Yurik was lying facedown. His tired hair, which hadn’t been trimmed for more than two years, spread over the pillow in dank, heavy clumps. The clothes he had shed lay in a pile on the floor and stank. Martha gathered up the smelly heap and took it away to launder it. Before putting the clothes in the washing machine, she turned the pockets inside out. When she found two syringes in the pocket of his jacket, she recoiled in horror.
For two whole days and nights, with just a few short breaks, the conversation between Grisha and Vitya continued. They hadn’t seen each other in three years, and corresponded infrequently; now Grisha was inundating him with what seemed to Vitya to be pure balderdash, in which he saw no meaning or logic. Grisha had played too big a role in his life for Vitya to be able to dismiss him out of hand, however. It was because of Grisha that Vitya had been able to relinquish his world of abstract dimensions and sets and devote himself to more concrete tasks, and he was happy and grateful for this. Now Grisha was the one spewing all kinds of abstract nonsense that was completely beyond the bounds of anything Vitya considered to be science.
“Vitya! There’s one science. There’s only one science in the world. We have to reject all the old thinking and retain only three disciplines: mathematics, biology, and physics. And the name of this new science is biomathics.”
Vitya looked sleepily at the slightly agitated Grisha. What did he mean by biomathics? Why did he want to throw all the sciences overboard?
“Our world is created by God according to a single plan. The first pages of the Torah offer a modern scientific description of the origin of the universe, the earth, plants, animals, and man. It was not only the Torah that the Creator dictated. All life in the universe, on our planet, is the unfolding of a single grand text. We are all merely trying to decode it and read it. And the only purpose of man is to read this message.”
“Grisha, these are just very generalized claims. They have no immediate bearing on human activity. They don’t contain any revelations or discoveries. What’s the main point, the essence of it?” Vitya said, trying to bring his friend back down to earth.
Grisha had already gotten a lot of flak about these very notions from their brethren in the scientific community, which Vitya could not have known. He had come seeking support from his friend, thinking perhaps he could recruit Vitya to his cause. By now Vitya had become the leading expert on the computer modeling of cells. In Grisha’s mind, the two new tables of the covenant were the Text and the Living Computer.
Grisha sighed. The crowd, as everyone knows, does not heed prophets. They either mock them or stone them. In Israel above all. Especially in Israel! During recent years, he had expended so much energy wrestling with and trying to master the Text that he thought to be pre-eminent in the world, the Torah, and had come to the conviction that it was only a digest, just commentaries and references to an even more important Text. Grisha found no sympathy for his convictions among his fellow scientists, nor among his religious teachers. Only one mad Kabbalist from Tsfat, the head of a nonexistent school, welcomed Grisha’s ideas. In Vitya, who was not in the mainstream of the scientific establishment, which Grisha viewed as science fiction, Grisha had expected to find a sympathetic listener at the very least. Instead, he encountered only perplexity. But he still didn’t abandon hope.
“The thing is, Vitya, that the primary alphabet of the Text was discovered only in 1953—that was the four-letter code of DNA. Even Watson and Crick didn’t realize they had discovered the ability to read the Divine Text. They had the most convincing argument in favor of the existence of God!” Grisha blushed deeply, raised his gaunt hands in the air like a street preacher, and exclaimed convulsively: “A conclusive argument! The ultimate argument. And they didn’t see it!”
“Wait a minute,” Vitya said, trying to pacify the overwrought Grisha. “Maybe Watson and Crick never needed this concept of a Creator? Actually, I never needed it myself. Not in the least.”
“Vitya! You wait a minute! Do you really not see that our world was created by the One and Only God according to a unified plan?” Grisha blurted out, now even more incensed.
Vitya was sitting in a deep armchair, his knees nearly level with his chin. Yurik, one leg lolling on the floor, slept on the divan next to him, and Grisha circled around in the small space between the coffee table and another armchair, piled high with freshly laundered sheets that Martha hadn’t had time to fold and put away in the cupboard.
“For seven years, I’ve been studying the Torah. I’m standing on the threshold of a discovery. Perhaps I’m one of the very few who are in a position to be able to compare modern discoveries in biology—the Science of Life—with the text of the Torah, which represents a paraphrasing of the genetic code of DNA. Today I’m convinced that many of the claims of the Five Books of Moses allow for direct experimental examination by modern scientific methods.”
“Hold it,” Vitya broke in impatiently. “I usually start from what I know. I can’t follow your logic here. You’re talking about things I know nothing about. I’m completely in the dark here. I’ve never in my life read any religious texts, and I have no desire to. Never have. You probably need to talk to Martha about this; she’s a believer.”
“That’s exactly what I mean!” Grisha almost shouted. “This is one of the most important ideas. Today, at the end of the twentieth century, through the evolution of human consciousness, the speculative thought of the ancient philosophers coincides with religious thought. We are at a unique point in the evolutionary history of humanity. It is a new era. All the discoveries in the fields of physics, chemistry, and science in the highest sense have no authorship!”
His final desperate yelp awakened Yurik, who couldn’t quite figure out what was going on. But the words, sounded by a rather shrill male voice, seemed to be meant for him in particular.
“There is a Divine Text! And human evolution has only one goal, one task—to lead unfinished, incomplete Creation to a state in which man learns how to read it. All the alphabets, all the signs, all the numbers, music notes, et cetera, were invented by us so we might carry out this task.”
Yurik dragged his head off the pillow. The shape of a button was imprinted on his cheek. The first thing he saw was an unfamiliar Jew in a yarmulke, with a graying, turned-up beard and a hand upraised.
Man, I’m tripping, he thought. When he noticed his father sitting behind the seething Jew, with a sullen look on his face, he was reassured. Okay, then, I’m not tripping.
Yurik propped himself up on his elbow, and sat up. The Jew stared at him in surprise. Grisha, who had already spent about twelve hours in this living room, had not noticed Yurik sleeping nearby on the couch.
“My son, Yurik,” Vitya said dryly.
“My God! That’s Nora’s son?”
“Well, partly mine, too.”
“Amazing,” he said. “So you’re here in the States, too? You’re the spitting image of Vitya. No, no, you really look just like Nora. And I’m Grisha Lieber. I went to high school with your parents. Have they told you anything about me?”
Yurik suddenly felt good.
“I liked what you were saying just now about authorship,” he said. “I also think that there’s no real authorship. Music exists somewhere in the heavenly spheres, and a musician’s job is to hear it and write it down. But since I’m a jazz musician, I know how much of the music stays out there, untranscribed, and lives only during the moments of improvisation.”