The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  All these explanations come to me now. Then, as a little girl, I could never have found the words. But since then, whenever I recollect this event, a vibrating nausea arises just beneath my heart.

  But then the drill stopped. I was lying on Grandfather’s couch, but the room with the striped wallpaper, with the darling little bay window, was not there. This was some unfamiliar place that resembled nothing else. It was a low-ceiling space illuminated with a dull brownish light that was so weak that the ceiling and the walls disappeared into the gloominess. Perhaps it was not a room at all, but some terribly closed-in space with what resembled a wretched sky overhead. There were a lot of unpleasant things there, but after all these years I don’t want to strain my memory to resurrect the details, because when I think back to then I begin to feel sick.

  A multitude of muddy shadow-people filled the space around me. Among them was Grandfather. They moved about painfully and aimlessly, squabbling slightly, and paying no attention to me. I didn’t want them to see me. Especially Grandfather. He limped, as he had when he was alive, but he had no cane.

  This state of powerlessness and sadness was so heavy, so contrary to life, that I guessed that this was death. As soon as I thought that, I saw myself behind our house in Troparevo on a bright summer afternoon with patches of sun and shadow. A large poplar toppled by a recent tornado lay across the path, and I walked along it, stepping over broken branches, slipping on the damp trunk, and inhaling the strong scent of withering foliage. Everything was slightly spongy: the tree trunk under my slight weight and the layers of decaying foliage. A dream inverted: from there to here.

  Here, in the place where I was, there was no real light and no shadows. There, behind the Troparevo house, where the fallen tree lay, where the sole of my shoe slid along the velvety tree trunk, there were shadows, and spots of light, and an immeasurable wealth of shades of colors. Here everything was unfixed and brown, but real. There everything was unreal. Here there were no shadows. Darkness doesn’t have shadows. Shadows are possible only where there is light …

  I lay as if paralyzed, unable even to move my lips. I wanted to cross myself, as Grandmother had taught me, but I was sure that I could not even lift my hand. But my arm lifted easily, and I made the sign of the cross and recited “Our Father” …

  A man in a clay mask resembling an ordinary oven pot approached me. Through the clay eye slits in his mask he stared at me with bright blue eyes. These eyes were the only thing that had any color. The man sneered.

  My prayer hung tangibly over my head. Not that it was weak. It just did not go anywhere. It was cancelled. This dark place was located in some place far away from God’s world, in a solitude so unimaginable that light did not penetrate it, and I realized that prayer without light is like fish without water—dead …

  I could hear the buzz of a conversation—sad, decayed, and deprived of any sense. Nothing but lethargic irritation, a languid argument about nothing. And Grandfather’s voice: I ORDERED, you ORDERED, I did not ORDER … This “ORDERED” was a being …

  The one in the clay mask bent over me and started to speak. I don’t remember what he said. But I remember that his speech was unexpectedly coarse and vulgar, ungrammatical; he chided me, even mocked me. His words, like the brownish clay on his face, also were a mask.

  “He can speak using other words; he’s deceiving me. Liar,” I thought. And as soon as I said that to myself, he disappeared. It seems I had exposed him with my thought alone …

  SHADOWS FLUTTERED HERE AND THERE, AND ALL OF this lasted timelessly long, until I saw that this place had no walls, that merely the thickened gloom created the appearance of a closed space, while in fact this cramped, dark place was enormous, infinite; it filled everything, and nothing existed besides it. It was a maze with no way out. I became terrified. Not for myself, but for Grandfather, and I began to shout.

  “Grandfather!”

  He seemed to look in my direction, but either he didn’t recognize me, or didn’t want to recognize me, but just continued mumbling, looking at me with his faded brown eyes: I ORDERED, he ORDERED …

  Suddenly everything shifted and began to slip away. Like the shadow of a cloud across a field, the dark space began to move off, and I saw first a part of the wall in its striped wallpaper, then all of Grandfather’s room in the gray predawn gloom.

  I had not awoken, I simply was not asleep. The morning gloom, depressing and unpleasant on ordinary days, now seemed a live pearl color full of promise, because even the nighttime gloom of this, our world, is a shade of our earthly light. What had been shown to me there was the absence of light, a sad and unwelcoming place. That was it, the shadow of death … And when the last edge of the darkness floated out of the room and disappeared somewhere to the north, I heard a clear, youthful, indubitably male voice saying:

  “The middle world.”

  TO THIS DAY I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THAT WAS … OF ONLY one thing am I almost certain: all of that was shown to me because my crippled grandfather with his gloomy face slipped among the crowd of shadows.

  Later, when I grew up and read the Gospels and the Epistles of Saint Paul, I returned to this event, to this otherworldly encounter, and thought, Does the apostle know that not all of us change, that some do not change at all and preserve forever their lameness and gloominess, and that what’s behind all this is sin? I do not condemn Grandfather, by no means—who in our family can judge whom? But Mama once let slip that when Grandfather’s case with the train station pavilion that had collapsed was under investigation, his guilt had not been proven, but that the accusation had been that he had used poor-quality materials, which caused the illfated pavilion to collapse and the workers to die … Theft or bribery … The usual Russian story. And so, is it going to be this way forever, with no forgiveness whatsoever? Did the apostle promise deliverance from sin only for those without sin? No, I don’t understand …

  And what about my memory lapses? What if I forget? I forget so much these days, I probably also forget my sins. So then what’s the point of repentance and forgiveness? If there’s no guilt, then there can be no forgiveness.

  Tiny pieces of my life seem to have been washed away as if by water. In their place a blank space has formed, as when you wake up after you’ve dreamed that you had a really important discussion with someone inhumanly intelligent but you can’t pull, can’t drag any of it out into your waking life, and everything important stays in the dream. You get this horrible feeling that there are valuables stored in some sealed room that you can’t get into. Although sometimes you manage to return to an old dream, to the same person you were having the conversation with, and continue the conversation where it broke off. And he answers, and everything is clear as day. But then you wake up and once again, there’s just blankness.

  I had one of those blank spots appear where I committed a betrayal. I still remember it, but just the fact. For a long time I haven’t felt any repentance or shame. Apparently, I forgave myself. And the way I committed the betrayal: easily, with no pangs of anything, not even hesitation, or thought. I am talking about my dead Anton. There was a poem that was very popular during the war, Konstantin Simonov’s “Wait for me, and I’ll return” … At the end it goes: “Only you and I will know how among flames and fire your waiting saved my life …” Instead I caused his death by not waiting.

  I fell in love with PA not even at first sight, but as if I had loved him even before I was born and merely remembered anew my old love for him. I forgot Anton as if he were just a neighbor, or a classmate, or a colleague from work. Not even a relative. Though I’d lived with him for five years. He’s the father of my only daughter. Your father, Tanechka. I see nothing of Anton or his family in you. You really do resemble PA. Your forehead, your mouth, your hands. I won’t even mention your facial expressions, your gestures, and your habits. But I can’t tell you that PA is not your natural father. So, it turns out that first I betrayed Anton, and then I robbed him, deprived him of his daughter. Can
you ever forgive me?

  Overall, I’m certain that PA means more for Tanya than I do. He’s meant more for me than I have for myself. Even now when everything is so hopelessly ruined between us, fairness demands I admit that I have never met a more noble, more intelligent, or kinder person. And no one in God’s world can explain to me why this best-of-the-best person has for so many years served the greatest evil there is on this earth. How can these two things coexist in one person? In my heart I sensed it all, knew it all back then when we were in evacuation and he took the Romashkins’ kittens away. At first I couldn’t believe that he had drowned them. Now I believe everything. After all, with just one phrase he crossed out our love, all ten years of our happiness. Destroyed everything. Destroyed me. Cruelty? I don’t understand. But that’s exactly what I don’t want to remember now. For me right now it’s important to restore everything that’s slipping away from me, that always, before PA appeared in my life, played such a large role. My dreams and early memories.

  What I see—what’s told to me and shown to me in my dreams—is much richer and more significant than what I can put to paper. I have a wonderful spatial imagination, professional in a certain sense. Probably I am particularly sensitive to space, and for that reason have found myself in its mysterious back alleys, like that “middle world.” On the other hand, nothing comforts me more than my dear mechanical drawing, where each structure is strictly and completely transparent.

  The dreams I see exist in some sort of dependency on the everyday waking world, but I won’t even try to describe the nature of that dependency. There is doubtless logic to the transition, only it remains on the other side and never emerges into waking reality. It’s perfectly clear to me that even though my hyperphysical journeys to various strange places violate all possible laws, my presence in those places is no less real than everything that surrounds us here, where I write with a pen in a school notebook Tanya started and abandoned at the very beginning because the school year had ended. No less real than the houses, streets, trees, and teacups here.

  But again, the key to it all is sealed in a room, in a room without doors. In general, a lot of different things in my dreams are connected with doors and windows. The first, probably most important, door I saw was a very long time ago, not as a child, but when I was a teenager. I can’t say for sure when, because this vision is always accompanied by a sense of having encountered something already seen before. As if it were possible first to commit something to memory and then to be born into the world with the memory.

  This door was in a cliff, but at first I saw the cliff, which was of dazzling fresh limestone so totally and abundantly flooded with sunlight that all the details of its coarse texture, all its uneven surface—a memorial incarnate to a hardworking civilization of small shelled animals long ago extinct—were as visible as if under a magnifying glass. Then my gaze shifted, a screw turned, and a slight swell swept over the surface, and I saw a door with a bas-relief surface cut into the side of the cliff. The relief was very distinct but it didn’t add up to an intelligible image. The smooth lines intersected, weaved, and flowed into each other, until finally my eyes adapted, and then the meaning of the image revealed itself to me. I made out a high pallet containing a smoothly curved body that flowed downward from the top, delicate hands folded in meekness, Jewish heads with tall brows bent low, and, above them all, the lone figure of the Son with the Theotokos as child in his arms …

  The door was ready to open; a shadow even seemed to flit across a crack in the aperture in the cliff, and I was invited to enter. But I took fright, and the door, sensing my fright, once again reverted into the bas-relief on the white cliff, becoming flatter and flatter as I watched, gradually being covered over by the white meat of the limestone until it disappeared entirely.

  I was not ready to enter. But there was nothing irreversible or irrevocably lost in this. I simply wasn’t ready. I’m still not ready.

  Then it was as if I were told: Leave. Let your fear expend itself in life’s travails. And when your pain, your longing, and your thirst for understanding exceed your fear, come back again.

  That’s approximately what I heard at the door. It was said tenderly. By the way, people always speak tenderly to me.

  There was another thing about the door. It led from one space to another. But there weren’t any walls or anything else resembling a barrier between these two spaces. Just a door. Not even a door, a doorway. But everything visible through that doorway was different: the air, the water, and the people inhabiting it. I desperately wanted to go inside, but the space of the doorway was hostile and would not let me through. Its hostility was so great that it wasn’t worth trying. I stepped away. And then it occurred to me: you should try, make an attempt … I turned around. But the doorway was no longer there. And the space wasn’t there. Only ripples in the air left by a vanished opportunity.

  I also remember how Grandmother died. As happens with the righteous, she knew in advance of the day of her death. Not long before Grandmother’s death Vasilisa had left for who knows where—she suddenly got the urge, you know how even now that still happens with her. But on the eve of Grandmother’s death she returned. By that time Grandmother had not got out of bed for a week, had not taken any food, and had drunk only small amounts of water. She was not in pain, at least, so it seemed to me. Her whole life no one had ever heard her complain. She did not speak, answering questions only by shaking her head to say no. No to everything. Vasilisa sat alongside Grandmother and read something devout. I think now that it must have been the “Office of the Parting of the Soul from the Body.” But maybe something else. Grandmother was well over eighty years old and looked like antiquity itself, an Egyptian mummy. Despite her horrifying thinness, though, she was very beautiful. Those last days she did not open her eyes. But her face was not unconscious. Just the opposite, it was the attentive face of a person concentrating on some important and weighty question.

  On the eve of her death her young neighbor dropped by to borrow wineglasses: it was her birthday. I opened the cupboard and took out several different wineglasses, among which there was one real beauty, an antique with a worn gold pattern. The neighbor started looking it over and began to gush. She spoke rather loudly, and her squeals of delight over this beautiful glass were very inappropriate: Grandmother lay dying in the same room.

  “My, they knew how to make things then. They don’t make things that way now. It must cost …”

  And just then, in a clear and rather sonorous voice, Grandmother—without opening her eyes—fully conscious, and even severely, made a pronouncement.

  “My child, you’re disturbing me …”

  FOR TWO WEEKS SHE HAD SAID NOTHING, AND THE LAST three days it had seemed to us that she was unconscious … I don’t know how we disturbed her, what important business we tore her from …

  A day later, at sunset, when we—Anton Ivanovich, Vasilisa, and I—were sitting at the table, her clear, loud voice suddenly rang out from its weeklong oblivion.

  “The doors! The doors!”

  Vasilisa flew down the long corridor—clattering with her old shoes that fell from her heels—to open the front door. She switched the latch, and the door flung open. Just then a stream of air rushed through the open window leaf in the direction of the front door, the light, cold draft touching Vasilisa as it blew past …

  I turned toward Grandmother. She exhaled, and never inhaled again. The draft seemed to dart back. The front door slammed shut of its own, and the window leaf jerked on its hinge. A sunbeam darted from Grandmother’s face to the shifting glass. The sunbeam, a little golden clot, was solid, and as it flashed on the scoured pane we heard the faint sound of shattering glass.

  Anton Ivanovich stared at the window leaf and shook his head. Vasilisa, who had sensed everything instantly, crossed herself. I went over to Grandmother, not yet quite believing that everything was over.

  Her death had been as serene as it could be. It was “a Christian death,
peaceful, painless, and without shame.” But at the time I didn’t know that’s what it was called. Vasilisa knew.

  Grandmother’s face turned solemn and joyous. The pale-pink skin of her head peeked through her bluish-gray hair; her forehead and nose hardened and froze like fine porcelain clay, and her wrinkles smoothed out. Her eyebrows were sable, with tiny brushes at the bridge of her nose. It was precisely at that moment that I distinctly realized how much I resembled her … Our white cat, Motya, who had lain at Grandmother’s feet since she had taken to her bed, got up, went over to the edge of the bed, and jumped to the floor.

  Anton went to see what had happened to the window leaf. He still hadn’t realized that Grandmother had died.

  “The draft shattered the glass,” he mused in wonderment, picking off a piece of dried putty. “There’s a big piece of glass in the back stairwell; I can cut a piece of it for the window leaf … Good thing that it’s a rectangle; any of the other window panes could be real trouble …”