It was a gathering of musicians, but among the mourners were also people from “the audience,” participants in the world of music, which seemed to exist above the Soviet world of collectivization and industrialization, all the official state upheaval and frenzy, which appeared so paltry against the background of Beethoven, Schubert, Shostakovich, and even Misha Gnesin, an utterly forgotten composer, younger brother of the celebrated Gnesin sisters.
Tamara was astonished. She had known many of her grandmother’s “old-lady friends,” but here, at the graveside, she finally understood what kind of world her grandmother, who went around in a stretched-out sweater with pieces of dried egg stuck to the collar and a skirt that sported all manner of stains in varying hues, had inhabited.
Almost all the “old-lady friends,” except perhaps for Anna Alexandrovna, who lived on Pokrovka, were local, from the Arbat neighborhood. They came on foot and stood in a small group nearby. They were not exactly members of the family’s inner circle, not teachers or performers, but “initiates” …
They mourned in a musical key, performing the music of Mikhail Gnesin, written for Meyerhold’s staging of Gogol’s play The Inspector General. This was a gift of love to the departed Maria Semenovna from the Gnesin family, who were also dying out.
Then the elderly musicians all came up to Tamara and Raisa Ilinichna, her mother, to say a few words about Maria Semenovna, about music and about friendship. And it seemed that they invested these ordinary words with completely new meaning. Anna Alexandrovna also came up to them, asking them not to forget Maria Semenovna’s friends, and to come to visit her. And she stroked Tamara’s head, running her hand over Tamara’s rough hair.
The old apartment was reproduced inside the new one. In the large walk-through room stood the piano, with the dusty divan, covered with a worn red rug, next to it. Above it hung all the same pictures from the house on the Arbat, in the same arrangement as before. Only her grandmother, who had played on the piano, was missing. Tamara soon moved from the divan in the walk-through room into her grandmother’s room, the best one in the apartment. And she inadvertently became the head of this new household, which tried so hard to be indistinguishable from the old one.
Raisa Ilinichna, who had spent her whole life taking up as little space as possible, moved into the smaller room by the entrance door. Timid and unlucky, during the span of her life she had accomplished one major deed: having a child, which was Tamara, out of wedlock. The move and the death of her mother broke Raisa Ilinichna’s heart. Always defenseless against the blows that life dealt, she now became nearly immobilized by grief. She was not yet fifty, but to her daughter she seemed old and completely washed out. Raisa Ilinichna had the same opinion of herself.
In the new place, without the guiding hand of her mother, she felt unmoored. She couldn’t get used to the new neighborhood, and for a long time she traveled all the way back to the Arbat to buy bread. When she got home, she would sit in her narrow little room all by herself and weep, trying to hide the tears from her daughter.
But Tamara wasn’t aware of this, and even if she had noticed, she would not have attached any significance to the weak-willed and pointless tears. Tamara’s new life was a rich whirlwind of activity. The drowsy languor of the last years in high school vanished, and all the gears went into overdrive. Days passed in a flash, and she could hardly catch her breath. She was unaccountably, improbably lucky. Her studies were interesting, her job even more so. The academic adviser that had been assigned to her, Vera Samuilovna Vinberg, was heaven-sent. An extremely bright older woman, who had survived the labor camps, she became a mainstay in the complex picture of Tamara’s life. The void was filled, all her questions answered and her fears dissipated.
As tiny and dry as a flea, Vera Samuilovna, shaking the tight stainless-steel curls that escaped onto her forehead and neck from the large cluster atop her head, would instruct the new lab assistant in a manner that implied that she knew beforehand what a remarkable scientist and researcher she would become. Vera Samuilovna looked at Tamara’s luxuriant hair, at her small, agile fingers, and noted her keen intelligence—and thought that the girl could have been her own daughter; or, more likely, her granddaughter.
Vera Samuilovna even planned to invite Tamara to her home, to introduce her to her husband, to bring her into the family. But for the time being, it was merely a vague intention. Her husband, Edwin, for all his outward amiability, didn’t take easily to new people.
Meanwhile, fate was busy laying down byroads upon which Tamara might meet the love of her life. The Vinbergs’ home was one of the places that Tamara’s lover-to-be regularly frequented.
But for now, the things that interested her most were concentrated in the old textbook of endocrinology that Vera Samuilovna presented to her lab assistant, saying:
“Tamara, dear—learn this by heart. For a start. We’ll take on chemistry later. First you have to understand the connections that exist in this wisest of all systems.”
Vera Samuilovna was crazy about endocrinology. In her laboratory, she synthesized artificial hormones, which she viewed almost as the key to immortality of the human species. Vera Samuilovna believed in hormones as though they were the Lord Above. She would solve all earthly problems with the help of adrenaline, testosterone, and estrogen.
A new picture of the world opened before Tamara. The human being appeared to her now like a marionette governed by hormone molecules, on which depended not only size, appetite, and mood, but also mental activity, habits, and fixations. Vera Samuilovna considered the director of this whole theater of life to be the pineal, a tiny gland hidden in the depths of the brain. A wonderful, mysterious insight afforded only to initiates! Other scientists gave priority to the pituitary gland; but in this sphere of activity, they didn’t send you to prison for the error of your ways.
Tamara’s personal endocrine system worked like clockwork: her pineal gland (what else?) sent out exciting signals; her adrenal gland pumped out adrenaline; her thyroid sent out serotonin for the urgent replenishment of supplies. How could her boundless energy have been explained any other way? A surplus of estrogen made little pimples bloom on her forehead. There weren’t many of them—they could have been covered up with her bangs—but the hair insisted on sticking straight out and up, so she had to wrestle it down with hairpins. Everything was perfect. Only there was never enough time …
Galya never had enough time, either. Nor did she have any extra energy—it all went into her training. They didn’t teach the athletes too much at the institute. They weren’t in the business of training teachers, but of producing champions. At first everything went very well. She went from small triumphs to greater ones; she dreamed of Olympic gold, or silver at the very least. What followed, however, was a serious injury.
In her fourth year, Galya took part in the Moscow championship. When she dismounted from the parallel bars, having completed the routine without a hitch, she landed so awkwardly that she fractured her knee, severely damaging the joint. After that her career prospects as a champion evaporated, though she had almost made the national team. She spent three months in the Institute of Traumatology, where Dr. Mironova, their best surgeon, operated on her twice. Her knee became functional again, but the articulation of the joint was inadequate for an athletic career.
The heady life of training sessions, competitions, and promise had ended. They didn’t expel her from the institute, however. Galya dove into her textbooks, but floundered. She still lived in her semibasement, but no one took any interest in her now. Her glory had been short-lived, and she again felt insignificant, unattractive, and worthless. Plain old Polushka she had been, and Polushka she was destined to remain.