Ilya Iosifovich snored on his folding bed, defeated by fatigue and alcohol. Unable to fall asleep owing to this nasal trisyllabic music, Pavel Alekseevich reflected with the clarity of nighttime introspection. How much moral majesty and impassable nonsense could there be in one person! A Jewish dzhigit! Was it some kind of Jewish disease—Russian patriot syndrome? Like psoriasis or Gaucher’s disease.
Pavel Alekseevich recalled a recent patient, a young Jew who had given birth to a second child with Gaucher’s disease. A genetic ailment . . . Goldberg had said something about the accumulation of recessive genes in ancient peoples with high frequencies of consanguineous marriages. And blurted something about curing humankind through miscegenation. He practically raved about the creation of a new race of people . . . In fact, when examined closely, everyone was sick. Everyone around was sick. His current assistant, Gorshkov, was sick with hate for his mother-in-law. Even the quality of his voice changed when he talked about her. But what’s the point of talking about her: a cantankerous old woman with a bad heart and diabetes? His nurse, Vera Antonovna, was mad about microbes: she ran her own underwear through the sterilizer . . . And Lenochka? With those dreams of hers . . . ? Her eyes look inward, and what does she see there? You ask her something, and it’s as if she’s just woken up. Her face is filled with fright, tension. Toma whispers to her flowerpots; Vasilisa makes the sign of the cross over the stove before she turns on the gas . . . It’s one big madhouse. Tanechka is the only healthy person with normal reactions. But even she’s been looking bad of late. Pale. With circles under her eyes. Either she’s pushing herself too hard, or . . . Maybe we should do an X-ray?
“I’ll talk to her on Sunday,” Pavel Alekseevich resolved.
Sunday mornings were usually their own, when they were absolutely alone. The evening before Vasilisa usually left town for services somewhere. Of late, Elena, who had never gone to church before, had taken to attending services, as if to spite Pavel Alekseevich. True, she didn’t go to the same place as Vasilisa. She had found a priest, a former architect, in some old church on the Ostozhenka, with whom she could also talk about her drafting dreams. Toma headed out to worship rhododendrons and oleanders at the Botanical Garden.
Sunday mornings belonged wholly to Tanya and Pavel Alekseevich. They had breakfast together and spent an hour or two discussing everything on earth—things at work, literature, politics. At night Pavel Alekseevich listened diligently on their ancient electron tube Telefunken to all the enemy “voices” that made their way through the clamorous jamming; Tanya took to reading the first samizdat to come out—the unknown verses of known poets as well as those of new, fresh-baked writers. Sometimes she handed her father something that had especially appealed to her. It was important for them to tell each other about everything. Politics occupied them to a certain extent, but both were much more interested in talking about blood vessels and capillaries.
Tanya had mastered the skills of a histology laboratory assistant as if it were child’s play: the job demanded precision and dexterity, and she loved everything about it. She prepared stains, hematoxylins, using antiquated, almost medieval formulas. She spent hours evaporating, settling, filtering, and redistilling. She told Pavel Alekseevich about her achievements, and he grinned: nothing had changed, everything was the same. When he had been a student they had studied slide preparations stained in the same way. With Erhlich’s hematoxylin. Kulchitsky stain . . .
Tanya enjoyed the entire procedure of preparing slides, which was governed by strict rules—from the moment the rat’s brain slid smoothly into the fixing solution to using the heavy microtome knife to slice the opaque paraffin cube that contained the paraffined brain. A thin ribbon of micron cuts remained on the knife, and with a light brush Tanya would sweep them onto the slide, affix them, and stain them with the same hematoxylin she had spent three days processing . . . Only Old Lady Vikkers’s—Gansovsky’s personal laboratory assistant’s—slides were better than Tanya’s. But Vikkers had not done anything else for the last fifty years. Besides, Karolina Ivanovna was incapable of mastering any technique on her own, while Tanya undertook each innovation with pleasure and a passion.
Tanya told her father in detail about the precise and rather tricky operation she had learned together with MarLena Sergeevna. They extracted a pregnant bicornate uterus from an anesthetized rat, spread the right and left horns of the uterus out on the shaved belly of the rat, and inserted a needle into the embryo’s skull precisely at the vertex where the two hemispheres joined and where deep inside the brain there was a certain mysterious gland. When the insertion was successful, they were able to induce artificially an obstruction of the flow of cerebrospinal fluid and thereby induce experimental hydrocephalus, that is, water on the brain . . . That is, of course, provided the operation was done well, and the rat did not miscarry or devour her defective young, and gave birth on time. Ultimately, all these delicate manipulations were supposed to lead to an understanding of the causes underlying this birth defect and, moreover, even more ultimately, to deliver humankind from this grave, but fortunately rather rare, affliction.
Tanya delighted in the sense of professionalism, entirely new for her, when eyes and hands work together, requiring neither commands nor oversight from above, performing their task independently and autonomously, while the task itself takes to one’s hands as if rejoicing at the process under way . . . From Tanya’s sighs of delight and the fervor of her stories focusing specifically on the details he recognized in her someone who was one with him by nature—a doer.
Pavel Alekseevich listened with sincerest attention—this kind of scientific enthusiasm was very familiar to him . . . Tanya had just completed her second year at the biology faculty, but she was already chin-deep in the game of science that Pavel Alekseevich understood so well. “Still, it’s a pity she didn’t go into medicine. She has good hands, but she’ll spend her life gutting rats,” the old doctor thought to himself.
In his treasured nocturnal jottings during those months he noted: “The windbags have achieved a stranglehold like never before. A preponderance of people has evolved whose profession consists solely of vapid and even malicious word-mongering. The entire nation has been divided into talkers and doers. Whole institutions and special appointments have been created—it’s a terrible virus. What a relief that Tanya belongs to the species of doers. One’s job, one’s profession is the only thing one can stand on. Everything else is in flux.”
The laboratory studied brain structure and development. Morphologists and histologists observed through the lenses of their primitive microscopes the developing microvascular trees of the brain, and tracked the mysterious process by which new networks in the brain were formed to replace those damaged or defective. Often they used the technique of experimentally infusing dye into the vascular system. The blood was gradually replaced by dye, and in specimens prepared afterward one could trace distinct dark branches filled with granular dark-gray caviar, which is precisely what the dye looked like under a microscope. This method was most effective when the infusion was performed on a live animal. Its heart would beat, not having figured out that instead of live blood it was pumping deadly ink, and only gradually, as it succumbed to oxygen deficiency, would the heart slow down and stop. More often, though, the injection was performed on a dead animal that had already been subjected to various scientific interventions. It was simpler, but the blood vessels did not fill as well with dye. The sets of instruments required for these two procedures differed somewhat, and it was at this relatively insignificant juncture that a decisive turn in fate awaited Tanya.