Finally the guide arrived—a fat man in an embroidered Ukrainian shirt and gold-framed glasses who distantly resembled Nikita Khrushchev in a good mood—and led them down the shaded footpaths. It was cool and mysterious. The guide talked about the abundance of Crimean flora, about rare endemic plants that lived exclusively in this region, and about ancient myths connected with the plants . . .
Toma was a city girl and despised the countryside—one could say—for personal reasons. When she had spent her summer months in the village during her childhood, she had never noticed nature of any sort; everything there seemed ordinary and insultingly poor. For her, forest, field, and pond were connected with hard work: she was sent to the woods to gather berries for sale, to the field to help with the harvest, and to the pond to rinse laundry. Here in Crimea in the Botanical Gardens nature was selfless: it demanded no laborious effort. Even the sea, the salty water that no one had to haul in buckets from under the hill, had been created exclusively for the joy of swimming and diving.
Toma surreptitiously stroked the leaves—some smooth and some furry, some dry as old paper, and the needlelike conifers—that lined the paths of the Botanical Gardens, filling her fingers with a joy they had never known before. Insufficiently caressed in infancy, not having known a loving touch in her childhood, now, though provided with everything she needed, she was still as deprived as ever of the loving touch without which a living thing suffers, falls ill, and withers . . . Perhaps her small size could be explained by the fact that growing up without love was as difficult as without some special unknown vitamin . . .
Their Khrushchev-look-alike guide turned out to have a completely magical voice, and what he said was a real fairy tale.
“Here we have an acacia,” he said, pointing to a small tree covered with sweet yellow blossoms, “one of the greatest trees ever. According to ancient Egyptian beliefs, the Egyptian goddess Hathor, the Great Cow, who gave birth to the sun and the stars, also could assume the identity of an acacia tree, the tree of life and of death. Acacia was the oracle of one of the great goddesses of fertility in Western Asia, and even the ancient Jews, who rejected idolatry, were seduced by the acacia: they called it the ‘shittim tree,’ and in ancient times built the Ark of the Covenant from it . . .”
Of all the things he said Toma understood only one word: “cow.” Everything else was incomprehensible, but cool. It turned out that every tree and every bush, and even the tiniest flower, all had a foreign name, a history, a geography, and—most amazing—a legend about its presence in the world. While she, Tamara Polosukhina, had nothing of the sort; even by comparison with a fir tree or a daisy she meant nothing . . .
She also got the feeling—Toma had no formed thoughts, only feelings garnished by thoughts—of a mutual sympathy between herself and the plants as well as an equality with them in their insignificance.
“Probably among all these plants there’s one that’s exactly like me . . . If I saw it, I would recognize it right away,” Toma thought, stroking a rhododendron or boxwood as she walked.
Tanya and Toma almost never coincided in either their thoughts or their feelings, and if they did, it was exclusively thanks to Toma’s ability to adjust herself to Tanya’s thought waves. This time they were thinking about one and the same thing: if I were a plant, what kind would I be?
At the shop near the exit from the Botanical Gardens, with pocket money that Tanya spent immediately and recklessly and Toma scrimped, Toma bought two sets of postcards with local and Mediterranean types of plants and a boring book called Flora of Crimea.
That day the question of finding an appropriate profession for Toma, which Elena Georgievna and Pavel Alekseevich had been pondering and only Vasilisa considered completely decided—that Toma would follow in her footsteps—was resolved.
Still ahead was the tenth grade, a whole year to figure out details and prepare for exams. Tanya had set her sights on the biological faculty, to the amazement of Pavel Alekseevich, who could not imagine any other path for his daughter except medicine. But Tanya talked incessantly about higher nervous functions, about studying consciousness—the first American science fiction books had already been translated, and the Goldberg boys diligently supplied Tanya with the same. It was very romantic, much more romantic than a physician’s everyday routine. As for Toma, Pavel Alekseevich took her to the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy. There they were greeted with circumstance appropriate to Pavel Alekseevich’s rank, shown the experimental fields of corn and soybeans, and the laboratories. What impressed Toma was the artificial climate laboratory, the greenhouses with plants from the South; everything else reminded her of boring life on the collective farm with its crop rotations, cursing at the collective farm office, and village melancholy. On the way home she told Pavel Alekseevich she really did not take a hankering to the Timiryazev Academy and that she would prefer to go to a place where they worked with southern plants. Pavel Alekseevich attempted to explain to his foster daughter that once she received an education, she could work at the Botanical Gardens or at the Institute of Medicinal Plants, or anywhere else, but Toma would hear none of it: she did not understand why she needed an education if she could work at the Botanical Gardens without one. What she wanted most was to admire the beautiful plants, to care for them, to touch them occasionally, and to inhale their smells . . . In the meantime she set up a whole family of clay pots of all sizes on the windowsill and puttered with lemon and tangerine seeds . . .
18
AND SO IT CAME TO PASS THAT A YEAR LATER TANYA TOOK university entrance examinations, overcoming steep competition and her own—who knows from where—fear of tests, while Toma simply applied for gardener courses at the Moscow Executive Committee of the City Soviet of People’s Deputies, from which, six months later, she would receive a white piece of paper testifying to her acquisition of a new profession.
Tanya did not make it into the day division, earning one less point than she needed, but she was accepted into the evening division. By September 1 she had to get a job in her field of specialization in order to be able to present proof of daytime employment. Pavel Alekseevich—who had not even considered helping Tanya matriculate by making a single phone call to one of the university’s heavyweights equal in rank to himself—now picked up the phone and called his old colleague, Professor Gansovsky, a physician and researcher, who headed the clinic of pediatric brain defectology and a laboratory specializing in brain development. Pavel Alekseevich’s request was modest: would they hire his daughter, a student in the evening division of the biology faculty, as a lab assistant? Professor Gansovsky chuckled and said that he could take her as soon as tomorrow.
Pavel Alekseevich delivered his pride and joy several days later. Tanya recognized this building alongside the Ustinsky bridge from childhood: they had brought her here for an X-ray or for an appointment with the pediatric cardiologist . . . But now she entered through the battered door of the yard entrance, through a corridor with a black board with numbered tags hanging from it. This was a completely different experience. She was coming to be hired for a job.
Professor Gansovsky lived almost year-round at his dacha and did not come to work every day, but he had made an appointment with Pavel Alekseevich and his daughter for that day because one of his leading researchers, MarLena Sergeevna Konysheva, had prepared the manuscript of her doctoral dissertation for him to read and was supposed to give him the weighty volume.