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?”
“I’m not sure,” Nora said, musing on what Tengiz had said. It was the best thing he had ever told her. Actually, he never talked about anything related to the horizontal position. This was a very heady confession. There was nothing to add to it.
Nora reached out to grab a pack of cigarettes, lying conveniently within reach.
“I’m really not sure, Tengiz,” she said. “By the time I was fifteen, I was already adept at keeping sexual matters separate from anything one might call love. So as not to confuse what were inherently different things. This freed me from a lot of emotional unpleasantness. Only once did I mix those things up, and I have yet to extricate myself from the result. No, I’ve never felt deadly boredom; ordinary regret, to be sure. My sexual revolution happened back when I was still in high school.”
“Good, let’s get back to love. To this, I mean.” And again he started whistling “Habañera.”
“Oh, that,” Nora said, laughing. “But Mérimée actually didn’t write it at all. That somewhat vulgar and banal story—the libretto of the opera, I mean—was written by Meilhac and Halévi, a couple of French hack writers.”
“You astonish me, Nora! You’re the most literate person I know. You know everything about everything.”
“That’s a strange statement, coming from the friend of a philosopher like Merab Mamardashvili. I didn’t even graduate, Tengiz. The only education I got was in trade school. Well, it was a solidly respectable trade, of course. But you know my background. I even dropped out of the Moscow Art Theatre studio. That’s where my miserable regret has been spent … I simply have a good memory. I remember everything I read. And I read a lot. And my grandmother, of course, was pushing good books under my nose from early childhood.”
“You’re lucky you had an educated grandmother. Mine was a peasant. Illiterate. She only knew how to sign her name.”
Nora held an unlit cigarette in her hand. Tengiz reached for his jeans, lying in a heap on the floor. He took a lighter out of the pocket to light Nora’s cigarette.
“Well?”
“Mérimée was a genius,” she said. “He was the first person in Europe to appreciate Pushkin. Everyone ignores the last chapter of Carmen, believing it to have been tacked on gratuitously. They all rack their brains trying to figure out why he introduces such a scholarly discussion willy-nilly at the end of the book—but it’s very important.”
Here Tengiz interrupted her. “Hold on. Do you know why I suddenly came back to life? I realized how lucky it was that The Knight in the Panther’s Skin fell through. I hate it, that’s what I realized. And Tariel and Avtandil, his minions, too. They can all go to hell, with their adoration of beautiful women and their subservience to authority. If we have to speak of love, let it be about your Carmen. Go on, tell me more about Mérimée! And let me read it, to see why it’s so brilliant.”
Now, this was happiness. True happiness. They took it apart bit by bit, this unwieldy, hybrid admixture—a traveler’s notes, jottings of a fictional scholar, the literary games of an extraordinary writer. Tengiz’s enthusiasm grew, and hers was fired by his, as always happened when they worked together. She read the book out loud, and from time to time he would raise his finger in the air and say, “That’s exactly what I need.” After two days of slow and painstaking reading, Tengiz told Nora, “Now get some paper and start writing.”
“Are you crazy? I do costumes, and I have the temerity to do set design and décor, too. One time I worked on a play with Sergei Barkhin himself; I did the costumes, and he just watched what I was doing—I learned everything from him. But writing a play? Even Tusya would never take that on. I know that for a fact. I’ve been learning from her my whole life. Barkhin doesn’t write plays, either. And his hand is present in everything I have done.”
“Oh, and I was thinking it was my hand that was present in everything you have done.”
“Pinocchio knows best who his Papa Geppetto is. I can’t argue, though—you honed me still further.”
“Hmm, you’re starting to make me suspicious…”
Nora immediately put him straight: “Stop right there!”
But he understood that he had transgressed an unspoken rule. When they were together, occupying the small islands of life they claimed only for themselves, neither past nor future existed. Tengiz had reprimanded Nora harshly for her trip to Tbilisi—he considered their chance meeting to have been deliberately planned. Their open relationship would have been impossible to maintain if they didn’t observe these sacred boundaries. Tengiz had established these boundaries many years before. It was difficult and painful for Nora to accept them, but with time it seemed that the boundaries were symmetrically enforced, and just as necessary to her.