Everything Flows (5 page)

Thousands perished that day. The tragedy of
Khodynka
, on the day of the coronation of Nicholas II, paled into insignificance in comparison with the death day of the earthly Russian god, the pockmarked cobbler's son from the town of Gori.

People seemed to go to their death in a state of enchantment, in some kind of Christian, Buddhist, or mystical acceptance of doom. It was as if Stalin—the great shepherd—were gathering up the sheep that had not yet been gathered, posthumously excluding any element of chance from his terrible general plan.

Stalin's comrades-in-arms read the horrifying bulletins from the Moscow police stations and morgues and looked at one another. Their deep confusion was also linked to a feeling entirely new to them; they no longer feared the inescapable wrath of the great Stalin. The boss was dead.

A month later, on April 5, Nikolay Andreyevich woke his wife with a wild cry, “Masha! The doctors are innocent! Masha, they were tortured!”

The State had acknowledged its own terrible guilt. It had admitted that the imprisoned doctors had been subjected to “impermissible means of interrogation.”

After the first moments of clarity and happiness, Nikolay Andreyevich unexpectedly began to experience a turbid, aching feeling that he had never known before.

It was a new, strange, and very particular sense of guilt—guilt with regard to his own moral weakness, to his speech at the meeting, to his having signed the collective letter denouncing the monster doctors, and to his willingness to consent to an obvious lie. Guilt with regard to the genuineness and sincerity of his consent; it had come from the bottom of his heart.

Had he lived right? Was he really, as everyone around him seemed to think, an honest man?

This aching sense of repentance grew only stronger.

Now that the divinely impeccable State was repenting of its crimes, Nikolay Andreyevich began to sense that the State's body, the State's flesh, was in fact mortal and earthly. It too, like Stalin, suffered heart tremors; it too had albumen in its urine.

The divine impeccability of the immortal State turned out not only to have suppressed individual human beings but also to have defended them, to have comforted them in their weakness, to have justified their insignificance. The State had taken on its iron shoulders the entire weight of responsibility; it had liberated people from the chimera of conscience.

And Nikolay Andreyevich felt as if he had been undressed, as if thousands of strange eyes were looking at his naked body.

The worst thing was that he too was there in the crowd, looking at his own naked body. Along with everyone else, he was studying his breasts, which hung down like an old woman's, his wrinkled stomach, which had been stretched by overeating, and the folds of fat on his flanks.

Yes, Stalin had had an irregular, filiform pulse; the State had excreted urine; and beneath his expensive suit Nikolay Andreyevich turned out to have been naked.

Examination of one's own self—how very unpleasant it was. The list of despicable acts was unbelievably vile.

It included general meetings of the Institute; sessions of the scientific council; solemn meetings on important anniversaries; routine briefings in the laboratory; little articles; two books; banquets; celebrations in the homes of the important and evil; voting in elections; jokes told during dinners; conversations with the directors of personnel departments; letters he had signed; an audience with the minister.

But
the scroll of his life
contained all too many letters of another kind: letters unwritten, although God commanded that they should have been written. Silence when God commanded that a word be said; a telephone number it was imperative to ring, and that he had not rung; visits it was sinful not to pay, and that he had not paid; telegrams never sent; money never sent. Many, many things were missing from the scroll of his life.

And now that he was naked, it was absurd to take pride in what he had always prided himself on: that he had never denounced anyone; that he had refused, when summoned to the
Lubyanka
, to provide compromising information about an arrested colleague; that instead of turning away when he happened to meet the wife of an exiled colleague, he had shaken her hand and asked after the health of their children.

No, he did not have so very much to feel proud about...

His entire life had been a single act of obedience, with not one moment of refusing to obey.

And as for Ivan—Ivan had spent three decades in prisons and camps, and Nikolay Andreyevich, who had always felt proud about not having officially disowned Ivan, had not written him even a single letter. And when Nikolay Andreyevich had once received a letter from Ivan, he had asked his elderly aunt to reply.

What had once seemed entirely natural had now begun to trouble him, to gnaw at him.

He remembered how in 1937, at a meeting called in connection with the
Moscow Trials
, he had voted in favor of the death penalty for Rykov and Bukharin.

He had not thought about those meetings for seventeen years.

At the time he had found it strange, even crazy, that the poet Boris Pasternak, and a Mining Institute professor whose name he had forgotten, had refused to vote for the death penalty. The criminals had, after all, confessed during the trials. They had been questioned in public by a man with a university degree, Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky. There had been no doubt about their guilt, not a shadow of a doubt.

But now—now Nikolay Andreyevich remembered that there had been doubt; his certainty of Bukharin's guilt had been a pretense. Even if he had been certain, in his heart and soul, of Bukharin's complete innocence, he would still have voted for the death penalty—and so it had been easier for him not to doubt, to pretend to himself that he had no doubts. It was impossible for him not to vote for the death penalty; he believed, after all, in the ideals of the Party of Lenin and Stalin.

He believed, after all, that a socialist society, a society without private property, had been constructed for the first time in history, and that socialism required the dictatorship of the State. To have the least doubt about Bukharin's guilt, to have refused to vote, would have meant that he had doubts about this mighty State and its great ideals.

But still, somewhere in the depth of his soul, there was doubt—even with regard to this sacred faith.

Could this really be socialism—with the labor camps of Kolyma, with the horrors of collectivization, with the cannibalism and the millions of deaths during the famine? Yes, there were times when a very different understanding had found its way into the borderlands of his consciousness: that the Terror really had been very inhuman, that the sufferings of the workers and peasants had been very great indeed.

Yes, his whole life had passed by in obeisance, in a great act of submission, in fear of hunger, torture, and forced labor in Siberia. But there had also been a particularly vile fear—the fear of receiving not black caviar but red caviar, mere salmon caviar, in his
weekly parcel of food
from the Institute
. And this vile, “caviar” fear had co-opted his adolescent dreams from the time of
War Communism
; it had made use of them for its own shameful ends. What mattered was to have no doubts or hesitations; what mattered was to give his vote, to sign his name, without a second thought. Yes, yes, what had nourished his unshakable ideals was two very different fears: fear for his own skin—of being skinned alive—and fear of losing his entitlement to a bit of black caviar.

And suddenly the State had trembled. Under its breath it had muttered the truth—that the doctors had been tortured. And tomorrow the State would admit that Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, and Pyatakov had been tortured, and that Maksim Gorky had not been killed by enemies of the people. And the day after tomorrow it would admit that the lives of millions of peasants had been destroyed for no reason.

And it would turn out that it was not, after all, the omnipotent and impeccable State that would be taking responsibility for the crimes that had been committed. It was Nikolay Andreyevich who would have to answer for them—and
he
had had no doubts,
he
had voted for everything,
he
had signed everything. He had learned to pretend to himself so well, so skillfully that nobody, not even he himself, had noticed that he was pretending. He had, in all sincerity, prided himself on his faith and purity.

There were moments when his self-contempt became so overwhelming that he began to feel bitterly, piercingly resentful toward the State itself: Why, why had it confessed? It should have kept its mouth shut. It had no right to confess; everything should have been left as it was.

What must it be like now for Professor Margolin, who had said that he would be prepared, for the sake of the great internationalist cause, to put to death not only the Killer Doctors but even his own little Yid children.

Those many years of base submissiveness were too great a burden for his conscience to bear.

Gradually, however, this weight of depression began to lighten. Everything seemed to have changed and, at the same time, not to have changed at all.

The atmosphere of the Institute grew incomparably calmer and easier. This change became all the more tangible when Ryskov was dismissed from his post as director after irritating his superiors with his general rudeness.

And Nikolay Andreyevich finally achieved the success of which he had always dreamed; it was a true, important success—not just a matter of being recognized by officials and bureaucrats. It made itself felt in all kinds of ways: in journal articles; in remarks made by speakers at conferences; in the admiring looks of female colleagues and laboratory assistants; in the letters he now began to receive.

Nikolay Andreyevich was appointed to the Institute's
Higher Academic Council
. Soon afterward, the presidium of the Academy of Sciences confirmed his appointment as the Institute's scientific director.

Nikolay Andreyevich wanted to bring back the “idealists” and “cosmopolitans” who had been expelled, but he found himself unable to get the better of the head of the personnel department—a woman who was charming and pretty, but terribly obstinate. All he could do was to provide them with piecework.

Looking at Mandelstam now, Nikolay Andreyevich wondered how this pitiful, helpless figure, coming in to deliver a package of abstracts and translations, could have been described only a few years ago, in the foreign press, as a very important—perhaps even great—scientist. Had he himself really longed so desperately for this man's approval?

In the past Mandelstam had dressed carelessly, but now he came to the Institute in his best suit.

Once Nikolay Andreyevich made a joke about this, and Mandelstam answered, “An unemployed actor must always be well dressed.”

And now, as he recollected his past life, the thought of the coming meeting with Ivan filled him with a strange feeling, with a mixture of joy and bitterness.

The general view in his family had been that Vany
a was the most talented and intelligent of his generation, and Nikolay Andreyevich had accepted this. Or rather, deep in his heart, he had not accepted this view at all; he had merely submitted to it.

Vanya had used to read through great volumes of math and physics quickly and easily, not just absorbing what was written like an obedient schoolboy but understanding them in his own particular way. He had shown a talent for sculpture even as a child; he had the ability to notice a facial expression, an unusual gesture, the essence of a particular movement—and to reproduce them in clay in a really quite lifelike manner. Most unusually of all, his interest in mathematics coexisted with a fascination for the ancient Near East. He had a good knowledge of what had been written about Parthian manuscripts and monuments.

His character, ever since childhood, had been made up of traits that could never, it seemed, have been found in one and the same person.

During a fight at secondary school he—small as he was—had bloodied his opponent's head so badly that he had been held at the police station for two days. And at the same time he was timid, shy, and sensitive. In a cellar he had set up a hospital for unfortunate animals—a dog that had lost one paw, a blind tomcat, a sad jackdaw with a torn-off wing.

As a student, Ivan had been an equally strange compound of, on the one hand, refined sensitivity, kindness, and shyness and, on the other hand, a merciless sharpness that evoked resentment even in those who were closest to him.

It may have been because of these very traits that Ivan failed to justify people's hopes. His life had been broken, and it was he himself who had done the most to break it.

During the 1920s many talented young people were denied higher education because of their social origin. The children of the nobility, of priests, of factory owners, and of merchants were all unable to study.

But Ivan's parents were educated working class, and he was able to go to a university. And he was not affected by the harsh purge of the socially alien.

And had he been beginning his life now, he would not have had any problems when he came to point five (nationality) of the countless questionnaires one had to fill in.

But had Ivan been beginning his life now, he would, probably, once again have chosen the path of failure.