The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

by Ulitskaya, Ludmila

  Only forty minutes later did Goldberg sense the ice-age frost creeping toward him across the long, T-shaped desk from the direction of the bald podge ensconced at the head of the desk in Buddha-like fixity in the center of his large office at the epicenter of rejuvenated genetic science. Goldberg fell silent, stunned by a grim presentiment. The director also was silent. He knew how to hold a pause. Goldberg did not.

  Ilya Iosifovich halted the stream of his outpourings, all of them concerning medical genetics—from general assertions on the need for structural reorganization connected with Pavel Alekseevich’s project for creating a center for genetic consulting to the most abstract of ideas, the realization of which would require about thirty years … Interrupting himself, he got straight to the point.

  “Kolya, are you going to give me a laboratory or not?”

  The director’s face did have something of Napoleon’s about it: diminutive facial features, a chubby chin that flowed softly into a massive short neck. The insignificant face of exceptional significance … His brain was hard at work, but the look on his face said nothing. Should he stave off saying no, and leave it to this cocked fool to figure out for himself with time that in some cases yes signifies nothing more than a variation of no, or cut him to shreds immediately … They were already enemies anyway, and they would become even more bitter enemies, that the director understood for certain. There was nothing to calculate here whatsoever; it was merely a matter of personal satisfaction. For that reason he maintained his absolutely neutral pause for a while longer—in moments like this his graduate students would be struck by spasms of diarrhea—and, having tried on in his mind several variations with differing degrees of derogation, he bared a pseudosmile of new, too-white plastic teeth, and answered.

  “No, Ilya. I have absolutely no need for you …”

  All of this Ilya Iosifovich related to his friend.

  “It turns out, Pashenka, that he has no need for me, or Sidorov, or Sokolov, or Sakharov. He doesn’t need Shurochka Prokofieva, Belgovsky, or Rappoport. Timofeev-Resovsky he especially has no need for. Instead he’s hiring small fry, Landsknechts, and starry-eyed kids hatched only yesterday. And now, my friend, I return to the beginning of our conversation: all moral foundations have been undermined. Immoral science turns out to be worse and more dangerous than immoral ignorance …”

  At this juncture Pavel Alekseevich perked up.

  “There you go again, your usual tendency to lump everything into one big heap. You’re confusing concepts. There is no such thing as moral ignorance. A semiliterate can be moral. And an entirely illiterate person, like our Vasilisa, can be moral. What follows from your words is that science is the antithesis of ignorance. That’s mistaken. Science is a way of organizing knowledge, while ignorance is the rejection of knowledge. Ignorance is not a lack of learning, but a position. Paracelsus, for example, knew less about the workings of the human body than the average doctor today, but there’s no way you could call him an ignoramus. He knew about the relativity of knowledge. Ignorance knows nothing, except its own level, and precisely for that reason there can be no such thing as moral ignorance. Ignorance despises everything that it cannot access. It rejects everything that demands intensity, effort, and changing one’s point of view. And, by the way, as far as science is concerned, I don’t think that science has a moral dimension. Knowledge does not have moral nuances, only people can be immoral, not physics or chemistry, and especially not mathematics …”

  Goldberg chuckled, and the last of his surviving premolars peeked out of the corners of his mouth.

  “Pashka, maybe you’re right, but that kind of rightness is not for me. If there is progress, the good of humankind, it means that science directed at achieving a certain conditional good is moral, while that which has no good in mind can go to the devil. It’s a reliquary.”

  “I’m sorry.” Pavel Alekseevich made a helpless gesture. “By your logic science can be Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist, bourgeois, and even workers’-and-peasants’! Give me a break!”

  They started in for what would be half the night, picking apart science in general, theory and practice in particular, the not-so-distant past, and the bright future. They cracked jokes, swore, chuckled, and drank a second bottle. Toward daybreak Ilya Iosifovich slapped himself on his bald spot and cursed.

  “What an old fool I am! I forgot to call Valentina.”

  So he called Valentina, who all this time had been sitting on the edge of her chair, hugging her high belly, which had been growing since the time of her three-day visit to her husband in the camp. She had already constructed a detailed plan of what she would do tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and had intended first thing in the morning to go to Pavel Alekseevich’s, where no one was picking up the phone—which meant a search was under way and they were not allowed to pick up the phone—and from there to the regional KGB office, and then to the lawyer’s. Or first to the lawyer … The main thing was to pick up the main manuscript of the book at the typist’s and hide it in a safe place …

  Ilya Iosifovich picked up the phone: there was no dial tone.

  “Your phone’s broken: there’s no dial tone. Valentina is going crazy. She, Pasha, is in her seventh month, you know …” Goldberg seemed to be apologizing.

  Pavel Alekseevich attempted to dissuade Ilya Iosifovich from going home. It was almost five in the morning. And only after his intractable comrade had slammed the door behind him did Pavel Alekseevich realize at long last that dear awkward Valentina was giving birth to a baby from no one other than old, stooped, and withered Ilya, and that—say what you will but—the real question had nothing to do with science or with whether it was moral or not very. The main thing lay in the infant—its little nose tucked inside its crossed palms, covered with lanugo, slippery with vernix, and not yet having acquired full pigmentation and for that reason yellowish-colorless—that floated, concentrated and totally complete in and of itself, in the crammed space of its first home, in Valentina’s uterus, the child of old age, but also of love, with all its physiological accoutrements—kisses, embraces, erection, friction, and ejaculation … Pavel Alekseevich sighed: the seminal glands, the adrenal cortex … and androgens, several varieties of steroids … He tried to remember the formula for testosterone … And for this very reason, because of the activeness of his endocrinal system, Ilya Iosifovich was smitten by global interest in the moral foundations of gnosiology, while he, Pavel Alekseevich, having suppressed forever his hormonal surges, was tormented solely by his worries about Tanya, about his granddaughter Zhenya, and about his wife Elena, whom he would leave with Toma and Vasilisa when he left that Saturday for Piter to visit his dear little girls …

  20

  IN LENINGRAD LIFE SEEMED TO TANYA TO BE MORE PEDIgreed, with interesting roots, and somehow better accoutered in all respects—the streets, and things, and people had more substance to them, was that it? The past peeked out from under every bush, and you had to be a complete numbskull, like dear Tolya Aleksandrov, to put a hot frying pan on a wood mosaic table and never once in twenty years wonder to whom the table had belonged before. It had belonged to Zinaida Gippius, who had lived in precisely this room, having moved in as a young girl with her young husband. The city was a marvel of perpetual history, but the scars of the frying pan were also visible everywhere, which occasionally invoked a certain melancholy. There was no time, however, for melancholy: their little child did not allow it. Morning and daytime life were filled with things to be done, their bohemian, artistic life ensuing in the evening. They hired Aunt Shura, who for not very much money agreed to babysit Zhenya in the evenings and sometimes through the night. Tanya and Sergei dashed to friends’ or to the cafés—no small number of which had cropped up in those days—drinking, smoking, and dancing. From time to time Sergei would perform. Their trio had not only not broken up, but, just the opposite, was becoming more and more well known in the world of the city’s younger generation, but—it goes without saying—that fame w
as of the half-underground, private variety.

  During her second Petersburg winter Tanya began to experience a wearying drowsiness and sluggishness, which she battled unsuccessfully, sleeping with little Zhenya up to twelve hours a day between December and February. But when winter’s gloom began to recede a bit, she set herself into calculated motion, and already in February managed to lease a rather decently equipped workshop. There she planned to begin making strange jewelry from wire and cheap Siberian stones that a geologist friend brought from the Urals.

  Tanya’s daughter was blessed with a marvelous disposition, amused herself, never got bored, and it was enough to put a toy, a spoon, or a piece of string in her hands for her to spend hours of total delight investigating it, gnawing at it with her fresh tooth, sticking it in her pocket, spinning it, and deriving from it masses of interest. Sergei came to love the little girl in the most natural of ways, just as Pavel Alekseevich had once come to love Tanya, so that few of their friends knew that the little girl was hardly Sergei’s daughter or Tanya—his wife. The couple did not bother with the issue of matrimony. Technically, neither of them was officially free: Sergei was married to Poluektova, and Tanya was married to Goldberg. The only problem that could possibly arise was that Tanya lacked a residence permit, which was required to get a job or to have access to health care. But Tanya had no intention of getting an office job and was completely healthy. Were anything to happen to her little daughter, she would immediately jump on a train and the next morning place the sick child in the best hands on earth … But nothing of the sort happened, not even a cold.

  Tanya rose early, like a working woman, fed Zhenya, dressed her in her little fur coat, hat, and the stuffing underneath that one was supposed to put on children in those days before down snowsuits and hygroscopic diapers had been invented, and, with the heavy bundle loaded into her carriage, traveled—no matter what the weather—from the south mainland bank of the Neva to the checkered Petrogradsky district, where she had managed to lease a studio on the west bank of the Nevka, right next to the house of the artist Mikhail Matiushin, of whom, at the time, she knew absolutely nothing, although she quickly sensed the bizarre springs of avant-gardism that poked through the local decaying bogs.

  The route from home to the workshop took at least an hour, which made for a good walk, after which Zhenya slept for an hour in her carriage, which had become a tight fit. Tanya constructed large, deliberately crude jewelry pieces with black jet and smoky quartz, which she intended to make fashionable on the Neva’s left bank among her pretentious contemporaries, lovers of Petersburg jazz. Since childhood she had been aware of a special quality she had: when she put something on, all of her classmates immediately imitated her … For that reason, the first thing she needed to do now was to drape herself with as much of her own handmade beauty as possible, hang out, and wait for customers.

  At lunchtime Sergei would arrive, having taken care of his morning responsibilities—walking the dogs and communing with his saxophone. He brought food from a takeout store and kefir for little Zhenka. Although she was more than a year old, she loved baby food and obviously preferred liquids to solids. Tanya set the teakettle on the electric hot plate, and Sergei steeped tea. Opinion was that he did that better than anyone else. They ate student-style. Like a true Petersburger he referred to white bread as buns and was careful not to waste food: the blockade had left its mark, although he, a sickly little boy, had been evacuated that year over the ice …

  Afterward he either left to hang out with the guys, to practice, or just shoot the breeze and drink, or they spent the rest of the day together until evening. When he stayed, he would lie down on the filthy couch and play with Zhenya.

  Their dinners together concluded with after-dinner games, considered harmful from the point of view of digestion. He would hoist the little girl dancing in his arms into the air, trying to catch the rhythm of her movements and tooting intermittently with his lips, while Tanya pounded out her own working beat with her mallet—metal against metal. Sergei delighted in how rhythmically conceptualized their existence was—filled through and through with musical meaning, while they themselves formed a kind of cool trio with a bass line, a lead, and a sub-lead, just as in a jazz ensemble, and even their acoustic space was divided into distinct niches, like the three melodic voices in New Orleans Dixieland …

  “We’re having a terrific jam session,” Sergei said to Tanya, who, beating out another cascade of blows, objected.

  “No, we have a marvelous family music box.”

  “Are you kidding? Music boxes make dead music …”

  “You’re right, you’re right,” Tanya agreed instantly.

  They did not reflect on their happiness, just as the blissful pair in the never-ending Summer Garden had not a care for their daily bread, their health, or their bank accounts. Even the question of where to live did not faze them: they were living for free in a pricey bourgeois apartment in exchange for services rendered to their hostess, also for free—feeding and walking the two stupid, handsome borzois. This was work, but Sergei was used to it, knew where to buy bones, what kind of meat to add, and who to get vitamins from. Two enormous pots never left the stove top, and there were times when Tanya and Sergei served themselves from the dogs’ pots, adding salt to taste.

  Of course, this improbable idyll was not without problems. For example, the climate. It was cold. Or, for example, where to buy a bottle of vodka at night? From a taxi driver? Go all the way out to the airport? And there was the political order, which was disagreeable and at times downright dangerous. On the other hand, politics was everywhere, and where there was no politics there were either mountain precipices or wild beasts and venomous snakes. And other inconveniences …

  Everyone had it bad, while for these kids, in the 1960s, life was a wonderful time.

  That is difficult to believe—convincing evidence is required, a survey of eyewitnesses, the testimony of onlookers. Over the many years since, a lot has been erased from memory, and each remembers his own: Goldberg—the insides of the camp; Pavel Alekseevich—Elena in her strange transitional state as she slowly departed the world of living people; Toma—long lines for food that she had to stand in despite the food rations PA brought home from work. Others remembered the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Searches and arrests. The underground. Gagarin’s launch into space. Radio-buzz and tele-pandemonium. Memories of how closed-in life was, of fear dissolved in the air like sugar in tea.

  But these kids at play had a wonderful time. In their frivolity they lived without day-to-day fear, taking fright instead only for minutes at a time. Then, shrugging off their fears, they took up their redemptive music, which not just made them free, but was free in itself. This was where the invisible divide existed between Sergei and his parents. This was the very thing that had jarred the two of them—Sergei’s Marxist-Leninist father and the father’s musician hooligan son—apart. They were like sulfuric acid for each other … The child’s attachment and the parent’s love hissed and went up in acrid smoke, leaving neither pity nor empathy in the burnt-out hole …

  Sergei and his parents had cut each other off long ago. His father referred to his son as none other than a bum and a renegade. His mother could not forgive her son’s betrayal, although she was unable to explain whose faith he had violated with whom. Funny, but it couldn’t have been with music! From Sergei’s neighborhood friends his mother learned that he had a daughter. She yearned for reconciliation but, fearing her husband, lacked the courage to take the first step. Sergei’s disgust with his parents was stronger than hatred. He had not seen them for eight years already, since his grandmother’s death, having left home as soon as he finished school.

  “There is nothing human in them. Everything that they think and say and do is one big lie. Nothing human.” Talking about them wrenched his guts.

  His mother sent Sergei’s former classmate—Nina Kostikova, one of the neighborhood girls who had had a crush on him since first grade�
�to visit him. She had a mission: to set up a family reunion.

  “What’s the big deal?” Nina petitioned on Sergei’s mother’s behalf. “You could show them Zhenya.”

  “Tell her that the kid isn’t mine, and she’ll calm down.” He took the baby in his arms, pressed her little forehead to his own, and cooed “ooh-ooh-ooh.” Zhenya jumped with joy. “Tell her that someone dropped her on my doorstep. In her mother’s lap.” He chuckled as if he were being God knows how witty.

  Tanya arched her brow. “So what’s wrong with my lap? All right, next time I’ll deliver the kid right into your arms …”

  She had not forgotten about a new child. Several times it had seemed to her that she was pregnant, but each time she was mistaken. She loved her little daughter very much, but she wanted a little boy, and this desire had a strange persistence, as if she were obliged to give birth to a boy for the sake of some unknown higher goals. From the vantage of their everyday existence a second child would be insanity. But the first one had not been any less so. They were completely bereft of so-called material resources. Although money came in from Sergei’s performances, and Pavel Alekseevich, who came to visit his children once every six weeks or so, also always left them money. This weighed slightly on Tanya, but she hoped that soon she herself would begin earning money. However, both of them—Sergei and Tanya—ruled out as an option the sweaty servitude of working for someone else, figuring that money for their livelihood should come about of its own, in the process of their free play …

  In the meantime Tanya had become increasingly more engrossed in music. She even got herself a recorder and conversed with it occasionally, on the sly from Seryozha. The instrument was poor, but the sound was touching and childish … Tanya did not miss a single one of the performances of Sergei’s trio and went with him to hear other jazz groups, of which no small number had formed in Piter at the time. There were not that many truly worthwhile musicians: you could count them on one hand. Sergei’s idol at the time was Germann Lukianov, a Muscovite with conservatory training, of a different social breed entirely—a snob in black tails who played multiple instruments (at the time, principally the flügelhorn), and was an interesting composer as well. Later Sergei became disenchanted with him and got hooked on Vladimir Chekasin … But in general everyone was mad over Coltrane and Coleman. Each new album was a celebration; Sergei even celebrated the anniversary of the first time he had heard each album. He and Garik sucked every note dry and discussed every turn, every chord progression, every rhythmical shift, every tempo change, and the asymmetrical phrasing. Though Tanya far preferred listening to live music rather than these hours-long analyses, she completely understood what they were talking about: though it was not extensive, she did have musical training.