The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  He turned down the corridor to the left and looked into their former bedroom, Elena’s room. There was a complex smell of hospital, dust, and some sort of bitter herb.

  It was filthy. Their place had become very filthy. Vasilisa’s vision was poor, and she never really had known how to clean right. Toma worked and went to school: the girl had a heavy load. He should ask Praskovia, the cleaning woman in their section, to come by. No, that was impossible: Vasilisa would take offense … But you couldn’t put a child in this room. In my study. That’s the optimum choice. And I can clean my place up myself. A crib in the center of the room—there’s plenty of space. I’ll bring a changing table from the section. And immediately apply for retirement. How fortunate, I’ve already turned sixty-five …

  Elena was not sleeping. She looked at the dark silhouette in the doorway. The light burst from behind his back, and the semblance of a halo had formed around his head and shoulders.

  “Is that you?” Elena asked.

  Pavel Alekseevich sat down at her feet. Elena had always loved to sleep on high fluffed pillows. Earlier, when he used to sleep on this wide bed, her pillows had stood upright in the left part of the bed, while his little flat one lay on the right … He stuck his hand under the blanket and stroked her feet in their silky socks.

  “I just got a call from Leningrad: Tanya’s given birth to a little girl.”

  “No, no,” Elena interrupted him softly. “I’m the one who’s had the little girl.”

  “Tanya has grown up, gotten married, and given birth to a little girl,” Pavel Alekseevich reiterated.

  Elena’s eyes flashed brightly in the semidarkness.

  “It’s too early. It’s too dark. Where is Tanechka?”

  “In Leningrad.”

  “Tell her to come in here. I haven’t seen her in a long time … Is she at school?”

  “Tanechka finished school a long, long time ago. She’s in Leningrad. She’s given birth to a daughter,” Pavel Alekseevich repeated patiently.

  “Say something else, Papa,” Elena requested. “I don’t understand that.”

  Pavel Alekseevich moved his round stool to the head of the bed. The young Murka, who had arranged herself under Elena’s hand, started and opened one eye. Pavel Alekseevich sat down next to his wife and took her by the hand. Her hand was dry, cool, and almost weightless.

  For many years they had called him PA. At work they had pronounced it Pee-A, such was the fashion in those days—to refer to superiors by their initials. At home in the better years of their family life he had been called Pah. But now Pavel Alekseevich wondered whether Elena had taken him for her own father. He held her hand, stroked her fluffy uncombed hair, and decided not to find out who she took him for. It wasn’t all that important …

  “I’m leaving for Leningrad right now, to see how things are there, and I’ll try to bring them back,” he informed Elena.

  “That’s nice,” she sighed. “Tell Tanya to come in.”

  Pavel Alekseevich continued, ignoring Elena’s inability to keep up a coherent dialogue.

  “It seems to me she’s having some trouble with her husband. Perhaps he offended her somehow. I don’t know. And I don’t intend to ask. Last time Vitaly called was last week. He asked about Tanya, and I told him that she was in Leningrad and was planning to return soon, but that she hadn’t given me her address. What do you think about that?”

  Elena was perplexed and began to fret.

  “I don’t know, what do you think … You yourself … I don’t …”

  “In any case it’s better for her and the child to be at home than just anywhere, don’t you think?” He asked a question that required no more than a nod of the head.

  But Elena no longer heard him. She swept her hands anxiously at her sides, and he guessed that she was looking for the escaped Murka, whom she developed a need for whenever she found herself in a difficult situation. The cat sat in a chair, at some distance. He picked it up and put it on the bed near Elena. Elena squeezed it with both hands and smiled. As soon as she touched the animal, she seemed to abandon the space of the bedroom: her gaze became not quite vacuous, but focused somewhere without, beyond the bounds of the here and now …

  Pavel Alekseevich sat a bit longer, then went to his study and called the information line. It turned out he had plenty of time to make the day train to Leningrad. He took his briefcase and packed a toothbrush, his white hospital coat, and the military flask with diluted alcohol that he always kept in stock at home. He decided not to tell anyone he was leaving, and to call in the evening from Leningrad. He was not worried about finding a place to stay: he had an old friend at whose place he could always stay, and there was the Academy’s hotel on Khalturin Street, where they would always find a room for him … He set out for the train station, bought a ticket unexpectedly quickly, and managed to drop in at his clinic as well: there was a woman there in critical condition whom he wanted to check on and give the attending physician instructions for …

  The Leningrad day train traveled an absurdly long time, and Pavel Alekseevich turned out not to have a single book with him. He cast a curious eye toward his fellow travelers—a young couple that kissed surreptitiously—and tried to figure out whether they were older than Tanya … Probably they were even younger. Until the darkness set in he looked out the window: the pleasant flickering outside distracted him from his oppressive thoughts. When he was young, his sense of righteousness had been exceptionally important, and many of his actions had been determined precisely by that inner sense. Now he was at a loss: Tanya had acted completely irresponsibly. You have to admit: she abandoned her ailing mother—with no explanation whatsoever. Now, with a kind of maniacal consistency she was making everyone sick with worry—her husband, her father, even Vasilisa … She had given birth recklessly and thoughtlessly who knows where; it was unclear where she would go to live with the child, and how she would support it … The girl was wrong on all counts.

  He, Pavel Alekseevich, could not seem to find himself guilty of anything, but that was irrelevant. He took her wrongfulness on himself and was going to her in order to set wrongs right, to correct what had gone wrong, the abnormities in her life that had come about, after all, through his, Pavel Alekseevich’s, entirely imponderable fault. He reproached himself for his inability to put their lives in order: his wife was ill, his daughter had left home … Every time his circular anxious thoughts returned to this juncture he opened his briefcase and took a big gulp from the canvas-covered flask. It was an automatic reaction that had formed at the end of the 1940s when a summons to the ministry or to a meeting at the Academy had promised trouble … The hydroxyl group (–OH) near the saturated carbon atom, bless its heart, protected him in its usual way from troubles both external and internal …

  In the evening, when the train had moored at the Moskovsky train station, the flask was bone-dry and his heart once again rumbled double-time, but inside he felt relieved, because over the course of the trip—while observing out of the corner of his eye the young couple that kept trying to touch each other with a shoulder, an elbow, or a knee—everything had come together of its own in his head. The sole plausible explanation for Tanya’s unreasonable—no matter how you looked at it—behavior was a new romance. He recalled a similar tragic incident in ’46–’47, when a woman confined to bed rest toward the end of her pregnancy—Galina Kroll was her name, a beauty, a colonel’s wife—fell in love with the department assistant, Volodya Sapozhnikov, within a few days of when she was to give birth. Their affair was so wild that by the time Galina and her child were to be released from the hospital she refused to return to her husband and moved in with Volodya. Her husband tracked down the home wrecker and filled him with lead. The poor woman was left with no husband and no lover: one had been murdered and the other put in prison … About five years later she came back to see him. After the infertility center had already been founded … Galina had married a second time, changed her surname, and spent three years
in treatment before she could conceive again. She came to Pavel Alekseevich to give birth to the baby. Her second labor was complicated: a breach presentation … For some reason his memory held hundreds and hundreds of cases … Thus Pavel Alekseevich prepared himself for a meeting with his daughter and consoled himself with the fact that Vitalik would hardly track anyone down …

  From the train station Pavel Alekseevich took a taxi; twenty minutes later he was at the maternity hospital. The chief doctor was awaiting him: it wasn’t every day academicians visited an ordinary maternity hospital. He washed his hands and put on his white coat. They took him to the ward where on the second bed from the door lay his thin, dear little girl—who looked more like a teenager, perhaps even a teenage boy—with deep circles under her eyes and swollen lips … He did not recognize her immediately, but she, seeing her father, quietly “oh-ed” and flew straight out of bed onto his neck.

  They held each other tight: there was no question of either being offended.

  “Dad, it’s great that you’ve come … You’re a real … Tell them to show you our little girl. How’s Mama? What’s Tomka up to?”

  He stroked her short-shorn little head, her shoulders, and his hand was amazed by her thinness, and his fingers savored the feel of her sharp shoulder blades …

  “My silly little girl,” he whispered. The other women in the ward were all eyes. Tanya was a special bird in their ranks: although she had said nothing about herself, over the course of the day public—if not opinion, then suspicion—had formed that the girl was unmarried, a drifter, and something about her was not right … Now it turned out that she was special in addition because her father was someone famous …

  THEY GAVE TANYA A DRESSING GOWN, AND THE TWO OF them set out for the nursery ward. White swaddled bundles just slightly larger than loaves of bread lay in miniature beds that resembled a doll’s.

  “Go find her, show her to me,” Pavel Alekseevich whispered.

  The local doctor was about to extract herself from the hastily formed procession around him, but he signaled to her: don’t.

  It was not much of a riddle: there were little plates with the mothers’ surnames on the cribs, but Pavel Alekseevich peered into each tiny face, hoping to recognize his own among them.

  “Here,” Tanya pointed to a baby. Their name was written in violet letters at the foot of the crib … The little girl slept. Dark bangs fell on her high forehead, her face was a bit yellow, her nose big, her mouth small and tightly shut. “Beautiful, isn’t she?” Tanya asked possessively.

  Pavel Alekseevich lifted the swaddled bundle out of the crib, and his heart ached: our baby … Then he stuck his little finger into the corner of the diaper folded inward from the back, and placed the bundle on the changing table. The little girl opened her mouth with a little smack and squeaked. Pavel Alekseevich extracted her from her diapers, pulled aside her undershirt … straightened out her legs, leveled them, turned her over on her tummy with the same dexterous movement women use to turn pancakes on a frying pan, compared the folds under her barely defined buttocks, probed her pelvis joint—he knew this was a genetic weak spot—and held the little girl up by her legs … He ran his finger down her spine, probed the nape of her neck, the top of her head, then once again turned her on her back. Then he felt her protuberant stomach and pressed his finger alongside the bandaged stalk of her umbilical cord.

  “Fresh as they come,” he murmured. “Her liver is slightly enlarged—infantile jaundice, nothing terrible. You haven’t forgotten everything yet? Do you understand what’s happening there? The fetal hemoglobin is breaking down …” He placed three fat fingers on the left side of her chest. Then he took the tiny hand, straightened the fist, and touched the soft nails, which were bent at the edges.

  “Stethoscope,” he tossed out into space, and immediately, as if out of thin air, a metal disk with ear tubes appeared.

  He listened for a minute.

  “Normal. It seemed to me at first that her little nails were a bit blue. But her heart is just fine. At least there’s no defect.”

  The little girl grabbed at his finger, looked at him with her milky—like a kitten’s—eyes, and moved her upper lip. Tanya watched all these manipulations as if bewitched: her father with the infant in hand somehow reminded her of Sergei with his saxophone—the same tenderness and assurance in the way they held them, the same freedom of movement and ease of touch …

  “A marvelous little baby. I like this kind the best: tiny, firm, and with good musculature … You know, she’s not of your breed. She’s a Goldberg. I’m going to send a telegram to the camp to tell him, make him happy,” he whispered quietly in Tanya’s ear. “Congratulations, my little girl … In a day or two we’ll gather your stuff and take you home.”

  Tanya had not thought of going to Moscow, but at that moment—either out of postpartum fatigue or owing to her father’s total assuredness and belongingness in this place alongside the newborn little girl—she agreed readily.

  “We’ll go, but not for long. I’m moving to Piter. I have a …” she pondered for a minute how to explain to her father what precisely she had here. “Everything I need is here.”

  Pavel Alekseevich nodded understandingly. “That’s what I thought.”

  17

  Dear Sergei!

  How my hand enjoys writing your name! How your name suits you; it’s the only one for you. But it could have been Vitalik or Gena …

  Greetings, Sergei!

  Congratulations to you on having me and to me on having you. Everything about my existence today is different from yesterday. I had a little girl. It looks like we were terribly deceived, and she got substituted for a little boy. But she is very beautiful, everyone says, she looks like me. Keep in mind, I’m going to need a little boy soon. A little boy who looks like you. The fact that the little girl doesn’t resemble you and could not resemble you makes her a not very interesting creature for me. That is, I like her. They brought her to me today. She is touching and darling, but in some way—I can admit this to you—she is particularly dear to me as a witness to our love, as a witness to your caresses. As a secret participant even. I think that she will love you terribly, in a way that will be torturous for me.

  I am jealous of you. Jealous of your former life, of all the things you touch, especially your instrument, but also the towel you wipe your face dry with, the teacup you touch with your fingers. Of all the women you caressed before.

  Since you appeared, the world has changed so awfully much. Because I used to look at everything from one point of view, but now I look at things from two: I ask myself what would you think? I kiss you wherever I want. This time in the little indentation under your neck and on the scar on the left. Our little girl says hello. I don’t have any milk, but they say it might still come. Bring kefir and a big towel. It hurt, but went quickly.

  Tanya

  SERGEI READ THE LETTER, NEATLY REFOLDED THE SHEET of paper along the crease, and placed it in the inner pocket of his jacket. He had just delivered to the mustached receptionist behind the little window a bouquet of tea roses, some food, and a note. He had asked where the windows in Tanya’s ward looked out, and it took him a long time to figure out how to find them. He had known since evening that Tanya had given birth, and he had spent the whole night drinking with friends on that occasion, but now he suddenly wanted terribly to see Tanya, not through the window, but in person. He walked away from the information desk and headed for the staff entrance. A door guard was sitting there.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I’m here to fix medical equipment,” he improvised. “Someone in the second section called me to come in and fix the proton synchrotron. Where can I leave my coat?”

  The proton synchrotron that had for some reason rolled off Sergei’s tongue thoroughly satisfied the door guard.

  “The coatroom attendant’s out sick; take off your coat and hang it up yourself. No one will steal it. We all know each other here.�
� The door guard let him pass. Removing his jacket, he took the absent cloakroom attendant’s blue work coat off its communal nail and rushed up the stairs. The door to the section was closed, so he rang the bell. A while later a nurse opened the door.

  “What do you want?”

  “They called me about fixing some equipment,” Sergei answered, trying not to breathe wine fumes at the nurse.

  “You have to talk to the head nurse, in room seven,” the nurse barked and disappeared.

  Sergei immediately spotted the door he needed, ward four. Tanya was standing alongside the window, her back to him, in a blue hospital gown—very tall and very thin.

  “Tanya,” he called to her. She turned around. He had never seen her not pregnant, and she seemed like a stranger and terribly young.

  The bouquet lay on her bed stand, not yet put in water. It was obvious that having received his parcel she had immediately run to the window to look for him.

  “How did you get in here?” Tanya asked, somewhat embarrassed and freeing herself from his embrace. The women in the beds stared at them, their eyes popping out of their heads.

  “I got called in. To fix the proton synchrotron,” he continued the game, and not in vain, because one of the women, almost elderly, who had just given birth to her fourth, was already planning to complain, because visitations were not allowed …

  “They just took the children away. Too bad. If you had shown up about twenty minutes earlier, you could have taken a look at her.” Tanya smiled the silliest of smiles.

  At that moment Sergei seemed to her to be dazzlingly handsome and unbearably her own. She had long ago and permanently forgotten that the child had no relation to him, and she passionately wanted to brag. After Pavel Alekseevich had praised her daughter yesterday evening, she had started to like her a lot more.