She felt more and more angry with Krymov. No, no! She wasn’t going to sacrifice her own happiness for him . . . He was cruel and narrow-minded. He was a fanatic. She never had been able to accept his indifference to human suffering. How alien it was – to her and to her mother and father. ‘There can be no pity for kulaks,’ he had said when tens of thousands of women and children were dying of starvation in villages all over Russia and the Ukraine. ‘Innocent people don’t get arrested,’ he had said in the days of Yagoda and Yezhov. Alexandra Vladimirovna had once recounted an incident that had taken place in Kamyshin in 1918. Some property-owners and merchants had been put on a barge and drowned, with all their children. Some of these children had been school-friends of Marusya. Nikolay Grigorevich had just said angrily: ‘Well, what would you do with people who hate the Revolution – feed them on pastries?’ Why shouldn’t she have the right to be happy? Why should she pity someone who had always been so pitiless himself?
For all this, she knew deep down that Nikolay Grigorevich was by no means as cruel as she was making out.
She took off her thick skirt, one she had bought by barter at the market in Kuibyshev, and put on her summer dress. It was the only dress she had left after the fire in Stalingrad. It was the dress she had worn that evening in Stalingrad when she and Novikov had gone for a walk along the banks of the Volga.
Not long before she was deported, she had asked Jenny Genrikhovna if she had ever been in love. Clearly embarrassed, she had replied: ‘Yes, I was in love with a boy with golden curls and light blue eyes. He had a white collar and a velvet jacket. I was eleven years old and I knew him only by sight.’
What had happened to the boy with the curls and the velvet jacket? What had happened to Jenny Genrikhovna?
Yevgenia sat down on the bed and looked at the clock. Shargorodsky usually came to see her around this time. No, she wasn’t in the mood for intellectual conversation.
She quickly put on her coat and scarf. This was senseless – the train must have left long ago.
There was a huge crowd of people around the station, all sitting on parcels and sacks. Yevgenia walked up and down the little backstreets. One woman asked her if she had any ration coupons, another if she had any coupons for railway tickets. A few people glanced at her sleepily and suspiciously. A goods train thundered past platform number one. The station walls trembled and the glass in the windows rang. She felt as though her heart were trembling too. Then some open wagons went past; they were carrying tanks.
Yevgenia felt suddenly happy. More and more tanks came by. The soldiers sitting on them with their helmets and machine-guns looked as though they had been cast from bronze.
She walked home, swinging her arms like a little boy. She had unbuttoned her coat and she kept glancing at her summer dress. Suddenly the streets were lit up by the evening sun. This harsh, dusty city, this cold city that was now preparing for another winter, seemed suddenly bright, rosy and triumphant. She went into the house. Glafira Dmitrievna, the senior tenant, who had seen the colonel coming to visit Yevgenia, smiled ingratiatingly and said: ‘There’s a letter for you.’
‘This is my lucky day,’ thought Yevgenia as she opened the envelope. It was from her mother in Kazan.
She read the first few lines and gave a plaintive cry: ‘Tolya! Tolya!’
6
Viktor’s sudden inspiration, the idea that had come to him on the street that night, formed the basis of an entirely new theory. The equations he worked out over the following weeks were not an appendix to the classical, generally accepted theory; nor were they even an enlargement of it. Instead, the classical, supposedly all-embracing theory had become a particular instance included in the framework of a wider theory elaborated by Viktor.
He stopped going to the Institute for a while; Sokolov took over the supervision of the laboratory work. Viktor hardly even left the house now; he sat at his desk for hours on end or strode up and down the room. Only in the evening did he sometimes go out for a walk, choosing the deserted streets near the station so as not to meet anyone he knew. At home he behaved the same as ever – making jokes at meals, reading newspapers, listening to Soviet Information Bureau bulletins, teasing Nadya, talking to his wife, asking Alexandra Vladimirovna about her work at the factory.
Lyudmila had the feeling that Viktor was now behaving in the same way as herself: he too did everything he was supposed to, while inwardly not participating in the life of the family at all. What he did came easily to him simply because it was habitual. This similarity, however, was merely superficial and did nothing to bring Lyudmila closer to Viktor. The husband and wife had quite opposite reasons for their alienation from the life of the family – as opposite as life and death.
Uncharacteristically, Viktor had no doubts about his results. As he formulated the most important scientific discovery of his life, he felt absolute certainty as to its truth. When this idea of a system of equations that would allow a new interpretation of a wide group of physical phenomena – when this idea had first come to him, he had sensed its truth immediately, without any of his usual doubts and hesitations. Even now, as he came to the end of the complicated mathematical demonstration, checking and double-checking each step he had taken, his certainty was no greater than at that first moment of inspiration on the empty street.
Sometimes he tried to understand the path he had followed. From the outside it all seemed quite simple.
The laboratory experiments had been intended to confirm the predictions of the theory. They had failed to do this. The contradiction between the experimental results and the theory naturally led him to doubt the accuracy of the experiments. A theory that had been elaborated on the basis of decades of work by many researchers, a theory that had then explained many things in subsequent experimental results, seemed quite unshakeable. Repetition of the experiments had shown again and again that the deflections of charged particles in interaction with the nucleus still failed to correspond with what the theory predicted. Even the most generous allowance for the inaccuracy of the experiments, for the imperfection of the measuring apparatus and the emulsions used to photograph the fission of the nuclei, could in no way account for such large discrepancies.
Realizing that there could be no doubt as to the accuracy of the results, Viktor had then attempted to patch up the theory. He had postulated various arbitrary hypotheses that would reconcile the new experimental data with the theory. Everything he had done had been based on one fundamental belief: that, since the theory was itself deduced from experimental data, it was impossible for an experiment to contradict it.
An enormous amount of labour was expended in an attempt to reconcile the new data with the theory. Nevertheless, the patched-up theory still failed to account for new contradictions in the results from the laboratory. The theory remained as powerless as ever, though it still seemed unthinkable to reject it.
It was at this moment that something had shifted.
The old theory had ceased to be something fundamental and all-embracing. It didn’t turn out to be a mistake or an absurd blunder, but simply a particular instance accounted for by the new theory . . . The purple-clad dowager had bowed her head before the new empress . . . All this had taken only a moment.
When Viktor thought about just how the new theory had come to him, he was struck by something quite unexpected. There appeared to be absolutely no logical connection between the theory and the experiments. The tracks he was following suddenly broke off. He couldn’t understand what path he had taken.
Previously he had always thought that theories arose from experience and were engendered by it. Contradictions between an existing theory and new experimental results naturally led to a new, broader theory.
But it had all happened quite differently. Viktor was sure of this. He had succeeded at a time when he was in no way attempting to connect theory with experimental data, or vice versa.
The new theory was not derived from experience. Viktor could see this quite
clearly. It had arisen in absolute freedom; it had sprung from his own head. The logic of this theory, its chain of reasoning, was quite unconnected to the experiments conducted by Markov in the laboratory. The theory had sprung from the free play of thought. It was this free play of thought – which seemed quite detached from the world of experience – that had made it possible to explain the wealth of experimental data, both old and new.
The experiments had been merely a jolt that had forced him to start thinking. They had not determined the content of his thoughts.
All this was quite extraordinary . . .
His head had been full of mathematical relationships, differential equations, the laws of higher algebra, number and probability theory. These mathematical relationships had an existence of their own in some void quite outside the world of atomic nuclei, stars, and electromagnetic or gravitational fields, outside space and time, outside the history of man and the geological history of the earth. And yet these relationships existed inside his own head.
And at the same time his head had been full of other laws and relationships: quantum interactions, fields of force, the constants that determined the processes undergone by nuclei, the movement of light, and the expansion and contraction of space and time. To a theoretical physicist the processes of the real world were only a reflection of laws that had been born in the desert of mathematics. It was not mathematics that reflected the world; the world itself was a projection of differential equations, a reflection of mathematics.
And his head had also been full of readings from different instruments, of dotted lines on photographic paper that showed the trajectories of particles and the fission of nuclei.
And there had even been room in his head for the rustling of leaves, the light of the moon, millet porridge with milk, the sound of flames in the stove, snatches of tunes, the barking of dogs, the Roman Senate, Soviet Information Bureau bulletins, a hatred of slavery, and a love of melon seeds.
All this was what had given birth to his theory; it had arisen from the depths where there are no mathematics, no physics, no laboratory data, no experience of life, no consciousness, only the inflammable peat of the subconscious . . .
And the logic of mathematics, itself quite unconnected with the world, had become reflected and embodied in a theory of physics; and this theory had fitted with divine accuracy over a complex pattern of dotted lines on photographic paper.
And Viktor, inside whose head all this had taken place, now sobbed and wiped tears of happiness from his eyes as he looked at the differential equations and photographic paper that confirmed the truth he had given birth to.
And yet, if it hadn’t been for those unsuccessful experiments, if it hadn’t been for the resulting chaos, he and Sokolov would have gone on trying to patch up the old theory. What a joy that that chaos had refused to yield to their demands!
This new explanation had been born from his own head, but it was indeed linked to Markov’s experiments. Yes, if there were no atoms and atomic nuclei in the world, there would be none inside a man’s brain. If it weren’t for those famous glass-blowers the Petushkovs, if there were no power stations, no furnaces and no production of pure reactors, then there would be no mathematics inside the head of a theoretical physicist, no mathematics that could predict reality.
What Viktor found most astonishing was that he had achieved his greatest success at a time of unremitting depression and grief. How was it possible?
And why had it happened after those bold, dangerous conversations that had revived his spirits but which bore no relation to his work – why was it then that everything insoluble had so suddenly been resolved? But that was coincidence . . .
How could he ever make sense of all this . . . ?
Now that it was completed, Viktor wanted to talk about his work. Previously, it hadn’t even occurred to him to share his thoughts with anyone else. He wanted to see Sokolov and write to Chepyzhin; he wondered what Mandelstam, Joffe, Landau, Tamm, and Kurchatov would think of his new equations; he tried to guess what response they would evoke in his colleagues both here in the laboratory and in Leningrad. He tried to think of a title for his work. He wondered what Bohr and Fermi would think of it. Maybe Einstein himself would read it and write him a brief note. He also wondered who would oppose it and what problems it would help to resolve.
He didn’t, however, feel like talking to Lyudmila. In the past he had read even the most ordinary business letter out loud to her before sending it off. If he had unexpectedly bumped into someone he knew on the street, his first thought had always been, ‘Well, Lyudmila will be surprised!’ If he had come out with some fine sarcasm in an argument with the director, he had thought, ‘Yes, I’ll tell Lyudmila how I settled him!’ And he could never have imagined watching a film or sitting in a theatre without knowing that Lyudmila was there, that he could whisper in her ear, ‘God, what rubbish!’ He had shared his most secret anxieties with her. As a student, he had sometimes said to her, ‘You know, sometimes I think I’m an idiot.’
So why didn’t he say anything now? Was it that his compulsion to share his life with her had been founded on a belief that his life mattered more to her than her own, that his life was her life? And that now he was no longer sure of this? Did she no longer love him? Or did he no longer love her?
In the end, without really wanting to, he did tell his wife.
‘It’s a strange feeling, you know. Whatever may happen to me now, I know deep down in my heart that I haven’t lived in vain. Now, for the first time, I’m not afraid of dying. Now! Now that this exists!’
He showed her a page covered in scrawls that was lying on his table.
‘I’m not exaggerating. It’s a new vision of the nature of the forces within the atom. A new principle. It will be the key to many doors that until now have been locked . . . And do you know, when I was little . . . No, it’s as though a lily had suddenly blossomed out of still, dark waters . . . Oh, my God . . .’
‘I’m very glad, Viktor. I’m very glad,’ said Lyudmila with a smile.
Viktor could see that she was still wrapped up in her own thoughts, that she didn’t share his joy and excitement.
Indeed, Lyudmila didn’t mention any of this to Nadya or her mother. She evidently just forgot about it.
That evening, Viktor set out for the Sokolovs’. It wasn’t only about his work that he wanted to talk to Sokolov. He wanted to share his feelings with him. Pyotr Lavrentyevich would understand; he was more than merely intelligent; he had a pure, kind soul.
At the same time, Viktor was afraid that Sokolov would reproach him, that he would remind him of his earlier lack of faith. Sokolov loved explaining other people’s behaviour and subjecting them to long lectures.
It was a long time since he had been to the Sokolovs’. His friends had probably been there another three times since his last visit. Suddenly he glimpsed Madyarov’s bulging eyes. ‘Yes, he’s a bold devil,’ Viktor said to himself. How peculiar that, during all this time, he’d hardly given a thought to those gatherings. Now he didn’t want to. There was some fear, some anxiety, some expectation of imminent doom connected with those late-night discussions. They really had let themselves go. They had croaked away like birds of ill omen – but Stalingrad still stood, the Germans had been halted, evacuees were returning to Moscow.
Last night he had told Lyudmila that he wasn’t afraid of dying, not even at that very moment. And yet he was afraid of remembering the criticisms he had voiced. And as for Madyarov . . . That didn’t bear thinking about. Karimov’s suspicions were quite terrifying. What if Madyarov really were a provocateur?
‘No, I’m not afraid of dying,’ thought Viktor, ‘but now I’m a proletarian who has more to lose than his chains.’
Sokolov, in his indoor jacket, was sitting reading a book.
‘Where’s Marya Ivanovna?’ asked Viktor, surprised at his own surprise. He was quite taken aback not to find her at home – as though it was her he had come to talk to about t
heoretical physics.
Sokolov put his glasses back in their case and smiled. ‘Who says Marya Ivanovna has to hang around at home all day long?’
Coughing and stammering with excitement, Viktor began expounding his ideas and showing Sokolov his equations. Sokolov was the first person he had confided in; as he spoke, he relived everything again – though with very different feelings.
‘Well,’ said Viktor finally, ‘that’s it.’ His voice was shaking. He could feel Sokolov’s excitement.
They sat for a while in a silence that to Viktor seemed quite wonderful. He frowned and shook his bowed head from side to side. Finally he stole a timid look at Sokolov. He thought he could see tears in his eyes.
There was a miraculous link that joined these two men – sitting in a miserable little room during a terrible war that enveloped the whole world – to everyone, however distant in space and time, whose pure mind had aspired to these exalted realms.
Viktor hoped that Sokolov would remain silent a while longer. There was something divine in this silence.
They did remain silent for a long time. Then Sokolov went up to Viktor and put his hand on his shoulder. Viktor felt his eyes fill with tears.
‘It’s wonderful,’ said Sokolov, ‘quite unbelievable. What elegance! I congratulate you with all my heart. What extraordinary power! What logic, what elegance! Even from an aesthetic point of view your reasoning is perfect.’
Still trembling with excitement, Viktor thought: ‘For God’s sake! This isn’t a matter of elegance. This is bread for the soul.’
‘Do you see now, Viktor Pavlovich,’ Sokolov continued, ‘how wrong you were to lose heart and try to put everything off till our return to Moscow?’ Then, just like someone giving a sermon: ‘You lack faith, you lack patience. This often hinders you.’