The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  “This way.”

  He went in. The Renoir-esque secretary, shimmering pearly pink, asked him to wait. He sat down on an austere wooden bench, spreading his knees far apart and placing between them the old briefcase with which his father had once delivered reports to a government buried long ago. Pavel Alekseevich prepared himself for a long wait, but he was summoned two minutes later. By this time the alcohol had reached all the ganglia of his nervous system and released its serene warmth and calm. In a long inelegant office behind an enormous desk sat a little man with a puffy face sculpted from dry soap—one of those faces seen ruffling on May Day posters in the spring.

  “His kidneys are shot to hell, especially the left one,” Pavel Alekseevich automatically noted to himself.

  “We familiarized ourselves with the contents of your letter,” the important party personage pronounced monarchically.

  Both the sound of his voice and the barely evident disdain on his face communicated that the cause had been lost.

  “Nothing to lose now then,” Pavel Alekseevich thought, and slowly undid the briefcase buckles. The important personage fell silent, creating an icy pause. Pavel Alekseevich extracted the flat jar, slightly covered with condensation, brushed his palm across the front glass, and placed it on the table. The important personage leaned back in his chair in fright, pointing to the specimen with his puffy finger, and asking with disgust: “What have you dragged in here?”

  It was a resected uterus, the most powerful and complexly structured muscle of the female body. Bisected lengthways and opened outward, and not yet having lost all its color in the formaldehyde, it resembled a boiled yellow fodder beet. Inside the uterus was a sprouted bulb. The monstrous battle that had taken place between the fetus, enmeshed in dense colorless fibers, and the translucent predatory sack that more resembled some sort of sea creature than an ordinary onion, such as one might use in a salad, was already over.

  “I ask that you note: this is a pregnant uterus with a sprouted onion inside. The onion is inserted into the uterus and then begins to sprout. The root system penetrates the fetus, after which it is extracted together with it. When nothing goes wrong, that is. When something goes wrong, they wind up on my operating table or go directly to the Vagankovo cemetery … More often the latter …”

  “You’re joking …” The party functionary recoiled.

  “I could bring you pounds of these onions,” Pavel Alekseevich politely answered the paled functionary. “Official statistics—and I cannot conceal this—do not at all correspond to the reality.”

  The party boss stiffened.

  “What gives you the right … ? How dare you?”

  “I dare, I dare. Whenever I manage to rescue a woman after a criminal abortion, I have to enter ‘spontaneous miscarriage’ in her chart. Because if I don’t, I’ll put her in prison. Or her neighbor, who also has small children, while half the children in our country are already fatherless. Believe me, this onion is the cleverest, but not the only, method of aborting a pregnancy. Metal knitting needles, catheters, scissors, intrauterine injections of take your pick: iodine, soda, soapy water …”

  “Stop, Pavel Alekseevich,” implored the by now white bureaucrat, who had remembered how before the war his wife also had resorted to something of the sort. “Enough. What do you want from me?”

  “We need a decree legalizing abortion.”

  “You’re out of your mind! Don’t you understand that there are the interests of the state, the interests of the nation? We lost millions of men during the war. There’s the issue of replenishing the population. What you’re saying is childish babble.” The official was truly upset.

  “Not a bad idea bringing that jar,” Pavel Alekseevich thought. The conversation, it seemed, had swung to his advantage. He had begun it correctly, and now he had to end it correctly.

  “We lost millions of men, but now we’re losing thousands of women. A legal medical abortion does not involve mortal risk.” Pavel Alekseevich frowned. “You see, improved general health in and of itself will lead to an increase in the birth rate …” Pavel Alekseevich’s eyes met the bureaucrat’s. “How many orphans are left behind? Orphanages also are fed out of the state budget, by the way … This has to be resolved. It will rest on our conscience …”

  The party boss grimaced, deep folds forming beneath his chin.

  “Take that away … , the talk happens there.” He pointed at the sky.

  “I’ll leave you this specimen. Maybe it will come in handy.”

  The official threw up his hands. “You’ve lost your mind! Take that away immediately …”

  “Based on incomplete statistics—highly incomplete—twenty thousand a year. In Russia alone.” Pavel Alekseevich scowled. “You’re responsible for them.”

  “You’re going too far,” the party boss bellowed, no longer resembling his May Day portrait at all.

  “That’s because you’re not going far enough,” Pavel Alekseevich cut him short.

  That was how they parted. The specimen remained on the grandee’s desk near the pen-and-ink set embellished with the iron head of a proletarian writer.

  THOSE FIRST YEARS AFTER THE WAR WERE VERY SUCcessful for Pavel Alekseevich: his department, suspended during war, regained its right to full-scale operations. Two of Pavel Alekseevich’s best pupils who at the outset of the war had retrained and left obstetrics and gynecology for several years returned. The number of positions in the clinic doubled. New research slots were still not being granted, but even in the worst of times Pavel Alekseevich had managed to conduct research and save up certain ideas that awaited their moment. He was contemplating cures for a certain type of female infertility, had done deep research into female oncology, and had come upon interesting links between pregnancy and the malignant processes that arose in women’s bodies during this period. His thinking brought him very close to the idea of treating cancer with the aid of hormonal growth inhibitors. His gift of intravision provided no answers to his questions, but it helped him to see more clearly certain general pictures of the life of the body. His vision of the life of society and state was, on the contrary, completely unclear. It seemed to him, as it did to many in the initial postwar years, that former prewar errors would dissipate on their own and that life would acquire some reason. The project he was developing would insure the accelerated dawning of the bright future, at least in his area of competence.

  Despite his successful—as it had seemed to him—visit to the high-ranking boss, his project was not moving forward, the commission still had yet to convene itself, and he continued persistently and methodically pounding the threshold of the now even more guarded Workhorse to make his case that the time had come to modernize existing health care. She politely heard him out (rumors of his escapade had reached her immediately), but insofar as she had not been given any direct orders, she continued to be extremely careful with Pavel Alekseevich. She even thought it advantageous to treat him kindly. Owing precisely to her initiative, at the end of 1947 Pavel Alekseevich was awarded the rank of corresponding member of the Academy of Medical Sciences and, at about the same time, assigned an apartment in a newly constructed building for the medical elite. It was like advance payment for future state achievements. The advance was splendid: a three-room apartment with a walk-in pantry off the kitchen. Vasilisa was the happiest of all. For the first time in her life she had her own room. Seeing the pantry, she burst into tears.

  “There it is, my little monastic cell! God grant I die here.”

  No matter how hard Elena attempted to persuade her to live in the main room, together with Tanechka, Vasilisa refused.

  By standards of the time they were rich beyond measure. Only Pavel Alekseevich’s generosity was equal to their wealth, thanks to which there was never any spare cash in the house. Twice a month, on payday, after their late dinner, Pavel Alekseevich would announce: “Lenochka, the list!”

  Elena would bring him the list of those to whom they sent monetary aid. Si
nce before the war Pavel Alekseevich had sent money to his cousin’s daughter, a half-aunt, an old surgical nurse with whom he had begun his career, and his friend from university, Ilya Goldberg, who since 1932 had been either in a camp, or in exile, or in some provincial hole.

  Before Pavel Alekseevich’s marriage there had been no list as such: he just remembered and sent the money. But now, when his wife compiled the list, adding to her husband’s her own distant relations, her girlfriend from school stranded in Tashkent, and several of Vasilisa’s old lady friends, Pavel Alekseevich even acquired a certain respect for his big salary. Since the circle of people was rather extensive and could change from month to month, Pavel Alekseevich would look at the list and sometimes inquire about a name.

  “Musya? Who’s that?” Hearing out the explanation, he would nod.

  Then Elena would announce the grand total, after which Vasilisa would scurry into his office and solemnly bring out the old leather briefcase. Pavel Alekseevich opened the briefcase and divvied up the banknotes. The next morning Vasilisa wrapped each amount separately in newspaper, then, for some reason, wrapped all the newspaper bundles into an old towel, then, one hand clutching her change purse and the other Elena’s arm, she went to the post office, and only there, at the window, handed the money over to Elena, who sent off the money orders.

  Vasilisa moved her lips. Elena thought that she was counting the money. Vasilisa was saying her favorite prayers. She had few words of her own, and she was accustomed to conversing with her God in fragments of the psalms and prayer formulas. When she experienced an urge to add something from herself, she invoked the Immaculate Virgin as “darling, dear, please do this and that, so that everything will be all right …”

  Vasilisa’s world was simple: on high sat the Lord God, the Holy Mother of God with all the angels, all the saints, and mother superior among them; then came Pavel Alekseevich; and then they, the family, and everyone else—evil people to one side, good people to the other. In her eyes Pavel Alekseevich was almost a saint: at that hospital of his he helped everyone, good and evil, just like the Lord God. Even mortal sinners who had taken the lives of others. That Pavel Alekseevich’s chief concern was to legalize that sin had not yet occurred to her.

  7

  AFTER TURNING FIVE TANECHKA SPROUTED AND LOST her baby fat: her face acquired angles, and moist blue shadows appeared under her eyes. Her cough would go away, then come back again. They called Isaac Veniaminovich Ketsler, a friend and classmate of Pavel Alekseevich’s late father. He was more than eighty; he had worked at the former St. Vladimir’s children’s hospital since 1904, and after retiring he continued to make the daily trip to his clinic, where he was allowed to keep his office.

  Isaac Veniaminovich was renowned for his divine ears. They even looked unusual, enlarged with age, flabby and dry, like an elephant’s. A fountain of gray hairs spurted out of his ear canals, while his elongated lobes hung in long wrinkled folds. For all this, Isaac Veniaminovich was hard of hearing until he put his short black tube in his ear and placed the wide end against a child’s back. His hearing improved especially if he pressed his old ears directly against the ticklish tiny patient’s squirming body.

  “We have a primary infection right here,” Isaac Veniaminovich said, pointing a finger just below Tanya’s clavicle.

  “In the upper right lobe. You need to go the Institute of Pediatrics and have Dr. Khotimsky do an X-ray for you … On the Solyanka, Solyanka Street …”

  Pavel Alekseevich nodded. He knew the place well: an old structure near the Ustinsky Bridge built at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a foundling house for abandoned infants, the children of wayward village girls, maids, and seamstresses to Moscow’s Babylon who had not managed to keep their transgressions from becoming newborns …

  Pavel Alekseevich looked at his daughter, undressed to the waist, with his special vision, focusing it several inches just below the surface of her milk-white skin, but he sensed nothing except his own restless concern.

  “Unfortunately, it’s a widespread phenomenon,” Isaac Veniaminovich mumbled, walking his fingers around Tanya’s ear and down her neck, stopping below her chin and then entering the depths of her armpits.

  “She is lymphatic, lymphatic. Likely, her thyroid is slightly enlarged as well. How is her appetite? Bad, naturally. How could it be good? And vomiting? Does she vomit frequently? Heraus? From the stomach?”

  “Very frequently.” Elena nodded.

  “A spoonful too much and she starts to vomit. We never try to talk her into eating more.”

  “As I thought,” the old man responded with satisfaction. “She’s spasmatic.” He put an ear to her stomach. “Does your tummy hurt? Here?” He poked his finger at a certain spot. “It aches right here, does it?”

  “Yes, yes,” Tanechka was delighted. “Right there.”

  “That’s what it is,” Pavel Alekseevich brightened to himself. “The old man’s ears are clairvoyant. Not his eyes, not his fingers …”

  Strain as he might, he could not see anything this time. The picture he had grown accustomed to seeing—of a person from the inside, the mysterious landscape of organs, the turns of rivers, foggy caves, hollows, and the labyrinth of the intestine—would not open up before him …

  Not turning off his discouraged vision, he looked at Isaac Veniaminovich. The crimson light of a cancerous tumor enveloped his stomach. The locus was in the pylorus, and a cluster of metastases crept along the mediastinum. Pavel Alekseevich closed his eyes …

  Tanya got an X-ray. They found something. Blood tests confirmed the diagnosis. The old pediatrician’s recommendations turned out to be amazingly old school. The child was prescribed Switzerland, within means, naturally—that is, suburban Moscow Switzerland. Many hours outside, sleep in the fresh air—much to Vasilisa’s horror, for as a simple person who had grown up in a village, she did not believe in fresh air. And, of course, good nutrition and cod-liver oil. In a word, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, although Isaac Veniaminovich had never heard of it. And no medicines like that newfangled PAS: why strain the liver or overload the kidneys?

  Pavel Alekseevich nodded, and nodded, and then asked pointedly whether the old pediatrician wanted to have his own stomach examined.

  “My dear colleague, at my age all natural processes have slowed down to the point that I have a good chance of dying of pneumonia or heart failure.”

  “He knows everything. He’s right,” Pavel Alekseevich agreed in his heart.

  THEY RENTED A BIG WINTRIFIED DACHA NEAR ZVENIgorod that belonged to a career admiral banished for the minor infraction of grand larceny to an honorable exile as chief military attaché at the embassy in Canada. That same autumn the Academy of Sciences was distributing dachas, and Pavel Alekseevich was invited to submit an application. For some reason he refused. He could not have explained to himself why, but he had an inkling: they were offering him an awful lot these days. Would it later cost him the skin off his back? He did not even tell Elena about the offer of a dacha.

  Tanya and Vasilisa were settled at the rented house. No matter how hard Pavel Alekseevich attempted to persuade Elena to quit that worthless job of hers and remain at the dacha, she refused flat out. She did not want to quit her job or leave Pavel Alekseevich by himself in the city all week.

  The dacha was huge, two-storied, with pseudo-Gothic china cupboards and sideboards filled with porcelain and useless knickknacks. A piano stood in each of the two main rooms, upstairs and downstairs, among a herd of rock-hard wooden armchairs and chairs with carved backs. The piano upstairs was a black concert grand; the one downstairs—an upright with a cracked soundboard, made of rosewood with bronze detail. It could not be tuned, but they figured that out only later, after Pavel Alekseevich and the watchman had carried it into one of the two rooms they would live in—for Tanya. A teacher from Zvenigorod was hired, and she came to the house three times a week.

  Within a few weeks, on Sunday evenings, after heating the house toa
sty warm, Pavel Alekseevich and Elena would sit down in the carved German chairs that smelled of theft, as did everything else in the house, and Tanya played them bashful tunes learned that week …

  Thus passed two years. Tanya remembered the winters much better than the summers. Perhaps because winter in Russia is twice as long as summer. She would later recollect her childhood as a time of whiteness, not illness: morning portions of sweet goat’s milk in a white porcelain mug; outside the window thick, wavy snowdrifts along the ground and small round pillows of snow festively embellishing the fir-tree branches above; the white gleam of the keys of the piano she would sit down to after breakfast while Vasilisa washed the dishes. Later Vasilisa would give her a wooden shovel and order her to clear paths. Tanya moved snow around with her shovel until Vasilisa would offer her a new task—feeding the birds.

  The lot surrounding the house was enormous, and Pavel Alekseevich had set up four feeders, and Tanya watched for hours on end as red-breasted bullfinches and yellow-cheeked titmice fed from the little wooden table under the slanting canopy. Sometimes she and Vasilisa, each with a covered canister—one small, the other large—walked to a spring about a third of a mile away to gather tasty water. A spring flowed nearer the house, at the edge of the enormous lot, but sometimes it got buried during snowstorms and the water could not break through to the surface. Every day they went to the village for goat’s milk, visiting their old woman friend, her goat, and her dog that lived in the front entranceway with her black puppies.

  Tanya was constantly busy. She did not know the difference between work and fun. There was nothing forced in her life. Even cod-liver oil, which she had not liked before, became tolerable after Vasilisa treated the black puppies to pieces of bread sprinkled with cod-liver oil and they snatched them up as if they were undreamed of delicacies.