He had always pitied her, poor thing. Very early on, however, he had decided that he would not be like his mother—he would leave and make something of himself, he would cut the contemptible country hick out of his very being. After seven years of primary and secondary school, he enrolled in nursing school. There were few men there. His presence was valued, and he applied himself to his studies. Then came the army, where he was assigned to a medical unit, thus making using of his education. After the army, he didn’t stay in Podolsk, but entered medical school in Moscow, where he was accepted on the strength of his army service, without having to compete for a spot. Since that time he had been a true city man.
All that remained of Dulin’s rural childhood was the habit of working with animals. Sometimes he even missed having a cat in the house, and he brought home Marinka’s Saturday bunny because he liked feeling the creature’s animal warmth in his own, human, hands. But Nina didn’t want animals in the house, not even a cat. And what Nina did not want, Dulin did not do.
They got married in the third year of medical school. Dmitry was older than Nina by six years. She was rather stunted, and he enticed her with his height, his seriousness, and his modesty. She was not mistaken in the least—nor was he. Dmitry owed everything to his wife: his residence permit in Moscow, and his internship in neurology, and then his graduate studies. He had not aspired to that himself; but through her friends, Nina secured him a place in a research institute. She herself worked as a doctor at a local clinic, for which she was given an apartment, thus bypassing the waiting list.
Dulin initially resisted the idea of graduate school. He couldn’t understand why it was necessary. If it was so important to her, why shouldn’t she enroll in graduate school and defend her dissertation? But Nina had decided otherwise. Since the institute he entered for graduate studies specialized in psychiatry, and Dulin’s particular field was neurology, he had to dip into some psychiatry textbooks to pass the entrance exam. He was assigned the topic of alcoholism—and he learned everything there was to know at the time: about changes in the psyche, behavioral responses of alcoholics, delirium tremens, and other fascinating things.
For three years Marinka played with the rabbits, while Dulin forced his rabbits to drink diluted spirits, pouring it into them through a funnel since the test animals refused to drink it on their own. Then Dulin defended his dissertation and became a junior researcher. He no longer brought the baby rabbits home, but now Marinka sometimes accompanied her father to the institute’s vivarium. In addition to rabbits, there were also white rats, and cats and dogs. At one time there were even monkeys.
When Dulin finished his dissertation, he was suddenly filled with uncertainty: the results of his research were exactly what he had expected them to be, and his work had not yielded anything even remotely resembling a discovery. Karpov, his academic adviser and the head of the department, reassured him:
“Expecting a great deal of oneself is a fine quality in a scientist. I assure you, however, you can live a worthwhile life in science without making any discoveries. We are the workhorses of science. We are the ones who move it forward, not those who make discoveries, some of them quite dubious. And as for geniuses … we know what these geniuses are like!”
Dulin understood perfectly well that his adviser was referring to Vinberg. Dulin had become acquainted with him by chance, on account of a fire that broke out in Vinberg’s laboratory. Two years before, when Dulin happened to be the only one on that floor, he was busy with his calculations when a wire shorted out and caught on fire. His keen sense of smell sniffed out the fire in Vinberg’s lab, and he called the fire department; but even before they arrived, he managed to switch off the fuse box and put out the fire. And he prevented the firemen from even entering the lab, since he knew they would only cause chaos, and would steal things, besides. He spoke firmly to the fire chief, let him have a look around, and signed the protocol. Vinberg was grateful; and Dulin had been on friendly terms with him ever since.
Edwin Yakovlevich Vinberg was a real professor, with a brilliant education. And he was a rarity: he loved to talk about science. There was nothing he liked more than a question, in answer to which he would deliver a whole lecture. Because of his modest position and intellectual innocence, Dulin could never have expected to find any grounds for communication with this stellar individual. But the fire had afforded Dulin the right to visit the Vinbergs in the evenings for a chat over tea.
From him, Dr. Dulin learned things that never appeared in Soviet textbooks: about Dr. Freud, about archetypes, and about the psychology of the masses. Vinberg himself studied gerontology, forms of dementia in old age; but he seemed to know everything about everything, and had fascinating theories on every subject, including alcoholism.
Many people were suspicious of Vinberg. He had fled from the Fascists in Germany to the USSR even before the war. In Russia, he was arrested a month later. They protected him from the Fascists for nearly twenty years in the labor camps. After the death of Stalin, he was “rehabilitated”—it turned out he had been arrested by mistake. He was released, and very soon, in a matter of a few years, he assumed his rightful place—not in a career, of course, but in science. How many years he had spent in the camps! It would have been natural to suppose that there, as a doctor in the camp dispensary, he would have been unable to continue his work as a scientist. It turned out, however, that not only had he kept up with modern science, he was even in the forefront of it: he wrote two monographs right away, and he was awarded a doctorate without having defended a dissertation. Psychiatrists flocked to him for consultations from every corner of the land. His authority was undisputed, though he still had a fair number of detractors. Not everyone liked the fact that this quintessential stranger, moreover a Jew and a German to boot, was developing his legendary teachings and comporting himself with a European self-respect virtually unknown on our native soil.
“Dmitry Stepanovich!” he said to Dulin, in his heavy German accent, with irreproachable Russian grammar. “No one has yet studied the social nature of alcoholism, and the patterns of social behavior specific to alcoholics. There’s no better place than Russia for studying this subject. Here, the entire country could serve as a platform for laboratory experiments. But where are the statistics about the relationship between alcohol use and aggression? They don’t exist. If I were younger, I would certainly take on this topic. You ought to work on it, it’s very promising! As for the somatic view, it’s not terribly interesting. It would be fruitful, however, to work at the genetic level. But those rabbits of yours—they’re not viable objects of study. They aren’t drosophila! And alcohol dehydrogenase is the same in everyone, it’s a simple fermentation process. No, no, if I were you I’d study alcohol and aggression.”
But Dulin didn’t observe any alcohol-related aggression in his objects of study. The tipsy rabbits began to exhibit signs of tremors, then just fell asleep. Their appetite diminished, as well as their weight, but they remained peaceful creatures. They didn’t bite, and they didn’t attack humans. In short, there was no protest activity on their part. Moreover, the professor’s arguments notwithstanding, the primary male, head of this alcoholic harem, not only did not become more aggressive, but actually lost his renowned rabbit potency. Every three months, one of his own sons took over where he had left off.
When Dulin worked up the courage to challenge Vinberg, saying that his research in no way confirmed the aggression of alcoholics, the professor only laughed.
“Dmitry Stepanovich, what about the workings of the higher nervous system? A human being is not a rabbit, of course, but a highly organized, complex being! Moreover, I would draw your attention to the fact that rabbits are vegetarians, and people, for the most part, are predators. In their eating habits people are closer to bears, which are omnivorous! Keep in mind that not a single species is comparable to Homo sapiens in the variety of its diet. Northern peoples are carnivorous, while in India, for example, there are huge swathes of the population that are exclusively vegetarian. As far as can be observed without scientific study, neither group outdoes the other in displays of aggression.”