The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  What sins of Elena’s did she have in mind? Vasilisa Gavrilovna had her own special, complicated way of adding things up, but underlying her method was a strange, even if somewhat silly, truth.

  13

  Elena’s First Notebook

  MY LIFE IN AND OF ITSELF IS SO INSIGNIFICANT AND I myself am so insignificant that it never would have occurred to me to write anything down, were it not for the fact that my memory is getting worse and worse. It needs some sort of external reinforcement: smells, sounds, objects, that elicit memories, pointers, references … So let there be at least this little notebook, and when my memory fails entirely, I will be able to look at it and remember. It’s so strange how you grow up and acquire knowledge, and past events take on completely different meaning, depth, a sense of God’s agency, and I want to excavate my own life, like an archeologist, uncovering layer after layer, so as to understand what is happening to me and to my life. Where is it taking me, and what is it trying to tell me? I can’t understand; I don’t know how. The most horrifying thing is that my brain has become like an old porcelain cup: it’s filled with tiny cracks. My thoughts suddenly cut off, lose themselves, and it takes a long time to pick up their trail. Periods when I drop out. Sometimes the image of a person takes on a life separate from the name of its owner. A person you know well, have known for a long time, a loved one—suddenly you can’t remember their name, no matter how hard you try. Or just the opposite: you remember a name, but not the person behind it.

  I constantly write notes to myself: don’t forget this, don’t forget that. Then I lose the notes. Not too long ago I found one and had a real scare: it was written in my hand, but, my God, what spelling: a letter left out here, whole syllables out of place.

  Deep in my heart I suspect that this is the beginning of some terrible disease. I just wrote that and now am entirely convinced of it. And it scares me. No one in our family had anything similar. Although Grandmother, it seems, had an older sister who reverted to her childhood when she got old. It’s awful: your whole life then becomes senseless. If a person has forgotten her own life—her parents, and children, and loves, and joys, and losses—then what was the point of living? The other day I was thinking about Grandmother Evgenia. And I couldn’t remember her patronymic. I’d totally forgotten it. It made me so upset. And then the next day it just came to me on its own: Evgenia Fedorovna.

  I have to write everything down—everything. For myself. And maybe for Tanechka. She’s going through this period of distancing herself. She’s totally preoccupied by her studies, wants to become a biologist, and has grown unusually close to her father. But they’ve always adored each other. Only he doesn’t have as good a sense of her as I do. When her head or her stomach hurts, I know exactly how it hurts … And the fact that Tanechka seems not to have any interest in my life and leans more toward her father doesn’t really mean anything. I am sure that she will still need me. And she needs to know everything that I know. After all, it’s not just the big, significant events that are important. Surprisingly, the more distant they become, the more important the small, insignificant events are. Especially dreams … I’ve always had dreams, and such powerful ones that now my earlier recollections and childhood dreams seem to be intertwined and I can’t say for sure which image is from the real past and which from a dream. Tanechka needs to learn about all my petty trifles while they still haven’t been lost by my faulty memory. For example, it seems to me that I remember how I first learned to walk: I’m alone in a very large room, propped up against a green velvet sofa. It tickles. Kitty-corner in front of me is a white tile stove, a Dutch stove, and I want to touch it. It is smooth and alluring. I collect my strength. It’s very scary. I’m afraid to walk without anyone’s hand, but it seems to me that I could run over to it. I screw up my face with effort, push off from the sofa, and run. Fly almost. And run palms first right into the tile. It is unexpectedly hot. I scream. A large, mustached woman with a swarthy face appears from nowhere and sweeps me up into her arms … Where was that? Probably in Moscow, in Grandmother’s apartment. Mother said that I started to walk very early, before my first birthday. Can a child that age really remember anything? Or was it a dream after all? There’s no one to ask.

  My father, Georgy Ivanovich, was no ordinary person: he was a dreamer endowed with the rare ability to convince others of his ideas, a homegrown philosopher, from a young age an ardent revolutionary who even hung out with terrorists, but after the events of 1905 he turned to Tolstoyism. After he became a Tolstoyan he professed other ideals, and working the land became his religion. After that he never again lived in the city, but organized Tolstoyan farm collectives in various regions, all of them failures, except the last, the one in Troparevo.

  When he was young, Father was very handsome. He had an aquiline nose and bright black eyes. Probably that was his Greek or South Caucasian blood. Mother, on the other hand, does not look very pretty in the photographs taken when she was young: a chubby face, tiny eyes, and a potato nose. When she was older, though, when I already began to understand things, Mama got prettier. She lost a lot of weight, her face acquired more distinct characteristics, became more memorable. Father was a man of unlimited passions. He liked to argue, took offense easily, and was quick-tempered, but incredibly kind. No, not kind, selfless. He was truly a man of the future, as I understand it. He had something in common with PA. He never thought about his own benefit, in fact, he didn’t really understand what that might be. He was ready to give everything away. But except for his books he had nothing, and his library was always communal. His bookplate had a curlicue border with the words “From the Public Library of Georgy Miakotin.”

  He professed nonviolence as passionately and energetically as everything else. Now I’m able to judge him soberly: he supported nonviolence in public life, but was a terrible despot at home. He was gifted with the rare ability to instill his ideas in others; there was something infectious about him. Like Tolstoy he had many acolytes and followers. I think that Mama in fact was a victim of his rare, seductive personality. She followed him everywhere, trusted him in everything. He would change his convictions, and she couldn’t keep up with him. For her everything was more superficial, though; for her the main thing was that she loved him immensely, and for his sake she gave up her life as a modest music teacher in the city for life in the countryside. In the countryside she didn’t teach music, but cooked porridge for dozens of people, did laundry, and milked cows. She learned to do it all. All of it was beyond her capabilities, but she made the effort on Papa’s behalf: in addition to everything else, she wanted to be his best student. She did everything he wanted. Except for one thing: she returned to her parents’ house in Moscow to give birth. And left her tiny children with them to raise until we were old enough. I was the last, the third. Father was very angry with her for doing this. Because the other Tolstoyans all raised their children on the land. But this was the only issue that Mama did not concede to Father. Until I was four I was raised by my grandmother, then, at my father’s insistence, taken to live with them in the commune.

  After collectivization started, the authorities launched frightening attacks against the commune, although, you would think, it was that same ideal collective farm the Bolsheviks intended to organize throughout the entire country. In the first year of collectivization, they even proposed that my father, an experienced commune manager, join the administration and help organize collective farms. But he refused.

  “Our communities are voluntary, and that’s what keeps them alive, but you’re proposing to organize people through the use of force, which does not coincide with my views,” was how he explained it to the party bosses.

  At first they left the members of the commune alone, but clearly not for long. Following deliberations and discussions it was decided that they look for new locations, farther away: the village of Troparevo was much too close to the capital. They began their search in 1930, but it was 1932 before they not only found a place but pu
t up their first log houses in the foothills of Altai. Just before they moved, Mama begged Papa to leave me in Moscow. I was fifteen years old, and Grandmother was able to adopt me. I became a Nechaeva. Probably that’s what saved me from arrest—my grandmother’s surname.

  In Altai, in Solonakcha, their life took a horrible turn. After that I never saw any of them. My brother Sergei was drafted, but refused on ethical grounds: he did not want to carry a gun. He was tried by military tribunal and sentenced to death by firing squad. He was like my father: unbending. But Vasya was a gentle, tender little boy: they called him shepherd boy. He was the only one of us who truly loved the soil and farming not abstractly, out of theoretical considerations, but from the heart. Animals listened to him.

  Mishka the bull would follow him around like a puppy. Vasya drowned in the Ob River five days after he was handed a draft notice. The next day he was supposed to appear at the draft board in town. That was 1934. Soon after, my parents were arrested. They were given ten years without the right to send or receive letters. Grandmother tried to track them down: before the war she stood in all sorts of lines. But she never got an answer. She silently maintained that they had all perished because of my father. Basically, that’s how all the Tolstoyans became extinct. I visited Maroseyka Street where there used to be a vegetarian cafeteria. But the place was unrecognizable. No publishing house, no cafeteria …

  But I wanted to write about something else. Here’s another image from my early childhood: I’m sitting at a large table with huge basins of raspberries in front of me. The berries are almost the size of eggs. I pull the fat white stems out of the centers of the berries and put them in a large cup and toss the berries into a bucket, as if they were no good, trash. It’s the inedible white centers that are valuable. The smell of the raspberries is so strong that it seems as if the air itself is colored with a reddish-blue tint. Inside me churns this difficult, serious question about how what’s most important to some can be trash and garbage for others. Was this a dream?

  There are lots more just like this. I’m carrying a bowl of chopped greens for tiny baby rabbits. The stronger of them jump up first, while several little scrawny ones can’t make their way to the food. I have to sort these weak ones out and put them in a separate cage. So the stronger ones wouldn’t trample them. That seems not to have been a dream. But maybe it was a dream? It’s difficult to imagine that such tender liberties were allowed at our commune. Life was very harsh …

  All these colorful trifles somewhat confuse and, if you will, soften the images of my memories. The commune where I lived from the time I was four, in Troparevo, a not so distant suburb of Moscow, was small: only eighteen to twenty adults and about ten children, all different ages. But we had our own school. We were taught to read using Lev Tolstoy’s primer. And our first books were, of course, Tolstoy’s. The story of the plum pits: how it’s bad to lie. About the wooden trough for the old grandfather: how one should treat one’s parents well. There was almost never enough food, but it was divided equally. When there was a lot—that happened too—it was still shameful to take a lot.

  The Teachings of Christ Presented for Children: I have memories of it from early childhood. I read the real Gospels only much later, when I was living with Grandmother … To say that the adults in the commune loved Tolstoy would be an understatement: they idolized him. As a small child I had my fill of him. It’s even funny to admit, but they fed me such a steady diet of his articles and philosophy that I wouldn’t go near The Cossacks, Anna Karenina, or even War and Peace. I read his novels only after the war.

  But that’s not what I want to talk about. There’s something else. Since I was a little girl from time to time I’ve had moments when I seem to lose touch with the here and now. I think that many people have this experience, but because it’s so enormously complicated to describe these occurrences—for which our impoverished language has neither the words nor the concepts—no one even tries to share their experience with others. I have noticed many times how a child will suddenly stop in the middle of playing, eyes empty, fogged over, and then a second later is once again rolling a truck or dressing a doll. The child just drops out for a while. I’m sure that everyone knows the feeling of stopping dead in your tracks and losing all sense of the passage of time. How can I describe this, especially since I’m not a writer? Yet for some reason it seems important to try to get all this out. Perhaps it’s precisely for this reason that I’ve stopped trusting my own memory, which constantly fails me.

  The most frightening experience I’ve ever had—and the most impossible to describe—is that of border crossings. I’m talking about the border between everyday life and various other conditions I’m acquainted with but that are as difficult to describe as death. What can a person who has never died say about dying? But it seems to me that each time you drop out of everyday life you die a little bit. I love my profession of drafting precisely because it has an exact set of rules that can be used to organize everything. There’s a key to the transition from one projection to another. What I’m talking about, though, is when there’s a transition, but from one time to the next you never know what laws govern it, which is what makes it so frightening.

  Merciful Lord, all those journeys … All of them different … The most frightening thing that happened to me—for that matter the most frightening transition I ever underwent—happened just after my grandfather’s death. In order for you to understand this, I need to say a bit more about my family.

  Everyone feared my grandfather—my mother and my grandmother included. That I was afraid of him is perfectly understandable. I was a frightened little girl in general. When he died, I was seven years old. In 1922. He was a building contractor, and at one time he had been very wealthy, but had lost it all before the revolution. I know very little about the history of my family, especially this part of it. All that survived in Grandmother’s version was that a train station pavilion he had built caved in, several people died, and he himself was hurt and his leg had to be amputated. There was a court trial, and that was his ruin. After the court case Grandfather never recovered. Usually he would sit in his deep armchair with its back to the bay window, and against the light background his face would seem dark, especially when it was sunny. Grandmother and Grandfather lived in Trekhprudny Lane, in the Volotsky buildings. My grandfather himself had built them, in 1911, I think. It was a garret apartment. The elevator never worked. Climbing up the tall staircase took a long time. Grandfather basically never left the house. He was always ill, breathed with a rasp, smoked smelly tobacco, and walked around the apartment with two canes. He never used a crutch. He just kept it near the couch.

  In those years we—I mean the commune—kept cows and brought milk from Troparevo to City Hospital No. 1 on the Kaluga Highway. We had a cart and a communal horse. Mama sometimes took me with her, and after having delivered the milk, we would ride from the Kaluga Highway to the vegetarian cafeteria on Maroseyka Street. I remember carrot tea with saccharine, and soy cutlets … In the same building there was a publishing house and the Tolstoy Society’s offices. My father’s relationship with the society’s administration was not very good. It seems strange, but as far as I can judge now, the Tolstoyans were always fighting, arguing, and trying to prove something to each other. My father was an ardent debater. Between him and his father-in-law, my grandfather, there were deep hostilities, for political reasons. As for my grandmother, Evgenia Fedorovna, my father somewhat despised her for her Orthodox Christian beliefs, and though he never argued with her to the point of breaking off relations, he was always instructing her how to practice her faith correctly, the Tolstoyan way … Like Tolstoy, he did not recognize miracles or other mystical phenomena; for him the main thing was moral content. And Christ was the epitome of morality. I look back on this all now with a smile, because I constantly have before my eyes our Vasilisa, who has not the least conception of morality. She says, “that’s God’s way” or “that’s not God’s way,” and hasn
’t a thought about good and evil, and judges only by her silly heart. While Papa had a theory for everything.

  My mother visited her parents almost secretively. In any case, I somehow realized that I was not supposed to tell my father about our trips to Trekhprudny. It was kind of Mama’s and my secret. Like the several spoons of farmer’s cheese Mama withheld from sale as a present for her parents. Dairy products were not for our consumption. Only the sick and little children were given milk.

  Grandmother always received us in the kitchen, which was right next to the entrance. Grandfather never came out of the room at the far end of the apartment, and I did not realize that Grandmother kept our visits secret from him. He extended his dislike for my father to my mother and would get frightfully angry if word got to him that Mama had been at Trekhprudny. A very, very cruel and intolerant person Grandfather was. He barely tolerated his grandchildren.

  Mama told me that he had a long and painful death, and cursed terribly until his last minute, damning everyone and blaspheming. They did not take me to his funeral: it was freezing cold. After some time had passed—I think not less than six weeks had passed—Mama brought me to Grandmother’s during Holy Week and left me with her because I had just broken out with chicken pox. While I was sick, I slept in the room where Grandfather had lived. They put me on his couch, which stood rather strangely in the center of the room. Probably in the last months of his life, when he could no longer get out of bed, they had turned the couch in order to be able to approach him from both sides. He was very heavy, and it was very difficult for Grandmother to change his linen by herself …

  I was very ill for about three days, and then the healing sores just itched. Grandmother gave me some sort of tranquilizer, and I remember that it made me sleep and sleep, so that I confused day and night. Once in the middle of the night I heard a knock that seemed to come from the neighbors’. I was surprised in my sleep. What were they pounding nails at night for? Harder and harder. Each strike hit me right on the bridge of my nose. That’s because I’m sleeping, I explained to myself. I have to wake up. But I couldn’t. Then the blows seemed to coalesce, as if an invisible jackhammer were boring with great pressure into my forehead … The drill gnawed deeper, the vibration was unbearable, and it seemed as if all of me were being dragged into a velvet-black, spinning abyss. This was no dream; it was something else. And it lasted long enough for me to figure out two things: first, that what was happening to me was stronger than pain, and the suffering was not physical, but some other kind. Second, the spinning blackness began in the middle of my forehead, formed a funnel, and carried me off beyond time. I was terribly nauseated in a strange way, but if I had been able to vomit, I would have vomited up myself … Pain encircled me from all sides; it was bigger than me; it existed before me. I was simply a grain of sand in an unending stream, and what was happening, I guessed, was what is called eternity …