Brainfire Read online

  He looked at Andreyev. “Have you ever thought what would happen if she … turned on you? If she turned on us?”

  Andreyev frowned. “I haven’t considered it.”

  “You think she can be kept in control by a diet of morphine and the promise of an exit visa? You think that’s enough?”

  “Yes,” Andreyev said. “I hope so.”

  “You hope so.” Domareski felt a wild despair, the cul-de-sac of some hopelessness. “You make me sick, Andreyev. This whole business makes me sick. How can you lend yourself to this …”

  Andreyev was watching him and there was, Domareski thought, a warning in the expression, as if the tightening of the brow, the sudden lines across the forehead, were a means of saying: Be quiet. Be still. Something in the look made him afraid.

  “I understand as well as anybody what she’s capable of,” Andreyev said. “To me it’s a matter of research.”

  “Research,” Domareski said. “You cover a multitude of your sins that way, Andreyev. The holy grail of research—”

  “What would you do, then? What would you do?”

  Domareski was silent for a while. He imagined Mrs. Blum’s face, her lumpen hands, and what he felt was a sense of his own purpose sinking like a weight in water. It would not take much, he had thought before. It would take only an increased dosage. She trusts me. Trusts. He looked at Andreyev and saw an expression now of desperation in the Scientist’s face; fatigue, weariness, the soldier who has been ordered to too many impossible fronts. And, despite himself, despite his own inherent controls, he said quietly, “I would kill her.”

  3.

  The locomotive stopped somewhere between Irkutsk and Cheremkhovo; workmen, muffled in protective clothing, bent against a sudden blizzard, were clearing the line. She could see them alongside the train: they looked strangely anonymous, their faces masked, hats pulled down over their ears, scarves wrapped around their necks. They dug with huge spades. An oxyacetylene torch flashed, burning the collected ice on the rail. Instead of speaking to one another they made quick gestures, raising their hands, waving, flapping. She pulled her blanket over her shoulders, then sipped the hot tea that Domareski had brought to her.

  “You look rested,” he said.

  She regarded him a moment, sensing that behind his smile, beyond the light in his gray eyes, there was some kind of discomfort. He’s afraid of me, she thought. Afraid—as Aaron had been afraid.

  He pushed his fingers through his long gray hair. Flecks of dandruff settled on the collar of his dark coat. “How is the pain?” he asked.

  She sipped the tea, then said, “A little better.”

  “Medical science has its shortcomings,” he said, and smiled. “Don’t breathe a word of it to a soul—but arthritis happens to be one of them.”

  She set the cup down on the small table beside her bunk, conscious of the sight of her own bulky fingers and how they irritated her. She wanted to hide them under her blanket. She licked her dry lips and looked at Domareski. How could she talk of her mental pictures? How could she tell him what she had seen? That moment of excruciation, the searing of flesh, the rupture of bone, the outrage of a man’s dying? Hua, she thought. And for what?

  “I spoke with Comrade Sememko,” he said. “Again. You have to say everything at least twenty-five times to a politician before he begins to understand what you’re talking about.”

  He’s lying, she thought. I am old, I am being lied to and patronized—and yet he knows, he knows I can see, that he is like a sheet of thin glass to me.

  “He said the formalities will be taken care of when we get to Moscow.”

  “Moscow?”

  “Didn’t you know? That’s where they keep all the rubber stamps.” He was trying to make a joke, she saw that. But his smile was thin and his gray eyes uncharacteristically opaque—as if a vital part of him were elsewhere, not on this train, not in this compartment, but removed to some great distance. She pressed her hands together: there was a faint spark of pain.

  “Anyway,” he said, “why in the name of heaven do you want to go to Israel so badly? It doesn’t snow in Israel, you know. What will you do all day? The sun will burn you to death.”

  He had risen, walked to the window; he was looking out at the workmen laboring miserably in the drifts. He shook his head back and forth.

  “Ah. I promise you. You’ll miss all this gorgeous snow, Mrs. Blum.”

  She closed her eyes once more: it was odd how sleep came back on her, rather like a tide. No matter how rested she felt, regardless of how long she had slept, there was always a drowsiness on the margins of her mind—like clouds, she thought, clouds rolling in from hills. A small comfort, a small death. When she stared into the clouds she surrendered her hold on the things around her, as if they were beads breaking apart on a string, scattering, rolling this way and that—

  An increased dosage

  Startled, opening her eyes, she looked at Domareski. But he hadn’t said anything. He wasn’t even looking at her. She struggled into a sitting position. An increased dosage? What did that mean? Why had she picked up on that? Now Domareski turned to look at her and there was a slight expression of sadness on his face. An increased dosage of what? She watched him a moment as he came back from the window. He sat on the edge of the bunk and picked up a leather wallet from the table. He opened it, flicking through the snapshots in the plastic covers.

  “I think I know your family almost as well as you,” he said. She watched the snapshots move as he flipped them past her—and the colors jumped at her, faces transformed by sunlight, photographs incandescent with captured light: they were not still, stiff, posed; they rippled, they were animated, figures coming off the surface at her. She took the wallet from him and she thought: My life. My whole life. Without this there is nothing else. The boy, Stanislav—no, he wasn’t a boy anymore, he wasn’t the child Aaron had held in his arms, he was forty now—but he would always be the boy. The slim girl he had married, the girl with the dark liquid eyes and the captivating name of Yael, the sound as of some soft bird skimming the surface of tranquil water—Yael; and the grandchildren—a sturdy boy who looked as Aaron had once looked, a girl as slim as her mother. The longing to touch them was painful to her. She had imagined and rehearsed it an infinity of times, seeing them run toward her, seeing all that shyness and strangeness break down in loving; she had felt her face pressed against them, their hair, their hands, how they would feel to touch. She knew them: in all their mannerisms, their delights, in all their moods and concerns and daydreams and ambitions, she knew them. And the longing, in its intensity, was worse than ever. It was a weight in her heart.

  “You understand,” she said to Domareski.

  He said nothing. He nodded his head. He laid his hand upon the back of her wrist.

  “I’m a prisoner in this country,” she said. “I’m a prisoner.”

  He stared at her now and she caught it again: An increased dosage, that’s all. And for a moment she was afraid of him, afraid of the man she had come to think of as her only ally—because she could not trust Andreyev, who was weak, who was even more of a prisoner than she, or his frigid assistant. There was only Domareski and she could not afford to be afraid of him. She gripped his fingers and looked directly into his eyes. Where did this fear come from?

  “I’ve got to go to them,” she said. “Do you understand what it means to long for something so badly that each time you feel the longing you bleed? Do you understand that?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “No. No, you don’t understand.” She took her hand from his arm: her pain was bad, spreading, now a sensation no longer confined to hands and wrists but carried deep into her center. And she found herself weighing the death of the Chinese soldier, weighing that grief, against her own terrifying desire for these people in the collection of snapshots. Trapped: how could you live a life in such a trap? Trapped by a country, imprisoned by your own wretched gift? But it wasn’t a gift, was it? It was a par
t of being doomed, of belonging amongst the damned.

  She watched Domareski rise and go to the door. He turned once and smiled, a smile pale to the point of nonexistence, a mere distension of lip.

  “An increased dosage of what?” she asked. “Of what?”

  He looked puzzled. “I don’t follow you.”

  She lay back down, watched him a moment, saw the door slide open and then close; and he was gone.

  4.

  “He said he would kill her.”

  Andreyev heard his own sentence, his own thick voice. He watched the snow fall against the window of Katya’s compartment, aware of an aroma trapped in the enclosed space, a scent he could not quite place.

  Katya was silent. Watching her, he was reminded of Domareski’s attitude in the corridor, and he felt the same old conflicts begin anew—it was reasonable and unreasonable, simultaneously logical and absurd. Domareski was both right and wrong at one and the same time. How did you deal with that?

  Katya sat on the edge of her bunk, smoothed her skirt with a steady movement of her hand. “Do you think he will?”

  Andreyev looked at her: he felt an unaccustomed sense of desire, a strange need to slide the bolt on the door and cross the room to her, throw her back across the bunk—a rape, not a communion; a violation in which he could dissolve conflicts.

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why are you so sure?”

  “He wouldn’t have told me, would he?”

  Katya clasped her hands on her knees. “He’s a risk.”

  “A risk?”

  “To all our work,” she said.

  She smoked a cigarette, fitting it into a holder. Andreyev watched the smoke drift to the cold window. The moon was up somewhere, smothered by cloud. A suggestion of silver, a hint of frosted metal. Domareski—he felt a sudden affection for the man, a sympathy with his disenchantment, attuned to his disillusion. He also resented the Physician’s strength because it reflected, like a savage mirror, what he considered his own weaknesses.

  Katya got to her feet, ejected the cigarette, stamped it into the floor. “You’re prepared to ignore it?”

  “Yes,” Andreyev said. Why not? Why not indeed? “He’s going through …” His voice trailed off; he watched Katya as she waited for him to finish.

  “A phase?” she asked. “A stage? Some misgivings? There’s no fool like a humanist fool, Victor.”

  An accusing edge to the voice: Andreyev could hear the slice of a razor blade slip through a thin substance. Who was the fool here? Himself or Domareski?

  “You’ve worked very hard,” Katya said. “Don’t underestimate how hard, Victor. Don’t misjudge anything. Do I make myself plain?”

  He listened to the train, the roll of wheels over the slick tracks, and he thought of the years—years of labor, years of detection and painstaking investigation—and he felt the weight of accumulated disappointments. There had been scorn too; humiliation, embarrassment, a skeptical disregard of his work. Do I make myself plain?

  “How often do you encounter a Mrs. Blum?” Katya asked.

  “Never,” he said.

  “Well then?”

  Andreyev went to the window, peered out into the darkness, the rush of reflected light from the carriages that struck the snowbanks alongside the tracks. “I don’t think Domareski would do anything to harm her,” he said.

  Katya was silent for a while. A restless hand went up to her hair; fingers patted the short, tight locks. How unattractive she is, Andreyev thought, glancing at her, glimpsing her half-open mouth, the small teeth. He was conscious of how close to her he stood; he stepped away from the window, turning his back to her.

  “No,” he said. “I think he wants to let off steam.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “That’s all,” he answered, struck by uncertainty now, remembering Domareski’s strange assurance in the corridor—that strength, single-mindedness. An honorable man, Andreyev thought, in a world of deceit. An honorable man made to perform against his principles: was there a more dangerous creature than that?

  5.

  The Politician, Sememko, had a private car at the back of the train. It was guarded, more for reasons of paranoia than any fear of a breach in security, by two agents of the KGB; both were bored men who stood in the corridor and watched night fall through the snow. Neither looked remotely interested in the wilderness outside. They leaned against the walls, whistled, touched their automatic pistols, and sometimes exchanged quick phrases, jokes about the cold, prospects of Moscow, brief arguments over the merits of soccer teams—Moscow Dynamo compared to Lokomotiv, for example. They were men who had become accustomed to waiting, who had learned how to whittle their time away in tedious places. The red-haired one pressed his face to the dark glass and hummed a phrase from a tune he had recently heard on “The Voice of America” over a confiscated radio. The other, a lean man with thick spectacles, was walking around in small circles, observing the marks left by his shoes, trying to fit new footprints into old ones; he gave the impression of a novice tightrope artist who did not exactly trust his eyesight.

  The red-haired one peered out into the blackness and asked, “Do you think they’re screwing?”

  Removing his spectacles, rubbing the lenses with a small rag, the other said, “I wouldn’t touch her with your proverbial ten-foot pole. Would you?”

  The red-haired man shrugged. “It would pass some of the time,” he said. “You could always pull a bag over her head.”

  “You couldn’t exactly pull a bag over her body, could you?”

  Both were silent for a while, both thinking about the thin woman who had gone, not twenty minutes before, into Sememko’s car. The lean man replaced his glasses and laughed, making a masturbatory gesture with his right hand. “It would be better than that,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t bet on it,” the red-haired one said.

  Silence. Both men were still for a while, as if they were listening for the sound of sexual activity from behind the closed door of Sememko’s car. But there was only the rhythmic ticking of the wheels on the track and sometimes the sound of the wind wailing around the train.

  And then the door was opened; the woman stood there in a square of bright yellow light. Both men stood attentively upright, looking at her.

  She moved past them, stopped, and then turned to face them. She said, “I believe Comrade Sememko wants to see you.”

  6.

  Domareski was alone in the empty dining car. It was late now and there was no longer any food or drink to be had. He sat at a table near the door; the white tablecloth, a piece of thin linen, reflected the pale light from a lamp. The overhead lights had been extinguished earlier and his lamp created the effect of a tiny oasis of illumination in the long car. Papers were spread in front of him; they pertained to matters he would have to attend to back in Moscow—as if, by the act of reading them, he could relegate Mrs. Blum to some substratum of consciousness, put her in a place where he would not have to deal with her. He was tired; he massaged his eyelids, blinked, stared at the papers on the linen cloth. A colleague—Glazkov—had recently found an enzyme in both thymus and bone marrow: it was called terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase, or TdT, and Glazkov had been investigating its helpfulness in determining therapy protocols to which leukemia patients might respond. TdT, Domareski thought, and he had a sudden longing to get off this train, to assist Glazkov in any way he could, to put an end to this whole business of Mrs. Blum.

  What was he anyhow?

  A physician—yes.

  He wasn’t a hired thug, a technician with a needle. His business wasn’t that of reducing old women to a state of wreckage from which there could be no return, no wholeness; it wasn’t up to him to take a person and reduce that person to splinters. Damn them, he thought.

  Damn them—

  He turned his face away from the papers. Flecks of snow, maddened crystals, could be seen falling away from the window, disturbed by t
he wind and the motion of the train. He saw his own yellowy reflection in the glass. TdT, he thought. Leukemia. Therapy protocols.

  They.

  He remembered the face of Professor Yeremenko, his rather elaborate room at Moscow University, the man’s contagious nervousness, the palm of one hand forever stroking a marble paperweight, a Bulgarian souvenir; he remembered Yeremenko’s stumbling presentation, the stuttered proposition, the hooded reference to Mrs. Blum. There had been sunlight in the room, particles of dust shifting in an orange column of light, the room itself the color of a decaying tangerine.

  It will take you out of Moscow for a while, Domareski.

  Yes, Domareski thought.

  Yes—

  Mrs. Blum has, hmmm, special talents.

  Domareski had heard himself refuse; he remembered the weight of his own negative response, how the refusal had somehow lain trapped in that orange room.

  I don’t think I make myself plain, Domareski.

  How so?

  They have indicated that there are no choices. You hare been selected for this, hmmm, special duty.

  Domareski recalled a fragment of ash in Yeremenko’s beard; it had hung from a coiled hair like a small white flake. Why recall that now? A detail, banal, nothing. Special duty. He should have known that Yeremenko hadn’t clambered to the top of the heap because of his humanitarian abilities; he should have understood that Yeremenko’s summit had been reached only by circumnavigating the scientific dissidents and adhering, clinging, to the Party line. To that great nipple of the State. There was neither room nor space for rejection, for refusal. You did what you were told.

  No choices. Special duty. Don’t you understand? It is a simple case of administering morphine. It shouldn’t upset you.

  Domareski stared into the light bulb until his eyes hurt. They. Them. All his life he had been conscious of anonymous forces shaping the patterns of things. The creations of paradigms, matrices, obligations by which you lived. To stand up against them took a special bravery, didn’t it? The courage of history, the simple courage of the fool: stand up and be counted—but the count was small, the lure of the labor camp, oblivion in the permafrost, overwhelming.