The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  At particularly vile times Pavel Alekseevich stayed at home, drank a glass of vodka in the morning, played with Tanya, taught Vasilisa how to make meat dumplings, or just slouched around the apartment, where he constantly found the little notes his wife Elena wrote to herself. Touching little notes that began with one and the same words, “don’t forget … ,” followed by: “buy apples,” “take linen to the laundry,” “take your purse to the repair shop …” What was funny was that there were so many of these notes, all of them with one and the same list: apples, laundry, repair shop …

  He knew that Elena was not good at household chores, and her efforts not to forget anything, to get everything done on time, touched Pavel Alekseevich. His wife’s virtues delighted him and her shortcomings endeared her to him. That’s what’s called marriage. Their marriage was happy both night and day, and their mutual understanding seemed especially full because, being reserved and silent by nature as well as by upbringing, neither of them required the kinds of verbal confirmations that get worn out so quickly by people who like to talk.

  Pavel Alekseevich’s drinking binges, despite their initially diplomatic character, were hardly staged. But Elena, although worried about the health of her not-so-young husband, made no attempt to put an end to them. Women’s intuition, not reason, as always, guided her. She knew nothing about the nature of alcoholism, especially Russian alcoholism, when the soul, finding no other outlet, finds easy and available consolation without lies or shame.

  When binges occurred, Elena sometimes took vacation time, and she and Pavel Alekseevich would head out to the dacha. One of these short holidays occurred in the autumn, two others in the winter. There were no better days in her life than these drunken holidays when he cast off all of his numerous cares and belonged entirely to her. It was the fever of youth that they had both missed, the uncomplicated revelations of seeming bottomlessness, where everything climaxed—about this Pavel Alekseevich longed to forget, and sometimes he managed to—with a few milligrams of a secret and measured dose of a mysterious substance inside the tunica albuginea … And when he no longer had the strength to extend his arm for a glass of water, everything at the bottom went cold: all of it was in vain, in vain, for there remained that insurmountable boundary they were unable to cross together … The only medicine was to try again and again …

  By his third binge Elena knew that the ensuing period of sobriety would be an ordeal for her. She both feared and deep in her heart awaited the morning when Pavel Alekseevich, having drunk his first liberating glass, would say to her:

  “Get your things, dear, we’re going to the countryside …”

  AT THE ACADEMY IN THE MEANTIME THEY HAD STOPPED bothering him. The reputation of a drunkard was a peculiar sort of reprieve. No single other vice elicits nearly as much compassion in our country as alcoholism. Everybody drinks: tsars, archbishops, academicians, even trained parrots …

  10

  IN THE THIRD WEEK OF MAY A PREMATURE HEAT WAVE set in, making everyone a little bit sick. A few more days remained until the end of classes, but the curriculum had been covered in its entirety, and grades, both quarterly and final, had been given. It was already known who the honor students were and who would have to repeat a grade. The girls and the teachers at the school languished from the emptiness of time and its sluggishness.

  Galina Ivanovna, an elderly schoolteacher, a worn-out nag with a flabby croup, came to class in a new summer dress, dirty beige with broken black lines that lost each other, then found each other, and emitted little sprouts.

  Galina Ivanovna had worked with this group of girls for four years and had taught them everything she knew: writing, arithmetic, and drawing. Over these same years the girls had memorized both of her woolen winter dresses—one gray, the other burgundy—as well as her dark-blue suit covered with a layer of gray cat fur.

  Since their first class that day the future fifth graders had been heatedly debating the teacher’s new acquisition: the belt was a bit plain, without a buckle, and it had Japanese sleeves. Most of the girls were eleven-year-olds, the age when they were most unalike in terms of development, when some of them had already developed curves and growths of curly hair in the hidden regions of their bodies, while others were still thin, sexless children with gnawed nails and scratched knees. But the teacher’s new dress intrigued both the former and the latter.

  It intrigued Galina Ivanovna herself no less. She had sewn this dress not simply because her old one had worn out, but also because today, after classes were over, there would be a festive tea party to mark her fortieth anniversary as a teacher. During the class change Galina Ivanovna had even gone to the lavatory to look at herself in the mirror and straighten her collar. She had already achieved the rank of honored teacher, and now deep in her heart she dreamed that she would be given a real award—a medal or ribbon.

  She devoted the fourth period to extracurricular reading. At first the girls read aloud in turn, every one of them poorly. Those who did not trip over their words rattled them out so senselessly that it was impossible to catch the contents. When she tired of correcting them, Galina Ivanovna took the book and began reading herself. Her voice, a bit high for such a large and stout person, was slightly nasal, but expressive. She read the part about freezing Kashtanka suffering on the shelterless street with particular depth and feeling.

  Only a few minutes remained until the end of the lesson, and the most impatient were already silently collecting their satchels. The sun scorched at full capacity through the windows, and the girls to a one sweated in their woolen dresses that stuck to their wet armpits.

  “A freezing dog gets no sympathy in this heat,” Tanya thought to herself, and at that same moment heard first one, then another, sniffle of someone crying into her sleeve.

  Galina Ivanovna stopped reading. The entire class turned to look back at the far corner of the last row where for the last four years Toma Polosukhina had sat, insensible and indifferent to everything. She was crying over the bitter fate of frozen, lost Kashtanka.

  Desks slammed shut, and the girls jumped from their seats.

  “Class is not over yet,” Galina Ivanovna reminded them and, smiling professionally from the corners of her faded mouth, she said to Toma, “Why are you so upset, Toma? Didn’t you finish reading to the end?” She tried to calm the girl. “Everything will turn out all right at the end.”

  “No it won’t, no it won’t!” Toma sniffled, tearing her cheek from the sticky school desk and wiping her nose with her apron.

  She was one of the smallest, one of the least developed girls, plain and ordinary, like a sparrow or longspur …

  The bell finally rang. Galina Ivanovna decisively closed her book. As if by magic everyone’s drowsiness dissipated; the languid, intolerable heat outside the windows instantaneously metamorphosed into fine weather—excellent weather—as they all trembled with impatience and dashed to get out into the street to hop on chalked asphalt; skip rope by themselves, in pairs, or in whole groups; or just jump and kick about, like young foals or kid goats, somersaulting, pushing and shoving, and senselessly tearing about …

  Toma was still sniffling as she collected her dirty textbooks when Tanya went up to her. Why she went up to her she herself did not know.

  “What’s wrong?” Tanya asked.

  Tanya was no sparrow and no longspur; she was something rare, like a royal lily or a big transparent dragonfly. And both of them knew perfectly well who was who …

  But that day Toma was going through something huge and awful that Tanya could never go through, and that made them equal, and even, perhaps, elevated Toma above the rest of the world, and for that reason, this little girl who had never said anything about herself and who would never be of interest to anyone said: “My mom’s dying. I’m afraid to go home …”

  “I’ll go with you,” Tanya offered fearlessly.

  Were it yesterday, Toma would have been proud and rejoiced that Tanya was going home with her, but today she al
most did not care …

  They passed through the schoolyard, which rang with girlish shouts and shimmered with greenish gold, slipped through two courtyards, squeezed through a fence, and stopped at the entrance to the “partment.” That’s what Toma’s mother called their housing, which had been assigned before the war to her husband, who had perished in 1944. It was a former garage, with a regular door cut through the garage door. Toma stopped in her tracks at the entrance; Tanya resolutely pushed the door.

  It was the stench that hit first. The place reeked of sour dampness, urine, and kerosene, all of it rotten, decayed, and deathly … Two pieces of rope strung across the room were draped with wet linen. At the far end, under a wide low window that looked out onto a brick wall, stood the enormous bed on which the whole family—mother, Toma, and her two younger brothers—slept, as atop a Russian stove.

  At first it seemed that the bed was empty, but when her eyes grew accustomed to the semidarkness, Tanya could make out a tiny head in a thick headscarf. Next to the bed stood a basin filled with brown linen. The girls approached the bed, the source of the horrible smells.

  “Momma, Mom,” Toma called.

  A groan could be heard coming from the scarf.

  “Maybe you want something to eat or to drink?” Toma asked, her voice full of tears.

  There was no answer, not even a groan.

  Toma pushed the smelly blanket to the side: the woman was lying on a red sheet. Tanya did not realize immediately that this was blood. The brown linen in the basin also was bloodied, but it had darkened with exposure to the air.

  “She needs an ambulance,” Tanya said firmly.

  “She won’t let me call an ambulance,” Toma whispered.

  “But there’s a lot of blood; she’s hemorrhaging …” Tanya was surprised.

  “Yeah, she’s hemorrhaging. She scraped herself out,” explained Toma. Not sure that Tanya would understand, she explained: “She brings guys here, then she scrapes herself out. She scraped too far this time.”

  Toma sniffled. Tanya winced: bang, screech, crash … The walls started to float, her depth perception inverted, and a stinking abyss gaped before her … Life was caving in on her, and Tanya understood that from this moment she had left her former life behind her, forever …

  “I’ll call my dad, that’s what …”

  “That’s what you say. He won’t come here.”

  “Wait … I’ll be back soon.”

  Within five minutes Tanya had reached the apartment. Her mother was not at home, and Vasilisa opened the door.

  “You gone berserk?”

  Not answering, Tanya rushed to the phone to call Pavel Alekseevich. No one picked up for a long time, then a voice told her that he was in surgery.

  “What happened?” Vasilisa Gavrilovna tried to get her to answer.

  “Ah, you wouldn’t understand.” Tanya waved her off.

  It seemed to her that she must not reveal this awful knowledge to anyone, because no matter whom she told, their life also would collapse and fall apart, as hers had. The secret had to be kept safe …

  “I’ll be back soon,” she shouted from the threshold and, slamming the door, dashed down the staircase.

  Tanya remembered only vaguely how, not waiting for the trolleybus, she ran to the metro station, rode to the Park Kultury station, then ran once again down long Pirogov Street. It seemed like her running was infinite and went on for many hours. At the security desk of her father’s clinic they stopped her.

  “I’m going to see my dad, Pavel Alekseevich …”

  They let her through immediately. She tore up the stairs to the second floor, pushed open the glass door, and there was her father, walking toward her, in a white surgical gown and round cap. A whole brood of doctors and students milled around him, but he walked ahead of them—taller and broader than them all, with a deep-rosy face and gray-tufted bushy eyebrows. He caught sight of Tanya. It seemed as if the air parted in front of him.

  “What happened?”

  “Toma Polosukhina’s mother is dying. She scraped herself out!” Tanya blurted.

  “What? Who let you in here?” he roared. “Go downstairs, to the reception area! Wait for me there!”

  Tanya flew downstairs, gulping down her tears.

  For all his bravery, he had taken fright. One denunciation would be enough to turn his life to hell …

  Three minutes later Pavel Alekseevich came downstairs to the reception area. Tanya rushed over to him.

  “Daddy!”

  He stopped her again with his gaze.

  “Now explain calmly what happened to you.”

  “Toma Polosukhina, Dad … We have to hurry … Her mother is dying …”

  “Whose mother? Who?” Pavel Alekseevich asked coldly.

  “Our janitor, Aunt Liza. They live in the garage, behind our house. She scraped herself out, she did … Dad, it’s terrible there … Dad, there’s so much blood …”

  He removed his glasses and rubbed the ridge of his nose. The phrase “scraped herself out” from Tanya’s lips …

  “Okay, listen … Go straight home.”

  “How?”

  “The same way you got here.”

  Tanya could not believe her ears. It was as if her father had been replaced by someone else. He had never spoken to her with such an iron voice.

  Slouched, she went outside …

  Thirty minutes later Pavel walked into the Polosukhin garage. His assistant Vitya was with him. The driver of the ambulance they had arrived in did not get out.

  As soon as he set eyes on her, Pavel Alekseevich sized up what had happened: there she was, his patient, the unfortunate object of his professional concern … A wartime widow or single mother, probably alcoholic, and probably slept around … He touched the little janitor’s wide cold hand and opened an eyelid with his finger. There was nothing to be done here. Near the bed stood the three kids, two little boys and a girl, who stared at him with big eyes.

  “Where’s Toma?” Pavel Alekseevich asked.

  “I’m Toma.”

  Pavel Alekseevich looked at her closely: he had taken her at first for a seven-year-old, but now, having got a better look at her, he understood that she was indeed Tanya’s classmate.

  “Toma, take the boys upstairs to apartment number twelve. In the big gray house. You know where?”

  She nodded, but did not budge.

  “Go, go. Vasilisa Gavrilovna will let you in. You tell her that Pavel Alekseevich sent you. Tell her to set the table. I’ll be there in a second.”

  “Are you taking Mommy to the hospital?”

  He used his mighty figure to block their view of the bed and the miserable woman who was no longer.

  “Go, go. We’ll do what needs to be done …”

  The children left.

  “Well, we’ve gotten ourselves into a mess … She has to be taken to the morgue … ,” the assistant half-implored.

  “No, Vitya. We can’t take her to the morgue. I’m going to send Vasilisa Gavrilovna down here. She’ll be the one to call the ambulance and the militia … We were never here …” Pavel frowned. “You know yourself I’d take her if she were still alive …”

  Vitya knew it all too well. Actually, all doctors knew how close this came to the criminal code.

  Liza the janitor’s death sent shock waves up and down the baptized population of the odd-numbered side of Novoslobodskaya Street all the way down to Savelovsky Station, raising a storm of passions and arguments that shattered friendships forever. After Vasilisa Gavrilovna called the ambulance and the militia, and the dead woman’s contorted body was taken to the forensics morgue for an autopsy, scandal arose on two fronts—one having to do with housing, the other with medicine.

  There were three significant contenders for the “partment.” The first—Kostikov, the house manager—dreamed of getting the place for his own sister and her daughter, who had been living in his quarters for more than two years while she waited to get an apartment th
rough the factory where she worked, but with little hope. The day of the death Kostikov took advantage of the opportunity to sign his sister up for the late Liza’s job, and now he was sure the living space would not get away from them. The second contender was the electrician from the house management office, Kostya Sichkin, who was tired of living in a seven-by-four-foot room with three children and a fourth already on the way. There was one more contender, also not an outsider, a militiaman from the local beat, Kurennoy, who had the largest room in the dormitory, but was planning to get married, and waited in combat readiness. Other minor folk from the nearby barracks also would not have objected to an upgrade, but they had no chances whatsoever.

  On the medical front things were more serious. The autopsy showed that Liza the janitor had died of hemorrhaging induced when the wall of her uterus had been perforated and some arm of illfated underground medicine, using an unidentified instrument, had pulled half of her intestine through the unintended puncture …

  According to the criminal code this unsuccessful intervention was worth three to ten years, depending on the qualifications of the person performing the abortion: in the case of a lethal outcome doctors were given ten years, twice as many as an amateur. Which had a certain justice.

  The whole neighborhood knew the names of the two women who practiced this impious trade: Granny Shura Zudina and the Moldavian woman Dora Gergel. The former was simpler and cheaper. She gave an injection and inserted a catheter. Usually it worked. Sometimes, with particularly muscular women or those who had never given birth, it did not. In which case Granny Shura shrugged and did not take any money.

  Dora was a trained medic, and did everything by the book, with no misfires. She had moved to Moscow from Kishinev after the war. A swarthy beauty with fiery eyes—her suspicious but undiscerning neighbors took her for a Jew. She had a knack for anything she tried: although already pregnant at the time, she managed to marry a major; she was a crafty housekeeper—in Moscow, a new place for her, she quickly figured out what was to be had where, even when food was still being rationed. She got a job as a nurse in a hospital, although her nursing diploma was counterfeit, not even written in Russian. She performed real abortions at the patient’s home, with painkillers even, but she was expensive. Richer people went to her, and Liza could hardly have afforded her. So the neighborhood concluded with no uncertainty that the whole mess was Zudina’s doing.