The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

6

LIKE HIS LATE FATHER, PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH HAD, BEYOND doubt, the qualities of a man of state. Although his father’s rank as an officer in tsarist times had cast a long shadow over Pavel Alekseevich’s career, the second war seemed to have eradicated this unpleasant spot in his biography: his father, though an officer, had been a doctor and perished in a war with Germany. Now, when the country again was waging war with the sons of those same Germans, Pavel Alekseevich was retroactively pardoned his dubious heritage. Soon after returning from evacuation he was summoned to the ministry, where it was proposed that he author a plan for the organization of peacetime health care in his own areas of specialization, obstetrics and pediatrics. The war was coming to an end, and while a commission had not yet been created, the assumption was that he would head it. Pavel Alekseevich was supplied with statistics that had been compiled incompetently, frequently with errors and incomplete data, but to a certain degree revealing nonetheless the horrible demographic situation. It was not just a question of the irreversible loss of an enormous part of the male population and, with that, a drop in the birth rate. Child mortality was enormous, particularly among infants. And there was one more factor, one not quantified in official statistics, but all too well known to any practicing physician: a large number of women of reproductive age died as a result of illegal abortions. Officially, abortions had been made illegal in 1936, at practically the same time that Stalin’s Constitution had been adopted.

This prohibition was a sore spot in Pavel Alekseevich’s work: nearly half of all emergency operations were the consequences of underground abortions. Contraceptives were practically nonexistent. Physicians were obliged under pain of criminal penalty to examine each woman brought in by ambulance “to inspect for evidence of an underground abortion.” Pavel Alekseevich avoided such veiled denunciations and entered the condemning words criminal abortion in his patient’s medical history only when the patient was dying. If the life of the woman were spared, such a medical opinion would have put the victim as well as the person who had performed this age-old procedure in the dock. Several hundred thousand women were in labor camps precisely because of this law.

The extensive program Pavel Alekseevich was charged with developing encompassed social as well as medical aspects.

The project reminded him of any one of those papers submitted to his reigning Highness by the best sons of the fatherland, among them both romantics and dimwits, a broad spectrum of interesting characters, from Prince Kurbsky to Chaadaev. His own father, Aleksei Gavrilovich Kukotsky, had been among them.

Pavel Alekseevich foresaw that after the war major changes would shake the very institution of the family; he expected a large number of single mothers and viewed this phenomenon as socially inevitable and even advantageous. He considered it imperative to introduce various benefits for single mothers, yet at the same time believed that the first step had to be the repeal of the resolution of July 1936 prohibiting abortions.

As work progressed, the project expanded and turned into a veritable utopia between the lines of whose fantastic constructions shone serious and very constructive ideas that were far ahead of their time. For example, it presupposed the establishment of social services for parents, sex education for young people, and the creation of a network of children’s homes and sanatoria where the care and upbringing of both physically and mentally healthy children would be practiced based on scientific principles. This in part echoed pedagogical methods forbidden in the 1930s and even smacked slightly of Chernyshevsky. The need for medical genetic consulting also had not been overlooked: Pavel Alekseevich intended to charge his school friend, Ilya Goldberg, doctor of genetics, with organizing this aspect.

The Minister of Health at the time was a woman beyond her prime, an experienced bureaucrat and a party member from the salt-and-pepper top of her head to the stubborn calluses on her feet; she also happened to be the only woman in the government. For years she had been known as Workhorse, partly because it sounded like her surname, and partly owing to her indefatigability and rare ability to plug on, never swerving from the assigned path. She even liked the nickname, and not infrequently, having allowed herself a good bit to drink with close company, was wont to boast: “Yes, it’s true, the Russian woman is a steed with balls. She can tackle anything!”

She was incontestably the number-one woman in the country, a symbol of women’s equality, and International Women’s Day incarnate, after, of course, the mythological Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Zoya Kosmodemianskaya, and the eternally youthful Liubov Orlova. All of them, Workhorse included, resembled each other in one way: they were all childless . . .

Initially, when the project of reorganizing health care was only just getting under way, Workhorse was a major supporter, but as Pavel Alekseevich’s work increasingly gained scope, her enthusiasm cooled. In fact, she got scared. The project looked too radical, demanded enormous financing and—and this was the main thing—risk. In many respects blind, deaf, and dumb, Workhorse possessed superhuman acuity for the fluctuating moods of those higher up, which she regarded as the interests of the state. Intuition told her that at the moment the state’s interest hardly lay in the field of obstetrics and gynecology, or in maternal care or pediatrics, but in other loftier endeavors.

Academician Oparin, for example, had already explained how organic matter had evolved from inorganic matter through the introduction of electric currents blasted—with a boost from the doctrines of Marx and Engels—into a primary broth of ideologically trustworthy protein molecules. Another academician, Trofim Lysenko, had almost succeeded in subordinating Mother Nature to the wave of his magic wand, and she had already made a firm promise to him to behave as required by the carrot-and-stick method. A third academician, that world-famous woman Olga Lepeshinskaya, was within inches of conquering old age, and a foot from conquering death itself. The atom had already agreed to become peaceful, and rivers were ready to flow wherever needed, instead of where they so desired. Soviet science—medical science, in particular—was in full bloom even without the repeal of that infamous resolution on abortions, while the great leader of all times and peoples, paralyzed left arm stuck in his jacket, used his working right arm to accept an immortal bouquet from the hands of a little blond girl (who subsequently on investigation turned out to be Jewish) and smiled wisely . . .

Still, that bald gynecologist came to the ministry every week to badger the minister with one and the same question: had she sent the project upstairs? No, no, and no! At the present moment there was no way she could take it upstairs. What if they suddenly took it the wrong way? Besides, ideas usually travelled in the opposite direction: not upward from below, but downward from above. For the moment they had forgotten about reorganizing health care, and she was not about to remind them of it. Workhorse stalled the best she could: not a single resolution went any further without first being discussed in the party’s Central Committee, and her acute inner sense said to wait. Pavel Alekseevich insisted. After more than a year of fruitless negotiations with the minister, he committed, ultimately, an act thoroughly unethical by bureaucratic and military standards: he penned a missive over the head of the Minister of Health to the Central Committee, addressed to Politburo member N who oversaw social issues. As required by standard protocol, the letter began with the magical formula “Under the leadership of . . . ,” but it was written in impeccable old-fashioned language, with precise argumentation and devastating—both literally and figuratively—statistics.

THIS TIME PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH LOCALIZED THE PROBLEM: he submitted not the entire project, but only a fragment related to what he saw as the most pressing issues, those concerning the legalization of abortion.

Several months passed, and Pavel Alekseevich had already stopped waiting for an answer when at 9:00 A.M., during a staff briefing, a phone call came in from the Central Committee offices on Staraya Square. Pavel Alekseevich excused himself and walked out of the staff room with a scowl. Someone had violated the rule: no phone calls during briefings. But this was an invitation to an audience at the Central Committee, an urgent one at that.

Ten minutes later the official car was already pulling away from the clinic. Alongside the driver sat a gloomy Pavel Alekseevich. The call had been unexpected—the most ominous kind. He was particularly unhappy about the urgency. Before leaving he managed to do only two things of primary necessity: he drank down a full glass of diluted spirit alcohol and picked up the briefcase he had long ago prepared for this occasion. Still, on the way to Staraya Square he thought that he had been wrong not to drop by the house to say good-bye to his family . . .

At the security post at entrance number six he was stopped and told to leave his briefcase. Inside the briefcase was a flat-sided anatomy jar with a sealed wax top; the jar was to play a decisive role in the forthcoming conversation. After protracted explanations and objections, the briefcase was allowed to proceed to the meeting together with its owner. Pavel Alekseevich was led down long carpeted corridors. This far from pleasant journey felt like a nightmare. Pavel Alekseevich once again regretted that he had not stopped at the house. The two guards assigned to him—one to his right, the other to his left—stopped at the door.

“This way.”

He went in. The Renoir-esque secretary, shimmering pearly pink, asked him to wait. He sat down on an austere wooden bench, spreading his knees far apart and placing between them the old briefcase with which his father had once delivered reports to a government buried long ago. Pavel Alekseevich prepared himself for a long wait, but he was summoned two minutes later. By this time the alcohol had reached all the ganglia of his nervous system and released its serene warmth and calm. In a long inelegant office behind an enormous desk sat a little man with a puffy face sculpted from dry soap—one of those faces seen ruffling on May Day posters in the spring.

“His kidneys are shot to hell, especially the left one,” Pavel Alekseevich automatically noted to himself.

“We familiarized ourselves with the contents of your letter,” the important party personage pronounced monarchically.

Both the sound of his voice and the barely evident disdain on his face communicated that the cause had been lost.

“Nothing to lose now then,” Pavel Alekseevich thought, and slowly undid the briefcase buckles. The important personage fell silent, creating an icy pause. Pavel Alekseevich extracted the flat jar, slightly covered with condensation, brushed his palm across the front glass, and placed it on the table. The important personage leaned back in his chair in fright, pointing to the specimen with his puffy finger, and asking with disgust: “What have you dragged in here?”

It was a resected uterus, the most powerful and complexly structured muscle of the female body. Bisected lengthways and opened outward, and not yet having lost all its color in the formaldehyde, it resembled a boiled yellow fodder beet. Inside the uterus was a sprouted bulb. The monstrous battle that had taken place between the fetus, enmeshed in dense colorless fibers, and the translucent predatory sack that more resembled some sort of sea creature than an ordinary onion, such as one might use in a salad, was already over.

“I ask that you note: this is a pregnant uterus with a sprouted onion inside. The onion is inserted into the uterus and then begins to sprout. The root system penetrates the fetus, after which it is extracted together with it. When nothing goes wrong, that is. When something goes wrong, they wind up on my operating table or go directly to the Vagankovo cemetery . . . More often the latter . . .”

“You’re joking . . .” The party functionary recoiled.

“I could bring you pounds of these onions,” Pavel Alekseevich politely answered the paled functionary. “Official statistics—and I cannot conceal this—do not at all correspond to the reality.”

The party boss stiffened.

“What gives you the right . . . ? How dare you?”

“I dare, I dare. Whenever I manage to rescue a woman after a criminal abortion, I have to enter ‘spontaneous miscarriage’ in her chart. Because if I don’t, I’ll put her in prison. Or her neighbor, who also has small children, while half the children in our country are already fatherless. Believe me, this onion is the cleverest, but not the only, method of aborting a pregnancy. Metal knitting needles, catheters, scissors, intrauterine injections of take your pick: iodine, soda, soapy water . . .”

“Stop, Pavel Alekseevich,” implored the by now white bureaucrat, who had remembered how before the war his wife also had resorted to something of the sort. “Enough. What do you want from me?”

“We need a decree legalizing abortion.”

“You’re out of your mind! Don’t you understand that there are the interests of the state, the interests of the nation? We lost millions of men during the war. There’s the issue of replenishing the population. What you’re saying is childish babble.” The official was truly upset.

“Not a bad idea bringing that jar,” Pavel Alekseevich thought. The conversation, it seemed, had swung to his advantage. He had begun it correctly, and now he had to end it correctly.

“We lost millions of men, but now we’re losing thousands of women. A legal medical abortion does not involve mortal risk.” Pavel Alekseevich frowned. “You see, improved general health in and of itself will lead to an increase in the birth rate . . .” Pavel Alekseevich’s eyes met the bureaucrat’s. “How many orphans are left behind? Orphanages also are fed out of the state budget, by the way . . . This has to be resolved. It will rest on our conscience . . .”

The party boss grimaced, deep folds forming beneath his chin.

“Take that away . . . , the talk happens there.” He pointed at the sky.

“I’ll leave you this specimen. Maybe it will come in handy.”

The official threw up his hands. “You’ve lost your mind! Take that away immediately . . .”

“Based on incomplete statistics—highly incomplete—twenty thousand a year. In Russia alone.” Pavel Alekseevich scowled. “You’re responsible for them.”

“You’re going too far,” the party boss bellowed, no longer resembling his May Day portrait at all.

“That’s because you’re not going far enough,” Pavel Alekseevich cut him short.

That was how they parted. The specimen remained on the grandee’s desk near the pen-and-ink set embellished with the iron head of a proletarian writer.

THOSE FIRST YEARS AFTER THE WAR WERE VERY SUCcessful for Pavel Alekseevich: his department, suspended during war, regained its right to full-scale operations. Two of Pavel Alekseevich’s best pupils who at the outset of the war had retrained and left obstetrics and gynecology for several years returned. The number of positions in the clinic doubled. New research slots were still not being granted, but even in the worst of times Pavel Alekseevich had managed to conduct research and save up certain ideas that awaited their moment. He was contemplating cures for a certain type of female infertility, had done deep research into female oncology, and had come upon interesting links between pregnancy and the malignant processes that arose in women’s bodies during this period. His thinking brought him very close to the idea of treating cancer with the aid of hormonal growth inhibitors. His gift of intravision provided no answers to his questions, but it helped him to see more clearly certain general pictures of the life of the body. His vision of the life of society and state was, on the contrary, completely unclear. It seemed to him, as it did to many in the initial postwar years, that former prewar errors would dissipate on their own and that life would acquire some reason. The project he was developing would insure the accelerated dawning of the bright future, at least in his area of competence.

Despite his successful—as it had seemed to him—visit to the high-ranking boss, his project was not moving forward, the commission still had yet to convene itself, and he continued persistently and methodically pounding the threshold of the now even more guarded Workhorse to make his case that the time had come to modernize existing health care. She politely heard him out (rumors of his escapade had reached her immediately), but insofar as she had not been given any direct orders, she continued to be extremely careful with Pavel Alekseevich. She even thought it advantageous to treat him kindly. Owing precisely to her initiative, at the end of 1947 Pavel Alekseevich was awarded the rank of corresponding member of the Academy of Medical Sciences and, at about the same time, assigned an apartment in a newly constructed building for the medical elite. It was like advance payment for future state achievements. The advance was splendid: a three-room apartment with a walk-in pantry off the kitchen. Vasilisa was the happiest of all. For the first time in her life she had her own room. Seeing the pantry, she burst into tears.

“There it is, my little monastic cell! God grant I die here.”

No matter how hard Elena attempted to persuade her to live in the main room, together with Tanechka, Vasilisa refused.

By standards of the time they were rich beyond measure. Only Pavel Alekseevich’s generosity was equal to their wealth, thanks to which there was never any spare cash in the house. Twice a month, on payday, after their late dinner, Pavel Alekseevich would announce: “Lenochka, the list!”

Elena would bring him the list of those to whom they sent monetary aid. Since before the war Pavel Alekseevich had sent money to his cousin’s daughter, a half-aunt, an old surgical nurse with whom he had begun his career, and his friend from university, Ilya Goldberg, who since 1932 had been either in a camp, or in exile, or in some provincial hole.

Before Pavel Alekseevich’s marriage there had been no list as such: he just remembered and sent the money. But now, when his wife compiled the list, adding to her husband’s her own distant relations, her girlfriend from school stranded in Tashkent, and several of Vasilisa’s old lady friends, Pavel Alekseevich even acquired a certain respect for his big salary. Since the circle of people was rather extensive and could change from month to month, Pavel Alekseevich would look at the list and sometimes inquire about a name.

“Musya? Who’s that?” Hearing out the explanation, he would nod.

Then Elena would announce the grand total, after which Vasilisa would scurry into his office and solemnly bring out the old leather briefcase. Pavel Alekseevich opened the briefcase and divvied up the banknotes. The next morning Vasilisa wrapped each amount separately in newspaper, then, for some reason, wrapped all the newspaper bundles into an old towel, then, one hand clutching her change purse and the other Elena’s arm, she went to the post office, and only there, at the window, handed the money over to Elena, who sent off the money orders.

Vasilisa moved her lips. Elena thought that she was counting the money. Vasilisa was saying her favorite prayers. She had few words of her own, and she was accustomed to conversing with her God in fragments of the psalms and prayer formulas. When she experienced an urge to add something from herself, she invoked the Immaculate Virgin as “darling, dear, please do this and that, so that everything will be all right . . .”

Vasilisa’s world was simple: on high sat the Lord God, the Holy Mother of God with all the angels, all the saints, and mother superior among them; then came Pavel Alekseevich; and then they, the family, and everyone else—evil people to one side, good people to the other. In her eyes Pavel Alekseevich was almost a saint: at that hospital of his he helped everyone, good and evil, just like the Lord God. Even mortal sinners who had taken the lives of others. That Pavel Alekseevich’s chief concern was to legalize that sin had not yet occurred to her.