At the security post at entrance number six he was stopped and told to leave his briefcase. Inside the briefcase was a flat-sided anatomy jar with a sealed wax top; the jar was to play a decisive role in the forthcoming conversation. After protracted explanations and objections, the briefcase was allowed to proceed to the meeting together with its owner. Pavel Alekseevich was led down long carpeted corridors. This far from pleasant journey felt like a nightmare. Pavel Alekseevich once again regretted that he had not stopped at the house. The two guards assigned to him—one to his right, the other to his left—stopped at the door.
“This way.”
He went in. The Renoir-esque secretary, shimmering pearly pink, asked him to wait. He sat down on an austere wooden bench, spreading his knees far apart and placing between them the old briefcase with which his father had once delivered reports to a government buried long ago. Pavel Alekseevich prepared himself for a long wait, but he was summoned two minutes later. By this time the alcohol had reached all the ganglia of his nervous system and released its serene warmth and calm. In a long inelegant office behind an enormous desk sat a little man with a puffy face sculpted from dry soap—one of those faces seen ruffling on May Day posters in the spring.
“His kidneys are shot to hell, especially the left one,” Pavel Alekseevich automatically noted to himself.
“We familiarized ourselves with the contents of your letter,” the important party personage pronounced monarchically.
Both the sound of his voice and the barely evident disdain on his face communicated that the cause had been lost.
“Nothing to lose now then,” Pavel Alekseevich thought, and slowly undid the briefcase buckles. The important personage fell silent, creating an icy pause. Pavel Alekseevich extracted the flat jar, slightly covered with condensation, brushed his palm across the front glass, and placed it on the table. The important personage leaned back in his chair in fright, pointing to the specimen with his puffy finger, and asking with disgust: “What have you dragged in here?”
It was a resected uterus, the most powerful and complexly structured muscle of the female body. Bisected lengthways and opened outward, and not yet having lost all its color in the formaldehyde, it resembled a boiled yellow fodder beet. Inside the uterus was a sprouted bulb. The monstrous battle that had taken place between the fetus, enmeshed in dense colorless fibers, and the translucent predatory sack that more resembled some sort of sea creature than an ordinary onion, such as one might use in a salad, was already over.
“I ask that you note: this is a pregnant uterus with a sprouted onion inside. The onion is inserted into the uterus and then begins to sprout. The root system penetrates the fetus, after which it is extracted together with it. When nothing goes wrong, that is. When something goes wrong, they wind up on my operating table or go directly to the Vagankovo cemetery . . . More often the latter . . .”
“You’re joking . . .” The party functionary recoiled.
“I could bring you pounds of these onions,” Pavel Alekseevich politely answered the paled functionary. “Official statistics—and I cannot conceal this—do not at all correspond to the reality.”
The party boss stiffened.
“What gives you the right . . . ? How dare you?”
“I dare, I dare. Whenever I manage to rescue a woman after a criminal abortion, I have to enter ‘spontaneous miscarriage’ in her chart. Because if I don’t, I’ll put her in prison. Or her neighbor, who also has small children, while half the children in our country are already fatherless. Believe me, this onion is the cleverest, but not the only, method of aborting a pregnancy. Metal knitting needles, catheters, scissors, intrauterine injections of take your pick: iodine, soda, soapy water . . .”
“Stop, Pavel Alekseevich,” implored the by now white bureaucrat, who had remembered how before the war his wife also had resorted to something of the sort. “Enough. What do you want from me?”
“We need a decree legalizing abortion.”
“You’re out of your mind! Don’t you understand that there are the interests of the state, the interests of the nation? We lost millions of men during the war. There’s the issue of replenishing the population. What you’re saying is childish babble.” The official was truly upset.
“Not a bad idea bringing that jar,” Pavel Alekseevich thought. The conversation, it seemed, had swung to his advantage. He had begun it correctly, and now he had to end it correctly.
“We lost millions of men, but now we’re losing thousands of women. A legal medical abortion does not involve mortal risk.” Pavel Alekseevich frowned. “You see, improved general health in and of itself will lead to an increase in the birth rate . . .” Pavel Alekseevich’s eyes met the bureaucrat’s. “How many orphans are left behind? Orphanages also are fed out of the state budget, by the way . . . This has to be resolved. It will rest on our conscience . . .”
The party boss grimaced, deep folds forming beneath his chin.
“Take that away . . . , the talk happens there.” He pointed at the sky.
“I’ll leave you this specimen. Maybe it will come in handy.”
The official threw up his hands. “You’ve lost your mind! Take that away immediately . . .”
“Based on incomplete statistics—highly incomplete—twenty thousand a year. In Russia alone.” Pavel Alekseevich scowled. “You’re responsible for them.”
“You’re going too far,” the party boss bellowed, no longer resembling his May Day portrait at all.
“That’s because you’re not going far enough,” Pavel Alekseevich cut him short.
That was how they parted. The specimen remained on the grandee’s desk near the pen-and-ink set embellished with the iron head of a proletarian writer.
THOSE FIRST YEARS AFTER THE WAR WERE VERY SUCcessful for Pavel Alekseevich: his department, suspended during war, regained its right to full-scale operations. Two of Pavel Alekseevich’s best pupils who at the outset of the war had retrained and left obstetrics and gynecology for several years returned. The number of positions in the clinic doubled. New research slots were still not being granted, but even in the worst of times Pavel Alekseevich had managed to conduct research and save up certain ideas that awaited their moment. He was contemplating cures for a certain type of female infertility, had done deep research into female oncology, and had come upon interesting links between pregnancy and the malignant processes that arose in women’s bodies during this period. His thinking brought him very close to the idea of treating cancer with the aid of hormonal growth inhibitors. His gift of intravision provided no answers to his questions, but it helped him to see more clearly certain general pictures of the life of the body. His vision of the life of society and state was, on the contrary, completely unclear. It seemed to him, as it did to many in the initial postwar years, that former prewar errors would dissipate on their own and that life would acquire some reason. The project he was developing would insure the accelerated dawning of the bright future, at least in his area of competence.
Despite his successful—as it had seemed to him—visit to the high-ranking boss, his project was not moving forward, the commission still had yet to convene itself, and he continued persistently and methodically pounding the threshold of the now even more guarded Workhorse to make his case that the time had come to modernize existing health care. She politely heard him out (rumors of his escapade had reached her immediately), but insofar as she had not been given any direct orders, she continued to be extremely careful with Pavel Alekseevich. She even thought it advantageous to treat him kindly. Owing precisely to her initiative, at the end of 1947 Pavel Alekseevich was awarded the rank of corresponding member of the Academy of Medical Sciences and, at about the same time, assigned an apartment in a newly constructed building for the medical elite. It was like advance payment for future state achievements. The advance was splendid: a three-room apartment with a walk-in pantry off the kitchen. Vasilisa was the happiest of all. For the first time in her life she had her own room. Seeing the pantry, she burst into tears.