“It’s been said before you.” Pavel Alekseevich chuckled. “Plato said it. It’s called eidos. The idea of the thing. Its divine content. A divine template that gives form to all worldly things . . .”
“That’s not for me. That’s too intellectual.” Elena waved him off.
But she did not forget Pavel Alekseevich’s words. That was it, philosophy. They used to talk about similar things at the commune, but at the time she had been too little for such conversations and fell asleep during them.
Pavel Alekseevich looked at her with a tender pride. Such a wife he had: soft-spoken, prone to silence, talked only when she had to, but if you could get her to say what she thought, her ideas were intelligent and subtle, her understanding profound . . .
Elena frequently had the urge to tell her husband her ideas about the “draftableness” of the world, about the dreams she had from time to time with technical drawings of all sorts of things—words, illnesses, even music. But no, no, it was impossible to describe.
Two seers of the hidden lived side by side. For him all living matter was transparent; she perceived the transparency of some other, immaterial world. But both of them hid from the other, not for lack of trust, but out of pudicity and the protective interdiction placed on all secret knowledge, regardless of how acquired.
9
THE RESEARCH TOPICS THAT INTERESTED PAVEL ALEKseevich had always been connected to concrete medical issues, whether it be the fight against early miscarriages, treatments for infertility, or new surgical techniques for resecting the uterus or performing Cesarean sections in cases of incorrect presentation of the fetus.
The phrase “bourgeois science,” which appeared in the newspapers with increasing frequency, made him smirk with disgust. From his point of view, the field of science to which he had given so many years of his life had no class subtext.
Irreproachably honest in the everyday sense of the word, Pavel Alekseevich had lived his entire professional life under the Soviets and long ago had grown accustomed to using formulaic language in his articles and monographs, opening sentences with fixed turns of phrase like “in scientific circles of the Stalin era . . .” or “owing to the untiring concern of the party, the government, and Comrade Stalin personally . . .” He knew how to express his own practical observations within the limitations of this cant. For him it was the formula for politeness in the present era, like “Your Grace” in the past, and had no bearing on the content of his work.
At the beginning of 1949 the campaign against cosmopolitanism began, and with the very first newspaper publication Pavel Alekseevich woke up. This was a new assault against common sense, and the attack on genetics and eugenics at last year’s session at VASKhNIL no longer seemed to him just an ominous coincidence. As a member of the academy and director of an institute, Pavel Alekseevich found himself now at a level of service that required assurances of loyalty. He was supposed to speak out publicly and at least verbally demonstrate his support for the new campaign. The upper echelons were hinting insistently that now was the time. They also made highly suggestive reference to his project, which had been on hold for several years now . . .
A public speech of this sort was out of the question. For Pavel Alekseevich it would mean stripping himself of his self-respect, overstepping the bounds of ordinary, albeit bourgeois, decency.
For all his relatively free thinking Pavel Alekseevich had, after all, received a traditional education that copied the German model; his thought processes had been formed to fit a German mold. Historically, humanistic thought in Russia had been influenced principally by the French, but in the fields of science and technology German influence had dominated since the time of Peter the Great. The very concept of universalism, in the Latin sense of the word, appealed to Pavel Alekseevich, so he saw no global evil in “cosmopolitanism” per se.
On the eve of the general assembly of the Academy of Sciences, on one of the last Sundays of spring, he set out for Malakhovka to see his friend Ilya Iosifovich Goldberg, a physician and geneticist, to seek his advice. A less suitable adviser would have been hard to find.
A JEWISH DON QUIXOTE WHO ALWAYS MANAGED TO GET sentenced for something other than what he was guilty of just before the campaign against what he was guilty of began, Goldberg by this time had managed to sit out two insignificant (by standards of the time) prison terms and was gearing up for his third. Between terms he got several unusual (for him) lucky breaks when he by chance happened not to be in the right place at the right time, and disaster passed him by.
He had done his first stint in 1932 for a presentation he had made three years prior, in 1929, at an in-house seminar, all that remained of the long-defunct Society of Free Philosophers. The subject of his presentation had nothing to do with genetics. Goldberg, who made a hobby of rummaging through Western journals, had dug out of Nature or Science an article by Albert Einstein on the relationship between space and time. The article’s mathematical austerity appealed to him enormously—before that he had never encountered works in which philosophical concepts were interpreted by mathematicians—and he did a presentation on it.
The affair was small change, and he got only three years. How many would he have got if they had had any inkling of what he was working on in those days—human population genetics?
After getting out, he worked for a while at the Medical Biological Institute, where he succeeded in publishing several articles on population genetics and gene drift. This time it was his unbearable personality that helped him avoid major unpleasantness: just before the institute was shut down he got into a verbal brawl with one of its leading researchers over, it goes without saying, some deeply fundamental scientific issues. Their quarrel was so heated that it ended in a fistfight. Witnesses to the incident said that a more comical sight than their fisticuffs would have been hard to imagine. In the heat of this scientific polemic Ilya Iosifovich knocked out his opponent’s tooth, and the latter—insulted and injured—took him to court. As a result, Goldberg got one year for petty hooliganism.
Two weeks later the director of the institute, Solomon Levit, a foremost specialist in genetics, and several leading members of the institute were arrested, among them Goldberg’s sparring partner with the knocked-out tooth. Both Levit and Goldberg’s enemy were shot in 1937, while Goldberg—one more example of the ridiculous absurdity of Soviet life!—was released exactly one year later . . . Soviet power had a soft spot for hooliganism . . .
In the same lucky way Ilya Iosifovich dodged his next inevitable arrest. Released from prison, he left for Central Asia, where he took up an entirely new field of study—genetics and cotton selection. Although the witch hunt in the sciences was already in full swing—genetics laboratories had been closed down and many scientists arrested, but it was still unknown how many of them were shot—cotton production stood apart, because cotton was raw material for the war industry. The laboratory Ilya joined turned out to be semiclassified, and either out of negligence or error or as a result of the administration’s dimwittedness, Ilya went unscathed . . . During this short, relatively calm period of his life, Ilya succeeded in marrying his lab assistant, pretty Valya Popkova, and in 1939—through an ironic joke of the heavens!—they gave birth to identical twins, the classic object of genetic research, to whom Ilya gave the significant names Vitaly and Gennady.