The Tool & the Butterflies

by Dmitry Lipskerov

  “Well, this isn’t my specialty,” he warned her. “But all the evidence leads me to believe that you are pregnant—very pregnant, as a matter of fact.”

  “How could I be pregnant?!” the terrified patient asked.

  “I’m sure a gynecologist could explain that to you!”

  After the woman left, her face looking like a crepe that had gone stale, the oncologist complained to the nurse at great length about the population’s near-universal sexual illiteracy, stunned that women didn’t know what IUDs and birth control were, or even product no. 2.

  “What’s product no. 2?” asked the nurse.

  “She doesn’t even know about her own situation!” said the oncologist, throwing up his hands. “How will she take care of that unfortunate child? And product no. 2 is a rubber!”

  As she left the clinic, Dasha fully understood that there was a little person living inside her. She distinctly remembered living inside her mother’s belly, how sweetly she had slept there, how warm it had been in the shoreless maternal ocean … She didn’t need any gynecologist to understand the unchanging essence of things. Nature explained everything itself, bypassing her brain and transforming into emotion.

  When she got home, Dasha informed Joseph that she was carrying a child in her belly, her son’s little brother or sister. Then she suddenly realized that the father of her child would be her own son. Her heart clenched with horror, but another thought instantly came to her rescue—Joseph was adopted. There was no reason at all he couldn’t be born perfectly normal!

  It was only the janitor who worked the other shift who sensed that something was up and began looking at Dasha’s belly suspiciously. One day, her curiosity got the better of her, and she asked straight out.

  “Do he force himself on you?”

  “What?”

  “That retarded son of yours.”

  “What?” She didn’t understand. All she could do was ask again.

  “Did your son knock you up?!” For some reason, the other janitor was mad.

  “What? No!” Dasha had finally gotten it. “Why would you say that?”

  “Who was it then?”

  “Brodsky, the poet! I am carrying his offspring!”

  “Poet? What poet?”

  “Just a regular poet. He’s a Nobel laureate.”

  “Oh!” went the other janitor, putting two and two together. “A con? A guy in jail?”

  “Yeah,” Dasha said, just going with it.

  “You were pen pals first?”

  “Uh-huh …”

  “A tale as old as time, really … He got out, had his way with you, and took off, like a crowded bus that won’t stop to pick you up!”

  “Yeah, it was just like that.”

  They commiserated about women’s rough lot awhile and then went about their business. Dasha toiled away cleaning the stairwells, her stomach growing all the while, the child’s birth coming closer, one stretch mark at a time, and Joseph continued to use his mother’s body to keep his destroyed brain more or less balanced.

  She had to have the baby at home—there was nobody to watch the sick kid. She was not afraid of this process; after all, where she was from, women would sometimes even give birth out in the tundra, like reindeer. The only person Dasha could seek help from was the other janitor; she didn’t know anybody else.

  “How about I call an ambulance?” her gal comrade asked.

  “ … I’ll do it myself …”

  “Whatever you say …” They got all the towels in the building ready and boiled a bunch of rags. The last of the woman’s water ran down her legs as her labor continued, but she paid not the slightest attention to that, ignored her accelerating contractions, and kept on ironing some gauze to disinfect it. She took a pair of regular desk scissors out of the locked cabinet and boiled them as well.

  “They’re dull,” the janitor winced.

  “They’ll do.”

  “I sure don’t envy you, honey! Maybe I should call that ambulance after all?”

  “It’s starting!” Dasha warned her, pulling off her pregnancy belt and lying down on the bed. Like all women do, she screamed from her labor pains, pushed as hard as she could, while Joseph, locked in the kitchen, yowled like a dog, as if someone had died. Five hours into the process, Dasha’s relief from her burden resulted in a miraculous baby boy.

  “Congratulations!” the janitor said with a smile and cut the cord with the scissors. “Well, time for my shift.”

  That was how Dasha gave birth to a son—a biological son this time—whom she named Joseph in honor of his father and her father, with a patronymic to match as well, so the full name on his birth certificate was “Joseph Josephovich Brodsky.”

  “That’s a Jewish name!” the civil servant declared. “You registered his ethnicity as Russian!”

  “Well, let’s rewrite it then. I didn’t know.” The lady at the registration office produced a new form, filled it out, then wrote the word “JEWISH” in thick letters in the box labeled “ethnicity,” not without a certain degree of satisfaction.

  “Here is your birth certificate!” Then she smiled nastily. “How does that look?”

  “Looks great!”

  Dasha redoubled her efforts, toiling away in those stairwells where her righteous neighbors gave her scornful looks—two bastard children and she’s acting like she’s as sweet as a dandelion. The janitor who delivered the baby just threw fuel on the fire of their ostracism.

  “It was a con who put that whoreson in her. The kid came out with a head full of black hair … And I didn’t get dime one for helping her! Those slanty-eyed types are all the same!”

  Joseph Josephovich grew up strong. The little tyke sucked greedily, but, if anything, Dasha produced an excess of milk, like a little dairy farm. While his father, Joseph, was in the process of fulfilling his sexual needs, he, too, would drink his fill.

  Life went on, as it does. The children grew, and the younger Joseph was just as handsome as his father, but his brain worked like it ought to—actually, he even outstripped his peers.

  Dasha’s biological son had long since moved on from his mother’s milk. He turned seven and started school. They agreed to enroll him instantly, the moment the assistant principal saw the incredibly handsome boy with his big, sad eyes and hair as black as piano polish that cascaded on to his shoulders. She could see him vividly, in white gloves with the school’s banner in his hands at the opening day ceremony.

  “He doesn’t look like you at all,” the assistant principal commented.

  “He’s the spitting image of his father.”

  “That can happen when the father has dominant genes.”

  Dasha tried to make sure Joseph Senior never had her in front of Joseph Junior. Well, he was the boy’s real father, so you could say they were a normal family … She’d even kept making the milk that her adopted son and husband loved so much.

  Then Joseph Senior got sick. It all started with an ordinary cold, just coughing and a runny nose. The twenty-three-year-old didn’t understand what was happening to him or why there was so much bad stuff going on inside him. He no longer sucked on his mother’s breasts with his now-dry mouth, lost all physical attraction to her, and did little but hold his head in his weakening hands, trying to squeeze the unbearable pain out of his skull. He tried to roar, but the strength in his body was waning rapidly, so he sounded more like a cat than a lion. Dasha tried everything she knew, even melted deer fat, both rubbed on the skin and taken internally. It was futile, so she decided to call an ambulance, which took both of them to the nearest hospital, while little Joseph stayed at an after-school program where he beat everyone at chess, even the upperclassmen.

  “He has neurological problems!” Dasha repeated over and over again at the hospital. “He can’t answer your questions by himself,” she told the nurse.

  It turned out that there was no need to explain anything. The elderly doctor with a beard just like Kalinin who came out to meet the mother told
her that he had some kind of nasty meningitis.

  “Why did you wait so long to seek medical help?” the doctor griped. “Go say goodbye.” She still couldn’t make any sense of all this.

  “Is this going to take a while? I’ll just wait here on the couch …”

  “He’s dying. Oh yeah, it’ll be a while. A long while.”

  She stood in the hallway, feeling her legs growing into the floor, as heavy as if they had been poured from concrete. When the meaning of what she had heard reached her, she staggered toward the ward where her son and husband was dying. She went in, her legs almost too stiff to walk, looked at the doctors hovering over Joseph, and, barely able to open her lips, asked everyone to leave, to just let her have two minutes of his life … Then, when they were alone together, she lay down on the hospital bed, took out her right breast, brought it to her son’s lifeless mouth, and pressed on it, forcing out a drop. Joseph stuck out the tip of his gray tongue to catch the milk, pulled it back, and then was gone in an instant.

  They buried Joseph Senior in some country cemetery in the village of Kozino, out by Solntsevo. It was done simply and very cheaply. No priest, no mourners, only her little son was with her as she stood over the fresh grave and struck a toy drum like a shaman playing a tambourine.

  Dasha had no way of knowing that, on that very same day, on the other side of Moscow, a young woman had died of an undiagnosed illness. She was exactly the same age as Joseph Senior and she had left a daughter behind … It must also be noted that the dead woman was the daughter of a certain Maria, better known as Masha. The same Masha from the foreign currency store, with whom the young Iratov had spent a most enjoyable night, back when life seemed eternal …

  An orphaned life awaited Dasha and the young Joseph. The milky river in her breasts dried up, and her suffering made her thin and bony; only her face stayed round. She dreamed of her dead Joseph every night. She tormented herself with guilt over not saving her son and husband, realizing that it was her ignorance that had caused this tragedy. She would howl quietly into her pillow so she wouldn’t scare the boy, but, to her increasing surprise, he never mentioned his father.

  “Don’t hold it in!” Dasha said, embracing Joseph. “Let the bird of death fly free, you’ll feel better.”

  “There’s no bird inside me.”

  “You just don’t want to remember your father, but you have to—he was your father, after all. I think about mine all the time—your grandfather, Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel laureate. He was Jewish.”

  “I don’t think about mine, though.”

  “Why? Why don’t we go to his grave on Sunday?”

  “It’s cold out there, and there’s nothing in the ground.”

  “Your father is buried there.”

  “My father’s body may be buried there, but he is somewhere else.”

  “With God?” Dasha asked.

  “Who’s God?”

  “The one who created us.”

  “Then he’s with God. So why would we go to some grave where my father left his broken space suit when he went … to God? We just buried the suit … If it was valuable, my father wouldn’t have left it here, in some hole …”

  Dasha had never heard such mysterious talk from her son, and she looked at him as if he had been reborn. She had probably missed the development of Joseph’s mind, absorbed as she was with her sick adopted son, her physical relations with him, and his future.

  “Listen, son,” she imparted. “I wasn’t born smart, so when knowledge came to me, I did not let it in, didn’t know what it was for. So what you’re saying isn’t something I can understand.”

  “You’re my mother!” Joseph said, his tone strangely adult. “There is nothing more important in this life than one’s mother and father. My father has left us, and now I only have you. How much intelligence you were endowed with is of no consequence to me …” The boy drew closer to his mother, put his arms around her waist, and nuzzled against her breasts, the safest place there was. She cradled his head, kissed it long and passionately, as if she were kissing two Josephs at once, or even three, including her father the poet.

  “I’ve got no brains,” Dasha said, beginning to cry. “Neither did your father. It was all mixed together and set aside for you. It’s all in your head …”

  Life went on, and they hardly noticed the passage of time. Dasha stopped mourning quite so deeply, released the bird of death beyond the bounds of the universe, and delighted in the fact that her biological son was doing tremendously well in school, winning all the academic contests he entered and medaling at several adult chess tournaments. Former world champion Valery Estin once came to their school and held a simultaneous exhibition. He had been doing that less and less often lately—he wasn’t as energetic as he once was, and his interest in the game had been long since satisfied … Both the students and the teachers took part. They all lost, including Joseph Brodsky. But the youth made such an unconventional move in the middlegame that Estin had to spend three nights sitting at the board to realize that it was a revolutionary innovation that would change how people thought about the Sicilian Defense. Later on, this fantastic opening strategy was sold to the current world champion, who used the novelty move to retain his crown in a match against a challenger. Estin sent his friend Mitya Schwartz, who had a doctorate in theoretical mathematics as well, to the boy’s school in Belyaevo. The forty-year-old academic’s task was simple: determine the youth’s IQ.

  The assistant principal, of course, could not turn away people who had so much influence—not just in their country, but around the world. A whole classroom was set aside for Joseph to meet the mathematician, and the first-graders were sent home early to accommodate the testing. A quiet day was declared throughout the school.

  Joseph went into the classroom, where Schwartz, the mathematician, had already made himself quite at home, eating the last of an éclair, the crumbs of which had already settled all over the room. The scholar had a mop of red hair, a freckly face, and eyes hidden behind thick glasses.

  “Mitya,” said the scholar, extending his hand to the youth.

  “Joseph.”

  Now acquainted, they got settled in at a long double desk in the back row. There was some odd resemblance between the two of them, though Mitya Schwartz could hardly be called handsome.

  “It’s all quite simple,” the mathematician explained. “I will give you the Eysenck Test, which you must complete within thirty minutes. True, the questions are in English, but I’ll translate for you.”

  “No, that’s fine.”

  “How do you know English?”

  “From our school curriculum … Well, and I’ve read a few things in English. Books.” That was enough for Mitya to give his blessing.

  “Then go for it! Remember, exactly half an hour. In the meantime, I’ll step out for a smoke. The clock starts now.”

  When the mathematician returned twelve minutes later, Joseph gave him the stack of papers.

  “Too tricky?” Mitya, still smelling of tobacco, wasn’t surprised. “Don’t be upset. Most people can’t make heads or tails of it.”

  “No, these are my answers.” Then Mitya was surprised, but not terribly so. He took Joseph’s work, sat down at the desk, and looked through his answers. Schwartz looked at the boy for a few minutes, then held out his hand.

  “I have to go!” Joseph nodded, not venturing to accompany the scholar to the door; he just turned to the window to watch him walk away. Mitya Schwartz wasn’t walking away, though; he was running. The mathematician dashed across the school grounds like a top-notch sprinter and disappeared through the gate.

  Just an hour later, he met Estin at their training camp. Chewing on a high-calorie bun, he gave the world champion his answer.

  “180!”

  “Very high. He’s a genius.”

  “But at what?” Schwartz wondered, picking a raisin off the bun. “You don’t need me to tell you how many people with that IQ have vanished into oblivion.�
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  “He’s certainly not a genius at chess,” Estin noted. “He could have drawn, at least … Yeah, he has the kind of mind that can memorize three thousand pages of text, but what for? If they don’t have a vocation, these kids become the unhappiest of people. If he worked at some design bureau, they wouldn’t know what to do with him. He thinks so quickly that a computer can’t keep up. He’ll think he’s speaking accessibly, but a PhD will lose the thread two words in. It’s like an adult trying to explain the theory of relativity to a one-year-old.”

  “Agreed. If he were a precocious mathematician, we would have seen some evidence by now, but he got a B at school. What should we do?”

  “Nothing,” the former champion replied. “We’ll watch, we’ll monitor him … Maybe he’ll become an actor, like James Woods.”

  Well, there you have it.

  Joseph graduated with high honors but didn’t go to drama school. Actually, he didn’t even apply anywhere. He mostly sat at home and read some thick book in a language Dasha couldn’t understand.

  “They’ll draft you if you aren’t in school!” she warned him. “And you won’t be able to hack it!”

  “People get by wherever they are …”

  His mother was worried about him. Sometimes, when she looked into her son’s eyes, she saw his father, Joseph Senior.

  Six months after he completed his high school finals, the young man started going to the town of Istra, where he visited the yeshiva and begged for permission to audit some classes on the book he’d been reading at home. Joseph demonstrated deep knowledge of the text and real maturity in his thinking. He spent his evenings with the rather elderly teacher, Rabbi Yitskhok, stunning him with his unexpected interpretations of a few passages in the book that the Almighty presented to Moses on Mount Sinai.