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Of Venerable Bones and Intrigue
| Article
# : |
10210 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1993 |
3,331 Words |
| Author
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David Sears
David Sears is an American journalist living in Denmark who
has published recently in Geo and the Guardian of London. |
Our grimy bus whines down cobblestoned streets and yaws pregnantly around corners. Inside, jam-packed shoulder to shoulder, chin to elbow, Muscovites, like commuters in cities anywhere, escape numbing routine behind newspapers and books and long blank stares toward distant points, though the windows are covered with mud. Nobody talks. Professor Viktor Zviagin's gray-blue eyes slowly scan the cabin, taking the measure of one stone-faced commuter after another.
The bus squeals to a convulsive stop, the rear doors burst open like a shotgun blast, still more people crowd in, the doors close more tentatively, we shudder away. The professor's impish eyes lock onto a lean young man. "He has some Asian blood, don't you think?" he asks me.
It's a game, I've learned. I first noticed him playing it months earlier on Bering Island. We sat under a canvas tarpaulin, Russians at one long table, Danish archaeologists and journalists at the other. We were eating salmon--we ate salmon for breakfast, so plentiful was the supply and so cheap--and so, too, were frenzied swarms of black flies. The simple delivery of fork to mouth was a test of concentration--of sheer sanity--to judge from all the compulsive twitching, head jerking, and spontaneous flailing of hands. Amid the lunacy sat Zviagin, erect, genteel, with that imperturbable gaze focused on one or another of us, codifying attributes.
After an hour commuting, we emerge from a grandly marbled, chandeliered metro station into an astonishingly gray-on-gray Moscow morning. KGB headquarters towers darkly above Dzerzhinsky Square; a gleaming BMW looks as aberrant as a UFO. We turn down a broken driveway leading to a low, nondescript nineteenth-century building burrowed in dull anonymity, where Zviagin has worked for twenty-four years.
He heads the Physical-Technical/Medical Criminology Department of the Research Institute for Forensic Studies, a job that requires him to discern the causes of (mostly) unnatural death and identify the victims. From bones he can ascertain an individual's race, sex, age, way of life, cause of death, and, when he has a skull, physical appearance.
"Please," he beckons politely. I follow, passing a glass-doored cupboard filled with cracked and yellowed human skulls to a dark concrete stairway leading to the basement of the institute; our footsteps echo in a low-lit corridor lined with more cupboards, filled with more skulls, until we get to a steel door.
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