Pavel Alekseevich listened to his wife’s story, a coherent and detailed narrative with precise details. With an analysis of the situation, criticism, and an ability to arrive at meaning. Not a shadow of dementia. There could be no thought of dementia here . . . So why, two hours ago, had she been sitting with the cat and the unopened envelope, answering with irrelevant information, with nonsense answers typical of the insane, unable to control even the simplest movements, and at times forgetting how to hold a spoon. No, she hadn’t quite forgotten entirely, but was experiencing obvious difficulty dealing with the simplest of things. She couldn’t remember what she’d eaten for breakfast . . . If she had even eaten breakfast . . . The picture more likely suggests pseudodementia. A seeming loss of the simplest skills. A sui generis game of hide-and-seek of the mind with itself . . . No, I could never solve this puzzle. Maybe I should read Freud. In 1912 my dead mother had traveled to Vienna for psychoanalytic sessions with one of Freud’s students. What a shame I know absolutely nothing about that. It seems my mother had some variety of hysteria . . . Pavel Alekseevich frowned. Silly Vasilisa: his sin lay not in aborting fetuses, half-ounce clots of high-potency protein with enriched potential, but in the stupid rigidity with which he had rejected his mother’s second marriage, and his mother herself, a fair-haired beauty who had grown old with dignity and died in Tashkent in 1943 from ordinary dysentery.
With the acuity of the mentally ill Elena noticed the lightning speed of Pavel Alekseevich’s frown and fell silent.
“Yes, yes, Lenochka. The frame was crooked . . . Tell me more . . .”
But she had fallen silent, as if someone had switched off the power. Once again she sank her fingers into Murka’s fur, charged with live, slightly crackling, electricity, and withdrew entirely from the conversation and from the letter that had served as the indirect reason for the conversation, and from Pavel Alekseevich, who just seconds ago she had called “Pashenka” . . . Once again her face resumed its expression of “Imnothere.”
Pavel Alekseevich knew that no force could bring her back. She would wake up to communicate again in a week, a month, or in a year. Sometimes these glimmers lasted hours, sometimes days. These temporary glimmers threw him for a total loop because Elena would become herself and even resemble herself in those mythological times when their marriage had been complete and happy.
The exact same thing had happened last time, three months ago, when she had spoken to him about Tanya, as if she had wakened from her illness, and she had spoken bitterly, almost in despair about alienation and loss, about emptiness and the torturous loss of sensation that afflicted her, about her indescribable confusion at not being able to recognize the world around her . . . And then her speech had stopped in the middle of a word, and she buried herself in the cat.
“Always the cat,” the thought entered Pavel Alekseevich’s head. “Next time when she begins to talk again, I’ll chase the cat into the corridor . . . How strange: the cat is like a conduit to madness . . .”
“Lenochka, you and I were talking about Flotov . . .”
“Yes, thanks much . . . I don’t need anything . . . Yes, everything’s completely fine, please, don’t worry . . .” Lena babbled, addressing either the cat or someone else who existed imaginarily inside her dusty, unkempt room.
11
LIKE ALEKSANDR SERGEEVICH PUSHKIN, TANYA WAS MISerable in spring: she felt wiped out, fatigued, and caught colds that refused to go away. This time her usual spring indisposition was complemented by an insuperable somnolence and aversion to food.
She was living on Profsoiuznaya Street now, in the Goldbergs’ apartment. As soon as his medical leave ended, Vitalka was immediately fired from his job as part of a supposed staff reduction. He eked out a living as a translator. Like his father in the old days, he found what work he could writing for several scientific review journals, usually under someone else’s name, and attempted to write articles for popular science magazines. Two short notes of his about new technologies in the West appeared in Chemistry and Life. Also with the help of acquaintances.
Barely able to withstand her nausea from kitchen smells, Tanya cooked food and slept fourteen hours straight. Occasionally coming out of hibernation, she went to Obninsk to see how Gena was doing. He was finishing his quick-fire dissertation and awaiting trouble at any minute from his institute’s internal security office, but his adviser, a friend of Goldberg senior, a physicist who like Goldberg had done time in the camps, supported him one hundred percent. Yet, for all his authority and scientific achievements, the adviser was neither tsar nor god, and it was unclear until the very last moment whether or not Gena would be allowed to defend . . .
Tanya spent a day or so strolling through the still-transparent April woods underlit by varicolored buds ready to open, and returned a couple of times again in May to look at the young greenery. The fresh air quickly made her tire, and she fell fast asleep, thinking little of the fact that Gena lay down alongside her when he returned from the laboratory. Their friendly intercourse had no more significance than their communal breakfast, after which he accompanied her to the bus, then ran off to his laboratory . . .
Having spent a couple months living this way, Tanya suddenly woke up, made a few female calculations she had never before condescended to, and arrived at an interesting conclusion. In the five years of her experience in bed nothing similar had ever happened, and the discovery at first stunned her.
Nanny Goat Vika’s girlfriends constantly discussed issues of applied gynecology connected with contraception, abortions, and means of dealing with the pain. During these discussions Tanya maintained an expression of total disinterest, as if she were a virgin or an old woman. For her, pregnancy was neither a joy nor an affliction, merely an interesting event. After making her discovery, she slept almost a full day straight, in her sleep reconciled herself with this entertaining circumstance, and announced it to Vitalka, who just happened to be at hand.
“Oh you devil,” he rued. “I’m a jerk, of course, but you’re to blame too . . . But a kid, in the present circumstances—that’s too much.”
“You think so?” Tanya surprised herself by taking offense, although she had not yet decided how she should feel about the possible appearance of a child. “So should I have an abortion?”
Vitalik said nothing. For too long.
“It seems I don’t want it.” Vitalka’s long pause turned out to be decisive, because a minute before that Tanya had not at all known what she wanted. “We don’t need a kid,” Vitalik announced rather decidedly. “And my arm doesn’t straighten completely . . .”
That was when Tanya suddenly took mortal offense on behalf of her future child, raised her splendid eyebrows, and smirked.
“I’ll have to ask Genka. Maybe he wants it?”
Having assumed in the depths of his soul that Tanya belonged principally to him and visited Gena out of tradition and with his, Vitalka’s, tacit agreement—a kind of sexual philanthropy on behalf of his brother, Vitalka gazed at Tanya with a look of stupefaction: he hadn’t expected this turn of events. It had somehow never occurred to him that the alleged child might turn out to be his nephew . . .
“Listen, so who’s the kid’s father?”
Having made it a rule never to hide her thoughts and always to tell the truth, Tanya smiled a bit more broadly than usual.
“The Goldberg brothers, Vitalik. The Goldberg brothers. Under the present circumstances, it seems to me, you won’t have as hard a time dealing with it together.”