The professor enjoyed his musings, rubbing his dry, cleanly scoured palms together in a gesture that suggested he was about to examine a patient.
“Very curious. Very curious. One must begin with biochemistry, I believe. Der Mensch ist was er isst. And what he drinks!” And just like that he laughed, showing his mouthful of pure metal teeth, which a local dentist, originally from Vienna, had fitted him with in Vorkuta. Dulin either recalled from the German he had managed to pick up at school, or simply guessed, that what Vinberg had said was: You are what you eat.
Vinberg knew everything there was to know in the world, or so it seemed: anthropology, Latin, and even genetics. But he hadn’t been able to take care of his teeth. He was in a hurry to live, to read, to think; he had been in a hurry to write down all the idiosyncratic and untimely ideas that had descended on him in the northern latitudes.
He talked a great deal to whoever would listen, including Dulin. But there were some things he kept to himself, telling only those closest to him.
“A land of children!” he would say to his wife, whom he’d acquired through the camp dispensary. “A land of children! Culture blocks the natural impulses of adults; but not of children. And where there is no culture, blocking is absent. There is a cult of the father, of obedience, and at the same time an unmanageable childish aggression.”
Vera Samuilovna brushed this off disdainfully. She was the only one who would permit herself such a gesture.
“Edwin, what nonsense! What about the Germans? The most cultured country in Europe? Why didn’t culture block their primitive, natural impulses?”
Vera Samuilovna attacked her husband with youthful passion, and Edwin Yakovlevich, as usual, fiddled with his nose, as though it were precisely in that organ that his intellect was concentrated.
“Another mechanism was set in motion, Vera, another mechanism. Das ist klar. Selbstverständlich. This can be proven. Levels of awareness—this is what we must consider.”
And he would fall silent for a long time before offering this theoretical proof.
They had no children. One boy had been born to them in the camps, but they had been unable to save him. All their energy, their entire store of talent that had remarkably survived and flourished, was invested in their profession. Vera Samuilovna was obsessed with her endocrinology. She synthesized artificial hormones, which she nearly believed could guarantee human immortality. Edwin Yakovlevich did not endorse his wife’s views. He was not attracted by immortality. Their scientific interests converged in this fundamental conflict: gerontology by definition flew in the face of the idea of immortality. Vinberg was certain of this. But Vera believed in hormones.
The couple had plenty to discuss in their late-evening soirées. After the loss of their whole prewar way of life—conservatories, libraries, science and literature; after the camp barracks, the dispensaries, the necessity of curing every possible illness with no medicine at all; after all that, sitting in the nighttime stillness of their own tiny apartment, stuffed with books and records, in the warmth, with plenty of food, just the two of them, was their source of joy.
* * *
Dulin continued to study alcoholism, now not only from a scientific perspective, as theory, but in an applied, practical context as well. His department started a treatment program, which, unfortunately, didn’t meet with any particular success. The salary was good, though—he received 170 rubles a month, plus a bonus.
Three years went by. Again, he got lucky, this time without Nina’s influence. A position for a senior research fellow opened up when an elderly colleague retired. At the same time, quite unexpectedly, Dr. Ruzaev, the most promising doctor in their institute and one who had already defended his dissertation, was lured away by the Kazan Medical Institute.
A search was begun to fill these two positions. Dulin would never have considered applying on his own initiative, but the head of the department urged him on, telling him to get all the necessary papers in order. And in the autumn of 1972, Dulin was promoted to the position of senior research fellow! This was a stunning coup in the unfolding of his career. It took all winter for Dulin to get used to it. In the mornings, while he was shaving in the bathroom, as he scraped the foamy hillock covering his dark brown whiskers from his cheeks with a safety razor, he would look at himself in the mirror and say: “Dmitry Stepanovich Dulin, Senior Research Fellow.” He had expected it to take ten or fifteen years to reach this position, but suddenly—there it was!
And he felt pride, and uncertainty, all at once …
Things were going very well in the department. Now he had a new subject—alcohol-related paranoia—and two wards of patients whom he studied and treated. Gripped by fits of jealousy, inflamed with hallucinations, tormented by persecution manias, overwrought and excitable, or, on the contrary, listless and depressed, devoid of any sense of self-worth, pumped up or deflated by neuroleptic drugs, they bore very little resemblance to his soft, warm-eared rabbits. Aggression was always hovering just below the surface.
Some of them were tied to the bed, others were sedated with drugs. On occasion, a particularly ungovernable patient would break the windowpane and fling himself out, trying to escape his illness straight into the arms of the Lord God. All told, there were only two windows without bars in the entire department: one in the department head’s office, as well as a tiny one in the examining room. At the beginning of spring one such patient took the leap from that very window. Luckily, the ward was only on the second floor; still, he broke his arm. It was very unfortunate for all concerned. The patient was a celebrated actor, beloved by the whole nation. And his form of delirium was also deeply rooted in the people: he believed that tiny men were after him, and he had to keep picking them off, shaking himself free in squeamish terror.
Dulin chased off the tiny men with the help of Amytal and haloperidol.
Then the artist recovered, and his beautiful wife, also an actor, came to fetch him. She gave the nurses six boxes of chocolate, and the department head a portrait of the patient. Now it hung in his office, adorned with the artist’s autograph. For the teetotaler Dulin, they brought a bottle of cognac. Dulin was very happy—not about the cognac, of course, but that no scandal had ensued. The actor had arrived all in one piece, and he had left with a broken arm in a cast. They should have been more careful.
Dulin didn’t like his paranoiacs. In fact, he felt a deep contempt for them. He considered them all to be lost causes, and deep inside he viewed alcoholism itself not as a true illness, but as an ordinary human failing. His wife, Nina, from morning till night, made her rounds of the district, listening with her stethoscope, palpating stomachs, writing out prescriptions and sick-leave certificates, and carrying out what he considered to be true medical work. What went on here, Dulin suspected, was just academic rigamarole. But, on the whole, he was satisfied with the job. It was a good one.
One day, in the middle of summer, when vacation season was in full swing, Dulin was summoned to the administrative office. Eleonora Viktorovna, the secretary, a mature black-haired beauty with luxuriant, immobile eyebrows and unbridled power at the institute, nodded to him and smiled sourly: