The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

“Let’s go out somewhere before they throw me out …”

  The section at that hour was quiet. They pulled at one door, then a second, and found an empty linen room, and Tanya pushed him inside. Here they buried themselves in each other, whispering passionate silliness in each other’s ears, locking themselves to each other with lips and teeth, and, between kisses, informing each other of various important things. Tanya told him that after they let her out she was taking the child to Moscow for a bit. He told her that he had been to see Poluektova and told her that he had a daughter, and that Poluektova had been invited to conduct ballet classes at the Perm Choreographic School and she had offered them her apartment to live in …

  “In your wife’s apartment?” Tanya was taken aback.

  “What’s the big deal? It’s normal. We’ll keep an eye on her place, walk her dogs, and feed her old cats …”

  Tanya pressed his wrists.

  “All right. We’ll decide that later. But on the whole it’s pretty cool that she’s so … magnanimous, is it?”

  “No, you don’t understand. It’s just easier for her that way. She has two borzois, and they’re not easy to deal with … But they listen to me …”

  They buried themselves in each other once again, and with her tongue Tanya traced the hard spot inside his lip—from the saxophone mouthpiece … For a whole hour no one bothered them in the linen room as they checked to make sure that nothing had changed now that Tanya did not have a belly anymore … But everything was just as it should be: the hot places were hot; the damp places—damp; and the dry—dry … And their love, as it turned out, had not diminished one single bit …

  18

  THREE DAYS AFTER GIVING BIRTH TANYA FELT AS IF SHE had been born again, as if the birth of her daughter had infused her with a certain quality of newness as well. Essentially, that was what had happened: she was a newborn mother and, although she still knew nothing about the lifelong burden of motherhood, about the immutable link between a woman and her child that alters a woman’s psyche—often to a painful degree—a thought had already awakened inside her that she wanted to share with her daughter before anyone else. She lowered her brown beanlike nipple into the child’s delicately opened mouth and tried to imbue the tightly swaddled bundle with the idea that they loved each other, mother and daughter, and would take joy in each other, and belong to each other, but not solely … that she, Tanya, would have her own separate life, but, in exchange, when she grew up, Tanya would give her freedom and the right to live the way she wanted, and that she would be the older daughter, and then there would be a little boy, and another little boy, and a little girl … And our family will not be like those others where the daddies yell at the mommies and fight over money and the children scream and take each other’s toys … And we will have a house in Crimea, and a garden, and music … Tanya fell asleep without finishing her picture of the happy future, while the little girl continued to suck. She had an amazing little girl who emanated sleep like a campfire emanates warmth … Tanya had never known such strong and powerful sleep … The practical nurse collected the fed infant and carried it away, while Tanya, though she noticed some movement around her, had not the will to wake up …

  A week later Tanya was released, and Pavel Alekseevich delivered her and the baby to a large cold room in an expensive hotel. The little girl was set down perpendicularly on the immensely wide bed made of Karelian birch and covered with a woolen blanket and then a cotton-stuffed one. Soon after, Sergei showed up with a bouquet of frozen roses, champagne, and his saxophone. He pulled off his jacket filled with damp cold and rushed to the child. He sat down on the bed to look at the new face in its multilayered packaging.

  “Oh my gosh, she’s so small. And how she makes you want to sleep!”

  “She’s a terribly soporific girl, that’s for certain,” Tanya agreed. “As soon as they brought her into the ward, I would conk out.”

  Essentially Tanya was not planning to go to Moscow, but things turned out not quite as she had wanted. Poluektova was scheduled to leave for Perm only at the end of January, while a long drawn-out scandal had erupted at Aleksandrov’s communal apartment with the neighbors, who had no intention of putting up with a tiny child on the other side of their plywood wall … Sergei refused to travel to Moscow to Tanya’s parents’ place: he had had enough of his own parents. Tanya’s departure upset him mainly because he had already managed to telephone everyone in town that he had a daughter, and no little vodka and dry wine had been drunk over the past week in that connection, but now he had no one to produce as proof.

  Tanya hastily introduced her father to Sergei and asked if he would let her and Sergei go for a walk. Pavel Alekseevich let his daughter go for three hours, until the next feeding, and stayed with his little granddaughter. Five minutes after Tanya left, having been exposed to the infant’s soporific energy, he fell into a deep sleep, not to wake up until his daughter returned. He dreamed that he was asleep, but in the dream inside his dream it was summer outside, and a large group of children was getting ready to go to a pond. He was the eldest of the children, who included his younger sisters, nonexistent in real life, but who were very convincingly played by Lenochka in the role of an eight-year-old and Toma as a two-year-old. The other children were familiar, but also refashioned from adults he had come to know in the later years of his life. The duality of these people, however, did not at all surprise Pavel Alekseevich. What troubled him, rather, was that one of the boys was someone he did not know at all. Only at the very end of the dream, when the crowd of them poured out of their old dacha in Mamontovka, did it become apparent that the unknown little boy had been Tanya’s Sergei in disguise, after which Pavel Alekseevich stopped worrying and woke out of his deep sleep into a more shallow slumber and pressed the bundle swaddled in a thick blanket to his chest, thought for a minute about whether or not he wanted to go down to the pond with all these masquerading children, but decided not to return to that place …

  The next day at eight fifteen in the morning, Pavel Alekseevich, his daughter, and granddaughter were home on Novoslobodskaya Street. Toma had not yet set off for work, Vasilisa crawled out of her pantry and stood with old Murka at her feet in her usual pose of greeting facing the corridor from the kitchen, propping herself with one hand against the wall. Out of the half-opened door into Elena’s room, Murka Jr. poked out first, followed by Elena in a robe thrown over her shoulders.

  “Tanechka, I’ve been waiting for you for so long,” Elena said coherently and joyfully, and Tanya, passing her daughter to a perplexed Toma—who still did not know what to say and what to do—kissed her mother, while the latter pushed her away and reached for the bundle:

  “Tanechka …”

  “Momma, that’s my daughter.”

  “That’s my daughter,” echoed Elena, anxious consternation forming on her face.

  “Come with me, Momma, and I’ll show her to you …”

  Tanya spread the child on her mother’s bed, while Pavel Alekseevich was relieved that Tanya was acting the right way, not scaring poor Elena, but drawing her into the new event.

  Tanya undid the layers of clothes and extricated the tiny body. The little girl opened her eyes and yawned.

  Elena looked on tensely and as if with disappointment.

  “Well, do you like her?”

  Elena lowered her head in embarrassment and looked the other way.

  “That’s not Tanechka. That’s another little girl.”

  “Mom, of course it’s not Tanechka. We still haven’t decided on a name for her. Maria, maybe? Masha, huh?”

  “Evgenia,” Elena whispered barely audibly. Tanya did not hear what she said.

  Vasilisa repeated: “How else? Evgenia. After your grandmother …”

  Tanya bent over the little girl, who was pushing her little fist into her mouth.

  “I don’t know … I have to think about it. Evgenia?”

  While the women crowded around the baby, Tanya was swept upward, as if b
y a tidal wave, held there for a minute, then lowered down … She rushed about the apartment, looking into every cluttered corner …

  “Dad, we’re remodeling,” she said to her father fifteen minutes later.

  “Yes, actually, we’re long overdue,” Pavel Alekseevich agreed, “only now, I think, is not the time. There’s a baby in the apartment. Maybe in the summer, when you all go to the dacha …”

  “No, no, I’ll leave for Piter later, we need to do it right now. We can start with the nursery … Then the common spaces, your study, the bedroom …”

  In the evening, when Toma arrived home from work, half of her flowers had been distributed among the neighbors, half discarded, the furniture was stacked in the middle of the room, everything was covered over with a drop cloth, and a deal had been struck with the painters … Pavel Alekseevich got the feeling that their dilapidated abode, which had stood like an abandoned ship at anchor, had moved from its spot and set off sailing toward its destination, its sleepy crew awakened, and even the limp and sunken-in furniture lined up in formation and standing at attention … Vasilisa, who never threw anything out, surrendered to Tanya’s pressure and carried out of her pantry in her own two hands the decayed blanket given to her as a present by Evgenia Fedorovna in 1911, when it had already been not very new. But even that seemed not enough for Tanya, and with a cheerful sweeping movement she carried the chipped plates, burned pots and pans, and empty glass jars stored up just in case—Vasilisa’s entire collection of pauper’s-and-hoarder’s household goods—out to the trash heap.

  The nameless little girl abided the orchestrated chaos almost without a peep, getting in no one’s way and demanding practically no attention. Tanya settled her in a laundry basket she had first lined with clean cotton print fabric, and for a while hauled the basket from room to room. Then Elena asked that the little girl be left near her bed, which formed a quiet corner that Tanya did not touch for the time being. The speed with which the apartment metamorphosed was amazing: the former girls’ room was redone in a week, and although Toma’s jungle suffered substantial losses, the surviving plants sparkled fresh against the background of sand-yellow wallpaper that recalled the heat of African deserts.

  The next week was devoted to the kitchen and the bathroom. Cooking at home was cancelled. Tanya bought incalculable quantities of inexpensive food at the takeout store, fed the workers and her family as well as acquaintances, who dropped in from time to time. Vitalik telephoned on the third day, and Tanya greeted him with indifferent gladness. He came over immediately, frowning, with an insulted look on his face, but she did not trouble herself to notice. She showed him their daughter, as if she were her own private trinket. To his proposal that she move to Profsoiuznaya Street Tanya responded with a hurtful smile, but promised to visit him as soon as she finished her household affairs here.

  “Valentina’s living with us now.” Vitalik reported his principal news.

  “Why didn’t you bring her along?” Tanya asked with surprise.

  “She’ll come. She frequently comes to visit Pavel Alekseevich. You know, all the legal hassles … Perhaps they’ll parole him early. The crime is the variety they usually serve only two-thirds of their terms for …”

  “I should have done something about Ilya Iosifovich’s affairs … The whole lot of them, after all, are so amazingly inept,” thought Tanya. But that was unjustified: Valentina was entirely competent, and whatever she did she thought through carefully and carried out to the letter …

  Tanya slept in Pavel Alekseevich’s study between the laundry basket holding her daughter and the telephone: Sergei called at night, and they would talk at length about everyday nothings, about the little girl, who had not yet been given a name, about the remodeling, and about Poluektova’s borzois, then Sergei would turn on a tape recording so that Tanya could hear the music he had played that day … That week he played a lot, almost every evening, because there were New Year’s parties everywhere, and they had a lot of gigs lined up—at institutes, clubs, and cafés … On the morning of December 31, Tanya was about to set out for one night in Piter, having tricked Sergei into telling her where he was playing and even bought a ticket for the day train. But such a fierce freeze set in the evening before that Tanya, not having told Sergei about her secret plan, cancelled her trip. She remembered how cold it had been in the train when she returned to Moscow with her newborn daughter. She was frightened that the little girl might catch cold … The decision turned out to be more than wise, because Sergei, following the same logic of caprice, or surprise, arrived to spend New Year’s Eve in Moscow and killed the few hours in between at a restaurant at the Leningrad train station …

  By this time the remodeling had engulfed the entire apartment like fire. The place smelled of paint, glue, and roast goose. The table was set up in the former nursery. Toma, on Tanya’s orders, decorated the seven-foot fatsia (referred to by laypeople as fig tree). At the head of the table sat Pavel Alekseevich; next to him Elena, whom Tanya had dressed for the occasion, sat with a childlike, happy face. Vasilisa had donned her carpetlike yellow and crimson headscarf, which made her as self-conscious as if she had come out with bare shoulders. Toma, on the other hand, had put on a dress with a deep plunging neckline, the same one she had sewn for Tanya’s wedding, and had piled her hair so that her little head resembled a big sheep. The guests included the three Goldbergs—the two brothers and Valentina (maiden name Gryzkina), the young stepmother of Tanya’s retired husbands. The basket with the little girl stood at a distance, on Toma’s bed—she was the star that night—and Pavel Alekseevich understood perfectly that were it not for her, Tanya would not have come home or organized this huge, wonderful perturbation.

  At a quarter to twelve the doorbell rang, and Tanya ran to open the door, having prepared in advance a snide phrase for their neighbor Roza Samoilovna, who had come by at least fifteen times today and by this time had managed to borrow positively everything there was in the house, from salt and a stool to candles and napkins … In the doorway, wearing a light cloth jacket and a huge fur cap, saxophone and sports bag in hand, stood Sergei.

  This was the most bizarre family holiday one could imagine. Except for Tanya and Sergei—happy and unconcerned about either the past or the future—each of those present experienced a profound loneliness and a piercing sense of alienation from the others. As if their natural ties to each other had been severed, scrambled, then retied in some perverted way: Pavel Alekseevich’s wife had long ago become his child, while his daughter over the last two weeks had turned out unexpectedly to be the true head of the family; Elena, who sat at a crowded table for the first time in three years, experienced a nauseating form of anxiety caused by all the familiar people who had completely lost their names. Even her daughter Tanya, who more or less resembled her old self, was slightly doubled because the little girl lying in the basket was also Tanechka, but not entirely, only in part, as in a cutaway or cross-section, where the invisible, internal contours of the object usually indicated by lines of dashes were those of the little girl revealed by the cutaway … Vasilisa, with her eye resurrected from darkness, saw bright spots of light and the colored contours of bodies against a flat background, and Tomochka’s light-blue spot was the only one that was reassuring. Fluttering about the table like a thin gray bird, placing food on everyone’s plate, and dropping her, Vasilisa, a piece of ferial goose—in total disregard for the Orthodox Christmas fast—Tanya kept disporting herself and touching the young long-haired fellow in black (a member of the clergy?) as she went, all in the presence of her husband and just as Elena had done during the war, while her husband sat and watched, as if he didn’t care, and was this good … Filled with disgust by the picture before her, Vasilisa entreated: Lord, have mercy, Lord … Establish, O Lord, my unstable heart on the rock of Thy commandments, for Thou only art Holy and Lord … The words flew off and fell downward, the pieces of the psalms and prayers that Vasilisa had preserved in her failing memory were forgotten an
d jumbled, and all that remained was her remorse for her dear ones, all of them living incorrectly, committing sins, and not observing God’s commandments—both temporal and spiritual, no matter where you looked … Sins, all our mortal sins …

  Valentina Goldberg, raised in Old Believer purity in everything, from body, hut, and habits to thoughts and actions, and having deviated from her ancestors not in the slightest degree—despite her total and final estrangement from their unintelligent and outdated religion—observed Tanya mournfully. She had become acquainted with Pavel Alekseevich only after Ilya Iosifovich’s arrest, come to trust him, and to love him, and now she found it impossible to connect the dots between the well-known story of their children’s strange marriage, their indecent family triangle, the appearance of this long-haired musician (obviously, Tanya’s lover), and Tanya herself, whom she was seeing for the first time, having taken a dislike to her in advance, and now on seeing her, for some reason feeling somehow sympathetically disposed toward her … although what else should this girl elicit except protest and indignation with the way she carried about, thinking of nothing, and destroying the relationship between the two brothers … She was promiscuous, promiscuous …

  The Goldberg brothers—or husbands—conducted themselves appropriately, but they hardly “didn’t care,” as Vasilisa had surmised. Both of them were pained by the appearance of the pretender. For the first time in the last year they both felt one and the same thing—a condition familiar to them since early childhood, perhaps, one of their first conscious experiences—that of the disappointment and justice of defeat … It had already struck twelve, and they were late with the champagne. Tanya had forgotten the bottle in the refrigerator, and by the time she brought it out and Pavel Alekseevich opened it … The New Year had already begun, and they drank a toast that all be well, that Ilya Iosifovich be released, and that everyone be happy and healthy, especially the brand-new baby girl … They all talked noisily, interrupting each other, clanking their forks against their plates, while only Tanya and Sergei sat silently, looking at each other, well, staring at each other like two icons. Everyone saw that this musician was a perfect match for Tanya, you could see they shared the same nature, lived on the same planet, or whatever … What in Tanya was singular and slightly enigmatic was written all over him in full color. The Goldberg brothers had absolutely nothing to do with this and understood that perfectly. Especially when the musician unpacked his saxophone and asked Tanya to accompany him a bit, and she immediately, without mincing, cleared the stack of newspapers off the piano, warned that she had never heard a more out of tune piano, and sat down without protest, and he showed her the left-hand accompaniment on the bass, and she picked it up. Pavel Alekseevich immediately guessed that she had been practicing on and off over the past months … Sergei first extracted out of that horn of his some prospective trills, and Tanya harmonized, going right, then left, until they bumped into each other in some indeterminate place, and then Sergei sang long jubilant tidings on his saxophone that ended with such a happy wail that the Goldberg brothers exchanged understanding glances and felt like they were back in the schoolyard in Malakhovo during recess among those hostile rural, small town, and children’s home kids from whom they suffered particularly for not belonging to any of those groups … At the first sound of the saxophone Elena dug her fingers into the cuff of her husband’s house jacket: she heard—rather, saw—the music as a set of French curves running from the dark core of the instrument’s metal throat: the principal curve, taut and matte like fresh rubber, first flattened itself, then rolled into a harmonious Archimedean spiral that kept expanding, filling the entire room, and then with a flip of one of its arms whipping out the window … The sound itself, it turned out, was the projection of something unknown, unnamed, but produced with obvious effort by the long-haired youth with the familiar face …