The other exam grades he had to appeal against: he knew full well that he deserved nothing less than a Five, while his teachers knew equally well who it was they weren’t allowed to award Fives to. He first appealed against a Four for mathematics. The members of the commission were hirelings from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, since there was no separate mathematics department at the medical institute. The postgraduates were far from stupid and quickly recognized that this was a very clever boy. He also displayed exceptional stamina, answering their questions for four hours until, when they finally asked him one he couldn’t answer, he laughed and said to the five-member commission: “The question is incorrectly formulated, but I beg to draw your attention also to the fact that none of the questions I have been asked falls within the school syllabus.” He knew he had nothing to lose and decided to go for broke: “Something tells me that the next question is going to be on Fermat’s Last Theorem.”
The examiners exchanged glances, and one asked, “Well, can you formulate it?”
Alik wrote a simple equation and sighed. “Where n is greater than two, there are no whole positive solutions, but I will not attempt to give a general proof of that.”
The chairman of the subject board, with a feeling of profound distaste for the boy, for himself, and for the situation in which they had been placed, entered a Five in the register.
The procedure for his chemistry and biology results was the same, but with less éclat. For English he also received a Four, but this was the last exam, and as it was clear that he had accumulated enough points to matriculate, he didn’t bother appealing. He was worn-out.
The tale of his matriculation became a legend at the institute, and bore more than a passing resemblance to the tale of Cinderella. His school years had been poisoned by his physical insubstantiality: he was the smallest pupil in his class; the youngest too, as it happened. His intellectual distinction, if indeed anybody noticed it, did nothing to save him from the humiliations of physical education. In fact, his childhood was laden with humiliations: the maid who accompanied him and who tied the sheepskin earflaps of his girlish fur hat under his chin; the fear of going home alone, when he himself had insisted that the maid should no longer escort him; the main break as a major unpleasantness, with the impossibility of going to the school toilets. If he was desperate, he would go to the doctor complaining of a headache, be excused lessons, and, shoving the slip of paper with the letters “Exc.” into the hands of his beloved teacher, rush home for a pee.
He was acutely aware of his pariah status, vaguely intuiting that it had more to do with his strengths than with his weaknesses. His father was an editor at the Military Publishing House and all his life had been embarrassed by his Jewish second-class status; he could do nothing to help his son, beyond giving him valuable guidance on what to read. Isaak Aaronovich was a well-educated philologist, but life had driven him into a corner where he was only too glad to edit memoirs of the late military campaign written by semiliterate marshals.
The merging of the boys’ and girls’ schools did oddly enough alleviate Alik’s fate. His first friends were girls, and when he was a grown man, he would constantly declare his belief that women undoubtedly comprised the better part of humanity.
In the medical institute the better part of humanity was also numerically dominant. From the very first months of his studies, he was surrounded by an atmosphere of respectful admiration. Half his classmates were from other towns, had worked in medicine for two years already, and had a varied experience of life. They crowded into the big room on Myasnitsky Street. At the end of the year Alik’s mother was allocated a two-room apartment in New Cheryomushki. It was in this new apartment, still unfurnished and heaped with bundles of as-yet-unpacked books, that two of Alik’s fellow students, Vera Voronova from Sormovo and Olga Anikina from Kryukovo, skillful, agreeable nurses with distinctions on their diplomas, deprived Alik of his romantic illusions and simultaneously relieved him of his burdensome virginity.
From about his third year, when it was time for practical work and being on duty in the wards, quick, easy copulation in the laundry room, the house doctor’s office, or the examining room was as casual as the cups of tea they drank at night, and even had a suggestion of medical practicality about it. Alik did not ascribe any great significance to coition performed on the state’s laundry: he was much more interested in those years in science— natural science and philosophy.
His daily journey from New Cheryomushki to the Pirogov Institute was a real Göttingen for him. He started with the works of Comrade Lenin, compulsory reading for the course on the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Then he dipped into Marx, raided Hegel and Kant, reversed back to the sources— and took greatly to Plato.
He read quickly, in a special way of his own, snaking up and down so that several lines simultaneously comprised one larger line which was being read. Many years later he tried to explain to Masha that what mattered was the reaction time of the perceptual systems, and even drew her a diagram.
Giving his agile brain its rein, he constructed a syllabus for a universal man, and in addition to the medical institute, started attending the university, taking specialist courses in biochemistry in Belozersky’s department and in biophysics with Tarusov. He was fascinated by the problem of biological aging. He was no madman in pursuit of immortality but calculated from certain biological parameters that 150 years was the natural limit for human life. In the fourth year of his course he published his first scientific article, coauthored with a respected scholar and another whiz kid like himself.
After a further year he came to the conclusion that research at the cellular level was too crude, but that he had insufficient knowledge for working at the molecular level. He gained what he needed from the foreign scientific literature. Many years later, occupying an extremely high position in American science, Alik said that intellectually the most intense period of his life had been precisely these years as an undergraduate, and that all his life he had been exploiting ideas which came to him in his final year of study.
It was in the same year that he met Masha. His former classmate Lyuda Linder, a lover of unofficial poetry, occasionally dragged him to apartments and literary clubs where samizdat flourished and where even Brodsky, when he was in Moscow, sometimes did not disdain to recite the poetry which in the fullness of time was to earn him the Nobel Prize.
On this occasion Lyuda had taken him to a party where several young authors would be reading their poetry, including one exceptionally promising young man who had discovered hard drugs earlier than the rest and died shortly afterward. Masha read first, as the youngest young author. There were not many people present; as people say of such occasions, just a few friends plus the KGB informer on duty that day, who was simultaneously responsible for maintaining public order.
The times were changing as never before. It was 1967. Bread cost nothing, but words, spoken and printed, acquired an unheard-of weight. Samizdat was already covertly undermining the System, Sinyavsky and Daniel had been found guilty of publishing their works abroad, “physicists” were distancing themselves from “lyricists,” and the only areas which were off limits were to be found in the zoo. Alik was not drawn into this process: he always preferred theoretical problems to practical, philosophy to politics.
Masha, blue-eyed, with slender hands which lived a slightly absurd life of their own in the air beside her dark, cropped head, read her poems with quiet pathos. Alik did not take his eyes off her the whole thirty minutes allotted to her, and when she finished reading and went out into the corridor, he whispered in Lyuda’s ear, “I’ll be right back.”