At last, Mikha realized that he was dealing with a mad person, and that Mikha himself had provoked the outburst when, unbeknown to him, he had pressed some psychological trigger.
Polina Matveevna made signs at Mikha, which all the residents of the boarding school knew immediately how to interpret, signifying that he should clear out. And Mikha, grabbing up the envelopes, did.
Volsky! Volsky! Daniel’s protagonist, dying in a mental hospital! But Gleb Ivanovich was a victim as well! And the very same forces had driven him mad. Demons, demons. What had Voloshin said? “They walk the earth, blind, deaf, and dumb, and draw fiery signs in the spreading gloom…” He repeated it to himself, noting an irregularity in the stress pattern. Nevertheless, it was a great poem.* And he went back to thinking about Gleb Ivanovich. He wasn’t really to blame for anything, either. During the bus ride to the commuter train that would take him home, he pondered all these things with a heavy heart.
* * *
Gleb Ivanovich had been hospitalized for psychiatric disorders, and was on the registry. He had a checkered past. He had been fired from SMERSH, the counterintelligence organization, during the war. At the boarding school his official job description was physical-plant manager, not teacher. This was not merely for the sake of convenience. Because of his medical history, he was barred from working with children. He was a good man; he loved children, and he was honest and upright almost to a fault, with an almost German ardor and fastidiousness. Perhaps this was the quality, which bordered on the extreme, that led him to write a denunciation of Mikha the very next day.
Mikha had no idea that Gleb Ivanovich’s denunciation was already crawling, slowly but surely, to the place where all waterways cut off and all roads ceased.
Due to the general laxity of Soviet life, as well as the law of coincidence of misfortune, Mikha’s application for enrollment in the graduate program in absentia matched the unhurried progress toward the institute of the denunciation against him. When, two weeks later, two documents landed simultaneously on the desk of Comrade Korobtsov, head of the first section, he called in Yakov Petrovich. The seventy-eight-year-old corresponding member of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences trotted down to see Comrade Korobtsov, already a captain at the age of thirty-six, who gave him a proper dressing-down.
* * *
Though Yakov Petrovich Rink was fairly old, he looked younger than his years. He had been dressed down over and over again. He had devoted his entire life to deaf-mute pedagogy. He had helped the hard of hearing; and the deaf had, in turn, been his salvation. In the offices where semiliterate lieutenants and poorly educated captains decided the fate of science, the professor’s work seemed so innocuous and absurd that they left him alone. He was German—but a Russian-German. His ancestor had been invited into the Russian Academy of Sciences one hundred fifty years before, and the family had been firmly settled on Russian soil ever since. Luckily, his nationality was registered as Russian in his documents. Unlike his cousins, who had been banished to Kazakhstan at the beginning of the war, he had never been subjected to political repression. He was well aware that this was a gift of fate. Each time that Yakov Petrovich was summoned to the offices of the lieutenants and the captains, he expected to be unmasked. Even now, twenty years after the war had ended.
Pursing his lips in the tight, straight line that signified a smile, he told his close friend and associate, Maria Moiseevna Bris:
“You have it good, Maria Moiseevna. You are a bona fide Jew, and there is no need to unmask you. Half my life I feared being taken for a Jew, and now I live in fear that they will unmask me as a German. And all the while, you and I are just ordinary Russian intellectuals.”
* * *
“Who are these people you’re taking on as graduate students this year, Yakov Petrovich?” Korobtsov said, not offering him a seat.
How sick I am of him, how sick I am of him, how sick I am of all of them …
“Are you lacking some documents, Igor Stepanovich? There’s a student named Sasha Rubin, and an in absentia student—one Mikha Melamid. They’re good kids, both graduates of our institute.”
“Sit down, sit down, Yakov Petrovich. We have some things to talk about. Sasha Rubin is fine—good recommendations, he’s a Komsomol organizer. But how well do you know this Melamid?”
It was plain as day. They didn’t like Melamid. There was something about him that gave them pause. Maria Moiseevna had been right: he shouldn’t have allowed Jews to take two spots in the program. They’d seize upon it. There was one young man from Moldavia, but he didn’t have a very strong academic background. They would have accepted him, but he hadn’t passed his entrance exams …
“He just published a very interesting article. He’s already working in the field. Well-read. Keen on his subject. He has all the makings of a scholar,” said Yakov Petrovich.
“Um-hmm…” Korobtsov paused. “And why him in particular? Other kids took the entrance exams, too. Take a look…” He rifled through some papers, and read out a name syllable by syllable: “Pe-re-po-pes-cu, Ne-do-po-pes-cu, something along those lines. From Moldavia, an ordinary fellow. And you give us these Melamids, Rabinoviches…”
How I hate you, how I hate you, how I hate you …
“Melamid is one of our own graduates, and he has a job we recommended him for. He’s a talented and serious young man!”
“Umm. Well, Yakov Petrovich, you tell this serious young man that the first section wouldn’t let him in. If he has any questions, he can come to me, and I’ll explain.”
“Do you mean to say that you won’t okay the application?”
“Exactly. Why are you looking at me that way? We’re looking out for your interests, the interests of the institute, and the country as a whole! Are you willing to answer for him, Yakov Petrovich, if he gets mixed up in some sort of trouble? Personally vouch for him?”
Go to the devil, go to the devil, you can all go straight to the devil …
“I’ll think about it, Igor Stepanovich. I’ll think about it.”
* * *
In fact, there was nothing to think about. Financial backing for the laboratory, Maria Moiseevna’s doctoral dissertation, which she hadn’t been able to defend since 1953, the opening of the learning center, colleagues and associates, students and graduate students—Yakov Petrovich couldn’t afford to beat his head against a brick wall.
* * *
In the fall, so many things happened in Mikha’s life, both good and bad, almost simultaneously, that they all blended into one patchy, vibrant mass. Alyona’s behavior toward him suddenly changed, and their nervous relationship, with its thaws and its cold snaps, accompanied by Alyona’s constant emotional fireworks, suddenly grew calm and close. Mikha didn’t understand why the change had occurred; Alyona didn’t consider it necessary to explain to him that she had broken off with a married man she had been in love with since the age of sixteen. She put him out to pasture and decided to marry Mikha. Mikha was overjoyed.
He hadn’t yet managed to come to terms with all the implications of this imminent change in his life, to think through the myriad quotidian issues it raised, and to which Alyona was oblivious, when things were resolved in a very unexpected way: Aunt Genya died suddenly and without any fanfare.
She had planned on living a long time, and getting properly sick before the end. She had already accumulated a sizable list of illnesses; but she was deceived. She went to bed in the evening and died in her sleep, thus magnanimously resolving, in a way completely uncharacteristic of her, Mikha’s greatest worry—where to live.