“Me, myself, and I what? In the thirties they didn’t have any haloperidol! Aminazin! Stelazine! It didn’t exist yet! You’ve consigned him to the torture chamber, Dmitry Stepanovich! You can go and denounce me, now, if you like.”
He lowered his head and stared at the record. Daniil Shafran Performs …
He said nothing, his mouth twisted into a grimace. What baseness … what baseness everywhere one looks …
“What should I have done, then? Tell me,” Dulin asked in a quiet voice. “He really was … well, not completely, but … what was I supposed to do?”
Vinberg, spinning the record absently, then put both his hands on the desk.
Leave this place, leave this place. As soon as possible, leave this place, he thought. And also: What a people! How can they hate themselves so?
Then he smiled a bitter smile, and said something incomprehensible:
“I don’t know. A Chinese sage once said that for every question there are seven answers. Everyone has to answer this question for himself. Please forgive my rudeness, Dmitry Stepanovich.”
* * *
Vera Samuilovna understood immediately that her husband was agitated and dejected: by the brusque way he took off his coat, by the gloomy expression on his face, and the nod and a wooden “Danke,” when she put his soup in front of him. A tactful, clever woman, she kept silent and didn’t ask him any questions. He was always grateful to her afterward for her aristocratic silence and self-possession.
Edwin Yakovlevich felt his own failure keenly, and experienced a belated remorse: How could he have let himself humiliate this sweet, dim-witted, and diligent person? Had not he, Vinberg, taken part in a psychiatric expert consultation several years back, in the same Special Division? Had he not offered his conclusion about the mental unsoundness of a prisoner whose political beliefs about the nature of this regime he completely shared? But from a clinical point of view, his illness was undeniable. It was a clear and detailed picture of manic-depressive psychosis. Vinberg, the former prisoner, could do nothing about it. Almost all the freethinkers, the petition signers, the homegrown rebels were mad in both the everyday and, partly, the medical sense of the word. This is the nature of Russian radicalism, of course. It is never grounded in common sense, Vinberg mused, feeling gradually more calm.
Vinberg wasn’t even aware of it himself when he began voicing his inner musings out loud:
“When Hitler came to power, all of the intelligentsia who had their wits about them emigrated, but the loyal ones … There’s no way out, no way out. But a doctor is in a unique position—he’s only supposed to heal, to treat illness. The way out, or through, is through his profession. The prison camp hospital. Physical injuries, ulcers, tuberculosis, heart attacks. The honor of the profession is the highest value. Higher than politics, undoubtedly. Undoubtedly. However … Vera, Vera! Every single person I’ve seen who is struggling against the regime in our time is on the border, on a very thin boundary, between health and sickness. Do you remember the woman who went out onto Red Square with her baby in a baby buggy? There is such an instinct as self-preservation. There is such a thing as maternal instinct, which forces the mother to protect her child. But there is no instinct for social justice in nature! Conscience militates against survival, Vera!”
His wife sat opposite him on a stool, in their fifty-square-foot kitchen, where a second chair wouldn’t even fit. Still, there was a table, a cooker with two burners, warm radiators in winter, and the luxuriant growth of some nondescript weed under the window in summer.
Vera peered into the black glass of the window, behind which nothing was visible except her own blurry reflection. She, too, knew that conscience worked against survival. Yes, biological evolution wipes out the species of those with a conscience that lives and breathes. The mighty survive. But she didn’t want to revisit that subject: the camps, starvation, humiliation, hell.
“Edwin, tell me, did Grachevsky bring you the record?”
Edwin Yakovlevich broke off, burst out laughing, and left the kitchen. Yes, they had talked it over; enough of that.
He took the cello sonata out of his briefcase and put it on the turntable. Vera was already sitting in an armchair in the room they referred to as the “living room” for propriety’s sake.
It was the earliest performance of the piece. Later, in 1950, Shostakovich recorded it with Rostropovich, and even modified the original version.
Vinberg’s large ears, with their tufts of hair, inherited from distant ancestors, seemed to quiver from tension. Vera Samuilovna, a qualified listener herself, had always considered Daniil Shafran to be a more versatile and gifted performer than Rostropovich. But here was Shostakovich, who seemed to her to be dry and severe. Her husband heard the music differently: there was a refusal to compromise, a drama of inner struggle and confrontation. The piano cadenza in the third movement recalled Beethoven’s late sonatas.
“Hopelessness. Cosmic hopelessness. Don’t you think, Vera?”
* * *
Dulin went straight to the vivarium after talking to Vinberg. He had a cabinet there in which he kept a secret stash of medical spirits under lock and key. He removed a half-liter vessel and poured some of it into a measuring beaker, to which he added tap water, half and half, as he did for the rabbits. Then he drank it down, all 200 ml of it straight from the measuring beaker. He put the vessel in his briefcase. It didn’t quite fit, but the cork was sturdy and snug, so he lay it on its side. And he went to get the trolleybus. He began feeling drunk only once he was inside the bus. When he got home, no one was there. Nina had gone to pick up Marinka from the biology club at the municipal House of Pioneers, which she took part in even though she was too young to join the Young Pioneers organization. She had an avid interest in biology.
At home, Dulin diluted more of the spirits, and drank another 200 ml. Disgusting stuff. How do they drink it? Now he was already feeling woozy. The room was spinning around his poor head. He couldn’t fall asleep, though. One thought, like a splinter in his brain, kept jabbing and jabbing away at him: What were the seven answers? What answers could there be, besides yes and no?
Then Nina came home. It took a while for her to realize that he was stone drunk. At first, she started to laugh:
“Poor little drunken rabbit!”
She tried to sober him up with strong tea, to put him to bed; but he refused to go. He kept babbling on and on about seven answers, or seven questions, and only late at night did she understand the cause of his torment.
By that time, Dulin had diluted the rest of the spirits, but he couldn’t drink it. He vomited, and began having severe stomach spasms. Then he lay down, shaking with chills.
Nina was already tired of looking after him. She sat down in a chair, muttering something angrily under her breath. She didn’t get into bed herself. Then Marinka came in in her nightgown, complaining that her head was hurting. At that moment, Dulin recalled all the bad things that had ever happened to him in his life: how the local kids had teased him at school, how Kamzolkina, the teacher, had yelled at him, how his mother had beaten him, how Mama’s drunken “suitor,” Uncle Kolya, had pulled him by the ears … And he began to weep.
Dulin wept—because he was a rabbit, and not a man.
That’s what Nina told him, anyway.
THE ROAD WITH ONE END
A camera without film dangled from Ilya’s neck. The film had been confiscated and exposed by the border guards. A half-empty camping rucksack was slung over his shoulder. In it he had a change of underwear and an English-language textbook that he had carried around with him constantly for the past two years. He was wearing a new jacket and old jeans. A scarf was wrapped around his neck. Olga had knitted it out of black and gray yarn, and it resembled exactly his already graying hair.