On one of their Sundays Tanechka proudly announced to her father that she had been placed in charge of the surgery room: she now kept the keys to the case that held all the laboratory’s instruments. Now anyone who intended to enter the operating room in the space in the half-basement would have to come to Tanya for forceps, clamps, scalpels, and saws—the frightening and beautiful tools required for cutting and sawing bone tissue. There, downstairs in the operating room, they cut not just rats, but cats, and dogs, and rabbits . . . But Tanya’s principal responsibilities lay in preparing the thinnest of histological sections, and she was good at this work.
IN THE SPRING OF 1960 TANYA COMPLETED HER EXAMS with straight A’s, and she was offered the opportunity to transfer to the day division. She refused, without even consulting her family. Although night school really was difficult, she had no intention of quitting the laboratory. Her real life was there, among the beakers, the rats, the slide sections, and in close communication with MarLena Sergeevna. Gansovsky himself had started paying attention to her. Old Lady Vikkers was planning to retire, and he was thinking about taking Tanya on in her place. MarLena Sergeevna guessed her boss’s intention and, valuing Tanya as a laboratory assistant, told him just in case that Tanya was planning to transfer to the day division. A minor, but absolutely classical, intrigue developed out of a purely work-based situation. As usual in such intrigues, Tanya was clueless.
During the summer months the children’s clinic attached to the laboratory usually closed down, except for the trauma section and the child development section that housed healthy children abandoned by their mothers while still in maternity hospital. Until these children turned three they were kept here under the watchful eyes of pediatricians and physiologists who observed the development of “normal” children, then sent them to orphanages. During these summer months when the clinic was virtually closed down, graduate students and researchers had the opportunity to focus on the “experimental” sections of their dissertations. Life at the laboratory became more intense, the operating room was in use every day and on a rigid schedule. Tanya’s responsibilities also increased: she was responsible for sterilizing and issuing instruments.
The incident that would become the most significant in her entire life began very ordinarily and banally. Holding in her tenacious grip a tray covered with a cloth yellowed by multiple sterilizations, Raya, a cute laboratory assistant who limped on one polio-stricken leg, asked to be issued a set of instruments for ink injections.
“What are you injecting?” Tanya asked matter-of-factly.
“A human embryo,” answered Raya.
Jangling her key, Tanya unlocked the glass case with its small metal treasures, pulled out tweezers, scalpels, and clamps from a broken sterilizing box, recounted all the antiquated metal piece by piece, and while selecting a clamp asked matter-of-factly, “Alive or dead?”
“Dead,” cute Raya responded calmly, then signed for the instruments she had received, and set off lopsidedly along a steep staircase down into the half-basement . . .
She had already rumbled to the bottom of the stairs and was scraping the wall with her hand in search of the light switch when Tanya suddenly realized what exactly she had asked about . . . Realizing it, she put the key to the operating room in its place, took off her white lab coat and hung it on a hanger, and left the laboratory. She would never return there. Nor would she return to the university. Her romance with science had ended at that very moment, forever.
20
FOR A WEEK SHE SAID NOTHING. IN THE MORNING, AS usual, she left the apartment, set off on foot to wherever—downtown, to Maryina Roshcha, or the Timiryazev Academy. Never had she had so much free time. Summer had come late, and although it was already the end of June, the greenery in the parks was still new and untrampled, and the lindens had blossomed late, and Moscow’s backstreets and courtyards held a special charm, the dilapidation of the old wooden houses—lovely and homey. Tanya wandered until she tired, then bought some bread, processed cheese, and a bottle of warm soda, and made herself comfortable in some secluded, cozy spot alongside some firewood sheds, or on the slope of an abandoned railroad track, or on a park bench . . .
She felt strange, torn. It seemed as if she thought about nothing, just walked and looked around, but deep inside her dwelt a thought that turned itself this way and that, from side to side, not a specific thought even, but the event that had struck her to the quick when she, Tanya Kukotskaya, had asked Raya Pashenkova if the embryo was alive, that is, if the child was alive, and if it had been, she would have given Raya the instruments necessary to inject dye into its veins, killing in the process not a baby rat or kitten or little rabbit, but a live child, a being with a name, a surname, and a birthday . . . Is every person that close to committing murder or was what had happened to her something exceptional?
Wandering the city from morning to night, she would return home, eat dinner, go to bed, and quickly fall asleep, only to wake up soon after to toss and turn, unable to fall asleep again. Once, in the middle of the night, driven by the emptiness of insomnia, she dressed and quietly slipped out into the street. She made her way through familiar neighboring courtyards that had metamorphosed into gigantic theater sets. The moon came out, quickly raced across the sky, and set just behind the Butyrsky prison. The wind then picked up, the sky lightened, and the new janitor hired to replace Lizaveta Polosukhina began sweeping the courtyard with a dry broom, raising a cloud of dust in the process . . .
By six thirty in the morning Tanya had returned home, lain down, and fallen asleep. When Toma began to rouse her, she muttered that she was not going anywhere today . . . Then Elena came and bent over her.
“Tanyush, what happened? You aren’t sick, are you?”
Pulling the sheet over her head, Tanya answered in a clear voice, “I’m not sick. I’m sleeping. Leave me alone.”
Elena was dumbfounded: what kind of an answer was that? Tanya was never rude . . .
Tanya woke in time for lunch. No one was at home; even Vasilisa had gone off somewhere. Tanya was delighted not having to explain anything to anybody, and set off once again to stroll about without purpose or sense . . . Palikha, Samoteka, Meshchanskie streets . . . Wooden houses, the last remnants of the old city . . .
Of course, she was prepared to talk about it all with her father and to hear what he—the main person in her life, the most intelligent and most learned—would have to say to her. But her father was not around; he had left on an urgent business trip, which made Tanya angry, and she even prepared a string of malicious words for him: whenever I need you, you’re either operating, or at a consultation, or in Prague, or in Warsaw . . .
Another possibility was to talk to Vitalka Goldberg, but he was moonlighting at a collective farm in the Kostroma region . . . As for talking to her mother, Toma, or Vasilisa—she might as well ask the cat for advice . . .
When Tanya returned home, Toma had already tumbled into bed, her mother for some reason was not at home, and Vasilisa was sitting in the kitchen sorting buckwheat.
“Will you eat something?” Vasilisa asked.
Tanya did not feel like eating. She poured herself some tea, sat down opposite Vasilisa, and stunned her with a question.
“Vas, what do you think: when does a soul attach itself to a child, immediately upon conception or only at birth?”
Vasilisa bulged her one buttonlike good eye and answered without the slightest hesitation.
“Everyone knows: at conception. When else?”
“Is that church doctrine or what you think?”
Vasilisa ingenuously knotted her brow. She suffered from the persistent delusion that precisely what she thought was church doctrine, but now she suddenly had doubts: the second question seemed more complicated than the first.
“What are you torturing me for? Ask your father: he knows better.” She suddenly became angry.
“I will ask, when he gets back.” Tanya, leaving the dirty cup on the table, walked out of the kitchen.
Vasilisa closed her eye and wondered, “That’s no accident . . . Why does she suddenly need to know about all that? Maybe I should whisper something to Elena?”
But, in fact, in Vasilisa’s eyes, Elena herself was not entirely trustworthy.