The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  By six thirty in the morning Tanya had returned home, lain down, and fallen asleep. When Toma began to rouse her, she muttered that she was not going anywhere today … Then Elena came and bent over her.

  “Tanyush, what happened? You aren’t sick, are you?”

  Pulling the sheet over her head, Tanya answered in a clear voice, “I’m not sick. I’m sleeping. Leave me alone.”

  Elena was dumbfounded: what kind of an answer was that? Tanya was never rude …

  Tanya woke in time for lunch. No one was at home; even Vasilisa had gone off somewhere. Tanya was delighted not having to explain anything to anybody, and set off once again to stroll about without purpose or sense … Palikha, Samoteka, Meshchanskie streets … Wooden houses, the last remnants of the old city …

  Of course, she was prepared to talk about it all with her father and to hear what he—the main person in her life, the most intelligent and most learned—would have to say to her. But her father was not around; he had left on an urgent business trip, which made Tanya angry, and she even prepared a string of malicious words for him: whenever I need you, you’re either operating, or at a consultation, or in Prague, or in Warsaw …

  Another possibility was to talk to Vitalka Goldberg, but he was moonlighting at a collective farm in the Kostroma region … As for talking to her mother, Toma, or Vasilisa—she might as well ask the cat for advice …

  When Tanya returned home, Toma had already tumbled into bed, her mother for some reason was not at home, and Vasilisa was sitting in the kitchen sorting buckwheat.

  “Will you eat something?” Vasilisa asked.

  Tanya did not feel like eating. She poured herself some tea, sat down opposite Vasilisa, and stunned her with a question.

  “Vas, what do you think: when does a soul attach itself to a child, immediately upon conception or only at birth?”

  Vasilisa bulged her one buttonlike good eye and answered without the slightest hesitation.

  “Everyone knows: at conception. When else?”

  “Is that church doctrine or what you think?”

  Vasilisa ingenuously knotted her brow. She suffered from the persistent delusion that precisely what she thought was church doctrine, but now she suddenly had doubts: the second question seemed more complicated than the first.

  “What are you torturing me for? Ask your father: he knows better.” She suddenly became angry.

  “I will ask, when he gets back.” Tanya, leaving the dirty cup on the table, walked out of the kitchen.

  Vasilisa closed her eye and wondered, “That’s no accident … Why does she suddenly need to know about all that? Maybe I should whisper something to Elena?”

  But, in fact, in Vasilisa’s eyes, Elena herself was not entirely trustworthy.

  21

  PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH ARRIVED FROM POLAND WITH A SUITcase full of presents. As usual, he had gone into the first shop he saw and bought everything there, including the suitcase. The shop turned out by chance to specialize in items for newlyweds; consequently, all his purchases were white, lacy, and in rather poor taste. Vasilisa and Toma oohed and aahed over the beautiful things, while Tanya and her mother only smiled at each other understandingly … Father had missed his target. However, the white shoes were just in time for both Elena and Tanya … Three more days passed before Sunday morning, which Tanya so awaited. By this time over the course of her senseless walks she had arrived at a whole theory for rejecting the foolish, insane, rotten world, by whose laws she absolutely refused to live.

  At breakfast she told her father about the main incident. Very restrainedly and precisely. He needed no time to mull things over; he instantly grasped the heart of the matter.

  “You understand, what I want to talk about?” she concluded her story.

  He sat silently, and Tanya waited also in silence for what he would say. He remembered her as a three-year-old, then as a five-year-old, and tried to apply to this grown-up young woman with the sad face all the silly nicknames of her childhood: Big-eyed Squirrel, Cherry, Kitten … Was there another defeat lying in wait for him?

  “You want to talk about professionalism?” he asked his daughter.

  “Precisely.” She nodded.

  “You see, a profession is a way of looking at things. The professional sees one piece of life extremely well but might not see other things not pertaining to his profession.”

  “Dad, I’ve read about the SS doctors. They conducted experiments on human beings to measure the impact of low temperatures and various chemical substances. They performed experiments using prisoners already sentenced to be executed. Exterminated, I mean.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. Terrible business. They were later tried at the Nuremberg Trials. You’re right. This conflict essentially exists.” He rubbed his eyes, which had immediately grown tired of this conversation. “Only don’t forget that the sentence—both the doctors’ and their patients’—in a certain sense had been signed in advance.”

  Tanya arched her brows.

  “Are you trying to tell me that all people are mortal? If we take that into consideration, then it’s even worse. Even more heinous. There’s not a drop of sense in anything then. Right now we’ve got a child in the pathology ward, this tiny little body with a head three feet in diameter. A thin film of skin stretched over a huge bubble of water. And no rats are going to save him. Which means it’s better to kill him and do a vivisection on him?”

  “That is not even a possibility. That’s idiotic reasoning.” Pavel Alekseevich shrugged his shoulders. “She’s picked up some of the family’s prejudices,” he thought with irritation, but decided that the conversation had to be played out to the end. “In our line of business, Tanya, the professional is the one who assumes responsibility, who chooses the most acceptable from available alternatives, and sometimes it is a choice between life and death. Medicine has its own code of ethics. Take Hippocrates and read him: he’s already written about this. There are predetermined decisions: in my profession when it comes to a choice between the life of the child and the life of the mother, usually the choice is to save the life of the woman. It doesn’t happen that rarely. As for your experience, the question here is absolutely speculative: for a minute it occurred to you that you could turn out to be a murderer …”

  Tanya interrupted her father.

  “Dad, it didn’t just occur to me. What have I been doing these two years? Murdering rats. I’ve slashed a whole mountain of rats. It seemed really easy. Snip, snip … As a result … Some barrier just sort of broke down …”

  “No, no, no. That’s for your mother. I know nothing and don’t want to know anything about those barriers. There is a certain hierarchy of values, and human life is at the top. And if in order to save the life of a single person, to learn how to treat only one human disease, hundreds of thousands—whatever number—of animals need to be destroyed, there is no question.”

  “Dad, you don’t understand. I’m talking about something else. Lord take the rats. I’m talking about me. What’s happened to me?” Tanya stretched out her amazingly thin arms.

  “I don’t see any tragedy here. It’s a question of your state of mind as a professional. You hit a bump. That happens.”

  “One helluva bump! What’s with you? Don’t you understand? I’m cutting heads off of rats, piling up whole baskets of little corpses, in order to achieve some result. In order to discover something, to cure something, and along the way something happens to me that makes me lose my fundamental values: I lose sight of the difference between the life of a human being and a rat … I don’t want to be the good little girl who cuts rats anymore!” Tanya was almost shouting. Pavel Alekseevich frowned even more, and the wrinkles on his bare forehead ran almost all the way to the nape of his neck.

  “I’m sorry, my child. And who do you want to be?”

  Tears began to sprinkle from Tanya’s eyes. Pavel Alekseevich could not bear this.

  “I want to be the bad girl who doesn’t cut anyone up!”
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  “Have a chat with Ilya Iosifovich. He’s the philosopher. He’ll prove to you that everything is material. You, and me, the rats, and drosophila: it’s all one and the same. I’m not interested in philosophy. I work in applied science: breech births, double nuchal cords … I refuse to try to solve problems of global significance. As it is, half the country is already busy doing that … It’s an irresponsible preoccupation. Anyone who does anything competent bears responsibility. The majority of people try to do nothing at all …”

  “I don’t want that kind of responsibility!” Angry tears were now flowing down Tanya’s face. She had expected sympathy and understanding from her father, but had found nothing of the sort in him. Pavel Alekseevich looked at her with an alien disapproving gaze.

  “Then you should have stuck to playing the piano. Or replanting cactuses. Or, if you wish, do drafting … and don’t go into science …”

  “I’m not doing anything of the sort anymore. That’s it. I quit.” With slow, not entirely confident movements Tanya collected her cup from the table and placed it in the sink.

  PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH WATCHED HER TENSED SPINE WITH the repugnant feeling that this had already happened to him before. Of course, he’d insulted, he’d hurt the girl, the old fool! Just as he’d done with Lenochka … Insulted, Tanya had collected her cup from the table in the very same slow and uncertain way …

  He grabbed her by her pointed shoulders and hugged her.

  “Tanya! Don’t turn an experiment into a tragedy.”

  The slender young woman so resembled her mother at that moment that Pavel Alekseevich’s heart wrenched. She turned her angry, tear-streamed face to him and said quietly, “You’re just the same as the rest … You don’t understand anything …”

  She walked out of the kitchen, slamming the door loudly behind her and leaving Pavel Alekseevich in a state of profound dismay and bewilderment: what had he said that was so out of line, how had he offended his favorite little girl?

  Pavel Alekseevich sat down at the head of the enormous table and sank his smoothly shaved head in his hands. He reflected … There was a multitude of factors that kept people from becoming close to each other: shamefulness, fear of interfering, indifference, and, ultimately, physical repulsion. But the stream flowed in the opposite direction as well, pulling and drawing people to the closest proximity possible. Where was the dividing line? How real was it? Having drawn around themselves their own magic circles—some wider, some narrower—people live in cages they have defined for themselves and relate to their self-designated psychic space each in their own way. Some cherish their imagined cage beyond measure, others suffer from its constraints, and still others seek to admit into their personal space only chosen favorites while excluding those who would impose themselves …

  The majority of Pavel Alekseevich’s many acquaintances could not tolerate self-isolation, fearing more than anything else that they might remain alone, face-to-face with themselves, and for that reason they were willing to drink tea, chat, and do all kinds of work just not to remain alone. Discomfort, pain, suffering—anything to be in the public eye, to be among people. There was even a proverb: misery loves company. But people who think, who seek to create, and are, in general, worth something, always fence themselves off with a protective band, an alienation zone … What a paradox! The most severe insults resulted precisely because people who are extremely close to each other draw the internal and external radii of their personalities in different ways. One man absolutely has to have his wife ask him five times a day why he’s looking so pale. How is he feeling? Another regards even a slightly too attentive look as an infringement on his freedom …

  “What a strange, singularly strange family we are,” Pavel Alekseevich reflected. “Perhaps because only two of us—Elena and Tanya—are connected by real blood ties … The rest of us came together through the whims of fate. What inexplicable wind dropped gloomy Vasilisa at the door, or good-for-nothing Tomochka with her evergreen pleasures … Elena is melancholy, Tanechka is rebelling who knows why … Each in her impenetrable, separate cage, separate, and each with her own simple secret …”

  In fact, Pavel Alekseevich had planned to do some work today: to skim through the American journals and write a commentary on a dissertation that had been lying around for two weeks already … But his mood was ruined, and he had no desire to read someone’s son’s dissertation. He opened the door of the cupboard—the bottle was where it should be—and peeled off the metal lid …

  “And I’m to blame for it all, old fool. I’ve hurt everyone: Elena, Tanya, Vasilisa …”

  22

  TANYA FLEW OUT OF THE HOUSE AND RAN ALMOST AS FAR as the Savelovsky train station, then veered off to the right, then to the left, passing through a confusion of alleyways and courtyards, and stopping to look around only at the back entrance to the Minaevsky Market: a dilapidated wooden counter they’d not yet burned and mountains of market trash—everything from rotten vegetables to broken glass.

  The sun blazed with its last presunset force. Both her tears and her rage had subsided. Tanya sat down alongside a shed. Nearby three boys of about age seven were playing cards. One of them had a cleft lip; the second—a stump instead of a right hand; and the third, more or less normal, had a face full of enormous pimples. They slammed their cards and cursed. Tanya felt awkward even looking in their direction. In the opposite direction sat a pair of drunks. These unimaginably filthy and strangely joyful beings were dressed too warmly for the summer, in sweat pants and winter shoes that were splitting into parts. Their gender was indeterminable. An empty bottle stood between them. They felt good. A gray loaf of bread and a piece of processed cheese lay on some cardboard, and their satisfaction veritably streamed above them in a pink cloud. They looked at Tanya and exchanged words.

  One of the indeterminate beings beckoned to Tanya, and when she set off in their direction, extracted an unopened bottle of cheap wine from a scruffy bag and winked …

  Their woolen ski hats of a color faded by dirt were pulled over their foreheads so that their hair was not visible, and only after peering at them more closely was Tanya able to determine from the unshaven face of the smaller one that he was a person of the male gender.

  “Come on, I’ll pour you some,” one invited Tanya. Now it became clear that the second creature was a woman.

  Her face was pitted, and the shadow of an old bruise lay beneath one eye.

  Tanya stepped closer. The woman painstakingly wiped a glass with her black hand and poured almost to the top. Tanya took the glass and drank to the bottom. The woman chuckled with satisfaction.

  “Ain’t it the truth: he say you woun’t, but I say nawbody don’t say naw!”

  Tanya felt like the object of an experiment and laughed joyfully in reply. The wine seemed very tasty, hit her immediately, and for the first time since she had walked out the door of the laboratory a week ago she experienced a sense of relief …

  “Kind of you, it’s very good wine.” Tanya thanked them, returning the glass.

  The drunken woman started. “Dawn’t you drink naw wine, girl!”

  She spoke a dialect not from Moscow, with strong “aw” instead of “o.”

  “I don’t really drink,” Tanya responded. The man, who had seemed good-natured at first, for some reason turned surly.

  “Yah, we know how you don’t drink. Chugged down the whole damn glass without chokin’.”

  “Pay naw ’tention to him, he a fool.” The woman winked again, but her companion grew even surlier, slowly pulled out his bluish hand, tried to form it into a fist, but couldn’t—his swollen fingers would not bend and just stuck out to the sides—and thrust it under the woman’s nose …

  With an unexpected coquettishness she slapped him on the hand.

  “Aw, I’m scared now!”

  “Watch out or I’ll teach you a lesson … ,” he threatened.

  “Here,” the woman pulled back in reconciliation and with nimble hand filled the di
rty glass and handed it to the little man.

  “That’s more like it!” He took the glass with his gnarled hand and drank. Then with a pensive, slow movement he placed the empty glass alongside the untouched food and turned to Tanya.

  “Whaddya sittin’ there for: go get some more.”

  Tanya obediently got up.

  “Of what?”

  “Of what!” he teased. “Fine champagne! Get whatever you have enough money for … You know where to go? All the stores are closed; you need to go to the wooden house.”

  First Tanya bought a bottle of dry Gurdzhaani, but her choice turned out to be wrong, and the little man flayed his arms in indignation. They still drank it, though. Then, almost not making it, just before the kiosk closed, she went back and bought two more bottles of port wine, which turned out to be exactly right. Between the Gurdzhaani and the port a militiaman showed up and chased them all off. They settled down not far away in a cozy blind corner of the courtyard overgrown with burdock between three crumbling structures for which the word “building” would have been a misnomer …

  Grace streamed down upon them. The couple no longer paid particular attention to Tanya. Over the entire time, except for interjections, the little man uttered only three articulate words: “Summer’s good. Warm …”

  A luminous bathhouse sweat poured over their filthy faces from under their wool ski caps, while the summer day lingered. This was neither laziness nor idleness, but repose.