Both classical and the most modern Western medical books ceased to interest him, and he spent many hours in the history and foreign-language libraries reading medieval treatises, antique rarities, and translations of the books of the ancient priests . . . He was searching for something in these Sibylline allegories . . . The secret of conception—that was what interested him. Nothing more and nothing less.
His own wife had securely locked the door of their bedroom to him for all times of the day. He had long ago given up on restoring their suspended marital relations. Following his memorable ignominy, she seemed indeed to have stopped feeling like a woman. But she was just over forty, and over the years her beauty had grown all the more expressive. Her face seemed as if drawn anew by a more demanding, more experienced artist. The maternal puffiness of her mouth and cheeks was gone, and a new expression had appeared in her eyes—one of keen attention directed not outwardly, but inwardly . . . At times it seemed to Pavel Alekseevich that while answering his infrequent questions she was thinking of something else.
Relations between husband and wife could not be called bad: as before, they guessed each other’s desires, sometimes read each other’s thoughts, and avoided having their eyes meet. She looked at his neck, and he at the bridge of her nose . . .
17
TANYA WAS HER PARENTS’ JOY. CODDLING AND INDULGING his daughter, Pavel Alekseevich expressed his concealed love for his wife. Elena felt that and was grateful to him for it, but answered him in a strange way by giving Toma more attention and care. A certain emotional balance was therefore maintained, while Vasilisa implemented a general strict policy of fairness by placing equal portions on their plates. This had stopped making sense long ago: food was plentiful, and everyone except Vasilisa had forgotten about food rationing, ration cards, and ration stations.
Tanya grew into a beautiful young girl—very lively and very talented in all pursuits, be it music, drawing, or the sciences . . .
In school they were already approaching the end of the ninth grade, and it was time to choose a profession, but Tanya was torn in different directions. Before Toma had appeared in their household Tanya had planned to enroll in music school, but as soon as Toma came to live with them, Tanya, to Pavel Alekseevich’s great chagrin, gave up music. For him there were no more pleasant moments at home than those spent watching her supple spine and fine shoulder blades as they moved under her sweater when she sat at the new instrument bought especially for her. Pavel Alekseevich kept wanting to get an answer as to why Tanya had absolutely refused to go to music school, but she would only clam up, then hug him around the neck, tickle him behind the ears, and mumble something about the Big-Eared Elephant, giggling and squealing, but uttering not a word in response.
Considerably later both Pavel Alekseevich and Elena understood what had happened to Tanya: apparently, she thought that her success in music would hurt Toma, who had never heard any music except what came out of the radio transmitter.
Tanya now found her father’s library more and more alluring. As always, Pavel Alekseevich worked a great deal, spent long hours at the clinic, and after arriving home and eating a quick supper in the company of a silent Vasilisa or a reserved Elena, he ever more often found Tanya in his study settled in a cozy nest of two throw blankets and sofa cushions, cat and book in hand . . . Near Tanya on the edge of a chair, with no comforts whatsoever, sat Toma, just as small as she had been at twelve, only fatter. One after the next she embroidered pillows, using a double Bulgarian cross-stitch on the lilac or exaggerated fruit patterns she clamped into her embroidery hoop. Her hunger—long ago forgotten and seemingly sated—had awakened in her a love for this luxury of the poor . . .
The girls were very attached to each other, and their attachment contained a mutual amazement: just as Tanya could not understand what pleasure lay in pulling threads through a stiff pattern, so Toma wondered how anyone could sit half the day with their head stuck in a boring book.
Observing the very different girls—his adored Tanechka and the charmless Tomochka, the scrawny feral brought into their home by special circumstances, Pavel Alekseevich, with his habit of regarding all phenomena in the world exclusively from a scientific point of view, fell to theorizing, noticing here too the manifestations of some great laws of nature that while not yet formulated nonetheless objectively existed.
Just as from the moment of fertilization a human embryo completes all the stages of its development to the hour and minute, Pavel Alekseevich thought, so in the child more complex psychophysical functions engage at strictly regulated intervals in strictly determined sequence. The chewing reflex cannot precede the sucking reflex. Yet both are stimulated from without: the feel of a nipple or even of some chance object, be it the edge of a sheet or the child’s own finger, arouses the instinct to suck within the first days of life; the placement of a piece of solid food on gums swollen from teething arouses the instinct to chew at the age of six months.
The functions of the higher nervous system are stimulated in exactly the same way, Pavel Alekseevich reflected as he observed the grown-up girls in his own family. Needs awakened at a certain age and unmet from without in the surrounding environment weaken and, possibly, die. Needs, therefore, precede necessities.
“They’ll accuse me of Lamarckism.” Pavel Alekseevich laughed to himself.
“It’s possible the whisper was born before the lips, and leaves fluttered in treelessness”—these lines had been written long ago and their author had already perished in the camps, and they never did make their way to Pavel Alekseevich’s consciousness. But there was no other person for whom this ingenious poetic epiphany was more comprehensible as a translation of a fundamental idea from the language of science to the language of poetry . . .
The child, tired of lying, that wants to sit up, will turn and fidget. Extend a finger toward it, and it will grab it and do what it so thirsts to do but still does not know it does. It will sit up. When it has matured enough to walk, give it the chance to take its first step. Otherwise it, like a child raised by animals, will never learn to walk on two legs but, like an animal, will move on all fours.
Give a child music when it feels the need to dance, a pencil when it gets the urge to draw, a book when it has matured to this level of obtaining information . . . How tragic it is when a new skill, a new need has ripened from within, but the moment has been lost and the world makes no effort to meet that need halfway . . .
Take Tomochka. Her mother had left her diapered in her little bed until she was two years old, because the poor woman had to go to work and there was no one to look after the little girl, and daycare was not even imaginable in blacked-out, evacuated Moscow. When Tomochka was set on the floor, she already had no urge to walk. She sat in a corner, on a pile of rags, and played with rags. She saw her first book only in school, when she was seven years old. Everything had been held back, everything slowed down. The poor little girl . . .
But Toma hardly thought of herself as unfortunate. Just the opposite, she was thoroughly convinced that she had drawn a winning ticket. A year after her introduction into the Kukotsky household, at the request of her Aunt Fenya, Toma had been sent to the village for the summer, and Toma, who had never spent a summer at Fenya’s when her mother was alive, came to despise village life with all her heart. She was horrified by the poverty, the filth, and, most of all, by the difficulty of daily life where she could not relax, as she would have with Tanya at their dacha, but from morning till night fed pigs, babysat Fenya’s three-month-old little daughter, and laundered filthy rags in cold water . . . Silently and unwillingly she did everything, never disobeying Fenya. Twice she traveled by bus to a distant village to visit her brothers. Her brothers horrified her: they had turned into villagers; dressed in rags, barefoot and dirty, they fought and cursed like adult peasants. Toma felt neither sympathy nor pity for them. Loving them was out of the question.