The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  The most fortunate of their circumstances was the complete confluence of the components of their lives, which usually only somehow coexist, sometimes pulling a person in different directions. Tanya’s love, family, creative, and routine household interests all flowed in a single line, her everyday life lived “musically,” by the same laws as a musical composition—a symphony, for example—was organized. The analogy amused her, and early in the morning when Sergei was still asleep and Zhenya was already cooing in her crib, she would give herself over to a sonata-like allegro, a dual-themed harmony in which the first theme, Sergei’s, was initially stronger and more voluminous, then subsided and conceded to the child’s line, which was burbling and joyful. She caught the andante on the dark street, pushing the carriage ahead of her, and its tripartite form corresponded to the geography of the streets, with the last part, so to speak, the most indistinct, beginning at the Petrogradskaya embankment.

  At her workshop the music initially stopped: she undressed her daughter, fed her water from a bottle, sat her on her pot, and tucked her back into her carriage for a nap before lunch. After that Tanya smoked her first cigarette of the day and went to her workbench. Here she was overtaken by the scherzo, which amused and lightly urged her on, rushing her as she lived for the finale, which led to the rondo, where the coda arose, a tender coupling of the morning’s theme connected to the sleeping Sergei, who would arrive toward lunchtime. A ring of the doorbell, and a very sweet recapitulation: AEACADAE.

  In spring the music season began. Tanya wanted to go with Sergei to the jazz festival in Dnepropetrovsk and then to Crimea. Toward the end of the winter two or three of the Petersburg jazz clubs started to get boring, and the trio’s relationship with one of them, The Square, soured. Sergei did not suffer from ambition, was easy going and friendly, but Garik would periodically get into some stupid conflict with one of the city’s jazz elders, first with Goloukhin, then with Lisovsky. Tanya, by that time already familiar to a certain extent with the ins and outs of jazz life and having made the acquaintance of many musicians, thought that Sergei should leave Garik. They played great together, but Garik never gave Sergei the amount of freedom he had grown to deserve. Sergei did more and more composing. Garik looked down his nose at these exercises and made light of them, but once, when they had been drinking, he said sternly and unambiguously: “As long as you’re playing for me, we’re playing my music …”

  Sergei was bitter. Tanya—all the more. It even seemed to her that the moment had arrived for her to get involved and direct the situation a bit. In the winter Sergei had been invited to play with Dixieland. Why not play with someone else? Garik wasn’t the only show in town … She called her father and asked whether he was still burning with desire to take Zhenya for the summer. If so, the two of them would come and live for a while in Moscow so that she got used to everyone …

  In the middle of May Pavel Alekseevich met Tanya and Zhenya at the Leningrad train station. He neatly finished off all of his duties at work by the end of the month. Now he wanted only one thing: to stay at their dacha with his granddaughter, feed her porridge in the morning, take her for walks, try to figure out her incoherent words and first thoughts. The women in his family were all falling apart: Elena got up from her armchair only unwillingly, Vasilisa had become decrepit, and her vision, despite the successful operation, was very weak. Toma helped him as much as she could, but her evening studies took a lot of her time, and Pavel Alekseevich could only quietly wonder why precisely Toma, with her very average abilities, banged her head so zealously against the sciences, while Tanya sat in a half-basement, molding something with her skilled hands, while her wonderfully organized head went completely unused.

  His granddaughter, whom he had visited in March, had not forgotten him and stretched out her little hand and turned her check for him to kiss. He kissed her creamy skin and was filled with hot air, like an aerostat …

  Tanya spent a week living at home. She did a deep cleaning of the place, digging out all the corners. She washed the windows. She was very tender with Vasilisa and took her to the public bathhouse: Vasilisa recognized no other form of bathing, but she was afraid to go on her own after she had slipped on the bathhouse’s stone floor. Toma rarely agreed to accompany her. In addition, Vasilisa did not recognize bathing on any day except Saturday, while Toma usually had her own plans for Saturdays. The bathhouse was not far away, on Seleznevskaya Street, and Vasilisa always brought her own basin, loofah—wherever did she get them?—smelly tar soap, and fresh change of underwear. For the first time in her life Vasilisa accepted Tanya’s help. First Tanya helped her peel off her thick coat, which was somewhat binding in the sleeves, then bent down and removed her all-weather felt boots. Nowadays she dressed year-round for the winter, just like a real old woman from the village. Vasilisa had stopped wearing shoes several years ago … Vasilisa grimaced and said in self-deprecation: “Well, miss, I’ve lived to see the day …”

  Then Vasilisa herself quickly unbuttoned her flannel house robe and removed her gray patched underwear. Her nakedness was as abject as her clothing. A gray, wrinkled body, knotty long legs with inky veins and a red rash of tiny vessels, and a withered, spiderlike rib cage with a big crucifix that hung down almost to her navel. Looking at Vasilisa was discomfiting, but her vision was so poor that she did not sense Tanya’s gaze, and for all her innate prudishness Vasilisa at the bathhouse took off her inhibitions along with her clothes. Tanya noticed hanging between her legs a rosy-gray fist-sized little sack that was relatively disgusting to look at …

  “Vasya, what’s that hanging between your legs?”

  Vasilisa bent over slightly, squatted a bit, and with an awkward movement stuck the hanging little sack back inside.

  “It’s my child parts, Tanechka. It ripped off. In 1930, when we were pulling a cart … It’s nothin’, nothin’ … It doesn’t get sick …”

  Tanya sat her down on the bench, put the basin with hot water under her legs, took a bathhouse basin full of water, and started to wash her with the loofah. Vasilisa moaned a bit, and groaned, emitting various degrees of pleasure …

  Awful, just awful … She worked for us all her life, carried bags, washed windows, ironed laundry with a two-ton iron … Reinserted her prolapsed uterus and climbed up the stepladder … In the house of the country’s leading gynecologist … Should I tell Dad? Awful, just awful … Standing in her rubber shower flip-flops on the slippery bathhouse floor as she scrubbed the old woman’s boney back, Tanya mumbled: “Lord, what am I supposed to do with you all? Vasenka, am I supposed to move back home … Why are you all grown so old …”

  The place was noisy with voices and flowing water, and Vasilisa did not hear her.

  “Enough. We’ve had our good time. Now we have to get back home,” Tanya said to herself. And she despaired at the horrible prospect of life in their old house between aging Vasilisa and her out-of-her-mind mother, with her daughter, and with Seryozha … The most intolerable thing was the smell of stale urine, both human and feline, of soured food, dust, grime, and dying—even after the most painstaking cleaning … Poor Dad, how does he bear it all? Then she remembered his chilly office and the ever-present empty bottle between the desk’s two columns of drawers … What if she were to have Toma quit her job and take care of the house? Then she realized immediately that she should be ashamed at the thought.

  When Tanya brought steam-mellowed Vasilisa back home and sat her down next to the teakettle, her mind was made up: she was going to the dacha right now to prepare it for the summer season and make a deal with some local woman to help out with the housework, then move them all out there and leave them there till fall. In the fall, after she returned to town, she would move to Moscow. With Sergei … The last point was still up for question … But, ultimately, they could rent a room … And people played jazz everywhere!

  21

  TOMA DID NOT LIKE CHILDREN. SHE DID NOT LIKE childhood—her own or anyone else’s—or anything connected with h
aving children. One doesn’t need Freud to understand her profound repulsion for everything in that sphere of life where sexual attraction resides—be it innocent petting in some corner or the wretched panting that accompanies coitus, to which she had been witness since childhood. Her mother’s festering bed—where the mystery of love occurred and where it claimed the life of the janitor whose name had long ago been forgotten by the people in the courtyard—and her undignified death were the stuff of Toma’s nightmares. Whenever Toma fell ill and her temperature climbed, it seemed to her that she lay in the family lair. She would open her eyes, and there would be Elena Georgievna alongside her clean starched bed, crocheting with a large hook something gray or beige; seeing that Toma had woken, she would give her warm tea with lemon and wipe her wet brow … Pavel Alekseevich would drop in in the evening with some surprise: once he brought her a transparent glass rabbit the size of a real mouse. Later she lost the rabbit at the dacha, or one of their dacha neighbors had stolen it, and there was much grief. Another time Pavel Alekseevich brought her a little box with scissors, tweezers, and a sharp thing she didn’t know what to do with. He brought Toma the present and kissed Elena Georgievna on the head as she sat alongside the bed. To Toma it was absolutely apparent that although they were husband and wife, there could be none of the wretched muck from which her poor momma had died between these two clean, fine-smelling, and beautifully dressed people. They even slept in different rooms.

  A lot of what Toma saw in the Kukotsky household she interpreted in the most fantastic ways, but in this case she was not mistaken: no such muck took place between husband and wife, in fact not since the moment she had entered their home …

  As for the manicure set, it has survived to this day and not lost its significance: when the girls were ill, he brought little presents every evening, and these daily treats reconciled them with their illness. When Tanya was ill, Pavel Alekseevich brought two presents, for both girls, the sick one and the healthy one. But if Toma was ill, he brought nothing for Tanya …

  For that reason, Toma was certain that Pavel Alekseevich loved her more than Tanya. Her understanding of fairness, whereby everything was distributed equally by weight, size, and quantity, had remained with her since infancy, although occasionally it was shaken by suspicion that things were not that simple. But Toma had always preferred simple things to the complex …

  In the Kukotsky household there was no talk of fairness. And nothing was divided equally. At dinner everyone was apportioned two meat patties. But Tanya frequently refused the second. Vasilisa did not eat meat at all. For a long while Toma thought that Vasilisa was not given meat “out of fairness,” that is, because she was a servant. Later it turned out that Vasilisa herself did not want the meat. But, after having spent several months in their household, Toma stalked Vasilisa and uncovered that she had her own special food that no one else in the house ate: in her pantry she kept dried white bread cut into tiny pieces, which she ate in the morning, in secret from everyone. Which meant that there was a certain kind of fairness here. Toma once crept into the pantry and found the bread wrapped in a rag and tried a piece: it was absolutely tasteless. There was absolutely nothing special about it at all.

  Living with her mother and brothers, Toma had constantly been involved in divvying things up: her little brothers always grabbed the larger and better pieces, and they fought constantly over food. Her mother also argued with everyone on various counts, and the arguments—even fistfights—were always over fairness. With the Kukotskys everything went contrary to fairness, which amazed her, especially at the outset. In the summer at the dacha Pavel Alekseevich would drop the first strawberry from his own plate onto Elena Georgievna’s, and she, laughing, poured her berries onto the plate in front of Vasilia, who would get upset.

  “I’m not going to eat your slush! Give it to the children …”

  Just as with meat patties, Tanya did not care for strawberries, and the berries would end their circular journey around the table on Toma’s plate …

  Now, though, after Zhenya had appeared in the household, Toma finally came to understand the joy of giving. It was amusing that Toma experienced this for the first time at the same dacha with the same first strawberries grown in their “own” garden. There were only eleven of these first, red but not quite fully ripe, berries from Vasilisa’s planting, which Vasilisa placed proudly on the table one Sunday morning, saying: “The first are yours …”

  Pavel Alekseevich gave everyone two berries each, placing the very last one on Zhenya’s plate. Once again, just as when Toma had been a child, the berries went from plate to plate. Pavel Alekseevich placed one in his mouth and another in Zhenya’s. Zhenya popped her berries into her mouth, comically screwing up her face but smacking her lips in delight …

  Vasilisa muttered something that sounded as if strawberries were also included in her fast. And here, watching Zhenya’s gastronomical pleasure written on her berry-juice-smattered face, Toma understood how she would get more enjoyment watching the child eat them than eating them herself …

  And so it happened, unnoticed by all, that Toma came to love Zhenya, her niece, as she called her …

  The little girl was living at her grandfather’s house for a second year. Pavel Alekseevich thought that the child should be with them until Tanya got her life in order. And so it came to be that last year’s dacha season had stretched over a whole year. Tanya was not able to move to Moscow. She had come to visit rather frequently for several days at a time, but only now, toward the beginning of July, had things begun to settle down. Just before retiring, Pavel Alekseevich had managed to obtain rights to a one-room apartment in a new academic cooperative building—for Toma. The former girls’ room returned to Tanya’s ownership, although, truth be told, the ownership was not hers alone, but her family’s, together with Sergei and Zhenya.

  The separate apartment Pavel Alekseevich had managed to arrange and pay for with his own money was a fairy-tale fantasy come true for Toma. The building was not entirely completed, but she had already made several trips to Leninsky Avenue, the far end, and walked around the already finished construction and even stood alongside the entrance to her future front door. She had been given an estate, her own island, as a result of which she reevaluated in her head everyone around her in relation to herself: her own worth, it seemed to her, had grown immeasurably … Among her coworkers, especially those her age, she knew no one who possessed a similar treasure. What was more, she still could not understand why the apartment was being built for her, and not for Tanya, their own daughter, who, in addition to everything else, had a family of sorts of her own.

  Certainly, the same idea had occurred to Pavel Alekseevich before it had to Toma. Moreover, he had discussed it with his daughter during one of her visits to Moscow. He had begun the conversation precisely by proposing to Tanya that they build a two-room apartment for her family. But Tanya, without a minute’s hesitation, had refused: her sole motivation for returning to Moscow was “our old girls, who are falling further into decline, and I’m moving here in order to take care of them …” Pavel Alekseevich was hurt by Tanya’s condescending use of the word “old girls” in reference to both Elena and Vasilisa …

  Breaking with Piter was difficult: Sergei had had a breakthrough, and he was mastering one instrument after the next, playing unusual chromatic double-voice pieces on a handmade double recorder, then trying his hand at the basset horn, then, finally—following in the footsteps of Roland Kirk—he got caught up in the completely exotic musical practice of playing two saxophones at once. And he succeeded at all of it. His musical path spiraled upward, and with increasing frequency Sergei extracted his own compositions from this musical rumble. After long drawn-out doubts, Garik began playing one of his compositions—“Black Stones.”

  Tanya worked a lot: her black stones were becoming stylish, in part with the help of Poluektova, who had come from Perm for the holidays. True, during her visits Sergei, Tanya, and Zhenya would have t
o move to the workshop, which Poluektova herself did not insist on: jealousy was not in her repertoire. She even liked Tanya, and her own life in Perm was on a steady rise. Her classes were considered the best, she had moved from stage repertoire teacher to choreographer, and her love affair with the most talented of the school’s graduates lent her energy, spirit, and a certain dose of good nature that was entirely out of character. Tanya presented Poluektova with a pair of her creations, and the latter modelled them very successfully at the Mariinsky Theater, where she had danced before retiring, and the entire corps de ballet lined up for Tanya’s jewelry. Tanya barely managed to keep up with the orders. Tanya herself had become an item as well: she and Sergei were constantly invited to all the hip events, from theatrical premieres to closed at-home concerts. Tanya now wore short black dresses, and her dyed brown hair, which grew with amazing speed, she wore long: after two years it covered her sharp shoulder blades. Tripping constantly along music’s shore as though along the sea’s edge, her body was poised and transmitted a kind of hidden movement even when she stood completely still. But the main event was taking place in the dark and where no one could see: Tanya was pregnant, thrilled immeasurably, and so far had said nothing about this to anyone, except Sergei—not even to Pavel Alekseevich. It was decided that her last two months free of household responsibilities she would spend together with Sergei touring Crimea and the Caucasus Mountains; after the tour ended they would travel to an international jazz festival in the Baltic region, and then, after quickly packing their rather impoverished stuff and drawing the line at the end of their Petersburg life, they would move to Moscow—to give birth to a son, raise Zhenya, and take care of the old folks. That the difficulties in all this promised to be enormous only fueled Tanya’s resolve: she was so full of happiness and strength, so fearless and carefree, that she even rushed time a bit. Which in no degree got in the way of her finding pleasure from day to day …