vodka, and it lit its little sun in her belly. The jazz band blew a brassy chord for attention and launched into a tune that even she, musical know-nothing that she was, could tell was old-sounding: one of the kind of things that you used to get on the radio during the war, when Eddie Rosner’s big band was serenading the Red Army, now lovingly polished and recreated. The crowd sorted itself into dancers and non-dancers. She moved off with the boys to a section of tabletop where she could balance the plate and the wine glass and they could fit food of their own.
‘So,’ she said, pitching her voice to pierce the swoony wa-wa of muted trumpets, ‘so – who are all these people? And what do you really work on, specifically?’
‘Hmm,’ said Kostya. ‘Here’s the thing. We really do work on saving the world.’
‘Really, truly, specifically,’ said Valentin.
‘I think I could probably handle a few more specifics than that,’ she said.
‘We’re working on ways to improve the economic mechanism?’
‘With you so far.’
‘We’re building a dynamic system of planning algorithms, using the techniques of linear programming in the light of the theorem that the equilibrium point in a many-person non-coalition game must be an optimum.’
‘Ah – too much./p>
‘The lady has passed from a state of insufficient bafflement to one of excessive bafflement, without stopping at the point of optimal bafflement in between. For God’s sake, Kostya – help her, help her.’ Valentin bit into a slice of sausage and beamed.
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