The Commissariat of Enlightenment

1910

THE
train jolted forward so abruptly that the three passengers in the first-class coach sensed that they had been propelled much farther than a few meters from the Tula station. One of the men (Gribshin) felt as if he had been thrust from the era in which he lived. The second man (Vorobev) perceived that he had been jerked out of a manner of thought that had become complacent after years of discovery; now he was poised at the brink of revelation. The third man (Khaitover), who had been resting with his eyes closed, now sprung them wide, as if he had been suddenly brought to life. The three men had not yet made each other’s acquaintance.

The initial surge bunched the cars, they paused in repose as the engine strained against them, and then the couplings tensed, there was another, now-anticipated jolt, and the train pressed forward again. The station’s cream-yellow bricks slid past the window, followed by railway sheds and equipment of uncertain purpose. Leafless nearby trees crossed more distant ones. Patches of white, remnants of the first snowfall, dotted the hard fields.

The third man, who after a lengthy, restless, and intermittently
ruinous residence in Russia now called himself Grakham Khaitover, his name Cyrillicized into something outlandishly guttural, scarcely noticed the first man, Gribshin, who was young and Russian. Of the second man, sitting opposite him, Khaitover remarked only a faint chemical, fungal scent, indefinitely disturbing but not unpleasant. At this crucial moment—but why was it crucial? why had the fog into which he had dozed not yet cleared?—the odor seemed pregnant with a message he could not read.

The second man, Professor Vladimir Vorobev, ignored the first man as some clerk or student, destined to be banished to a green third-class car once the conductor checked his ticket. If Vorobev had been told that Gribshin would someday make a revolution, he would have shrugged and replied that he was a scientist completely uninterested in politics. This practiced denial would be developed into an argument of contemptuous disinterest by the time he reached Bulgaria, years later, after fleeing there with former elements of the White Army, and then modified again into one of innocent apolitical ignorance once he returned to the Ukraine at the end of the Civil War.

The revelation that had just come to Professor Vorobev had to do with the specific gravity of certain liquid substances, particularly glycerin in respect to distilled water, and then again in respect to the specific gravity of human blood. The other substance to be taken under consideration was potassium acetate, a compound typically used in fabric conditioner.

Tula’s outlying settlements glided past, followed by snow-frosted small cottages, grain silos, the brown dome of a village church, and a tableau of peasants frozen in time, leaning away from their carts, against the direction of history. Professor Vorobev turned his attention toward the third man, Khaitover, who was clearly a foreigner. Khaitover was gangly and fair, with a small,
yellow mustache. The professor noted the failings of his toilet: the wrinkled business suit; the light, uneven side whiskers; the scuffed shoes; the drowsy demeanor. As the train picked up speed, rocking through the countryside, the foreigner’s head fell against the mud-specked window and his eyelids began to flicker.

Vorobev cleared his throat, as if in a lecture hall, and inquired:

“Sir, are you a pilgrim, or a journalist?”

Khaitover opened his eyes, but remained leaning against the window. The professor fairly glowed with the benevolence of his question. Khaitover responded in heavily accented, grammatically awry, snarly Russian.

“Do I look like a bloody pilgrim?”

“There are many pilgrims from abroad. Germany, England, America, India. Some have come on foot.”

Vorobev offered Khaitover his card, obliging the foreigner, grimacing, to dig one out of his own billfold, which itself had to be excavated from an inside jacket pocket. His living dependent on more than a single occupation, Khaitover carried a variety of cards. He made a selection and gave it to the professor. He kept his shoulder jammed against the window.

The first man, who at twenty years of age was still called Gribshin, attended the exchange with vague interest. The impulsion forward had left him chiefly occupied with an inventory of the physiological effects induced by accelerated time travel: a retrograde churning of your stomach contents, a searing of your nostril hairs, a sharpening of vision that brought the landscape into almost unbearable relief. You rarely experienced these effects in ordinary life, when you traveled into the future a single moment at a time. Gribshin wondered what new world he found himself in.

Vorobev squinted through his pince-nez, studying both the English and Russian sides of Khaitover’s visiting card. The profes
sor was a squat man with a round, sweaty face onto which a glossy black mustache seemed to have been clumsily pasted.

“The
Imperial.
I’m not familiar with it. Is it an important publication? What class of person is likely to purchase it?”

Khaitover replied, “The newspaperless class; that is, that class of people who do not have a newspaper and are desirous of reading one.”

He hardly knew more about the paper he wrote for than how much it paid by the column inch. He had been away from England a long time, barren years in which he had ceased to be a young man as he sought to pry his fortune from this impossible empire and its limitless, valueless steppes, its inaccessible forests, its untappable mineral veins; its teeming, unfished rivers, its lazy and superstitious natives—this hyperborean Congo. Or perhaps he had just been born, like today’s newspaper, which had arisen from dust and telegraphic sparks in only twenty-four hours. Or he was only tired: he had just been involved in some very complicated speculative business having nothing to do with journalism.

The professor examined Khaitover’s card as if it were a patient. Still holding Vorobev’s card in his hand, Khaitover saw that the professor was a medical doctor of some kind, but the string of initial letters and punctuation marks stumbling after his name left unclear the type of illness he might treat. Neither man thought to ask Gribshin for his card.

“And sir, tell me, please, are you an actual member of the newspaper’s staff? Or are you one of its specials?”

Khaitover nodded at the professor’s knowledge of Fleet Street practices and its hierarchy of personnel. Pretending faint pride, he declared, “I’m the
Imperial
’s special correspondent in Moscow.”

“I see,” said Vorobev, and tunelessly hummed to himself for a few moments. Just as Khaitover closed his eyes again, the profes
sor asked, “Does the newspaper have a regular staff reporter based either in Saint Petersburg or Moscow?”

Khaitover shook his head.

In his own corner of the train compartment, Gribshin had listened to the conversation with some feeling for its strangeness, for here in the future the newspaper was something antiquated and superseded. Of course, everything he had once known was now antiquated: trains, vest-coats, calling cards…Conversation even.

Gribshin carried through these remote provinces of tsarist Russia an innovation that he expected to be indispensable to future civilization; by the sort of coincidence about which history usually remains silent, so did Vorobev and Khaitover.

After some time, Vorobev loudly cleared his throat, forcing Khaitover to open his eyes. Khaitover’s stare was baleful. “I propose,” the professor announced, “that we collaborate on an article for your newspaper. The report would be a completely authoritative one acquainting your readers with some of the latest developments in Russian science.”

Khaitover said, “I’m already on assignment.”

“It would be more reasonable to offer this collaboration to the
Times,
or perhaps to a more established journalist on another newspaper. But I enjoy the extraordinary coincidence that has placed me in the same railway car as the representative of a British newspaper, of whatever class. If necessity is the mother of invention, then paternity must be laid to serendipity.”

The professor, chuckling at his aphorism, had opened a large black suitcase that was at his feet and was carefully preparing to take something from it. He added, “And of course, this would give me the satisfaction of helping to launch a young man in his career. Certainly, I did not become what I am today without the help of kindly elders.”

In his left hand he now held a small, unpleasant object.

“A stuffed rat,” Khaitover observed, not squeamishly, but not attempting to hide his distaste either. It was a particularly large, dead brown rat.

The professor, who was in fact only a few years older than Khaitover, smiled condescendingly.

“You’re making a very quick judgment, which I suppose is as useful a skill to a journalist as a reasoned, considered judgment is to a scientist. Note, please, that the eyes of the rat are closed. That’s the first difference between this specimen and a hunting trophy. See also the splendid sheen of its fur. Would you like to stroke it, or hold it? Have you observed the vitality of its facial expression?”

He brought the rat up to the space between them.

“Note, if you can, here, the tone of this muscle, the abductor magnus. See how firm and lifelike it is. The animal is tensed, ready to spring.”

Suddenly, the rat did spring, directly at Khaitover’s face. Vorobev squeezed its cheeks and its jaws yawned open, exposing pincer-teeth and the pink, moist lining of its mouth.

Khaitover recoiled and smashed his head against the wall of the compartment. The professor, with rat in hand, barked some hoarse laughter, his own mouth open. Khaitover immediately regained his composure, affecting that he hadn’t hit his head at all.

Vorobev said, “This vitality suggests something entirely other than a stuffed animal, but of course such an observation is probably entirely outside your experience. It’s forgivable for the lay person to confuse the embalmist’s art with the taxidermist’s. Allow me to add that we can expect this creature to retain its animate vitality two or three years hence, perhaps even longer.”

Russian travel was distinguished by its variety of indelicacies.
Khaitover had once shared a sleeping car across a frozen, moon-seared tundra with an obese Cossack who slept with his arms wrapped around his boots and silently passed wind reeking of carrion. Another time he traveled with a sailor who, as the night deepened and his bottle drained, turned increasingly melancholy and belligerent, while fixing on the idea that Khaitover was either a British spy or a Jew. On a trip south earlier this year, Khaitover’s fellow passenger had in fact been a Jew, a young man in a black beard and ringlets who rocked in prayer all the way from Minsk to Odessa. Over the years Khaitover had crossed Russia with Calmucks, Tchukchis, Bashkiri, Toungusians, and Bouriyats, as well as syphilitic prostitutes, gypsies, tubercular peasants, and exile-bound revolutionists, and he hadn’t yet become wealthy for his troubles. He returned now to his sleeping position and closed his eyes.

“Sir, you have witnessed life-in-death, the perfect preservation of the qualities of the vital force in a dead animal. This has been impossible until now. After years of research on cell and nucleic structure, and particularly liquid transfer across the cell membrane, my laboratory at the medical school in Kharkov has developed a unique chemical compound that allows for the long-term preservation of animal tissue. Improvements in the formula will extend the preservation effect indefinitely. This offers momentous opportunity for scientific and commercial research. In my country and in yours.”

But Khaitover wasn’t listening. He had dozed off to verminous dreams that would spin out until they reached the next train transfer, about fifteen minutes southward. Vorobev turned to the young Russian man diagonally across the compartment. Gribshin’s mouth was open. For the moment he had forgotten to breathe. He stared intently, not at the rat, but at the professor
himself. Vorobev appraised the youth again as a clerk or student, smiled with a dignity unmindful of the dead rodent in his hands, and returned it to the black case. The case’s locks fell shut with a crisp chiming that always delighted him.

Gribshin considered what he had just seen. He knew it was important. It belonged to the future, he was sure, but was it his future? He too was pleased by the sound the lock made as it closed: it was something predictive. In the echoing tintinnabulation of the lock’s components colliding hard against each other were conjured the sonances of rifle shots and beyond them smoky images of milling crowds. The sounds and images vanished without revealing to Gribshin exactly what they promised.