“My little rats,” the learned lady said, picking up a little rat with two fingers, stroking it on its narrow spine, and then—with a different, larger, pair of scissors lying to the right of the tray—accurately and precisely cutting off its little head. She tossed the slightly shuddering little body into the tray and lovingly spread out the head on the object glass. After which she looked searchingly at Tanya and asked with a shade of strange pride: “Well, do you think you can do that?”
“I can,” Tanya answered without hesitating for a moment. She was far from sure that she really could.
“I have to,” she said to herself and, heroically stifling the urge to vomit, she picked up the tender satiny nastiness of a newborn—warm to the touch—baby rat with her left hand and the cold perfectly ergonomic scissors with her right hand, and clutching that silly immortal soul in the grasp of enlightened reason striving toward science, she pressed down on the upper ring of the scissors with her thumb. Crunch—and the little head fell onto the object glass.
“Good job,” a soft female voice said approvingly.
The sacrifice had been accepted. Tanya had passed the test and was initiated as a junior priestess.
19
AS THE YEARS PASSED, PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH FOUND MORE and more sense in reading the ancient historians.
“It’s the only thing that allows me to tolerate today’s newspapers.” He tapped his firm, iodine-framed fingernail on the leather cover of The Twelve Caesars.
As Vasilisa cleaned his study, he sat in the girls’ room, awaiting the end of this monthly ritual. In surprise Tanya raised one thin brow with its hereditary brush in the corner.
“I don’t see any connection, Dad.”
“How should I put it? Julius Caesar was considerably more talented than Stalin as a commander; Augustus—one hundred times smarter; Nero—crueler; and Caligula much more inventive when it came to depravity. Yet everything, absolutely everything—the bloodiest and the most sublime—becomes the exclusive property of history.”
Tanya sat up on her pillow.
“But it’s sort of sad to think that everything is so senseless and all the victims have died in vain.”
Pavel Alekseevich grinned and stroked his book’s shagreen cover.
“What victims? There are no victims. There is only the instinct of self-justification, of justifying actions that are sometimes stupid, sometimes senseless, but more often malicious and mercenary . . . A thousand or so years from now, Tanechka, or perhaps five hundred, some old gynecologist like me—no matter what progress occurs our profession will always be around—will read the ancient history of Russia in the twentieth century, and there will be two pages about Stalin and two paragraphs about Khrushchev. And a bunch of anecdotes . . .”
Tanya smiled. “That’s not so, Dad. They will know Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak, while Stalin and Khrushchev will merit mention for the sole reason that they repressed them.”
“That will happen when there’s true communism,” Toma inserted wistfully as she carefully bathed an ailing Monstera deliciosa.
Pavel Alekseevich was in a good mood and allowed himself to joke.
“No, Tomochka, it will be only after that . . .”
“I should ask Tanya later what he meant by that,” Toma decided. No one had ever told her that anything could come after communism. Although, ultimately, what difference would it make, since we won’t be around anyway . . . She had something serious to worry about: pale spots had appeared at the base of the plant’s leaves, and their wax covering had somewhat softened in those spots. She stroked the leaves’ surfaces with the soft tips of her fingers: yes, they really were softer. And there seemed to be a similar spot on her treasured Yucca plant.
“Oh, no, not a virus!” she thought in horror, forgetting about communism forever. She was already a rather experienced employee of MosUrbGreen and had dealt with plant viruses twice, but those had been state-owned plants—one in the square in front of the Bolshoi Theater, and the other in the greenhouse that sent them seedlings. In both cases the virus had proved incurable, and it had wiped out the marigolds and the gillyflower. But these were her plants, her favorites, and Toma stuck the thumb of her left hand in her mouth and chewed in concentration at the root of her nail . . . Having chewed off a microscopic bit, she set to inspecting her jungle—by the end of the 1950s the Kukotsky apartment had metamorphosed entirely through her efforts: there was not a single surface left without pots of plants and jars with evergreens.
At first the rigid green plants had been pleasing to Elena’s eye, but then she embarked on a lame struggle against the tin cans and old pots and pans in which Toma potted her nurslings. Elena bought clay pots and planters, but the tin cans from the trash kept multiplying. Once the windowsills were thoroughly occupied, the vernicose army advanced to the dining room table and the desks, and then descended to the floor. The nursery, which had once been Tanya’s room, looked like the storeroom of a florist shop.
The abundant vegetation did not disturb Tanya at all since she was practically never at home. In the early morning she ran off to work—to her rats and rabbits, operations and preparations—and from work she rushed straight to the university, returning home only at half past eleven, dead tired. On days when she had no classes she also disappeared for hours on end, either visiting friends or at various entertainments. Toma gradually stopped participating in Tanya’s life after hours. Tanya had taken up with some new friends: the Goldberg boys had given way to other, more interesting young men who never came to the apartment.
Elena usually arrived home from work shortly after six o’clock to find not Tanya, but Toma—children’s watering can in hand—whispering to her plants. Toma’s workday ended early, and by four thirty she was already at home. Grumbling, Vasilisa fed them all separately.
Pavel Alekseevich labored like a worker at a steel plant, two shifts back-to-back. In addition to the institute and the clinic, he had begun teaching advanced qualification courses for doctors, which at once amazed and irritated everyone: it hardly befit an academician to spend three nights a week lecturing until the wee hours to provincial obstetricians and old midwives who, if they had received any medical training at all, had long ago forgotten what it had consisted of. He completely neglected his duties as a member of the Academy. Like a schoolboy playing hooky, he failed to appear at Presidium meetings and avoided his superiors. His reputation as an alcoholic was augmented by rumors of his eccentricity.
Long ago the upper echelons at the Ministry had changed: Workhorse was replaced first by an old KGB man trained in veterinary medicine, then by a famous surgeon who was also a ruthless careerist and a thief. With no regrets Pavel Alekseevich said good-bye to his great project of reforming health care, and the reforms took place without his participation, although the papers he himself had long ago forgotten still lay in the safe of the new minister, who occasionally skimmed them, to no avail.
Despite his frosty relations with his superiors, Pavel Alekseevich’s influence in medical circles was unusually far-reaching. All those provincial ladies from the distant corners of the huge country were trained by him both in the old methods of assisting birth and in new approaches to sustaining pregnancy, in the treatment of inflammatory processes and of postnatal complications . . . He wrote several textbooks for middle-level medical personnel—which category he considered unfairly neglected—and a monograph on questions of infertility.