Shortly after, he discovered what could provide each of them some relief from their mutual torture: when he placed his huge hands, slightly inclined toward each other on their heads, they would calm down. Before his eyes their wounds stopped bleeding, dried up, and scabbed over …
The initial sense of disorientation Skinhead experienced after the Judean left soon passed. His lifelong assistant—what he called either his intravision or simply intuition—now awakened in him not at those moments when he was examining patients or performing operations, but in those situations when Skinhead experienced uncertainty or perplexity.
After one of their rest stops, when Skinhead waved his hand over the flame and turned off the lighter glued firmly to his palm, which made the fire lull, the heat ceased to be emitted, and only its remnant continued to warm his palm for quite some time, at which point he sensed clearly which direction they needed to go. What used to show him those “inner pictures” now suggested which direction to move in … They set off in their usual order: single, maximum double file—Longhair with his case, Fat Lady with her enormous stomach, and Tiny and Longlegs with their chain … Skinhead had prepared himself for a long trek, but rather quickly a dark structure resembling an outbuilding came into sight in the distance. Closer up, they discovered that it was not a structure at all, but a section of forest densely bound with leafless branches. Like a nursery. Strange low-standing trees. Their trunks and branches were almost identical in girth, grayish brown, without the slightest hint of leaves. From a short distance it seemed as if the branches moved slightly. There was something invidious about their movement.
“Let’s go closer,” said Skinhead, and all of them, like children, obediently moved closer. The branches really were moving. They were covered over entirely with strange creatures the size of large rats, with old, completely hairless, loose, baggy, wrinkled skin and just as gray-brown as the trunks of the trees. They gnawed at the bark hungrily, ravenously, emitting an almost machinelike buzz.
Skinhead took one of these creatures by the scruff of its neck and pulled it off the trunk. It grumbled with discontent: “Let me go, let me go …” He straightened out the fat but scrawny little animal, and his fellow travelers saw that this repellent creature was a human being. Its tiny legs and arms were atrophied, its head was oversized like an embryo’s with barely perceptible slits for closed eyes, its nose undeveloped, and its mouth large and protruding, with bright-white rodentlike teeth. The muscles around its mouth automatically tensed, and its jaws continued to make their gnawing movement.
Skinhead petted the humanoid rodent and placed it back on the branch he had just removed it from.
“My Lord, who is that?” asked Newling in horror.
“The thirsty seeking to be filled,” Skinhead said derisively, then hesitated immediately: What am I doing? Why am I teasing her again? What inveterate madness …
Some wall cracked or curtain tore, and a huge piece of former knowledge surfaced in her memory: her parents, her grandmother, their house in Trekhprudny Lane, the commune in Troparevo … Lev Tolstoy and the Gospel, not the Gospel of Tolstoy, but the original one that she had received from her grandmother … Immediately she choked on his derisive tone: she recognized the words from the Gospels that he had obviously and deliberately distorted: “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled …”
“No, no, I am not making a mockery. I’m sorry. That’s just my way … I only wanted to say that that is their truth … All passion ultimately dies, does it not?” he continued, but her heart beat painfully from his words. “Just not everyone manages to find peace in the time allotted.”
He bent over and picked up off the ground a startled creature that had just fallen off a tree trunk. Now it was not a human rodent, but resembled more a human worm. The creature was motionless, its teeth had disappeared, and its mouth had acquired a size proportional to its head, while its tiny face seemed completely childlike.
“That’s it. It’s been filled. Now it most resembles a five-month-old human embryo.”
The Professor glanced over the Newling’s shoulder. Something terrifying came into his head, and he asked hoarsely: “Is it dead?”
“What are you saying! There is no death, Professor. And this one, I think, is considerably closer to the beginning than to the end,” Skinhead answered mysteriously.
At this point the Professor exploded: “I hate riddles! I demand a clear and concise answer to the question of what is going on here. If you consider it obligatory to show me all these so-called miracles, then could you at least explain your parables and allegories so that they make some sense … ?”
“What parables!” Skinhead laughed sincerely. “You and I haven’t even got to the alphabet yet!”
“Mind you, I’m going to complain! I have important connections in the most serious of organizations too!” the Professor chirred, and Skinhead seemed to retreat at his shouting and started to reason with him.
“Do pardon me. I in no way wanted to offend you or anything like that … You and I can discuss all this, just not right now. A little bit later. Now’s not the time. It’s not appropriate …”
The Professor calmed down: that it was not appropriate was something he could understand; it sounded convincing. And it was also pleasing that at the mention of his connections Skinhead had changed his tone of voice …
The beautiful woman stood alongside, tears flowing down her cheeks. It was apparent to the Professor that Skinhead had his eyes set on her.
“The poor, poor things,” she whispered. And unexpectedly quickly she asked Skinhead: “Is the tree bitter?”
He looked at her and responded very quietly, but the Professor heard it all down to the last word.
“Bitter? Of course, it’s bitter …” He motioned with his hand that it was all right to keep going in the indicated direction.
9
IT WAS A LONG, LOW MOAN THAT DESCENDED INTO A uterine growl. Skinhead searched with his eyes for Manikin, but the latter kept stomping along on its sluggish feet. The source of the groan turned out to be Fat Lady, who was dropping to the ground. With a professional’s hand Skinhead caught her up from behind. He helped her fall into a more comfortable pose. Fat Lady lay there, her legs bent at the knees as she attempted to clasp her enormous stomach. A puddle spread underneath her back …
“Is she giving birth?” Skinhead was astonished. “How strange that someone can give birth in this place … On the other hand, why not?”
The woman wore a flannel robe with large terry-cloth flowers, and a few of the buttons had managed to detach themselves under the pressure of her writhing body. With skilled fingers he undid the rest. He pulled the hem of her nightshirt back toward her enormous floppy breasts, and what he saw took his breath away. At first it seemed to him that her body was bound with a multitude of thick pink and lilac-crimson plaits with large sea mollusks, similar to those of the genus Tonicella or Neopilina, growing on them, each of them the size of a tea saucer. He touched one of the shells: it was not separable from her body, but some sort of parasitical growth. All these plaits and shells were attached with cords that had sprouted in her stomach. There was even a sort of monstrously attractive artistry to this living network.
Never in his long years of medical practice had Skinhead seen anything like this. He had no instruments with him, only the silver spoon he stuck between Manikin’s clenching jaws whenever its seizures began. Nothing but his bare hands …
He began to examine her, at least visually, and attempted to shift one of the shell-like growths and to palpate her stomach. On first palpation he thought he felt the fetus’s hand. High, very high up, right under her diaphragm.
“A breach presentation,” he uttered, dismayed, anticipating additional complications with the turn of the legs. He wanted to continue his manual examination, but something monstrous occurred: the little fist he had just felt punched through the taut wall of the belly and came through to the
surface. Fat Lady howled.
“Hold on, hold on, my dear,” he calmed the woman.
What is this? Perforation of the uterus wall, the wall of the abdominal prelum, and the surface of the skin? That’s unimaginable! How macerated must the tissues be for them to perforate under pressure from a fetus’s hand? He pressed her stomach once again: it was hard and dense.
Just then his intravision clicked on, and an image appeared. The woman’s entire womb was packed solid with infants, like a fish with caviar. The little fist he held in his hand belonged to a completely formed nine-month-old fetus, as apparent from the dense little nails on its fingers—a significant indicator of maturation …
With two fingers he expanded the opening from which the little hand had emerged. The woman moaned.
“Hold on just a bit, just a bit: you’re giving birth to a little champion,” he bolstered the woman with his automatically vigorous tone of voice.
The opening gave way easily, and, taking the child’s hand into his own, his arm disappeared into the hole almost to the elbow: he was hoping to turn the child by the head. It turned very easily, but face-first, not neck-first. The doctor made it dive downward and placed his hand under the back of its head.
The woman moaned, but she was no longer shouting, and Skinhead continued mumbling his usual, calming somethings, without giving it a second thought.
“That’s good, Mommy. Your first child? Second? You know what you’re doing then … Breathe deeper, deeper … And not so fast, count to ten …”
Everything went quite quickly, quite wonderfully, and the little boy popped out. A normal, live infant lay in the doctor’s hand covered in thick vernix caseosa … With no umbilical cord. A child could be born without arms, without legs, and without a head. But without an umbilical cord? The umbilical depression was deep, and clean, completely healed …
Despite his surprise, Skinhead did what needed to be done at that moment: he cleaned out the nose and the oral cavity, and, turning the infant upside down, smacked it on its moist buttocks. It emitted a deep insulted cry: “wah-wah …”
How long had it been since Skinhead had last heard this plaintive sound of new life? … The pathetic music, the hoarse song of lungs just opened, the first attempt at musical articulation from the cartilaginous flute of the vocal cords that frightens the performer himself … The infant cries out of fright at the new sound.
But this time everything was different, contrary to all rules, habits, and expectations. The infant easily detached itself from the doctor’s palm—just as a bubble of air rises from an underwater plant to the surface, and still articulating the same two notes, it floated smoothly upward about three feet, then disappeared, leaving behind the sound of a burst rubber ball and a swift whirlpool in the air …
Skinhead barely managed to follow it with his eyes, when the woman in labor let out another howl, and he dropped down to his knees alongside her. Among the rainbow network of growths there were two gaping tears: out of one stuck a little foot, and from the other a gray little head was pushing its way outward. The place from which the first infant had just been extracted had closed into a folded navel, so there was no need to suture it. Skinhead attempted to feel with his hand whether the head and the foot belonged to one child or two.
The woman screamed. Skinhead, while pushing the leg back inside, pressed on the woman’s stomach so that it was easier for the head to come through. A shell-like growth impeded the opening from widening, and Skinhead pulled the growth back with the silver spoon, using the fingers of his left hand to open up a path. The second boy was also without an umbilical cord, but Skinhead now thought only about how not to let this child float off into the sky. However, the phenomenon repeated itself exactly as before: the infant began to scream and to move its little hands, and although Skinhead held on to it tightly this time, covering it with his second hand, the infant slipped out from under his hand and, like a soap bubble, with the very same smacking sound, floated off, leaving one more quickly dissipating vortex.
With the third infant Skinhead struggled a lot longer because it came feet first—to turn it over had proved impossible—and to make matters worse, it pulled a section of the cord that had grown into the woman’s stomach in its tightly clenched fist. This time, though, Skinhead was already not surprised when the back of the light, hairless little girl detached itself from his moist palm and floated into the air.
The difficulty with the set of twins lay in that they turned out to be in a single amniotic sack and could not emerge from the opening, so that Skinhead was forced to bite through not the umbilical cord, as do animals and women giving birth without help, but the elastic dark-blue rope around the woman’s stomach, which, although it had emptied considerably, continued to be enormous.
The next child surprised Skinhead by emerging the most natural way, through the birth canal, but it also did not gladden him with an umbilical cord. That was the sixth. The seventh was born right after, also the old-fashioned way, but it was very premature and floated off the doctor’s hand so reluctantly that Skinhead even regretted slightly that he had not attempted to restrain it. Strictly speaking, the last two were hetero-ovular twins, but developmentally one lagged behind the other by about seven weeks. That just doesn’t happen … True, with twins it frequently happens that one overwhelms the other in prenatal development … But there was no time to intellectualize, because out of the woman’s stomach poked the little hand of the next client waiting to emerge …
When the multiple births finally ended, the woman asked where her children were. Skinhead stroked her face: it was she, his primary patient, the one for whose sake he had waged his battle with medical bureaucrats, with his colleagues, with his friends, and even with his family … She was exhausted by work beyond her strength, hunger, birthing, loneliness, responsibility, and lack of money, and he explained as best he could that her children must be in heaven. She sobbed bitterly.
“But what about me, not a single little child for me, not one?”
She lay there as he kneeled before her. The tangle of growths and cords had slackened and now hung around her hips, which were covered with stretch marks and abrasions. He pulled at one of the shells, and it remained in his hand. Dense and alive as worms just moments ago, the cords crumbled in his hands, and the entire confused network fell from her body like a dry hull. Some sort of leathery membrane that reminded him of a shed snakeskin fell from the woman’s hips. Her body recovered its human dignity. And her eyes, ringed by dark circles of suffering, looked at the doctor with gratitude. He knew well that exhausted, somewhat vacant look of a woman who had just given birth …
“Can you walk?” Skinhead asked.
“I’ll stay here,” she answered.
Skinhead then buried the remainder of the monstrous growths in the sand, gathered several dry plants off the ground, and lit a fire.
“You rest, my child, just rest. Everything will be all right …”
She began to move, and rose up on one arm. “What do you mean—all right … ?”
Skinhead looked back: they were waiting for him. For the first time in their entire journey, he did not put out the fire as he left.
They set off further in their usual fashion, in single or double file, and Skinhead, looking back, could still see the bluish flame in the distance. Then he heard a hollow smacking sound, and when he turned around for the last time he saw nothing except the sand hills and his own tracks quickly swept over by light drifts of sand …
10
FOR A WHILE THE PROFESSOR DISPLAYED A CERTAIN acquiescence and stopped battering Skinhead with questions. He tried talking with Newling: she just looked at him wide-eyed and benevolent, incapable of giving an intelligible answer to any of his questions. He deliberated at length how best to approach Skinhead so as not to lose face yet achieve some degree of clarity. This strange journey was dragging on, yet at the same time—the Professor sensed—his desire to find an explanation for it all was waning: an inkling ha
d crept into his head, but he kept driving it away. What was more, a strange apathy had overcome him. The campfire had a twofold effect on him: it calmed him, but also dulled his mind …
One time the Professor sat down next to Skinhead at the campfire and addressed him with respectful courtesy.
“Could you tell me, please, whether you have any means of contacting my family, my wife, that is? I am certain that she is very worried …”
“In principle, I do. What exactly would you like me to communicate to her?”
“Well, first of all, that I’m alive and well. You see, we’ve been married almost forty-two years and have never been separated for any length of time. If for some reason I cannot be returned to my former position,” here the Professor inserted a pregnant pause so that Skinhead would appreciate the full extent of his, the Professor’s, discretion, “might she be sent to join me?”
Skinhead scratched behind his ear with his thick finger. “Hmm … Could you tell me whether or not your wife believes in God?”
The Professor was indignant: “Excuse me! Well, we’re atheists, of course. I am a philosopher, a Marxist, and I teach Marxist-Leninist aesthetics. My wife is a party member …”
“I see, I see,” Skinhead interjected. “Are there any people of faith in your family at all?”
“No, of course not. My mother-in-law was an ignorant village woman, but she died—rest her soul—in 1951 …”
“Well that’s of no significance whatsoever.” Skinhead seemed to want to calm him.
“I’m sorry. What’s of no significance?”
“That she’s dead … In principle, we can get in touch with her. Only, you know, I would advise you to limit yourself to a brief message, on the order of, say, ‘Everything is all right. Don’t worry …’ How can you invite her here if you yourself don’t have a very good idea of where it is you are?”
“Clever bastard. He’s hinting that the place is classified,” the Professor seethed, but his position was so tenuous that he could hardly make demands or insist. And clashing with this Skinhead was dangerous: he was obviously not high up on the pecking order, but how to get to someone higher up? There was no one to complain to … For that reason the Professor merely affirmed: “Yes. I really don’t have a very good idea what this place is, and for a long time I’ve been wanting to obtain some information from you …”
The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel Page 26
