The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  The Goldberg brothers withstood the test honorably: by unspoken agreement they always visited the Kukotsky household together, calling first by phone to announce “it’s us, the Goldbergs,” even though the technical capabilities of telephony always dictated that only one of them spoke. If they invited Tanya to the theater or the cinema, they unfailingly traipsed together as a foursome, with the bland Toma as compulsory addendum to Tanya’s knockout charm. They never spoke about Tanya between themselves, unless to make a statement or indirectly.

  “Let’s go to the Kukotskys’ on Saturday …”

  “I bought tickets to the theater for next Sunday …”

  And that was the end of the conversation.

  Each of the boys individually had all the makings of an intolerable child with a superior intellect and egocentrically deformed personality, but the presence of Tanya in their lives in some strange way counterbalanced the dangerous circumstance of their being one step short of Jewish Wunderkinder with an ineradicable and almost justified sense of superiority over everyone else around. In the bitter years of their early manhood and later in their lives they would be forced to make sense of the particular significance of that “almost.” Tanya would give them a good run in this respect. Curly-haired, cheerful, and absolutely unconcerned with how those around her felt about her—likely because she had lots of evidence of being surrounded by people’s love from all sides—Tanya was beyond competition, if only for the reason that she was two grades behind them in school. There was two years’ difference in age between them and, in addition to everything else, she belonged to a different, female world, plus, at least until they were fifteen, she was taller than they were, and stronger—and it never would have occurred to either of them to match their strength against hers: for all these reasons they both were willing to submit to her, to serve her, and to provide her various pleasures commensurate with their age … In passing, with a flourish of the angled hem of her checkered skirt, she, without knowing it herself, had dismantled the strict intellectual hierarchy in which the still unmarried Ilya Iosifovich for the moment still held first place, followed, nose to nose, by the brothers, who were breathing down his collar, with everyone else left in their wake. Except Tanya … She was beyond … to the left or right. Her game was, essentially, not quite honest, as if during a game of chess she changed the rules without telling her opponent and won by shooting all her opponents’ pieces off the board and onto the floor with the snap of her thumb and middle finger … It was precisely this about Tanya that delighted the Goldberg brothers, and not her ash-blond curls or vigorous pounding on the piano … A hierarchy of intelligence turned out thereby not to be the only scale by which values were determined …

  From an early age the brothers’ tastes and preferences had been similar, but their mother had known almost from the moment of their birth that one of them, Gena, who was born twenty minutes later—the younger one, that is—cried just a bit harder and laughed just a bit louder. His needs were more dramatic and his fears more explicit. In any case, it was precisely five-year-old Vitalik, the relatively older one, who would ask Gena: “What kind of cereal do we like more?”

  And Gena would decide that they preferred buckwheat …

  Their worship of Tanya to a certain extent spared them from the comic role of Wunderkinder: they voluntarily, if not entirely appropriately, relegated first place to Tanya. The school in Malakhovka was unable to appreciate the boys’ talents—A students were all alike. Through the hardships of postwar existence to the day of her premature death, ingenuous Valentina—who worked as a laboratory assistant until 1953, when, in the heat of antisemitism, she was fired—never discerned her children’s talents, while their egocentric father, himself descended from a breed of Wunderkinder, for precisely that reason regarded his boys’ rare abilities as entirely to be expected. In addition, the brothers raised the bar for each other not only in relation to Tanya, but in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. For Tanya, basically, it was more interesting talking to Vitalik insofar as he was inclined toward medicine and they had more topics in common, but to tell the truth, as boyfriends she much preferred other boys who might not possess such exceptional knowledge in the field of the natural sciences but knew how to cut loose, boogying to the rock ’n’ roll that had filtered through the pores of the Iron Curtain …

  Now, after Ilya Goldberg had been arrested and appeared—unlike in previous years—to be an innocent suffering hero (it was the middle of the sixties!), his sons were illuminated by their father’s reflected light. Especially after Vitalka’s nighttime beating in the entranceway …

  Tanya and Gena walked out of the Kukotsky apartment a little after eleven o’clock. Gena knew that Tanya was not living at home, and over the past year they had not seen or called each other. Tanya seethed with compassion for Vitalka and immediately wanted to take part in hospital vigils over him. Gena, for the first time in many years, was alone with Tanya, and unexpectedly a completely new configuration arose in which Vitalka existed separately, while he and Tanya were together, unified entirely in their sympathy and compassion. While Vitalka—entangled in tubes, with freshly placed stitches along his cheekbone and the bridge of his nose, in plaster cast and with an IV drip—half-slumbered behind the glass divider of his isolation ward, Gena, having seized her by the dark-blue sleeve of her jacket, led Tanya to the metro, attempting to persuade her to spend the night on Profsoiuznaya Street, in order to be able to rush off to the Sklif first thing in the morning without losing time …

  Tanya hesitated a bit: ordinarily she warned Nanny Goat in advance if she planned not to spend the night in the workshop. There was no phone there. Tanya wavered; Gena was resolutely determined … Generally speaking, leaving him was not a good idea, and she headed off for Profsoiuznaya Street, where she had never been before.

  The two-room apartment in a Khrushchev-period five-story panel building looked as if the search had ended only a couple of hours ago. More accustomed to order than to cleanliness, having, essentially, rebelled against the inflexible logic of order and spent two years wandering around chance apartments and finding shelter ultimately in a workshop among small metal parts, old canvas stretchers, and heaps of broken furniture, Tanya stopped dead in her tracks at the sight of the elemental chaos of scribbled paper that flooded tables and chairs and cascaded in broad waves onto the floor. Footpaths had been marked out among the papers—one to water and another to food, one to the table and another to the bathroom—with newspapers spread over the scribbled paper; tea fields had formed with troops of variegated teacups brown from tea stains on the inside and dirty on the outside. Peaceful herds of fattened cockroaches grazed the scientific pastures.

  “How can you live here?” Tanya, by now used to everything, was amazed.

  “It’s not a problem. For the most part I’m in Obninsk. And Dad and Vitalka are here. But we don’t let anyone in the apartment so as not to scare anyone.” He flashed his big teeth, resembling white beans. “It’s even worse in Malakhovka. When Mama was alive there was some order. How she maintained it I have no idea …”

  “No, no, this is impossible.” Not yet having removed her jacket, Tanya tried to decide which side they should begin cleaning from. “We’ll start with the kitchen,” she announced.

  The decision turned out to be the right one. There were fewer papers in the kitchen, and the usual household dirt did not demand as close attention as the paper trash. Multilayered deposits peeled off the stove in sheets; the sewage-gray linoleum easily washed clean thanks to a packet of laundry detergent found in the bathroom. The main rooms went more slowly: the papers begged to be read, and from time to time some particularly intricate sheet would inhibit their progress. The effort required was more than Herculean: horse manure could be thrown out blindly.

  From midnight until four thirty in the morning they merrily cleaned four-hand. They chatted, giggled, and recollected childhood secrets; everything was easy, and the filth flowed down the toilet, while
the papers got stacked in drawers, which was also rather funny: the desk drawers had all been completely empty. The people who had conducted the quasi-robbery search had taken only what was in the desk; the other papers, of more recent vintage, spread in massive layers on all work and nonwork surfaces, had been left untouched …

  “Your brother’s strange,” Tanya announced toward the end. “Ilya Iosifovich has been in prison for half a year already, and he still hasn’t cleaned the apartment.”

  “You don’t understand: this is a memorial, an apartment-museum …”

  At half past four a couch covered with a dusty horse blanket emerged from under multiple layers of paper deposits. Tanya collapsed on it, raising a cloud of dust.

  “Enough. Time to sleep,” Tanya commanded, and Gena, who had spent several hours suppressing various urges—from sweet tenderness to bestial desire—did not keep himself waiting …

  After spending the full reserve munitions of a young warrior and not having slept for two full days, he sank into sleep, continuing all the while to be amazed by this state of acute tenderness and equally acute beastliness …

  “Where does that feeling of having done something underhanded, of some sort of guilt, come from?” he managed to think as he fell asleep. A voice within him answered sternly: “She’s your sister, after all …”

  Tanya thought of nothing of the sort: the fellow she had been sleeping with most recently was a hard-core geologist, promiscuous to the point of sainthood, with an innumerable number of children by café waitresses and academicians’ wives, and no worse and no better than this sweet little friend of hers since childhood. Tanya saw nothing particularly charming about a roll in the sack in and of itself and was always surprised by her older girlfriends and the way they went crazy over men: in bed all are equal … At the time she still did not know that this was not quite so.

  They arrived at the Sklif not by nine, as they had planned, but toward noon. At first they could not wake up, then Gena reaffirmed his new rights. By that time Vitalka had been transferred from intensive care to a regular ward: his condition had improved and he had regained consciousness and no longer intended to die.

  8

  A YEAR HAD PASSED SINCE A MURKY FILM HAD TOTALLY clouded over Vasilisa’s sole eye and darkness had occluded her vision. Blindness, a misfortune and terrible threat for the elderly, had liberated her from constant labor.

  So began her lawful release from work, beyond which blind Vasilisa envisioned her final unlimited and boundless recumbency. Her constant activity directed outward now turned inward. Before she had prayed to icons. She had several: a dark three-tone Theotokos from Kazan executed in cursory traveling merchant style, an Elijah the Prophet split in half by some stupid ax and crudely glued together so that the Prophet’s face had been preserved, but the cape that hung from the chariot for the most part did not fall in Elisha’s arms, having broken off to remain as a chip in the village church and to burn up along with it. There was also a Saint Seraphim of Sarov with an earless bear, and a drowning Peter—halo shifted to one side and arm extended toward a Savior walking past him in the opposite direction. Now it was as if she were deprived of all these protectors. She stood on her knees in her usual place where the rug was bald from her kneeling and attempted to resurrect them in her memory, but could not. The darkness that enveloped her hung like a smooth wall with no shades or points of light whatsoever. This went on for a rather long while, and Vasilisa grieved: it seemed to her that her prayers hung in the stale air near her head and rose neither to the Lord, nor to the Lord’s Mother, nor to God’s saintly miracle workers. Then something like a flickering candle flame began to cut through the darkness. The flame was so weak and so unsteady that Vasilisa feared that it might be some charm of her imagination. But it was so alluring, that bright spot, it so gladdened her, that Vasilisa beckoned it from within and tried to hold on to the image of light a bit longer. And the unsteady light grew and became stronger, and shone, visible to no one, in her private gloom, moving her to incessant and almost wordless prayer. Her prayers now were only about the “little flame,” as she called it, that it not leave her. Even in her sleep her prayer did not abandon her, as if it dozed alongside her, like the old Murka who had long ago chosen for her night lodgings the space alongside Vasilisa’s skinny, cold legs.

  So it was that Vasilisa thought that she had found a completely new, easier life for herself without her usual never-ending chores—without all those excessive, by her understanding, purchases of food, without washing large loads of hardly soiled laundry, and without enormous deck-swabbing housecleanings—leaving herself only her almost ritual duties of washing Elena in the morning and meeting Pavel Alekseevich after work. The larger part of the day she spent in her pantry in subtle meditation comprehensible only to Eastern monks … A blend of prayer-filled contemplation, spiritual communication—with the abbess, Mother Anatolia, with whom, of late, thanks to her blindness, she had grown even closer than before—and loving reminiscence of all those living and dead, close and distant, beginning with her own parents and the eternally memorable Varsonofy and ending with the nameless faces of the nuns of the N monastery, long ago deceased … by the light of that tiny flame that she had learned to fan within herself, as she would a coal in a stove …

  Every day, as he accepted from Vasilisa’s hands his pauper’s dinner, completely indistinguishable from the hospital dinner the practical nurse brought him at work, Pavel Alekseevich reproached himself for not being able to overcome Vasilisa’s stubbornness: he was convinced that all she had was just a banal cataract that could be removed and her sight at least partially restored. He was not some absentminded professor incapable of turning on a gas burner. He could warm up his own food, he could even prepare it, but to deprive Vasilisa Gavrilovna of performing her duties he could not, yet to accept the services of a blind servant was also untenable …

  Again and again he spoke to her about an operation. Vasilisa, though, did not want to hear about it, invoking God’s will, which determined everything for her … Pavel Alekseevich got angry, could not make sense of her, and tried, using her logic, to convince her that God’s will lay precisely in that a doctor given the call to operate on the blind would perform an operation on her, and she would be able to see the light, if only to sing the praises of God … She shook her head, and then he got even angrier, accused her of cowardice, illiteracy, and playing the holy fool …

  Each time he drank just a bit more than usual, Pavel Alekseevich started in anew with Vasilisa. But no line of reasoning could move her. Then once, Toma, without at all having spoken with Pavel Alekseevich, but simply having hauled an enormous bundle of linen from the laundry up five flights of stairs (the elevator was not working that day) and completely drained, accidentally uttered the only words that would convince her.

  “Look, Aunt Vasya, you’re so strong and healthy you could haul water, but all you do is pray … Why don’t you at least come with me …”

  Despite her scrawniness, Toma in fact came from a hardy breed: she spent whole days on end pottering with her green babies, pushing her nose to the ground, tirelessly digging and weeding. The blood of the peasant had spoken in her: what she had not wanted to do for trite beets and carrots she did with tenderness and passion for rhododendrons and choisya.

  She had never liked doing housework, which now required more and more of her time, and now she was enrolled at an evening trade school and in fact very busy.

  For a whole day Vasilisa carried this reproach—vented by Toma in a fit of temper—inside her. As always, she thought slowly and assiduously, calling upon Mother Anatolia for help. Finally, on Sunday evening, after supper, she informed Pavel Alekseevich that she was agreed to an operation.

  “But you didn’t want to do it.” Pavel Alekseevich was surprised. “First we need to show you to an oculist. For a consultation … Maybe they won’t agree to do it …”

  “Why not? I’m agreed. Let them cut …”

  The doc
tors found no contraindications. Two weeks later Vasilisa Gavrilovna was operated on at the eye institute on Gorky Street. Sixty percent of her sight was restored, and Vasilisa returned to her former household chores—once again she did the shopping, stood in lines, cooked their food, and did the laundry. Only her step remained unsure, wary, as if she were carrying some fragile precious object—her only seeing eye. Pavel Alekseevich’s words about God’s will effected by the hands of doctors had touched her heart. Although she remembered perfectly the entire operation—performed under local anesthetic—from the first acutely painful shot in her eye until the moment when they removed the bandage and she saw people, vague and quivering, like trees in the wind, she was constantly reminded of the New Testament story of Christ healing the man blind from birth, and she linked the doctors’ fiddling with her numbed eye with the Savior’s touching of the young blind man’s dead eye.

  No one in the house guessed the extent to which Vasilisa’s attitude toward herself changed after she recovered her sight: she became filled with respect for her strong, eternally virginal body, for her muscular, calloused feet and hands, and especially for her unseeing, tearing eye which had upped and begun to see. The inner light that had illuminated her in times of total blindness had left her, and now, in her restored sightedness, she could not see it at all. She longed for her lost “little flame,” but remained strongly convinced that it would return to her again when her temporarily resurrected eye would once again go out.

  Having reacquired her lost sight, she understood in what vain and fruitless fear for her last eye she had spent the larger part of her life. Only after having lost what remained of her sight was she able to liberate herself from that fear, and now, after the operation, having seen God’s earth anew, she found new faith not in God—her faith in God had never required reaffirmation—but in God’s love directed at her personally, at bent, stupid, and ignorant Vasilisa. She began to respect that same Vasilisa as the object of God’s personal love … Now she knew for sure that the Lord God set her apart from the enormous human multitude …