This was our second time on the errand, as the men, preferring money to shoes, had sold the first pairs given to them. An assistant to the emperor had advised us to leave the men barefoot, shackled at the ankles so they would not abandon us in trouble, but the great director refused this course. I assured him that I understood his desire to give our men sandals instead of chains, but I urged him to consider local custom.
Always obstinate, always right, still malarial from recent travels in Syria and Palestine, he said he most certainly would not.
The air was still faintly cool, and few people were walking in the rows of the market when we first arrived. But more gathered with the growing heat, and it was difficult to push through with fourteen pairs of sandals, shoes for which I was sure we had parted with too much money. But we still had carte blanche in those days, and the director was not one to descend to argue with a stall keeper.
A week later, in the unmapped Ethiopian interior, when both of us were sickened with typhus on top of the malaria, our kindness was repaid. Our guides, shod, not shackled, did not leave us behind.
The director made one of his most pleasing finds on the road to Aksum, something previously unknown even through crossing: a stemless hard wheat that fit the law of homologous series. And I found the humble teff I now chewed dry in a cold Leningrad hallway.
The guides pressed us to return to the capital when our sickness worsened. As we were borne out of the interior, tied atop the mules that our guides considered unmanly to ride, the great director confided in me what he had been writing in his even script on page after page of his notebook. Ethiopia, he said, was indeed a center of plant diversity, and he was now certain that agriculture had been adopted from Ethiopia by Egypt and not, as most geneticists thought, the reverse.
He would be proved right, but he would be dead by then.
In the first days of the blockade, when people’s notions of what mattered so altered, Alena asked the new director if she might come back, unofficially, just to do a little research. Nothing important, she stressed, and for no salary, just a little research on some landraces of rice. Genetics was her life.
The new director was not as devoted to Lysenko as we had expected. He was astute both scientifically and politically, which in these times meant he had only the narrowest line on which to walk.
Some of those who came with him, though, held stupid ideas. Thick-nosed Ivanovich, who believed that all fertilization is useless because only soil texture influences yield, for example, was for a time given charge of vegetable breeding. His wife, Klavdiya, an angular, long-nosed woman who was much smarter than her husband, agreed with his every pronouncement, but always with a slight smile that hinted at irony, distance, disdain. I decided that I could perhaps cultivate her as a friend.
With the start of the war, we lost more in number than we added. All the young men went to the front, leaving only female students and then, later, the young men who returned injured.
Others were evacuated. I was surprised that the new director, who, it goes without saying, was very well connected, did not get himself evacuated. But not one of us could have known how bad it would get or how long it would last. By the time we knew, it was far too late for most.
Of course the great director was gone too, long gone. Some said in Siberia. Others heard that he was actually in Moscow or had been evacuated to the more interior Saratov prison. His wife, Yelena, who was evacuated from Leningrad with their son, had not been told where he was.
The night before she left, she came to our flat to thank Alena for the letter she had signed. She did not thank me, though she must have known that I could have stopped Alena from signing had I really tried.
She told us that she did not expect to see her husband again. “One of us will be killed by the war or the prison,” she said. “Possibly both by both.”
I tried to soothe her, to give her the best to think, but my smart Alena shook her pale head. “No,” Alena said. “She is almost certainly right. She will never see him again.
“We will keep up his work,” Alena added, and Yelena smiled, nodded, and pressed Alena’s pretty hands.
Before his own arrest, the great director tried to help those who went before him. He put aside his own work, which for him was like putting aside his neck or his spleen, and wrote letters on their behalf. He made trips to Moscow and waited for hours to argue with men who did not want to listen to him or wanted only to hear him beg, which, of course, would never happen. He did everything else humanly possible, but here I must admit that some of it was out of stubbornness. He did not stop to consider that what he was doing might make things harder rather than better for those he wanted to help. But that is how idealists are.
In part because there was so much empty space from so many gone, Alena was allowed a corner of a basement laboratory and mostly ignored. When the watches of the collection were organized, she was given the harshest hours, at least at first.
After weeks passed, the political and even scientific differences among us broke down. Weight and health became the important measures.
Before Lidia, the woman most dangerous to my marriage was Iskra.
Her mother had renamed her, as a girl, after the early Bolshevik paper. As a young woman, the name fit her well. She was indeed a spark. And I was combustible.
I traveled to Moscow whenever I could, indulging with Iskra in those things my pure, gently ascetic Alena would never touch.
We played tennis and dined on pelmeni and good wine and meat and cherry pies at the Prague Hotel while Gypsy dancers performed under moving colored lights.
We smoked cigarettes and tapped our feet to Antonin Ziegler’s Czech group at the Metropole, to Leonid Utesov and Aleksandr Tsfasman at the National.
Afterward, at Iskra’s flat, I would carefully unhook — and roll down her beautiful long legs — the real silk stockings I brought back to her from my trips to France. I never knew what would come next.
At the parachute tower, on the day I fell in love with Alena, my future bride had told me that people use danger either to find themselves or to lose themselves. Perhaps the same is true of sex. With Alena, who needed neither to find nor to lose herself, sex was only sex, or perhaps potential procreation. She was wonderful to be with, always, and happy enough to make love. Despite taking her pleasure sadly, she enjoyed it for what it was. But not for anything more.
With no doubt, Iskra used sex to explore and express herself. She was different every time, and I thought that I might never tire of her and that it would be a good and safe thing to have only one mistress, whom I could eventually give up in older age for my wife.
But I did not give Iskra up for Alena.
I gave her up for Lidia, who, like me, sought in danger and sex not more but less of herself. In the weird mix of pleasure and pain that she always preferred, she abandoned the self that she must have hated as much as I, at least for a time, would come to hate it. As much as she wanted me to hate it.
For three days and part of the next, Alena did not speak to me except for the small phrases and questions necessary between two people inhabiting the same small place under hardship with no opportunity for one or the other to go elsewhere.
My offense was to have suggested, now that we lived under siege, that I had done Albertine a service by turning her out — though turning her out was Alena’s phrase and not my own. Now Albertine dined on roast duck and rampions and good bread while the children of Leningrad lived as orphans in the Caucasus or chewed sawdust or their own tongues.