The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  The tour began—which was especially delightful—in Odessa at that same International Sailors’ Club where Tanya had first seen Sergei. Here they celebrated the theoretical third anniversary of their union. There were no performances in Kurortnoe this year, but they hired a car for a day and went out there. Nothing had changed, and everything stood in its old place: the dusty whitewashed huts and the tomato plantations. They descended the precarious staircase to the colorless sea. Over those three years it had washed away even more shore, and now a dangerous hole gaped between the lower part of the staircase and the slope of the cliff.

  “Not for the tipsy,” Tanya noted. Sergei offered his hand. She took his hand, even though she felt completely sure of her footing.

  They went for a swim and decided to take a look at the dunes. The driver waited for them up above. A native Odessan, he was morose and gloomy and of few words, a walking refutation of common stereotypes about Odessans. He dropped them off at the sandbar, at the same place where three years ago Garik’s car had got stuck. Tanya and Sergei headed for the sandbar. It was a weekday, there were practically no people, no one was sunbathing near their memorial ruins, and only a few empty bottles lay scattered, half-covered with sand. It wasn’t as hot, as burning sticky hot as it had been then. A breeze blew in from the sea. It fluttered Tanya’s red sundress—she had put it on especially so that everything would be as it had been. They skinny-dipped. They lay down on the sand in the half-shade of the half-ruins … Tanya embraced Sergei, and he immediately responded. Now everything was different. They had matured and grown careful. They feared disturbing the infant that floated inside and had already begun his first stretches, thrashing from inside with a foot or a fist, and their lovemaking—pianissimo and legato—was of an entirely different variety from their first stormy and unconscious time. But both ways were good …

  Placing Sergei’s hands on her stomach, she whispered in his ear.

  “Our little boy is going to be big, not like Zhenka, the potbellied squirt …”

  Then Sergei took a bottle of wine, two tomatoes, some eggs, and greens from his bag. The green onion was yellowed and mature. The bread crumbled. Tanya chewed a limp stalk, salted a crust of bread, and bit off a piece. The food would not go down. She drank two gulps of wine, and, after collecting the remains, they headed back to the car. As they walked, Tanya’s nose began to bleed. Sergei dampened the red sundress in the estuary’s water, and applied a rather warm compress. The blood stopped quickly. They had to hurry, because there was a performance in the evening.

  They arrived an hour before it began. Tanya was nauseated, and her head and leg muscles ached. She wanted to put on her evening dress—the green one with the thin straps, a gay little number that stretched over her stomach—but at the last minute decided to stay in the room. She lay down and fell asleep immediately. But she quickly woke up from the pain. She placed her hands on her belly and asked: “So, how are you?”

  The little boy did not answer. Apparently, everything was okay with him. She should probably take an aspirin. But, first of all, there was none, and second, Tanya did not really want to take any pills. Just before Sergei returned, the nosebleed began again.

  “Maybe we should call a doctor?” Sergei began to worry.

  Tanya puckered her lips: she did not want medical care. During her last pregnancy she had not even bothered to register at a clinic, had not had any of the prescribed tests done, and was even a bit proud to have avoided all the ado women today make over so natural and healthy an affair as having a baby … A bit later Garik and Tolya—already slightly drunk—dropped by with two bottles: an open bottle of wine and a sealed bottle of vodka. Tolya did not consider wine alcohol, while Garik had an acute sense of style: he thought only a hopeless alcoholic would drink vodka in the South in the summer. Winter was a different matter …

  “I don’t like the way you look, old girl,” Garik announced from the threshold. “You’re not jumping or hopping, just bitter-bitter sobbing … Think what you will, but I’m calling an ambulance …”

  He headed resolutely for the phone. The phone was dead.

  Tanya stopped Garik.

  “Let’s wait until morning … I’d like to drink some tea with lemon. And, to hell with it, bring me some aspirin …”

  They brought Tanya her tea, and after taking the aspirin she felt better. She fell asleep. She woke up at four o’clock in the morning, vomiting. This time Sergei did not hesitate, went down to the reception desk, and called an ambulance.

  An elderly Jewess quickly examined Tanya and said that she was taking her to the hospital right away. She spoke in vexation, even threateningly, and Tanya took a deep dislike to her, but her muscles were killing her, her head was pounding, and pain was spreading along the wall of her belly.

  Tanya tried to object, but the old doctor would not listen to her, as if she were a senseless child, and turned instead to Sergei.

  “Her liver has descended by almost more than two inches. I refuse to accept that kind of responsibility. What did you bring me out here for? To talk? If you want to get medical help, you have to hospitalize her immediately. Explain to your wife that she could lose the child.”

  For some reason she did not take a liking to Tanya either and did not even look in her direction.

  Tanya was taken away, and after that all hell seemed to break loose. A pipe broke in the club, closing it for technical reasons. Their performance was canceled. They spent the whole day with only their worries, and Tolya Aleksandrov got drunk as a result, which in and of itself was nothing terrible, but he got into a fight in some beer hall and was socked hard right in the eye. Sergei shagged back and forth to the hospital three times a day: they told him nothing, and for two days straight he was unable to track down the attending physician, who had either just left or not yet arrived. Then the weekend came, and there was no physician in attendance whatsoever, only a doctor on call, whom Sergei also was unable to track down: he was either eating dinner or had been summoned to care for a critical patient. All the staff knew perfectly well that he was on a drinking binge and not coming to work.

  No one was allowed in the pathology section: it was quarantined. Everything stopped and was put on hold. Even the weather deteriorated, and it started to rain.

  Tanya was getting sicker and sicker, and the moment had come when she herself began to get scared. She discovered a black-and-blue mark on her left forearm, and a similar bruise on her side. The back of her head continued to throb. Her belly hurt with an unusual burning metallic pain. Nurses came and took her temperature, felt her belly, and measured her blood pressure … Her temperature was normal.

  Tanya felt worse and worse; on the third day she decided to summon her father.

  She got paper and a pencil from her neighbor and wrote a note to Sergei asking him to call her father in Moscow and tell him to come. Notes were passed by tossing them out the window. On Saturday morning Sergei picked up Tanya’s scribbled missive: it was laconic and desperate. He immediately headed for the post office and sent Pavel Alekseevich a telegram.

  Toward evening Sergei came to Tanya’s window with his saxophone. Usually visitors called up to their Veras and Galyas from the dusty lawn below, and the women would hang their milk-swollen breasts and victorious smiles out the window. Among the dozen or so local, fresh-baked poppas—sailors, criminals, and merchants—Sergei was the only one who was thin, long-haired, and sober. Moreover, what he experienced was not the collective joy of childbirth, but his own personal alarm and terror, which had settled at the bottom of his stomach, apparently, because his ulcer, healed over long ago, did not exactly hurt, but was sending ominous signals …

  Tanya was on the third floor, but Sergei decided not to shout from the lawn. He took his instrument out of its case, put the reed to his lips, and made it speak slowly.

  Tan-ya …

  Tanya heard, but was not able to come to the window right away. When she lifted herself from her pillow, her head started to spi
n, and a wave of nausea came over her. But her stomach had been emptied long ago, and enduring the sharp and pointless spasms, she dragged herself to the window. Her legs ached desperately with each step, while her belly seemed to be filled with lead … She popped her head out the window only after Sergei had extracted his mournful “Tan-ya” for the third time from the thin metal throat of his instrument.

  At first he did not recognize her: she had piled her hair in a bun on the top of her head, just as her mother had worn hers all her life. And the hospital gown–prison shirt made her seem strange and bulky … She waved her hand: the gesture was Tanya’s own, imitable by no one. Looking at him from above, Tanya recognized her favorite moment: when he took his instrument in hand, and this cute but nondescript young man metamorphosed into a musician in the same way a horse turns a person into a rider, and weaponry turns a man into a warrior: when the sum of human and inhuman exceeds the value of each separately.

  Sergei held his saxophone in his hands. His right hand was below, fingers on the keys, his left hand higher up, on the octave pin near the crook of the metallic body, his chin pointed upward, and his lower lip protruded—right inside was that tender callus she could touch with her tongue … He held the saxophone—a generally silly creature, the fantasy of an instrument-maker, a hybrid of wood and metal with a piece of plastic thrown in, that in terms of shape was far from perfect, its keys protruding not very elegantly from the body, and the bell, likely, too sharply turned outward … Among the wind instruments there were no few beauties: the flute with its ancient simplicity, and all its ingenuous relatives—from the syrinx to the tsevnitsa; the maple bassoon with its vestigial bell and beaklike head; the ascetic trombone that looked like something out of an apothecary; the pedantically curled brass cornet with its silly valve mechanisms; and the snail-twirled stately French horn … And what about the oboe’s bell? Or the funnel of the trumpet, curled back to the depths of its soul? The saxophone, of course, was not the most perfect, but the overtones of its voice could transmit human gradations of tenderness, triumph, or sorrow. And, in addition to everything else, they—Sergei and his saxophone—mutually resonated each other … Together the two of them were capable of uttering that which Sergei never could on his own. He placed the reed between his tensed lips, pressed his teeth up against the fold inside his lower lip, worn with years of playing, and a velvety deep-blue A-note said: “Let’s begin!”

  And they, Sergei and his “Selmer,” began—lightly, easily, and without having to think about what they wanted to tell Tanya that was so important. It was Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” and Tanya immediately recognized the breathless music that progressed through major thirds—C–E–G♯—the key changing three times over the course of the theme, but Sergei did not play to the end, swerving off into his own solo, then progressing by way of rising arpeggios to the top, looking back, and ascending once again to the point where the saxophone’s possibilities ended, and then carefully descending down the blues scale, and Tanya began to recognize something vaguely familiar, something she had heard many times … perhaps Haden’s “Always Say Good-bye” … or something like it … or Seryozha’s …

  She remembered how she had written him a letter full of grandiloquent nonsense from the maternity hospital three years ago, in Piter, when she had given birth to Zhenka … About how wonderfully they—Sergei and his instrument—got along without any words, and about how now, if this entire episode ended well, she would never again talk nonsense, because talking nonsense was shameful when there was music, which never spoke nonsense … Now the music spoke distinctly, gravely, and not at all glibly … , as it might seem to someone not fluent in its clear and transparent language: say good-bye, say good-bye … always … forever say good-bye … The small sounds—sharp, jagged, metallic—were just as unrelenting as they were marvelous …

  Tanya held her pain-wracked belly with both hands. Would he really die, their little boy, with his palms folded under his chin, his soft ears, his mouth still sealed shut, blond, resembling Seryozha, with an upper lip that hung slightly over the lower … Poor Pavlik … Poor unborn Pavlik …

  Sergei did not see Tanya alive again. Nor did Pavel Alekseevich. He arrived from the dacha and found two telegrams stuffed in the door: one from Sergei with a request that he come; the second, written two days later, with the notarized signature of the chief physician, informing him of the death of Tatiana Pavlovna Kukotskaya.

  A day later Pavel Alekseevich stood alongside a table covered with spotted tin, and it was the bitterest moment of his life. The delicate flame of life, the greenish tinge of a working heart, the clots of energy produced by the various organs, were already all shut down. She was an olive-plastic color, his suntanned little girl, with hematomas on her forearms and calves, with autopsy sutures of the like to indict these so-called doctors of a grave crime against nature. He had already seen the forensic report. They also showed him her backdated case history. The entire hospital—from the chief physician down to the last nurse—froze in horror, awaiting retribution. With a single glance Doctor Kukotsky had determined that over the first two days following admission to the hospital no diagnosis had been made and no treatment administered, that the required tests had been done too late, that pregnancy had only made the situation worse … and that he would have been able to save his little girl, had he arrived from the dacha not on Tuesday, but on Friday …

  Tanya’s resemblance to her mother was incredible and tormenting. A quarter century ago he had stood exactly the same way over young Elena, close to death, and had seen her gathered chestnut hair, her thin nostrils, and her brushy brows from precisely the same angle.

  “Never. Elena will never know about this,” he thought, and was stunned by an instantaneous epiphany: might Elena have departed for her empty, enigmatic, mad world so as never to learn about what her prophetic heart had glimpsed long ago … ?

  He proceeded to the chief physician’s office and asked him to gather the section heads. The chief attempted to object, but Pavel Alekseevich cast him such a general’s look, that he rushed to call his secretary to invite them all immediately to his office. Five minutes later six doctors sat in the office. The forensic report and the patient’s history lay before Pavel Alekseevich.

  “This case demands a special investigation,” uttered Pavel Alekseevich. The doctors exchanged glances. “The quantity of blunders, errors, and medical crimes exceeds all bounds. A patient with a communicable infection was placed in the pathology ward. No biochemical blood tests or bacteriological analyses were performed. No diagnosis was made. I am assuming that what we have here is Weil’s disease, Morbus Weili. If it is leptospirosis, then immediate measures need to be taken.”

  The forensic pathologist—a deformed little Asian with dyed whiskers, was terribly nervous.

  “Excuse me, colleague, but we have no grounds for such conclusions. You saw the report, and we gave you an opportunity to conduct an examination of the … corpse? body?” Whiskers hesitated for a second, “Patient? What grounds do you have?”

  “Focal degeneration with hemorrhaging in the muscles, petechiae. The patient’s records correspond to nothing. There was toxicosis. Intravenous infusions, indicated here, were not administered. I examined the veins … I am left to conclude that no treatment whatsoever was given. But that’s not the issue right now. Your maternity hospital is infected with hepatitis.”

  Pavel Alekseevich did everything he would have done in any other situation: he called the city health office, summoned the head of the health inspection service, and the chief epidemiologist. A fever ran through the city’s medical administration from top to bottom, to the extent that janitors started scrubbing down toilets twice a day, midlevel medical personnel stopped getting drunk on night duty, and the kitchen kept an eye out to make sure stolen butter and meat were not taken from the premises.

  Pavel Alekseevich spent three days at the hospital. On the fourth he boarded a train together with Sergei—who had fallen into
spiritual lockjaw and total stupefaction. In the train’s baggage car there stood a zinc coffin with a small rectangular window through which multiple folds of white gauze were visible.

  With Garik’s last money—Pavel Alekseevich had spent everything he had, Sergei also—they bought four bottles of vodka. They drank the warm vodka a long time, slowly, a little bit at a time, snacking on pieces of crumbled cookies straight out of the package—there wasn’t anything else—in silence … Then Sergei lay down on the lower berth, hugged the case with his instrument hidden away inside, and slept until they reached Moscow. Pavel Alekseevich never closed his eyes once the entire thirty-six hours: he sat opposite the sleeping young man and looked at his tormented face. He was fair-skinned, his eyelids and nose tipped with redness. His thin white stubble broke through the tender skin of his cheeks, forming tiny pustules … The corners of his crusted lips twitched. In his sleep he stroked the case and mumbled something. Pavel Alekseevich did not catch the words. He was thinking about how their life had changed when two men had appeared in their home: this dear young man and the little one who was not to be … He also thought about what had happened to his daughter: from the moment when a restless spiral had landed in her stomach together with the local rotten water, been absorbed by her mucous membranes, dispersed by the bloodstream throughout her entire body, nested in her highly oxygenated muscles, and poisoned her blood to such an extent that her poor liver, already overtaxed by her pregnancy, had been unable to filter it … Pavel Alekseevich needed no auxiliary clairvoyance now: the accursed picture, crude and clear as a picture from a child’s primer, stood before his eyes …