One of a pair of older boys snickered. His friend punched him cheerfully on the shoulder.
‘Move along, move along, nothing to see,’ he said. ‘Just another fat little zhid falling on his arse.’
Zoya glared, and would have said something, but Max gave her a very adult look. He was probably right. It was everywhere, now; not just spewing out of the mouths of teenagers, but from their parents in the institutes, and from students at the university. There’d been a case last winter when some of the Russian kids in a dorm decided it would be a good joke to lock the Jews out in the cold overnight. They’d put up a hand-painted sign saying A CHICKEN ISN’T A BIRD AND A JEW ISN’T A MAN.
‘What were you going to say, Mama?’ asked Max. ‘The bell’s going. I’ll be late.’
‘Just – not to be surprised if things are a bit … unpleasant today. If you get told some bad stuff about me.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Max. ‘I’ll keep my cool. Kostya told me what to do. Bye –’ and he was off, running for the gate, before she could embarrass him by kissing him.
*
The sun was fully up as she recrossed Morskoi, spilling a brightening orange wash across the ground and weaving a confusion of shadows round the trees on the far side. Her lips burned with the cold, and she could taste the sluggish gasoline vapours left in the air by the passing buses. It was going to be fine, though: blue as the eye in a peacock’s feather, overhead. Her spirits lifted despite herself. She had always loved the forest best, about living here; and the forest was still there to be delighted in, on the walk to work, even when the other pleasures of Akademgorodok had closed down, when people no longer trusted in the trustworthiness of strangers, when you could no longer hear a thousand conversations about people’s work, nuclear fusion in the post office queue, ecology in the cinema, sociology at the laundry. The forest remained.
In winter the canopy of the silver birches turned to a leafless tracery, with dark little seed-balls among the slender twigs: nodes in a network too complex to be grasped by the eye and moving, moving, as a bitter breeze stirred through the treetops. The pines kept their needles, greenish-black under their outlining of frost. You would think it was too cold for the receptors in the human nose to work, but somehow the resinous smell still penetrated, cold and slow, thick as cough medicine. She stepped across the crackling whiteness between the pale trunks and the red. Other figures were igration through the wood around her, but solitary, out of range of each other. She was not especially pleased when she rounded a corner in the path and found Valentin waiting under a tree for her, hugging his shoulders and puffing out clouds.
‘Good morning,’ he said. Since he went to Prague the year before, he had grown his blond hair out longer and developed a ridiculous moustache which continued down from the corners of his mouth to the bottom of his chin in straggly lines. Very Czech, very young, no doubt; but he had a little belly these days under his suede coat, and two toddlers at home. Past your prime, my boy, she thought.
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve got the next instalment of your research money.’ No need to ask why he was handing her an envelope in a wood, when so far as she knew the grants from the Fakel collective were entirely legal and above board. The money wasn’t the problem. It was being seen with her.
‘I’m not sure there’s much point,’ she said.
‘I don’t think there’s any point in us hanging onto it,’ he said. ‘We don’t know how much longer we’ll be going.’ Fakel had been a roaring, and then an embarrassing, success. It did contract programming work for enterprises all over Siberia, and the money had poured in so fast that at one point, so they said, the Akademgorodok Komsomol had had two million roubles in its bank account. They had been hastily spending it on good works ever since: research grants, sports events, the Festival of Bards scheduled for tonight.
‘Really?’
‘Haven’t you heard? They’re closing all the social clubs. “Under the Integral”, the Cybernetics Kaffee-klatch, the lot. Our bet is we’ll be gone in a fortnight.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said awkwardly.
‘Yes; well. So you might as well take it. Go on. It might, you know, be useful.’
She put the envelope in her pocket, and cast around for some friendly response.
‘I saw your genius just now,’ she offered.
‘Leonid Vitalevich? Not really my genius any more, you know? I haven’t really done much at the Institute since the Fakel stuff began.’
‘They say he’s saving the steel-tube industry now, since they wouldn’t let him save the world?’
‘Mm,’ said Valentin.
‘Weren’t you tempted?’ she teased. ‘I’m sure it’s important work …’
Mistake. Valentin didn’t smile; he rounded on her, red in his cheeks and misery in his eyes.
‘Did you ever think’, he hissed, ‘that if you weren’t so fond of laughing at people, you might not be in this mess? I don’t understand you. I don’t understand you at all. How can you be so irresponsible? How can you be so selfish? It’s as if you think you’re the only person in the world. The rest of us pay too, you know. God! If I were you I’d be shitting myself! Don’t you even care what happens to your son?’
‘Fuck off, Valentin,’ she said, and walked away. She thought the conversation was over, but after fifty metres or so, with her hand pressed to her mouth, she heard the quick crunch-crunch of his feet running after her.
‘Zoya, wait,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I meant to say – are you still seeing Kostya?’
‘What?’
‘Are you and he still – you know –?’
‘That’s really none of your business, is it? It never bloody has been.’
Incredibly, he put his hand on her arm. She shook it off.
‘Zoya, I just need –’
‘For God’s sake,’ she said. ‘Leave me to my irresponsibility, eh?’
This time he didn’t follow. ‘Are you all right?’ he said to her departing back.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.’
So much for the peace of the forest. The rest of the way to the institute, she thought about Kostya. They were not, as it happened, seeing each other in the sense that Valentin had meant, and they hadn’t been for some time. It was her doing. She had enjoyed the cradle-snatching aspect of the affair, to be honest; but she had not wanted it to grow into a decisive factor in her life. She had been married once and that was enough. She had liked smuggling him in and out of the apartment at times when Max would not have to meet him – snatching the two hours of Saturday afternoon when Max was at the Young Inventors’ Club, and then going to pick him up, secretly alive and awakened in her clothes, her lips a little puffy with kissing, the taste of Kostya still in her mouth. He was not a braggart or an oaf, and he had let her be gently educational. But they were at different stages in their lives. He had wanted more than her spare afternoons, he had wanted to be in love and to be loved back and for what was happening between them to be the thing that set the story of his life, or at least the story of that part of his life. It was understandable. He was in his mid-twenties. He expected things to be cumulative, to make sense. He expected events to cut an intelligible figure in the air as they went by. And so she brought things quietly to an end, so that he could go off and fall in love elsewhere; have, with someone else, a passion with a narrative to it. After which, she could finally introduce him to Max, and make of him a family friend. They got along: Kostya could offer advice on negotiating the worlds of boys and men. And it was for her to cope, quietly, with the jealousies that assailed her, quite irrationally, when she saw him walking with some postgraduate slut.
*
‘Pass please, Dr Vaynshteyn,’ said the guard in the glass box, at the doorway to Cytology and Genetics.
‘Come on, Tyoma, you know who I am.’
‘Sorry, can’t let you in without showing your pass. New rule. Gotta see everyone’s pass.’
‘What, you think I’m an impostor? You’ve been letting me in for six years.’
‘From today, gotta see everybody’s pass.’
‘I don’t have it with me.’
‘Better go home and get it.’
‘This is ridiculous …’
But the Director was coming in, overcoat flapping, smoothing his coiffure. He was clearly planning to sweep by without acknowledging her. She blocked his path with sour pleasure.
‘Director, won’t you explain to Tyoma here that you need me in the building today, pass or no pass?’
‘Exempt from the rules as usual, my dear?’
She smiled at him with lots of teeth.
‘You can’t have your show trial without the accused,’ she said.
Pause. ‘Sign her in.’
‘That was characteristically tactful,’ he said, when they were standing by the lift. The lift came. He got in. ‘The academic council will be expecting you at one o’clock,’ he said. ‘Don’t be late.’ The doors closed.
*
Her four juniors were all waiting when she came into the lab. Literally waiting: over by the window in a huddle, not doing anything, not saying anything.
‘Don’t just stand there,’ she said. ‘This isn’t a holiday. Tabulate!’
She hung up her coat and tried to concentrate. Thank heavens, another enormous pile of polyclinic data had been delivered and she could sink into the mechanical business of analysis. Tick the boxes, write the numbers on the cyclostyled returns, lose yourself in the soothing minutiae of the experiment, for just a little longer. Spina bifida, cystic fibrosis, mongolism – nine notifiable birth defects. Tick, tick, tick. This load came from a medical centre in Perm, within the ecological shadow of the heavy-metal complex there, and as she had expected with a local environment like that, the data showed a steadily elevated baseline level of mutations over time, with some particular spikes at dates that clearly corresponded to local events. But the two big spikes they had grown used to seeing were in place as usual, growing ever higher as the numbers mounted up: one for the late 1930s, one for the late 1950s. Two sudden peaks in the level of birth mutations in the human population, equally present in the medical record wherever around the Soviet Union they had looked so far. The key to interpreting them was to remember that these unfortunate babies were manifesting their parents’ mutated genes. Therefore, the spikes corresponded to periods one generation earlier than each maximum of birth defects, when for some reason there had been a greater prevalence of mutated genes in the population; or, to put it in good Darwinian terms, a definite differential advantage in possessing those mutated genes. From her work on fruit-flies, she knew that an active tendency to mutation was often associated with the adaptability of the creature, when some serious environmental challenge came along. But for a tendency toward mutation to confer a survival advantage in the human population, there must, by implication, have been a squeeze on, in the human population, of the same sort of order of severity as the die-offs afflicting fruit flies when a virus swept through that they had no immunity to. Only a demographic disaster would have this kind of effect. Now, it was easy to guess what had been going on twenty-odd years before the first peak. Late thirties, less twenty years, took you back to the disaster years of the First War, the Revolution, the Civil War: an acknowledged era when the Four Horsemen stomped recumbent Russia. But the later spike was interesting. Late fifties, less twenty years, took you back to the late thirties, before the acknowledged disaster of the German invasion.hich strongly suggested that the dying had begun, on a momentous and huge and demographically significant scale, before the acknowledged evil of fascism could be blamed for it. She had pointed out none of this in the lab – but they were in effect studying history, she and her junior staff, recorded not in documents or archives or even in human memories, but in what no one expected was keeping a record, in human bodies themselves. Nothing could have made more sense, if you thought about it: where would the past endure, if it endured at all, but in the irrefutable, ineditable archive of the genes? The trick would be to find a way to publish the results.
Well; would have been. She looked at her watch. Quarter to one. Reluctantly, she disengaged her mind from the purities of reason, and picked up her coat.
‘Thank you all,’ she said, by the door. ‘We’ve done good work.’ She remembered the packet of money. ‘Would you send this out to the polyclinics? It’s their next payment. Goodbye.’
*
The Academic Council of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics was twenty of the most senior members of the staff, heads of department and so on: people she had known for years. Some were mere mediocrities, Party hacks for whom she had never concealed her dislike, but many of the rest she had laughed with and schemed with, and a few she had considered friends. One or two she had slept with, since Kostya. Almost all of them had once been allies in the silent battle to save real genetics from Lysenko.
‘We have just one unpleasant item on the agenda today,’ said the Director. ‘A letter protesting against the conduct of a certain court case in Moscow, signed by forty-six employees of the Siberian Branch here in Akademgorodok, which was first printed in the American newspaper the New York Times and then read out, with the names of all its signatories, on the American propaganda radio-service the Voice of America. These signatories, I am sorry to say, include our own Dr Vaynshteyn, who we have asked here today to account for this extraordinary and destructive action. Now, I will just say this, before throwing the meeting open. This is not a court of law. It is a forum for comradely discussion. We are not here to inflict penalties, so nobody should feel a misplaced sense of anxiety, or mistake these proceedings for anything they are not.’
Snake, thought Zoya.
‘Who’ll begin?’ asked the Director.
‘I’d like to know why Dr Vaynshteyn concerned herself with this court case at all,’ someone said. ‘What did it have to do with her? Couldn’t she mind her own business? She’s not a legal expert.’
‘I know the people in question slightly,’ said Zoya.
‘Of course you do. You’ve got an address book full of troublemakers and undesirables. You don’t make any secret of it.’
‘I’d like to know’, said someone else, ‘why, if she had to meddle, she didn’t address herself to the appropriate authorities. Why defame Soviet justice before the whole world? Why go tattling to the enemy, and drag the institute through the mud?’
‘We didn’t. We sent registered letters to the prosecutor, to the Supreme Court, to the Central Committee and to the General Secretary. No one else. I have receipts.’
‘Then how do you explain the New York Times and the Voice of America?’
‘I can’t. Ask the people we sent the letters to.’
‘Now you’re accusing the Soviet government?’
‘I don’t see’, said one of the ones around the table she had classed as a friend, ‘that it matters very much how the letter reached the enemy. What matters is that the enemy knew where to look to find this sort of material. They knew where to look for disloyalty. For cynicism. For a willingness to betray colleagues.’
‘Under the constitution, any citizen may petition any official on any subject,’ she said.
‘Yes, true,’ said someone else, ‘but that doesn’t relieve you of the obligation to think before you open your mouth.’
‘Can’t you see how this plays into the hands of those who would like to drag us back to the past? Don’t you value the freedoms we enjoy here?’
‘So,’ she said, ‘you want me to serve freedom by shutting up.’
‘If you can!’
‘There’s speech and there’s speech, Dr Vaynshteyn. Are you a child, that you don’t know that?’
‘A dangerous child, Zoya.’
‘Dr Vaynshteyn, you don’t seem to be aware of how much we’re resented.’
‘The workers of Novosibirsk’, said the rep from the labour union, ‘do not resent the hard
-working scientists of Akademgorodok, who are preparing a better life for all by their heroic efforts. This is a slander. But the workers demand that the traitor Vaynshteyn, who is not fit to be called a scientist, should be expelled and face the full rigour of the law for her criminal anti-Soviet activity.’
‘Well,’ said the Director, ‘we should all note the strength of feeling expressed there by the institute’s workers, but I don’t think there’s any need at present to be talking in terms of punishment. Let’s simply express our own feeling. I think we’re ready to move towards a vote.’
A babble of voices.
‘Just a vote of censure,’ he said soothingly. ‘No binding force. Hands please? Unanimous? Good. Dr Vaynshteyn, I’ll show you out.’
In the corridor he said: ‘Do you remember? You promised me to be a good comrade.’ He said: ‘Your residence permit is being revoked. I’ll expect your resignation next week.’
*
‘Fired,’ she said in the House of Science that evening. ‘You?’
‘Fired,’ agreed sarcastic Mo.
She scanned the crowd for Kostya. They were standing at the back of the audience for the Festival of Bards, which had looked likely to be cancelled as part of the crackdown but had gone ahead anyway, perhaps because all the performers had already arrived. The Fakel collective’s money had paid for a collection of poets, balladeers and singers to converge on the town, and they were filing one by one across the little stage in the hot box of the House of Science’s atrium, singing sings about booze and heartbreak, with occasional pleas for the of the imperialist war in Vietnam. Max was at home in bed, having survived a day with less finger-pointing in it than she had feared. They had had the conversation that broached the imminent prospect of them going back to live in Leningrad with Grandma, and he had said he was all right with that. The student who was babysitting was curled up with Zoya’s copy of Zhivago. Between the tight-packed crowd and the winter dark, green ferns and bamboos grew in the glass walls of the House of Science. They were in a little lighted vivarium, a flask sealed against the cold outside. Everything seemed to be happening for the last time; to be touched with sadness. She was in a mood of elegy.
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