'Innocent people don't get arrested,' he had said in the days of Yagoda and Yezhov. Alexandra Vladimirovna had once recounted an incident that had taken place in Kamyshin in 1918. Some property-owners and merchants had been put on a barge and drowned, with all their children. Some of these children had been school-friends of Marusya. Nikolay Grigorevich had just said angrily: 'Well, what would you do with people who hate the Revolution – feed them on pastries?' Why shouldn't she have the right to be happy? Why should she pity someone who had always been so pitiless himself?
For all this, she knew deep down that Nikolay Grigorevich was by no means as cruel as she was making out.
She took off her thick skirt, one she had bought by barter at the market in Kuibyshev, and put on her summer dress. It was the only dress she had left after the fire in Stalingrad. It was the dress she had worn that evening in Stalingrad when she and Novikov had gone for a walk along the banks of the Volga.
Not long before she was deported, she had asked Jenny Genri-khovna if she had ever been in love. Clearly embarrassed, she had replied: 'Yes, I was in love with a boy with golden curls and light blue eyes. He had a white collar and a velvet jacket. I was eleven years old and I knew him only by sight.'
What had happened to the boy with the curls and the velvet jacket? What had happened to Jenny Genrikhovna?
Yevgenia sat down on the bed and looked at the clock. Shargorod-sky usually came to see her around this time. No, she wasn't in the mood for intellectual conversation.
She quickly put on her coat and scarf. This was senseless – the train must have left long ago.
There was a huge crowd of people around the station, all sitting on parcels and sacks. Yevgenia walked up and down the little back-streets. One woman asked her if she had any ration coupons, another if she had any coupons for railway tickets. A few people glanced at her sleepily and suspiciously. A goods train thundered past platform number one. The station walls trembled and the glass in the windows rang. She felt as though her heart were trembling too. Then some open wagons went past; they were carrying tanks.
Yevgenia felt suddenly happy. More and more tanks came by. The soldiers sitting on them with their helmets and machine-guns looked as though they had been cast from bronze.
She walked home, swinging her arms like a little boy. She had unbuttoned her coat and she kept glancing at her summer dress. Suddenly the streets were lit up by the evening sun. This harsh, dusty city, this cold city that was now preparing for another winter, seemed suddenly bright, rosy and triumphant. She went into the house. Glafira Dmitrievna, the senior tenant, who had seen the colonel coming to visit Yevgenia, smiled ingratiatingly and said: 'There's a letter for you.'
'This is my lucky day,' thought Yevgenia as she opened the envelope. It was from her mother in Kazan.
She read the first few lines and gave a plaintive cry: 'Tolya! Tolya!'
6
Viktor's sudden inspiration, the idea that had come to him on the street that night, formed the basis of an entirely new theory. The equations he worked out over the following weeks were not an appendix to the classical, generally accepted theory; nor were they even an enlargement of it. Instead, the classical, supposedly all- embracing theory had become a particular instance included in the framework of a wider theory elaborated by Viktor.
He stopped going to the Institute for a while; Sokolov took over the supervision of the laboratory work. Viktor hardly even left the house now; he sat at his desk for hours on end or strode up and down the room. Only in the evening did he sometimes go out for a walk, choosing the deserted streets near the station so as not to meet anyone he knew. At home he behaved the same as ever – making jokes at meals, reading newspapers, listening to Soviet Information Bureau bulletins, teasing Nadya, talking to his wife, asking Alexandra Vladimirovna about her work at the factory.
Lyudmila had the feeling that Viktor was now behaving in the same way as herself: he too did everything he was supposed to, while inwardly not participating in the life of the family at all. What he did came easily to him simply because it was habitual. This similarity, however, was merely superficial and did nothing to bring Lyudmila closer to Viktor. The husband and wife had quite opposite reasons for their alienation from the life of the family – as opposite as life and death.
Uncharacteristically, Viktor had no doubts about his results. As he formulated the most important scientific discovery of his life, he felt absolute certainty as to its truth. When this idea of a system of equations that would allow a new interpretation of a wide group of physical phenomena – when this idea had first come to him, he had sensed its truth immediately, without any of his usual doubts and hesitations. Even now, as he came to the end of the complicated mathematical demonstration, checking and double-checking each step he had taken, his certainty was no greater than at that first moment of inspiration on the empty street.
Sometimes he tried to understand the path he had followed. From the outside it all seemed quite simple.
The laboratory experiments had been intended to confirm the predictions of the theory. They had failed to do this. The contradiction between the experimental results and the theory naturally led him to doubt the accuracy of the experiments. A theory that had been elaborated on the basis of decades of work by many researchers, a theory that had then explained many things in subsequent experimental results, seemed quite unshakeable. Repetition of the experiments had shown again and again that the deflections of charged particles in interaction with the nucleus still failed to correspond with what the theory predicted. Even the most generous allowance for the inaccuracy of the experiments, for the imperfection of the measuring apparatus and the emulsions used to photograph the fission of the nuclei, could in no way account for such large discrepancies.
Realizing that there could be no doubt as to the accuracy of the results, Viktor had then attempted to patch up the theory. He had postulated various arbitrary hypotheses that would reconcile the new experimental data with the theory. Everything he had done had been based on one fundamental belief: that, since the theory was itself deduced from experimental data, it was impossible for an experiment to contradict it.
An enormous amount of labour was expended in an attempt to reconcile the new data with the theory. Nevertheless, the patched-up theory still failed to account for new contradictions in the results from the laboratory. The theory remained as powerless as ever, though it still seemed unthinkable to reject it.
It was at this moment that something had shifted.
The old theory had ceased to be something fundamental and all-embracing. It didn't turn out to be a mistake or an absurd blunder, but simply a particular instance accounted for by the new theory… The purple-clad dowager had bowed her head before the new empress… All this had taken only a moment.
When Viktor thought about just how the new theory had come to him, he was struck by something quite unexpected. There appeared to be absolutely no logical connection between the theory and the experiments. The tracks he was following suddenly broke off. He couldn't understand what path he had taken.
Previously he had always thought that theories arose from experience and were engendered by it. Contradictions between an existing theory and new experimental results naturally led to a new, broader theory.
But it had all happened quite differently. Viktor was sure of this. He had succeeded at a time when he was in no way attempting to connect theory with experimental data, or vice versa.
The new theory was not derived from experience. Viktor could see this quite clearly. It had arisen in absolute freedom; it had sprung from his own head. The logic of this theory, its chain of reasoning, was quite unconnected to the experiments conducted by Markov in the laboratory. The theory had sprung from the free play of thought. It was this free play of thought – which seemed quite detached from the world of experience – that had made it possible to explain the wealth of experimental data, both old and new.
The experiments had been merely a jolt that had forced him to start thinking. They had not determined the content of his thoughts.
All this was quite extraordinary…
His head had been full of mathematical relationships, differential equations, the laws of higher algebra, number and probability theory. These mathematical relationships had an existence of their own in some void quite outside the world of atomic nuclei, stars, and electromagnetic or gravitational fields, outside space and time, outside the
