Rural council chairman Denisov will work another half-year in the village. By spring, he will have organized the kolkhoz and, through earnest work, greatly raised the rate of collectivization in the settlement entrusted to him.
He will battle religion with all his soul, in the Baltic fleet manner. During the holy month of Ramadan, he will organize agitational processions around the mosque, personally speak as an opponent to three clergymen in the public debate “Is religiosity needed in Soviet society?” and gather up all village Korans for burning.
The crowning achievement of his career in the small town will be obtaining a Kommunar tractor for his kolkhoz. It will be the envy of all the canton’s neighboring villages, which, as yet, lack vehicles. The tractor will be the most valued and most guarded object in Denisov’s enterprise.
He will propose innovative initiatives and rename the pagan holiday Sabantuy – “Holiday of the Plow” – which is celebrated in small Tatar towns during late spring, to “Traktortuy.” The initiative will receive support from the center and a delegation from the Central Executive Committee in Kazan will come to the celebration, along with a landing force of newspaper correspondents. The holiday, however, will be ruined by the disrepair of the tractor itself. It will later become clear that an old local woman, the wife of a holy man, decided from good intentions to win over the tractor’s spirit and secretly fed the motor an uncertain quantity of eggs and bread, causing the breakdown. The correspondents and the dissatisfied comrades from the Central Executive Committee will leave for Kazan with nothing and Denisov’s career will begin a rapid decline.
He will be recalled from the village and sent home. Upon returning to Leningrad, he will find that his room in a communal apartment has been occupied by multiplying neighbors. During a desperate and drawn-out struggle with the building managers for living space, he will take to the bottle and be evicted from a dormitory a couple of years later, for drunkenness. During passportization in 1933, Denisov will be exiled from Leningrad as a person lacking an official residence permit and simply as a binging drunkard, sent first beyond the hundred-and-first kilometer, then to Ust’-Tsil’ma, and then, finally, to somewhere near Dushkachan, where his trail will be lost forever amid the rounded hills of the Baikal region.
COFFEE
Who doesn’t love coffee in little china cups?
Volf Karlovich Leibe hides his face under a blanket and continues to feel the warm touch of a sunbeam on his forehead. He’ll have to get up in a few moments. His work won’t wait.
Soon Grunya will burst noisily into his office carrying a tray with a tiny steaming cup in her dutifully extended hands. First thing in the morning, it’s just coffee and a small piece of chocolate, no food, which causes heavy thoughts and limbs. He himself will get up and throw open the drapes with a broad motion, allowing sunlight to flood the room. Grunya will cast a fastidious gaze at the dark blue dress uniform hanging at the ready and carefully remove a nonexistent dust speck from a sleeve – her bashful worship of his uniformed professorial vestments is growing all the stronger with the years. And a new day will unfurclass="underline" lectures, examinations, thousands of excited student faces…
Volf Karlovich sends the blanket to the floor with an energetic sweep, his toes fumbling at the smooth, cool leather of his slippers. The drapes fly off to the side with a swish, revealing a view familiar since childhood. This oriel window with three tall panes is like a huge living triptych where for so many years bushy old linden trees have been turning green, blossoming, dropping leaves, and after a covering of frost, blooming again, reflected in the mirror of Black Lake.
The panes are now covered with a delicate frosty mural. His German-born father would cast a majestic morning gaze through the window, as if saying an amiable hello to the winter month he called “Januar.”
This used to be his father’s office and little Volf wasn’t allowed in here. He used to steal in, though, hide out behind the curtains, flatten his nose against the cold glass, and admire the lake.
Now he himself works here. He even prefers sleeping right here, on the firm sofa by his father’s ancient writing desk. A quill pen and paper are ready on the desk – good thoughts have a habit of soaring at night. He has already forgotten when he last slept in the bedroom. That was probably back before the renovations began.
Grunya’s supervising the renovations, just as she has supervised everything that’s taken place in the old professorial apartment. Large, noisy, with a braid that winds around her head and is as thick as an arm (her arms are as thick as a leg, too), Grunya’s heavy soldier’s tread entered this home for duty twenty years ago and Volf Karlovich instantly capitulated, handing over the reins of his paltry household with a submissive joy so he could plunge headfirst into the intoxicating world of the mysteries of the human body.
Volf Karlovich Leibe was a surgeon and a third-generation professor at Kazan University. His practice was extensive and people waited months for operations. Each time he raised the scalpel over a patient’s soft, pale body, he sensed a cool trepidation in the very pit of his stomach: Do I have the right? The knife touched the skin and that chill changed to a warmth that spread to his limbs: I do not have the right not to attempt. And he attempted, conducting a mental dialogue with the cutaneous covering, muscle, and connective tissue through which he made his way to his goal, greeting the internal organs respectfully and whispering to blood vessels. He conversed with his patients’ bodies using a scalpel. And bodies responded to him. He told nobody about his dialogues: from an outsider’s perspective, this might appear to resemble mental illness.
Volf Karlovich had a second secret, too, which was that the mysteries of human birth excited him to an extreme, making his fingertips itch.
In his naive youth, intoxicated by the lectures of legendary Professor Phenomenov, he even wanted to stay and work in the department of obstetrics and female diseases. His father talked him out of it: “Deliver babies for peasant women your whole life?” Young Volf resigned himself to his father’s opinion and went into the noble department of surgery.
After becoming a surgeon and dissecting in the anatomical theater the unclaimed bodies of paupers and prostitutes that had been delivered from the police station as cadavers, he would sometimes discover a small fetus in a female womb. Each of these findings brought him to a state of vague excitement. A ridiculous thought would flash: What if this tiny little beast with the wrinkly face and caricature-like small extremities is actually alive?
“Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae,” said the inscription over the round building housing the university’s anatomical theater: “This place is where death delights in helping life.” And so it was. Unborn babies in the bellies of young women knifed from jealousy or accidentally murdered in bandits’ gunfights thirsted to reveal their little secrets to Volf Karlovich: their thin voices constantly swarmed in his head, whispering, muttering, and sometimes shouting.
And he surrendered. He performed his first hysterotomy at the age of twenty-five, in 1900, the turn of the century. He already had several dozen incisions of the womb to his credit by that time, and this new operation – the cesarean section – was not especially complex for him. There was a special feeling afterward, though, since it was one thing to cut a slippery bloody slab from a tumor in the patient’s womb and fling it in a basin, and something completely different to remove a live, quivering baby.