The family resided several years in the secure zone of the classified laboratory, until the war began. Then, the impassioned Goldberg—who had graduated from medical school in the early 1920s together with Pavel Alekseevich but unlike his friend had never practiced—registered for accelerated retraining and wound up in a military hospital as the head of a clinical laboratory. As a military doctor he made it through the whole war, from start to finish, without a scratch and was even awarded the Red Star (no trifle) for evacuating a medical transport carrying the wounded from a town captured by the Germans. What was most comical, but typical for Goldberg, was that owing to an altercation with the head of the hospital, he had loaded the laboratory inventory last, when the city was already captured, which he did not know, and the only wounded he evacuated was a staff colonel for whom a car had been ordered but which had not arrived because the road was already cut off.
When Goldberg finished loading, he saw a column of German tanks and, waiting till twilight, got behind the wheel of the covered truck with the inventory and the colonel and drove out of the town unobstructed, demonstrating not his customary garrulous heroism, but, on the contrary, exceptional composure totally out of character for frenzied, hotheaded Ilya . . .
Through the mercy of fate he was not arrested even when, at the very end of the war, he wrote an enraged letter to a member of the Supreme High Command about marauding and mass rapes of German women—behavior unbefitting Soviet soldiers, officers even, who bore the lofty title of soldier-liberators . . . On learning about the letter from its ingenuous, fuming author himself, the head of the hospital had a captain acquaintance in the SMERSH fish the letter from the mail stream and, once he had it in hand, destroy it immediately, after which he processed Goldberg for expedited demobilization and ordered him to go wherever he damn well pleased, preferably as far away as possible. Conscientious Goldberg, knowing nothing of his commander’s noble maneuver, sent an inquiry to the Supreme High Command demanding an answer to the expropriated letter.
Goldberg, however, did not intend to bury himself in some backwater. He went to Moscow, extricated his family from Fergana, and began looking for a job in his area of specialization. After a while he discovered that the field of science that so fascinated him was almost nonexistent. He knocked about for a while without a job, then found shelter under the wing of a great woman, Margarita Ivanovna Rudomino, who hired the unemployed geneticist as senior bibliographer at the Library of Foreign Literature, where he spent almost three years among reference books and card catalogues in German, English, Polish, Lithuanian, and Latin, the last language having been acquired by him at the Peter-Paul Schule, the Lutheran school he had graduated from. Miraculously the school survived in Moscow until the middle of the 1920s.
Ilya Iosifovich’s tenure at the library’s staff offices on Razin Street, five minutes from the Kremlin, in the bowels of a collection almost untouched by censorship, modified somewhat his research aspirations. He reread tons of books on history: what now interested him was genius as a phenomenon and its inheritability. Genius itself, however, lent itself poorly to definition or formularization, while genetics was a strict science that studied qualitative phenomena, not quantitative. Where along the spectrum did one draw the line between good abilities, brilliant abilities, and genius? Goldberg scoured the encyclopedias of all epochs and nations and, as a starting point, compiled a verifiable list of geniuses based on the frequency with which they appeared in encyclopedias. Applying some clever statistical formula, he demonstrated the validity of this method of selection. Next, he worked on his selectees, which totaled about one hundred per century. He had cast his nets wide enough to encompass the Golden Age of Athens, the Italian Renaissance, and the period of the nobility in Russian literature.
The next stage of his work involved finding some sort of characteristic or marker connected with genius. He was absolutely confident that such markers existed, and the question he faced was how to find them. He searched for something like farsightedness in combination with a birthmark on the right shoulder, or left-handedness combined with diabetes . . . He painstakingly combed the biographies of great people, searching meticulously for mention of the diseases that had afflicted geniuses, their parents; their physical features, defects, and deviations . . .
He could have finished this unusually crackpot book ten years earlier if he had not, of his own bizarre will, lashed out in an unintelligible roar against Comrade Stalin’s favorite, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, at the VASKhNIL assembly. After growling out his accusations—replete with serviceman obscenities he never used before or after—he was carted straight from the historic assembly to Kashchenko Psychiatric Hospital . . . It was there, his geniuses temporarily left to their own devices, that he wrote his denunciation—with detailed justifications, clear and precise argumentation, and absolutely devastating criticism of Academician Lysenko—to be sent to the science division of the Central Committee with a separate copy for Comrade Stalin personally . . .
Once again, luck was with him: the director of the ward they had delivered him to by ambulance, an old psychiatrist named Shubnikov, took an interest in and sympathized with this unlikely hero, issued him the life-saving diagnosis of “schizophrenic,” and released him with group III disability status.
Several months had already passed since Ilya Iosifovich had sent his three-hundred-page masterpiece to its addressees in the upper echelons; he had returned to his geniuses and their hereditary diseases and was awaiting an answer to his missive. Or arrest. This was the comrade that Pavel Alekseevich had chosen to advise him on “the current situation.”
GOLDBERG AND HIS FAMILY LIVED IN A TWO-STORY wooden barracks-like structure. At one time it had been a factory dormitory, then the factory was closed, the workers were evicted, and the building sold as apartments. One of the apartments had been purchased by Goldberg after he returned from the front. In fact, Pavel Alekseevich had bought it. Ilya Iosifovich, who was incredibly punctilious when it came to money, made an exception for his friend, permitting him this philanthropic act, because unlike everyone else, Pavel Alekseevich had to understand that helping him, Ilya, he was helping all humankind—Goldberg attributed enormous significance to his research. It was his profound belief that science was charged with saving the world.
“The great materialist idealist,” Pavel Alekseevich teased him in the rare hours of their peaceful conversations. But those hours of peace were sufficiently rare. Ilya Iosifovich did not tolerate objections and defended his most crackpot ideas with great passion, quickly overstepping the bounds of proper scientific argument. He was capable of infuriating even Pavel Alekseevich, and their meetings usually ended in quarrels, shouting, and door-slamming. Ilya Iosifovich reproached Pavel Alekseevich for knuckling under, while the latter attempted to justify himself: he was trying to save not the world, but just a few dozen, at best, hundred, pregnant broads and their spawn, which, in his opinion, was worth the effort.
For Ilya Iosifovich this was not enough: his ideas were so lofty they squeaked, and he prophesied that with the help of sound genetic theory the world order could be restructured entirely. In twenty years genes could be used as the building blocks for a new world of plants and animals with their beneficial qualities multiplied, and man himself could be redesigned by introducing new genes and endowing him with new qualities.
“What qualities?” Pavel Alekseevich inquired stiffly.
“You name it!” Ilya Iosifovich flung out his arms, and the thin vestiges of hair on his head stood on end. “We will learn to isolate from the genome individual genes responsible for genius, which will make it possible to create mathematicians, musicians, and artists in quantities unknown even during the Renaissance!”