The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  Pavel Alekseevich had been summoned in the middle of the night by his assistant, Valentina Ivanovna. She was a fine surgeon and knew that he trusted her entirely, but this case was special—for reasons she herself could not explain. She sent for him, woke him up, and asked him to come. When he entered the operating room, hands scrubbed for the operation and suspended in the air, her scalpel had just begun its incision into the pretreated skin.

  He stood behind Valentina Ivanovna. His special vision switched on by itself, and he saw not just the surgical area Valentina Ivanovna worked on, but the female body in its entirety—a spinal structure of rare proportions and fineness, a narrow thorax with slight ribs, a diaphragm set slightly higher than usual, and a slowly contracting heart illuminated by a pale-green transparent flame that throbbed along with the muscle.

  It was a strange sensation no one could have understood and he could not have explained: the body he saw was one he already knew well. Even the shadow along the top of the right lung—the vestige of juvenile tuberculosis—seemed as dear and familiar to him as the outline of the old spot on the wallpaper near the head of the bed one falls asleep in every night.

  Looking at the face of this young woman who was so perfectly structured internally was somehow awkward, but he nonetheless cast a quick glance over the white sheet that covered her to the chin. He noticed her narrow nostrils and long brown eyebrows with a fluffy brush at their base. And her chalky pallor. But his sense of discomfort scrutinizing her face was so strong that he lowered his eyes to where the undulating form of her nacreous intestines should be. The worm-shaped pouch had burst, streaming pus into the intestinal cavity. Peritonitis. That was what Valentina Ivanovna saw as well.

  A languid yellowish-pink flame that existed only in his vision and seemed slightly warm to the touch and gave off a rare flowerlike smell illuminated the woman from below and was, in essence, a part of her.

  He also could see how fragile her coxofemoral joints were, the result of an insufficiently globular femoral head. Actually, quite close to dislocation. And her pelvis was so narrow that childbirth would likely strain or rupture the symphysis pubis. No, the uterus was mature and had given birth. Once, at least, she had managed … Suppuration was already enveloping both strands of her ovaries and her dark stressed uterus. Her heartbeat was weak but steady, while that uterus emitted disaster. Pavel Alekseevich had known for a long time that different organs can have different sensations … But how could you say something like that aloud?

  Well, no more childbirth for you … He had yet even to imagine who exactly might give the woman dying right before his eyes cause to give birth. He shook his head, driving the haunting images from his mind. Valentina Ivanovna had resected the large intestine and reached the worm-shaped pouch. Pus was everywhere …

  “Clean it all out … Remove everything …”

  They had to hurry. “Damned profession,” Pavel Alekseevich thought before taking the instruments from Valentina Ivanovna’s hands.

  Pavel Alekseevich knew that Ganichev, the head of the military hospital, had several bottles of American penicillin. A thief and a crook, he nonetheless was obligated to Pavel Alekseevich … But would he give it to him?

  3

  THE FIRST FEW DAYS—WHEN ELENA WAS NO LONGER dying but also not entirely alive—Pavel Alekseevich looked in on her in her screened-off corner of the ward and himself administered the injections of penicillin intended for wounded soldiers and twice stolen from them. She had not yet regained consciousness. She was in a place inhabited by talking half-people, half-plants engaged in an involved plot in which she figured as a, if not the, central character. Carefully laid out on a huge white cloth, she felt as if she herself were part of the cloth, with careful hands doing something to the cloth that felt like embroidering; whatever was going on, she felt the prick of tiny needles, and those pricks were pleasant.

  Besides these caring embroiderers, there were others—villains, Germans even, it seemed, in Gestapo uniforms—who wanted not just for her to die, but something larger and worse than death. At the same time, something suggested to Elena that all this was a bit illusory, a kind of half-deception—that soon someone would come and reveal the truth to her. Over all, she surmised, everything going on around her had some relation to her life and death, yet beyond that there was something else awaiting her, something much more important and connected with the revelation of that ultimate truth, which was more important than life itself.

  Once she overheard a conversation. A deep male voice addressed someone and asked for the biochemistry. An elderly female voice refused. Elena imagined the biochemistry as a big glass box with little clinking colored tubes that were somehow mysteriously connected to the mountainous landscape where everything was taking place …

  Then the landscape and the little colored tubes and the illusory beings suddenly disappeared, and she felt someone tapping her on the wrist. She opened her eyes. The light was so crude and harsh it made her squint. A man with a face that seemed familiar smiled at her.

  “That’s good, Elena Georgievna.”

  Pavel Alekseevich was stunned: it was one of those cases where the part was larger than the whole; her eyes were so much larger than her face.

  “Was it you I saw there?” she asked Pavel Alekseevich.

  Her voice was weak, as thin as paper.

  “That’s entirely possible.”

  “And where’s Tanechka?” she asked, but did not hear the answer as she once again floated into colored spots and talking plants.

  “Tanechka, Tanechka, Tanechka,” the voices sang, and Elena calmed down. Everything was as it should be.

  After a while she regained consciousness for good. Everything came together: her illness, the operation, the ward. The attentive doctor who had not let her die.

  Vasilisa Gavrilovna visited her. A white film covering one eye, her dark headscarf tied low over her brow, she brought Elena cranberry juice and dark-colored cookies. Twice she brought Elena’s little daughter.

  The doctor at first came by twice a day, then, later, as for the others, only during morning rounds. The screen was removed. Elena now began to get up, like the other patients, and to make her way to the washroom at the end of the corridor.

  Pavel Alekseevich kept her in the ward for three months.

  At the time, Elena was renting a corner of a room behind a calico curtain in a rotting little wooden house on the outskirts of town. The landlady, who also appeared to be rotting, was exceptionally quarrelsome. She had already evicted four tenants before Elena. The Siberian city that before the war had boasted barely fifty thousand inhabitants now burst at the seams with evacuees: the employees of a munitions factory and of the design office where Elena worked, the staff and students of a medical school and its clinics, and two theater companies. Except for the prisoners’ barracks in an immediate suburb, no housing had been built in the town since the Soviets had come to power. People were packed like sardines in every crack and corner.

  On the eve of Elena’s release the doctor arrived at her apartment in an official automobile, with a chauffeur. Frightened by the car, the landlady hid in the pantry. Vasilisa Gavrilovna responded to the knock at the door. Pavel Alekseevich said hello and was struck by the smell of slops and sewage. Not removing his sheepskin coat, he took three steps inside, pulled back the calico curtain, and glanced inside at their beggarly nest. Tanya sat in the corner of a big bed with a big white kitten and looked at him in fright, and with curiosity.

  “Quickly collect all your things, Vasilisa Gavrilovna. We’re moving to different quarters,” he said, surprising himself.

  Moving a high-risk patient who had miraculously survived to this garbage heap was out of the question.

  Fifteen minutes later their entire household had been packed into a large suitcase and cloth bundle, Tanya was dressed, and three maidens, kitten included, sat in the back seat of the car.

  Pavel Alekseevich took them to his place. The clinic occupied an old mansi
on, and Pavel Alekseevich’s quarters were in an annex in the courtyard. It had once been the mansion’s kitchen and the servants’ quarters. The large stove had been repaired and was used to cook food for the patients, the space had been partitioned, and Pavel Alekseevich had been allocated two tiny rooms with a separate entrance. In one of those rooms he now settled this family. His future family.

  The first evening, left alone with Tanechka—Elena would be released only the next day—Vasilisa, having said her prayers as usual, lay down alongside the sleeping girl on the rigid medical examining couch and was the first to figure out where all this was headed … Ah, Elena, Elena, with a husband who’s still alive.

  Vasilisa Gavrilovna confirmed her suspicions the next day when, after crossing the courtyard, Elena first entered Pavel Alekseevich’s house. Weak and pale as a ghost, she smiled somewhat vaguely and perplexedly, even a bit guiltily. But that day Vasilisa Gavrilovna had no grounds for suspicions or reproaches—those would come several days later. Amazing how this old spinster with not the least experience of relations with the male sex could be so attuned to the stirrings of love still in the bud.

  All February it was bitterly cold. Pavel Alekseevich’s quarters were well heated, and for the first time in several months the women knew warmth. Possibly, it was the dry heat of wood the women had so missed that warmed Elena’s feelings. Whatever the reason, the love she felt for Pavel Alekseevich attained degrees she had never known before. From the summits of a new realization of love and of herself, her marriage to Anton Ivanovich now seemed flawed, artificial. She drove from her mind the tiny, dim thought of her husband, and day after day put off the minute when she would have to tell herself the sad truth, all of which was exacerbated by the fact that no letters had arrived from Anton for almost six months, and she herself had not written to him for a month so as not to write the truth or lie to him.

  At half past five every morning Pavel Alekseevich brought a bucket of warm water from the hospital kitchen—a luxury as inconceivable then as a bathtub full of champagne in other times—and waited behind the door while Elena bathed. Then he bathed, brought a second bucket for Vasilisa Gavrilovna and Tanechka, and tossed more firewood into the stove, which they stoked almost incessantly. Vasilisa sat in the other room until both of them left for work, pretending to be asleep. Elena knew that Vasilisa was an early bird who began her devotional muttering still in the middle of the night.

  She doesn’t come out because she doesn’t want to witness my disgrace, Elena surmised. And smiled.

  In the morning she felt especially happy and free. She knew that on the way to the plant everything would slowly begin to fade and that by day’s end not a trace of her morning happiness would remain: as evening approached, her sense of guilt and shame mounted and did not pass until Pavel Alekseevich took her into his strong nighttime embrace …

  Pavel Alekseevich was forty-three years old. Elena was twenty-eight. She was the first and only woman in his life who did not drive away his gift. The first night she spent in his room, he woke up in the darkness before dawn with her tickly braid spread along his forearm and said to himself: “Enough! So what if I never again see what other doctors can’t see. I don’t want to let her go …”

  Although a misogynist, for Elena, odd as that was, his gift had made an exception. In any case, Pavel Alekseevich continued to see the colored glimmer of life hidden inside the body just as he had before.

  Probably IT had fallen in love with her too, Pavel Alekseevich concluded.

  NOTIFICATION OF THE DEATH OF ELENA’S HUSBAND, Anton Ivanovich Flotov, arrived a month and a half after she had spent her first night in Pavel Alekseevich’s room. The notice came in the morning, after Elena had already left for the plant. Vasilisa cried herself dry over the course of the day; she had never liked Anton and now she reproached herself particularly for her dislike.

  That evening she placed the notice in front of Elena. Elena turned to stone. For a long time she just held the flimsy yellowish piece of paper in her hand.

  “My God! How can I live with this?” Elena pointed a finger to the large, clumsily printed numbers of the date of death. “Do you see what date it was?”

  It was the same day she had spent her first night with Pavel Alekseevich.

  By this time Pavel Alekseevich’s broad back in neat surgical dressing gown with ties at the base of his powerful neck had come to shield her from the rest of the world as well as from the perished Anton with his cool eyes and rigid mouth set against a thin face entirely deprived of any Slavic fleshiness.

  From that moment on her love for Pavel Alekseevich would be forever tinged with a feeling of incorrigible guilt before Anton, killed the same day she had betrayed him …

  Vasilisa saw something else in the numbers—forty days had already passed.

  “Too late for me to offer prayers or for you to be a widow.” Vasilisa began to cry.

  SEVERAL DAYS LATER VASILISA ASKED FOR TIME OFF FOR one of her mysterious absences that she more announced than requested. Having spent many years living with Vasilisa, Elena was well aware of her peculiar habit of suddenly disappearing for a week, two or three, and then returning just as unexpectedly. This time, though, she could not let her go: all days off had been cancelled in the drafting office where with easy hand she drafted production plans for the transmission gearbox of an improved tank. The rules of war did not allow for excursions about the country, and there also was no one to babysit Tanya …

  4

  ALTHOUGH THOROUGHLY IMMERSED IN HIS PROFESsional, medical affairs, Pavel Alekseevich was perceptive in many respects and took a sober view of life happening around him. Certainly he enjoyed the privileges of a professor and director of a major clinic, but the disastrous situation of his medical staff, insufficient food supplies even in the obstetrics ward, the cold, and the shortages of firewood, of medicines, and of dressings did not escape his notice … Although he had observed all this before the war, somehow, from somewhere, the idea had crept into his head that after the war everything would change, improve, be more just …

  Possibly, his very profession, his constant, almost mundane-seeming contact with fiery lightning—at that critical moment when a human being is born from a hemorrhaging canal, from the uterine darkness of nonexistence—and his professional participation in this natural drama were affecting him both outwardly and inwardly, as well as influencing his opinions: he knew both the fragility of human beings and their supernatural endurance, which far exceeded that of other living organisms. Years of experience had shown him that the abilities of humans to adapt far exceeded those of animals. Had physicians and zoologists ever investigated this phenomenon together?

  “I’m thoroughly convinced that no dog could ever withstand what humans do.” He chuckled to himself.

  Pavel Alekseevich possessed a most important quality for a scholar: the ability to ask the right questions … He kept a close eye on current research in the fields of physiology and embryology and never ceased to be amazed by the unfailing and even somewhat punctilious law that determined the life of a human being while it was still in its mother’s womb and dictated that every observable event occurred with great accuracy—not to the week or day, but to the hour and minute. This timing mechanism worked so precisely that exactly on the seventh day of gestation every embryo—a spherical accumulation of undifferentiated cells—split into two cell masses, inner and outer, with which amazing things began to happen: they bent, unlatched from each other, and turned outward, forming sacs and nodes—part of the surface migrating inward, and all of this recurring with incomprehensible accuracy, millions and millions of times over. Who or what provided the directions for how this invisible performance played itself out?

  Through an unnamed higher wisdom, a single cell formed by an immobile and slightly nebulous ovum, surrounded by a radiant wreath of follicle cells, and a long-nosed spermatozoa, with its fusiform head and a spiraled jittery tail, inevitably grew into a bellowing, twenty-inch, seven-p
ound, thoroughly senseless human creature, which—as dictated by the same law—developed into a genius, or a dolt, or a beauty, or a criminal, or a saint …

  Precisely because he knew so much—in fact everything there was to know—about the subject at the time, he could picture for himself better than anyone else the cosmic soup from which every little Katenka and Valerik emerged.

  His father’s library had contained a multitude of books on the history of medicine, and he had always enjoyed retracing the path of this quaint antiquity: he delighted in, marveled at, and sometimes chuckled over the fantastic opinions of his long-deceased colleagues—the ancient Egyptian high priest, the world’s first professional anatomist, or the medieval jack-of-all-trades who let blood, performed Cesarean sections, and removed corns, all for the same fee.

  He would never forget the text of a letter, which he had found as a youngster, written by the Babylonian priest and physician Berossus to a pupil explaining that thirty years ago the star Tishla had entered the constellation of Sippara, and since that time boys were being born larger, more aggressive, and with their little hands positioned as if holding a spear …

  “Little wonder,” the ancient physician continued, “that the last ten years have seen incessant war: these boy-warriors have grown up and are incapable of becoming plowmen. It must be that the goddess-protectress Lamassu is rewriting the table of fates.”

  Pavel Alekseevich had consulted German reference books to determine who this Lamassu was who was rewriting the destinies of generations. She turned out to be the goddess of the placenta. This idolization of separate organs and sense of a cosmic link between earth, sky, and the human body—entirely lost by modern science—amazed him. All these touching superstitions notwithstanding, could it be that an entire generation might share a common personality, a single identity? Was it only social factors that defined generations? Might it not in fact be the influence of stars, diet, or water chemistry? After all, Pavel Alekseevich’s teacher, Professor Kalintsev, had spoken about the hypotonic children of the beginning of the century … He had described them as languid, slightly sleepy babies, with puffy bags under their eyes, half-open mouths, angelically relaxed little hands … How unlike today’s children, with their tightly clenched little fists, tucked toes, and tensed muscles. Hypertonic. With a boxer’s stance—fists clenched to protect the head. Children of fear. Better equipped to survive. Only what are they protecting themselves from? Whom are they waiting to be struck by? What would the Babylonian scientist Berossus, priest of the goddess Lamassu, have said about these children?