5
PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH ADOPTED TANYA IMMEDIATELY AFTER the wedding and, as Vasilisa would say, “took her into his heart.” This “his own” little girl embodied all the thousands of newborns he had helped come into the world: pulled out, cut out, and saved from asphyxiation, cranial trauma, and other injuries that not rarely accompany childbirth.
Other people’s children were momentary, though. You spent great energy and work on them, and then they disappeared, and Pavel Alekseevich almost never saw these boys and girls at the age when they started to smile, to study their fingers, to delight at recognizing the face of a loved one, a pacifier, or a rattle.
Already during the first hours of a newborn’s life Pavel Alekseevich could discern manifestations of temperament: a strong will or passivity, obstinacy or laziness. But more subtle personality traits do not usually appear in the first days after birth, when the child is recovering from the herculean effort of being born and transitioning to its new existence. He knew a great deal about other people’s babies, but nothing about the child living in his house. The discovery turned out to be astonishing.
Tanya was barely two years old, and Pavel Alekseevich was old enough to be her grandfather. The sincere delight he took in her had the patina of an old man’s affection for all the new things that occur in children and no longer occur in adults. He noticed the fold on her wrist, the dimple on her waist; he discovered that her dark hair was not one single dark-brown color, but was lighter and softer, as though of a different sort, at her hairline, on her neck, behind her ears.
New words, new movements, everything about the intellectual development taking place in this two-year-old person elicited Pavel Alekseevich’s keen and loving interest. He never allowed his thoughts to consider that another woman could have borne him a different child, his own, perhaps even a boy, who would inherit not someone else’s brown hair but his, Pavel Alekseevich’s, light hair and tendency to early baldness as well as the strange shape of his hands with their huge, wide palms and triangular fingers that narrowed radically at the nail, and who would inherit, eventually, his profession.
No, no, even if Elena could give birth again, he was not entirely sure that he would want to put the love he felt for Tanechka to test or comparison. He said this to Elena as welclass="underline" I can’t imagine another child; our little girl is a genuine miracle.
It is hard to tell what derives from what: is a child’s good character the result of the boundless and unconditional love its parents lavish on it, or, just the reverse, does a good child bring out all the best in the parents? Either way, Tanya grew up loved, and they three were especially happy when together. Vasilisa, though she was a member of the family, was an auxiliary member of this triangle who merely lent additional stability to their existence.
Sometimes, when Tanya woke up before the adults, she trundled over to her parents’ room and dove between them like a calico fish, demanding with a sleepy, happy voice “bugs and quiches.” She had started talking very early and without error even from the outset, and for her these “quiches” were the play of a grown-up person capable of poking fun at herself, the child.
“Here, and here, and here.” She pointed her finger at her forehead, her cheek, and her chin and, on receiving her parents’ kisses as lawful tribute, she searched with amusing gravity for a place on Pavel Alekseevich’s scruffy cheek to give a smacking kiss in return.
After Tanya started school, this kissing ritual turned into a farewell kiss before walking out the door. These fleeting moments of contact, seemingly quite insignificant, were the tiny nails that held their daily life together.
Generally reserved, even with his beloved wife, and strictly observing the bounds of propriety in both gesture and word, with Tanya Pavel Alekseevich would degenerate to senile baby talk. He smothered the child with a lovey-dovey collection of flora and fauna: “my sweet little cherry,” “daddy’s baby sparrow,” “my black-eyed little squirrel,” “chubby little apple.” Tanechka ate it all up and had her own collection of tender nicknames for her father: “my favorite dog,” “Hippopotamus Hippopotamusovich,” “Mr. Catfish Whiskers.”
Pavel Alekseevich spoiled Tanya with a passion. Now and then Elena would have to put a chill on his ardor. He could walk into a toy store and buy up its sparse stock. But his mad indulgences seemed to do Tanya no harm, and she had none of the greediness or imperious possessiveness of the child who knows no limitations.
To Pavel Alekseevich all fabrics seemed too rough for his child’s skin, all boots would give her blisters, and all scarves would scratch her neck. He would shift his gaze to his wife, and his heart ached with amazement at how fragile and tender she was; he wanted to swaddle them both in batiste, down, and fur . . . There was a strange disconnect between Pavel Alekseevich’s ascetic inclinations, as well as the harsh and brutal realities of his life as a surgeon, Elena’s automatic habit of taking the lesser and the worst so easily and naturally that no one noticed, and Vasilisa’s parsimoniousness and strictness with the little girl, on the one hand, and, on the other, Pavel Alekseevich’s burning desire to put his daughter and wife under a bell jar so as to protect them from drafts, crudeness, and all the vulgarity of life around them.
By September 1944, Pavel Alekseevich’s clinic had returned to Moscow. Elena’s apartment in Trekhprudny Lane, which she had been counting on, was now occupied by two low-level NKVD officers, and the young family found itself in the same dormitory where Pavel Alekseevich had led his lonely, humble life before the war. It was a half-basement, which was spacious enough, but damp, and hardly suitable for a child. As if especially to assure them that their concern for her health was not for naught, Tanya often caught colds and coughed for long periods on end.
Pavel Alekseevich and Elena Georgievna’s family life was so happy that even Tanya’s illnesses lent a particular note of closeness between the spouses. For a long time Pavel Alekseevich’s first words on returning from work were a concerned “Did she cough?”
Vasilisa would shrug her bony shoulders: big deal, the kid coughs . . .
“Unfeeling old woman,” Pavel Alekseevich thought to himself as he pulled off his huge overcoat filled with cold from outside, shooing Tanya away from the cold air when she stuck her head out into the hallway . . .
6
LIKE HIS LATE FATHER, PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH HAD, BEYOND doubt, the qualities of a man of state. Although his father’s rank as an officer in tsarist times had cast a long shadow over Pavel Alekseevich’s career, the second war seemed to have eradicated this unpleasant spot in his biography: his father, though an officer, had been a doctor and perished in a war with Germany. Now, when the country again was waging war with the sons of those same Germans, Pavel Alekseevich was retroactively pardoned his dubious heritage. Soon after returning from evacuation he was summoned to the ministry, where it was proposed that he author a plan for the organization of peacetime health care in his own areas of specialization, obstetrics and pediatrics. The war was coming to an end, and while a commission had not yet been created, the assumption was that he would head it. Pavel Alekseevich was supplied with statistics that had been compiled incompetently, frequently with errors and incomplete data, but to a certain degree revealing nonetheless the horrible demographic situation. It was not just a question of the irreversible loss of an enormous part of the male population and, with that, a drop in the birth rate. Child mortality was enormous, particularly among infants. And there was one more factor, one not quantified in official statistics, but all too well known to any practicing physician: a large number of women of reproductive age died as a result of illegal abortions. Officially, abortions had been made illegal in 1936, at practically the same time that Stalin’s Constitution had been adopted.