Elise Blackwell: Hunger

I remember the slogan-shouting. A woman dressed as Gorky’s mother yelled, “Make fun of those who fall behind!” Someone else screamed, “He who does not laugh, does not eat!”

But there was very little laughter, and I chuckled the next day when the great director showed me a write-up of the Gorky Park carnival in a foreign newspaper. The astute journalist had commented that Russians enjoy themselves without smiling, always taking their pleasure sadly.

Alena and I walked under the park’s welcoming banner: LIFE HAS BECOME BETTER, LIFE HAS BECOME MORE CHEERFUL, and took a map of the park’s attractions. I remember well how Alena’s pale-blue shirt felt ethereally light and silky against my bare arm as we rode the Ferris wheel, how she bowled so much better than I did but never celebrated her victories. I remember thinking that Alena, like those carnival-going Russians that the foreign journalist had poked fun of, took her pleasure sadly.

And I remember thinking that it was a beautiful way to take pleasure, that she did things the right way, the way that I should. I remember almost all of the day that I fell in love with my wife. I remembered it the next day and remember it still.

Yet I did forget, until much later, about the parachute tower. I wanted to jump and Alena did not, and so I teased her about being afraid. But then I saw that it was not fear but something else altogether behind her reticence.

“We’ve done so many frivolous things today,” she said. “I’m at the end of my capacity for it.”

She must have been falling in love with me by then, though, because when I asked her to jump anyway, she consented. My wife never refused me, though I could not then and cannot now tell you why. She jumped, seemingly without fear or joy.

I jumped with great fear and great joy.

Later, we watched the dance floor from our table in the beer garden and sipped good lager and snacked on sharp Swiss cheese and spicy sausages. It took all of my self-control not to lick the froth left by the beer on the perfect little curl of Alena’s upper lip.

She said, “People court danger to lose themselves or find themselves. Which one do you pursue?”

I looked at this woman I now loved and decided to always tell her the truth. “I don’t know. Both, I think.”

She nodded, accepting my paltry answer to her good and important question. “I don’t need to do either,” she said. “I hope that’s all right with you.”

We married a few months later, and my commitment to be honest and faithful to my strong, perfect wife lasted for more than a year.

• • •

Sunk by Lysenko before we recognized it, the perils of underestimation. Who could have known that he could market his vernalization — the great director called it infernalization — so well to Commissar Yakovlev that the bureaucrat would advocate a Department of Vernalization? But Lysenko was underestimated by many, and the great director was always one to easily dismiss idiotic ideas.

Yet Stalin himself sat in the audience and clapped with his big hands for Lysenko’s 1935 speech to the Second All-Union Congress of Shock Collective Farmers — flaming arrows of words that all but named the great director as a class enemy of vernalization.

Back in 1927, we had laughed hard at Fedorovich’s description of Lysenko in Pravda . I burned the clipping a decade and a half later, though for warmth and not for spite nor even amusement.

It read:

If one is to judge a man by first impression, Lysenko gives one the feeling of a toothache. Stingy of words and insignificant of face, he has a dejected mien. All one remembers is his sullen look and his creeping along the earth as if, at the very least, he were ready to do someone in. Only once did this barefoot scientist let a smile pass, and that was at the mention of Poltava cherry dumplings with sugar and sour cream.

The great director had been noble, it is without doubt, but also willful. Courageous but also proud, high-minded but also deaf. There were so many warnings. An article appeared as early as 1931 on “applied botany, or Lenin’s renovation of the earth.” It denounced our institute as reactionary, unrelated to Lenin’s thoughts or intents, inimical to them, alien in class. The great director’s response was printed eventually, but only several months later and accompanied by editorial accusations that he concealed agricultural sabotage with the label of pure science.

Lysenko had already started to call the institute Babylon. “Babylon must crumble,” he would say. “Dust.”

The following summer, the government’s decree on selection demanded that the required ten or a dozen years to develop cereals for different regions be reduced to four and that the crops be uniform and high-yielding. The great director spoke his skepticism, his voice cascading down to the heavy wooden table around which sat the men who mattered. Lysenko pressed his soft hand into his soft belly, stained his face with a smile, his swine eyes almost disappearing into skin. He promised to do it in fewer than three years.

Of course he could not, but doing mattered so much less than saying, something I tried to make the great director understand. He would only stare at me, pull his hand into a fist in such a way that it would twist the papers sitting on the surface of his desk, and whisper the word mutant . Mutated mutant, he would hiss.

And then he would say, so rationally, that science is not compromise. Things are either true, not true, or unknown. Yes, I would say, unknown.

But he always elected to ignore this and to continue by saying that he did not decide the results of his experiments before he conducted them. Once, he finished the conversation by saying, “There is nothing we can do but stand up for what is true, or at least state the truth and nothing else.”

Of course, he was both right and wrong. He was right that we could not honestly say that we could produce what Stalin demanded in four years. But he might have found a way to say something other than no, hidden our disgust for Lysenko, who had seized on the class issue with all his surprising vigor — and with increasing success.

A few years later, Lysenko and the plagiarist Prezent announced a new concept of heredity to replace the old chromosome theory, which they denounced as reactionary, idealist, metaphysical, barren, and all things bad. Lysenko kept pushing his idiotic wheat vernalization and had farmers across the Union soaking their seeds and cursing their yields.

In 1939 the great director was denied papers to travel to a meeting in Scotland. He shrugged and declared he would rather spend the week collecting. At the Scottish meeting he did not attend, he was elected president of the International Congress of Genetics.

• • •

At least at first, I laughed when Lysenko called the institute Babylon. He meant to insult us as corrupt and decadent, of course, but I always heard it as a compliment. The ancient Babylonians had impressed me ever since I studied the early history of agricultural science back in the university.

Like the members of our own expeditions, the Babylonians traveled widely to collect medicinal herbs and unusual fruits. Either they or the Assyrians, who inhabited Babylon for a time, planted the world’s first botanical garden. Babylonian agriculture was a thing of envy.

The ancient Babylonians ate dates, figs, pomegranates, apples, pears, and plums. They ate onions, leeks, garlic, and turnips, as well as cucumbers and lettuces. They made cheeses from the milk of sheep and goats and dined on game, pork, and mutton. Locusts were a delicacy. In old Babylon, no fewer than fifty kinds of fish were eaten, though fish apparently went out of fashion later, as the word fisherman came to mean something closer to ruffian, opportunist .