Suddenly Toma burst out, “Tanya, our satchels are behind the radiator in the entranceway!”
“The sandwiches, the sandwiches!” Tanya remembered and pulled the fatally crushed sandwiches out of her pocket.
They gushed with laughter—who knew why. Most likely because their terror-wracked childish hearts needed this . . .
In the meantime, Vasilisa Gavrilovna was running through the darkening yards of their neighborhood and howling like a conjurer, “Tanya! Toma! It’s time to come home!”
Elena Georgievna stood in the corridor near the phone on the wall, spinning the black dial with a numb finger. Everywhere the line was busy: the militia, the morgue, the ambulance station . . . Pavel Alekseevich, who had set out after three in the afternoon in search of the girls, also was nowhere to be found. Having stuck an officer’s flask of diluted alcohol in the pocket of his overcoat, he wandered along the edges of the city center, where he kept encountering militia and army barricades, and his mind boggled at the thought of how the funeral procession’s organizers had managed to re-create the Khodynka massacre in the center of a city crisscrossed with streets, lanes, walk-through courtyards, and, after all, metro lines. He could not find a single spot where even a trickle of the cordoned-off crowd might have escaped. There was no hope of finding the girls, who he had no doubt had slipped out of the house to go to the funeral.
He stood on the corner of Kaliaevskaya and Oruzheinaya streets, leaning against the wall of the milk store. He remembered that there were still a few drops at the bottom of his flask, and he drew out this last gulp, stuck the empty flask into his pocket, and just at that moment felt someone pulling at his sleeve. A crafty goggle-eyed kid looked him in the eye from below.
“Hey, gramps, want me to take you?”
“Where?” Pavel Alekseevich did not understand right away.
“I know a way to get through.” The boy gestured ambiguously in the direction of Karetny Lane.
Pavel Alekseevich waved him off and walked away. His mood could not have been gloomier. At Belorussky Station he saw a whole column of ambulances . . . They were stuck in the roadblock of trucks.
“A hecatomb, a hecatomb,” Pavel Alekseevich suddenly said aloud, surprising himself. At the moment, he did not know how right he was.
16
PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH NEVER DID LEARN THE FATE OF THE monstrous sample he had brought to the high party office on Staraya Square. Though greatly impressed by his conversation with the mad doctor, the cautious bureaucrat decided not to raise the question of this delicate matter in the Politburo.
For several years the glass jar stood wrapped in paper on the lower shelf of his bookcase; on the eve of one May Day, in the fever of a general housekeeping in honor of the luminous holiday, a cleaning woman carried it out to the big garbage bin in the basement.
Strangely enough, “Soapface” turned out to be impressionable, and a few months after the great leader’s death the project to legalize abortions was studied and discussed. The state—having murdered countless millions of its citizens over the thirty-five years of its existence—deigned to allow women to decide the fate of the anonymous life that had sprung in their wombs against their wishes. A few demiurges signed, the valve at the top opened, and medical institutions were sent the corresponding circular that legalized the artificial interruption of pregnancies.
The former high party official who accomplished this on his last ascent of Olympus—there was no going any higher—to the day of his death (which occurred not long after) considered himself the great benefactor of the human race, while Pavel Alekseevich never did find out what role the ill-fated jar he had brought to Staraya Square had played . . .
The fate of the unfortunate hostages of their sex never ceased to concern Pavel Alekseevich; as before, he spoke at all conferences connected to infant and maternal welfare. He did not feel that he had won a victory: the conditions at maternity hospitals were, in his opinion, catastrophic. He returned once again to his principal project, hopelessly attempting to convince the country’s leaders of the necessity to reexamine the principles of health care financing, and delivering impassioned speeches about environmental concerns and a multitude of other factors that would adversely affect the next generation’s health . . . The word “ecology” had yet to enter the vernacular.
In the mid-1950s Pavel Alekseevich’s research interests took him in an unanticipated direction. While investigating several types of female infertility, Pavel Alekseevich discovered previously unknown phases within the monthly cycle. He focused his attention on women who had given birth to children after long-term infertility. He called such children “Abraham’s,” and meticulously studied and surveyed the women who had given birth to their first child in their first pregnancy after many years of childless marriage.
At the same time, by way of the work of the renowned Chizhevsky, he embarked on the study of natural cosmic cycles and biorhythms. Embryological research had shown that cytokinesis in fact occurred with clockwork precision. Comparing the daily activity of a human being with the speed of processes occurring within a woman’s body, he arrived at the theoretical conclusion that a certain percentage of women could not conceive at night.
His reasoning contained much that was intuitive and undocumentable by contemporary research standards, but it was based on conjecture about the existence of ova with unusually short phases of activity.
At the end of 1953 an amazingly handsome middle-aged Azerbaijani couple from Karabakh appeared during one of Pavel Alekseevich’s office hours. He was an artist, from a well-known family of carpet-makers, thin, with fine features and swarthy gray hair. His wife resembled her husband, like a copy of him reduced in size, with the same fine features, the same Persian facial structure. The lilac-tinged red silk of her dress, the emerald green of her shawl, her antique dark-silver jewelry . . .
Their tests showed that there was nothing wrong. Two healthy human beings who in twenty years of marriage had not given birth even to one little girl . . . The grief and disgrace of the wife.
Pavel Alekseevich looked at them for an indecently long time and listened: his secret adviser insisted.
“You must lie with your wife when the sun is at its zenith,” Pavel Alekseevich said in a strict tone of voice. “A year from now come to see me . . .”
The couple arrived not a year, but a year and a half later. And they brought with them a marvelous belly—taut, high, and with a beautiful little girl inside, whom Pavel Alekseevich himself delivered, and then, two years later, a boy . . .
Azerbaijan, Armenia, Central Asia—his first patients came from those areas. Then Russians began to come. Approximately half of them were hopeless, and Pavel Alekseevich always saw them and told them that there was nothing he could do to help. Some couples he recommended move to the East—to Vladivostok or Khabarovsk—for several years: this was a continuation and further development of his ideas having to do with natural rhythms and time zones . . . The table of his office was now covered with charts no one could make any sense of and that looked more like astrological tables than test results. The numbers of “Abraham’s” children continued to grow. And of each Pavel Alekseevich would say deep down in his heart, “Today I gave birth to you . . .” A child of midday, a child of dawn, a child of sunset . . . Expensive gifts piled up in his austere apartment: precious carpets, Chinese vases, and French bronze . . . He never charged a fee, but he also never refused donations. From time immemorial healers and priests took only natural products as payment for their services. As a rule, his patients were people of means who lacked only a child to complete their happiness. The poor either were not childless or did not go to doctors . . .