The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

“What about Holy Queen Tamara?” Toma reminded Vasilisa, who had earlier spoken to her about her patron saint, Queen Tamara, after whom she had been named in baptism.

  Vasilisa became angry and explained inarticulately, but with conviction: “Don’t you understand, they’re completely different things …”

  IN THE KUKOTSKY HOUSEHOLD TOMA BEHAVED EXACTLY as demanded by her role as adopted child. Placing great value on the practical amenities showered on her, she feared losing them and tried hard to make her presence in the household both pleasing and useful. While there was always a grain of solicitousness to her manners, it was compensated for entirely by the fact that she adored Pavel Alekseevich, sincerely admired Tanechka, and for reasons she could not explain deep down in her heart, feared only Elena Georgievna.

  Her relationship with Vasilisa was much more complicated. On the one hand, Vasilisa was just like her—not an urban creature; on the other hand, Vasilisa saw right through her, and if Vasilisa merely glanced at her over her string-trussed eyeglasses it was not at all pleasant, as if she knew some secret and very unpleasant thing about Toma. While there was a special kind of bond between the old servant and the little foundling, Vasilisa miscalculated entirely when she attempted to mold from Toma a successor not only to her dishwashing-housekeeping realm, but to her spiritual realm as well. It did not work out. If Toma, at first obeisant, memorized all the basic prayers and with drowsy attention heard out all of Vasilisa’s bumbling sermons, by the time she was fifteen, she began to slip away from Vasilisa—having figured out, likely, that she had no need for Vasilisa’s underground valuables—and grazed exclusively alongside Tanya, while Tanya buried herself in her father’s books, dragged her to the cinema, to the theater, and to concerts, and these outings were not just for culture’s sake: boys were also involved, which made an immense difference to Toma.

  In Tanya’s presence she played an unenviable role, but she really did not need her own boyfriend, and the very atmosphere of an outing—wherever—in the company of young men suited her entirely. Just as she had once relished those innumerable sandwiches with butter and sugar, her toothbrush, and her nightshirt, she now took pleasure in the fact that boys bought their tickets, took them to the refreshment stand, and treated them to soft drinks and cake …

  The boys did not think to conceal from Toma that she was an obligatory appendage to the holiday of an outing with Tanya to wherever, but this hardly distressed Toma: she had no need for any one of them in and of himself, but as a group they bore witness to the fact that Toma’s social status in society was very good because she got to go to the Bolshoi Theater, the Maly Theater, and the Art Cinema, and was treated to free refreshments in addition.

  Among the young men attracted to Tanya’s simple gaiety, obvious good looks, and curly hair, were the Goldberg brothers, who had been enamored of Tanya since that horrible winter in 1953 when they went to Pavel Alekseevich’s to be fed. The feeding had not really ever stopped: the boys’ mother died soon after Ilya Iosifovich was released, and the old geneticist, who had courageously survived his last arrest without having to sign a single false statement, was totally destroyed by the death of his forty-year-old wife.

  He fell apart physically too, losing as much weight as if he were in the camps. His only salvation was the work with which he loaded himself down beyond measure. He reviewed books for all the reference journals that would take him, and he kept writing his genius book about genius. Goldberg’s home life also fell apart; housekeepers came and left, one after the next. One stole, the other drank. The third, an intellectual Jewish woman who came three times a week, he suspected of being an agent of the KGB. In a word, in the absence of the deceased Valya, the Goldbergs’ favorite food—meat patties with fried potatoes—either did not taste right or was laced with the poison of suspicion, which was not life-threatening, but also not conducive to good digestion.

  Once again, for the umpteenth time, Vasilisa demonstrated great insight and was the first to note that the meat patties were now in major competition with Tanya, and that it was time to figure out why those boys had taken to visiting every Sunday as well as on the occasional weekday …

  The Goldberg brothers were identical to the point of being indistinguishable, but Tanya clearly favored the one who was studying to be a doctor. On Sundays they often lingered after lunch until supper, and Vitaly, the medical enthusiast, would pour fat in the fire when he talked about the complexity and fascination of studying at the medical institute, about the passions of anatomy and the mysteries of physiology …

  The second brother, Gennady, who had chosen physics, contented himself with contemplation of this lively conversation, said nothing, and only occasionally answered the confused questions Toma, confident that Gena was her share of the package, put to him …

  NINTH GRADE CAME TO AN END, AND IT WAS DECIDED that for their last summer vacation from school the girls would go to Yalta. Pavel Alekseevich at first planned to go with the family, but at the last minute was prevented from doing so by an unexpected prestigious trip to Switzerland to take part in a conference on infertility. Pavel Alekseevich laughed to himself: infertility interested Switzerland, the richest country in the world, but not China, Asia, or Africa … Pavel Alekseevich agreed to go to Zurich, and Vasilisa was offered the opportunity to travel to Yalta in his stead. She held out for a long time, and even argued slightly with Elena on this score, but in the end she agreed, on the condition, though, that first she would leave for three days to take care of her own affairs. And she left …

  Owing to this unforeseen jaunt everyone arrived a day late for their reservation at the resort, because Vasilisa did not return on the appointed day. But the delay was compensated for by the notes of divine delight Vasilisa emitted all twenty-three remaining days she spent on the shore of the Black Sea.

  All the women vacationers saw the sea for the first time. And each in her own way. Vasilisa found evidence of the might and wisdom of the great Lord God. The mountains made a greater impression on her than did the sea, but both evoked her delight in the Creator who had produced this grand inventory. Stoic and not inclined to cry, she frequently dabbed away incomprehensible tears with her crumpled handkerchief, and her usual occupation—in the absence of cooking, laundering, and cleaning—was to sit idly on their terrace looking out in the direction of the mountains, her face immobile, her gaze arrested, as if beyond those mountains there were still others visible to her alone … From time to time she would fall into ecstatic mumbling, and Elena—long familiar with her prayer repertoire—managed to catch bits of the psalms, of which Vasilisa knew only the fiftieth by heart, the rest only in bits and pieces, scraps, and separate phrases, from which she constructed her inspired babble … “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, thou art there too … Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength … The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy … For he commandeth and raiseth the stormy wind …”

  Food at the resort was abundant, which was somewhat offensive for Vasilisa, so as soon as she caught her bearings, she refused to go to breakfast and came only to supper with everyone else, where she took her place at the table assigned them and enjoyed the service. The waitresses served her food, asked her why she had again not come for lunch and should they bring her anything else … Her satisfaction was tinged with a certain uneasiness, because in her not-great but tenacious mind she knew well that if someone has more than she needs, then someone else does not have enough … And her Christian soul, despite the luxury of their vacation, experienced a bit of shame. In the end she admitted to Elena that if it was going to be like this in heaven, then she would have to ask for the other place, because all this made her feel guilty.

  Toma felt no guilt at all. She and Tanya exulted like puppies in the sun and the sea; they splashed, swam, and sunbathed with no thoughts for an
ything else. It became apparent in the process that Tanya enjoyed universal popularity among the young and not so young men, from the merchants at the market—where the family occasionally dropped in to make some exotic purchase like homemade cheese, that sticky South Caucasus sweet known as churchkhela, or a bunch of some unknown herb—to the young captains vacationing at the military sanatorium next door.

  In the evenings the girls set off for the dances held in the cafeteria or on the embankment. Tanya danced, while Toma sat on a chair along the wall—or stood, if there were no chairs—in the company of two or three girls who were not popular. Toma went only for Tanya’s sake; left to her own devices she would never have gone along only to put up with this shameful boredom. She was somewhat surprised that intelligent Tanya found anything good in a dance called “a fast foxtrot” or “a slow tango.”

  At 11:00 P.M. Elena Georgievna set out to look for them on the crowded dance floors and brought them home to sleep. Sometimes Tanya managed to make a date with an artful dancer and crawl out the window and disappear for half the night. Their family had been allotted two double rooms, and the girls occupied the one without a terrace.

  Credulous Elena turned out to be unprepared for such craftiness on her daughter’s part and never discovered Tanya’s midnight adventures. Tanya’s first kisses did not make much of an impression on her: they smelled of some particularly stinky shaving lather and the unforgettable scent of Chypre aftershave and gave off an odor of boot wax and military action. Tanya rolled with laughter, and the young men—already slightly intimidated by her youthful beauty—retreated, hurt. In a word, Tanya brought back not a single romantic tryst from her trip to the South. She had the best time of her life.

  Toma, on the other hand, acquired a lifelong, profound love in Crimea. On an excursion to the Nikitsky Botanical Gardens grace descended upon her: she fell in love with botany like girls fall in love with princes. It happened at the very end of their stay in Crimea, two days before their departure. Overall, the excursion to the gardens fizzled: the bus broke down and took a long time to fix, then the weather deteriorated, and although it never rained, the midday sun darkened, and the elegant luster of the South Shore grew turbid.

  At the entrance to the Botanical Gardens they had to wait for their guide, who had gone to attend to other matters as a result of their delay. They stood alongside a dark-bronze plaque engraved with: “The Botanical Gardens were established in 1812 by Kh. Kh. Steven, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Medical Academy …” There was no one there to tell them that Christian von Steven was no stranger, but a close friend of Nikita Avdeevich Kukotsky, Pavel Alekseevich’s direct ancestor, and that the foundation for this state undertaking had been laid during the friends’ first joint trip through the Caucasus Mountains in 1808, that Nikita Avdeevich had visited his friend here in Crimea on more than one occasion, and that among the seven thousand pages of the great herbarium of the Taurida administrative district there were not a few specimens collected by Kukotsky himself …

  Finally the guide arrived—a fat man in an embroidered Ukrainian shirt and gold-framed glasses who distantly resembled Nikita Khrushchev in a good mood—and led them down the shaded footpaths. It was cool and mysterious. The guide talked about the abundance of Crimean flora, about rare endemic plants that lived exclusively in this region, and about ancient myths connected with the plants …

  Toma was a city girl and despised the countryside—one could say—for personal reasons. When she had spent her summer months in the village during her childhood, she had never noticed nature of any sort; everything there seemed ordinary and insultingly poor. For her, forest, field, and pond were connected with hard work: she was sent to the woods to gather berries for sale, to the field to help with the harvest, and to the pond to rinse laundry. Here in Crimea in the Botanical Gardens nature was selfless: it demanded no laborious effort. Even the sea, the salty water that no one had to haul in buckets from under the hill, had been created exclusively for the joy of swimming and diving.

  Toma surreptitiously stroked the leaves—some smooth and some furry, some dry as old paper, and the needlelike conifers—that lined the paths of the Botanical Gardens, filling her fingers with a joy they had never known before. Insufficiently caressed in infancy, not having known a loving touch in her childhood, now, though provided with everything she needed, she was still as deprived as ever of the loving touch without which a living thing suffers, falls ill, and withers … Perhaps her small size could be explained by the fact that growing up without love was as difficult as without some special unknown vitamin …

  Their Khrushchev-look-alike guide turned out to have a completely magical voice, and what he said was a real fairy tale.

  “Here we have an acacia,” he said, pointing to a small tree covered with sweet yellow blossoms, “one of the greatest trees ever. According to ancient Egyptian beliefs, the Egyptian goddess Hathor, the Great Cow, who gave birth to the sun and the stars, also could assume the identity of an acacia tree, the tree of life and of death. Acacia was the oracle of one of the great goddesses of fertility in Western Asia, and even the ancient Jews, who rejected idolatry, were seduced by the acacia: they called it the ‘shittim tree,’ and in ancient times built the Ark of the Covenant from it …”

  Of all the things he said Toma understood only one word: “cow.” Everything else was incomprehensible, but cool. It turned out that every tree and every bush, and even the tiniest flower, all had a foreign name, a history, a geography, and—most amazing—a legend about its presence in the world. While she, Tamara Polosukhina, had nothing of the sort; even by comparison with a fir tree or a daisy she meant nothing …

  She also got the feeling—Toma had no formed thoughts, only feelings garnished by thoughts—of a mutual sympathy between herself and the plants as well as an equality with them in their insignificance.

  “Probably among all these plants there’s one that’s exactly like me … If I saw it, I would recognize it right away,” Toma thought, stroking a rhododendron or boxwood as she walked.

  Tanya and Toma almost never coincided in either their thoughts or their feelings, and if they did, it was exclusively thanks to Toma’s ability to adjust herself to Tanya’s thought waves. This time they were thinking about one and the same thing: if I were a plant, what kind would I be?

  At the shop near the exit from the Botanical Gardens, with pocket money that Tanya spent immediately and recklessly and Toma scrimped, Toma bought two sets of postcards with local and Mediterranean types of plants and a boring book called Flora of Crimea.

  That day the question of finding an appropriate profession for Toma, which Elena Georgievna and Pavel Alekseevich had been pondering and only Vasilisa considered completely decided—that Toma would follow in her footsteps—was resolved.

  Still ahead was the tenth grade, a whole year to figure out details and prepare for exams. Tanya had set her sights on the biological faculty, to the amazement of Pavel Alekseevich, who could not imagine any other path for his daughter except medicine. But Tanya talked incessantly about higher nervous functions, about studying consciousness—the first American science fiction books had already been translated, and the Goldberg boys diligently supplied Tanya with the same. It was very romantic, much more romantic than a physician’s everyday routine. As for Toma, Pavel Alekseevich took her to the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy. There they were greeted with circumstance appropriate to Pavel Alekseevich’s rank, shown the experimental fields of corn and soybeans, and the laboratories. What impressed Toma was the artificial climate laboratory, the greenhouses with plants from the South; everything else reminded her of boring life on the collective farm with its crop rotations, cursing at the collective farm office, and village melancholy. On the way home she told Pavel Alekseevich she really did not take a hankering to the Timiryazev Academy and that she would prefer to go to a place where they worked with southern plants. Pavel Alekseevich attempted to explain to his foster daughter that once she received an
education, she could work at the Botanical Gardens or at the Institute of Medicinal Plants, or anywhere else, but Toma would hear none of it: she did not understand why she needed an education if she could work at the Botanical Gardens without one. What she wanted most was to admire the beautiful plants, to care for them, to touch them occasionally, and to inhale their smells … In the meantime she set up a whole family of clay pots of all sizes on the windowsill and puttered with lemon and tangerine seeds …

  18

  AND SO IT CAME TO PASS THAT A YEAR LATER TANYA TOOK university entrance examinations, overcoming steep competition and her own—who knows from where—fear of tests, while Toma simply applied for gardener courses at the Moscow Executive Committee of the City Soviet of People’s Deputies, from which, six months later, she would receive a white piece of paper testifying to her acquisition of a new profession.

  Tanya did not make it into the day division, earning one less point than she needed, but she was accepted into the evening division. By September 1 she had to get a job in her field of specialization in order to be able to present proof of daytime employment. Pavel Alekseevich—who had not even considered helping Tanya matriculate by making a single phone call to one of the university’s heavyweights equal in rank to himself—now picked up the phone and called his old colleague, Professor Gansovsky, a physician and researcher, who headed the clinic of pediatric brain defectology and a laboratory specializing in brain development. Pavel Alekseevich’s request was modest: would they hire his daughter, a student in the evening division of the biology faculty, as a lab assistant? Professor Gansovsky chuckled and said that he could take her as soon as tomorrow.

  Pavel Alekseevich delivered his pride and joy several days later. Tanya recognized this building alongside the Ustinsky bridge from childhood: they had brought her here for an X-ray or for an appointment with the pediatric cardiologist … But now she entered through the battered door of the yard entrance, through a corridor with a black board with numbered tags hanging from it. This was a completely different experience. She was coming to be hired for a job.