Part One – There
(Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER FIFTY TWO – OUR COMPANY. MY FRIEND SASHA: GROWING UP
Our entire daily friendship was based on… conversations, or maybe on discussions. At school, pioneer camp and university we had common tasks. At school – lessons, at camp – CFR (Club of Funny and Inventive), at the university – classes, sessions and Physicist Day. But always and everywhere, it was necessary to discuss not only current affairs, but meetings and events. The meetings concerned girls, the events concerned politics. It was impossible to discuss both topics completely openly with everyone. This is how we formed the most loyal and simply good friends, old friends and good acquaintances, not to mention the mass of just friends and acquaintances.
My closest friends were Eli and Sasha. Eli – since the first grade, Sasha since eighth grade. Eli – from school, Sasha – from pioneer camp. Eli was my oldest friend, with whom we knew everything about each other, or thought that we knew. Anyway, we discussed our families. We shared our childhood experiences about lost fathers and the difficult fate of mothers, about the relationships of our mothers with our fathers’ relatives. However, the topic of girls and love was present in our conversations with Eli very superficially. It’s thou true that there was nothing to share at school about love. All the love flowed in my camp: dancing, dating, kissing. And at the university, Eli had already begun to tell me such fantastic stories that were impossible to believe. But the slightest doubt about the authenticity of the stories offended Eli. Anyway, I wasn’t going to offend him. Moreover, since the eighth grade I had a new and most trusted friend, Sasha. We shared with him our boyhood sufferings and successes. And without the shyness that is typical for many guys. This tradition continued both at university and after graduation and, as I believed, would remain for life. But life always turns out to be different from what you imagine it to be, and this applies to everything – society, individuals, relationships, climate, technology, health, and in general, to everything you can imagine.
The peak of our friendship with Sasha came in the seventies. We entered the university in 1969, having behind us a camp fraternity, Olympiads, including a trip to the All-Union Mathematics Olympiad in Kyiv, and almost daily conversations and walks around the old city.
Sonya appeared from the first student day, and I became the Chief of Staff of the Capturing of her Attention. How many times have we discussed the details of maneuvers, how to intercept her attention and outplay other suitors. It was not easy: Sonya was a tall, beautiful girl and, at seventeen years old, she was liked by older guys, senior students who were more experienced in courtship. But they didn’t succeed – we won! It was difficult to resist Sasha’s enthusiasm and talent. Judge for yourself: he entered the Georgian Mathematics faculty (they didn’t have Russian one) without knowing the language, and by the end he can lectured in Georgian; he was rejected from the capital’s university, and at home he developed the modern field of algebra so that while still a student he created a commercial contract (in modern terms – new jobs) and soon after graduating from university he defended his PhD.
It is not surprising that after a couple of years of intense siege, Sonya’s bastions fell. The wedding took place in the summer after the second year. Looking back on these years, I still regret that moral standards prohibited extramarital affairs. How many things would have been different, how many marriages and divorces would have been unnecessary. In the meantime, I enjoyed my role as a witness at Sasha’s wedding. As I already told you, the newlyweds soon received a very rare and valuable gift – a separate apartment. For their and our happiness (I mean our friends, and in particular myself), we could gather there with great pleasure without disturbing our parents.
I took an active part in transporting furniture – Sasha bought a wall units from a mathematician immigrating to Israel. It must be said that our city served as a transit point for many Russians, who were refused to move to Israel. It was poorly understood why people were not allowed to leave the country, and why it was worse from Russia and Ukraine than from Georgia. I think there were many reasons for this, not the least of which was the much friendlier attitude towards Jews in Georgia than in many other republics, as well as bribery, which flourished in the south and east of the country and contributed to the resolution of controversial issues. So, mathematicians, doctors of sciences (double PhD), were not allowed to leave Russia and, after submitting documents to immigrate, they were not allowed to work in their specialty. Tens of thousands of Jews went through similar persecution. Those who were lucky enough to move to Georgia were amazed at the changes: they were accepted into prestigious jobs, were respected, and helped with their move. In some cases people began to doubt whether it was worth going further – after all, the unknown, a new language and new customs lay ahead of them, but here everything was on the one hand familiar, Soviet, and on the other – very anti-Soviet, in the best and the brightest sense of this word.
So it was with this mathematician. He was warmly received in Georgia and given a position as head of a department at the Institute of Mathematics and teaching hours at the university. At the same time, no one reproached him for wanting to move to Israel. I remembered his speech when Sasha and I came to buy furniture from him and move it to Sasha.
“As a layman, I am very pleased that you are vacating my apartment, and not for my money, but for your money. But as a teacher and scientist, I am upset. You are wasting your golden time on nonsense. Move out of USSR immediately with a small suitcase! The main baggage are your brains. The sooner you direct them to the right deeds, the better. All the arguments that you don’t have something – money, a wife, a family, a completed education or education at all – are futile arguments. Go, immigrate, and you will have everything sooner and better than what you’ll achieve here.”
I didn’t yet understand that he was absolutely right. It was strange for me to imagine that I would leave my family, or that we would all leave my dad serving time in prison. Now I understand that if we had left then, that perhaps my grandmother would have lived much longer, like all grandparents whose lives were extended by emigration, my mother would not have lost her husband, and my sister and I would not have lost our own father, whom I knew for the first ten years of my life.
Still, I must note that the mathematician’s speech made an impression on Sasha and me, in any case, we carried the furniture with enthusiasm.
Well, soon the new apartment began to shine along with the new family, and only isolated flashes of Sonya’s dissatisfaction with preference foreshadowed… God knows what. No one knew.
Sonya’s outbursts were fueled by the ideas of equality of women and men. Her father was much older than her mother, a veteran of the war. At home he behaved like an eastern pasha who had won the right to rest. Sonya loved her dad very much, but did not share her parents’ views at all. She wanted things to be different in her family from the very beginning. As a mathematician, she strived for ideal equality,
“I sweep one room – you sweep the second.”
It didn’t work. Sasha declared in response,
“All right, I agree. Submit an article to a Math Journal like me, then I’ll sweep the second room like you.”
Then Sonya attacked preference game. Perhaps in retaliation, or as an activity inappropriate for a mathematician. She apparently did not know how her namesake, Sofia Kovalevsky, played this “obscene” game.
And then their son had born. Here Sonya got more troubles, and Sasha, instead of helping with the laundry, began to work with the penguins (private pupils).
“This is completely unfair,” Sonya thought, “After all, I’m also a mathematician. I could give lessons, and Sasha would do housework.”
And if in the general case this could be realized and be fair for some family, then in the particular case of this family, tension only increased in the relationship between the spouses.
And Sasha’s articles began to go beyond his dissertation thesis. They made it possible to perform calculations of complex electronic circuits with little effort. Usually, in all schemes there is a lot of intersections, which for technical reasons it is desirable to minimize. It was convenient to do optimization using algorithms discovered by Sasha. When an experiment was carried out at the radio factory, it turned out that in a day or two Sasha was able to calculate a circuit better than that one the entire design bureau had been poring over for a month. This is how the idea of economic contracts arose in the department of the Institute of Applied Mathematics, where Sasha wrote several articles and defended his PhD. This was a fruitful creative period of his life. The number of Sasha’s friends increased due to fellow mathematicians collaborating on the same topic, united by a modern algebra seminar in Odessa and other scientists moved to Tbilisi in order to emigrate easily from here.
The most colorful personality was Kharkov resident Matvey (Mathew), whom Sasha considered the best modern algebraist in the entire company. He was a good looking man, an excellent player of preference, had a beautiful wife and was preparing to leave, but in the meantime he took the place of the senior researcher at the Institute of Mathematics, which was vacated with the departure of his predecessor. “A transferable position with a view to emigration,” local mathematicians joked.
I really liked one of his stories. Matvey once lived in Novosibirsk, an algebraic center of the sixties, and in a search of young talents for a physics and mathematics boarding school, he went to hold a mathematical Olympiad in the Arctic, in the lands of the Evenks.
None of the schoolchildren scored enough points, but as it is customary everywhere in the world, the organizers from Novosibirsk were invited to a gala dinner. Several local men, women and three or four children, who had solved one problem each, were gathered in a yurt, where there was a cauldron with local dumplings, and next to it stood a basin filled with black caviar. Everyone was served full bowls of dumplings with Siberian sturgeon, and the gala dinner began.
The owners threw hot dumplings into their mouths with two fingers, and then scooped up the caviar with their palm and licked it from there. The guests looked at them in confusion, not knowing how to start the meal. And then the director of the local school came to the rescue,
“The Russian eats with spoon,” he said and translated it into Evenk language for his friends.
The women began to fuss, opened the chest, from which they took out blackened aluminum spoons and distributed them to the guests. Again no one touched the food. Once again the director helped everyone out (that’s what education means!)
“Russian loves clean,” he said, and for clarity, he spat on the spoon and rubbed it with his greasy finger.
But one smart boy grabbed the spoons and ran out into the snow, and five minutes later returned with clean ones. As a result, namely he was taken to Novosibirsk to a mathematical boarding school. Nothing bad. Eventually he became a mathematician.
Matvey was older than us and understood life better.
One day I went with my colleague Emma, a chemistry teacher to see Sasha. Emma was divorced, but we had no relationship; we met by chance on a warm summer evening and went for a walk. But after nine it was impossible to go to the cinema – the shows ended, and night cafes simply did not exist, and the only entertainment was to go on a visit. A friend with an apartment and a wife at the country dacha (summer house) was a luxury, and I had it.
Matvey was sitting with Sasha at the table and dealt out. They were playing “A Little Hussar”, but I knew very well this state, in which both could play with one hemisphere of the brain and think about the problems of modern algebra with the other.
“Own game,” declared Matvey, “But the connectivity of the system does not allow us to construct an isomorphic graph…”
“Firstly, not own game, but one trick less,” retorted Sasha, “And secondly, we need to try through hypergraphs…”
So Emma and I stopped by for a visit. Sasha was always happy to see me. He made coffee, cut a watermelon and suggested,
“Let’s play a real game. For three or four if Emma knows how to play.”
“I don’t play preference,” said my companion, “but if you want Nick, play. I do not have penguins in the morning, there is no need to rush home, and my son is at my parents.”
This information immediately set me up for completely different thoughts.
“Thank you Sasha, I’ll play next time. I just dropped by to see you.”
Before leaving, I whispered to Sasha:
“I’ll see her off and try to stay.”
I must say that this is what I did. The next morning I went to Sasha to boast about my successes. But it was not I who surprised him, but he who surprised me,
“Yesterday, when you left, I told Matvey that now Emma can’t get away from Nick.
And what do you think he answered? He said: Ha, ha, ha! This is Nick who can’t get away from Emma now! I even thought that if Nick sat down to play cards, I’d myself take Emma home.”
As you can see, practice (and Matvey had this practice) is a criterion for knowing not only objective reality, but also subjective female’s nature.
In Odessa in the seventies, a school of Soviet algebraists was formed, thanks to the seminars of Professor Rykov and the organizational talent of his wife, Raisa. At least once a year, algebraic mathematicians gathered in Odessa and exchanged news about their works. The main thing, perhaps, in this communication was not the reports at the seminars, but the discussions of ideas and directions of development. I heard stories from Sasha so often about many of the school’s participants that I formed my own idea about their world – like-minded people and scientists connected by informal friendly and creative relationships.
To be honest, I was a little envious of such a circle of colleagues. I had a lot of good friends, but we almost never got to work on anything together. In such an environment of like-minded people, I spent six months during my graduate internship at the Institute of Physiology and later, two years at the Department of Physics of the Polytechnic Institute. However, the scientific output was small. In the first Institution there were few luminaries who set the direction of development, and the second one was an educational institution, and science was dealt with there from time to time. You can’t compare with theoretical physicists and mathematicians. The main successes of Soviet science belonged to these areas. Nevertheless, I remember the friendly atmosphere at work with pleasure. Just like Sasha’s Odessa seminars. Once, when I was visiting Odessa, I even attended a mathematical seminar: sunbathed on the beach and played preference. I knew several mathematicians from my city, and I met some colorful figures on the beach.
Tbilisi residents were represented by Sasha, Matvey, Leva Slyuda and Aron Nik, who wrote his dissertation under the guidance of Matvey. A funny story happened to Aron.
One day a pretty girl approached him at the opera house and exclaimed,
“Hello, Nick!”
“Hello,” Aron responded hesitantly; that was his last name.
“Don’t remember me?”
“No,” Aron shook his head, worrying that he was about to be reminded.
“From the physics department?” the stranger girl continued.
“No,” Aron said with relief, “From the Faculty of Mechanics and Math!”
“Math or Mass? Are you joking again? Isn’t it you one who did Physicist Day?”
Then Aron realized whom the girl was confusing him with.
“Not me. Nick did this.”
“But you said that you are Nick.”
“Right. My last name is Nick, and first name is Aron. And you know Neiman, whose first name is Nick.”
Many of the mathematicians I named emigrated to different countries. One of them, by the name of Edelveysky, a modest middle-aged man, a lover of travel and tourism, was leaving alone, with a small dog and a backpack in which was packed a hatchet with a carved handle – a gift from the Chukchi. But the customs officers did not like the tourist appearance of the mathematician, and, in search of valuables, they sawed the ax into pieces. It’s good that they didn’t doubt the dog.
In those years, emigration began to increase. Not only to Israel, but also to the USA and other countries. But we were not yet ready to leave. And although many things seemed wrong in our country, enthusiasts had not yet tried all the possibilities here, and therefore were in no hurry to leave their homeland.
Sasha developed the economic contract very well – orders multiplied every day. The more and more organizations were interested in his work on optimal circuit boards. One day Sasha said that he was expecting Novosibirsk delegation from Akademgorodok to visit: two guys and two girls. The latter was the most intriguing for me, because in those days I was more interested in girls than in emigration. In a word, Sasha’s information set me up for an adventure.
After work, I came to the Institute of Mathematics for a meeting with the Novosibirsk delegation with a leather folder under my arm. The Novosibirsk residents had just arrived and went straight from the road to report on their developments to their Georgian colleagues. I arrived at the lecture late, and in order to get a better look at the visiting girls, I immediately plopped down in the first row of the assembly hall where the hearings were taking place. I must say that the reports were of little interest to me, and the head of the Novosibirsk delegation noticed my hunting gaze. After the lecture, he came up to me, mistaking me for someone from the management due to my lateness, the leather folder in my hands and my darting gaze, and said,
“I’m very sorry for the errors in the report. We were very tired from the long flight.”
“You needn’t worry,” I reassured him, “I don’t understand anything at all about your squiggles. I am here, one might say, at the call of my heart.”
The guy turned pale. He decided that the omnipresent KGB, in my person, was spying on scientists. I didn’t even know that the guests were working on complex electronic circuits in the defense field. But despite the difference in tasks, the relationship between the two scientific teams, as well as my relationship with the talented Siberian girls, developed in the best way; in any case, all parties were satisfied.
The most interesting story related to Sasha’s work was a business trip to Kyiv. More precisely, near Kyiv to the rest house of scientists of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. This place was secret, only selected people could get there. And suddenly, Sasha received an invitation to come there and give a report on his contractual topic. He was very surprised by this, but, of course, did not refuse the paid business trip. It turned out that he was invited by the Council on Cybernetics and, as they used to say in those years, personally… no, not Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, but Academician Glushkov – “the main Soviet cyberneticist.” Sasha gave a short report on his article published in the proceedings of Tbilisi University. The small audience remained indifferent; no one spoke out on the substance of the abstract problems of modern algebra. Then the Chairman of the Council showed those present a thick tome in leather binding, without any title, and turned to Sasha with a request,
“We managed to get acquainted with the annual report of NACA, in which your article is included in the list of references used. Can you explain what interested the Americans in it?”
Sasha explained. Of course, according to his point of view,
“They were interested in optimization algorithms for electronic circuits.”
“Why aren’t ours interested in them?” asked Glushkov.
“Some are interested,” Sasha answered and gave the example of Novosibirsk residents.
“Before leaving, come see me,” the academician asked.
And he made Sasha an offer that he believed was impossible to refuse. Do you remember how Academician A. sent me to work as a “spy” in Kyiv, so as not to miss the important discovery of bone growth control and to secure a share in this discovery?
Similarly, the Kiev academician saw promising work, and similar thoughts dawned on him. Apparently academicians see the future well, in a word, Glushkov suggested that Sasha apply for the State Prize.
“Of course, there will be about eight to ten co-authors,” said Glushkov, “including me and the Minister of Electronics Industry.” None of them will claim the part of a monetary reward, but if so, you understand that the most important advantage of the award is not material, but the prospects that it opens up for people, especially in their younger years.”
“This is a great honor,” Sasha thanked him, thinking how not to fall into the category of secrecy and cut off his path to long-overdue emigration.
“However, I am not at all sure that scientists will support the submitted application. Presence of my article in a closed NACA report does not give it any greater scientific value. Thank you.”
“Well, I’ll think about it,” said Glushkov, “Thank you for your objective assessment of your work.”
I think that the academician’s proposal showed Sasha that his work is important and valuable, and it was time for him to pack up and leave the country in which he could spontaneously have eight to ten co-authors for the State Prize. But before this happened, a number of events took place in Sasha’s life.
One day, employees of a secret pattern recognition laboratory arrived on a business trip to the Institute of Mathematics. They were interested in improving and simplifying complex electronic circuits, and this is what Sasha’s algorithms helped with. But not just in that – Sasha met a young woman from the laboratory. The team worked on the problem of how to distinguish our submarines from foreign ones, sharks and rocks on the seabed. I don’t remember what exactly Seda, that was the name of Sasha’s new acquaintance, did in the laboratory, but the effect of meeting was similar to the effect produced by Sonya during her first day at university – “both sides had recognized and appreciated mutual images.”
Sasha was no longer a boy. He was a specialist and was preparing to change his life by leaving the USSR. But the most common reason for changes in life is not emigration at all, but love, and it met again on Sasha’s path.
Oh, how many conversations we had about this, how many discussions! But despite my “subversive activities,” he, under the guise of a card game, disappeared for the weekend – he flew to another city to meet with Seda. I was the only one who knew the route and phone number to call in case of emergency, but thank God, they didn’t arise, and I could only reassure Sasha’s parents, who bombarded me with questions on weekends,
“Does he really play cards? Isn’t this a bad company? Not bandits?”
What could I do? Seda’s perky character, her ability to think logically and act decisively charmed Sasha, who was tired of fighting equality in sweeping the apartment, persecution of card games and disagreements in intimate life that arise from this struggle. But the most important thing that completely captivated Sasha was the determination with which Seda accepted the feelings that surged through her. She did not hesitate for a minute in matters of intimacy, although her chosen one was married, and she herself grew up in a patriarchal, conservative family. And Sasha appreciated this highly. He even thought about how he could leave country with Seda, and not with Sonya, but in reality this was impossible. Seda had high security clearance and she would not be allowed out of the country. But Sasha no longer wanted to stay in the USSR. The romance that had begun was doomed. Although Sasha brushed off my arguments against divorce, life itself corrected the scenario in favor of preserving the family and emigrating.
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