But, once outside, I found myself unable to work up the will to head straight to my hotel and pack. Instead, I traced a long arc around the Bolshoi, trying not to think about how I’d failed Lenny. I felt plunged in disgrace and ugliness. It was miserably obvious that I had actually believed that my pathetic banter with Kablukov at the Metropol would get him over “to my side.” Stupidly, I had only brought more chaos into my child’s already exposed life. The only way to get Lenny out of danger was to tell him the truth. This, I knew, was the reason I was in no hurry to get to the dacha to see him. To say what? That I had done the one thing I’d always warned him not to do: opened my mouth? So mired was I in my self-contempt that I suddenly realized I had no idea where I was walking. And here, against a blinding setting sun in Theater Square, I looked up to behold a scene at once ancient and intimately familiar: Beneath the statue of Karl Marx were half a dozen shabbily dressed, graying men—all of them about my age—gathered around open attaché cases and felt display boards to which were mounted hundreds of tiny lapel pins—those antique nickel-and-enamel-painted znachki that, like a thousand other amateur collectors, I’d once bought and mounted to felt boards of my own. These falerists had assembled to compare their rare specimens, to trade or to sell them (to profiteer, as might say Mr. Marx, in whose shadow all this speculation was happening). The znachki caught the five o’clock sun like scraps of gold and touched a deep memory of Lenny at five years old, a demon of childish excitement, jumping at a gift of a new znachok I’d brought back from one of my latest research trips to Leningrad. And all at once I was remembering kneeling beside him as he removed the souvenir pin from its acetate pocket—a dime-sized Yuri Gagarin head in a cosmonaut’s helmet or a Vostok 2 aircraft hurtling into black space—my fingers helping him affix the small bent pin carefully to the velvet lining of his own collector’s case.
As playthings these lapel pins could not have been much fun for a five-year-old. How much of the excitement, I now wondered, was Lenny’s, and how much was my own? Of the thousands of pins minted to commemorate every possible enterprise, sports club, city centennial, historical battle, our favorites were those celebrating space travel. Unlike the others, which were merely stylized paeans to socialist construction, the space pins were emblems of a more universal hope—a hope that we could, quite literally, rise above our failings as a species through technology, through science, through optimism. Was I, even then, conveying to him the sort of man I wished him to become—a scientist or an engineer, a believer in the reassurances of steady, incremental achievement? Were these the same expectations that were now at the heart of the belligerent hypersensitivity that reared itself whenever the subject of Lenny’s work—or lack of it—arose? I wanted to assure him that no good parent took satisfaction in his child’s failures. I happened to know a little something about how crushing defeat can feel, what a near decade of wasted years can do to the soul. Had I felt it possible to engage in such a conversation without risking some high point of drama or misunderstanding, I would have told my son about May 12, 1977, the day I was flatly deserted by my illusions. The day this beloved city of mine, to which he was still so in thrall, stopped being home.
During the years when I was buying Lenny his znachki, I had been working toward my candidate-of-sciences degree—equivalent to a Ph.D.—in hydrodynamics, pursued in between full-time work and minding a young family. Our apartment in those days consisted of two rooms. Our marital bed was a sofa Lucya and I unfolded each night so the children could sleep in a room of their own, and my “study,” where I performed calculations late into the night, was a corner of our negligible kitchen. At thirty-four, I already had one brief failed marriage under my belt (made disastrously while I was still a university student). This time around I was “getting it right”—remarried to a smart and devoted girl who was also an adoring mother of our kids, and who heroically bore both shares of the housework to make it possible for me to pursue my dream of a doctorate. Every several months—over a period of six years—I would travel to the wharves in Leningrad to perform studies into gases that might be used to separate ice from its grip on the surface of water. The practical applications of the research were numerous. In those days, the conventional methods of sending ships through ice-cold waters still involved heavy diesel engines to compress massive quantities of air; I was looking into ways to deploy gases from a ship’s hull to reduce drag, to reduce the bulk of unnecessary machinery, and to employ redesigned gas turbine engines, diffusers, and expansion chambers to generate hot compressed gas and save fuel. My ambition was nothing short of reshaping the discipline of shipbuilding.
I can no longer remember all the faces of those deciding my fate the day of my doctoral defense, or their questions. I remember that they asked me many. If any member of the review board was especially impressed with my findings, the enthusiasm was well hidden. By the time I left the room, I was covered in sweat. My pulse was still racing a good twenty minutes later, as I waited for the committee’s decision in an empty hallway of the Institute of Control Sciences. At last, one of the three came out of the room and approached me. He was short and seemed to be compensating for his small stature with an enormous mustache. During the prolonged interrogation, he had been the most encouraging of my work. “Some interesting ideas there, Brink,” he said to me in the corridor. He paused to repeat my name, “Brink,” somewhat speculatively. “I saw you were born in Kuibyshev. Your family from there?”
He was suggesting that he was familiar with my passport, which included, of course, the notorious “fifth column” revealing my American nationality and my Jewish last name. But at that moment I was sure that he was suggesting I wasn’t a “real Muscovite,” so I set him straight. “My parents were both from Moscow,” I informed him. “I was born during the war evacuation.”
“I’m from Kazan myself,” he said. “Not many of us Volgans here, are there?” He smiled. I had no idea what he was talking about. At least not then.
“I’ll be square with you, Brink,” he continued, gazing out the window. “I was hoping you might be from Kuibyshev, or someplace far off like that, because here in Moscow we have our production norms, if you will.” He pulled a cigarette neatly out of his shirt pocket and lit it. “The trouble is,” he said, after taking a hungry drag and clearing his throat, “we can’t give you a degree until we give it to everyone ahead of you. And in your case, Comrade, it’s a clogged pipeline.”
He looked at me to see if I understood him. I said nothing.
“So you have a choice,” he continued. “Wait six years in our queue, or”—he gestured toward the window, including in the sweep of his hand the whole of the Soviet empire west of the Volga—“you can go somewhere else—say, to Kuibyshev—enroll in their university, and defend your project through a less high-profile institute without our…restrictions.”
As with all bad news, the meaning of his words failed at first to register. I watched the caterpillar of his mustache flexing, but the message entering my ears was as abstract as a radio broadcast. Possibly a catastrophe, yes, but not necessarily applying to me.
I wasn’t a complete dolt. I knew about the Jewish quota system in Russia’s universities. I had beaten its odds before; maybe I thought I’d go on beating them forever. Whatever handicaps my “nationality” had inflicted on me, I’d been coping with them since I was six with as much patience as lefties cope with the tyranny of right-turning doorknobs, with the monocracy (in those days at least) of right-handed penmanship, scrupulously overcorrecting for my disadvantage with quiet, monumental effort.