'When you do go back, dearest,' said Alexandra Vladimirovna abruptly, 'I think it would be best if I don't come with you. There isn't really enough room for me in your Moscow flat. Is that all right? Either I'll get Zhenya to come and live here, or else I'll go and live with her in Kuibyshev.'
It was a difficult moment. Everything that had troubled both mother and daughter was now out in the open. Lyudmila, however, took offence – as though she herself were in no way to blame. Alexandra Vladimirovna saw the expression of hurt on her face and felt guilty.
Usually both mother and daughter were cruelly forthright. Now, though, they felt frightened and tried to draw back.
"Truth is good, but love is better" – the title of a new play by Ostrovsky,' remarked Nadya.
Alexandra Vladimirovna looked with some hostility, even fear, at this schoolgirl who could work out things she hadn't yet worked out for herself.
Soon after this Viktor came back from work. He let himself in and appeared suddenly in the kitchen.
'What a pleasant surprise!' said Nadya. 'We thought you'd be all night at the Sokolovs'.'
'How really splendid to find you all sitting at home by the stove!' said Viktor.
'Wipe your nose!' said Lyudmila. 'And I don't understand. What's so splendid about it?'
Nadya giggled. Imitating her mother's tone of voice, she said: 'Go on then! Wipe your nose! Don't you understand plain Russian?'
'Nadya, Nadya!' cautioned her mother. The right to try and educate Viktor was something she reserved for herself.
'Yes, yes, there's a cold wind outside,' said Viktor.
He went through to his room. He left the door open and they could see him sitting there at his desk.
'Guess what Papa's doing?' said Nadya. 'He's writing on the cover of a book again.'
'Well, that's none of your business,' said Lyudmila. She turned to her mother. 'Why do you think he's so pleased to find us all sitting here? He's quite obsessive – if any of us aren't at home, he gets worried. Right now he's working out some problem and he's glad there won't be anything to distract him.'
'Sh!' said Alexandra Vladimirovna. 'We probably really do distract him.'
'On the contrary,' said Nadya. 'If you speak loudly, he doesn't pay any attention. But the minute you start whispering, he rushes in and says: "So what's all this whispering about then?" '
'Nadya, you sound like a guide at the zoo talking about the instincts of the different animals,' said Lyudmila.
They all looked at each other and began to laugh.
'Mama, how could you be so unkind to me?' said Lyudmila.
Alexandra Vladimirovna patted her on the head without saying a word.
Then they all had supper together. That evening the warm kitchen seemed to Viktor to be endowed with a peculiar charm.
Viktor's life still rested on the same foundation. Recently he had been constantly preoccupied by a possible explanation of the contradictory results of the experiments carried out in the laboratory; he was itching to pick up his pencil and return to work.
'What splendid buckwheat stew!' he said, tapping his spoon against his empty bowl.
'Is that a hint?' asked Lyudmila.
He passed his bowl to her. 'Lyuda, you remember Prout's hypothesis?'
Taken aback, Lyudmila paused, her spoon in the air.
'The one about the origin of the elements,' said Alexandra Vladimirovna.
'Ah yes,' said Lyudmila. 'Everything deriving from hydrogen. But what's that got to do with the stew?'
'The stew?' repeated Viktor in astonishment. 'Listen now: what happened with Prout is that he arrived at a correct hypothesis largely because of the gross errors that were current in the determination of the atomic weights. If the atomic weights had already been determined with the accuracy later achieved by Dumas and Stas, he'd never have dared hypothesize that they were multiples of hydrogen. What led him to the correct answer was his mistakes.'
'But what's all that got to do with the stew?' asked Nadya.
'The stew?' Finally he understood and said: 'It hasn't got anything to do with the stew. But it's hard to make sense of anything in the stew I'm in.'
'Is that from today's lecture?' asked Alexandra Vladimirovna.
'No, no, it's just something… It's neither here nor there… I don't give lectures anyway.'
He caught Lyudmila's eye and knew that she understood: once again he felt inspired by his work.
'So how are things?' he asked. 'Did Marya Ivanovna come round? Did she read you any of Madame Bovary, the famous novel by Balzac?'
'That's enough from you!' said Lyudmila.
That night she expected him to talk to her again about his work. But he didn't say anything, and she didn't ask.
17
How naive Viktor found the ideas of the mid-nineteenth-century physicists, the opinions of Helmholtz who had reduced all the problems of physics to the study of the forces of attraction and repulsion -themselves dependent only on distance.
The soul of matter is a field of energy! A unity, both a wave of energy and a material particle… The particle nature of light… Is it a shower of bright drops or a wave that moves with the speed of lightning?
Quantum theory had replaced the laws governing individual physical entities with new laws: the laws of probability, the laws of a special statistics that rejected the concept of an individual entity and acknowledged only aggregates. The physicists of the preceding century reminded Viktor of men in suits, with starched collars and cuffs and dyed moustaches, crowded around a billiard table. Deep-thinking, serious men, armed with rulers and chronometers, knitting their thick brows as they measured speeds and accelerations and determined the masses of the resilient spheres which filled a universe of green cloth.
But space – measured by metal rods and rulers – and time – measured by the most accurate of watches – had suddenly begun to bend, to stretch and flatten. Their stability had turned out not to be the foundation-stone of science, but the walls and bars of its prison. The Day of Judgement had come; thousand-year-old truths had been declared errors. Truth had been sleeping for centuries, as though in a cocoon, inside ancient prejudices, errors and inaccuracies.
The world was no longer Euclidian, its geometrical nature no longer composed of masses and their speeds.
Science was progressing with ever increasing impetuousness in a world liberated by Einstein from the fetters of absolute time and space.
Two currents, one moving outwards together with whole universes, the other seeking to penetrate the nucleus of the atom, flowed in different directions but never lost sight of each other – though one moved in a world of parsecs while the other was measured in millimicrons. The more deeply physicists penetrated the heart of the atom, the more clearly they were able to understand the laws governing the luminescence of stars. The red shift in the spectrums visible from distant galaxies gave birth to the notion of universes receding into infinite space. But if one preferred a finite, convex space, distorted by speeds and masses, then one could suppose that space itself was expanding, dragging the galaxies after it.
Viktor never doubted it: no one in the world could be happier than the scientist… There were times – on his way to the Institute in the morning, during his evening stroll, this very night – when he thought about his work and was seized by a feeling of compounded happiness, humility and ecstasy.
The energies that filled the universe with the quiet light of the stars were being released by the transformation of hydrogen into helium…
Two years before the outbreak of war two young Germans had split the nuclei of heavy atoms by bombarding them with neutrons; Soviet scientists, reaching similar conclusions by different paths in their own researches, suddenly experienced what the cavemen had felt, thousands of years before, as they lit the first bonfire…