The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  “It’s possible Flotov was taken prisoner and became a displaced person. Thousands of Russian soldiers did not return home, you know that. Perhaps it was all for the better. If he’d returned, they would have sent him to the camps …” Pavel Alekseevich spoke insignificant words only so that her speech mechanisms would not shut down, as frequently happened with her.

  “No, you don’t understand … Flotov was a Baltic German. His great-grandfather was from Königsberg, von Flotow, and he had a lot of relatives who had stayed behind. He hid who he was …”

  “What are you saying, Lenochka? That’s simply amazing … That means he was one of the guilty? When I was young, everyone in my circle of acquaintances, well, perhaps except for a few idiots and bastards, knew that they were guilty of something, and they hid who they were …”

  “Yes, of course. I remember how I felt it the first time. When my parents took me from my grandmother and brought me to a colony near Sochi, in the spring of 1920. That’s when I first saw the vegetation in the South … And that’s when I understood that something bad made us colonists different from all other people … A portrait of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy hung in the communal dining room. Done in oils, a clumsy portrait, his bare forehead shining and his beard fluttering in the wind, and, what really annoyed me, the frame was crooked. And no one noticed …”

  Pavel Alekseevich listened to his wife’s story, a coherent and detailed narrative with precise details. With an analysis of the situation, criticism, and an ability to arrive at meaning. Not a shadow of dementia. There could be no thought of dementia here … So why, two hours ago, had she been sitting with the cat and the unopened envelope, answering with irrelevant information, with nonsense answers typical of the insane, unable to control even the simplest movements, and at times forgetting how to hold a spoon. No, she hadn’t quite forgotten entirely, but was experiencing obvious difficulty dealing with the simplest of things. She couldn’t remember what she’d eaten for breakfast … If she had even eaten breakfast … The picture more likely suggests pseudodementia. A seeming loss of the simplest skills. A sui generis game of hide-and-seek of the mind with itself … No, I could never solve this puzzle. Maybe I should read Freud. In 1912 my dead mother had traveled to Vienna for psychoanalytic sessions with one of Freud’s students. What a shame I know absolutely nothing about that. It seems my mother had some variety of hysteria … Pavel Alekseevich frowned. Silly Vasilisa: his sin lay not in aborting fetuses, half-ounce clots of high-potency protein with enriched potential, but in the stupid rigidity with which he had rejected his mother’s second marriage, and his mother herself, a fair-haired beauty who had grown old with dignity and died in Tashkent in 1943 from ordinary dysentery.

  With the acuity of the mentally ill Elena noticed the lightning speed of Pavel Alekseevich’s frown and fell silent.

  “Yes, yes, Lenochka. The frame was crooked … Tell me more …”

  But she had fallen silent, as if someone had switched off the power. Once again she sank her fingers into Murka’s fur, charged with live, slightly crackling, electricity, and withdrew entirely from the conversation and from the letter that had served as the indirect reason for the conversation, and from Pavel Alekseevich, who just seconds ago she had called “Pashenka” … Once again her face resumed its expression of “Imnothere.”

  Pavel Alekseevich knew that no force could bring her back. She would wake up to communicate again in a week, a month, or in a year. Sometimes these glimmers lasted hours, sometimes days. These temporary glimmers threw him for a total loop because Elena would become herself and even resemble herself in those mythological times when their marriage had been complete and happy.

  The exact same thing had happened last time, three months ago, when she had spoken to him about Tanya, as if she had wakened from her illness, and she had spoken bitterly, almost in despair about alienation and loss, about emptiness and the torturous loss of sensation that afflicted her, about her indescribable confusion at not being able to recognize the world around her … And then her speech had stopped in the middle of a word, and she buried herself in the cat.

  “Always the cat,” the thought entered Pavel Alekseevich’s head. “Next time when she begins to talk again, I’ll chase the cat into the corridor … How strange: the cat is like a conduit to madness …”

  “Lenochka, you and I were talking about Flotov …”

  “Yes, thanks much … I don’t need anything … Yes, everything’s completely fine, please, don’t worry …” Lena babbled, addressing either the cat or someone else who existed imaginarily inside her dusty, unkempt room.

  11

  LIKE ALEKSANDR SERGEEVICH PUSHKIN, TANYA WAS MISerable in spring: she felt wiped out, fatigued, and caught colds that refused to go away. This time her usual spring indisposition was complemented by an insuperable somnolence and aversion to food.

  She was living on Profsoiuznaya Street now, in the Goldbergs’ apartment. As soon as his medical leave ended, Vitalka was immediately fired from his job as part of a supposed staff reduction. He eked out a living as a translator. Like his father in the old days, he found what work he could writing for several scientific review journals, usually under someone else’s name, and attempted to write articles for popular science magazines. Two short notes of his about new technologies in the West appeared in Chemistry and Life. Also with the help of acquaintances.

  Barely able to withstand her nausea from kitchen smells, Tanya cooked food and slept fourteen hours straight. Occasionally coming out of hibernation, she went to Obninsk to see how Gena was doing. He was finishing his quick-fire dissertation and awaiting trouble at any minute from his institute’s internal security office, but his adviser, a friend of Goldberg senior, a physicist who like Goldberg had done time in the camps, supported him one hundred percent. Yet, for all his authority and scientific achievements, the adviser was neither tsar nor god, and it was unclear until the very last moment whether or not Gena would be allowed to defend …

  Tanya spent a day or so strolling through the still-transparent April woods underlit by varicolored buds ready to open, and returned a couple of times again in May to look at the young greenery. The fresh air quickly made her tire, and she fell fast asleep, thinking little of the fact that Gena lay down alongside her when he returned from the laboratory. Their friendly intercourse had no more significance than their communal breakfast, after which he accompanied her to the bus, then ran off to his laboratory …

  Having spent a couple months living this way, Tanya suddenly woke up, made a few female calculations she had never before condescended to, and arrived at an interesting conclusion. In the five years of her experience in bed nothing similar had ever happened, and the discovery at first stunned her.

  Nanny Goat Vika’s girlfriends constantly discussed issues of applied gynecology connected with contraception, abortions, and means of dealing with the pain. During these discussions Tanya maintained an expression of total disinterest, as if she were a virgin or an old woman. For her, pregnancy was neither a joy nor an affliction, merely an interesting event. After making her discovery, she slept almost a full day straight, in her sleep reconciled herself with this entertaining circumstance, and announced it to Vitalka, who just happened to be at hand.

  “Oh you devil,” he rued. “I’m a jerk, of course, but you’re to blame too … But a kid, in the present circumstances—that’s too much.”

  “You think so?” Tanya surprised herself by taking offense, although she had not yet decided how she should feel about the possible appearance of a child. “So should I have an abortion?”

  Vitalik said nothing. For too long.

  “It seems I don’t want it.” Vitalka’s long pause turned out to be decisive, because a minute before that Tanya had not at all known what she wanted. “We don’t need a kid,” Vitalik announced rather decidedly. “And my arm doesn’t straighten completely …”

  That was when Tanya suddenly took mortal offense on behalf of her future child, rai
sed her splendid eyebrows, and smirked.

  “I’ll have to ask Genka. Maybe he wants it?”

  Having assumed in the depths of his soul that Tanya belonged principally to him and visited Gena out of tradition and with his, Vitalka’s, tacit agreement—a kind of sexual philanthropy on behalf of his brother, Vitalka gazed at Tanya with a look of stupefaction: he hadn’t expected this turn of events. It had somehow never occurred to him that the alleged child might turn out to be his nephew …

  “Listen, so who’s the kid’s father?”

  Having made it a rule never to hide her thoughts and always to tell the truth, Tanya smiled a bit more broadly than usual.

  “The Goldberg brothers, Vitalik. The Goldberg brothers. Under the present circumstances, it seems to me, you won’t have as hard a time dealing with it together.”

  Then, not saying another word, Tanya began to collect her bag. Vitalik, also without saying a word, saw her to the bus that she usually rode to Obninsk.

  Gena’s reaction was more circumspect and mature.

  “I’m completely at your disposal, Tanka. The only thing I can’t do right now is leave Obninsk before I finish this damn dissertation. As for everything else, you call the shots. If you want, you can move here, at least until autumn. If you want to get married, we’ll do that here, not in Moscow.”

  “Why not in Moscow?” Tanya asked, expecting some catch.

  “I’ll lose two days on my dissertation. I told you, there’s a huge rush.”

  “Ah.” Tanya nodded, satisfied.

  Gena did not mention Vitalka. That pleased Tanya. She was ready to marry one of the Goldberg brothers, and the choice had now been made for her: Genka …

  But things did not turn out according to plan. When Tanya returned from Obninsk three days later, Vitalik was preoccupied with a new problem that had been dumped on him: a notice had come from the draft board … It was obvious that this was their way of punishing Goldberg senior.

  The answer proposed itself: a draft deferment lay right in Tanya’s belly. All they had to do was get married as quickly as possible and have her pregnancy certified at the polyclinic.

  “If that’s the way it has to be … What’s there to talk about, Vitalik? Just keep in mind, though, that my choice of husband is Genka.”

  Vitalik smiled a crooked smile.

  “Are you trying to tell me that ours is going to be a fictitious marriage?”

  “I didn’t put it that way. But if you want, we can call it that.”

  The rest of the evening they spent battling wits on the subject of who would be related to whom and how as a result of their matrimonial operation. Tanya designated Vitalik a verbal adjective, the future child a half-nephew, and their marriage a Triple Alliance.

  Having laughed their full and eaten supper, they lay down on the same distressed couch with its iron ribs sticking out and fell asleep in a close embrace, entirely oblivious to whatever moral dilemma might be seen by any outside observer, but not by the members of this particular family.

  The next day they ran down to the civil registry office and submitted an application. Their wedding was set for the beginning of July. Vitalik did not go to the draft board. As a precaution it was decided that he should leave Moscow for a while. He quickly gathered his things, stuffed his bag with dictionaries, and grabbing half of a German textbook on clinical biochemistry—one of his father’s staffers had shared this sweet morsel of a translation with him—set off for his maternal aunt’s house in Poltava. Without calling or otherwise alerting her …

  Everything turned out to have been calculated flawlessly. Two days after Vitalik left, another summons arrived, and on the next day, at seven in the morning, there was pounding at the door. Tanya admitted three men—two military and one policeman—into the apartment. They had come to take Vitalka into the army.

  “The owner’s on a trip. I don’t know a thing. I think he went to the Urals to look for work …” was all they were able to extract from Tanya.

  Following Vitalik’s departure Tanya fell in love with her pregnancy. Not with the child that was supposed to be born, but precisely with her condition of fullness, contentedness in the literal sense of the word. Usually inattentive to her health, she now obeyed her body’s slightest whim and resolved to indulge herself by doing everything that was pleasant and wholesome. In the morning she drank juice—not store bought, but hand-squeezed; she set up her own kefir production on the windowsill using some especially curative dairy culture; she spent several days a week in Obninsk with Gena. There she would stroll through the woods for hours on end, acquiring in the process a warm brown tan, hemoglobin, and a pleasant fatigue. Her somnolence was replaced by morning sickness. In the morning she would suck on sour hard candy; her nausea usually let up later in the day. To Tanya’s great chagrin her belly had not grown one bit, although she constantly experienced a kind of taut fullness inside her that had nothing in common with the vulgar condition of someone who has eaten two dinners at one sitting. Her breasts, on the other hand, had enlarged noticeably; her nipples stuck out like doorbell buttons, and turned from pink to brown. Tanya scrubbed them with a coarse loofah: somewhere she had read that that was the way to prepare breasts for nursing. Gena sucked at her darkened nipples. He liked the way her nipples hardened from his touch. Tanya also liked this entirely new sensation.

  Two more notices addressed to Vitaly arrived from the draft board. Some captain called, threatening and attempting to scare her. Tanya played the idiot.

  On rare occasions Tanya would visit her family. She announced that she was pregnant and was planning to get married. But Elena did not react to the announcement at all. It seemed to Tanya that her mother had not heard. But that was not quite true, because in the evening of that same day Elena told her husband that Tanya would give birth to Little Tanya. Accustomed to the chaos of her mental processes, Pavel Alekseevich did not attach any special meaning to this vague bit of news, thinking to himself about the complex processes taking place in his wife’s mind: apparently, the message about Flotov had stuck in the deep layers of her cortex and she had remembered the time when she herself had awaited a daughter. She was identifying herself with the grown-up Tanya.

  The letter from the International Legal Collegium remained unanswered. Elena was in no condition to express her opinion about the inheritance, let alone answer. And Pavel Alekseevich had not said anything to Tanya about it: he just couldn’t find an appropriate moment. For him it was a question not of inheritance but of something much more important.

  On one of those late light evenings at the beginning of July when, having found her father in a pleasantly intoxicated state, Tanya informed him of her forthcoming marriage, he made up his mind to talk to her about that ill-starred inheritance. He sat her down in his study, placed the slightly pawed envelope in front of himself, and before handing it to her told her how he had met her mother, how he had operated on her and married her soon after she recovered.

  “You moved to my place, Tanya, the very same day that a telegram arrived with information about the death of the man who had been your mother’s husband before me.”

  Tanya’s eyes burst out of their sockets: she had never thought about her mother having been married to someone before Pavel Alekseevich.

  “You were two years old then, Tanechka. Your biological father was Anton Ivanovich Flotov. I adopted you immediately after we got married. Probably I should have told you about this earlier …”

  “Daddy, what difference does it make?” She saw Pavel Alekseevich’s anxiety, and all her childhood love, like the sun in the sky, shone down upon him at that minute …

  She hugged his bald round head, kissed him on his fuzzy eyebrows, and on the nose. She inhaled his smell, which she had always liked—a combination of medicine, war, and alcohol—squeezed her eyes shut, and whispered: “Who cares about Flotov or Boatov … You’re crazy … You’re my real, my favorite elephant, Daddy, you old fool … You and I are terribly alike; you’re al
l the best in me … I’m sorry that I abandoned you … I love you terribly, and I love Mama. I just can’t live with you … Dad, I’m pregnant, I’m going to give birth to your grandson soon … Cool, huh?”

  He had never had children of his own. He had heard about this moment from others, although many, many times men desperate to have children had learned of the event from him and had become fathers owing precisely to his demiurgic intercession. His adopted daughter had just informed him that she was going to give birth, and his chest filled with the warmth of happiness, and the future child turned out to be at once both desired and long awaited.

  “My little girl: is it really true we lived to see the day … Will I really deliver my own grandson?” Pavel Alekseevich said in an old man’s weakened voice, and Tanya suddenly saw how he had aged over the last few years, and, moved to tears and immediately angry at herself for that reason, she remonstrated.

  “So why don’t you ask me who I’m marrying? I’m marrying the Goldberg brothers.”

  “What difference does it make? So it’s the Goldbergs. The main thing is that you be happy.” He in fact could barely tell the brothers apart and was always joking that one of the brothers was a tad smarter and the other a tad more handsome, but he always forgot which one was which …

  He sensed nothing amiss in this piece of news. For the first time after many years downhill, of decline—both at home and at his job—he sensed an upsurge of joy: Tanya had not rejected him, and his life’s renewal was promised by the child, who would be his and Ilyusha’s grandson. Wasn’t that a miracle?