Vanya stood in the gallery of benches that lined the balcony above the operating theater and watched his sister below as she marched into the room, emanating confidence. He was filled with pride because, regardless of what Yuri had done, Vanya knew she’d earned this day, this position. She’d worked toward it ever since she saved their cousin all those years earlier. Yuri followed her with a smile as if he’d done nothing wrong. And Vanya found that as much as he wanted to be angry with Yuri for his lies, it wasn’t that simple. Yuri had given Miri the greatest gift anyone could give. It was a supreme act of generosity.
The men around Vanya, students and surgeons, were crammed together shoulder to shoulder with no room to spare. Vanya was sure his sister hadn’t expected so many people to watch, but word must have spread that Dr. Rozen’s woman would be operating for the first time on her own and they’d all come to witness the spectacle. The space filled with the smell of stale clothing and carbolic.
“She’ll kill him. Mark my words,” a man next to Vanya said.
“Of course she will. Why would they trust a woman with a man’s life?” agreed another.
But what about Sukovich himself? None of them discussed the crime or the hatred that could kill them all. Vanya kept his mouth shut and his hand in his pocket, fingering the letter from Eliot. He spotted the elder surgeon from the hallway in the front row.
Miri looked up to address the gallery, and the room went silent save for a moan from the fishmonger. Vanya knew Miri didn’t want to waste time talking, but she had to follow protocol. She introduced herself as Dr. Abramov, the lead surgeon, Yuri as her assistant, and then presented her patient, his condition, and her plans for the operation. When she turned to begin, a nurse fastened her mask for her, and the men in the balcony all leaned forward, up on tiptoes.
“I’ve heard she’s as skilled as Olevovich was at that age,” one murmured, comparing Miri to the chief of surgery.
“That’s a lie,” another disagreed. “Leave women to tend to their own.”
Vanya was tempted to challenge them, but he held his tongue, letting their criticism boil with the heat that crept into the gallery and left the voyeurs dripping. As Miri worked, Yuri stood over her and pointed to the patient, to implements. Behind his mask, Vanya was sure Yuri was whispering instructions. And he was also sure Miri wasn’t listening. Vanya knew the look in his sister’s eyes. It was pure concentration. She was doing the work on her own. Dissecting the spleen from surrounding tissues. A complicated, blood-filled procedure she was handling perfectly, it seemed.
And then, suddenly, Vanya heard the man next to him hiss, “Too much blood!” He leaned even further forward. The comment was followed by other murmurs around them.
“She’s enlarged the tear.”
And: “She’s killing him.”
Quickly, Yuri took the instrument from Miri and she stepped back. A nurse began using sponge after sponge in the fishmonger’s chest. Had Miri made a mistake? Or, as she’d predicted, had they operated so late that his body had given way?
“Hold this,” Vanya heard Yuri say in a voice louder than it needed to be. “I’ll tie it off.” More blood and sponges. Miri eased down to Sukovich’s side and stroked his palm just as Vanya used to stroke hers when they were children and she was scared. Finally, Yuri made a show of handing Miri a curved needle, asking her to close the incision. At that, Miri let go of Sukovich. She leaned in and narrowed her eyes. The look, the posture, Vanya knew. She was doing all she could to hold back the darkness, and tears. She was angry and ashamed. Couldn’t Yuri see that crack in her? Why didn’t he say anything to defend her, to tell the room it was Miri who’d made the correct diagnosis, that she’d started perfectly?
“What we expected,” the man next to Vanya said. Was he smiling?
After the last stitch was tied, the men around Vanya surged toward the exits, but Vanya stayed. Baba had raised them to respect pain, to fight through it, but that didn’t mean Miri needed to feel it on her own. Vanya wanted to comfort her, but she’d never forgive him if he did that in front of her peers. And so he waited in case the room cleared and she looked for him. But she didn’t. She disappeared through the side door without even glancing up at the gallery. “Damn Yuri,” Vanya muttered. He could have helped more.
Vanya checked his watch and realized he still had time to run to the university for his lecture. As much as he didn’t want to go, he knew he should. Baba was right; Kir didn’t need more ammunition. It was lucky he hadn’t canceled after all. Vanya hurried through the hushed hospital, past people waiting in line to be seen, and through the heavy front doors. Outside the street was loud—a main thoroughfare—packed with the frenzy of Kovno’s workers. Vanya bobbed past carts piled with vegetables, fish, and coal, past wagons loaded with soldiers and cannons. On the corner closest to the edge of the square, he waited for the tram. A woman across from him was selling blankets. They hung from lines on display like laundry. A small girl played in them, pressing her hands into their wool while her sister batted at her profile. The tram choked to a stop. Vanya elbowed his way on.
As the noisy tram slinked through the city, Vanya reached into his pocket and ran his fingers over Eliot’s letter. An expedition. Coming to Russia. Even now. Incredible. He burned to read the rest, but he couldn’t manage it on that crowded tram. If only he could solve the math before the eclipse. He tried to push past what had happened to Miri and concentrate on his equations for relativity. At least that was something he could fix.
He asked, again, the question he’d been asking himself every day for five years. How to account for acceleration? And gravity? How he wished he could ask his Papa. Baba had been mother and father to them both, more than any child could hope for, but Vanya longed for those afternoons he’d spent in his father’s workshop as a child. “Look around,” Papa used to say. His father had sold watches and clocks. When he could, he’d taken in repairs and taught Vanya about the gears and mechanisms. “No clock can ever be perfect.” The first time Papa had said that, Vanya was nine years old. He was bent over a workbench, clutching a screwdriver and a loupe. The smell of grease was thick between them along with the remnants of smoke from Papa’s pipe.
“I don’t understand,” Vanya said.
“You see all these clocks on the walls? Not one tells the same time as another. Even if their hands point to the same hour and minute, their second hands aren’t in sync.”
“We could fix that.”
“Perhaps we could make it look precise to the human eye, but to make it truly exact is impossible. It is beyond any human ability. No clock can precisely match another.” Papa smiled through his thick beard. “You’re fighting nature. Think about it, my boy. If time existed naturally, every clock in this room would read the same.”
Vanya had never considered it before but nodded as the idea worked through him. “You’re right. The moon doesn’t tell time.”
“Of course not! Our watches can’t mark the rising or setting of the sun or the moon—those change every night. What’s it matter to the moon or to the stars what any clock says? Still, time is important to us. For trains. For anything with a schedule.” The idea was radical. Vanya knew it even then and he loved his father for it. Later, after he’d lost his parents, when he discovered that the great scientists of the day were focused on the problem of synchronizing clocks, he couldn’t turn back. Especially not when he discovered Einstein’s work at the patent office was dedicated to reviewing inventions for aligning clocks, inventions such as pneumatic tubes and blasts of air. His father was right: time was a human invention. Like Einstein, Vanya came to believe time was relative. And defining a second or an hour was arbitrary—but sequence was absolute. A tree falls. It cannot rise up and become whole again, just as an egg breaks and its shell cannot be reassembled, regardless of how anyone defines the time it takes for these events to happen. How did that fit into field equations?
He closed his eyes to picture the problem, but then the tram stopped hard and sent Vanya into the window. Looking out, he realized he’d missed his stop. Not by much. He hurried for the door and ran down the cobbled streets toward the university.