The night people there, with whom she occasionally struck up conversations, were entirely unlike ordinary day people who filled the streets when it was light out. Morosely sobering drunks, unlucky prostitutes, the twelve-year-old boy who had run away from home, homeless couples who for the sake of their refugeless lovemaking nested in entranceways with wide windowsills and unlocked attics . . . Once, on the uppermost landing of a staircase that led to a locked door onto a roof she stumbled on a sleeping man and was horrified: was he dead . . . ?
The other thing about night people was that they came in shifts depending on the hour: before one in the morning, you could still encounter a lot of decent couples on their way home. In fact, these were not night people, but day people simply slightly delayed. After one, they were replaced by loners, inebriated for the most part. They were not dangerous, although sometimes they accosted her. They would ask for something: a cigarette, matches, a two-kopeck coin for the phone booth; or offer something: to have a drink, to make love . . . She sometimes had conversations with these inebriated loners . . . The most dangerous people, it seemed to Tanya, came out between three and four thirty. In any case, her most unpleasant meetings occurred at that particular time.
She spat out like a plum pit all her former knowledge from school and from books. What interested her now was a different kind of experience, the kind that privileged unexpected maneuvers and nimble moves: she delighted every time she found a new courtyard that connected two dead-end lanes or a building with entrances at both sides—the façade side and the servants’ entrance side. She knew Moscow’s last water pump, forgotten by the waterworks’ authorities and still functioning in the area of the former Bozhedomka, and she discovered an apartment in a half-basement—a thieves’ den?—where very criminal-looking types gathered at night. The miles she trekked at night were paved with reflection: until recently, life had seemed to her an even uphill journey, a gradual ascent, the goal of which was a scientific accomplishment combined with merited success and even, perhaps, fame. But now instead of this heroic picture she saw a trap, and science seemed as much an idol as that wretched imposed socialism which of late radio announcers had started to pronounce as “socialeezism,” trucking up to the barely literate Khrushchev, who could hardly put two words together . . . When she had been little, the world had naturally divided itself into “grown-ups” and “children,” “good people” and “bad people.” Now she had discovered a new dimension: “the obedient” and “the disobedient.” This was not about children, but about adults—intelligent, enlightened, and talented adults . . . Tanya decisively and happily crossed over to the second category. True, she was still not quite clear where her father stood: he did not fit in either category. He seemed to be socially useful, that is, obedient, but he always acted of his own accord, and forcing him to accept someone else’s opinion or to submit was impossible . . .
Once in a dead-end courtyard in Sredne-Kislovsky Lane Tanya found a stern old man sitting very erect on a park bench, his back not touching the rolling back of the bench, his wooden hands leaning on a lordly wooden walking stick with a sturdy polished handle. Tanya sat down on the edge of the bench. Without turning his large head, which was illuminated at an angle by the weak streetlight, he said to her in a deep voice: “Tanya, I think it’s time to put dinner on the table.”
“How do you know who I am?” she wondered, at first not realizing it was pure coincidence.
“I’m telling you again: it’s time to eat dinner.”
“Where do you live?” Tanya asked.
The old man seemed a bit perplexed, then worried, then answered not entirely confidently.
“I live . . . here.”
“Where here?” Tanya asked again, this time realizing that the old man had lost his memory.
“In the town of Gadyach, in the Poltava guberniya . . .” He answered with dignity.
“What is your name?”
“It’s time to serve dinner.” He shifted on the bench, attempting to raise himself from its depths, and leaning on his cane. “It’s time to eat dinner.” He sank back down, unable to liberate his rather unwieldy body.
Dawn was approaching. Tanya helped him free himself from the deep bench that was as awkward as a wooden hammock and said, “Let’s go. It really is time for dinner. Tanya’s waiting for you with dinner.”
She led him off to a precinct station where they might help him find the cunning Tanya who had not put dinner on the table on time. At the precinct station, as she turned the majestic old man over to the petty powers-that-be, Tanya noticed the writing in white paint along the length of the cane: “Pechatnikov Lane, House 7, Apartment 2. Lepko, Alexander Ivanovich.”
“Good-bye, Alexander Ivanovich.” Tanya bid him farewell, regretting that she had not noticed earlier the calling card written along the stick.
“The penultimate stage of freedom.” Earlier such a thought would not have occurred to her.
When she left the precinct station, dawn was already breaking. The night people had taken cover, while the day people had not yet emerged from their lairs. Tanya was in a wonderful mood, and she decided that after getting some sleep she would go to the laboratory around one in the afternoon, when all the lab assistants got together in the prep room for tea, and that she would buy a cake and some candy as a way of celebrating her liberation . . .
Her tea party did not go as planned. Of the six lab assistants three were on vacation, one was ill, and the remaining two were precisely the least pleasant—the elderly Tasya Kukharikova and thieving Galya Avdiushkina. They each ate two pieces of cake and put the rest in the refrigerator. There was no one in the laboratory: some people were on vacation, some at a conference, and others on their research day in the library. MarLena Sergeevna also was away.
Tanya dropped into her former room and with no regrets or sentimentality whatsoever recollected that first day when her father had brought her here. Everything stood in its former place: the microscopes, the microtomes, the torsion scales, the batteries of glass bottles of alcohol and xylol secured with slightly bent metal lids. What had once seemed to her the temple of science now looked poor and dilapidated. In the molecular biology building at the university they had been using an electron microscope for a long time already, they had modern equipment—not the stuff in this museum of the history of science, the nineteenth-century room. She wanted to have nothing to do with any of this anymore. Only the smell—the heavy laboratory smell of alcohol and formaldehyde mixed with vivarium and chloroform—remained, after all, a bit thrilling.
Tanya pulled out the drawer of her desk and gathered her personal belongings: a long wooden cigarette holder, a compact for face powder, a typed collection of Mandelstam’s verses, and—who knows for what purpose—her notebook . . . She tossed it all in her bag and headed for Gansovsky’s office. She knocked on the antiquated door with its opaque glass inserts. She entered. Gansovsky—tanned, his hair freshly dyed brown, in his white coat—was sitting at his enormous desk, reading a journal.
“Come in, come in.”
The only chair for visitors held a mountain of books. He indicated to Tanya that she sit on the folding wooden library stepladder. The bookcases ran to the very ceiling and could not be reached from the floor. In its folded state the staircase resembled a high chair.