But then there were the men – men in overcoats covered in oil and fastened at the waist with soldiers’ canvas belts – who smiled and waved as they ran past, calling out: ‘How are things, Vera? Vera, do you ever think of me?’ Yes, she could sense a great tenderness around her. Maybe her little one would feel it, too; maybe he would grow up pure and kind-hearted.
Sometimes she looked inside the workshop used for repairing tanks. Viktorov had worked there once. She tried to guess which bench he had stood at. She tried to imagine him in his working clothes or his flying uniform, but she kept seeing him in a white hospital gown.
Everyone knew her there, the workers themselves and the soldiers from the tank corps. In fact, it was impossible to tell them apart – their caps were all crumpled, their jackets all covered in oil, their hands all black.
Vera could think of nothing but her fears for Viktorov and for the baby, whose existence she was now constantly aware of. The vague anxiety she felt about her grandmother, Aunt Zhenya, Seryozha and Tolya now took second place.
At night, though, she longed for her mother. She would call out to her, tell her her troubles and beg for help, whispering; ‘Mama, dearest Mama, help me!’
She felt weak and helpless, a different person from the one who calmly told her father: ‘There’s nothing more to discuss. I’m staying here and that’s that.’
62
While they were eating, Nadya said thoughtfully: ‘Tolya preferred boiled potatoes to fried.’
‘Tomorrow,’ said Lyudmila, ‘he’ll be nineteen years and seven months old.’
That evening she remarked: ‘How upset Marusya would have been, if she’d known about the Fascist atrocities at Yasnaya Polyana.’
Soon Alexandra Vladimirovna came in from a meeting at the factory.
‘What splendid weather, Vitya!’ she said to Viktor as he helped her off with her coat. ‘The air’s dry and frosty. “Like vodka”, as your mother used to say.’
‘And if she liked the sauerkraut,’ Viktor recalled, ‘she used to say, “It’s like grapes.”’
Life went on like an iceberg floating through the sea: the underwater part, gliding through the cold and the darkness, supported the upper part, which reflected the waves, breathed, listened to the water splashing . . .
Young people in families they knew were accepted as research students, completed their dissertations, fell in love, married, but there was always an undertone of sorrow beneath the lively talk and the celebrations.
When Viktor heard that someone he knew had been killed at the front, it was as though some particle of life inside him had died, as though some colour had faded. Amid the hubbub of life, the dead man’s voice still made itself heard.
The time Viktor was bound to, spiritually and intellectually, was a terrible one, one that spared neither women nor children. It had already killed two women in his own family – and one young man, a mere boy. Often Viktor thought of two lines of Mandelstam, which he had once heard from Madyarov, a historian who was a relative of Sokolov’s:
The wolfhound century leaps at my shoulders,
But I am no wolf by blood.
But this time was his own time: he lived in it and would be bound to it even after his death.
Viktor’s work was still going badly. His experiments, which he had begun long before the war, failed to yield the predicted results. There was something absurd and discouraging about the chaos of the data and the sheer obstinacy with which they contradicted the theory.
At first Viktor was convinced that the reason for these failures lay in his unsatisfactory working conditions and the lack of new apparatus. He was continually irritated with his laboratory assistants, thinking that they devoted too little energy to their work and were too easily distracted by trivia.
However, his troubles did not really stem from the fact that the bright, charming and talented Savostyanov was constantly scheming to obtain more ration-coupons for vodka; nor from the fact that the omniscient Markov gave lectures during working hours – or else spent his time explaining just what rations this or that Academician received and how this Academician’s rations were shared out between his two previous wives and his present wife; nor from Anna Naumovna’s habit of recounting all her dealings with her landlady in insufferable detail.
On the contrary – Savostyanov’s mind was still clear and lively; Markov still delighted Viktor with his calm logic, the breadth of his knowledge and the artistry with which he set up the most sophisticated experiments: Anna Naumovna lived in a cold, dilapidated, little cubby-hole, but worked with a superhuman conscientiousness and dedication. And of course Viktor was still proud to have Sokolov as a collaborator.
Greater rigour in the execution of the experiments, stricter controls, the recalibration of the instruments – all these failed to introduce any clarity. Chaos had erupted into the study of the organic salts of heavy metals when exposed to fierce radiation.
Sometimes this particle of salt appeared to Viktor in the guise of an obscene, crazy dwarf – a red-faced dwarf with a hat over one ear, twisting and writhing indecently as he made obscene gestures at the stern countenance of the theory. The theory had been elaborated by physicists of international fame, its mathematics were flawless, and decades of experimental data from the most renowned laboratories of England and Germany fitted comfortably into its framework. Shortly before the war, an experiment had been set up in Cambridge with the aim of confirming, in certain extreme conditions, the behaviour of particles predicted by the theory. The success of this experiment was the theory’s most brilliant triumph. To Viktor, it seemed as exalted and poetic as the experiment on relativity which confirmed the predicted deviation of a ray of light from a star passing through the sun’s gravitational field. Any attack on this theory was quite unthinkable – it would be like a soldier trying to rip the gold braid off a field-marshal’s shoulders.
Meanwhile, the dwarf carried on with his obscene foolery. Not long before Lyudmila had set off for Saratov, Viktor had thought that it might be possible to expand the framework of the theory – even though this necessitated two arbitrary hypotheses and considerable further complication of the mathematics.
The new equations related to the branch of mathematics which was Sokolov’s particular speciality. Viktor wasn’t sure of himself in this area and asked for Sokolov’s help. Sokolov managed fairly quickly to extrapolate new equations for the expanded theory.
The matter now seemed settled – the experimental data no longer contradicted the theory. Delighted with this success, Viktor congratulated Sokolov. Sokolov in turn congratulated Viktor – but the anxiety and dissatisfaction still remained.
Viktor’s depression soon returned. ‘I’ve noticed, Pyotr Lavrentyevich,’ he said to Sokolov, ‘that I get into a bad mood whenever I see Lyudmila darning stockings in the evening. It reminds me of the two of us. What we’ve done is patch up the theory, and very clumsily at that, using different-coloured wools.’
He worried away at his doubts like someone scratching a scab. Fortunately he was incapable of deceiving himself, knowing instinctively that self-consolation could lead only to defeat.
The expansion of the theory had been quite valueless. Now the theory had been patched up, it had lost its inner harmony; the arbitrary hypotheses deprived it of any independent strength and vitality and the equations had become almost too cumbersome to work with. It had somehow become rigid, anaemic, almost talmudic. It was as though it no longer had any live muscle.
A new series of experiments carried out by the brilliant Markov then contradicted the new equations. To explain this contradiction, he would have to resort to yet another arbitrary hypothesis. Once again he would have to shore up the theory with splinters of wood and old matchsticks.
‘It’s a botched job,’ he said to himself. Viktor knew all too well that he was following the wrong path.
A letter came from the Urals: the factory was busy with orders for military equipment and the work of casting and mach
ining the apparatus ordered by Shtrum would have to be postponed for six to eight weeks.
This letter didn’t upset Viktor. He no longer expected the arrival of the new apparatus to change anything. Now and again, however, he would be seized with a furious desire to get his hands on the apparatus as soon as possible – just to convince himself once and for all that the theory was hopelessly and irrevocably contradicted by the new data.
The failure of his work seemed to be linked with his personal sorrows. Everything had become grey and hopeless. For weeks on end he would feel depressed and irritable. At times like these he became uncharacteristically interested in the housekeeping, repeatedly interfering and expressing astonishment at how much Lyudmila spent.
He even took an interest in the quarrel between Lyudmila and their landlady. The landlady was demanding additional rent for the use of the woodshed.
‘Well,’ he would ask, ‘how are the negotiations with Nina Matveevna?’
After hearing Lyudmila through, he would say: ‘What a mean old bitch!’
Now he no longer thought about the link between science and people’s lives, about whether science was a joy or a sorrow. Only a master, a conqueror, can think about such questions – and he was just a bungling apprentice.
He felt as though he’d never again be able to work as he had before. His talent for research had been crushed by his sorrows. He went through the names of great physicists, mathematicians and writers whose most important work had been accomplished in their youth and who had failed to achieve anything of note after the age of thirty-five or forty. They at least had something to be proud of – whereas he would live out his life without having accomplished anything at all worthy of memory. Evariste Galois, who had laid down the lines along which mathematics would develop for a whole century, had been killed at the age of twenty-one; Einstein had published ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’ at the age of twenty-six; Hertz had died before he was forty. What an abyss lay between these men and Shtrum!
Viktor told Sokolov that he’d like to suspend their laboratory work for a while. Sokolov, however, had high expectations of the new apparatus and thought they should continue. Viktor didn’t even remember to tell him about the letter from the factory.
Lyudmila never once asked Viktor about his work, though he could see that she knew of his failure. She was indifferent to the most important thing in his life – but she had time for housework, for conversations with Marya Ivanovna, for her quarrels with the landlady, for sewing a dress for Nadya, for meetings with Postoev’s wife . . . Viktor felt bitter and angry with Lyudmila, quite failing to understand her true state of mind.
Viktor thought that his wife had returned to her habitual way of life; in fact, she was able to carry out these tasks precisely because they were habitual and so placed no demands on her. She was able to cook noodle soup and talk about Nadya’s boots simply because she had done this for years and years. Viktor failed to see that she was only going through the motions, not truly entering into her previous life. She was like someone deep in thought, who, quite without noticing them, skirts pot-holes and steps over puddles as he walks down a familiar road.
In order to talk to her husband about his work, she would have needed new strength, new spiritual resources. She didn’t have this strength. Viktor, however, thought that she remained interested in everything except his work.
He was also hurt by the way Lyudmila kept on bringing up occasions when he had been unkind to Tolya. It was as though she were drawing up the accounts between Tolya and his stepfather – and the balance was not in Viktor’s favour.
Once Lyudmila said to her mother:
‘Poor boy! What a torment it was to him when he had spots all over his face. He even asked me to get some kind of cream from the beauty parlour. And Viktor just teased him.’
This was true. Viktor had liked teasing Tolya; when Tolya came home and said hello to his stepfather, Viktor used to look him up and down, shake his head and say thoughtfully: ‘Well, brother, you have come out in stars!’
Recently Viktor had preferred not to stay at home in the evenings. Sometimes he went round to Postoev’s to play chess or listen to music – Postoev’s wife was quite a good pianist. Sometimes he called on Karimov, a new friend he had met here in Kazan. More often, though, he went to Sokolov’s.
He liked the Sokolovs’ little room; he liked the hospitable Marya Ivanovna and her welcoming smile; above all, he enjoyed the conversations they had at table.
But, late at night, as he approached his front door, he was gripped by anguish – an anguish that had been lulled only for a moment.
63
Instead of going home from the Institute, Viktor went straight to his new friend, Karimov; he was to pick him up and go on to the Sokolovs’.
Karimov was an ugly man with a pock-marked face. His swarthy skin made his hair look still greyer, while his grey hair made his skin look still swarthier. He spoke Russian very correctly, and only the most attentive listener could detect his slight oddities of pronunciation and syntax.
Viktor had never heard his name before, but it appeared to be well-known even outside Kazan. Karimov had translated The Divine Comedy and Gulliver’s Travels into Tartar; at present he was working on The Iliad.
At one time, before they had been introduced, they often used to run into one another at the University, in the small smoking-room on the way out of the reading-room. The librarian, a loquacious, slovenly old woman who used a lot of lipstick, had already told Viktor all about Karimov. He knew that Karimov had studied at the Sorbonne, that he had a dacha in the Crimea, and that he had formerly spent most of the year at the seaside. His wife and daughter had been caught in the Crimea by the war; Karimov had had no news of them since. The old woman had hinted that Karimov had been through eight years of great suffering, but Viktor had only looked at her blankly. It was clear that the old woman had also told Karimov all about Viktor. The two of them felt uneasy at knowing so much about each other without having been introduced; when they did meet, they tended to frown rather than smile. Finally, they bumped into each other one day in the library cloakroom, simultaneously burst out laughing and began to talk.
Viktor didn’t know whether Karimov enjoyed his conversation; he only knew that he himself enjoyed talking when Karimov was listening. He knew from experience that a man who seems intelligent and witty at first often proves terribly boring to talk to.
There were people in whose presence Viktor found it hard to say even one word; his voice would go wooden and the conversation would become grey and colourless – as though they were both deaf-mutes. There were people in whose presence even one sincere word sounded false. And there were old friends in whose presence he felt peculiarly alone.
What was the reason for all this? Why is it that you occasionally meet someone – a travelling companion, a man sleeping next to you in a camp, someone who joins in a chance argument – in whose presence your inner world suddenly ceases to be mute and isolated?
Viktor and Karimov were walking side by side, talking away; Viktor realized that there were times now when he didn’t think of his work for hours on end, especially during these evening talks at the Sokolovs’. He had never experienced this before; he normally thought about his work the whole time – in the tram, listening to music, eating, while he was drying his face after getting washed in the morning.
Yes, he must have got himself into a blind alley. Now he was unconsciously pushing away any thought of his work . . .
‘How’s your work gone today, Akhmet Usmanovich?’ he asked.
‘My mind’s gone quite blank. All I can think of is my wife and daughter. Sometimes I think that everything’s all right and that we will see each other again. And then I have a feeling that they’re already dead.’
‘I can understand,’ said Viktor.
‘I know,’ said Karimov.
How strange it all was: here was someone Viktor had known for only a few weeks – and he could talk
to him about what he couldn’t even talk about with his wife or his daughter.
Almost every evening, people who would never have met in Moscow gathered together in the Sokolovs’ small room.
Sokolov, though outstandingly talented, always spoke in a rather pedantic way. No one would have guessed from his smooth, polished speech that his father was a Volga fisherman. He was a kind, noble man, and yet there was something in his face that seemed sly and cruel.
There were other respects in which Sokolov differed from the Volga fishermen: he never drank, he hated draughts, and he was terrified of infection – he was constantly washing his hands and he would cut the crust off a loaf of bread where he had touched it with his fingers.
Viktor was always amazed when he read Sokolov’s work. How could a man think so boldly and elegantly, how could he elaborate and prove the most complex ideas with such concision – and then drone on so tediously over a cup of tea?
Viktor himself, like many people brought up in a cultured, bookish environment, enjoyed dropping phrases like ‘a load of crap’ or ‘bullshit’ into a conversation. In the presence of a venerable Academician, he would refer to a shrewish female lecturer as ‘an old cow’ or even ‘a bitch’.
Before the war Sokolov had always refused to allow any discussion of politics. As soon as Viktor even mentioned politics, Sokolov had either fallen into a reserved silence or else changed the subject with studied deliberateness.
There was a strange streak of submissiveness in him, a passive acceptance of the terrible cruelties of collectivization and the year 1937. He seemed to accept the anger of the State as other people accept the anger of Nature or the anger of God. Viktor sometimes thought that Sokolov did believe in God, and that this faith showed itself in his work, in his personal relationships, and in his humble obedience before the mighty of this world.