The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  “In three, three and a half months.”

  Her belly was taut, full. Sergei pulled back his hand as if he had been scalded by a teapot.

  “For real? Nothing like that has never happened to me before …”

  “Or to me either.” Tanya laughed. “There’s always a first time … This is the first time I’ve ever been with you.”

  He got up and went to the shower. He stood under the thin warm stream for several minutes. Then he drank some of the nasty water from his palms.

  “The girl’s nuts. I’m going to kick her out right now,” he decided, and stepped out of the shower. She was already standing alongside the door and slipped inside. She had a wonderful figure, and breasts, and waist. Her belly was not large, but entirely noticeable.

  He went back to bed and lit a cigarette.

  “Get dressed and leave,” he requested when she sat down next to him on the bed.

  She shook her head.

  “What, are you scared? Everything is all right. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “You’ve got a child inside you, and I could break something in there. Are you supposed to be screwing in your condition?”

  “Did it seem to you that I shouldn’t be?”

  “No, I just didn’t notice.”

  “Well, I think that I’m very much supposed to. After all, I came to the South in order to make life pleasurable for him.” She clasped her belly with her arms.

  “In what sense?”

  Tanya laughed.

  “Go swimming, roll around in the sun.”

  She dove into bed under the sheet and hugged him around the neck.

  “Everything I like, he likes. Word of honor.”

  She was a wonderful girl, and his fear had passed, while his desire remained. And in fact there was even a certain appeal to that taut belly of hers, those tense nipples, and the intensified womanliness that derived of her being pregnant. They spent the whole day in the hotel room, leaving only once to get mineral water …

  In the evening the musicians gave another concert, and Tanya could not take her mind off Seryozha’s music for a minute—it was the continuation of their new love. Then they spent the night together, collected some very respectable money for their performances in the morning, and left. Tanya ran over to Nanny Goat’s place for a minute, grabbed her travel bag, planted kisses on the top of Misha’s head and on Vika’s cheek, and disappeared from Nanny Goat’s sight forever.

  15

  THE JAZZ TRIO’S TOUR RAN FROM THE MIDDLE OF SUMmer until late autumn. They called themselves GAZ—Gabrielian, Aleksandrov, Zvorykin. It was their first year as a group, they were still just learning to function as a single organism, and things were just beginning to come together. Every day they made a new discovery. Although they did not give up their usual drinking habits, they essentially got drunk not on wine, but on the high that came from the music they made. The eldest and driving force behind the project was Garik Gabrielian, the only professional musician among them, who had been expelled in his last year from the Leningrad conservatory and effected a mind-boggling escape from the castle of classical beauty into the free zone of jazz improvisation. The drummer, Aleksandrov—a former engineer, mad with exotic ideas and at that particular moment preoccupied with levitation, but also having an unhealthy predilection for abominable snowmen, aliens, and extraterrestrial civilizations—banged out signals to unknown forces on his four booming drums and multitude of percussive rattles and clappers. He assured all that with proper percussive technique flight was as natural a phenomenon for humans as, for example, swimming. He had never, by the way, learned how to swim. Seven years later he chanced upon the golden vein of shamanism and ultimately flew off into the great beyond straight from his cot at a wretched psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Leningrad …

  Saxophonist Sergei Zvorykin also belonged to the breed of musical maniacs. By this point he had abandoned his studies at the Technological Institute in Leningrad, and having quarreled irrevocably with his father, a professor of communist philosophy, left home and married a forty-year-old retired ballerina, thereby driving the last nail into the coffin of his reputation as a sane human being. That was Tanya’s chosen man and his friends. It turned out that the people Tanya had taken so close to heart, the people for whom she had so longed, were not doctors, like her father, the best of the best; not scientists, like MarLena Sergeevna, armed with scissors and tweezers for poking around in the depths of a pregnant rat’s uterus; not tenacious and inspired dissidents, like old Goldberg and his sons; not Nanny Goat Vika’s loud and clueless semibohemians, but precisely these men of few words and vague thoughts—or rather no thoughts at all when it came to crucial real-life issues, be they moral, social, or political. They did nothing, they sought to achieve nothing, and they aspired to nothing: they simply played their music, played at their music, and entrusted it to speak for them, taking joy in that fact that it, their music, turned out to be so good at doing that …

  Tanya listened closely, not only at rehearsals and concerts, but all the time, from morning until night, from night until morning. It turned out that the music never stopped; it sounded not just in those moments when keyboards were pounded or horns blown.

  She told Sergei about her discovery. He just nodded his head.

  “Why, of course. And in dreams too. Especially in dreams …”

  Tanya strained her memory, or imagination, or some other organ responsible for nocturnal consciousness, and recollected, that yes, dreams do have music, only it’s impossible to remember it … From that day on a musical sound track appeared, running parallel to the world in which she was a participant, a stream uninterrupted and ever changeable, just like the view from a train car, inseparable from the movement of the train itself …

  The jazzmen’s music was but a component part of everything that moved alongside it, that lived and sang in the rustling and splashing and sounds of human speech—not in the dull sense of words, but in the timbre of voices, their banter back and forth, their intonations and rhythmic patterns … The sounds of machines and the natural voices of the sea, the wind, the rain—receding and approaching—existed like background noises, occasionally gathering strength and assuming the lead part … This lasting music had no preconceived plan; it existed beyond the limits of the chorus form, was full of arbitrariness or chance, but was nonetheless music, not musical chaos, and for all its uninterruptedness and infiniteness, it ultimately resolved to a cadence, culminating at logical points and taking off once again from almost any chance note …

  Once, when lying on the warm sand of a rather filthy beach, Tanya attempted to express this sensation verbally. Sergei nodded matter-of-factly.

  “Aleatoric. It is called aleatoric music. Chance contains a wealth of possibilities.”

  “Like fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope?” Tanya brightened.

  “You could put it that way. Talk to Garik, he’s a wiz at music theory; I’ve just picked up what I need along the way.”

  “Man, everything’s been figured out already,” Tanya said in dismay. “No matter what you discover, it’s been studied and described …”

  “You’re silly,” laughed Sergei. He stroked the rolling hill of her firm belly.

  “You’re not going to overheat, are you? Let’s go sit in the shade, huh?”

  In the space of two weeks he had grown as accustomed to Tanya and her belly as if he had spent the last six years with her and not with the retired ballerina Elvira Poluektova, who was totally devoid of female bulges or softness, which, it bears mentioning, he liked a lot.

  Following two more weeks of gigs in Odessa, the trio headed for the Caucasus mountain region.

  “First we’re going to put you on a train, and then we’ll head out,” Garik announced to Tanya.

  Tanya asked them not to send her off and to let her stay until the end of their tour. Sergei added: “At least for one week, Garik. We’ll do Sochi and send Tatiana from there. Besides, it’ll be easier
to get tickets by then.”

  This was absolutely true: train or air tickets were hugely difficult to obtain at the end of August.

  “What about her belly?” Garik frowned. He had two children, and he was the only one of them who knew from firsthand paternal experience that pregnancies inevitably ended with birth.

  Tanya folded her thin arms over her belly.

  “Garik, honey, I still have two more months ahead … Don’t banish me now. I’ll be good for something.”

  Garik raised his hands in defeat.

  “You’re just like the Frog Princess … Ultimately, it’s Seryoga’s decision. Not mine.”

  Garik was a classic Caucasian womanizer, who considered it his sacred duty to bang any and every big-busted blond at the same time he idolized his bright and scholarly wife, a Georgian woman grown old before her age, with a Ph.D. and a letterless bra size. He was prepared to approve of any of Seryoga’s affairs, particularly because he couldn’t stand that stuck-up and stupid ballerina, but Tanya’s pregnancy was a dilemma for him.

  “Are you sick, Seryoga? Tanka’s a nice little girl, but how you can fuck her with another man’s goods inside, I’ll never know.”

  Tanya’s belly in fact excited Sergei terribly. His marriage to Poluektova, who was abstractly sexual and barren as a rock, had been concluded coldly and straightforwardly. At the outset he had rented a room from her, then he started to bring home kefir and walk her two borzois, then somehow accidentally he found himself in her bed, and married her as a demonstration to the world, mostly his parents, of his total independence from everyone. At one time the retired ballerina had attracted him with her complete lack of resemblance to anything he had known before; Tanya now attracted him with her perception of the world, which coincided entirely with his, as did the course of her thoughts, the turns in her emotions, and, most of all, her protestant thirst for the truth, which in practice played out as protest against any kind of falsehood, be it official or everyday.

  “We have total synergy at the molecular level.” Tanya stated this surprising fact, and Sergei agreed.

  The tiny thing in the middle of Tanya’s belly got in absolutely no one’s way. Tanya said that her son was happy because she had found him a proper father. Sergei did not object to this either.

  There was also one other, profoundly intimate circumstance. For all her impudent spirit—being with a child that had resulted from a charitable act and touchingly uninhibited in her examinations of male anatomy, to which she had not condescended in her earlier experience—Tanya, as she candidly admitted to Sergei, until that summer had never known the not exclusively human delight that any living creature from earthworm to hippopotamus experiences as the direct result of the friction of mucous glands against mucous glands, producing a powerful release of the central nervous system.

  “It’s the most fundamental difference between men and women: men can achieve it with anyone and at any time,” Tanya philosophized drowsily.

  “You’re mistaken, I know a lot of women who can achieve it with anyone,” Sergei objected.

  “But for some reason I don’t want to continue exploring how many men in the world I can achieve it with. I think I’ll stop with you.”

  “Just keep in mind that others have already stopped with me.” Sergei laughed.

  From time to time Tanya called Vitalka and her father in Moscow. It was impossible to get through to Obninsk: Gena’s laboratory had one landline for the entire floor, and the person on duty in the dormitory would not call people to the phone in the evening. It was precisely Gena Tanya really wanted to talk to, to tell him that she had fallen head over heels in love and was not planning to return to Moscow. She didn’t have the resolve to tell either her father or Vitalka that: Vitalka was too vain, and her father too logical and serious. As it was, he was demanding that she return immediately, shouting into the receiver that the end of the seventh month was particularly dangerous, and that she was putting the child at risk.

  “He’s doing well, Daddy! And I’m doing well! We’re so well! We’re going to stay here just a little bit longer!” She held the phone with one hand and Seryozha’s hand with the other.

  “Should I send money?” Pavel Alekseevich asked.

  “No money. Don’t send any money. Day after tomorrow I’m going to Sukhumi!” she shouted joyfully, while Pavel Alekseevich, once the phone call was over, went to his study to down a glass of tranquilizer. He in fact was very worried: Tanya had her mother’s build, the same narrowness of the lower pelvis, and there was danger the pelvic bones might separate. She should be confined to bed rest.

  It could never have entered Pavel Alekseevich’s head that she would not return to Moscow to give birth, but would remain to deliver her child in some other city, into a stranger’s hands.

  But that was precisely how it happened. The tour, having begun successfully in Yalta and met with even greater success in Odessa, achieved the pinnacle of success in Sochi. In Sukhumi they were received considerably less enthusiastically, and in Batumi they gave only two of the four scheduled concerts. Scorching Adzharia gave them a cold reception, partly because it was the beginning of the tangerine harvest season, and so they left, breaking their semilegal contract. Garik was anxious to send Tanya home, but she kept finding pretexts not to go, until he just gave up.

  Over the past month Tanya had noticeably put on weight, and the child would go for days without making himself known, then suddenly make such a fuss inside that it felt as if there were a whole pack of children in there. At night Sergei would put his hand on her stomach and feel a heel or a fist thrashing and with entirely distinct outlines.

  “I could give birth to twins,” Tanya threatened Sergei, but he was lighthearted and without a care.

  “What difference does it make? If it’s twins, it’s twins. One gray, one white, two happy geese.” He clapped her on her swollen side, pressing his lips to her thin skin stretched to its maximum from within, and his attraction to the future child’s domicile not only did not wane, but, on the contrary, increased.

  “I like it so much, I love it so awfully much. You will always be pregnant and having babies with me … Like Natalia Nikolaevna …” Like all Petersburgers, he did not invoke Goncharova’s surname—there was no need. “Abortions are abominations. When she was young, Poluektova got herself scraped every three months. Ballet dancers don’t have babies. But you and I will never do that … Never … It’s so beautiful. Carefully … very carefully … I won’t hurt you …”

  Up until the moment she gave birth they were unable to tear themselves apart from each other.

  Tanya did not return to Moscow. She flew to Leningrad at the end of October. They had no place to live. Initially they crashed with Tolya Aleksandrov, the drummer. Long ago his family had been allotted communal living space in the former living room (with three pseudo-Italian windows) of a grand apartment on the corner of Pestel Street and Liteiny Avenue, but the huge room had already been partitioned off with wooden walls into four long pencil cases with three-fourths of a window in each. True, following the deaths of his mother and grandmother Tolya came into two whole rooms, and now he let one of them to his friends. The money earned on the tour quickly ran out, and so they lived together with Tolya as one needy family. Tanya fried potatoes, did the laundry, cleaned the neglected rooms, and listened to the music, that same unceasing sound track that she had learned to hear during their travels …

  In the middle of December an ambulance took Tanya to a maternity hospital. They did not want to accept her without documentation from a women’s clinic. All she had with her was her passport with her Moscow registration and labor pains. While admissions was scolding her for being so irresponsible, her water broke, and there was nothing left to do but place the woman in labor on a cart and take her to the delivery room. The baby was delivered by one of those midwives taught by Pavel Alekseevich at advanced qualification courses at the institute, and, seeing the renowned last name on a hastily written piece
of paper, the midwife asked Tanya if she was related to Doctor Kukotsky. Once she learned that she was his daughter, the midwife never left her side and at the end of the tenth hour of labor—which was good, even quick, for a first delivery—received her little girl with rather long black hair.

  When she heard that she had a daughter, Tanya cried bitterly. Never had she been so profoundly disappointed …

  The midwife who had performed the delivery called Moscow, tracked down Pavel Alekseevich’s home phone number, and congratulated him on the birth of a granddaughter.

  16

  PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH PUT DOWN THE RECEIVER. HIS HEART suddenly drained, skipped a beat, then burst into a drumroll.

  “Oh-ho, one hundred eighty beats a minute,” he estimated. “Paroxysmal tachycardia …” He reached for his watch—half past four. A night girl. Born between midnight and late sunrise. December 16. The darkest days of the year. Close to the solstice.

  The second hand of his old—wartime—Swiss watch was completing its meticulous circle, and Pavel Alekseevich automatically counted his pulse. One hundred ninety beats a minute.

  He lowered his legs from the bed. Dry sinewy sticks. He pressed his finger against the ball of his foot: not a hint of edema.

  “All right, thank God, I have a granddaughter. No more feeling offended. My disappointment is of no significance.”

  He sat for a rather long time, waiting for the rhythm of his heart to settle down. “Most likely it’s sinus arrhythmia.” Pavel Alekseevich quickly arrived at a diagnosis.

  He stood up and did his nighttime rounds, checking the apartment in which he had lived almost twenty years. A massive old man with a shaved head dressed in old military long johns, his back hunched, made his way along the corridor and turned on the light in the anteroom: the place couldn’t have been more run-down. At first he looked into the girls’ room: there were two beds there. Toma was sleeping on one, while the other, Tanya’s, was piled with a mountain of unironed laundry. Dark masses of leaves billowed disagreeably in the room’s twilight; it smelled of damp earth …