Yurik lost the third game in a row, and was about to start howling, but Vitya said, “My friend, you play very well. I couldn’t play as well as you do at your age. Now I’ll show you one more move, and no one will ever be able to beat you in the game again.”
Vitya set out the pieces again in order to show Yurik a “fork.” Yurik caught on immediately and laughed, asking Vitya to show him another trick like that. After this, Vitya liked the boy so much that he had no objections to seeing him from time to time.
“Wonderful!” Nora said. “You can come and see us. You can play chess together. Just call beforehand to let us know.”
While they were riding on the metro to go home, Nora kept thinking about what she would say the next time Yurik asked about his father. She herself didn’t bring it up. A week and a half later, Yurik asked a question out of the blue, which, at the same time, prompted a satisfactory answer.
“Mama, is there such a thing as a cousin-papa?”
Which of Nora’s men was the papa-papa and which the cousin-papa was never determined with absolute certainty. Vitya began coming over now and then. He didn’t really stand out among the other numerous visitors to the “crossroads.” All Nora’s friends loved and spoiled Yurik—both those who considered him to be smart and wise beyond his years, and those who were wary of his eccentricities. Among the latter was Taisia, who continued to urge Nora to take the child to a children’s neurologist and other specialists. Nora, however, was reluctant to consult the specialists, until she realized that Yurik could distinguish colors only by their intensity. First she went to see an ophthalmologist. After studying a chart for ten minutes, the doctor announced that Yurik suffered from color blindness, and a rare form of it at that. They were referred to a neuropathologist, and from there made the rounds of all the specialists at the children’s polyclinic. Finally, they gave her a referral to the Institute of Defectology, where Yurik was examined by a whole brigade of doctors. Nora, who was present at this council of physicians, was astonished by the imprecision of the doctors’ questions, and the accuracy of Yurik’s answers. To begin, they asked whether he knew the names of the basic geometrical forms—triangle, circle, square. Then they asked, “What shape is a Christmas tree?”
“Round,” Yurik said without missing a beat.
They presented the geometric shapes again, and then asked the same question.
“Round,” he said. Another explanation followed, and the question was put to him again.
“But I’m looking at it from above!” Yurik said, agitated. Nora could hardly suppress a smile. She knew about his ability to look at things from his own perspective.
The doctors exchanged glances and presented him with the next task. On a piece of paper divided into four sections, there were pictures of a horse’s head, a dog, a goose, and a sled.
“Which picture doesn’t belong here?” an older woman with a braid encircling her head asked him in a sugary voice.
“The horse.”
“Why?” all the doctors said in a chorus.
“Because the other ones are all whole, and there’s only one piece of the horse—his head.”
“No, no, that’s wrong, think again,” the lady with the braid said.
Yurik thought for a while, and examined the picture with great concentration.
“The goose,” Yurik said confidently.
And again they were taken by surprise.
“Why?”
“Because the horse and the dog can be hitched to the sled, but not the goose.”
The women in the white robes exchanged significant glances again and requested the mother to leave. By now Nora had guessed that the correct answer was “sled,” since it was the only inanimate object in this menagerie. She left the room.
When she was in the corridor, she no longer found it amusing, and felt angry at herself. Why had she dragged her bright child here to be examined by these idiots? They didn’t even realize how much better organized his mind was than their own. Nonetheless, they made a diagnosis: retardation of psychological development. In addition to giving Nora the paper with the diagnosis, they also directed her to a special live-in school for children with psychological aberrations.
Not on your life! Next year, when he turned seven and was ready to go to first grade, she would enroll him in the same school that Nora’s parents had attended. She herself had not been able to attend because of new zoning rules requiring that she go to another school, which she still shuddered to remember. But there was still a year to go before he entered first grade, and Nora decided to start him in music school in the meantime.
The closest one was the Central Music School, curated by the Moscow Conservatory. It was one of the best schools in the city, a rather refined and snobbish place that had been evacuated for a time for refurbishment but had just begun to function again in its home premises. Everything was institutional green-and-tan and smelled strongly of paint. Yurik inhaled the thick air through his nose. The interview was conducted by a plump middle-aged woman with an impressive tortoiseshell comb in her wispy gray hair, held back in a small bun.
The woman first asked Yurik to sing, but he outright refused, and made a counteroffer to the woman—he suggested they play a game of chess. The lady raised her eyebrows slightly and declined the offer. She tapped her fingers on top of the piano and asked him to tap out the same rhythm. Yurik put his hands on the lid and beat out a rhythm that was long and complex, but in no way resembled what he had just heard; he was remembering his African djembe. The woman turned out to be needlessly persistent, and, bending over him, urged him to repeat the simple passage. Again he beat out a rhythm of his own. The teacher opened the lid of the piano and played do-re-mi. Yurik, standing next to her, held his nose and said, “It really stinks in here.”
Perhaps if the woman had not doused herself with the old-fashioned Red Moscow scent, and had sprinkled the more modern Silver Lily-of-the-Valley or Carmen, Yurik’s life would have taken a different turn.
They walked home. Yurik was quiet the whole way, contemplating something deeply. Next to their entranceway, he stopped, took his mother’s hand, and said, “Nora, why am I me?”
Nora took in a gulp of air. How could she answer a question no one could answer?
“Well, you know about yourself that you’re your own person, one of a kind, that you’re … ‘I.’ Other people are not you, but they all have their own ‘I.’”
“But how do you know that I’m a one-of-a-kind person?” As they stood at the front door to the building, Yurik fiddled with Nora’s hand. She felt helpless with confusion. Then he said, “We’re all one-of-a-kind. Me, Grandmother Amalia, and Taisia. But I thought I was the only special one.”
“Well, you were right,” Nora said, unsure what else to say.
“And Vitya is also one-of-a-kind,” Yurik added, after thinking about it a bit.
Nora froze. He’s right, she thought. They are both as different from other people as the Houyhnhnms are from the Yahoos.
13 A Major Year
(1911)
The year 1911 was wonderful from the start. Marusya spent Christmas with her brother Mikhail, who had arrived from Petersburg laden with presents and was dressed in the latest style of the urban capital, fashionably coiffed, with a small, neat beard and a waxed mustache. He had always been handsome, but now his appearance was almost provocative. Marusya felt a certain kind of ambivalence: It was exciting to walk down the boulevards with him. He piqued the interest of the ladies they encountered on their strolls. She found it pleasant that they looked at him, and at the same time at her, but there was some discomfort mixed into it. Her overcoat was old, a cut that had long gone out of fashion, and, added to that, it was too big for her. What embarrassed her even more than the unfortunate overcoat, however, was that she, a sophisticated and educated young woman, suffered for such a banal, unworthy reason.