Yesterday Tomochka said that she’s planning on entering trade school. Good girl! She’s also very tender with me.
This morning I drank tea, ate a piece of bread with cheese, and then forgot and went back to the kitchen to have breakfast. Vasilisa yelled at me, saying that I got in the way of her making dinner. I said that I wanted to have breakfast. She said that I had already eaten breakfast. What a nightmare! I’m turning into an old woman who never walks away from the refrigerator, like Anna Arkadievna’s crazy mother-in-law. I’m going to have to write down what I did and didn’t do.
I ate breakfast. I ate dinner. I worked after dinner. The doctor from the polyclinic came by. It’s cold in my room.
I ate breakfast (or was that yesterday?). PA came home and scolded me for not taking my pills. Now Vasilisa is going to give me my pills three times a day because I forget. That’s very funny. It would be hard to find anyone less suited for that assignment. Today she woke me at six in the morning—to take my medicine. “My dear, why so early?” I asked her. “Later I’ll be busy and forget!” It’s so funny you want to cry! This isn’t a family; it’s a madhouse. Poor PA, what will happen to him if I lose my memory entirely?
I ate breakfast. I couldn’t remember if I washed up or not. I went to wash up, but my towel was wet. That means I’d already washed. There was dinner: vegetable soup and chicken for the main dish. Was there chicken yesterday too? And the day before?
They brought my drafting table from work. It fills half my room. I asked if it couldn’t be moved. It turned out that they had brought it last week. I was amazed. I didn’t tell them the worst of it: it turns out that I had already done some work, drafted something, but I don’t remember a thing. And it would be awkward to ask. I’m trying hard to behave correctly. Because I’m afraid of constantly revealing my memory lapses I’ve almost stopped talking with people at home and try to answer with as few words as possible. I watch TV more. Reading gives me no pleasure. I picked up my old volume of Tolstoy. It’s probably the only reading that doesn’t depress me. I know his work so well that I don’t have to strain.
Today my head is exceptionally clear. I had Vasilisa change my bedding. She has never liked to change bedding. If you don’t remind her, she’ll never do it on her own. I took a bath and washed my hair. While sitting in the tub I remembered a recent dream with an enormous amount of water in it. Suddenly I realized that I had not stopped having dreams; I’d simply stopped remembering them. I have to try to write everything down.
PA sat with me for a long while in my room. I feel so good with him. He simply sat down in the armchair next to me and said nothing. Then he took me by the hand and played with my fingers for the longest time. I love him very much. He probably knows that.
I ate breakfast. I took my pills. I ate dinner. Kozl. has two mistakes in his drafts. It’s much more plesnt working with constructors. They have mch more competent staff.
It turns out it’s already May. I must start writing down the date. Otherwise, time is like mush. PA said that he wants to rent a dacha. That seems excessive to me. What does he imagine: Vasilsa and I will move there, and he’ll come to visit on Saturdays and Sundays, and the girls, who knos if they’ll come even once the whol summer. And who’s going to take care of the whole apartment in Mocsow. Vasilis’s also against it. She left for some prayer service for several days, and the apartment just simply fell apart. Only in the evening PA came home and life begagagan. One day I didn’t even get otuof bed. Everything in the kitchen has been rearranged, I don’t know where the pots are, or where . . . Or maybe I simply forgot?
I ATE BREAKFAST. AND SO ON.
Vasilisa sad that she’s leaving for Ss. Peter and Paul day. The twelvth July?
Strangers. More strngers. Why are so many strangers cming here?
someone died DIED
I don’t understand, but it’s uncomfortable asking: it seems we’ve moved to a new aprtment. Everything is different. A long cordor.
Tanya came by today. Or Toma. No, it was Tan. She’s beautiful.
No one home. Yesterday no one. TANYA PA
Vasilisa gave me tea
BREAKFAST DINNER SUPPER
PA said yesterday that he gong on a busness trip. Three days. Vasilisa dosn’t give me breakfst.
BREAKFAST Nothing hurts. Nothing thing hurts. DIED who
TANYA TANYA TANYA TANYA
HOSPITAL BREAKFAST NO
PAVEP A PV PA
WHITE brkfast
Happning awfal ask PA WHERE
WPER WHER WRE HERWHERWH
I Elena Grgeva N Kukts 1915 PA who ded de tnya
5
ILYA IOSIFOVICH’S WORK GREW LIKE A TREE: THE OLD AT the roots, the new in the branches. With many, many new offshoots. Anthropology, evolutionary genetics, demography, statistics, and even history all came in handy, everything went into the mix, and everything was made to work. Ilya Iosifovich was both plowman and poet. Sometimes in the evenings, having spent ten hours straight at his desk, he experienced the pleasant muscular fatigue that occurs after a mountain hike or skiing. Besides its sixteen staffers, his laboratory had a whole troop of volunteers—students, librarians, pensioners—who helped him assemble huge amounts of information that he tallied and built into a system similar to Mendeleev’s periodic table that explained not the structure and properties of elements, but the structure and properties of nations.
He cast his nets so broadly that the most varied fish—from the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary to The Gulag Archipelago, from Anaximander of Miletus to Theodosius Dobzhansky—were part of his catch. The grandness of his designs made his bald head spin, and he was constantly giving papers for various research societies, at institutions of higher education, and at the private seminars that blossomed in those days through an oversight of, and in part overseen by, the organs of state security, which had slightly relaxed during the Thaw. It was here he performed as an inspired poet in the Romantic sense of the word. Pavel Alekseevich, who happened to be present at one of his performances, gave him a rather sharp review.
“Ilya, you may have some important points, but you get too carried away, like some David Garrick . . .”
Goldberg could not contain his passion: he had made an earthshaking discovery and hastened to share it with his contemporaries: politics absolutely had to be considered as one of the most significant components in the evolutionary process. In the slice of time he had studied, from 1917 until 1956, in a concrete geographic region—within the territory of the USSR—this factor had exerted a negative influence on the evolutionary process. A convinced Darwinist, Goldberg considered evolution as a phenomenon having a moral aspect: positive evolution, in his opinion, was directed at the preservation, improvement, and expansion of the habitat of a species, while negative evolution aimed at the weakening and degeneration of a species. At its core Soviet power, in Goldberg’s opinion, was progressive, but in the concrete historical situation it functioned as a negative factor.
His fundamental treatise, something like “Political and Genetic Foundations of Population Theory,” had not yet been written, but “Essays on the Genetic Ethnography of the Soviet Nation” already existed on paper.
Other papers also existed, collected in a tidy green folder with a two-digit number: numbered, bound sheets of paper bearing the reports of regular and nonstaff employees, copies of book requests from the Lenin Library and the Library of Foreign Literature, and tape recordings of Goldberg’s impassioned presentations. Filed under its own separate number was the typescript of “Essays on Genetic Ethnography” with the author’s own notations: it had been lost accidentally by one of the especially talented staffers in his laboratory on the No. 110 bus . . . Likely owing to the same accident, the thick folder also contained Valentina II’s report on her trip to Novosibirsk. The graduate student had reported on the work of Novosibirsk geneticist B on the “domestication” of silver foxes, animals that were both aggressive and dangerous. It turned out that with consecutive selection and crossbreeding, by generation X the most obedient animals evidenced a sharp decline in the quality of their fur, and having become obedient and trusting, the foxes began to bark like dogs. Thus, the only foxes suited to adorn the collars of generals’ wives were those who failed to conform to good relations with human beings. Foxes that behaved badly. Those that learned to lick the hands that fed them were no good for any other purpose.