The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  Odessa and its suburbs ended about forty minutes later, giving way to a dusty, bumpy road, to fields annihilated by heat, to burned-out corn, and to feather grass. Nanny Goat was the first to get sick: she and her Swedish comrade had got carried away not just dancing, but with an exotic combination of cocktails that wrenched her Russian stomach even without the jolty road. Then little Misha threw up. Tanya held out the longest, but three hours of jostling suitable only for cosmonauts in training and not for delicate beings—particularly pregnant ones—unglued her as well.

  They crawled out of the bus near a string of whitewashed peasant huts turned gray from the dust of orchards and tomato gardens. This miracle of nature was called Kurortnoe, “Resort Town.” Only there was nothing of a resort about it. Just more of the same dusty fields, with the sea nowhere in sight. In short, there was nothing there but heat and ferocious sun. They asked a woman passerby with a bucket full of tomatoes where the sea was.

  “Over yonder,” she waved in no particular direction. “You lookin’ to rent?”

  “Yes, to rent.”

  The woman led them toward her place. Along the road they ran into two more women. They stopped and chatted quickly in not quite understandable Russian. After which the first woman passed them on to one of the others, and she led them off in a different direction. Sickly cypresses came into sight, with something resort-looking behind them. It was a resort hotel, behind which more little white houses appeared, and the new arrivals were taken to one of them. They rented a separate little house in a garden alongside a wooden outhouse with a tin sink attached with a huge rusty nail to a ridiculous lone wall—all that remained of a demolished shed. Beds of tomatoes stretched around the little house: they were “oxhearts,” a rare variety, huge lilac-crimson beauties, sooner fruit than vegetable … This was the sole local tourist attraction, the sole local delicacy, and almost the only food there was for people, pigs, and chickens. The tomatoes were used to make borscht and jam; they were boiled down into paste, dried, and left to rot. As the new arrivals figured out the next day, the local store had no bread, no butter, no cheese, no milk, no farmer’s cheese, no meat, and no lots of other things, but they did sell a low-grade flour, vegetable oil, canned fish, and chocolate candies … For the time being, having consumed the travel rations Mama Zina had provided, they set off to find the sea, which they still had not set eyes on and about which their landlady had said, waving in a certain direction, “over yonder.”

  They set out in the indicated direction along a beaten path through the feather grass and arrived at a steep cliff. The land ended, and the sea began. It lapped—invisible and inaudible—far beneath their feet and merged with the sky in the blinding gray haze seamlessly, without even a hint of a horizon.

  An earthen staircase haphazardly reinforced with wooden posts led to the water. Down it Tanya and Nanny Goat led a recalcitrant Misha, who was a bit cowardly and rather lead-footed. Having overcome about a hundred feet of crumbling steps, they found themselves on a sandy shore that was peopleless and touchingly sad, like the shore of an uninhabited island.

  “Awesome,” said Nanny Goat.

  “The end of the earth,” Tanya confirmed.

  “There’s nothing here,” Misha whined in disappointment.

  “What’s not here?” Nanny Goat said in surprise.

  “Where they sell ice cream, and in general,” Misha explained his disappointment.

  The sea was shallow, warm, and gray … It pretended to be calm, tame, as if it never battered the local shore with its autumnal storms that eroded many miles of barren, but hard earth …

  They went in for a dip, gave Misha swimming lessons, built a maze out of wet sand, then fell asleep, waking up only toward evening when the sun had relented and a breeze blew from the sea …

  Their landlady, a cook at the local resort hotel, turned out to be simply a treasure. In the evening she took them to the kitchen and showed them the cellar, whose shelves were lined with jars of butter preserved in salted water and pyramids of stewed meat—Soviet man’s daily bread.

  “Take what you need and then we will figure it out. You have a child with you,” the landlady proposed generously.

  Their vacation was working out sumptuously. Never in their lives had they eaten such quantities of stewed canned pork and butter as they did in those two weeks vacationing in the South. As for tomatoes, there was nothing to be said: that summer taught them that the product sold under the name of tomatoes in all other places had no relation whatsoever to the real thing.

  But their principal discovery was made three days later, when having had their fill of looking at the sad, barely live sea, they made their way finally to the estuary.

  The sandbar—overgrown in places with reeds and wormwood—stretched many miles, washed on one side by the languid sea and on the other by the estuary’s standing water, rather, that of one of its long inlets, which during spring high water was connected with the river’s main stream, but for the larger part of the year was entirely cut off. In a surprising way this small sandbar represented the entire local region: abandoned, almost nameless, cut off from its own history and alien to the present. This was the edge of the Bessarabian steppe, the setting for ancient civilizations trampled by Scythians, Gets, Sarmatians, and various nameless tribes. Once the outlands of the Roman Empire, it was now the wasteland of another, contemporary empire. Unfortunate, forsaken by all the gods, the motherland of white feather grass and fine suffocating dust …

  Already sunburned, in long sundresses, their crimson backs covered with towels, Tanya and Vika dragged little Misha in his pajama bottoms along the unpopulated shore as they attempted to find a place where they could take cover from the direct rays of the sun. The round sand dunes, which had stopped growing short of full size, offered no shade. At noon, no one went outside except vacationers: the locals lived by the laws of the South, burrowing off for siestas at this time of day, regardless of their work schedules …

  They found a small hill with three bushes with a trembling hint of shade underneath. They lay down on the hot sand. At this place the sandbar was about three hundred feet wide, the path running close to the estuary; having rested for a bit, they dipped themselves in its fresh water. You couldn’t say the water was warm; it was hot. They found a half-submerged dinghy in the reeds, which kept Misha busy for quite a while. Ducks with their adolescent ducklings scurried along the shore, accustomed to the heat, the warm water, and the abundance of food. The shallows, like a can of sardines, teemed with minnows. Only without tomato sauce. The thickets of reeds were filled with a live rustling: something there scurried by, started a ruckus, and emitted various sounds. Unidentifiable paws of various sizes had left their tracks along the tiny sandy shoal, and Misha bent over them, studying their script.

  Tanya folded her arms across her stomach and tapped with her finger.

  “You good in there? Satisfied?” She understood that yes, he was good …

  The ever-prepared Nanny Goat, who in addition to water and food had hauled along a chubby volume, leaned her head into the scanty shade and opened her book. She started to read aloud.

  “He thought that the mountains and clouds looked completely identical and that the particular beauty of the snowy mountains, about which he had been told, was as much an invention as Bach’s music and a woman’s love—none of which he believed in—and he stopped waiting for the mountains to appear. But the next day, early in the morning, he was wakened by the fresh air in his cart and looked casually to the right. The morning was perfectly clear. Suddenly he saw—about twenty steps away, as it seemed to him at first glance—the pure white colossi with their gentle outlines and the whimsical, distinct aerial line of their summits against the distant sky. When he comprehended the true distance between him and the mountains and the sky, the full enormity of the mountains, and when he sensed the full infiniteness of this beauty, he became frightened that it was all an apparition, a dream. He shook himself, so as to wake up …”
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  Tanya glanced over her shoulder. “You rereading Tolstoy? What for?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. I feel like it. Almost every year, and certainly in the summer. Like this, on the beach. On a train … In the yard, in the kitchen garden … Like visiting a relative. Out of a sense of duty. But love too. It’s a bit boring. But necessary.”

  “Yes, yes. I know. My mother has read Tolstoy that way all her life. Her father, my grandfather, was a Tolstoyan or something like that. He was shot.”

  “Are you kidding? They arrested Tolstoyans too?” Nanny Goat was surprised.

  “How else? Absolutely …” She closed her eyes. She saw an unexpectedly lustrous picture—pure white colossi with their gentle outlines and the whimsical, distinct aerial line of their summits against the distant sky. “I don’t care for him. No, that’s not so. He writes that he doesn’t believe in the music of Bach or a woman’s love, in the beauty of mountains, and you’re prepared to agree with him. Then he ups and suddenly writes three sentences about the beauty of the mountains that hit you right between the eyes … And it all gets turned upside down.”

  She rolled off her back onto her stomach and leaned on her elbow in the sand.

  “Thank you for hauling me out to this hole. This place, of course, is awesome … Nobody around …”

  In fact, there were lots of vacationers, who could be observed in the morning at the local market: people from Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Kishinev. Many vacationers arrived particularly toward the weekend. But they all gathered amicably on two beaches—the resort hotel’s and the so-called public beach … The Moldovans with their hanging mustaches, Ukrainian mine workers who succeeded in covering their coal-dust-darkened faces with crimson suntans, their full-bodied wives, and screaming children laid out their domestic supplies along a littered strip of shore where they drank warm vodka, played circle volleyball, splashed about in the shallows, then left, leaving behind stinking mountains of trash to be washed away by the cleansing storms of autumn. No matter what they called themselves, they were the true descendants of the extinct barbarous world.

  Neither the sandbar nor the wild seashore down the staircase interested anyone. Walking past the feculent public beach, Tanya and her companions would come out on the sandbar, and a quarter mile later the remains of the barbarians’ campgrounds disappeared. If they followed the turn of the sandbar and walked another two to two and a half miles, they found themselves at such a remove, in such an uninhabited world, as was impossible to imagine …

  On the second Saturday of their stay on the estuary, the pain of their sunburns having already subsided, they made their way to the very middle of the sandbar, where the remains of some indeterminate stone structure were still preserved. Likely the winter waves reached these ruins, but the vacationers did not, which meant that there were no broken bottles and no tin cans among the roots of the pathetic bushes that had sprouted under the cover of the heaped-up stones … They walked over toward the ruins and caught sight of a tent made out of a white sheet strung in seclusion among the rocks: there were several young men inside the tent.

  “It’s the musicians from the club.” Tossing a quick glance in their direction, Tanya recognized them immediately.

  “What club?” Nanny Goat wondered.

  “The sailors’ club, where our Mama Zina …”

  “I hadn’t paid any attention to them. Tanya, you have an incredible visual memory. How did you remember them?” Nanny Goat continued to be amazed.

  The pianist, the eldest of them, thick-nosed and hairy-legged, waved cordially.

  “Welcome, ladies, welcome!” he shouted in English.

  Everyone called him Garik, but his real name was something Armenian and difficult to pronounce, and whenever he drank his first shot of whatever, he immediately switched to English, which he knew in the particular context of jazz—exclusively by way of musical terminology and classical blues lyrics. Jazz musicians at the time were totally insane, but until today there had been none in Tanya’s circle of friends. The saxophonist sat almost with his back to them, but Tanya recognized him by his light straight hair of a length considered in those days a challenge to the social order. He looked around, looked at Tanya, and she immediately seized her stomach: the child kicked about with unusual force.

  “What’s with you?” Tanya asked him. He kicked about another time, and then fell quiet. Everything’s all right.

  Tanya and Nanny Goat were still trying to decide whether they should turn in their direction or pretend that they were going somewhere else, but Misha had already run up to the musicians and declared: “You’re sitting in our spot. We always sit …”

  So they did not walk on, but stopped … The forty feet between Tanya and the saxophonist passed as if in slow motion: he raised a slow hand to his temple, and a lock of long hair shifted in a protracted agonizing movement. He touched his hair, stopped, slowly turned his neck, smiled with the corners of his mouth, which flowed upward, revealing his large upper teeth and the small lower ones that resembled a young puppy’s. It all happened in enlarged close up. He smiled at Tanya, and he looked at her with the same slow gaze, and Tanya already then, it seems, had guessed that at that moment her fate was being decided.

  The musicians were drunk, but within reason. In the evening they were supposed to play at the local resort hotel and were observing their work regimen. They had been playing together for half a year already, and they knew perfectly well how much wine would improve the music, and when it became destructive. The drummer started making moves on Tanya. Tanya couldn’t take her eyes off the saxophonist. At six o’clock, when the sun’s heat had abated, they set off together in the direction of the resort hotel. The guys had left their car at the entrance. Nanny Goat and Misha headed home to eat supper. Tanya squeezed into the back seat and went off with the musicians. She liked Sergei something awful. Like no one and never before.

  The concert went off with great success. After the concert people danced for a long while to tape-recorded music. All the musicians got very drunk. Sergei did not dance. They sat behind the do-it-yourself stage and kissed till stupefaction, until he said that there was a room reserved for him but he didn’t remember the number. The key, though, just happened to have attached to it an oilcloth ticket with a violet number 16 penned on it.

  14

  TANYA DID NOT WAKE UP, SHE CAME TO. THE ROOM—A shoddy double with a pair of wooden beds and a bedside table between them—was filled with hot dense light, like an aquarium filled with water. There was not the slightest movement, not the least flutter, and none of the bustle that often occurs in the early morning. It was as quiet as noon, at the hour when the sun is at its peak. An instant of life in freeze-frame was what it was.

  “And I’m at my peak.” Tanya smiled, placing her palms on her convex belly and stroking it from the sides. “We’re at our peak!”

  The high point of life, the top of the mountain, and the mountain of her belly—all these things were related.

  “Do you feel it?” she asked her belly.

  “Do you feel it: you and I have fallen in love …”

  Her belly for some reason was her accomplice. She looked at Sergei sleeping alongside her. She had been studying his hands since the night before: not large, with the distal phalanxes bent upward, with enlarged joints under the horizontal folds of skin on his knuckles, fingernails with white spots—signifying either some sort of vitamin deficiency or an unexpected present prepared for him by destiny … She squinted to the side: his hand, opened trustingly palm upward, lay on her shoulder. In the middle of the flesh of his mons pubis she found a deep scar. There was another one on his forearm. There were many more details of this boyish body that she had not managed to note the night before, but already loved. The big toe on his foot stuck out forward, the foot itself was narrow and not large, like a woman’s. There was the plush of thick white hair on his shin … He lay on his side, one leg bent at the knee. In the shadow of his private parts, among the ligh
t curly hairs, lay his sleeping tool, and it was not at all without its own character. Previously it had seemed to Tanya that men’s penises differed only slightly in size, but in all other respects were absolutely identical. This one had a characteristic bend that replicated the line of his lips and expressed naïveté and a capacity for self-oblivion … With her hand Tanya touched his milky-white skin, the small strip on his hip not covered with a suntan. His skin was as soft as a woman’s. His chest was covered with soft growth, light-colored, like sun-bleached moss. She touched the scar on his palm. “This will be my favorite place.”

  He rummaged his other hand along his side, then pressed her to his body.

  “Where are you going? Don’t leave …”

  “Never,” Tanya laughed. “But can I go to the bathroom?”

  “No way.”

  He pressed her to himself: everything fit wonderfully. Never before had he experienced such a coincidence. Without opening his eyes, he asked her: “Where did you come from?”

  “Nowhere. I always was.” Tanya laughed.

  “Apparently,” he agreed, running his hands over her neck, breasts, and stomach.

  “Open your eyes,” Tanya said.

  “I am afraid.” He smiled, but opened them.

  “And?” Tanya got up and edged away slightly.

  “Terrific,” he said to calm her and, perhaps, himself. “Everything was terrific, only I just couldn’t remember your face. You know, once at just this point I had a terrible trauma. I woke up, and alongside me …”

  Tanya clamped her hand over his mouth.

  “Forget it. Immediately forget everything that ever was before. You are Sergei, I’m Tanya, and nothing else matters.”

  Sergei chuckled. “Good. But I just happen to have a wife.”

  “And I have a husband. Two, even. And I’m going to have a baby soon …”

  “In what sense?”

  Sergei pulled himself up and leaned on his elbow. Tanya took his hand and placed it on her belly.