The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  A completely empty tram, the No. 50, approached. She did not have time to see where it went. Most likely, to some metro station. The tram was long in transporting her alone; then an elderly couple got on. They crossed the Yauza. The last stop turned out to be the Baumanskaya metro station. It was nearly ten, but she didn’t feel like going home … Tanya circled the large cathedral and found herself on Olkhovskaya Street. The courtyards on this street of almost entirely one-story buildings were good dirt yards, with gardens and benches, children’s sandboxes, and swings. There were no new buildings, just old lower-middle-class dwellings. Only one of them had five stories, a Moscow moderne building from the early 1900s. Tanya felt tired, walked into the first courtyard, and saw—what a gift!—a gazebo. Inside the gazebo there was a crude table and two benches set into the dirt. A place for playing dominos.

  Tanya lay down on one of the narrow benches and turned her head in order to see a piece of the sky thick with stars. From somewhere came the sound of radio music mixed with the sounds of a proletarian argument.

  “I am a very, very free person,” Tanya said to herself, admiring the phrase, and fell asleep without noticing. She woke up from the cold. There was no telling how long she had slept. Not long, it seemed. In the meantime, the moon had come out, filling everything with its artificial light. She still had no desire to go home, but it was time … On the earthen parapet of a completely rural-looking house in the depths of the courtyard sat a boy. With concentrated attention he was conjuring over his wrist.

  Tanya walked up closer. He heard her steps, turned around, and froze, grasping the wrist of his left hand with his right hand.

  “Beat it,” the boy said rudely.

  Tanya just stood there without moving. Half of a razor blade shone in the strong light of the moon. Understanding, she said to him: “That’s not going to work.”

  “Why not?” He raised his head, and she saw a pale face that seemed tear-stained, with a fresh black-and-blue mark swelling under one eye.

  “You need to do it in the bathtub, in warm water … ,” she said, sympathizing. “It won’t work otherwise.”

  “How do you know?” the boy asked glumly.

  “I’m a vein specialist. I spent two years studying veins. That’s going to drip for a bit and stop. You’re better off jumping from the roof—Bam! And it’s over.”

  “Not for me!” The boy smirked. “I need a machine. Understand, I don’t have a machine. But if I cut it wider, I can stick a vial inside … If you’re such a specialist, maybe you have a machine on you?”

  Now Tanya did not understand him: “What kind of machine?”

  “A syringe, idiot!” he explained.

  “Oh, a syringe. I have one at home.” Wonder of wonders, she had lived her whole life being so smart, but today had spent the whole day playing the idiot …

  “You live far away?” The boy lit up with interest.

  “Far away.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I’m out for a walk. I like to walk around at this time of night.” She sat down alongside him and noticed that he was older than he had at first seemed. “Let’s go for a walk. I like to look inside windows …”

  She pulled him by the sleeve of his checkered shirt, and he obeyed. He wrapped the razor blade in a piece of paper, stuck it in the pocket of his shirt, and hurried after her. She led him out into the street, then turned confidently into a passageway between two houses that led to a barely visible walkway toward an illuminated window. A dirty lightbulb streaked with whitewash hung naked on its cord. A chair stood on a table, and there were sawhorses as well. The room was being remodeled. Obviously, they had forgotten to turn off the light. The window was open. The first floor.

  “Let’s crawl in,” Tanya proposed.

  “No, I’ve already done time for a shop. That’s enough for me.” The boy scurried ahead. “What if we go to your place?”

  “I lost my keys … And, in general …” Tanya was at a loss. Everything was a bit topsy-turvy.

  “All right, let’s go,” the guy proposed magnanimously, and they set off to wander further.

  They walked with their arms around each other, then, in some courtyard, they kissed, then they wandered about a bit longer, and then it turned out that they were standing in a large entranceway, pressing against each other with their arms and their hollow stomachs and hands that were sticky from the little bit of blood that had managed to flow through the tiny cut across his vein.

  They went up to the last floor of the very same Moscow moderne building that Tanya had noticed at the beginning of her journey along Olkhovskaya Street. A light burned on the fourth floor, but beyond that lay mysterious darkness. A story above the last floor, near a padlocked entrance to the attic, there was a small semicircular window with flowing casements that cast curvilinear shadows in the strange light. They kissed a bit longer, standing at the wide windowsill. Then she sat down on the windowsill and did everything that Gansovsky had wanted of her.

  “Gansovsky ordered that stepladder especially for that kind of stuff!” Tanya guessed as the boy pulled her onto himself.

  With neither a thrill nor inspiration she bid farewell to her senseless virginity, imparting absolutely no significance to the event whatsoever. The boy accepted this unexpected gift in total bewilderment.

  “You still got your cherry? You’re my first. And do you know how many broads I’ve had?”

  Tanya laughed at his street slang and shook her bandaged hand.

  “What a bloody day I’ve had today … And you too …”

  Then he sat down alongside her on the windowsill. Though wide, the windowsill was too short for them to lie down on.

  Ten minutes later he was telling her about some girl named Natasha who had played with him for two years—because all broads are bitches—and about his deferral—he was going to join up during the fall draft as a border guard—and some other gibberish about real men … Tanya had no interest in this whatsoever. She jumped off the windowsill and waved to the little chump.

  “I’m out of here!”

  And she flew down the stairs, clicking distinctly with the heels of her flats.

  By the time he slowly figured out what had happened, she was already two floors down.

  “Where are you going?” he shouted after her.

  “Home!” she replied, without slowing down.

  “Wait! Wait!” he shouted, dashing after her. But she was already out of sight.

  3

  PAVEL SENSED MORE THAN KNEW: CALL IT STARS OR whatever, but there was something beyond human beings themselves that guided human life. He was convinced of this most of all by the “Abraham’s” children, brought into this life through his, Pavel Alekseevich’s, hunch about a connection between cosmic time and the innermost cell responsible for the production of progeny … He allowed that other aspects of human life could be influenced by the cosmic clock—that bursts, as well as slumps, of creative energy were governed by this same mechanism. Determinism—so obvious in the development of, say, an embryo from a fertilized egg—satisfied him entirely; what was more, he regarded it as the principal law of life. But he was unable to extend this strictly predetermined movement beyond the physical course of ontogeny. His freedom-loving spirit protested. However, a human being was formed not just from certain more-or less-known physiological processes; many other completely chaotic factors interfered, as a result of which identical seven-pound sucklings developed into spiritually diverse human beings, some of whom achieved great deeds, others—crimes, while some died in birth of scarlet fever and others on the field of battle … Had a plan been preprogrammed for each of these innumerable millions? Or was fate a grain of sand on the seashore? What unknown law dictated that two out of three Russian soldiers would fall under fire during the war, and of those who remained a part would perish in prison camps and another part drink itself to death … One in ten had survived … Who regulated this mechanism?

  As far as he hims
elf was concerned, Pavel Alekseevich knew that his fate was headed downhill. He still worked, and taught, and operated, but gone from his life was the intense pleasure of the incipient moment, the sensation of being one with the times, with which he had existed for many years. His home life too preserved only its general designs, an empty shell of their former family happiness … Gone was the feeling that had overcome them in evacuation during the war and had lasted a whole decade, until 1953, that like a sunken ship with stolen gold had descended to the bottom of memory to be replaced by a monastic and laconic union built without touching and almost entirely on understanding glances alone … Something was happening to Elena: her eyes were covered over with a thin film of ice; if they expressed anything at all, it was an anxious and strained lack of understanding, like that of a small child still unable to speak just before it is about to start crying for some inexplicable reason.

  His relationship with Tanya had fallen apart. Just as before, she was rarely at home, but earlier her absence had signified a kind of accumulative activity, a nutritional acquisition of skill, whereas now, after she had abandoned everything, Pavel Alekseevich wondered with what sort of activities she filled her day, evening, and—not infrequently—nighttime hours spent away from home. He was chagrined by what he suspected to be an empty waste of time mostly because he so valued the special quality of each young person’s time, before fatal automatism had set in and when each youthful minute was muscular, capacious, and commensurate with the acquisition of knowledge and experience in their purest form … As opposed to his—an old-man’s—time, which slid by, weightless and even more worthless …

  What had once been the burning content of life—those birth mothers transparent as aquarium guppies with all their pathologies and complications, and his teaching, through which Pavel Alekseevich passed on to his students not just techniques but that tiny unnamable entity that comprises the heart of every profession—was becoming more and more automatic and losing its value, if not for those around him, then for Pavel Alekseevich himself.

  “The relative weight of time decreases with age” was Pavel Alekseevich’s diagnosis.

  Fatigued, he returned from work and first thing headed for his study, drank three quarters of a glass of vodka, and only after that emerged for supper. Elena, who had been waiting for him, also came out of her room. She sat down at the table Vasilisa had set, placed her thin hands with their enlarged joints alongside her eating utensils, and sat, her head lowered, as Vasilisa recited the appropriate prayer—to herself, on her own behalf as well as for all those present, repeating it as many times as there were people at the table. Pavel Alekseevich, who knew nothing about this ritual of hers, also hesitated, waiting for the wave of alcohol to spread through his body, and on feeling its warmth, he uttered his usual “bon appétit” and started in on Vasilisa’s thin soup. Tanya rarely ate supper at home. Toma, who had embarked on further studies, came home after eleven four times a week, and if she ate with the family, she was silent most of the time. They exchanged the most insignificant and necessary words: pass the salt, thank you, very delicious …

  After supper Pavel Alekseevich retired to his study and over the course of the evening drank the remainder of the bottle, leaving two fingers at the bottom for his morning dose. This was now his way of fighting with time: his sad attempt to kill it.

  Ilya Iosifovich, by contrast, had entered the happiest streak of his life. In the beginning of the 1960s his life had taken a turn: he was given a laboratory that operated as an independent research institute, and the lab had attracted several young people who were committed to the sciences to their last drop of blood. For his monograph on the nature of genius he was awarded a doctorate in biological science without having to defend. True, many years later Ilya Iosifovich acknowledged that those two dissertations he had been unable to defend owing to yet more arrests more aptly fulfilled the requirements of a doctorate. But at this particular moment he was enamored of his own work and had not yet reconsidered his hardly genial achievements in the field of genius research. Ilya Iosifovich existed in a state of euphoria: genetics had been allowed, Lysenko was done, and the same people who earlier had not let him in the door now flatteringly shook his hand and smiled phony smiles at this former foot soldier from the front lines who out of the blue had entered the ranks of heroes.

  The main event in Ilya Iosifovich’s life—long kept secret from everyone—was named Valentina II. A graduate student from Novosibirsk, Valentina Moiseevna Gryzkina, an athletic type of girl, the complete opposite of the deceased Valentina, had fallen in love with her dissertation adviser with the singularity of purpose of a basketball forward. In point of fact she was the best shooter on her university women’s basketball team, and her athletic vigor benefited from the inner resolve of an Old Believer: she was descended from a family of schismatics. One of her ancestors had accompanied Archpriest Avvakum on his famous journey, and since that time for more than two hundred years now, the family had settled in Siberia, and in the face of all sorts of persecution, persisted in its faith and produced strong and numerous offspring. It was to these folk, tempered by centuries of struggle, that Valentina, in the sixth grade or so, had announced that humans had evolved from apes. For starters her parents thrashed her with all their patriarchal ferocity and forbade her from going to school. But the little girl turned out to be worthy of her parents: they had met their own match. One faith against the other … Following two years of devastating struggle for the dignity of humankind descended from apes, Valentina left home, bearing on her already broadened shoulders her grandfather’s curse. Next came boarding school, evening school, and university—who knew on what money, with no financial aid whatsoever, living only on her paltry stipend. In her last year she read several articles by Goldberg in the journal Genetics and chose him to be her mentor. She arrived in Moscow with a recommendation to graduate school—she’d graduated with honors after all!—sought out Ilya Iosifovich, and passed her entrance exams.

  To Goldberg’s credit, a long time would pass before he noticed the amorous charge emanating from his new graduate student. He did, however, note her self-discipline, resourcefulness, and excellent knack for work: she deftly maneuvered heavy crates filled with test tubes and quickly taught herself all the techniques for working with flies, which were the principal object of the laboratory’s investigations.

  The main thing was that Valentina had no idea that Ilya Iosifovich measured female attractiveness by one single criterion: the extent to which the subject under consideration approximated the image of his late wife. It needs to be noted as well that during her life Valentina I had never struck him as the ideal, but after her death, over the course of the years, he idealized her more and more in his memory.

  The broad-shouldered, droll graduate student with two sharp bumps under her sweater in place of the massive soft hills expected in this broad expanse, in her men’s shoes and dark-blue lab coat, in no way inclined Ilya Iosifovich to thoughts of his inveterate loneliness, his unsettled bachelor life, or, even less likely, of the youthful frivolity of falling in love or of sexual conviviality …

  Valentina endured and endured, and then confessed her feelings. Ilya Iosifovich was perplexed and flattered, but with Onegin-like craftiness he mumbled something appropriate to this classic declaration against the background of a maidens’ chorus: “When old enough to be a father, my pleasant destiny dictated I become a spouse …”

  After which they both started thinking. Valentina—about transferring back to Novosibirsk; and Ilya Iosifovich about the sweet girl who had avalanched on his bald head like Siberian snow … And the more he thought, the more he liked her. The first symptoms of lovesickness occurred simultaneously with the arousing thought of the obscenity of having relations with a) a graduate student in general, and b) a graduate student who was almost forty years his junior …

  Gansovsky, of course, would have just smirked and backed the hussy into the corner of his bookshelves on a specially d
esigned device … But Gansovsky would never have cause to experience but a shadow of the happiness that Goldberg achieved following a half-year of semiromantic torment when, on a trip to the biology school in the semisecret city of Obninsk, following a long cross-country ski trip, Valentina remained with him in his cold hotel room … For all her awkwardness to disappear without a trace, Valentina needed only to get on her skis; in her dark-blue Olympic ski suit and ski cap pulled down to her shining eyes and wedging at the bridge of her nose she was for Ilya Iosifovich a streak of amazing lightning. (She was ranked nationally in skiing as well as in basketball.) His joyous amazement was fated to be long-lived—the first few years in great, but poorly kept, secrecy …

  Pavel Alekseevich, had he known, might have reflected on the hormonal nature of creative inspiration. He and his friend saw each other not very often, but no less than once a month. Usually Goldberg arrived at Novoslobodskaya Street at around ten in the evening, and Pavel Alekseevich would pull out a bottle of vodka, and they would carry on their purely man-to-man conversation until the wee hours of the night. Not about war, or horses, or drinking exploits, but about population genetics, the gene pool, genetic drift, and problems Ilya Iosifovich would label with the previously unknown term sociogenetics … Although Goldberg loved abstract, philosophical-biological conversations, he also knew how to formulate an experiment both competently and cleverly, as well as how to extract with maximum economy a direct answer to a precisely formulated question. His students worked productively, at a state-of-the-art level, and many of them were publishing articles in international journals. Everyone knows that Russians always do well in those fields of science where it’s possible to do the work in your head, on your fingers, and without serious financing.