“Are there many pressures in his out-stressed life?” I asked.
“I like that, out-stressed. That’s putting it mildly,” she answered.
“Does he have a great deal of money?” I thought to ask something practical.
“Sort of, but he has two ex-wives and a new wife, who is soon to be another ex-wife. They all cost.”
“And you?” I wondered where she fit in.
“I’ve known Harry forever; we went to high school together. We started spending time together when he was leaving his first wife, Felice. She was a friend. We’re all from Hartford.”
“So Harry is his real name?”
“It is, but that’s not what he wrote on the motel register, is it?”
“No, I think it said Alfred E. Smith.”
“Harry’s in local politics. He budgets the city’s money. Smith is one of his heroes.”
“He was a politician in New York. I know, I’ve been studying for my citizenship. He’s the answer to one of the questions. I don’t mind waiting with you until Harry wakes up.”
“Who is known as New York’s ‘first citizen’? I bet you that’s the question. He studied that guy’s life. Maybe we should change his name in the register to Rip Van Winkle.”
“I’m not familiar with this political figure.”
“Never mind, Stalina. How about a drink?”
I dialed the front desk.
“Front desk.” Mr. Suri sounded very efficient.
“Mr. Suri, it’s Stalina.”
“Yes. What’s going on in there?” he replied.
“She needed my help to get him on the bed. He’s breathing well. It will be another hour before he comes to consciousness at least.”
“They’ll owe us for two more hours,” he reminded me.
“I know, I’ll get the money.”
“Let’s have a drink, and then perhaps you can tell me more,” I said to Joanie.
Chapter Twelve: More Vodka
Joanie’s affection for Harry brought Trofim to mind, and my time with him in Leningrad after I graduated from the Vilnius University. While he was my professor, we spent a lot of time together but never touched. I was in his lab every day; he was a most well-liked professor. While he walked around the lab observing our experiments, he would balance and twirl a beaker on the tip of his finger, never missing a beat to explain where we had gone off on one of our calculations or experiments. When he came close to me, I shivered. Every move he made I felt in my bones; every time he looked at me, I was hypnotized. Trofim was tall and broad; his receding hairline showed off his large head and prominent forehead to great effect. One day I felt his breath on the back of my neck as I labored over the right balance of sulfur, rubidium, and strontium for a plant absorption experiment with a bit of pyrotechnics. I turned my head, and he whispered in my ear.
“Good work, Stalina, you almost have it. Stay after class and I will show you how to finish.”
I was so nervous I nearly knocked over my bubbling crucible. When we talked after class, I was so dazed by his attention that I barely heard a word he said about my experiment, but when he asked me to be his assistant I jumped to attention and practically barked, “Yes, sir!” He laughed, told me I had beautiful eyes, and kept chatting.
“What brought you here to Vilnius, so far from Leningrad?”
I collected myself and took a deep breath. “My father went here from 1918 to 1922. He was a writer, a poet.”
“I know your father’s poetry. He was well respected here. A scholar of great renown.”
This was unbelievable to me. I already would have done anything for Trofim; now I was completely under his spell.
“I wanted to know the hallways and classrooms that he loved. It became an obsession,” I said innocently.
“You obviously inherited your father’s sharp intellect, although I don’t know anything about your mother.”
“She is also very smart,” I said proudly.
He hugged my shoulders with his strong, broad hands and thanked me for agreeing to be his assistant. By the end of the semester, I knew this was more than just a schoolgirl crush when he gifted me with the lab coat and told me he was offered a job in Leningrad.
“I hope we can see each other when I get settled into my new lab at the university.”
I had been back in Leningrad for a month when he called. He wanted to see me and show me his lab. He was excited about the work, but lonely in a new city. His family did not join him right away, and even though it was wrong, I could not stay away. I was no longer his student, I was a woman, and as they say, the flesh is weak. And they are right about that. Oh, if it had only been the flesh, it would have been easy to give him up. He made me laugh, he was brilliant, and I felt inspired when I was with him. He stirred me. No phrase describes it; for once my words cannot express my feelings.
The first time we kissed, spring had finally come to Leningrad after the long, frozen winter of 1954. The ice on the Neva was melting, and snow still held to the ground. The gripping silence of the season was over. Our winters are known for the depths of the cold, but this one was known as “the thaw” because it was the year after Stalin was dead and gone, and everything Soviet was topsy-turvy. Burying Stalin left some with tears of joy to be rid of the monster, while others believed he was our savior. We still had to be careful; you could not trust anyone, so I let my heart take me wherever it wanted to go. I was maybe foolish, but I will never forget my time with Trofim.
The state university set him up with his own lab. His students were hungry for a new era of science and flocked to his lectures. The university buildings are across the river, and from the window of his lab you could see the two-hundred-foot gilded spire of the Admiralty. The river and canals divide the city into many islands. Vasilesky Island is the home of the state university and many important buildings of science. Walking to his lab down the long, long hallway of the school, you could see the beer garden barges and boats filled with tourists traveling up and down the river. The lab was sparse but well equipped. He had changed his research from biology to chemistry and then to physics because it was safest during Stalin’s time to be a physicist. Stalin was convinced that in order to build a Soviet atom bomb, they had to employ Einstein’s theories. Other sciences and their leading minds were condemned—genetics, Darwin, biology, all denied. The only decoration in the lab was a needlepoint his wife had made having heard about his meagerly equipped lab. It read, “It’s better to have a small fish than a big cockroach.”
“My wife is very practical,” he said.
He stood close enough for our lab coats to touch. I had a sense from the sober look and message of the needlepoint that Trofim was in need of affection. I admired his charts, flickering spectral scopes, and heating crucibles. Out of the deep freezer he pulled a sealed test tube of clear liquid and a beaker that had something purple and gray hanging in frozen liquid.
Jiggling the heavy liquid in the test tube, he said, “This is the best vodka; we make it here from the original recipe of Mendeleev. Let’s drink to being together in Leningrad, Stalina.”
Mendeleev’s chemistry for the distillation of vodka couldn’t be outlawed. Stalin could not have Russia without vodka or the atomic bomb.
“What’s in the other beaker?” I asked.
“That’s my good luck brain,” he said.
“Whose brain?” I asked suspiciously.
“T. D. Lysenko, the great scientist and my teacher.”
