She didn’t discuss it with her husband, but read him a poem written that year:
“Despised fidelity that smacks of duty
holds out the lure of casual affairs,
for only love is constancy and dares
bind not itself with vows and sophistry
and asks no bargain for the gift it shares.”
Alik guessed the meaning, said nothing, and gained a great deal thereby: Masha was completely reassured. Over the years of their marriage a few episodes came his way too. He did not go looking for them, but he didn’t run away from them either.
With the years, however, they became ever more closely attached and found more and more advantages in their family life. Observing colleagues and friends who married, divorced, or lightly embarked on a life of bachelor debauchery, he, like the Pharisee of whom he knew nothing, said in his heart: “God, we thank Thee that we are not as others are. We live an orderly and worthy life and are therefore content.”
His scientific work was going splendidly: so much so, indeed, that few of his colleagues were capable of appreciating the results he was obtaining. His elite status, which in childhood had been such a heavy burden, made heavier by the embarrassing, unasked-for, and highly inconvenient fact of his being a Jew, changed its complexion over the years, but a good upbringing and his inborn good nature masked an ever-growing awareness of his superiority over the mediocre brains of the majority of his colleagues.
When his first article appeared in a prestigious American science journal, he looked down the list of the editorial board on the cover and told Masha, “There are four Nobel Prize–winners there.”
Masha glanced at his swarthy face, more Indian than Jewish, and knew that he was trying himself for size against the highest scientific honors. Reading his thoughts, she asked Nike, who still had a muffle left over from her dalliance with ceramics, to inscribe a poem on a china cup, which was Alik’s birthday present from his wife that year and on which in thick blue letters was written: “These things shall be: your morning dress; my evening gown; the King, listening, in his crown; a banquet for his guests.” The birthday guests greatly admired the cup, but no one apart from Alik caught the allusion.
Both of them enjoyed the fact that their wordless communication worked even in a crowd: they had only to exchange a glance to have shared their thoughts.
This time they had not seen each other for around two weeks, and Alik was bringing his wife sensational news. A famed American scientist who specialized in molecular biology had come to the Academy of Sciences to read a conference paper and give a lecture. He had duly visited the Bolshoi Ballet and the Tretyakov Gallery as prescribed by his social program, and had asked his interpreter to arrange a meeting for him with Mr. Schwartz. The interpreter contacted her superiors, passed on the intelligence, and received her instructions: the visitor was to be informed that Mr. Schwartz was unfortunately on holiday at the moment.
Mr. Schwartz was not, however, on holiday. Indeed, he came to the conference specifically to ask the American a particular specialized question. A five-minute conversation ensued during which the quick-witted American (not for nothing had his grandfather been born in Odessa) soon saw how the land lay, took Alik’s home telephone number, and late that evening came to visit him, paying the taxi-driver, who was also quick-witted in his way, a sum equivalent to Alik’s monthly salary.
All this had occurred in Masha’s absence. Debora Lvovna, Alik’s mother, was on holiday at a sanatorium. Mountains of unwashed dishes and piles of open books finally convinced the American that he was dealing with a genius, and he lost no time in making him an offer to come and work for him. In Boston, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That raised one technical but not insignificant problem: emigration. This was the development that Alik was bringing to his wife. Both of them were bursting to tell the other their news.
The topic of emigration was one of the most contentious among the intelligentsia in those years: to be or not to be, to go or not to go. “Yes, but supposing . . .” “No, but what if . . . ?” Families were split, friendships sundered. Political motivations, economic, ideological, moral . . . And the actual business of getting out was so complex and agonizing, sometimes taking long years, demanding resoluteness, courage, or desperation. The official gap in the Iron Curtain was only open for Jews, although non-Jews used it too. This time it was the Black Sea that divided its waters to allow the Chosen People through, if not to the Promised Land then at least out of the latest Land of Egypt.
“It says in Exodus,” exclaimed Lyova Gottlieb, a close friend whom Alik called “the Principal Jew of the Soviet Union,” “that Moses led six hundred thousand men on foot out of Egypt, but nowhere is it said how many remained behind. Those who stayed simply ceased to exist. And those who didn’t leave Germany in 1933? Where are they?”
Alik was completely uninterested in his own life from a Jewish viewpoint: for him what mattered most was the advancing of science. Needless to say, he heard all these conversations taking place, and even took part in them himself, introducing a theoretical and unemotional perspective, but all that really concerned him was cellular aging.
What the American offer meant to him was that he would be able to work more effectively. “By about three hundred percent,” he estimated when telling Masha all about it. “The best equipment in the world, no problems with reagents, laboratory assistants to help me, and absolutely no material problems for you and me. And Alik can study at Harvard, eh? I am entirely ready for this. It’s up to you, Masha. Well, and Mother too, of course, but I can talk her around.”
“But when?” was all Masha could ask, entirely unready for events to take this turn.
“If there are no hitches, then in six months’ time, if we submit our documents straightaway. But it could drag on for a long time: that’s what I’m most worried about, because I’ll have to leave work immediately in order not to land my boss in trouble.” He had already thought everything through.
“Two weeks ago a proposal like this would have delighted me,” Masha thought. “But today I can’t bear to think about it.”
Alik had been hoping in the depths of his heart that Masha would be gladdened by the prospects this opened up, and he was puzzled by her hesitancy now. He didn’t yet know that their home life, so logical and well thought out, had cracked right from its crystal top down to its much despised bottom. Masha had not yet fully realized it herself.
Then Masha read Alik her recent poems, and he praised her and noted their new quality. He received Masha’s ardent confession about the revelation she had received in a new and intense relationship, about a special kind of perfection she had found in a different person, about a new experience in her life, as if a dulling film had been lifted from the whole world: from landscapes, from faces, from ordinary feelings.
“I don’t know what I should do with all this now,” Masha complained to her husband. “Perhaps from the generally accepted point of view [‘bourgeois’ wasn’t a word she ever used] it is terrible that it should be you I am telling this to, but I trust you so much. You are the person closest to me, and it only makes any sense at all to talk about this to you. You and I are one, as far as that is possible, but all the same I don’t know how we are to go on living. You say we should emigrate. Perhaps we should.”