The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

7

AFTER TURNING FIVE TANECHKA SPROUTED AND LOST her baby fat: her face acquired angles, and moist blue shadows appeared under her eyes. Her cough would go away, then come back again. They called Isaac Veniaminovich Ketsler, a friend and classmate of Pavel Alekseevich’s late father. He was more than eighty; he had worked at the former St. Vladimir’s children’s hospital since 1904, and after retiring he continued to make the daily trip to his clinic, where he was allowed to keep his office.

Isaac Veniaminovich was renowned for his divine ears. They even looked unusual, enlarged with age, flabby and dry, like an elephant’s. A fountain of gray hairs spurted out of his ear canals, while his elongated lobes hung in long wrinkled folds. For all this, Isaac Veniaminovich was hard of hearing until he put his short black tube in his ear and placed the wide end against a child’s back. His hearing improved especially if he pressed his old ears directly against the ticklish tiny patient’s squirming body.

“We have a primary infection right here,” Isaac Veniaminovich said, pointing a finger just below Tanya’s clavicle.

“In the upper right lobe. You need to go the Institute of Pediatrics and have Dr. Khotimsky do an X-ray for you . . . On the Solyanka, Solyanka Street . . .”

Pavel Alekseevich nodded. He knew the place well: an old structure near the Ustinsky Bridge built at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a foundling house for abandoned infants, the children of wayward village girls, maids, and seamstresses to Moscow’s Babylon who had not managed to keep their transgressions from becoming newborns . . .

Pavel Alekseevich looked at his daughter, undressed to the waist, with his special vision, focusing it several inches just below the surface of her milk-white skin, but he sensed nothing except his own restless concern.

“Unfortunately, it’s a widespread phenomenon,” Isaac Veniaminovich mumbled, walking his fingers around Tanya’s ear and down her neck, stopping below her chin and then entering the depths of her armpits.

“She is lymphatic, lymphatic. Likely, her thyroid is slightly enlarged as well. How is her appetite? Bad, naturally. How could it be good? And vomiting? Does she vomit frequently? Heraus? From the stomach?”

“Very frequently.” Elena nodded.

“A spoonful too much and she starts to vomit. We never try to talk her into eating more.”

“As I thought,” the old man responded with satisfaction. “She’s spasmatic.” He put an ear to her stomach. “Does your tummy hurt? Here?” He poked his finger at a certain spot. “It aches right here, does it?”

“Yes, yes,” Tanechka was delighted. “Right there.”

“That’s what it is,” Pavel Alekseevich brightened to himself. “The old man’s ears are clairvoyant. Not his eyes, not his fingers . . .”

Strain as he might, he could not see anything this time. The picture he had grown accustomed to seeing—of a person from the inside, the mysterious landscape of organs, the turns of rivers, foggy caves, hollows, and the labyrinth of the intestine—would not open up before him . . .

Not turning off his discouraged vision, he looked at Isaac Veniaminovich. The crimson light of a cancerous tumor enveloped his stomach. The locus was in the pylorus, and a cluster of metastases crept along the mediastinum. Pavel Alekseevich closed his eyes . . .

Tanya got an X-ray. They found something. Blood tests confirmed the diagnosis. The old pediatrician’s recommendations turned out to be amazingly old school. The child was prescribed Switzerland, within means, naturally—that is, suburban Moscow Switzerland. Many hours outside, sleep in the fresh air—much to Vasilisa’s horror, for as a simple person who had grown up in a village, she did not believe in fresh air. And, of course, good nutrition and cod-liver oil. In a word, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, although Isaac Veniaminovich had never heard of it. And no medicines like that newfangled PAS: why strain the liver or overload the kidneys?

Pavel Alekseevich nodded, and nodded, and then asked pointedly whether the old pediatrician wanted to have his own stomach examined.

“My dear colleague, at my age all natural processes have slowed down to the point that I have a good chance of dying of pneumonia or heart failure.”

“He knows everything. He’s right,” Pavel Alekseevich agreed in his heart.

THEY RENTED A BIG WINTRIFIED DACHA NEAR ZVENIgorod that belonged to a career admiral banished for the minor infraction of grand larceny to an honorable exile as chief military attaché at the embassy in Canada. That same autumn the Academy of Sciences was distributing dachas, and Pavel Alekseevich was invited to submit an application. For some reason he refused. He could not have explained to himself why, but he had an inkling: they were offering him an awful lot these days. Would it later cost him the skin off his back? He did not even tell Elena about the offer of a dacha.

Tanya and Vasilisa were settled at the rented house. No matter how hard Pavel Alekseevich attempted to persuade Elena to quit that worthless job of hers and remain at the dacha, she refused flat out. She did not want to quit her job or leave Pavel Alekseevich by himself in the city all week.

The dacha was huge, two-storied, with pseudo-Gothic china cupboards and sideboards filled with porcelain and useless knickknacks. A piano stood in each of the two main rooms, upstairs and downstairs, among a herd of rock-hard wooden armchairs and chairs with carved backs. The piano upstairs was a black concert grand; the one downstairs—an upright with a cracked soundboard, made of rosewood with bronze detail. It could not be tuned, but they figured that out only later, after Pavel Alekseevich and the watchman had carried it into one of the two rooms they would live in—for Tanya. A teacher from Zvenigorod was hired, and she came to the house three times a week.

Within a few weeks, on Sunday evenings, after heating the house toasty warm, Pavel Alekseevich and Elena would sit down in the carved German chairs that smelled of theft, as did everything else in the house, and Tanya played them bashful tunes learned that week . . .

Thus passed two years. Tanya remembered the winters much better than the summers. Perhaps because winter in Russia is twice as long as summer. She would later recollect her childhood as a time of whiteness, not illness: morning portions of sweet goat’s milk in a white porcelain mug; outside the window thick, wavy snowdrifts along the ground and small round pillows of snow festively embellishing the fir-tree branches above; the white gleam of the keys of the piano she would sit down to after breakfast while Vasilisa washed the dishes. Later Vasilisa would give her a wooden shovel and order her to clear paths. Tanya moved snow around with her shovel until Vasilisa would offer her a new task—feeding the birds.

The lot surrounding the house was enormous, and Pavel Alekseevich had set up four feeders, and Tanya watched for hours on end as red-breasted bullfinches and yellow-cheeked titmice fed from the little wooden table under the slanting canopy. Sometimes she and Vasilisa, each with a covered canister—one small, the other large—walked to a spring about a third of a mile away to gather tasty water. A spring flowed nearer the house, at the edge of the enormous lot, but sometimes it got buried during snowstorms and the water could not break through to the surface. Every day they went to the village for goat’s milk, visiting their old woman friend, her goat, and her dog that lived in the front entranceway with her black puppies.

Tanya was constantly busy. She did not know the difference between work and fun. There was nothing forced in her life. Even cod-liver oil, which she had not liked before, became tolerable after Vasilisa treated the black puppies to pieces of bread sprinkled with cod-liver oil and they snatched them up as if they were undreamed of delicacies.

Living her happy life in the countryside, Tanya missed first grade. She completed the first-grade program at home. She could read well and had mastered counting. Penmanship was more difficult. Tanya would get upset because her letters were not as beautiful as those in the practice books. Her recuperation was complete. Isaac Veniaminovich, who could have testified to the fact, was no longer among the living.

TOWARD AUTUMN TANYA WAS BROUGHT BACK TO THE Moscow apartment and started school, going straight into the second grade. Preparations for her first day at school were made with great labor and care. They had a school uniform sewn for her—a brown dress with a stand-up collar, attachable white collars and cuffs for dress occasions, black sleeve protectors, two black aprons, and a white apron with pleated ruffles on the shoulders, also for special occasions.

“Just like an angel.” Vasilisa sighed devoutly.

And in her childlike soul she began to look up to Tanya. She herself had never attended school, and that uniform had not been pieced together from some old dress, but cut from a whole piece of new wool cloth, which seemed to her a sign of particular distinction. She even thought to herself: “Beautiful enough to bury . . .” She did not mean anything bad.

They also bought her a stack of light-bluish notebooks with porous pink blotting paper inside, an aromatic wooden pencil box with precious contents: new pencils, erasers, pens . . . They even ordered new high shoes for Tanya at a special shoe atelier that no one in the family had ever been to.

Tanya had been dreaming about school for a long time: she had been promised that at school she would find all the girlfriends she so missed having during her happy tubercular childhood in Zvenigorod.

On the first of September, Elena brought her daughter to school. She found the teacher and left Tanya in the classroom, alone and confused, with a heavy schoolbag and a thick-stemmed bouquet of plump asters. There turned out to be too many girls to be friends with. They were noisy, but one could deal with that. What was most unpleasant was that they all touched Tanya, her braids, the ruffle of her apron. One even managed to grab her by her white sock . . .

The classroom turned out to be exactly as Tanya had pictured it. The teacher pointed to her seat next to a fat little girl with braids wound in little donuts around her ears. In the middle of the lesson Tanya’s neighbor bumped her elbow, and Tanya made a huge blot on the first page of her notebook. She froze. This had happened to her before when she filled out her lonely writing books in Zvenigorod, but now she was horrified. She had not yet recovered from her shock when her deskmate leaned over and pinched her painfully on the leg. That was when Tanya understood that the bump on the elbow had been on purpose, and she started to cry. The teacher walked up to her and asked what the matter was.

“May I go home?” Tanya whispered.

“You may go home after the fourth period,” the teacher said firmly.

For the first time in her life Tanya had bumped up against someone else’s will, against force in its mildest form. Until that moment the wishes of those around her had fortuitously coincided with her own; it had never occurred to her that life could be any other way . . . It turned out that’s what adult life was—submitting to someone else’s will . . . From that point on, it turned out, in order to be happy as before, you had to make sure that you yourself wanted exactly what adults expected of you . . . She, of course, did not think that; the idea, rather, had come upon her from above and begun to press itself on her . . .

Until the end of the fourth period she sat at her desk as if in a stupor, not getting up even for breaks. The girls whom she had expected to be her friends turned out to be malicious monkeys: they skipped round her, pulled her braids, pointed their fingers at her, and laughed meanly. Tanya tried to understand why they disliked her and could not imagine that they were just expressing their interest in her. She could not fathom that a few months later these same little girls would fight tooth and nail for the privilege of being her partner in line, doing class duty, or just walking down the corridor with her.

Tanya, as it turned out, possessed a rare quality difficult to define: no matter what she did—tied a bow, wrapped a notebook, shook drops of water from her hands with that distinctive upward sweeping gesture of hers, wrinkled her nose in a smile—each of her movements was immediately noticed and attracted the girls’ attention, and she became a model for emulation. Even the way she chewed on the fluffy end of her braid when she was lost in thought was imitated by all of the girls who had braids . . .

Despite the girls’ adulation, Tanya never took a liking to school. Surrounded by dozens of little girls competing for her attention and friendship, she felt more alone than she had been in Zvenigorod. The only person who felt more left out was Toma Polosukhina, a downtrodden D-student with a raspberry ring of peeling dry skin around her mouth who sat in the last row. A withdrawn, slouching little girl no one wanted to sit with . . .

Toma did not belong to the ranks of Tanya’s admirers: interstellar distances lay between them . . .