He stood on the corner of Kaliaevskaya and Oruzheinaya streets, leaning against the wall of the milk store. He remembered that there were still a few drops at the bottom of his flask, and he drew out this last gulp, stuck the empty flask into his pocket, and just at that moment felt someone pulling at his sleeve. A crafty goggle-eyed kid looked him in the eye from below.
“Hey, gramps, want me to take you?”
“Where?” Pavel Alekseevich did not understand right away.
“I know a way to get through.” The boy gestured ambiguously in the direction of Karetny Lane.
Pavel Alekseevich waved him off and walked away. His mood could not have been gloomier. At Belorussky Station he saw a whole column of ambulances … They were stuck in the roadblock of trucks.
“A hecatomb, a hecatomb,” Pavel Alekseevich suddenly said aloud, surprising himself. At the moment, he did not know how right he was.
16
PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH NEVER DID LEARN THE FATE OF THE monstrous sample he had brought to the high party office on Staraya Square. Though greatly impressed by his conversation with the mad doctor, the cautious bureaucrat decided not to raise the question of this delicate matter in the Politburo.
For several years the glass jar stood wrapped in paper on the lower shelf of his bookcase; on the eve of one May Day, in the fever of a general housekeeping in honor of the luminous holiday, a cleaning woman carried it out to the big garbage bin in the basement.
Strangely enough, “Soapface” turned out to be impressionable, and a few months after the great leader’s death the project to legalize abortions was studied and discussed. The state—having murdered countless millions of its citizens over the thirty-five years of its existence—deigned to allow women to decide the fate of the anonymous life that had sprung in their wombs against their wishes. A few demiurges signed, the valve at the top opened, and medical institutions were sent the corresponding circular that legalized the artificial interruption of pregnancies.
The former high party official who accomplished this on his last ascent of Olympus—there was no going any higher—to the day of his death (which occurred not long after) considered himself the great benefactor of the human race, while Pavel Alekseevich never did find out what role the illfated jar he had brought to Staraya Square had played …
The fate of the unfortunate hostages of their sex never ceased to concern Pavel Alekseevich; as before, he spoke at all conferences connected to infant and maternal welfare. He did not feel that he had won a victory: the conditions at maternity hospitals were, in his opinion, catastrophic. He returned once again to his principal project, hopelessly attempting to convince the country’s leaders of the necessity to reexamine the principles of health care financing, and delivering impassioned speeches about environmental concerns and a multitude of other factors that would adversely affect the next generation’s health … The word “ecology” had yet to enter the vernacular.
In the mid-1950s Pavel Alekseevich’s research interests took him in an unanticipated direction. While investigating several types of female infertility, Pavel Alekseevich discovered previously unknown phases within the monthly cycle. He focused his attention on women who had given birth to children after long-term infertility. He called such children “Abraham’s,” and meticulously studied and surveyed the women who had given birth to their first child in their first pregnancy after many years of childless marriage.
At the same time, by way of the work of the renowned Chizhevsky, he embarked on the study of natural cosmic cycles and biorhythms. Embryological research had shown that cytokinesis in fact occurred with clockwork precision. Comparing the daily activity of a human being with the speed of processes occurring within a woman’s body, he arrived at the theoretical conclusion that a certain percentage of women could not conceive at night.
His reasoning contained much that was intuitive and undocumentable by contemporary research standards, but it was based on conjecture about the existence of ova with unusually short phases of activity.
At the end of 1953 an amazingly handsome middle-aged Azerbaijani couple from Karabakh appeared during one of Pavel Alekseevich’s office hours. He was an artist, from a well-known family of carpet-makers, thin, with fine features and swarthy gray hair. His wife resembled her husband, like a copy of him reduced in size, with the same fine features, the same Persian facial structure. The lilac-tinged red silk of her dress, the emerald green of her shawl, her antique dark-silver jewelry …
Their tests showed that there was nothing wrong. Two healthy human beings who in twenty years of marriage had not given birth even to one little girl … The grief and disgrace of the wife.
Pavel Alekseevich looked at them for an indecently long time and listened: his secret adviser insisted.
“You must lie with your wife when the sun is at its zenith,” Pavel Alekseevich said in a strict tone of voice. “A year from now come to see me …”
The couple arrived not a year, but a year and a half later. And they brought with them a marvelous belly—taut, high, and with a beautiful little girl inside, whom Pavel Alekseevich himself delivered, and then, two years later, a boy …
Azerbaijan, Armenia, Central Asia—his first patients came from those areas. Then Russians began to come. Approximately half of them were hopeless, and Pavel Alekseevich always saw them and told them that there was nothing he could do to help. Some couples he recommended move to the East—to Vladivostok or Khabarovsk—for several years: this was a continuation and further development of his ideas having to do with natural rhythms and time zones … The table of his office was now covered with charts no one could make any sense of and that looked more like astrological tables than test results. The numbers of “Abraham’s” children continued to grow. And of each Pavel Alekseevich would say deep down in his heart, “Today I gave birth to you …” A child of midday, a child of dawn, a child of sunset … Expensive gifts piled up in his austere apartment: precious carpets, Chinese vases, and French bronze … He never charged a fee, but he also never refused donations. From time immemorial healers and priests took only natural products as payment for their services. As a rule, his patients were people of means who lacked only a child to complete their happiness. The poor either were not childless or did not go to doctors …
Both classical and the most modern Western medical books ceased to interest him, and he spent many hours in the history and foreign-language libraries reading medieval treatises, antique rarities, and translations of the books of the ancient priests … He was searching for something in these Sibylline allegories … The secret of conception—that was what interested him. Nothing more and nothing less.
His own wife had securely locked the door of their bedroom to him for all times of the day. He had long ago given up on restoring their suspended marital relations. Following his memorable ignominy, she seemed indeed to have stopped feeling like a woman. But she was just over forty, and over the years her beauty had grown all the more expressive. Her face seemed as if drawn anew by a more demanding, more experienced artist. The maternal puffiness of her mouth and cheeks was gone, and a new expression had appeared in her eyes—one of keen attention directed not outwardly, but inwardly … At times it seemed to Pavel Alekseevich that while answering his infrequent questions she was thinking of something else.
Relations between husband and wife could not be called bad: as before, they guessed each other’s desires, sometimes read each other’s thoughts, and avoided having their eyes meet. She looked at his neck, and he at the bridge of her nose …
17
TANYA WAS HER PARENTS’ JOY. CODDLING AND INDULGING his daughter, Pavel Alekseevich expressed his concealed love for his wife. Elena felt that and was grateful to him for it, but answered him in a strange way by giving Toma more attention and care. A certain emotional balance was therefore maintained, while Vasilisa implemented a general strict policy of fairness by placing equal portions on their plates. This had stopped making sense long ago: foo
d was plentiful, and everyone except Vasilisa had forgotten about food rationing, ration cards, and ration stations.
Tanya grew into a beautiful young girl—very lively and very talented in all pursuits, be it music, drawing, or the sciences …
In school they were already approaching the end of the ninth grade, and it was time to choose a profession, but Tanya was torn in different directions. Before Toma had appeared in their household Tanya had planned to enroll in music school, but as soon as Toma came to live with them, Tanya, to Pavel Alekseevich’s great chagrin, gave up music. For him there were no more pleasant moments at home than those spent watching her supple spine and fine shoulder blades as they moved under her sweater when she sat at the new instrument bought especially for her. Pavel Alekseevich kept wanting to get an answer as to why Tanya had absolutely refused to go to music school, but she would only clam up, then hug him around the neck, tickle him behind the ears, and mumble something about the Big-Eared Elephant, giggling and squealing, but uttering not a word in response.
Considerably later both Pavel Alekseevich and Elena understood what had happened to Tanya: apparently, she thought that her success in music would hurt Toma, who had never heard any music except what came out of the radio transmitter.
Tanya now found her father’s library more and more alluring. As always, Pavel Alekseevich worked a great deal, spent long hours at the clinic, and after arriving home and eating a quick supper in the company of a silent Vasilisa or a reserved Elena, he ever more often found Tanya in his study settled in a cozy nest of two throw blankets and sofa cushions, cat and book in hand … Near Tanya on the edge of a chair, with no comforts whatsoever, sat Toma, just as small as she had been at twelve, only fatter. One after the next she embroidered pillows, using a double Bulgarian cross-stitch on the lilac or exaggerated fruit patterns she clamped into her embroidery hoop. Her hunger—long ago forgotten and seemingly sated—had awakened in her a love for this luxury of the poor …
The girls were very attached to each other, and their attachment contained a mutual amazement: just as Tanya could not understand what pleasure lay in pulling threads through a stiff pattern, so Toma wondered how anyone could sit half the day with their head stuck in a boring book.
Observing the very different girls—his adored Tanechka and the charmless Tomochka, the scrawny feral brought into their home by special circumstances, Pavel Alekseevich, with his habit of regarding all phenomena in the world exclusively from a scientific point of view, fell to theorizing, noticing here too the manifestations of some great laws of nature that while not yet formulated nonetheless objectively existed.
Just as from the moment of fertilization a human embryo completes all the stages of its development to the hour and minute, Pavel Alekseevich thought, so in the child more complex psychophysical functions engage at strictly regulated intervals in strictly determined sequence. The chewing reflex cannot precede the sucking reflex. Yet both are stimulated from without: the feel of a nipple or even of some chance object, be it the edge of a sheet or the child’s own finger, arouses the instinct to suck within the first days of life; the placement of a piece of solid food on gums swollen from teething arouses the instinct to chew at the age of six months.
The functions of the higher nervous system are stimulated in exactly the same way, Pavel Alekseevich reflected as he observed the grown-up girls in his own family. Needs awakened at a certain age and unmet from without in the surrounding environment weaken and, possibly, die. Needs, therefore, precede necessities.
“They’ll accuse me of Lamarckism.” Pavel Alekseevich laughed to himself.
“It’s possible the whisper was born before the lips, and leaves fluttered in treelessness”—these lines had been written long ago and their author had already perished in the camps, and they never did make their way to Pavel Alekseevich’s consciousness. But there was no other person for whom this ingenious poetic epiphany was more comprehensible as a translation of a fundamental idea from the language of science to the language of poetry …
The child, tired of lying, that wants to sit up, will turn and fidget. Extend a finger toward it, and it will grab it and do what it so thirsts to do but still does not know it does. It will sit up. When it has matured enough to walk, give it the chance to take its first step. Otherwise it, like a child raised by animals, will never learn to walk on two legs but, like an animal, will move on all fours.
Give a child music when it feels the need to dance, a pencil when it gets the urge to draw, a book when it has matured to this level of obtaining information … How tragic it is when a new skill, a new need has ripened from within, but the moment has been lost and the world makes no effort to meet that need halfway …
Take Tomochka. Her mother had left her diapered in her little bed until she was two years old, because the poor woman had to go to work and there was no one to look after the little girl, and daycare was not even imaginable in blacked-out, evacuated Moscow. When Tomochka was set on the floor, she already had no urge to walk. She sat in a corner, on a pile of rags, and played with rags. She saw her first book only in school, when she was seven years old. Everything had been held back, everything slowed down. The poor little girl …
But Toma hardly thought of herself as unfortunate. Just the opposite, she was thoroughly convinced that she had drawn a winning ticket. A year after her introduction into the Kukotsky household, at the request of her Aunt Fenya, Toma had been sent to the village for the summer, and Toma, who had never spent a summer at Fenya’s when her mother was alive, came to despise village life with all her heart. She was horrified by the poverty, the filth, and, most of all, by the difficulty of daily life where she could not relax, as she would have with Tanya at their dacha, but from morning till night fed pigs, babysat Fenya’s three-month-old little daughter, and laundered filthy rags in cold water … Silently and unwillingly she did everything, never disobeying Fenya. Twice she traveled by bus to a distant village to visit her brothers. Her brothers horrified her: they had turned into villagers; dressed in rags, barefoot and dirty, they fought and cursed like adult peasants. Toma felt neither sympathy nor pity for them. Loving them was out of the question.
By the time she returned to the city Toma had firmly resolved that never again would she go to her aunt’s and that she would do everything possible in order to remain forever in the Kukotsky family.
Toma was completely unconcerned about whether she was loved in her new family. In their household she had her own place, which more resembled the place of a house pet. There was absolutely nothing insulting about this: in some households the entire world order revolves around a little dog that has to be taken out every morning or a cat that eats only a certain type of fish.
Toma had her own bed in the room she shared with Tanya, her own place at the table between Tanya and Elena Georgievna, and many other things that she had never had before when she lived with her mother: her own comb and toothbrush, her own towels in the bathroom, and a nightshirt—the existence of which she could not even have imagined before. In return nothing was asked of her. Surprisingly, much larger demands were made of Tanya—for misbehaving, for returning home late from school, and for the untidiness Tanya was constantly guilty of. Toma would cover for Tanya. Sometimes she would wipe up the puddle she left in the bathroom or wash the teacup she had left on the table, and, sometimes, when they were late returning from school, she would take the blame for their tardiness.
“Aunt Vasya, they made me stay after to redo an assignment, and Tanya waited for me …”
And Vasilisa, who had already reheated the girls’ dinners twice, would stop grumbling. She would even refrain from commenting on Toma’s behavior more than necessary, although she was very observant and knew perfectly well the real reason for all these little deceptions …
As for their studies, there was nothing to be said. Tanya was practically an honor student. All she lacked was vanity to become a straight-A student. In the time she spent living in their hou
sehold Toma had succeeded in becoming a solid C student. The complication lay in that everyone was dissatisfied with Tanya’s Bs, but overjoyed by Toma’s rare B. A certain sensitivity was required of everyone in the household, who must never forget that equality was an exclusively theoretical thing and could not be regarded as a serious principle even in so practical an area as a child’s upbringing. Ideas of equality concerned Elena somewhat—memories of her Tolstoyan childhood were still keen. Vasilisa did not nibble at the bait.
“Tanechka is special, and Tomochka is something completely different.”
For that reason she would say to Toma simply, “Let me teach you how to brine cabbage, fry fritters, and other things, otherwise when I die you won’t know how to do anything …”
Tanya’s lack of such skills did not worry Vasilisa, but she obviously considered Toma her successor in her amorphous household position, which she herself endured with patience and a certain pride. It was precisely with Toma that Vasilisa could suddenly start a conversation about the most important and protected part of her life, about what was sealed in her little pantry as a result of Pavel Alekseevich’s longtime ban. In Tanya’s early childhood he had adamantly forbidden Vasilisa to have any conversations of any sort with the child about the divine. For that reason Vasilisa taught not Tanya but Toma the two most important prayers and instructed her in any and all difficult situations to turn to the Mother of God.
“In mathematics too?” Tomochka inquired simply when Vasilisa was explaining to her that her protectress and intercessor was the Mother of God, who cared for all orphans.
The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel Page 16