Tanya filled the tub. Elena pressed her elbows to her side and feebly resisted.
“You have to get undressed. Look, Mommy, there’s already water in the tub . . .” Tanya coaxed her, and reluctantly she obeyed.
Her mother’s gauntness was painful, and it was not a matter of her being underweight: Tanya herself weighed less than 110 pounds. Empty folds of flesh hung from Elena’s shoulders and arms, and at the sight of her mother’s nakedness Tanya was struck by the thought of how sad and sexless the human skeleton was, and how what lent women their charm and men their strength and even made for the difference between men and women were merely pieces of fat-streaked flesh. Of her mother’s former womanhood all that remained were her pale breasts and the vague shadow of her almost hairless pubis.
At long last Tanya sat her mother in the warm water. Elena lay back and stretched out her legs.
“How good it is . . .”
“I’m like Ham,” Tanya laughed to herself as she lathered the sponge. Looking was indecent, but washing, trimming, and wiping dry was quite all right . . .
“Wait, Tanechka. I want to lie here for a bit. It’s such bliss . . . Was the bathtub broken before?” Elena asked in a very hale voice.
“Yes. Now it’s fixed.”
Elena closed her eyes. Her hair slipped into the water and got wet. Tanya moved it to the side.
“Everything changes in water. My head is a lot better in warm water. I don’t want you to live at home. I don’t want you to live with me. I forget everything, and it seems to me that now I’ve forgotten more than I remember. But soon I’ll forget even how much I forgot. Don’t be frightened, I don’t have anything terrible in mind, I am simply dying in the most usual way, from the middle of my head. Right now I feel very good. I haven’t felt so good in a long time, and I want to say good-bye to you. I’m being consumed by a hole. For some reason what’s happening to me is very shameful. And I don’t know if anything will remain at the very end. Tell me, how old am I?”
“Soon you’ll be fifty-two . . .”
“And you?”
“I’m twenty-three.”
“Good. The water has cooled. Add a little bit more hot . . . I’m not sure of anyone or anything. Sometimes strangers come, and sometimes people I know . . . At times there’s Vasilisa, with someone else inside her . . . I’m not even sure of myself . . . You know about that.”
“No, Mommy. I don’t know anything about that . . .”
“Never mind, whatever. I wanted to tell you that at this minute I am I and you are you, and I love you very much. And now I’m going to say good-bye to you. And then you soap me up . . . And then leave . . .”
Tanya wanted to object, but her tongue refused, because all she could have said would have been pathetic, meaningless words. She lathered her mother’s hair, leaning her head back slightly so that the soap would not run into her eyes, scrubbed her scalp, and directed the stream of water from the shower head to rinse off the suds . . . She washed all the sagging folds of Elena’s narrow body, dried her dry, and covered her skin with baby cream. Then she dressed her in a long flannel shirt and took her to her bed. It was nearly nine in the evening. Pavel Alekseevich arrived soon after: that day he had delivered evening lectures at the institute of continuing professional education. Tanya was all packed. They ate supper together, and he saw the girls off to the station.
The Moscow period of Tanya’s life was over.
19
DURING HIS LAST PRISON TERM LUCKY GOLDBERG SPENT not a single day doing general labor: they immediately put him to work as an attendant in the camp’s sick bay. The head doctor—an elderly, real shit, Lord forgive, of a woman who had lazed herself into a lump—drowsily dumped half her work on him. For all of her rottenness—having logged twenty years doing prison camp medicine, which less than any other branch had the right to call itself medicine—the head doctor lazily defended before the administration her right to keep Ilya Iosifovich on, and at least twice she managed to spare him from getting transferred to general labor . . .
Had there been a male doctor in her stead, Ilya Iosifovich would not have tolerated—even in spite of her protection—her sleepy indifference toward the patients, her thievery, and her petty underhandedness. What reconciled him with the head was compassion, which went beyond all his principles: perpetually grazing at the doctor’s side was her twenty-year-old mentally disabled daughter whom she was afraid to leave at home alone. This woman’s biography—bitter, Soviet, and as ineluctable as an unburied corpse—tagged behind her . . .
Perhaps for the first time in his life, Goldberg’s public insistence on the truth—as indecent as a patch on the seat of one’s pants—held its tongue. Over the past two-plus years he had drudged away as attendant in name and assistant chief physician in fact, he never once bothered her with stormy discussions, never called her on anything, never tossed a mug at her, and never yelled . . . When they were saying their good-byes, she uttered to Goldberg words that amazed and even shamed him: she turned out to be smarter and better than he had thought. But perhaps the matter lay precisely in the fact that Ilya Iosifovich’s presence, his old-fashioned magnanimity and comical gentility—usually taken for impracticable ridiculousness—had for a brief moment elevated the doctor to his level, and she clumsily pronounced her unprepossessing words, worthy of a dying man’s last confession, then asked how she could help him . . . After which she sat her fat ass down on her red plush upholstered chair to spend another twenty full years at her boring job, because somehow she had to feed her impaired daughter and send money to her widowed sister, with a house full of kids, whose husband had long ago been swallowed up by the same system she worked for . . .
In a word, Ilya Iosifovich said good-bye to Elizaveta Georgievna Witte (there it is again, the unburied corpse!) and marched toward the gate. It closed behind him, and he marched farther toward the train station, a small bit of money and his release papers with him . . . The local train stopped at this station—to be found nowhere on any map—in the evenings, rather, did not even come to a full halt, but slowed down, and just at the moment when it should have stopped, it picked up steam again . . . An hour before the train was to arrive, Elizaveta Georgievna Witte—“the lump,” as Goldberg had come to call her to himself—dropped into the plywood pavilion and gave Ilya Iosifovich a parcel of food. A notebook of sheets of paper sewn together lay between a loaf of bread and two cans of stew meat . . .
“All moral foundations have been undermined, Pasha. The moral foundations of life, the moral foundations of science . . . But the human being is alive.” Goldberg held his bony palm on the notebook of pieces of paper that had been kept separately and bound together only on the eve of his release.
Once again, three years later, they sat in Pavel Alekseevich’s study, friends turned relatives by the whim of their children whom there was no figuring out, except that baby Evgenia, their granddaughter in common, was alive and well and living in Leningrad with Tanya and the long-haired jazz player who had enthusiastically assumed the not insubstantial cares of paternity . . . The old men drank, first with toasts, then simply after raising their glasses slightly higher than their noses and stopping the motion of their arms for a second . . .
“Your health . . .”
“The hole of holes, Pasha, the hole of holes . . . But the head doctor ordered journals for me from Novosibirsk University. American, German, French . . . From the 1930s forward. I think, Pasha, that I’ve closed the gap that opened when the Center for Medical Genetics was shut down. This book is not so much for scholars as it is for doctors specializing in what is not yet a specialization . . . A textbook that’s not a textbook . . . An introduction to medical genetics . . .”