The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  For all of her almost twenty years Tanya had never found herself in so happy a place, where work, cares, duty, and haste had been annulled. This alcoholic couple possessed such a wealth of freedom that they could share it with Tanya.

  The woman took off her shoes, egesting her filthy bare feet from the remains of her foot rags. Spreading her legs, she set her feet into the warm grass. It felt good … Then she took a couple of steps to the side and dropped her pants. Her backside gleamed with an unexpected whiteness. The man commented serenely on the event:

  “Piss, bitch …”

  Then he got the urge himself. He stood up, rolled back the elastic of multiple pairs of sweat pants, and pulled out his tiny tackle. The burdock shook under his healthy stream.

  Tanya felt good, better and better as her inebriation increased, until she finally fell asleep right there in the shade of the soaked burdocks.

  She was awakened after dark by an acute attack of nausea. She did not immediately realize where she was. She tried to move. She got up on her knees. She vomited violently. Then she wiped her mouth with a piece of rough burdock leaf. The couple was gone. She had to make her way out of there. She moved and was once again overcome by nausea. This time the vomiting spurted violently, and it seemed as if her stomach were ripping apart. Having emptied her stomach, she set out across dark courtyards illuminated only by the weak light of windows. She crossed one, then another, then a third. A tram clanged not far away, and she headed toward its recognizable music. The street was familiar. Tikvinskaya. Quite close to her house.

  She felt better again, as if something wonderful had happened to her. Oh, the vagrants … Nice people free of all cares …

  How wonderfully simple life is! I did something to myself … Snip! Snip! No more. No more pregnant rats, hydrocephalus, or developing capillaries!

  A serene tranquility came over Tanya, the heavenly moment of contentedness and joy that had shone over the drunken pair of vagrants …

  23

  ELENA GEORGIEVNA SAT ON A NARROW WOODEN BENCH behind the collection box and awaited her priest acquaintance. The service was already over. The worshippers had dispersed. The cleaning woman clanged with her bucket. The metal scraping sound suited the church’s hollow silence. In the refectory the priests, the church elder, and the choirmaster were eating dinner, and the smell of fried onions reached Elena. The lighting in the church was absolutely theatrical: the twilight was broken by thick columns of sunlight that fell from the high-set windows, and the scoured coverings of the icons caught in these streams of light shone, and the copper candlesticks burned, while in those places where the light did not reach there was only an enigmatic glimmer, patches of light, the quivering glow of candles about to expire … Elena’s soul was peaceful and quiet. She came here for moments like this: her worries now seemed mundane, her problems insignificant, and the conversation she had waited for so long—awkward and specious … Perhaps she had asked Father Vladimir for a meeting for naught? Perhaps there was no need to tell anybody anything? And how would she put it? Yes, the world was falling apart. But she herself understood perfectly well that it wasn’t the world that was falling apart, but her mind, which was losing precious splinters of knowledge, memory, and life skills … She would have gone to a neurologist, to a psychiatrist, instead of to a priest, were the cracks of her consciousness not filled with something not of this world—more precisely, otherworldly—faces and voices, all of them unearthly, disturbing, but sometimes inexpressibly sublime as well … Was this a charm? A deception? How could she put it?

  The priest was already heading toward her, wiping his mouth, buried under his mustache and beard, with a checkered handkerchief …

  “Now, my dear, at your service,” he said in an absolutely secular tone, as in the old days when he had worked at the Moscow Architectural Project office and Elena had occasionally done drafting work for him. “What problems are you having?”

  ELENA DID NOT HAVE THE KIND OF PROBLEMS THAT COULD be discussed in such a vigorous, businesslike manner.

  “I’m having difficulties with my daughter … ,” she forced out of herself. She had not planned to talk to him about Tanya, but since the question of Tanya was concrete and readily comprehensible, she spoke about her. A feeling of betrayal clenched Elena. Tanya had not charged her to talk about her affairs with anyone, but there was no alternative, so she continued. “She’s a very capable girl, good at her studies, but now she’s suddenly left her job, does nothing, and spends her days and nights strolling about town, and she never says anything …”

  “How old is she, twenty?” Father Vladimir ruefully shook his crude thick nose, and his eyes looked out sympathetically from under his one long eyebrow joined at the bridge of his nose. “It’s the same with mine … Kolya quit the institute, and Natochka left her husband … We raised our children without the church, and these are the pathetic results …”

  Elena Georgievna felt excruciatingly bored, but leaving right away was impossible, so they spoke another twenty minutes about the harm of an atheistic upbringing, about the need to bring children to church beginning in early childhood, about the benefits of reading the Gospel, about prayer, and about other good and proper things. It was remarkably similar to what Vasilisa talked about in less sophisticated terms.

  Shortly after three Elena walked out into the street. The sun shone, and it was still summer, but the place seemed entirely unfamiliar to her, and she experienced the kind of wild terror a child feels at having lost its mother at a crowded train station … She stood for a moment and waited: perhaps it would suddenly pass … This happened to her sometimes, but only for a moment, like an eclipse. This time her amnesia of the world lasted longer, and she would have to adapt to it.

  “It’s a city,” she said to herself. “I’m in Moscow. I came here on the metro … Or was it a trolleybus … ? I’ll have to ask where the nearest metro station is … There’s a station near my building. I don’t remember what it’s called. It has colored stained-glass windows … I have a home. There’s a phone in the apartment … The number is … I don’t remember … I should ask the man I was just talking to …”

  But she was unable to remember to whom she had just spoken and about what …

  A tall woman in a light-colored suit, a silk scarf with grayish-blue streaks covering her graying hair, stood on the church stairs attempting to find some speck of texture on the empty mirror of the world that had just been filled with color and various details, each of which had a title or a name … She set off slowly down the lane. And walked, and walked, past places that were unfamiliar and more pleasant than not, but completely unrecognizable. She tried not to cross streets: that was too terrifying. When she tired, she sat down on a bench in some square. She wanted to ask the woman sitting alongside her what time it was, but she could not formulate the question: the words would not come together or be pronounced. Then someone familiar touched her shoulder.

  “Elena Georgievna? Has something happened?”

  The voice was a woman’s, concerned. Elena never did remember who it was. This angel brought her home and helped her with the key. For some reason it was already late in the evening. She could not understand where the day had gone. Elena sat down in her armchair in the kitchen and remained there for a long, long time, until she fell asleep … Two other people were asleep at home—Pavel Alekseevich in his study, and Toma in the nursery. Alongside Pavel Alekseevich’s couch lay an empty vodka bottle. Toma slept without having washed her earth-stained hands or turning out the light. That evening Vasilisa did not return home. Neither did Tanya … but Elena did not notice.

  Part Two

  1

  THE SAND, PICKED UP BY A STREAM OF AIR, RANG LIGHTLY as it struck against the transparent stalks of the dry, brittle plants. A haze stretched across the horizon in every direction, and the sky held not a single suggestion of any light source. Tiny whirlwinds spun—dissipating, then rising up again—over barely formed, lowlying hills. The sand slowly ro
lled from place to place, flowing like dry water, but the outlines of this pale earth barely changed.

  On one of the flat hills lay a woman, half-covered by the sand. Her eyes were closed, but her fingers sifted the sand, and gathering a handful, sprinkled it in fine streams.

  “It’s probably all right for me to open my eyes now,” the woman thought. Hesitating a moment, she opened them. The soft semitwilight was pleasant. She lay for a little while longer, then rose up on one elbow. Then sat up. The sand tickled as it poured from her clothes. She examined the sleeve of her white nightshirt with the tiny green florets.

  “Brand-new, made in Pakistan. A present: I didn’t buy one like this,” she observed to herself and sensed a certain discomfort from the knot of the white polka-dot kerchief tied village-style under her chin. She smiled and flung it off. Sitting straight up, she tucked her knees under her chin: that felt good … light and easy …

  She stuck her hands under the hem of her nightshirt and felt the coarse scaliness of her legs. She ran her palms over her calves, and the sand fell off. The woman drew up her hem and was astonished by the sight of her legs: they were covered with rough cracks. Near the cracks the skin rippled with pink, scaly tubules. She rapped on them, and they fell off, exactly like paint off an old mannequin. She took a certain pleasure in scraping off this dried paint, releasing the dirty plaster dust underneath and exposing new young skin inside. Her big toes were particularly frightening: each of them was encrusted in a grayish-yellow layer from which the nail stuck out like an overgrown wooden mushroom.

  “Yuck, how disgusting!” She rubbed the almost limy growths with a certain revulsion, and they unexpectedly detached themselves, falling off and instantly blending into the sand. They revealed new pink toes—like those of an infant. A pair of olive-colored canvas shoes with bone buttons appeared from somewhere. They were so familiar … Of course, Grandmother had bought them and a dark-blue wool sweater for her mother at the Torgsin store in exchange for a gold chain and ring: shoes for her …

  Her hands, too, were covered with a dry, dusty crust. She rubbed them, releasing long, slender fingers, glove-smooth, without any knobs on the joints or dark raised veins …

  “How wonderful,” she thought. “I’m like new.”

  And none of this surprised her in the least. She stood up and felt that she had grown taller. Remnants of old skin dropped in sandy layers at her feet. She ran her hand over her face and hair: everything was her own, yet everything was changed. The sand crunched under her feet, and her heels sank into the sand. It was neither cold nor hot. It grew neither darker nor lighter: it was early dusk, and it seemed as if nothing here intended to change.

  “I’m all alone.” The thought ran through her head. Just then she felt a slight movement near her feet; a common household cat, gray with squiggly dark stripes on its sides, brushed against her bare legs. One of the innumerable Murkas that accompanied her everywhere. She bent over and stroked its arched spine. The cat purred in appreciation. Then suddenly everything changed: the air around her turned out to be inhabited. It moved with warmth, with waves of a certain quality that she could not put a proper name to: the air is alive, and it is not indifferent to me. In fact, it is rather well-disposed toward me …

  She inhaled it. It smelled of something familiar and pleasant, but inedible. Where in the world had the memory of this smell crept into her head from?

  She ascended a small hill and saw a multitude of similar tablelands.

  “Rather monotonous.” Then she set off forward, with no point of reference—there was none to be found in this place, really—with no intended direction, wherever her eyes would lead her. The cat walked alongside, its paws sinking lightly into the dry sand.

  WALKING FELT GOOD. EFFORTLESS. SHE WAS YOUNG AND light. Everything was absolutely as it should be, although not at all like what she had prepared herself for so long. Nothing of what was happening corresponded to her now forgotten expectations; it all ran counter to the crude folk descriptions of the old women at church and the elaborate schemes of various mystics and visionaries, yet at the same time it conformed to her early childhood premonitions. All of the physical discomforts of her existence connected with her swollen, rusty joints, her sunken and stooped spine, her lack of teeth, her weakness of hearing and sight, and the slackness of her bowels had disappeared completely; she took pleasure in the lightness of her own step, in the enormity of her visual horizons, and in the marvelous harmony of her body with the world stretched out around her.

  “How are they doing back there?” she thought, but “there” was bare and deserted. “Okay, so I don’t need to know,” she agreed with someone who did not want to show her any pictures. “They” also could not be made out as individuals …

  She held something in her hand. She looked: it was a black lace headscarf, gathered along the seams and as rigid as if new. She spread it out: the pattern was familiar—not quite bells, not quite flowers, little bells braided together with sinuous whiskers. A memory seemed to break through from somewhere, as if through an invisible wall, and the woman smiled: at last she could orient herself … This was the headscarf she had searched for long ago when her grandmother had died. Grandmother had insisted on being buried in this headscarf, but she had hidden it so well that no one had been able to find it. So they buried her without it, covering her head with a white kerchief … She flung the headscarf on her head and with a familiar gesture tied it at the back of her neck.

  She walked for a long time: nothing changed in the landscape or in time, and though she experienced no fatigue, she suddenly felt terribly bored. She noticed that the cat had disappeared. And then she saw some people—come from who knew where—sitting around a small campfire. Its transparent white-blue flame was barely visible, but streams of air flowed visibly around it.

  She approached them. A tall, thin man with characteristic Semitic features rose up to greet her, his bald spot gleaming together with his smile, which was directed at her.

  “We have a Newling,” he said welcomingly. “Come here. Come. We’ve been expecting you.”

  The people around the fire stirred, making room for her. She stepped closer and sat down on the sand. The Judean stood alongside her, smiling like an old acquaintance. She felt awkward, because she could not remember where she had seen him before. He placed his hand on her head, chanting:

  “That’s good, that’s good … Newling …”

  And she understood that Newling was her name now. He was the Judean. The ten or so people sitting around the fire were men and women. Some also had familiar faces, but she had long ago grown accustomed to driving away those agonizing sensations of something once familiar and now fleeting; her efforts to remember, to excavate some scrap of memory and connect it to the fabric of existence had been so futile that she just waved them off as a function of habit. “They can’t remember either,” the Newling guessed, noticing with what breathless attention a smooth-shaven man sitting Asian-style slightly off to the side watched her. There were also two dogs and a strange animal the woman had never seen before.

  “Just sit, sit and rest,” said the Judean. Something she had never known before was taking place alongside the fire. More than anything else it seemed as if they were sunbathing … at twilight in the light of the small campfire … An enormous bulky woman wrapped head to foot in a crude flannel robe shifted, turning sideways toward the fire, while an old man with a gloomy face extended his arms, palms facing outward. A tall elderly woman in a black cowl that covered her face pressed toward the fire … Besides warmth the campfire exuded a radiating light that was very pleasant … One of the dogs rolled over on its back, exposing its stomach, covered with thin white fur. The mutt’s mug had bliss written all over it. The second dog, a shaggy sheepdog, sat with its paws crossed in front of itself, exactly like a human being.

  They sat for a while in silence. Then the Judean extended his hand over the campfire, making a gesture as if he were squeezing something in his hand, and
the flame went out. In place of the burning fire the Newling saw neither ash nor charcoal, but a light-silver powder that blended with the sand before her very eyes.

  The people stood up and shook the sand from their clothes. The Judean walked ahead, the others strung out in pairs or one by one behind him. The Newling remained sitting on the sand, studying them from behind: though their movements were marked by total uncertainty, they seemed to share a strange singleness of purpose and concentration … Last in line was the one-legged Limper leaning on a stick. Both his stick and his foot sank in the sand, yet although he was last, he did not lag behind …

  They had already moved rather far off into the distance when the Newling realized that she did not want to be left on her own, and she easily caught up with the chain, overtaking Limper, the Old Woman in a cowl, the Warrior in his strange jacket that seemed to have been taken from someone else, the strange creature—more likely human than animal, but absolutely not a monkey—and pulling up alongside Skinhead.

  “That’s good,” he said.

  2

  TIME HERE WAS MARKED, AS THE NEWLING SUBSEQUENTLY noted, not by the alternation of days and nights, not by the changing of seasons, but solely by stops at the campfire and a sequence of events that struck the Newling as one stranger than the other. But nobody required that she express her opinion of what was taking place, and gradually she ceased to have any opinion at all of these various strange events, merely observing and occasionally participating in them. She did not always understand the essence of the events, but she never was forced to do anything against her will. Sometimes situations would arise requiring a certain effort on her part, but the general rhythm of their movement was such that their stops would occur just when she would begin to think that it would not be a bad idea to have a rest.