Everything Flows (3 page)

As he waited
for his cousin to arrive, Nikolay Andreyevich thought about his own life. He got ready to tell his story, to make a confession to Ivan. He imagined showing Ivan his apartment. In the dining room they had a fine Turkmen rug. “Look!” he would say to Ivan. “Damned fine rug, isn’t it?” Masha had good taste, and Ivan knew very well who her father had been. And in Petersburg in the old days people had understood how to live well.

How would he find a way to talk to Ivan? Whole decades had gone by. Life had gone by. No, life had not gone by—and that was what they must talk about...Life was only just beginning!

What a meeting it would be! Ivan was arriving in Moscow at an astonishing time. There had been so many changes since the death of Stalin. And they affected everyone. Both workers and peasants. There was bread in the shops now. And Ivan was back from the camp now. As were many others. And Nikolay Andreyevich had also reached an important turning point in his life.

Ever since his student years Nikolay Andreyevich had felt dogged by bad luck. This was all the harder to bear because he was certain he deserved better. He was well educated; he worked hard; he was considered a witty raconteur; women were always falling in love with him.

He was proud to be seen as someone honorable, as a man of principle. At the same time, he was entirely free of pious hypocrisy. He enjoyed listening to a good story over a meal, and he had an excellent understanding of all the complexities of dry wines—even though he often preferred to get straight down to the vodka.

When people praised Nikolay Andreyevich, Maria Pavlovna looked at her husband with gay, angry eyes and said, “Try living under one roof with him! Then you’d get to know the real Kolya: Kolya the despot, Kolya the psychopath, Kolya the greatest egotist the world has ever seen!”

Each knew every one of the other’s failings and weaknesses, and sometimes this knowledge was more than they could bear. Sometimes it seemed it would be easier to live apart. But they were quite unable to live apart; if they had, they would have suffered terribly.

Maria Pavlovna had fallen in love with Nikolay Andreyevich when she was still a schoolgirl. And everything that thirty years ago had seemed astonishing and splendid—his voice, his big forehead, his big teeth, his smile—all of these things, with the passing of time, had become still dearer to her.

And he loved her too, but his love had changed. What had once been central in their relationship had faded into the background, and what had once seemed of lesser importance had become central.

Tall and dark-eyed, Maria Pavlovna had been a beauty. Her gestures and movements were still remarkably graceful, and her eyes had not lost their youthful charm. But what had been a flaw in her looks when she was young—the way her large lower teeth stuck out when she smiled—had become more noticeable with the years.

His continued bad luck remained a source of deep pain to Nikolay Andreyevich. At student seminars it had been the talks hastily flung together by that drunkard Pyzhov or by the red-haired Radionov that had generated excitement—not his own meticulously prepared papers.

Nikolay Andreyevich had become a senior researcher at a famous scientific institute; he had published dozens of works; he had successfully completed his doctorate. But his wife—and his wife alone—knew what torments and humiliations he continued to experience.

At the cutting edge of his area of biology there was only a small number of researchers. One was an academician, two were Nikolay Andreyevich’s juniors, and one had not even completed his
candidate’s dissertation
. All four respected Nikolay Andreyevich’s decency and valued him as someone to discuss their ideas with. They were friendly and well disposed toward him—but they simply, and quite sincerely, did not think of him as a scientist.

Nikolay Andreyevich was constantly aware of the aura of tension and excited admiration around these men—especially around the lame Mandelstam.

A London scientific journal had once described Mandelstam as “a scientist who is brilliantly continuing the work of the founders of contemporary biology.” Nikolay Andreyevich had felt that, had this been written about himself, he could have died of joy.

Mandelstam often behaved badly. Sometimes he was sullen and depressed; sometimes he spoke in a haughty and patronizing tone. When he got drunk at a party, he would mimic other scientists, referring to them as mediocrities and sometimes even as frauds and rogues. Nikolay Andreyevich found this extremely irritating. Mandelstam, after all, was criticizing personal friends, people whose hospitality he enjoyed: when Mandelstam was eating and drinking in someone else’s home, he probably called Nikolay Andreyevich a mediocrity and a rogue.

Nikolay Andreyevich was equally irritated by Mandelstam’s wife—a stout woman who had once been beautiful and who now, it seemed, loved only two things: card games played for money, and the scientific glory of her lame husband.

And at the same time he felt drawn toward Mandelstam. “Life is never easy,” he would say, “for people so very special.”

But when Mandelstam gave him a condescending lecture, he used to feel very upset indeed. He would come back home cursing and swearing, raging at that upstart Mandelstam.

Maria Pavlovna saw her husband as someone quite brilliant. The more Nikolay Andreyevich told her about the indifference and condescension shown by various luminaries toward him and his work, the more fervent grew her faith in him. Her admiration and faith were as necessary to him as vodka to an alcoholic. They both believed that some people are lucky, and some are unlucky, but that in other respects everyone is much the same. Mandelstam, for example, was blessed by special luck—he was a kind of Benjamin the Fortunate of the biological sciences. As for Radionov, he had as many adoring fans as if he were some famous operatic tenor—not that he looked much like one, with his snub nose and his prominent high cheekbones. Even Isaac Khavkin seemed to be blessed with good fortune—in spite of the fact that he had never completed his candidate’s degree and that, being suspected of the heresy of
vitalism
, he had never, even at the most relaxed of times, been offered work at any research institute. Instead, although he was already gray-haired, he worked at a local bacteriological laboratory and went about in torn trousers. But there was no getting away from it—academicians used to go to him to discuss their work, and the research he conducted in his pitiful little laboratory generated considerable interest and controversy.

When the campaign against the followers of Weissman, Virchow, and Mendel began, Nikolay Andreyevich was troubled by the harshness of the punishments meted out to many of his colleagues. Both he and his wife were upset when Radionov refused to confess his errors. He was, of course, dismissed; Nikolay Andreyevich cursed his quixotic obstinacy and at the same time arranged for him to earn some money by translating English scientific texts in his own home.

Pyzhov was accused of “servility toward the West” and sent off to work in an experimental laboratory near Orenburg. Nikolay Andreyevich wrote to him and sent him books; Maria Pavlovna organized a New Year parcel for his family.

Newspapers began printing articles consisting largely of denunciations: of careerists and petty crooks who had obtained degrees, and even higher degrees, through fraud; of doctors guilty of criminal cruelty toward sick children and women in childbirth; of engineers who had built dachas for themselves and their relatives when they were supposed to be building schools and hospitals. Nearly everyone denounced in these articles was a Jew, and their names and patronymics were cited with unusual punctiliousness: Srul Nakhmanovich...Khaim Abramovich...Israel Mendelevich...A hostile review of a book by a Jewish writer with a Russian pseudonym would include, between brackets, the writer’s original Jewish surname. Throughout the whole of the USSR it seemed that only Jews thieved and took bribes, only Jews were criminally indifferent toward the sufferings of the sick, and only Jews published vicious or badly written books.

Nikolay Andreyevich was aware that it was not only street sweepers and drunks on suburban trains who enjoyed these articles. He himself was appalled by them—and yet he felt annoyed with his Jewish friends who seemed to look on these scribblings as portents of the end of the world and who were always lamenting that talented young Jews were not being accepted as graduate students, that they were being barred from university physics departments, that they no longer seemed eligible for jobs in ministries or in heavy—or even light—industry, and that Jews graduating from institutes of higher education were all being sent to work in the most far-flung parts of the Soviet Union. And whenever staff reductions were being made anywhere, it was always the Jews who had to go.

All this, of course, was quite true, but the Jews all seemed to believe in the existence of some grand State plan that doomed them to hunger, impoverishment of every kind, and death. Nikolay Andreyevich, on the other hand, thought it was all just a matter of a hostile attitude toward Jews on the part of a certain proportion of Party and Soviet officials. He did not believe that any special instructions with regard to Jews had been issued to personnel departments or admissions committees of institutes of higher education. Stalin was not himself anti-Semitic and, in all probability, knew nothing about any of this.

And in any case it was not only Jews who were having a hard time. Old Churkovsky, and Pyzhov, and Radionov had suffered too.

Mandelstam, who had been the head of the research division, was demoted to a post in the same department as Nikolay Andreyevich. Nevertheless, he was able to continue his work, and the fact that he had a doctorate entitled him to a good salary.

But then came an unsigned editorial in
Pravda
about the contempt for Russian theater exhibited by Gurvich, Yuzovsky, and other “cosmopolitan” theater critics. This marked the beginning of a vast campaign to unmask “cosmopolitans” in all areas of art and science, and Mandelstam was declared an “anti-patriot.” In an article for the Institute’s “wall newspaper,” Bratova, a scientist then working on her doctorate, wrote an article with the title “Ivan, Who Has Forgotten His Relatives.” It began with the words, “On returning from his travels to distant parts, Mark Samuilovich Mandelstam has thrown to the winds the principles of Russian Soviet Science...”

Nikolay Andreyevich went to visit Mandelstam at his home. Mandelstam was upset. He was moved, though, that Nikolay Andreyevich had come to see him, and his haughty wife no longer seemed so very haughty. The two men drank vodka together. Mandelstam roundly cursed Bratova, who was his own student. His head in his hands, he lamented about how his students, his talented Jewish students, were all being driven out of science. “What are they supposed to do now?” he asked. “Sell haberdashery from stalls in bazaars?”

“Come on now, it’s not as bad as all that,” said Nikolay Andreyevich. “There’ll be work enough for everyone,” he went on jokingly. “For you, and for Khavkin, and even for Anechka Silberman the lab technician. There’ll be bread for all of you—and with a bit of caviar too!”

“Heavens!” said Mandelstam. “What’s caviar got to do with it? We’re talking about human dignity.”

As regards Khavkin, Nikolay Andreyevich had soon been proved wrong. Things had taken a bad turn for him. Not long after the publication of the article about the
Killer Doctors
Khavkin had been arrested.

That article—about the monstrous crimes committed by Jewish doctors, and by Solomon Mikhoels, the Jewish actor—had shocked everyone. It was as if there were a dark cloud over Moscow, creeping into homes and schools, creeping into human hearts.

On page four, under the heading “Chronicle,” there had been a statement to the effect that all the accused had confessed during the investigation. There could be no doubt; the doctors were criminals.

Nevertheless, it had seemed unthinkable. It was hard to breathe; it was hard to go about one’s work in the knowledge that professors and academicians had become poisoners, that they had murdered Zhdanov and Shcherbakov.

When Nikolay Andreyevich thought about dear Doctor Vovsi, and about the brilliant Solomon Mikhoels, the crime they were accused of seemed unimaginable.

But these people had confessed! And if they were innocent but had confessed anyway, that implied another crime. It implied that they were the victims of a crime still more terrible than the crime of which they were accused.

Even to think about this was frightening. It took courage to doubt their guilt. If they were not guilty, it was the leaders of the socialist State who were the criminals. If the doctors were not guilty, then Stalin himself was a criminal.

Meanwhile, doctors he knew were now saying that it had become painfully difficult for them to carry on with their work in hospitals and polyclinics. The terrifying official announcements had made patients suspicious, and many people were refusing to be treated by Jewish doctors. The authorities were receiving countless complaints and denunciations with regard to intentional malpractice on the part of Jewish doctors. Jewish pharmacists were being suspected of trying to pass off poisons as medicines. Stories were being told in trams, in bazaars, in public institutions of all kinds, about how a number of Moscow pharmacies had been closed down because the pharmacists—Jews working as undercover American agents—were selling pills made of dried lice. There were stories about maternity hospitals where women in childbirth and newborn babies were being infected with syphilis, about dental surgeries where patients were injected with cancer of the tongue and of the jaw. There was talk of boxes of matches imbued with deadly poison. Some people began recalling suspicious circumstances around the deaths of long-dead relatives and writing to the security organs, demanding the investigation and arrest of the Jewish doctors responsible. It was especially sad that these rumors were believed not only by street sweepers, not only by semiliterate and semi-alcoholic porters and drivers but also by writers, engineers, and university students, even by certain scholars and scientists with doctorates.