But his principal concern always remained his large-bellied patients, who came to him with their damaged wombs, their malfunctions, and their fears. He saw them at consultations on varying levels: weekly office hours, by special request of acquaintances, and private consultations. Although the Kremlin Hospital had already been in existence for some time, the wives and daughters of the heads of state often appealed to him—for assistance giving birth, for an operation . . .
In one section of the clinic with the euphemistic tag “Diagnostics,” they performed dilatation and curettage, some of which was in fact diagnostic . . . It was practically the only place in the city where anesthetics were administered; at other clinics sin was punished severely, the impudent decision to rid oneself of an unwanted child almost always included trial by pain . . . In this section four surgeons and four registered nurses dilated and scraped nonstop all sixteen hands at a time. The most primitive of anesthetics—local administration of Novocain—twenty-five minutes of work, an ice bag to freeze the belly, and next in line . . .
Pavel Alekseevich seldom came into this section. He considered the artificial interruption of pregnancy the gravest of operations in moral terms both for the woman and for the doctor . . . Was it not here that the essential divide between humans and animals lay: the ability and right to step beyond the limits of biological law, to breed not at the will of natural rhythms, but of one’s own desire? Was this not where human choice, the right to freedom, ultimately was realized?
Vasilisa represented the opposite—radically opposite—opinion. From the moment she replaced her adulation of Pavel Alekseevich with total rejection he even began to relate to her more seriously in a way. Her position was ludicrous, from a doctor’s point of view, even ignorant and inhumane, but in its own way moral. What was sad was that her obscurantist abhorrence of abortion had influenced Elena, whom she had inculcated with Christian-church intolerance. Vasilisa’s semiliteracy combined quite harmoniously with her views. But Elena? How could he explain to her that he was the servant not of Moloch, but of the miserable people of an invidious world . . . Besides, he himself practically never performed artificial interruptions of pregnancy. Perhaps the only thing that theoretically interested him in the whole procedure was the issue of how best to utilize the valuable bio-products considered waste in these procedures. But that was being studied by hematologists, a whole laboratory of them, headed by a competent student of his . . . No, there was another aspect that preoccupied Pavel Alekseevich, and he even recommended to one of his staff to give some thought to hormonal post-abortion protein folding, that is, the still completely unstudied process the female organism undergoes during artificial pregnancy termination, the hormonal consequences thereof, and how to assist the body in recovering from this condition with minimal damage . . .
The dissonance between his reasoned professional activity and the stone wall of rejection he encountered at home—from his wife, that is, and not from brainless Vasilisa—aroused a certain reflectiveness in him, and, as if in self-justification, he constantly wrote comments and notes to himself in which he combined medical incidents with the most abstract considerations, a kind of homebrewed philosophy of medicine. He made absolutely no attempt to organize his scattered thoughts into something orderly or intelligible . . . Ilya Iosifovich Goldberg, who was constantly producing innumerable sheets of paper filled with tiny script, each time announcing his latest grandiose plans to his friend, had cured Pavel Alekseevich of any desire to construct overarching theories or to erect planetary plans . . .
Unlike Goldberg, who ignited like dry brushwood at each new turn of scientific thought, Pavel Alekseevich had spent decades observing one and the same object, spreading its pale shutters with his rubber-covered left hand, inserting his mirror with its bent handle, and peering fixedly into the bottomless breach of the world. From there came all that was living; these were the true gates of eternity to which all those girls, aunts, ladies, and grand dames who spread their thighs before him never gave a second thought.
Immortality, eternity, freedom—they were all linked to this hole that engulfed everything: including Marx, whom Pavel Alekseevich had never been able to read, and Freud with his ingenious and erroneous theories, and him himself, an old doctor who had accepted into his hands hundreds, thousands, an unending stream of wet, screaming creatures . . .
Whenever Ilya Iosifovich—long ago released from his penultimate (it later turned out) prison term, inspired by the recent revival of his beloved field, and captivated now by molecular genetics—waxed profusely about the secret code of life discovered in DNA by those lousy Englishmen, as he referred to Watson and Crick, and bristled at how we, the Soviets, that is, had been beaten to the draw, Pavel Alekseevich, his chin resting in his big knitted palms, would stop him in midflight.
“You, Ilyusha, are a hot-shit scientist, while I’m just a simple cunt-cutter, and I just can’t figure what you’re so worked up about. So those heathens invented that spiral of yours. They have good financing. The Swiss equipment in my clinic was made in what year? Nineteen hundred and four. And the centrifuge in your office, when was it made?”
“That’s just the point, Pasha. If we had their money, we’d run rings around them. Our upcoming generation is super-talented, what potential!” For a moment his concern was replaced by a warm shadow. “You know my Vitaly turns out to have a terrific head on his shoulders. Just terrific! Too bad he’s leaning toward biophysics. Blum seduced him . . . Don’t you understand, Pavel, give us their money . . .”
“Where do they get their money from, Ilya?” Pavel Alekseevich tossed Goldberg some bait, and he bit instantaneously.
“The colonies, Pasha, the English colonies, imperialism and horrendous exploitation. You’re like a child, Pavel. Amazing.”
Pavel Alekseevich nodded.
“Child. Child. You’re the child, Ilyusha. A case of gerontological chickenpox. I’m prescribing for you spiritus vini, one hundred and fifty grams three times daily. How, after eight years in the camps, can you even pronounce that awful word: im-pe-ri-al-ism?”
Pavel Alekseevich poured one hundred fifty grams of vodka exactly to the drop into a glass and slapped a slab of fatback on a heavy chunk of bread—the way Vasilisa liked to lay it on, thick . . . This time they were drinking in Pavel Alekseevich’s study. Nowadays Goldberg frequently dropped in on the Kukotskys: the trip to Malakhovka was long, and he would sit in his laboratory until late at night and sometimes spend the night in the apartments of his Moscow friends.
Goldberg would jump up, overturn a chair, knock over a lamp, or at the very least sweep a plate off the desk.
“Because of types like you, types like me . . . ,” the wounded Goldberg wailed. “My father had an account in a Swiss bank, he was a timber merchant! With a house on the Moika, and a house on Lubyanka Street. And a dacha in Yalta! Socially, I’m a dead man. I’m not the one to tell them that they’re violating Lenin’s principles. Who would listen to me? As far as this country’s concerned, I’m guilty for life.”
“Okay, so you’re guilty. But what am I guilty of as far as this country’s concerned?” Pavel Alekseevich asked, although he knew perfectly well what his best friend would accuse him of.
“What? Your father was a general! He had control of . . .”
Pavel Alekseevich yawned, shook his head, and asked Elena to give them a folding bed and linen. She had everything ready. She loved Ilya Iosifovich and felt sorry for him.