The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  Everything had been arranged. Vitalik Goldberg met them at the Kursk train station. At the German cemetery the family burial plot was already open—two steps away from Doctor Haass. There lay Pavel Alekseevich’s grandfather and great-grandfather. And now, interrupting the natural order, Tanya would be placed to rest there. No one besides Tanya’s father, husband, and lover was present at the burial.

  Sergei wanted to leave immediately, but Pavel Alekseevich asked him to spend the night. Sergei did. The apartment was empty, summery, dusty. Pavel Alekseevich gave him some sort of pill. They drank vodka. Then Sergei lay down to sleep on Toma’s couch. He, Tanya, Zhenya, and the little boy were supposed to have moved into this room several months later.

  22

  IN PITER, SERGEI TOLD NO ONE OF HIS ARRIVAL. HE immediately went to the workshop. He did not have keys: they were back in Odessa with Tanya’s things. He easily picked the lock. There was the same mess they had left when leaving. A coffeepot abandoned in haste stood unwashed in the sink. A mysterious flower of fungus sprouted from the teapot. Tanya’s black dress hung on a wooden hanger on the wall. Her high-heeled shoes that made her a half-head taller than him stood alongside the narrow couch, one on top of the other … On the eve of their departure they had gone to a party at the house of a young director who intended to invite him for some sort of vaguely enticing staging … Lord, and the bed wasn’t made either, the striped sheet hanging from the foot of the bed, and the only pillow, which each of them in their sleep dragged to their own side, preserved the indentation of their heads …

  Sergei sunk his face into the pillow, and the smell scalded him. She was still here. On the white pillow lay one of her dark hairs curled in a spiral. Under the pillow lay her tiny black underpants, pushed to the side. Still dressed in his clothes he lay down on the couch and fell asleep.

  He woke up after an indeterminate length of time, drank some water straight from the tap, and pissed in the sink: the toilet was on the stair landing—one for all four basement apartments—and locked. The key to the toilet hung on a nail near the entrance, but Sergei for some reason decided that it was on Tanya’s key ring in Odessa.

  He lay down to sleep again, this time having undressed. Tanya’s smell intensified each time he crawled out of the bed and returned to it again. All that remained were her smell and the bunched up nylon underpants. He would keep them for an indeterminate number of days and nights. He fell asleep, then woke up. He drank water from the tap. He pissed in the sink. He had no appetite. His unfed stomach idled.

  At long last he crawled out from under the blanket and sat down at Tanya’s workbench. He touched her tools and her moldings. The metal said nothing to him about Tanya. But when he opened the motley tin box with the black stones, he could not tear his eyes from them for a long time. They seemed to have preserved the touch of her hands: polished layered agate, blackish-blue magnetite, rough black nephrite, and his very favorite—the translucent obsidian … He selected two at random and put them in his jeans pocket. Then he grabbed his case and walked out of the workshop. The door, not fastened with a hook from inside, flapped in the doorway: the lock was broken. He turned back, found a hammer with a nail remover, and a large nail. He hammered the nail from the outside into the doorframe and with a strike of the hammer bent it so that the door seemed locked. Then he put the hammer under the doormat so that there would be something to extract the nail with when he came back. A strange thought ran through his head: but will I come back?

  Poluektova—whom everyone considered a world-class shrew, but whom Sergei knew was still a human being even though she really was a bitch—had assumed that he was stuck in Moscow. Garik had called Piter from Odessa and informed everyone of Tanya’s death. He also had said that Sergei had set off for Moscow with the coffin. All of Seryozha’s friends were certain that he would remain there.

  Sergei seemed to have lost the keys to Poluektova’s apartment. In any case, he rang the doorbell, not at all sure that anyone would open the door for him. The door was opened by the mistress herself in full make-up and with hair-sprayed black ballet bun at the top of her head.

  “What do you want?” she asked and stopped short. She had not recognized Sergei at first. He was thin with long stubble or a patchy beard, pale and slightly jaundiced, and looking totally deranged. Gray bounded toward him to lick him on the lips … He stood in the door, as if he had come there unconsciously, on autopilot.

  Poluektova gasped and began shouting in an ugly high-pitched voice, bombarding him with her silly prattle.

  “So you couldn’t call, could you? I’m leaving today. Damn, it’s all so stupid, stupid. Don’t dare say anything. I know all about it. Anything but about that … I’m taking the dogs with me. That’s it. Why didn’t you call, scarecrow? I’ve rented the apartment. Maybe, I should have left it for you? Don’t dare say anything to me!”

  She hugged his shoulders: her boy, her—who knew what—student, old lover, nephew, pal … It always happened that way with her, between genres, never anything reliable, definite, or socially upstanding … That is, at just that moment, it seemed as if someone like that was about to bite … How to avoid jinxing it? A man with no artistic inclinations whatsoever: exactly what she needed. Gremin, Gremin. An honest-to-goodness general …

  She stroked Seryozha’s dirty, disheveled locks, which he had not pulled back with an elastic band (he’d lost it), patted him on the back, and pushed him away.

  “Go take a bath. I’m making you something to eat.”

  He went to the bathroom, turned on the water, which streamed sumptuously from the faucet, and realized that he had not bathed since Odessa … He lay down in the almost unbearably hot water and began to sob …

  Poluektova-the-bitch called her general in Perm and in a squeaky voice most ill-suited to her mighty martial spirit, informed him of a change of plans: he did not need to meet her train; she was returning her tickets and staying on for at least a week. Her former husband, who had just been widowed, had dumped himself at her place like an avalanche, and she was going to have to take care of him, because there was no leaving him alone in this condition …

  The Siberian general nodded into the receiver, said drily “yes, yes, yes,” and marveled at what a proper, strong, and real woman he had found himself, even if she was a ballerina with a flat hard chest and a back as muscular as a new recruit’s. He smiled and quietly relished the resuscitation occurring below his belt: never in his life had he had such a woman; he had never even thought that they existed …

  A week was not enough for Poluektova. She cared for Sergei for almost a month, fed him food and pills, turned on his favorite music, forced him to go for walks with the dogs, and gradually he returned to himself and began to play. The very same day when, after the long hiatus, he was scheduled to perform at the club, Poluektova flew off to her gray-haired lover who, although he wasn’t quite tall enough, was in all other respects the most proper of husbands even for a prima ballerina and who, in the course of his unplanned extended wait, had reached a final decision to put an end to his drawn-out widowerhood and to marry this exceptional, outstanding woman with the past of a whore and the future of the grand dame of a region large enough to accommodate fifteen Belgiums, eight Frances, and five Germanys all at once …

  23

  WHILE ON DUTY ONE NIGHT AT THE PRECINCT, KUPCHINO resident Semion Kurilko, a militia officer and squadron leader, beat the shit out of a prisoner. Not more than usual, within limits, but toward morning the guy died.

  The guy turned out to work at a museum. And all because of that skinny-pants faggot, that pansy dick-licker, Semion got into so much trouble that his whole life took a left turn. They kicked him out of the militia, adding: you ought to be thankful they didn’t put you in the slammer … His wife left him and moved with their daughter to Karelia. Then his mother—the only person who had stood up for him, not to mention fed him—died. Then, after all this, Semion himself got sick: in a fit of rage he axed to shreds a brand
-new, just constructed children’s playground, with a little house for crawling into, a sandbox, and a carved wooden bear. They strait-jacketed him right there alongside the mangled bear and took him to the mental hospital. He was treated for almost a year, then released back to his room in Kupchino. While he was sick, his neighbors cleaned his place out, taking his blankets and his “Spidola” radio receiver left over from better times.

  Semion had served eight years in the militia, joining right after the army, and he had no other profession. They gave him a disability pension, but a small one. Fortunately, he didn’t drink, because the pension barely covered food. He had a good appetite that didn’t match his pension. In the hospital he had put on a lot of weight, and now he needed more than before. The way he saw it, a skinny guy doesn’t need as much nourishment as someone with meat on his bones. He would have looked for a job somewhere—as an armed guard someplace, for example, but they wouldn’t take him because he’d been severed from the militia. He tried to get a job as a loader at a print shop, but they fired him for a—you have to admit—really stupid reason: smoking was forbidden on the premises, but he kept lighting up out of habit. They caught him once, twice, a third time, and then the foreman, a young kid just out of university, the same kind of skinny-pants shit as that museum worker the whole ruckus in the militia was about, fired him.

  Once again Semion was left with nothing. That was when he was overcome by enormous anger at those skinny young guys, all those brainy boys, who had messed up his whole life. That was when Semion picked up his shiv. Thin, sharp, thicker than a knitting needle, but thinner than a file. He’d kept it at home for a long time, since his militia days when he took it away from a thief they’d hauled in. Why he pocketed it, he didn’t know. He stuck it in his sleeve, tucking the blade under the band of his wristwatch. The watch was broken and hadn’t worked for a long time, but now it came in handy. It was a crafty setup.

  Semion lived near the Memorial Cemetery of the Victims of January Ninth, located on an avenue with the same name, in a building with a deep courtyard formed by three two-story barrack-type apartment buildings, about twenty minutes by foot from the suburban train station. On May 1, 1961, his favorite holiday, when the militia was up to its ears with business—drinking brawls, slashings, and other cheerful entertainments—he completed his first mission. He strolled down to the train stop, got on a suburban train, and rode to the Vitebsk train station. From there he turned left down Zagorodny Avenue, and, not hurrying, checking out the passersby, set off in the direction of the Technological Institute. There in the walk-through courtyard with a huge trench running through it that deprived it of its walk-through functionality—people peeked in, went as far as the trench, then returned to the archway they had come in through—he sat down on a bench and sat until evening, because things were not going as he had planned: either people walked together in groups, or the lone passerby was not of the right type he needed. It was only after eight that a skinny faggot in narrow-legged pants (with a thin little briefcase) came by. He was drunk as well. He wasn’t looking for a way to exit to the other street; all he needed was a secluded spot, a dark corner, to release the fast-flowing beer. After he had splashed his load in a suitable place, Semion approached him from the back and stuck the shiv right where it was supposed to go, slightly to the side and between the ribs. At first the shiv seemed to hesitate, as if it had run up against a dense film, but after that it was like cutting butter … In, and out. The guy oohed, fell nose-first against the wall, and dropped without even turning around. Semion didn’t even look at the briefcase, wiped the shiv neatly with a kitchen rag taken with forethought from home, stuck the instrument back up his sleeve under his watchband, and exited the courtyard with the new gait—stiff and manikin-like—that he had developed after his hospital treatments.

  His next mission took place November 7, also without a hitch. Now he already knew that next year on May 1, he would celebrate his holiday as his heart desired: he’d shiv that shit, the skinny faggot, that worthless kike …

  He’d been coming to this courtyard for three years. The trench had been covered over long ago, and people came through not in big streams, but in trickles. In May when it was light—more; in the November darkness—fewer. Semion was always lucky: one time the guy had a bouquet of flowers; another one—a tape recorder; the third was carrying two cake boxes tied together with string. Some he’d already forgotten. First he’d track one of them down: he recognized the type immediately. Then he’d catch up with him, stick to him for a second, then grab him with his right hand by the shoulder and strike with his left. Semion was a lefty retrained at school so he wrote with his right hand and did other things with both, but more easily with his left.

  He had already scored seven when once, while in line in a store, he overheard two women talking about a murderer who’d appeared in town that the authorities hadn’t been able to capture for ten years already, and that the maniac killed only on holidays—all red-letter days, killing men on all the holidays, except for March 8, once a year, when he killed women. At first Semion was surprised, but a few seconds later he figured out that they were talking about him. They exaggerated, of course, the number of years and about the holidays. But basically they had it right. Two weeks later, passing by his former place of work, he saw a large poster reading: “Wanted …” There were three photographs—two men and one woman con artist, with names; the fourth was a sketch, an artist’s rendering instead of a photograph. The only thing in common between the sketch and Semion were the steep arches over the eyebrows and the buzz cut.

  Semion got scared, went into hiding, and didn’t come out of the house for a week until he had eaten his last piece of macaroni. It was close to November, and he decided that year not to go out of the house on the seventh. The manhunt didn’t just scare him, it also provoked him. From the seventh through the eighth he sat at home, barely able to control himself, his hands even shaking. On the ninth he went out. And carried off his mission quite well and successfully. The guy had nothing in his hands, but on his face he had this chi-chi little beard, and he was for sure a stinking faggot …

  After each mission Semion always felt better. He was even earning money now from time to time in a furniture store as a loader. Only just before the holidays he would begin to get jittery and attempt to recollect where he had hidden the shiv. He hid it at home, each time in a new place; one time he forgot where he’d hidden it, and turned the place upside down before he found it. He’d put it under the oilcloth tablecloth where the table ran up against the wall … Now he decided that he was going to detour the holidays, going out two or three days earlier or later … The militia was nothing but a bunch of idiots, that Semion knew well. They’d been told to search on the holidays, and there’d be no getting them out on any others.

  In November of 1966 number ten’s turn had come. But Semion came down with a bad cold—he had a cough, his body ached—and so he put things off not for three days, but for a whole week. He even thought that maybe he would skip this time. But it didn’t work out that way. The urge to go hunting beckoned. Only on the fifteenth he put on his cherished watch, loaded the shiv, and left the house when it was still light, right after three. As always, he rode the train to the Vitebsk station and headed down Zagorodny Avenue. Instead, though, of turning in the direction of the Technological Institute, he went in the other direction, toward Moskovsky Avenue …

  He didn’t know Leningrad well: he had been born in Kupchino and rarely made his way into the city. His mother always used to say it that way: we’ll go into the city … In school they took them on field trips several times. And his army service stationed him in a village, at a prison in the Kursk oblast. So he wound up neither an urbanite nor a villager, but a lifelong outlier, who couldn’t saddle a horse or find his way to the football stadium … Before serving in the militia, he hadn’t been able to cross the street without almost getting hit, and to this day he lost his way in unfamiliar places …

&n
bsp; Moskovsky Avenue led him to a square. He looked at the last house: the sign read PEACE SQUARE. It was crawling with people. There were lots of stores here. The square was odd-shaped, with lots of little side streets coming into it. Turning into one of the narrower and quieter ones, he thought to himself that he’d been wrong not to go to the Technological Institute, where he knew his way around. But the lane he was moving down now was, overall, just what he needed. Semion dropped into one courtyard, then another: they were all deep as wells, and not one of them had two exits … Then he walked into a deep archway and stood near the door of a former servants’ entrance that exited into the archway. PAWNSHOP read the modest little sign on the securely closed door. Occasionally people passed by, but his view was blocked and he couldn’t make anyone out. Furthermore, there were mostly women with shopping bags. It occurred to Semion that more young guys came out on the streets during the holidays, while there were mostly only middle-aged women on weekdays.