The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  Thoughts of these frightened children led Pavel Alekseevich in another direction: contemplating the fates of those close to him, he realized that almost all of them also had been crippled by fear. The majority concealed some unsavory fact about their family’s origin or background or, if unable to hide it, lived in constant anticipation of being punished for crimes they had not committed. His assistant, Valentina Ivanovna, was descended from one of the wealthiest merchant families; another colleague bore like the plague his half-German blood; the clinic receptionist’s brother had emigrated in 1918; and Elena, who had just entered his life, had admitted that her parents had perished in the camps while she herself had been spared a similar fate thanks to her grandmother, who had adopted her on the eve of her parents’ move to Altai. Even Vasilisa Gavrilovna, an absolutely common person, turned out to have her own tangled little secret. Each had something to keep quiet, and each lived in expectation of being exposed.

  With the beginning of the war, this amorphous, almost mystical fear had abated somewhat, replaced by another, more immediate fear for the lives of the men who had gone to the front. They were being killed by real, age-old enemies—the Germans. Yet in fighting and dying at the front, these men defended not only the country, but, to a certain extent, their families from their earlier, prewar terror: the agents of vigilance seemed to have forgotten about rich grandmothers, overeducated grandfathers, and relatives abroad. The death notices that arrived made everyone equal in grief. Orphanhood, hunger, and cold did not discriminate between the children of perished soldiers and the children of perished prisoners. Now everyone’s future was tied to victory; no one’s dreams lay beyond it. The virtually unspoken love that had arisen between Pavel Alekseevich and Elena in whispers and to the crackle of smoldering logs so fully absorbed them that they both put off all inevitable thoughts about the future: they were not terrified, yet.

  5

  PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH ADOPTED TANYA IMMEDIATELY AFTER the wedding and, as Vasilisa would say, “took her into his heart.” This “his own” little girl embodied all the thousands of newborns he had helped come into the world: pulled out, cut out, and saved from asphyxiation, cranial trauma, and other injuries that not rarely accompany childbirth.

  Other people’s children were momentary, though. You spent great energy and work on them, and then they disappeared, and Pavel Alekseevich almost never saw these boys and girls at the age when they started to smile, to study their fingers, to delight at recognizing the face of a loved one, a pacifier, or a rattle.

  Already during the first hours of a newborn’s life Pavel Alekseevich could discern manifestations of temperament: a strong will or passivity, obstinacy or laziness. But more subtle personality traits do not usually appear in the first days after birth, when the child is recovering from the herculean effort of being born and transitioning to its new existence. He knew a great deal about other people’s babies, but nothing about the child living in his house. The discovery turned out to be astonishing.

  Tanya was barely two years old, and Pavel Alekseevich was old enough to be her grandfather. The sincere delight he took in her had the patina of an old man’s affection for all the new things that occur in children and no longer occur in adults. He noticed the fold on her wrist, the dimple on her waist; he discovered that her dark hair was not one single dark-brown color, but was lighter and softer, as though of a different sort, at her hairline, on her neck, behind her ears.

  New words, new movements, everything about the intellectual development taking place in this two-year-old person elicited Pavel Alekseevich’s keen and loving interest. He never allowed his thoughts to consider that another woman could have borne him a different child, his own, perhaps even a boy, who would inherit not someone else’s brown hair but his, Pavel Alekseevich’s, light hair and tendency to early baldness as well as the strange shape of his hands with their huge, wide palms and triangular fingers that narrowed radically at the nail, and who would inherit, eventually, his profession.

  No, no, even if Elena could give birth again, he was not entirely sure that he would want to put the love he felt for Tanechka to test or comparison. He said this to Elena as well: I can’t imagine another child; our little girl is a genuine miracle.

  It is hard to tell what derives from what: is a child’s good character the result of the boundless and unconditional love its parents lavish on it, or, just the reverse, does a good child bring out all the best in the parents? Either way, Tanya grew up loved, and they three were especially happy when together. Vasilisa, though she was a member of the family, was an auxiliary member of this triangle who merely lent additional stability to their existence.

  Sometimes, when Tanya woke up before the adults, she trundled over to her parents’ room and dove between them like a calico fish, demanding with a sleepy, happy voice “bugs and quiches.” She had started talking very early and without error even from the outset, and for her these “quiches” were the play of a grown-up person capable of poking fun at herself, the child.

  “Here, and here, and here.” She pointed her finger at her forehead, her cheek, and her chin and, on receiving her parents’ kisses as lawful tribute, she searched with amusing gravity for a place on Pavel Alekseevich’s scruffy cheek to give a smacking kiss in return.

  After Tanya started school, this kissing ritual turned into a farewell kiss before walking out the door. These fleeting moments of contact, seemingly quite insignificant, were the tiny nails that held their daily life together.

  Generally reserved, even with his beloved wife, and strictly observing the bounds of propriety in both gesture and word, with Tanya Pavel Alekseevich would degenerate to senile baby talk. He smothered the child with a lovey-dovey collection of flora and fauna: “my sweet little cherry,” “daddy’s baby sparrow,” “my black-eyed little squirrel,” “chubby little apple.” Tanechka ate it all up and had her own collection of tender nicknames for her father: “my favorite dog,” “Hippopotamus Hippopotamusovich,” “Mr. Catfish Whiskers.”

  Pavel Alekseevich spoiled Tanya with a passion. Now and then Elena would have to put a chill on his ardor. He could walk into a toy store and buy up its sparse stock. But his mad indulgences seemed to do Tanya no harm, and she had none of the greediness or imperious possessiveness of the child who knows no limitations.

  To Pavel Alekseevich all fabrics seemed too rough for his child’s skin, all boots would give her blisters, and all scarves would scratch her neck. He would shift his gaze to his wife, and his heart ached with amazement at how fragile and tender she was; he wanted to swaddle them both in batiste, down, and fur … There was a strange disconnect between Pavel Alekseevich’s ascetic inclinations, as well as the harsh and brutal realities of his life as a surgeon, Elena’s automatic habit of taking the lesser and the worst so easily and naturally that no one noticed, and Vasilisa’s parsimoniousness and strictness with the little girl, on the one hand, and, on the other, Pavel Alekseevich’s burning desire to put his daughter and wife under a bell jar so as to protect them from drafts, crudeness, and all the vulgarity of life around them.

  By September 1944, Pavel Alekseevich’s clinic had returned to Moscow. Elena’s apartment in Trekhprudny Lane, which she had been counting on, was now occupied by two low-level NKVD officers, and the young family found itself in the same dormitory where Pavel Alekseevich had led his lonely, humble life before the war. It was a half-basement, which was spacious enough, but damp, and hardly suitable for a child. As if especially to assure them that their concern for her health was not for naught, Tanya often caught colds and coughed for long periods on end.

  Pavel Alekseevich and Elena Georgievna’s family life was so happy that even Tanya’s illnesses lent a particular note of closeness between the spouses. For a long time Pavel Alekseevich’s first words on returning from work were a concerned “Did she cough?”

  Vasilisa would shrug her bony shoulders: big deal, the kid coughs …

  “Unfeeling old woman,” Pavel Alekseevich th
ought to himself as he pulled off his huge overcoat filled with cold from outside, shooing Tanya away from the cold air when she stuck her head out into the hallway …

  6

  LIKE HIS LATE FATHER, PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH HAD, BEYOND doubt, the qualities of a man of state. Although his father’s rank as an officer in tsarist times had cast a long shadow over Pavel Alekseevich’s career, the second war seemed to have eradicated this unpleasant spot in his biography: his father, though an officer, had been a doctor and perished in a war with Germany. Now, when the country again was waging war with the sons of those same Germans, Pavel Alekseevich was retroactively pardoned his dubious heritage. Soon after returning from evacuation he was summoned to the ministry, where it was proposed that he author a plan for the organization of peacetime health care in his own areas of specialization, obstetrics and pediatrics. The war was coming to an end, and while a commission had not yet been created, the assumption was that he would head it. Pavel Alekseevich was supplied with statistics that had been compiled incompetently, frequently with errors and incomplete data, but to a certain degree revealing nonetheless the horrible demographic situation. It was not just a question of the irreversible loss of an enormous part of the male population and, with that, a drop in the birth rate. Child mortality was enormous, particularly among infants. And there was one more factor, one not quantified in official statistics, but all too well known to any practicing physician: a large number of women of reproductive age died as a result of illegal abortions. Officially, abortions had been made illegal in 1936, at practically the same time that Stalin’s Constitution had been adopted.

  This prohibition was a sore spot in Pavel Alekseevich’s work: nearly half of all emergency operations were the consequences of underground abortions. Contraceptives were practically nonexistent. Physicians were obliged under pain of criminal penalty to examine each woman brought in by ambulance “to inspect for evidence of an underground abortion.” Pavel Alekseevich avoided such veiled denunciations and entered the condemning words criminal abortion in his patient’s medical history only when the patient was dying. If the life of the woman were spared, such a medical opinion would have put the victim as well as the person who had performed this age-old procedure in the dock. Several hundred thousand women were in labor camps precisely because of this law.

  The extensive program Pavel Alekseevich was charged with developing encompassed social as well as medical aspects.

  The project reminded him of any one of those papers submitted to his reigning Highness by the best sons of the fatherland, among them both romantics and dimwits, a broad spectrum of interesting characters, from Prince Kurbsky to Chaadaev. His own father, Aleksei Gavrilovich Kukotsky, had been among them.

  Pavel Alekseevich foresaw that after the war major changes would shake the very institution of the family; he expected a large number of single mothers and viewed this phenomenon as socially inevitable and even advantageous. He considered it imperative to introduce various benefits for single mothers, yet at the same time believed that the first step had to be the repeal of the resolution of July 1936 prohibiting abortions.

  As work progressed, the project expanded and turned into a veritable utopia between the lines of whose fantastic constructions shone serious and very constructive ideas that were far ahead of their time. For example, it presupposed the establishment of social services for parents, sex education for young people, and the creation of a network of children’s homes and sanatoria where the care and upbringing of both physically and mentally healthy children would be practiced based on scientific principles. This in part echoed pedagogical methods forbidden in the 1930s and even smacked slightly of Chernyshevsky. The need for medical genetic consulting also had not been overlooked: Pavel Alekseevich intended to charge his school friend, Ilya Goldberg, doctor of genetics, with organizing this aspect.

  The Minister of Health at the time was a woman beyond her prime, an experienced bureaucrat and a party member from the salt-and-pepper top of her head to the stubborn calluses on her feet; she also happened to be the only woman in the government. For years she had been known as Workhorse, partly because it sounded like her surname, and partly owing to her indefatigability and rare ability to plug on, never swerving from the assigned path. She even liked the nickname, and not infrequently, having allowed herself a good bit to drink with close company, was wont to boast: “Yes, it’s true, the Russian woman is a steed with balls. She can tackle anything!”

  She was incontestably the number-one woman in the country, a symbol of women’s equality, and International Women’s Day incarnate, after, of course, the mythological Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Zoya Kosmodemianskaya, and the eternally youthful Liubov Orlova. All of them, Workhorse included, resembled each other in one way: they were all childless …

  Initially, when the project of reorganizing health care was only just getting under way, Workhorse was a major supporter, but as Pavel Alekseevich’s work increasingly gained scope, her enthusiasm cooled. In fact, she got scared. The project looked too radical, demanded enormous financing and—and this was the main thing—risk. In many respects blind, deaf, and dumb, Workhorse possessed superhuman acuity for the fluctuating moods of those higher up, which she regarded as the interests of the state. Intuition told her that at the moment the state’s interest hardly lay in the field of obstetrics and gynecology, or in maternal care or pediatrics, but in other loftier endeavors.

  Academician Oparin, for example, had already explained how organic matter had evolved from inorganic matter through the introduction of electric currents blasted—with a boost from the doctrines of Marx and Engels—into a primary broth of ideologically trustworthy protein molecules. Another academician, Trofim Lysenko, had almost succeeded in subordinating Mother Nature to the wave of his magic wand, and she had already made a firm promise to him to behave as required by the carrot-and-stick method. A third academician, that world-famous woman Olga Lepeshinskaya, was within inches of conquering old age, and a foot from conquering death itself. The atom had already agreed to become peaceful, and rivers were ready to flow wherever needed, instead of where they so desired. Soviet science—medical science, in particular—was in full bloom even without the repeal of that infamous resolution on abortions, while the great leader of all times and peoples, paralyzed left arm stuck in his jacket, used his working right arm to accept an immortal bouquet from the hands of a little blond girl (who subsequently on investigation turned out to be Jewish) and smiled wisely …

  Still, that bald gynecologist came to the ministry every week to badger the minister with one and the same question: had she sent the project upstairs? No, no, and no! At the present moment there was no way she could take it upstairs. What if they suddenly took it the wrong way? Besides, ideas usually travelled in the opposite direction: not upward from below, but downward from above. For the moment they had forgotten about reorganizing health care, and she was not about to remind them of it. Workhorse stalled the best she could: not a single resolution went any further without first being discussed in the party’s Central Committee, and her acute inner sense said to wait. Pavel Alekseevich insisted. After more than a year of fruitless negotiations with the minister, he committed, ultimately, an act thoroughly unethical by bureaucratic and military standards: he penned a missive over the head of the Minister of Health to the Central Committee, addressed to Politburo member N who oversaw social issues. As required by standard protocol, the letter began with the magical formula “Under the leadership of … ,” but it was written in impeccable old-fashioned language, with precise argumentation and devastating—both literally and figuratively—statistics.

  THIS TIME PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH LOCALIZED THE PROBLEM: he submitted not the entire project, but only a fragment related to what he saw as the most pressing issues, those concerning the legalization of abortion.

  Several months passed, and Pavel Alekseevich had already stopped waiting for an answer when at 9:00 A.M., during a staff briefing, a phone call
came in from the Central Committee offices on Staraya Square. Pavel Alekseevich excused himself and walked out of the staff room with a scowl. Someone had violated the rule: no phone calls during briefings. But this was an invitation to an audience at the Central Committee, an urgent one at that.

  Ten minutes later the official car was already pulling away from the clinic. Alongside the driver sat a gloomy Pavel Alekseevich. The call had been unexpected—the most ominous kind. He was particularly unhappy about the urgency. Before leaving he managed to do only two things of primary necessity: he drank down a full glass of diluted spirit alcohol and picked up the briefcase he had long ago prepared for this occasion. Still, on the way to Staraya Square he thought that he had been wrong not to drop by the house to say good-bye to his family …

  At the security post at entrance number six he was stopped and told to leave his briefcase. Inside the briefcase was a flat-sided anatomy jar with a sealed wax top; the jar was to play a decisive role in the forthcoming conversation. After protracted explanations and objections, the briefcase was allowed to proceed to the meeting together with its owner. Pavel Alekseevich was led down long carpeted corridors. This far from pleasant journey felt like a nightmare. Pavel Alekseevich once again regretted that he had not stopped at the house. The two guards assigned to him—one to his right, the other to his left—stopped at the door.