The main thing was the satisfaction. Of hunger, thirst, the need to be touched, and of the mutual interaction of liquids. Probably this was some primal sexual satisfaction, but not connected with any other particular being. It was a caressing, fertile environment that consisted entirely of turgescence, effusion, and partial dissolution of me in another, and another in me …
A blissful state. But long, rare threads of pain would creep into this bliss and induce me to move, and the new movement led to new bliss …
That’s it approximately …
Then something new and horrible set in. Were it not so absolutely dark, you might say that Gloom had set in. It was greater than any form of consciousness, all-penetrating, like water or air, and uncontrollable, like the elements. And at the core of my tenuous body my little “I” writhed with the anguish of fear.
It was not a human pain, which has its dimensions—beginning, end, rise, fall. The anguish I experienced had no dimensions. It was absolute, like a geometric point. Aimed entirely at me. I experienced something similar in childhood when I wound up in the place once inhabited by my dead grandfather.
I felt a particular kind of nausea. But it wasn’t my stomach or its contents, but my own “I” that was ripping itself from inside my body and, unable to find a way out, shaking me with spasms. My inviolable, secret, and precious core—protected by the mass of my fluid body from external streams of cold, warmth, acidic sourness, and excessive sweetness—trembled harder and harder, more and more agonizingly, while my body with all its jellylike blood vessels, sensitive, tender pores that absorbed thick sour streams, and fingerlike protrusions of various types capable of excreting their own liquid, which had been created anew within my flesh—my entire complexly organized body yearned to contract, to leave, and to hide from the moist horror that like an ocean covered the surfaces of all bodies … My body seemed to know that the horror was penetrating it through and through and not just flowing over its surface …
These two desires met each other halfway: my core impregnated with horror from within, pushed outward, while my corporeal part, attempting to escape an external horror, pushed inward. At the moment when it all grew entirely unbearable, my whole being contracted, collapsed, and almost ceased to be …
Although the spasms and cramps rent me apart, there was a shade of pleasure in this hellish pain.
A slight vibration—which at first I hardly felt and which formed a kind of weak background—intensified, taking the form of a funnel-shaped shell, and began to suck me in, intensifying the gloom—which had seemed to have reached its limits—by yet another degree. At that point my being could no longer withstand, something inside me snapped and shifted, and I turned myself inside out and immediately realized that the whole world was turning inside out together with me …
It was agonizing, but reassuring. I was participating in this inside-out movement, almost like a woman in labor who physically and spiritually facilitates a process that would take place even without her participation … it would just take longer and be more difficult. Like a woman in labor, I too tried to push myself out better, hiding all my elongated organs that used to be suspended freely in water, and pushing out the innermost part of myself. I felt it working. My strength was ebbing, the horror had almost receded, when a new feeling arose, one I had never experienced before: I had to hurry. In this new and not yet entirely evolved incarnation, a new dimension—that of time—was already ticking, already marking out invisible boundaries. I tried to hurry—and an invisible film snapped with a deafening ring. I turned myself outward. I had pulled myself out.
Bliss is the state of non-pain. Until I knew pain, I was unable to imagine bliss. There was no more horror and no more pain (a variation of horror). The whole world had become different; I had become different. Only a small part of my “I” remained unchanged, but it was so small that it barely contained itself and was entirely on the verge of dissolution, on the verge of disappearing.
The great novelty was that my body, accustomed to locating itself around its own undefined center, now was entirely inside, and my innermost core was now on the outside and experienced a weak current, a light sensation of movement along its newly constituted surface. Probably my body, accustomed to deriving everything it had needed for its composition and movement from the external world, had not gone entirely inside: at the very least, one large protrusion remained on the surface and opened itself up. Not moisture, not water, but air filled my inner body. It expanded slightly, then fell again. My breathing engaged. But I had not even succeeded in thinking through my new thought about how every imaginable form of bliss, like pain, always has yet another degree, when something on my surface broke and new apertures opened up, and I saw Light. Had my “I” acquired vision? Or had something happened in the world that had not happened before? I don’t know. Light had formed. And Eyes had formed. And I closed them, because at the pinnacle of bliss there was pain …
For whom and for what am I writing this Diary of a Madman? Who will believe me if I don’t entirely believe myself? Will you read all this to the end? Will anyone read this at all? And why? Perhaps you shouldn’t bother … I’m talking to you, Tanechka, but at times I forget and write whatever comes into my head so that it won’t dissolve into nothing.
Yesterday I came home from work, and Vasilisa said, “Someone called for you …” Five minutes later I couldn’t remember the name of the person she said had called. I asked her again. Once again Vasilisa said who. But this morning I again couldn’t remember. What’s more, it seems to me that yesterday I had spoken with one of my friends on the phone, but I can’t remember with whom … It’s a strange kind of absentmindedness, a total lack of attention. I do what I can so that no one notices. It seems to me that this unfortunate quality displays itself least at work. There I don’t forget anything or mix anything up. Except I couldn’t remember the name of the new draftswoman. I had to write it down on a piece of paper and put it in my pencil jar. “Valeria.” To tell the truth I committed it to memory right away. There, now I finally remember who called yesterday: it was Valya, Ilya Goldberg’s wife. She called from a phone booth, said something I couldn’t quite understand. She asked that PA get involved in something. And I forgot to give him the message …
It seems that PA has noticed that something’s wrong with me. Sometimes I catch his “medical” gaze on me. Since the day Lizaveta the janitor died, more than half a year ago now, our relationship has fallen apart completely. He tried to explain himself to me several times, and I see that he’s suffering because of our falling-out, but there’s nothing I can do with myself. The words he spoke that night still stand between us, and I don’t know whether I could ever forget them. “You are not a woman. You don’t have that organ.” It’s true. But why is that so offensive?
Things at home are very bad. For everyone. The only one who feels great is our little foster child. She sprinkles sugar on buttered white bread. And eats a loaf of white bread a day. With a happy, self-forgetful look on her face. At the same time, though, she’s always looking askance, as if she were guilty or had stolen something. She’s gained weight. Tanechka has helped her catch up with her schoolwork. In the end it’s simply mind-boggling: I lost PA because of her.
Tanechka, why am I writing about this to you? You’re only twelve years old. But one day you’ll grow up and fall in love with someone, and then you’ll forgive me all this nonsense.
He drinks a lot. He always smells of vodka—either just consumed or the reek of yesterday’s. He’s very gloomy, but I am certain that it’s not just because of me.
For Old New Year’s—Vasilisa observes only the old calendar—she prepared a table, baked her clumsy cabbage pie, thick as your foot, and made potato salad with bologna sausage. She boiled up beef-hoof aspic. The house reeked all day from it. Her eternal fasting has ceased temporarily. In the evening PA came out to the table and put a newspaper in front of me. One of the articles was circled—about doctor-murderers. I looked
at the list: half of them were his friends. The majority—Jews. He poured a glass of vodka, and chased it with a piece of cabbage pie. Then he winked at Tanechka, petted Toma on the head—she beamed—and returned to his study … I really wanted to talk to him, but it was impossible.
I went to bed and before falling asleep asked: Tell me what’s happening, what will happen to all of us? But nothing was shown to me.
14
ON JANUARY 13 OF THE NEW 1953, PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH went on another drinking binge. But this time there was no cheerful revelry, and no dacha. He was morose, silent, and would not come to the phone. He went to the clinic no more often than three times a week, and by two in the afternoon he was already home. Tanechka, with whom he had always spent much of his time at home, was now in the constant company of Toma.
Both Pavel Alekseevich and Tanya hesitated to offend Toma by leaving her alone, so only in the early morning would Tanya peek into her father’s study for a few minutes—to joke, giggle, and whisper in his ear one of her baby nicknames for him.
Two other children often came to the apartment, Ilya Iosifovich Goldberg’s sons, Gennady and Vitaly—thin, awkward, with breaking voices and violent acne. They came almost every day to eat dinner. Elena invited them, knowing the family’s difficult straits: Goldberg had been in prison since 1949, and Valya, who had worked in the laboratory of a Jewish doctor just arrested, was fired the day after. Left without a job, she fell ill, living from one heart attack to the next with respites only to take another trip to deliver a care package to her husband. She herself never ceased to be amazed that she was so sickly …
Vasilisa, whose clumsy and charitable hands passed on hundreds of money transfers and parcels, was unhappy about these dinnertime visits: as she saw it, alms were supposed to be handed out as small change or bread, not in the form of expensive meat patties. Elena guessed the reason for Vasilisa’s discontent, but said nothing …
Throughout the entire country, meetings of indignant citizens were held, and within the health system these events were conducted with particular inspiration. Anyone with any reputation was obliged to speak out and revile the criminals. Pavel Alekseevich realized from the outset that all doctors down to the very last one were being corralled into collaborating in these shameful accusations. He had not the least doubt that the doctors were completely innocent. Pavel Alekseevich was deeply depressed, and for the first time in his life he contemplated suicide. The thick volume, rebound in red leather, of Mommsen’s History of Rome lay constantly on his desk and whispered to him: in the period of late antiquity Pavel Alekseevich so loved, suicide was considered not a sin, but a courageous way out of a hopeless situation taken for the sake of preserving both honor and dignity. Pavel Alekseevich tried this seductive thought out on himself.
The holes in his relationship with his wife, which refused to be darned and only grew wider, depressed him. His beloved daughter was too small to become his confidante. Their closest friends now were almost all under arrest: geneticist Ilya Goldberg, forensic pathologist Jacob Shapiro, ophthalmologist Petya Krivoshey … All except Sasha Maklakov, his old university buddy who had long ago left medical practice to become a bureaucrat and unexpectedly turned up among the more inspired Jew-hunters …
But the biggest surprise awaited Pavel Alekseevich in his own home—Vasilisa Gavrilovna, who sincerely and absolutely despised Soviet power, for the first time in her life had taken its bait: the idea of covert enemies, clever doctors, and Jewish sorcerers struck a chord in her medieval soul. All the pieces of the picture fit: the Jews had led the revolution, killed the tsar, and destroyed the church. What could you expect from the people who had crucified Christ?
Vasilisa quaked, gasped, and prayed. From the street and from lines in stores she brought back eye-popping stories of doctors infecting their patients with blood from cadavers, blinding newborn infants, and inoculating their gullible patients of Russian descent with cancer. An enormous number of eyewitnesses and victims emerged. People refused treatment from Jewish doctors, and a mass psychotic fear of poisoning and the evil eye set in … Staff reductions, purges, trial by rumor … Lydia Timashuk received the Lenin Prize for exposing an underground ring …
During these months Vasilisa had no choice but to remain Pavel Alekseevich’s sole conversation partner, or, rather, listener. Elena went off to work, and the girls—to school. Following her morning grocery raids, Vasilisa came back to find Pavel Alekseevich waiting for her in the kitchen with a pot of coffee. He displayed an extreme degree of insensitivity and completely ignored Vasilisa’s obvious lack of interest in, and complete inability to maintain, a conversation. While she unloaded her patched shopping bags, he would settle in with a cup of tea or something stronger and embark on an unrushed lecture …
In fact, the lecture was intended for a different audience, one more enlightened and more populous, but there was no other: he could not lecture students on his investigations—having nothing to do with questions of medicine—into the history of antisemitism and its religious and economic roots. Mommsen served as his primary source, after whom Pavel Alekseevich rummaged around in the works of Josephus Flavius and real authors from antiquity; he read Saint Augustine and some of the Church Fathers … He worked himself toward the Middle Ages … Antisemitism, to his amazement, had plagued all of Christian civilization.
Vasilisa gloomily peeled carrots, sorted millet and buckwheat, and chopped cabbage. You couldn’t say that she did not hear Pavel Alekseevich, but for her his brilliant lectures were written in a foreign language. She was able to extract only the general idea that Pavel Alekseevich did not believe in the insidiousness of the Jews, just the opposite—he even condemned those who attacked the Jews. As he got more and more worked up, Pavel Alekseevich quoted something in Latin and then in German, which confused poor Vasilisa even more. Maybe he’s a Jew? Until recently she had believed in Pavel Alekseevich as in the Lord God, but after his fatal revelation, after he himself admitted to doing everything in his power to legalize infanticide, she did not know how she should feel about him. How much had he given away without ever counting? How many people had he helped without even knowing their name? And he was cutting children out of their mothers’ bellies, killing little babies … Maybe he’s the Anti-Christ? She seemed not to distinguish the various shades of gray between black and white, not to mention pink and green, and for that reason, lips pursed, she fried onions and maintained total and disapproving silence.
Once, having consumed a bottle of vodka over the course of a two-hour monologue, Pavel Alekseevich noticed that Vasilisa had not touched the coffee he himself had made for her.
“Vasilisa, sweetie, why didn’t you drink your coffee? Don’t tell me you’re afraid it’s poisoned?” he joked.
“So what if I am?” Vasilisa muttered.
Pavel Alekseevich wanted to laugh, but stifled his laughter. As happens with alcoholics, his mood suddenly changed. He was overwhelmed by repulsion for his life. He became morose and slumped.
“A great nation, damn it …”
Vasilisa crossed herself and whispered a prayer for protection: Pavel Alekseevich was now on her suspect list.
15
THE STALIN ERA ENDED ON MARCH 5, BUT A LONG TIME passed before anyone figured that out. Early in the morning that day the leader’s death was announced over the radio. By this time he had been dead for several days, but those who were now supposed to steer the Soviet Union were so discombobulated that they decided first to inform the world that he was ill. These fallacious news flashes about a corpse’s health communicated more than just the gradual decline of his already nonexistent wellness. Medical terminology and statistics were cited that said little to the average person, but in itself the very phrase “the urine test was normal” conveyed that those on high also unfastened their fly, took out their member with thumb and index finger, and produced a certain quantity of urine. Even if it was of the very best quality, it was still urine! That was the first, devastating blow to th
e cult of personality. The new leaders also needed time to get accustomed to the idea that ultimately even the most immortal die.
The country’s population reacted stormily: they sobbed, fainted, and collapsed from shock-induced heart attacks. Others sighed with relief, secretly rejoiced, and gloated in their hearts. But even the deceased leader’s covert enemies—he hadn’t had any overt ones for a long time—were in a state of confusion: how could they live without him?
Pavel Alekseevich’s family represented the full range of possible reactions. Toma, who had surprised everyone with her businesslike cool at the funeral of her own mother, was now absolutely choked with grief. For a full two days she sobbed, taking short breaks to eat and sleep. She literally, in the biblical sense, ate her bread with tears.
The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel Page 14
