The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  Professor Gansovsky lived almost year-round at his dacha and did not come to work every day, but he had made an appointment with Pavel Alekseevich and his daughter for that day because one of his leading researchers, MarLena Sergeevna Konysheva, had prepared the manuscript of her doctoral dissertation for him to read and was supposed to give him the weighty volume.

  Old Professor Gansovsky’s relationships with his female research staff were prolific. He was already over seventy, his bald spot shone merrily with shades of henna and silver, but the fringe of hair encircling his temples from ear to ear was dyed deep chestnut. His eyebrows he kept their natural black, and for that reason his entire henhouse debated constantly whether he dyed his eyebrows, and with what … Despite a coquettishness unworthy of his sex, he was so unconditionally masculine that his hair coloring—not quite war paint and not quite mating colors—sooner caused frustration than scorn. Not tall, but broad-chested, with large birthmarks on his cheeks, he resembled an old boxer, in the canine sense as well. In his laboratory full of women he was tsar, and his entire female staff—with the exception of janitor Maria Fokovna, practical nurse Raiska, and his two graduate students (one an Ossetian, the other Turkmen, both inclined to consider their boss’s indifference a form of discrimination)—had passed through his powerful, disproportionately long arms and, if truth be told, had not been left dissatisfied. Pavel Alekseevich was unaware of all these piquant details of Gansovsky’s biography. In order to know gossip you have to take a certain interest in it. Pavel Alekseevich was not even aware that Gansovsky’s first wife had worked in the laboratory all her life, while his second, younger wife, had done her graduate work there and stayed on at the clinic for her residency, or that there was yet another woman, who had not achieved the rank of wife—Zina, the plump, sweet-looking, not very young woman whose son Gansovsky helped raise—plus Galya Rymnikova, tall as a bell tower with a head the size of a doll’s, who had worked as his personal lab assistant for two years and then left in a huge scandal that barely fit under the rug, and a few more trifles, of interest, generally, only to the participants in this long-running performance. On the other hand, Pavel Alekseevich knew Gansovsky’s superb publications on embryogenesis of the brain, and for this reason considered him a suitable mentor for Tanya.

  Tanya was led into the professor’s office. There were bookcases with pedigreed volumes, two bronze busts of who knows whom, and some large glass jars with brain specimens—stiffened spirals the color of children’s soap … In the space between the windows hung black-and-red-colored charts and photographs of tinted landscapes whose rivers were micron capillaries, and their banks—fibers of striated muscle, flowing through huge mountains with gaping hollows: all of this seemingly geological activity had been captured under a microscope lens of not even God knew what power …

  “I’m going to put you, Tatiana Pavlovna, in the hands of my student, MarLena Sergeevna. She will teach you how to perform the necessary histologic work. She’s a great master of slide preparations. We’ll start with that … and take it from there …”

  Rising, he turned out to be short-legged and half-a-head shorter than Tanya, but he moved with the speed and deliberateness of a tennis ball. He gestured with his arm for them to follow.

  The laboratory was located in an old building and occupied two floors as well as some recesses between floors with windows adjacent either to the floor or to the ceiling, as if the building’s two former floors had been remodeled as three. The two honored academicians walked ahead of the slender, curly-headed girl whose heart skipped a beat with every smell—from the animal facility, of something chemical, boiled, stinging and nasty, and yet attractive. Probably a young girl with her sights set on the theater experiences the same sensations her first time backstage.

  The corridor took its last turn near a fire hose curled like a snake behind a glass door, and they entered the inner sanctum … It was all glass and crystal, transparent and splendid. There was an old laboratory table with a marble top suitable for a gravestone, a broad-shouldered cupboard with heavy sliding glass doors and transparent shelves with gleaming instruments laid out inside, and racks of laboratory glassware with sterilized insides. A wonderland of small glass tubules, of spherical and conic flasks …

  Ordinary wooden desks held microtomes on stocky iron object-stage platforms and monstrous triangular dissecting knives with razor-sharp edges. Microscopes—their little copper details and various screws gleaming—stood with horns raised. Torsion scales shone under glass covers that thickened unevenly toward the bottom … And there was a great variety of still other, yet unfamiliar objects that attracted Tanya’s enchanted gaze.

  At the marble laboratory table stood a tall, unattractive woman with salt-and-pepper bangs, narrow eyes, and too short a distance between the tip of her nose and her upper lip. Her face expressed fastidiousness, cleanliness, care, and something else particularly attractive to Tanya—something between confidence and impeccability … Her medical coat gleamed with the whiteness of mountain peaks, her hands were scrubbed for surgery, and she performed the most delicate movements with her fingers.

  Glancing at them for an instant, she buried herself once again in her lapidarian operations, apologizing that she needed a few more minutes to finish.

  “It’s old German equipment,” Pavel Alekseevich noted with surprise.

  “Yes, all prewar. Brought from Germany. But so far we haven’t figured out a way to make anything better yet. Jena optics, you know, Solingen steel … ,” Gansovsky smirked. “I brought it back myself. This equipment here is from Humboldt University …”

  But Tanya did not hear what they were talking about. She could not take her eyes off MarLena Sergeevna as the latter worked the satiny pink round bubble form on the preparation table with exquisite tiny scissors and thin tweezers. Nearby on the marble tabletop lay a whole string of identical glass containers with more pink bubble forms and a repulsive-looking dental surgery tray.

  “MarLena Sergeevna, I’ve brought to you the daughter of our dear Doctor Kukotsky. A budding biologist,” the professor heh-hehhed rather disgustingly, “for you to train. Why don’t you have a chat with the girl while I show Pavel Alekseevich the laboratory …”

  They left, leaving Tanya. MarLena Sergeevna nodded to her.

  “Come closer and take a look at what I’m doing …”

  And Tanya looked. The scholarly woman destined to become Tanya’s idol for several years used manicure scissors to slit the surface of the pink bubble form, which turned out to be the tiny little head of a newborn rat, folded back the edges of the incision with tweezers, and meticulously, so as not to disturb the tender white substance—the most complex thing created by nature, the brain tissue—below, removed a cranial bone the thickness of a child’s fingernail …

  After slicing small disks from the stem, MarLena Sergeevna removed them with the light touch of her tweezers, laying bare two elongated hemispheres and the two olfactory bulbs that jutted forward. Not a scratch or cut could be seen on the mirror-form surface. The brain shone like mother-of-pearl. With her thin tweezers MarLena Sergeevna pinched the elongated brain where it connected to the spinal cord, lifted this flickering pearl with a special little spatula, and just as the brain rested on the spatula, Tanya noticed a faint network of blood vessels barely visible to the eye. A moment ago the brain had rested, as in a bowl, in its natural bed and had seemed like some sort of architectural construction; now it slid like a heavy drop from the chrome-plated spatula into a glass container filled with transparent liquid … The container held several other identical peas that had already managed to shrivel a bit …

  “This requires great concentration and accuracy,” MarLena Sergeevna said. “Actually, small cuts along the sides are admissible, because what interests us is not the surface, but the deeper layers of the brain …”

  As she spoke, she raised a gauze napkin from the tray: several newborn baby rats scurried about inside together with the already decapitated
trunks whose heads had been sacrificed to the lofty and bloodthirsty god of science … This dreadfully lawless combination of the living, blindly scurrying, warm and trusting, with the headless, “decapitated,” as MarLena Sergeevna said, made nausea rise from Tanya’s stomach to her throat. She gulped back saliva …

  “My little rats,” the learned lady said, picking up a little rat with two fingers, stroking it on its narrow spine, and then—with a different, larger, pair of scissors lying to the right of the tray—accurately and precisely cutting off its little head. She tossed the slightly shuddering little body into the tray and lovingly spread out the head on the object glass. After which she looked searchingly at Tanya and asked with a shade of strange pride: “Well, do you think you can do that?”

  “I can,” Tanya answered without hesitating for a moment. She was far from sure that she really could.

  “I have to,” she said to herself and, heroically stifling the urge to vomit, she picked up the tender satiny nastiness of a newborn—warm to the touch—baby rat with her left hand and the cold perfectly ergonomic scissors with her right hand, and clutching that silly immortal soul in the grasp of enlightened reason striving toward science, she pressed down on the upper ring of the scissors with her thumb. Crunch—and the little head fell onto the object glass.

  “Good job,” a soft female voice said approvingly.

  The sacrifice had been accepted. Tanya had passed the test and was initiated as a junior priestess.

  19

  AS THE YEARS PASSED, PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH FOUND MORE and more sense in reading the ancient historians.

  “It’s the only thing that allows me to tolerate today’s newspapers.” He tapped his firm, iodine-framed fingernail on the leather cover of The Twelve Caesars.

  As Vasilisa cleaned his study, he sat in the girls’ room, awaiting the end of this monthly ritual. In surprise Tanya raised one thin brow with its hereditary brush in the corner.

  “I don’t see any connection, Dad.”

  “How should I put it? Julius Caesar was considerably more talented than Stalin as a commander; Augustus—one hundred times smarter; Nero—crueler; and Caligula much more inventive when it came to depravity. Yet everything, absolutely everything—the bloodiest and the most sublime—becomes the exclusive property of history.”

  Tanya sat up on her pillow.

  “But it’s sort of sad to think that everything is so senseless and all the victims have died in vain.”

  Pavel Alekseevich grinned and stroked his book’s shagreen cover.

  “What victims? There are no victims. There is only the instinct of self-justification, of justifying actions that are sometimes stupid, sometimes senseless, but more often malicious and mercenary … A thousand or so years from now, Tanechka, or perhaps five hundred, some old gynecologist like me—no matter what progress occurs our profession will always be around—will read the ancient history of Russia in the twentieth century, and there will be two pages about Stalin and two paragraphs about Khrushchev. And a bunch of anecdotes …”

  Tanya smiled. “That’s not so, Dad. They will know Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak, while Stalin and Khrushchev will merit mention for the sole reason that they repressed them.”

  “That will happen when there’s true communism,” Toma inserted wistfully as she carefully bathed an ailing Monstera deliciosa.

  Pavel Alekseevich was in a good mood and allowed himself to joke.

  “No, Tomochka, it will be only after that …”

  “I should ask Tanya later what he meant by that,” Toma decided. No one had ever told her that anything could come after communism. Although, ultimately, what difference would it make, since we won’t be around anyway … She had something serious to worry about: pale spots had appeared at the base of the plant’s leaves, and their wax covering had somewhat softened in those spots. She stroked the leaves’ surfaces with the soft tips of her fingers: yes, they really were softer. And there seemed to be a similar spot on her treasured Yucca plant.

  “Oh, no, not a virus!” she thought in horror, forgetting about communism forever. She was already a rather experienced employee of MosUrbGreen and had dealt with plant viruses twice, but those had been state-owned plants—one in the square in front of the Bolshoi Theater, and the other in the greenhouse that sent them seedlings. In both cases the virus had proved incurable, and it had wiped out the marigolds and the gillyflower. But these were her plants, her favorites, and Toma stuck the thumb of her left hand in her mouth and chewed in concentration at the root of her nail … Having chewed off a microscopic bit, she set to inspecting her jungle—by the end of the 1950s the Kukotsky apartment had metamorphosed entirely through her efforts: there was not a single surface left without pots of plants and jars with evergreens.

  At first the rigid green plants had been pleasing to Elena’s eye, but then she embarked on a lame struggle against the tin cans and old pots and pans in which Toma potted her nurslings. Elena bought clay pots and planters, but the tin cans from the trash kept multiplying. Once the windowsills were thoroughly occupied, the vernicose army advanced to the dining room table and the desks, and then descended to the floor. The nursery, which had once been Tanya’s room, looked like the storeroom of a florist shop.

  The abundant vegetation did not disturb Tanya at all since she was practically never at home. In the early morning she ran off to work—to her rats and rabbits, operations and preparations—and from work she rushed straight to the university, returning home only at half past eleven, dead tired. On days when she had no classes she also disappeared for hours on end, either visiting friends or at various entertainments. Toma gradually stopped participating in Tanya’s life after hours. Tanya had taken up with some new friends: the Goldberg boys had given way to other, more interesting young men who never came to the apartment.

  Elena usually arrived home from work shortly after six o’clock to find not Tanya, but Toma—children’s watering can in hand—whispering to her plants. Toma’s workday ended early, and by four thirty she was already at home. Grumbling, Vasilisa fed them all separately.

  Pavel Alekseevich labored like a worker at a steel plant, two shifts back-to-back. In addition to the institute and the clinic, he had begun teaching advanced qualification courses for doctors, which at once amazed and irritated everyone: it hardly befit an academician to spend three nights a week lecturing until the wee hours to provincial obstetricians and old midwives who, if they had received any medical training at all, had long ago forgotten what it had consisted of. He completely neglected his duties as a member of the Academy. Like a schoolboy playing hooky, he failed to appear at Presidium meetings and avoided his superiors. His reputation as an alcoholic was augmented by rumors of his eccentricity.

  Long ago the upper echelons at the Ministry had changed: Workhorse was replaced first by an old KGB man trained in veterinary medicine, then by a famous surgeon who was also a ruthless careerist and a thief. With no regrets Pavel Alekseevich said good-bye to his great project of reforming health care, and the reforms took place without his participation, although the papers he himself had long ago forgotten still lay in the safe of the new minister, who occasionally skimmed them, to no avail.

  Despite his frosty relations with his superiors, Pavel Alekseevich’s influence in medical circles was unusually far-reaching. All those provincial ladies from the distant corners of the huge country were trained by him both in the old methods of assisting birth and in new approaches to sustaining pregnancy, in the treatment of inflammatory processes and of postnatal complications … He wrote several textbooks for middle-level medical personnel—which category he considered unfairly neglected—and a monograph on questions of infertility.

  But his principal concern always remained his large-bellied patients, who came to him with their damaged wombs, their malfunctions, and their fears. He saw them at consultations on varying levels: weekly office hours, by special request of acquaintances, and private consultations. Although the Kremlin
Hospital had already been in existence for some time, the wives and daughters of the heads of state often appealed to him—for assistance giving birth, for an operation …

  In one section of the clinic with the euphemistic tag “Diagnostics,” they performed dilatation and curettage, some of which was in fact diagnostic … It was practically the only place in the city where anesthetics were administered; at other clinics sin was punished severely, the impudent decision to rid oneself of an unwanted child almost always included trial by pain … In this section four surgeons and four registered nurses dilated and scraped nonstop all sixteen hands at a time. The most primitive of anesthetics—local administration of Novocain—twenty-five minutes of work, an ice bag to freeze the belly, and next in line …

  Pavel Alekseevich seldom came into this section. He considered the artificial interruption of pregnancy the gravest of operations in moral terms both for the woman and for the doctor … Was it not here that the essential divide between humans and animals lay: the ability and right to step beyond the limits of biological law, to breed not at the will of natural rhythms, but of one’s own desire? Was this not where human choice, the right to freedom, ultimately was realized?

  Vasilisa represented the opposite—radically opposite—opinion. From the moment she replaced her adulation of Pavel Alekseevich with total rejection he even began to relate to her more seriously in a way. Her position was ludicrous, from a doctor’s point of view, even ignorant and inhumane, but in its own way moral. What was sad was that her obscurantist abhorrence of abortion had influenced Elena, whom she had inculcated with Christian-church intolerance. Vasilisa’s semiliteracy combined quite harmoniously with her views. But Elena? How could he explain to her that he was the servant not of Moloch, but of the miserable people of an invidious world … Besides, he himself practically never performed artificial interruptions of pregnancy. Perhaps the only thing that theoretically interested him in the whole procedure was the issue of how best to utilize the valuable bio-products considered waste in these procedures. But that was being studied by hematologists, a whole laboratory of them, headed by a competent student of his … No, there was another aspect that preoccupied Pavel Alekseevich, and he even recommended to one of his staff to give some thought to hormonal post-abortion protein folding, that is, the still completely unstudied process the female organism undergoes during artificial pregnancy termination, the hormonal consequences thereof, and how to assist the body in recovering from this condition with minimal damage …