The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  She long ago had come to realize that in these environs fatigue resulted not from their movement over the flat sand hills—movement that was really quite sluggish, although not enfeebled—but from the lack of that certain warmth emitted by the pale fire.

  The locale was monotonous, gradually creating the impression that their seeming orientation toward some goal merely masked the fact that they were moving in a circle.

  Yes, something was not right with the system of coordinates here, the Newling surmised at one point, and rejoiced, as she always rejoiced whenever her current existence was pierced by some thread from the past, which constantly loomed somewhere nearby but as if under lock and key, sooner an article of faith than a reality, like the dry plants in this place or the quite tangible tiny grains of sand that sometimes got in her eyes and irritated her tear glands.

  One time the Judean sat down beside her and laid his hand on her shoulder. He had a habit, she noted, of touching his fellow travelers—on the head, the shoulder, or on the forehead sometimes …

  “Do you want to ask me a question?”

  “I do … Is there some other system of coordinates in this place?”

  He looked at her with surprise.

  “It’s completely different.”

  “Not three-dimensional, that is?”

  “It’s multidimensional: everyone has their own set.” He smiled with his thin lips, the wind stirring what remained of the gray hairs that grew just above his ears and on the back of his head beneath his bare crown.

  “Does that mean that each of us is located in our own personal space with its own set of coordinates?”

  “Not everyone. I know where you are and that fellow over there …” The Judean pointed to Skinhead. “But you two do not yet fall within my space … But that’s not final. In these parts nothing is final. Everything is very mutable and changes with great speed …”

  “Ah-ha, that means time exists …”

  “And what did you think? Time exists, but not just one. There are several time systems, and they’re all different: hot time, cold time, historical, metahistorical, personal, abstract, accentuated, reverse, and many, many others …” He stood up. “Nice talking to you …”

  And walked off. The Newling sat, absorbing the rays of light with her body and filling with strength. That sickly fire nourished them all … The deserted place, so infertile and poor, was becoming more interesting than one could have supposed at the very beginning. What the Judean had said about time was rather enigmatic, but she nonetheless had the sense that she had known about this but had forgotten. That thought almost burned her it was so unpleasant.

  The Newling looked about: the fine sand, the silent people, and the boring landscape … “Once I knew many other things—other places, other people—but I’ve forgotten it all; I can’t remember anything. Perhaps I’ve fallen out of the realm of time where everything, everything in the past, took place?” She closed her eyes, because all that remained to her was the pleasure of the warmth and their eternal march through the fine sand …

  Some of the travelers were so locked inside themselves and incommunicative that they reminded the Newling of patients at a psychiatric clinic. They fulfilled the Judean’s infrequent orders lethargically at best, while he treated them like children—tenderly and with a firm hand. The majority of them recognized each other by sight, although they interacted little and only reluctantly. But there were some who were mutually disposed toward each other, and they would sit around the fire talking quietly among themselves.

  New faces occasionally appeared, and some would disappear. Usually they disappeared unnoticed. Only one woman—gray and distinctively bandy-legged, weighed down with two sacks and a knapsack—left in everyone’s presence. Once in what seemed relatively like morning, when they were just about ready to set out and even the fire had been extinguished, the woman approached the Judean, removed her cloth knapsack, placed the two stuffed bags at his feet, bowed, and kissed his hand.

  He withdrew his hand, patted her comradely and roughly on the shoulder, and, extinguishing his smile, growled, “Well, go, go … They’re waiting for you … You’re a clever girl, go, and don’t be afraid of anything …”

  Those who bothered to raise their heads saw two festive green streams floating above her as a semblance of music sounded—something halfway between the short signals of some unknown radio station and études for a musician just beginning to learn some instrument still unknown to the world—and the woman disappeared, and all that remained in her place was the messy heap of discarded bags and a slowly diminishing smooth funnel of fading movement in the air. The mongrel grew agitated, began to bark, rushed over to the still fluttering spot, yipped inquisitively, its light head lifted upward … The second dog—the big shaggy one—sighed and covered its eyes with its paw …

  Soon they were all walking down an indeterminate path, while the wind, full of fine sand, poured down on them a burden none of them needed …

  Shortly thereafter, at their next rest, a newcomer appeared—a long-haired young man. Up to this moment, he had been wandering for a rather long time through the scraggy, blanched desert, his rust-colored cowboy boots sinking deep into the sand. He carried a bizarre little suitcase, and with the cold curiosity of someone who had just consumed some exotic drug he pondered where he had managed to wind up. His memory was completely blank. There were at least three things he did not know about himself: where he was; why he was hauling the ridiculous burden of that heavy little suitcase so ill-formed it was impossible to make it stand upright and it could only be placed on its side; and, third and most unpleasant, what was that dark vortex that kept flying over him now and again … The animated stream of air rumpled his hair and blew under his clothes—first too hot then too cold—nastily and annoyingly demanding, begging, whining … Besides these more or less distinct sensations, of which he was consciously aware, he also had the vague feeling of some enormous loss. The loss by far surpassed everything that he possessed, and in general everything that he had was, so to speak, absolutely insignificant in comparison with what he had lost. But what exactly he had lost he did not know.

  He grew tired of walking, and he dropped onto the sand, shook his head, and white sand fell from his hair. He placed the little suitcase under his head. The sand crunched between his teeth and pricked him under his clothes. From somewhere off to the right the dark little vortex twisted upward, wobbled in the distance, and started to move toward him. Longhair felt a fatigued irritation and said under his breath, “Get lost, will you!”

  The vortex shuddered and stopped. Then the fellow decided that the vortex was sensitive to his moods and could be driven away by invoking his own inner powers. This was, perhaps, the first positive impression he had had of late. With the palm of his hand he swept a layer of sand off the suitcase and closed his eyes. You couldn’t say he had fallen asleep: rather, he had fallen into a kind of catalepsy. While he was still conscious, he admonished himself: I do not want to come here anymore, no more coming back here … Sometimes such self-injunctions helped. He had experience with this sort of thing.

  When he opened his eyes, however, nothing had changed except that his neck was stiff from the rigid corner of the bizarre object underneath his head. He wiped his neck and lay there a bit longer, and when he finally opened his eyes, he was encircled by people who sat in silence: they struck him as gloomy and poorly drawn. One of them was a bit more perceptible: he was bald, tall, and stood in profile, bent over a pile of dry stalks. He extended his hand over the tinder, and a thin flame rose up. The fire ignited of its own, without matches or a lighter. This somewhat calmed the young man: he had already visited places like this where water, fire, and wind merely laughed at the ambitions of small creatures who thought that with the flimsy reins of cause and effect they had tamed everything on earth …

  That Jew playing with fire is the leader here, Longhair guessed.

  The Judean approached him, rapped on the little blac
k suitcase, and immediately revealed his perceptiveness:

  “You’ll hardly need that thing in these parts.”

  “I can’t just throw it out!” Longhair shrugged.

  “Naturally …”

  “What’s inside it?” The question had occurred to Longhair for the first time. “What’s so important inside it that I’m hauling it around?”

  “Open it and look,” the Judean advised.

  Longhair stared in amazement at his interlocutor: why hadn’t that occurred to him earlier? But it hadn’t … In part this too was consoling and reminded him of that stereotypical dream, familiar even to cats, where you want to move, to run, to save yourself, even simply just to get a glass of water, but your body won’t obey you, and you can’t budge a single muscle …

  The little suitcase was locked with two clasps, and Longhair could not figure out at first how they worked. As he pondered the mechanisms of the intricate locking latches, his hands of their own pressed a bracket along the side and the suitcase opened. It was not a suitcase, but a case for an object of inconceivable beauty. The very sight of it took Longhair’s breath away: it was a metal tube with a flared bell of yellow precious metal—neither warm gold nor cold silver, but soft and luminiferous. The elongated letters engraved in the oval stamp read SELMER, and Longhair deciphered the small letters immediately. He whispered the word, and it was sweet in his mouth … Then he touched the wooden mouthpiece with his fingers. The wood was matte and tender as a maiden’s skin. Its curve was so acutely feminine that Longhair was abashed, as if he had inadvertently caught sight of a naked woman.

  “What a wonderful …” He faltered, looking for a word: toy, machine, thing? Rejecting the inappropriate words, he repeated with a declarative intonation: “How wonderful!”

  He had the urge to do something with it, but he did not know what … He tore off the tails of his plaid wool shirt, and, breathing warm air on the flared golden surface, he gently stroked it with the red-and-green rag.

  Now he was walking with all the others, and the circling that seemed to some senseless or monotonous had acquired sense for him: in his black case he carried a wondrous object whose flowing, lithe outlines the case reiterated; he guarded it from all possible danger, particularly from the impudent black vortex that stretched out behind him in the distance awaiting the moment to attack him with its pathetic yowling and unpleasant touch … It seemed as though this vortex was somehow interested in the black case, because it kept trying to touch it. Longhair frowned. “Shoo,” he said to himself, and the vortex leaped to the side in fright. At rest stops Longhair would extract the plaid rag from the back pocket of his jeans and lovingly rub the metal tube all the while they sat.

  Sometimes he caught the gaze of the tall lean woman with the black headscarf over her voluminous hair. He would smile to her as he was accustomed to smiling at nice women, his gaze able to convey total happiness, love until the grave, and generally everything you would ever want … But her face, for all its loveliness, seemed to him much too distracted …

  3

  THEY MOUNTED THE NEXT LITTLE HILL. THE JUDEAN stopped, looked for a long time at the earth beneath his feet, then sat down and began to rake the sand with his hands. There in the sand lay a human doll, a gray manikin, crudely fashioned and damaged in places. From its punctured chest hung some sort of dark-blue string. The Judean pressed his finger against the doll’s chest, palpated its neck, placed his fingers on its barely distinguishable eyes, then scattered a handful of sand over the doll’s face. All the others also threw handfuls of sand, then silently crowded together in a cluster.

  “Perhaps we should try anyway?” Skinhead asked the Judean.

  “A waste of time. There’s no way,” the Judean objected.

  “We should at least try. There are a lot of us. Maybe we’ll manage,” Skinhead insisted.

  “What do you say, Sister?” He addressed the thin old woman hopefully. Sister, not lifting her cowl, shook her head with regret: “It’s not ready yet, I think.”

  The Newling wanted very much to take another look at this human manikin, but the sand had already covered its clumsy figure.

  “What do you say?” the Judean unexpectedly addressed the Newling.

  “I would dig it out,” she said, having remembered how she herself had lain just that way on the top of a cold hill.

  “Are you willing to carry it?” He laughed, but his laughter was friendly and not malicious.

  “You ought to be ashamed,” Skinhead reproached him. “Your jokes, as always, are idiotic …”

  “All right, all right. Here, aim your flashlight and take a look.” The Judean sat down and quickly, almost like a dog, began to dig away the dry sand … “But keep in mind, if it doesn’t work, it will hang on you.”

  Skinhead looked aside aloofly and grumbled: “And what’s the volvox for then? Ultimately, it’s entirely possible … Just a bit.”

  Sister pressed her hands to her breast and almost wept. The Newling sat down alongside the Judean and began to dig the earth near Manikin’s feet. Skinhead dug the sand near the head …

  The legs, which soon appeared out of the sand, were cracked with tubules of rolled-up paint exactly like those the Newling had had not long ago …

  She scraped away the paint. Under it was a layer of dense material, but it was damp, claylike, not at all resembling the new pink skin the Newling had discovered under her worn shell. Skinhead worked on the head, removing some tattered patches of skin or paper.

  “Let me warm it up a bit.” The Judean gently moved Skinhead to the side.

  “That’s a good idea,” Skinhead nodded. “Warrior, gather some tinder …”

  The man in the military jacket nodded, and then appeared with several dry branches, which he fashioned into a vertical stack. The Judean approached, extended his arm, barely bent his finger, moved his thin lips, and the branches ignited with a bluish-white flame. They dug out the manikin. It was crude, its face poorly outlined, its arms and legs clumsily fashioned. Its sex was very distinct, and its entire configuration was expressly male, with wide shoulders, and with fingers, feet, and a penis that were disproportionately large. The figure emitted not the slightest signs of life.

  “Volvox,” Skinhead said into the air, addressing no one in particular.

  The Judean, having anxiously palpated the manikin’s neck and touched its stomach, frowned: “The material hasn’t set. It’s hopeless … We’ll all lose a stage and achieve nothing.”

  Skinhead was silent for a moment, thought, and said quietly so that the Newling would not hear: “You and your Jewish caution are keeping me from doing my job. I’m a doctor, after all … I’m supposed to do everything possible to save the patient.”

  The Judean laughed and brusquely pushed aside Skinhead with a fist to his stomach: “Fool! I told you: doctors are fallen priests. You spent your whole life practicing secular medicine and now you want to foist it on us here.”

  “You’re the fool,” Skinhead snapped without malice and completely pro forma. “You believers have no sense of professional duty. You’ve dumped all your problems on the shoulders of your Lord God … When it comes down to it, volvox is nothing more than an exercise in energy …”

  “Okay, okay, I don’t object,” agreed the Judean with a smile, and the Newling guessed that they were very close friends and that the connection between them was somewhat different from that among the others present here …

  The Newling felt with the skin on her face that the usually weak wind had picked up, and grains of sand were striking her lightly in the cheeks and forehead and burying themselves in her hair. The wind bore not just sand but thin stalks of grass, weblike clumps of prickly leaves, fragile vegetative threads, and dry moss. The fire burned, inclining slightly toward the ground, but with no intention of dying out.

  The human manikin lay on the ground alongside the fire, and everyone stood around, waiting for something to happen. Skinhead pulled a ball of rather coarse thread out
of his pocket and passed it to Warrior standing nearby. Having gone full circle, the ball returned to Skinhead. Everyone held the thread with two hands. To the right of the Newling stood Sister; to her left—Limper. The wind intensified, its direction impossible to determine as it blew from all sides and carried more and more vegetative rubbish. They all stood motionless, and dry stalks of grass, weblike fibers, and flying seeds of unknown plants stuck to their hair and their clothes; they clung to the thread stretched between them, and after a while they formed a circular fence of vegetative rubbish, open only at the top, while at their feet, alongside the fluttering flame, the crude manikin lay motionless. The Judean raised his arm over his head toward the very center of the opening, and the opening was covered over, forming the semblance of an ancient hut. The Newling sensed that her breathing was inconsonant with that of all the others, and she held her breath in order to join their common rhythm. Having done so, she discovered that besides their common breathing, they shared a common heartbeat and a common will directed at the insensible log, which seemed even to be resisting them, at least it displayed a certain discernable resistance to their common effort, to what might even have been called work. A very strong pulsation came from Sister on one side of her, while Limper merely designated his presence. The two strongest engines were Skinhead’s and the Judean’s.

  The wind continued to rise, and standing was difficult, but the thread, which had seemed to be so flimsy, was durable, and it too conducted a flow of energy. The thread began to glow slightly, with the same pale-blue light as the fire, and the Newling felt their sphere lifting off the ground and suspended in the air. The manikin lying on the ground trembled, shuddered, and rose slightly off the ground.

  “There, it’s working.” She heard Skinhead’s satisfied voice. “Now we just need to breathe on it real hard.”

  They blew with all their might, and from the force of their breathing their sphere even expanded and contracted slightly, as if it too were breathing, and although the wind was carrying them off in some indeterminable direction, the Newling had the happy feeling of a child doing everything well and correctly and worthy of praise …