The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  Pavel Alekseevich was amazed at how skillfully Tanya accompanied; she had obviously not forgotten her music lessons—and this gladdened him.

  Sergei diminished the sound, blowing the remnants out of the saxophone, and Elena saw the French curves topple, fade, and dissolve. The young man’s face was not just familiar, but as familiar as if she had memorized it: his thick light brows in a single line, his upper lip hanging slightly over the lower … He placed his saxophone alongside the laundry basket, shook his head, ran his fingers through his hair, then threw it back with a familiar gesture … His hair is full of sand, Elena thought.

  Then Tanya carried the basket with the sleeping baby girl into Pavel Alekseevich’s study, where she and Sergei closed the door behind them, and the guests, passing through the corridor past the door to the bathroom, could hear them laughing. They chatted and laughed for two hours. In the morning Sergei left while everyone was still asleep. Pavel Alekseevich had put Elena to bed and lay down to sleep in the bedroom, in his former spot, without undressing, and slept until late in the day: the night before he had had a lot to drink. Elena practically did not sleep and lay with her eyes open as she recollected where she knew that musician from, and seemed to have remembered …

  By the end of January the remodeling was finished. The apartment had been renovated, and Vasilisa now could not find anything: the pots, and plates, and vegetable oil all stood in new places, and she so tired of constantly searching that she ultimately took the bread into her pantry, wrapped it in a towel, and kept it in her nightstand. Tanya turned the household over to Toma, stocked up on grains and macaroni, sugar, and flour. She hung new curtains and bought a washing machine … Then she announced to Pavel Alekseevich that she was leaving.

  “Mama’s grown accustomed to her, leave her with us. When you get your life in order in Leningrad, you can take her,” Pavel Alekseevich implored.

  In the space of time that his granddaughter had spent at the apartment he had understood that he had lived to the point in his life when this little baby girl was capable of replacing his entire professional life, his students, his mentees, and, most of all, his patients. No matter what he did at the section—follow the quivering lines of a cardiogram, poke his seeing hands into a hemorrhaging uterus rupture, or palpate a ripe belly—he never forgot for a minute the little girl in the wicker basket. He mentally kept track of her newborn, still not rich time: now she was sleeping, already waking up, sucking, belching, stretching and kicking her little legs, performing the grave act of defecation, then falling asleep again … His sole and constant desire was to be alongside her basket, alongside the little girl who emitted infantile radiation and sweet slumber. She still had very little individuality, but her family heritage was beginning to show through: her eyebrows were long, and several little hairs stuck out in that same place where the family brush would eventually grow. She sort of reminded you of a hedgehog: a long nose and locks of hair clumped together in little needles … But her forehead was Goldberg’s high forehead …

  Tanya had been two years old when she had come into Pavel Alekseevich’s life, and she had been a beautiful and tender child, kindhearted and trusting, while this tiny mite was almost without any character at all; she did not have to capture her grandfather’s heart, she had simply from birth been imbued with power over Pavel Alekseevich, and he relished sitting alongside her basket, helping Tanya bathe her, touching her little red unwalked-on feet. It was a purely natural feeling that needed neither justification nor explanation, like a lion loving a lion cub, a wolf a wolf pup, and an eagle an eaglet … At this point, he discovered, pedagogy of any sort is nonsense and cold rationalism, and when pedagogy begins, what recedes is this natural feeling, this profound animalistic sense of love for one’s young … The lowest of all high emotions …

  “I say that absolutely seriously. We’ll match her up with donor breast milk. Tomorrow I’m turning in my resignation …”

  “Dad, what are you saying?” Tanya gazed at her father’s wrinkle-lined face and caught an expression she had never seen in it before—entreaty. It made her feel uneasy, and she became indignant: “What are you talking about? I can’t imagine you retired! You’re going to make her porridge, are you? Take her for walks in her stroller?”

  He nodded. “Uh-huh. With pleasure. Tanya, I’ve spent too little time on the family. And now’s just the time. Mama and I will take her for strolls.”

  “Mama’s totally out of it,” Tanya responded gloomily.

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure …”

  Tanya embraced his neck and tickled him behind his ears.

  “Dad, you’re fantastic, really. I’ll bring the baby girl to you, for sure. You know I want to have a lot of children. Girls and boys, five of them.”

  Pavel Alekseevich clenched Tanya’s hands, wasted on laundry and remodeling, kissed them, and went to the kitchen to down an absolutely necessary dose: three-fourths of a medium-size, broad-faceted glassful. The gears were turning in his aging head: why of all the tens of thousands of children he had brought into the world, saved, and even planned through his own intuition, was this baby girl and the other two or three Tanya planned to have so dear? I can’t even say that it’s blood … There’s no blood, no parentage, nothing but the irrational, inexplicable, capricious, and good-for-nothing call of the heart …

  Tanya was in a hurry. She had a whole list of things to do, which she crossed out one after the next—the ineradicable habit of a responsible and organized human being … The most expensive and labor-consuming task was replacing all the plumbing fixtures, including the bathtub, which had become unusable of late because of a constant leak; the most delicate task was getting her daughter baptized. Vasilisa was commissioned as expert to arrange this sacred procedure, with Toma as godmother. For starters, Vasilisa flatly refused to go to the St. Pimen Church, which was closest to their house, because it had—in Vasilisa’s mind—besmirched itself in the past with “revisionism”; she suggested they go to some rural church in the far reaches of the Moscow region where a “proper” priest served. Tanya dealt with Vasilisa’s principles with surprising ease, telling her that she would not travel that far and that she was not sure herself how she had got it into her head to baptize the child in the first place, and if there were going to be complications, then she was prepared to give up the notion entirely. At that, Vasilisa pursed her lips and began changing from her trimmed felt boots, which served as house slippers, to her street felt boots with the rubber galoshes … The sacrament of baptism was performed at the Church of St. Pimen. From that day on the little girl was designated Evgenia, and Tanya struck the thin cross from her list. All that was left was to give Elena a bath in the new bathtub. It had been more than a year since they had last used the bathtub, taking showers instead, not plugging the drain and rinsing off as quickly as possible so as not to flood the neighbors downstairs.

  Tanya filled the tub. Elena pressed her elbows to her side and feebly resisted.

  “You have to get undressed. Look, Mommy, there’s already water in the tub …” Tanya coaxed her, and reluctantly she obeyed.

  Her mother’s gauntness was painful, and it was not a matter of her being underweight: Tanya herself weighed less than 110 pounds. Empty folds of flesh hung from Elena’s shoulders and arms, and at the sight of her mother’s nakedness Tanya was struck by the thought of how sad and sexless the human skeleton was, and how what lent women their charm and men their strength and even made for the difference between men and women were merely pieces of fat-streaked flesh. Of her mother’s former womanhood all that remained were her pale breasts and the vague shadow of her almost hairless pubis.

  At long last Tanya sat her mother in the warm water. Elena lay back and stretched out her legs.

  “How good it is …”

  “I’m like Ham,” Tanya laughed to herself as she lathered the sponge. Looking was indecent, but washing, trimming, and wiping dry was quite all right …

  “Wait, Tanechka.
I want to lie here for a bit. It’s such bliss … Was the bathtub broken before?” Elena asked in a very hale voice.

  “Yes. Now it’s fixed.”

  Elena closed her eyes. Her hair slipped into the water and got wet. Tanya moved it to the side.

  “Everything changes in water. My head is a lot better in warm water. I don’t want you to live at home. I don’t want you to live with me. I forget everything, and it seems to me that now I’ve forgotten more than I remember. But soon I’ll forget even how much I forgot. Don’t be frightened, I don’t have anything terrible in mind, I am simply dying in the most usual way, from the middle of my head. Right now I feel very good. I haven’t felt so good in a long time, and I want to say good-bye to you. I’m being consumed by a hole. For some reason what’s happening to me is very shameful. And I don’t know if anything will remain at the very end. Tell me, how old am I?”

  “Soon you’ll be fifty-two …”

  “And you?”

  “I’m twenty-three.”

  “Good. The water has cooled. Add a little bit more hot … I’m not sure of anyone or anything. Sometimes strangers come, and sometimes people I know … At times there’s Vasilisa, with someone else inside her … I’m not even sure of myself … You know about that.”

  “No, Mommy. I don’t know anything about that …”

  “Never mind, whatever. I wanted to tell you that at this minute I am I and you are you, and I love you very much. And now I’m going to say good-bye to you. And then you soap me up … And then leave …”

  Tanya wanted to object, but her tongue refused, because all she could have said would have been pathetic, meaningless words. She lathered her mother’s hair, leaning her head back slightly so that the soap would not run into her eyes, scrubbed her scalp, and directed the stream of water from the shower head to rinse off the suds … She washed all the sagging folds of Elena’s narrow body, dried her dry, and covered her skin with baby cream. Then she dressed her in a long flannel shirt and took her to her bed. It was nearly nine in the evening. Pavel Alekseevich arrived soon after: that day he had delivered evening lectures at the institute of continuing professional education. Tanya was all packed. They ate supper together, and he saw the girls off to the station.

  The Moscow period of Tanya’s life was over.

  19

  DURING HIS LAST PRISON TERM LUCKY GOLDBERG SPENT not a single day doing general labor: they immediately put him to work as an attendant in the camp’s sick bay. The head doctor—an elderly, real shit, Lord forgive, of a woman who had lazed herself into a lump—drowsily dumped half her work on him. For all of her rottenness—having logged twenty years doing prison camp medicine, which less than any other branch had the right to call itself medicine—the head doctor lazily defended before the administration her right to keep Ilya Iosifovich on, and at least twice she managed to spare him from getting transferred to general labor …

  Had there been a male doctor in her stead, Ilya Iosifovich would not have tolerated—even in spite of her protection—her sleepy indifference toward the patients, her thievery, and her petty underhandedness. What reconciled him with the head was compassion, which went beyond all his principles: perpetually grazing at the doctor’s side was her twenty-year-old mentally disabled daughter whom she was afraid to leave at home alone. This woman’s biography—bitter, Soviet, and as ineluctable as an unburied corpse—tagged behind her …

  Perhaps for the first time in his life, Goldberg’s public insistence on the truth—as indecent as a patch on the seat of one’s pants—held its tongue. Over the past two-plus years he had drudged away as attendant in name and assistant chief physician in fact, he never once bothered her with stormy discussions, never called her on anything, never tossed a mug at her, and never yelled … When they were saying their good-byes, she uttered to Goldberg words that amazed and even shamed him: she turned out to be smarter and better than he had thought. But perhaps the matter lay precisely in the fact that Ilya Iosifovich’s presence, his old-fashioned magnanimity and comical gentility—usually taken for impracticable ridiculousness—had for a brief moment elevated the doctor to his level, and she clumsily pronounced her unprepossessing words, worthy of a dying man’s last confession, then asked how she could help him … After which she sat her fat ass down on her red plush upholstered chair to spend another twenty full years at her boring job, because somehow she had to feed her impaired daughter and send money to her widowed sister, with a house full of kids, whose husband had long ago been swallowed up by the same system she worked for …

  In a word, Ilya Iosifovich said good-bye to Elizaveta Georgievna Witte (there it is again, the unburied corpse!) and marched toward the gate. It closed behind him, and he marched farther toward the train station, a small bit of money and his release papers with him … The local train stopped at this station—to be found nowhere on any map—in the evenings, rather, did not even come to a full halt, but slowed down, and just at the moment when it should have stopped, it picked up steam again … An hour before the train was to arrive, Elizaveta Georgievna Witte—“the lump,” as Goldberg had come to call her to himself—dropped into the plywood pavilion and gave Ilya Iosifovich a parcel of food. A notebook of sheets of paper sewn together lay between a loaf of bread and two cans of stew meat …

  “All moral foundations have been undermined, Pasha. The moral foundations of life, the moral foundations of science … But the human being is alive.” Goldberg held his bony palm on the notebook of pieces of paper that had been kept separately and bound together only on the eve of his release.

  Once again, three years later, they sat in Pavel Alekseevich’s study, friends turned relatives by the whim of their children whom there was no figuring out, except that baby Evgenia, their granddaughter in common, was alive and well and living in Leningrad with Tanya and the long-haired jazz player who had enthusiastically assumed the not insubstantial cares of paternity … The old men drank, first with toasts, then simply after raising their glasses slightly higher than their noses and stopping the motion of their arms for a second …

  “Your health …”

  “The hole of holes, Pasha, the hole of holes … But the head doctor ordered journals for me from Novosibirsk University. American, German, French … From the 1930s forward. I think, Pasha, that I’ve closed the gap that opened when the Center for Medical Genetics was shut down. This book is not so much for scholars as it is for doctors specializing in what is not yet a specialization … A textbook that’s not a textbook … An introduction to medical genetics …”

  Pavel Alekseevich reached for the bottle, which was already light … What a wreck I’ve turned into … Ilyusha’s as strong as an ox: thin with a neck like a plucked rooster’s, even his bald spot has wrinkles, and where does he get the strength, the energy …

  More than two weeks had passed since Goldberg had shown up in Moscow. In that period of time he had managed to meet with a dozen colleagues, caught up with what was going on in the scientific world, delighted at the serious level of thinking taking place—although he saw no new great achievements—visited two publishing houses, presented a project description of the book he had already written, and realized that there was no hope of publishing it soon. Khrushchev’s fall, which had occurred while Goldberg was doing his last term in prison, interested him only insofar as it signified the final defeat of Lysenko and his henchmen. The most significant event that had taken place in his absence was the formation of the Institute of Genetics. Naturally, he rushed off first thing to visit the new director, whom he had known since before the war, a well-trained geneticist nicknamed Bonya, short for Bonaparte …

  The first forty minutes of their meeting Goldberg sang like a nightingale, generously casting his pearls hardly before swine … The beast who sat before him looked at him with stern blue eyes; it had jaws of steel, an iron grip, and a diamond-hard fortress of ambition to match his nickname … But the two of them also had a lot in common: great mentors, a flawed family bac
kground—if a Jewish lumber dealer can be compared to a Siberian factory owner—experience in the camps, and top-quality brains … The director listened with the highest degree of attentiveness, but gave no indication of his thoughts either in word or with movement of his eyebrows.