With bright eyes that from year to year grew lighter and lighter, at one time having been deep blue and now turned smoky gray, Elena looked out from one darkness into another . . .
7
AS FOR HER RELATIONSHIP WITH THE GOLDBERG BROTHers all that Tanya could say was that was the way it had turned out. Since childhood both of them had crushes on her and competed agonizingly for her. Tanya turned out to be a severe test of their bonds as twins, the closest of bonds that connect human beings: in the human world where immaculate conception is attributed only to Mary of Nazareth, even mother and son cannot achieve the same degree of proximity in biological composition as monozygotic twins. So said Goldberg’s exact science of genetics.
The Goldberg brothers withstood the test honorably: by unspoken agreement they always visited the Kukotsky household together, calling first by phone to announce “it’s us, the Goldbergs,” even though the technical capabilities of telephony always dictated that only one of them spoke. If they invited Tanya to the theater or the cinema, they unfailingly traipsed together as a foursome, with the bland Toma as compulsory addendum to Tanya’s knockout charm. They never spoke about Tanya between themselves, unless to make a statement or indirectly.
“Let’s go to the Kukotskys’ on Saturday . . .”
“I bought tickets to the theater for next Sunday . . .”
And that was the end of the conversation.
Each of the boys individually had all the makings of an intolerable child with a superior intellect and egocentrically deformed personality, but the presence of Tanya in their lives in some strange way counterbalanced the dangerous circumstance of their being one step short of Jewish Wunderkinder with an ineradicable and almost justified sense of superiority over everyone else around. In the bitter years of their early manhood and later in their lives they would be forced to make sense of the particular significance of that “almost.” Tanya would give them a good run in this respect. Curly-haired, cheerful, and absolutely unconcerned with how those around her felt about her—likely because she had lots of evidence of being surrounded by people’s love from all sides—Tanya was beyond competition, if only for the reason that she was two grades behind them in school. There was two years’ difference in age between them and, in addition to everything else, she belonged to a different, female world, plus, at least until they were fifteen, she was taller than they were, and stronger—and it never would have occurred to either of them to match their strength against hers: for all these reasons they both were willing to submit to her, to serve her, and to provide her various pleasures commensurate with their age . . . In passing, with a flourish of the angled hem of her checkered skirt, she, without knowing it herself, had dismantled the strict intellectual hierarchy in which the still unmarried Ilya Iosifovich for the moment still held first place, followed, nose to nose, by the brothers, who were breathing down his collar, with everyone else left in their wake. Except Tanya . . . She was beyond . . . to the left or right. Her game was, essentially, not quite honest, as if during a game of chess she changed the rules without telling her opponent and won by shooting all her opponents’ pieces off the board and onto the floor with the snap of her thumb and middle finger . . . It was precisely this about Tanya that delighted the Goldberg brothers, and not her ash-blond curls or vigorous pounding on the piano . . . A hierarchy of intelligence turned out thereby not to be the only scale by which values were determined . . .
From an early age the brothers’ tastes and preferences had been similar, but their mother had known almost from the moment of their birth that one of them, Gena, who was born twenty minutes later—the younger one, that is—cried just a bit harder and laughed just a bit louder. His needs were more dramatic and his fears more explicit. In any case, it was precisely five-year-old Vitalik, the relatively older one, who would ask Gena: “What kind of cereal do we like more?”
And Gena would decide that they preferred buckwheat . . .
Their worship of Tanya to a certain extent spared them from the comic role of Wunderkinder: they voluntarily, if not entirely appropriately, relegated first place to Tanya. The school in Malakhovka was unable to appreciate the boys’ talents—A students were all alike. Through the hardships of postwar existence to the day of her premature death, ingenuous Valentina—who worked as a laboratory assistant until 1953, when, in the heat of antisemitism, she was fired—never discerned her children’s talents, while their egocentric father, himself descended from a breed of Wunderkinder, for precisely that reason regarded his boys’ rare abilities as entirely to be expected. In addition, the brothers raised the bar for each other not only in relation to Tanya, but in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. For Tanya, basically, it was more interesting talking to Vitalik insofar as he was inclined toward medicine and they had more topics in common, but to tell the truth, as boyfriends she much preferred other boys who might not possess such exceptional knowledge in the field of the natural sciences but knew how to cut loose, boogying to the rock ’n’ roll that had filtered through the pores of the Iron Curtain . . .
Now, after Ilya Goldberg had been arrested and appeared—unlike in previous years—to be an innocent suffering hero (it was the middle of the sixties!), his sons were illuminated by their father’s reflected light. Especially after Vitalka’s nighttime beating in the entranceway . . .
Tanya and Gena walked out of the Kukotsky apartment a little after eleven o’clock. Gena knew that Tanya was not living at home, and over the past year they had not seen or called each other. Tanya seethed with compassion for Vitalka and immediately wanted to take part in hospital vigils over him. Gena, for the first time in many years, was alone with Tanya, and unexpectedly a completely new configuration arose in which Vitalka existed separately, while he and Tanya were together, unified entirely in their sympathy and compassion. While Vitalka—entangled in tubes, with freshly placed stitches along his cheekbone and the bridge of his nose, in plaster cast and with an IV drip—half-slumbered behind the glass divider of his isolation ward, Gena, having seized her by the dark-blue sleeve of her jacket, led Tanya to the metro, attempting to persuade her to spend the night on Profsoiuznaya Street, in order to be able to rush off to the Sklif first thing in the morning without losing time . . .
Tanya hesitated a bit: ordinarily she warned Nanny Goat in advance if she planned not to spend the night in the workshop. There was no phone there. Tanya wavered; Gena was resolutely determined . . . Generally speaking, leaving him was not a good idea, and she headed off for Profsoiuznaya Street, where she had never been before.
The two-room apartment in a Khrushchev-period five-story panel building looked as if the search had ended only a couple of hours ago. More accustomed to order than to cleanliness, having, essentially, rebelled against the inflexible logic of order and spent two years wandering around chance apartments and finding shelter ultimately in a workshop among small metal parts, old canvas stretchers, and heaps of broken furniture, Tanya stopped dead in her tracks at the sight of the elemental chaos of scribbled paper that flooded tables and chairs and cascaded in broad waves onto the floor. Footpaths had been marked out among the papers—one to water and another to food, one to the table and another to the bathroom—with newspapers spread over the scribbled paper; tea fields had formed with troops of variegated teacups brown from tea stains on the inside and dirty on the outside. Peaceful herds of fattened cockroaches grazed the scientific pastures.