The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  “Here’s the official notification of your inheritance.” He handed her the envelope. “Your father, Flotov, as we found out not long ago, did not perish at the front, but somehow wound up in Argentina, where he died not long ago. They’re looking for his heirs.”

  “So, like, he remembered me only after he died? What about earlier? No, Dad, I don’t want anything. I don’t need anything.” She pushed the envelope away and never thought of it again in her life …

  12

  IN THE MIDDLE OF JULY THE GOLDBERGS GOT MARRIED: Vitalka and Tanya signed at the Moscow Wedding palace, while Ilya Iosifovich registered his vows with Valentina in a camp in Mordovia. At the camp they completed the formalities without ornamental witnesses—in the presence of the camp’s regimen officer and the Moscow attorney who had managed to obtain permission for a prison marriage. Gena and Toma served as witnesses for Vitalik and Tanya. Toma—in a pink dress and white shoes on stiff heels—looked like the bride. Tanya had not thought of dressing up, but one could not say that she had totally ignored the importance of the moment: she had marked it with the purchase of three absolutely identical yellow and white striped men’s shirts, and in these shirts the three of them looked like they were all from the same children’s home—shorn short, thin, identically dressed, and the same height, five feet seven inches.

  Toma was disappointed—no reception, no gifts, and no merrymaking. She wanted grand solemnity and a huge party, but all that was precisely what Tanya could not bear. Their sole wedding gift was an orange-pink orchid, for which Toma the day before had traveled to the home of a friend from the Botanical Gardens and which replaced the traditional fleur d’orange. The mental picture of the brothers Goldberg with Tanya between them bearing a languid wobbly branch with three large drooping flowers—lion’s heads with manes, mouths, and side petals forming a lighter-colored halo, “a rarity of rarities”—would remain in Toma’s memory for the rest of her life.

  Vitalik did, though, get one more present. After the newlyweds received their marriage certificate written out on iridescently patterned official paper, Tanya pulled out of the pocket of her yellow-and-white shirt a certificate, folded in half, from the obstetric care center certifying that she was in her eighteenth week of pregnancy. Together these two documents gave Vitalik the right to a deferral from military service.

  Having resolutely refused all services offered by the state, from Mendelssohn’s “March” to expensive champagne, and accepting only the pompous congratulations of the Nonna Mordiukova look-alike beneath the red flag with the red suit and the red satin ribbon across her fat chest who had conducted the ceremony, the kids descended the grand staircase of the Wedding Palace, sat down on the steps, and drank a bottle of cheap, sour Rkatsiteli, after which Gena hailed a passing cab, he and Tanya got in, and they drove off.

  Toma, stunned and unaware of the true state of affairs, asked the melancholic young husband, “Where are they going?”

  “To Obninsk. She’s planning to spend the week there …”

  Tanya spent not one, but two whole weeks in Obninsk. Back in Moscow, she immediately stopped in at home. She missed them.

  She found Elena in her former condition, but very pale and limp, and she even tried to persuade her to go outside for a walk. Elena was so frightened by the offer that what had started as a coherent conversation suddenly came to a halt as she babbled pathetic and incoherent words.

  “If it wouldn’t be too much to ask … Might I possibly go there … You have to ask Pavel Alekseevich. Isn’t that so?”

  Tanya was horrified. Her mother’s illness was something unique, unlike anything else, and getting used to it was impossible.

  Later Pavel Alekseevich arrived and was delighted to see both Tanya and her belly, which had just begun to show.

  “Come on, I’ll tell you about our little boy.”

  Neither of them doubted for a minute that Tanya would give birth to a boy, and each time they met, Tanya would ask her father to tell her how the child must look at that point.

  She made herself comfortable on the couch, tucked her legs under her, and loosened the button of her jeans. He sat down on a round stool alongside her.

  “So, tell me,” she said.

  “So, now. First of all, I’m certain that he already feels something. Folk belief has it that the soul enters the child at the midpoint of pregnancy. That is, he begins to move and to feel simultaneously.”

  “No, I felt a lot earlier that he was running his finger along inside me,” Tanya objected.

  “Well, that means our little boy is an early developer. I’m telling you what happens in the average situation. Your little one is floating now and has no idea of up or down. He’s like this, about a foot long. His head is large and covered with hair, which, if it was light before, has now darkened. He is relatively grown, has acquired more than half of his height, but weighs only a pound and a half. A skinny little thing. And his skin right now is very wrinkled, without any hypodermic fat. But he doesn’t need fat right now. He’s covered with down, and the vernix caseosa is already forming. His face has acquired distinct features. He already resembles you, that is, I hope he resembles you. But the main work going on right now is taking place in his nervous system. A very complex program has to set in for his organs to begin working. It’s forming right now. How? I don’t know. And don’t ask. No one knows.

  “There’s a lot I don’t know about what’s taking place in there. But some things I do know. It seems to me that he has already acquired awareness of himself and that precisely in these last few days his sense of ‘I’ has been born. His sense of being apart from the rest of the world. The ‘rest of his world’ is you, my joy. Because until he’s born he’ll know no other world. With men that never happens. Men are never the cosmos. But a pregnant woman—in the second half of her pregnancy, at least—represents the entire enclosed cosmos of another human creature. You know, my dear, it always seemed completely natural to me that there could exist a species of animal where the female would die immediately after giving birth. The cosmos gives birth to the cosmos: who needs this imperfect world? That’s me talking nonsense. He’s floating right now like a rowboat tied to a pier, back and forth. Suspended from a mooring by the cable of his umbilical cord, and listening, probably, as the dense waves come and go, the thick moisture flowing about his sides and his tucked-under legs. They’re crossed, almost in a lotus pose. And the nails on his feet are already forming. And the auricles of his ears have already formed, but they’re still only skin, without any cartilage. And you know, those little ears of his are big. I wonder if he can hear what we’re talking about. You know, I don’t rule that out. Your mother was certain that the larger part of what she knew, even about drafting, she learned before she was born. I can’t say anything of the sort about myself. But then men are much more crudely constructed creatures than women. In biological terms a woman, as I see it, is the more perfect creature. I think that our little boy already experiences changes of mood. Sometimes he’s dissatisfied, sometimes happy. For example, when you eat something tasty, an hour and a half later he can already taste strawberries or grapes.”

  “Can he smile already?” Tanya interrupted her father.

  “I don’t think so. The mimetic muscles begin to function later. As a rule, as I’ve observed, fetuses have rather poor and somewhat chaotic facial expressions. There is, though, one certain expression they have—one of concentration and withdrawal—I know that one very well …”

  “And what would give him pleasure? What do you think? Maybe I should take him to a concert?”

  “Give yourself as much pleasure as you can—I think that will be pleasant for him as well,” Pavel Alekseevich advised his daughter. He could have had no idea in what direction his innocent recommendation would lead Tanya.

  13

  NANNY GOAT INHERITED A FORTUNE FROM THE ELDEST of her aunts and blew it immediately. More precisely, she blew only the packaging, a pudgy silver Fabergé jewelry box with a
pseudo-Greek female profile and three yellow diamonds on the lid. The jewelry box was late moderne, ornate, and the embodiment of a butler’s concept of true luxury. The box’s contents, however, were charming pieces of jewelry of pearl and amethyst, not of great value, but marvelous pieces of work with a pedigree: they had been presents to her great-grandmother from one of the Yusupov princes.

  The jewelry box brought Nanny Goat big money, approximately one one-hundredth of what it ultimately went for at an auction in London. But Nanny Goat never found out about that, while five hundred rubles were ooh-la-la what a sum of cash. Handed the money directly by an acquaintance, the director of a commission shop, she took a taxi to the dacha she had rented where her son Misha was stuck with her two remaining aunts and his own grandmother, Nanny Goat’s mother. She picked the kid up, and—paying almost twice the face value—bought train tickets to the South.

  Tanya arrived at her place the next day in the morning, having missed her cheerful banter. There were still six hours before the train departed, and Nanny Goat persuaded Tanya to go with her.

  “The ticket’s not a problem. If worst comes to worst, we’ll fix it so you can sleep in the conductor’s compartment.” Nanny Goat waved a fat bankroll before Tanya’s nose.

  At eight in the evening they were sitting in the train. An hour later, after all the tiny suburban stops had winked good-bye and remained behind, they found themselves luxuriously ensconced in a compartment of their own, having resettled the inhabitants of the entire sleeping car. Among Nanny Goat’s many talents was the ability to set down roots instantly, and blithe to the effort it cost, she had dragged along a whole suitcase of things that, from Tanya’s point of view, were entirely superfluous: little napkin placemats, coffee cups from home, and even a copper crank coffee grinder … Tanya’s lean bag held a bathing suit, some underwear, and a spacious dress with enough room for her future belly. She hadn’t even taken a towel, planning to buy one once they got there …

  It was not quite clear to her where “there” was. One of the Goat’s customers, an actress, who had dropped in the night before to show off her deep, still somewhat reddish, suntan, had sung the praises of the Dniester Estuary, from where she had just returned. Nanny Goat, white and freckled and never in her life ever able to get a real tan, was struck with envy and decided to try the same estuary sun, and now they were traveling to approximately the same places that the exiled Ovid had cursed …

  Their route took them through Odessa. At a transfer point in Odessa they were supposed to meet the mother of one of Vika’s girlfriends, who would put them up for the night and the next day put them on a bus through Bilhorod-Dnistrovsky to a sandbar between the Dniester Estuary and the sea …

  They arrived in Odessa toward evening. Waiting for them was a huge—couch-size—woman, Zinaida Nikiforovna, swaddled in flower-patterned silk. Next to her the buxom Goat seemed like a sparrow, and the woman immediately took to them with indulging tenderness. She dragged them down to her “ah-paht-ment,” two connected rooms in a communal apartment that had seen better times. A mirror in a gold-leaf frame occupied the space between two Venetian windows and reflected the ranks of five-pint canning jars of tender fruit boiled alive and intended for speedy consumption. The house burst with food and drink, and before they could wash up, their “open-ahmed” hostess started piling food on the table … Little Misha was falling asleep at his plate. Zinaida Nikiforovna waved him off in disappointment and told them to put him to bed. Like all seaside denizens, she had a stash of folding cots and bedding for the innumerable relatives who came to visit. While their hostess made up a cot for Misha in the next room, Goat whispered to Tanya:

  “We’re in for it now …”

  But they had no idea what adventures lay ahead.

  Little Misha fell asleep immediately. Zinaida Nikiforovna declared that they should all call her “Mama Zina,” that right now she had to go to work, and proposed that they take a stroll through evening Odessa, because there was no other city like it on earth …

  They walked out onto the boulevard submerged under a flood of people, taking in the overabundant denseness of the southern evening, the warm air weighed down by cachinnate voices, and the waves of food and beer lightly seasoned with the smell of vomit. Above all this floated the sounds of Odessa-Soviet radio music—crude thieves’ cant, but not without its own charm.

  The crowd on Deribasovskaya Street respectfully circumvented Mama Zina, splitting into two streams as they approached her cephalothorax, while Tanya and Vika, moored to her powerful right and left sides, occasionally exchanged glances, barely able to contain their laughter. Never closing her mouth of gold teeth for a second, Mama Zina spoke about literary Odessa.

  “We’ll take their Babel and Ilf and Petrov, even Bagritsky and Kataev, and even Margarita Aliger and Vera Inber. If we subtract them, who’s left? Do we need that Sholokhov of theirs? Their Fadeev? Bunin lived here. Even Pushkin spoke on behalf of Odessa! Right here!” she proclaimed, having stopped at the respectable entrance of the Hotel London. “Here’s where I work. We’ll go through the staff entrance.”

  It was a sailors’ club. International. Hard currency. A nightclub … And Mama Zina was in charge of the beer …

  “They’re with me,” she said, squeezing into the narrow corridor, to a whitish man who looked like a packing trunk and who had appeared from a dark corner. He nodded. They entered the main room. It was air-raid dark, and the pianist played quietly. Several sailors who had not yet had their fill lazily drank their beer, while two painted working girls sat at a corner table and lushly sucked something through straws.

  People spoke quietly, and the place did not smell of fish. Even Mama Zina sort of partly faded behind the bar counter. The beer was domestic, but the money was real—hard currency. Not just anyone got hired for this kind of work, only the most trusted. Mama Zina was precisely that kind—every seam of her, down to her uterus, checked by state security, even before the war, a partisan and a member of the underground. Here too her watchful party eye insured nothing got out of hand. As for the girls, the friends of her daughter who’d split to the capital, let them sit here and take a look, have some fun with the sailors, dance a bit …

  The pianist picked quietly at some song that was definitely not of the domestic variety, but soulful in its own way. It used to be that Zinaida Nikiforovna did not like this newfangled music, but then it grew on her. They played jazz here.

  The drummer arrived and set up his drums. He started to warm up. The really hot one was the one with the horn. But he was running late.

  It grew dark outside, and lights went on in the club. People started showing up. There was rarely a crowd here.

  Tanya felt more and more like sleeping. The piano gloriously purred out one and the same tune, but in different variations, which was rather interesting musically and slightly intoxicating, and she had no desire to get up. Then the horn’s voice rang out. It cut through the piano’s murmur with a dramatic and bitter sound. Tanya turned toward the stage. A not very tall, thin boy held a saxophone with both hands, and it seemed as if the instrument wanted to tear itself from his grasp as he tried to hold it back. What torturous music it was—sweetly painful, bitterly salty, sadly joyous … These were improvisations on Miles Davis’s old album ’Round Midnight, the saxophone following Coltrane’s dramatic lead, but at that moment Tanya knew none of this.

  The musicians played as if slightly out of sync, the drummer holding back, the pianist heading off ahead then slowing down, while the saxophone followed its own separate road, and occasionally they all came together as if accidentally, carrying on an exchange at the point they met, a question-answer session—about something important, but incomprehensible … They all played very precisely and subtly, but the saxophonist was the best of all … The wind spun around him, fluttering his straight, blond hair, and Tanya had the urge to place her face right under the sound of his horn … She didn’t even notice that Nanny Goat went off to dance with a fore
ign sailor who looked too scrawny and intelligent for so masculine a profession. Some creep approached Tanya, and she jolted in fright: no, no. He went away. Nanny Goat continued dancing with scrawny-guy and was even communicating something in a mix of German and French, which somehow overlapped with his English and Swedish …

  “Why did I give up music? Dad was right: sit at the piano; it flows from your fingers; you’re just a container, a mechanism for making the transfer from sheet music to sound … I don’t remember why I gave it up … Because of Tomochka, that’s why … The Komsomol consciousness of the idiot … It wasn’t the right music anyway. Music like this I’d never have given up … That and that,” she thought, noting the sighs of the saxophone and the heartbeat of the drummer …

  “Whatever dragged me into that scientific rat’s nest? I could have studied music … How expressive that saxophone is! I never realized that it had the intonations of a human voice. Or is the musician that talented? Yes, probably the latter …”

  The Swede escorted them back to Zinaida’s place. The two of them liked each other, but it was clear that this evening would be the end of something that wasn’t even started. He gave Nanny Goat a present, a notepad that already had writing in it, with a black leather cover—really classy. He didn’t have anything else. He wrote his address on the first page. Rune Svenson. And that was it. Because the next morning his ship was heading out to who knew where and forever. What a shame!

  They were let in by Zinaida’s sister, who lived in the same communal apartment and had kept watch over Misha’s sleep. By the time Mama Zina, who worked until three, returned, everyone was asleep. In the morning she saw her guests to the bus station, and they set off on the flat, dusty road. Sitting in the jolting, sweltering bus, Tanya remembered that that night she had had a dream with yesterday’s music in it, but in proportions larger than life, and it was performed by unusual sounding instruments …