The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

12

CLASSES AT SCHOOL ENDED, ALONG WITH THE PREMAture heat wave. Cold rain set in. They started packing for the dacha. Vasilisa had left, despite Elena’s admonishments, and Elena felt completely lost: without Vasilisa, life—not to mention their move to the dacha—was all off-kilter. Usually all the packing was done quietly and well in advance by Vasilisa; Elena now had no way of estimating how much macaroni and kerosene or sugar and salt they should take or how to wrap and pack it all.

Toma did everything she could to be useful and to be liked, especially by Tanya. For her, Tanya had always been a creature of a higher order, and now, when they spent all their days together, she sensed Tanya’s goodwill toward her, and put her on a pedestal.

Pavel Alekseevich moved to the dacha together with the whole family, but that summer he practically did not live there, coming only on Saturdays. His admonitory quarrel with his wife, which at first had seemed to him not that significant, had grown into full-fledged emotional dissonance. Pavel Alekseevich’s words about her inadequacy as a woman wedged like a splinter in Elena’s heart. The barrier turned out to be insuperable: Elena now spent the night on the sofa on the enclosed terrace. When Pavel Alekseevich visited, he would stay in his study upstairs. Their bedroom was vacant. He also had been inexpressibly offended: it was as if with her words Elena had deprived him of his paternity.

They both suffered and would have liked to talk it through, but there was nothing to apologize for: they both felt that they were right and had been unjustly insulted. They were not accustomed to talking things out, and they had never been able or wanted to discuss the intimate aspects of their life. Their alienation only mounted.

On Sundays Pavel Alekseevich rose early, woke the girls, and took them down to the small river. They would splash about until lunchtime, and he taught them to swim. Then they returned home and ate dinner. Toma tried not to scrape her spoon against her plate, to use her fork, and not to gorge herself on bread . . .

For all their emotional dissonance, their family life followed a well-trodden path: Pavel Alekseevich brought home enormous amounts of money, and Elena read through the lists and sent money-grams and packages. But without Vasilisa this festive and solemn ritual seemed to have lost its meaning. Two chance coincidental events—the family quarrel and Toma’s appearance in their household—somehow merged into one, and with deep-seated hidden hostility Elena observed the mousy little girl barely as tall as Tanya’s shoulder.

At the very end of summer Vasilisa returned, as if nothing had happened. Catching sight of her on the path that led to the terrace, Elena began to cry. Vasilisa too broke out into tears. She was black with suntan and thinner than usual. She explained nothing, and Elena did not ask any questions. Both of them were happy. The next day a letter came from Toma’s aunt asking them to “keep the niece at least until Christmas.” Elena read the letter while Vasilisa nodded her scraggly head to the rhythm of the words. They both fell silent. Then Vasilisa made coffee—it was her only gastronomical weakness and over the course of her wanderings she had missed coffee more than anything else. Vasilisa poured herself a big mug of watery brownish drink and was the first to resume the conversation left hanging long ago.

“Well, we got to decide what to do with little Toma . . . She’s not a puppy or a kitten. Fenya doesn’t want her. She either goes to a children’s home or she stays here.”

“I’m thinking.” Elena scowled. Her heart was in no way inclined toward this little girl, but she already knew that her heart was irrelevant, because the child had already attached herself to their household and nothing could be done about it.

“I think we should keep her: she’s really an ugly kid.” Such was Vasilisa Gavrilovna’s incomprehensible logic.

“Vasya, what are you saying?” Elena was shocked. “We should take her because she’s ugly?”

“Who else is going to take her, Elena? No lips, no hips, and barely a brain. With us she’ll have food on her plate, shoes on her feet, and clothes on her back. Look at all the clothes Tanya’s grown out of. And then she’ll be in God’s hands . . . It’s not up to us . . .”

“Which means we should adopt her,” Elena nodded doomfully.

“So talk to him.” Since returning Vasilisa had not once spoken Pavel Alekseevich’s name, referring to him only as “he.”

Strangely enough, Pavel Alekseevich was prepared with an answer. Apparently, he had thought about this earlier: apply for guardianship.

“Why, of course! Why hadn’t I thought of that?” Elena, who in no way could picture herself in the role of mother to the unattractive little girl, beamed. Vasilisa Gavrilovna too was delighted, though she hardly understood the fine legal differences between guardianship and adoption.

And Tanya was pleased. Toma had come to occupy a special place in her life, something like a talking dog one had to take care of. She never put a morsel in her mouth without Toma and was always ready to give her the best of everything, but at times, tiring of Toma’s silent and timid presence, she would slip out on her own to take a walk or visit neighbors . . . Toma never took offense, but tailed Tanya constantly for fear of losing her.

Just before they left the dacha, Pavel Alekseevich himself announced to Toma that he was inviting her to live in their house until she grew up and received her education.

“Okay, I agree.” The little girl accepted the invitation with dignity.

Deep in her heart she was terribly disappointed. She would have liked Pavel Alekseevich to be her real father, as he was for Tanya.

By September they returned to Moscow. Tomochka had been fully accepted into the household, and life followed its usual course. Only Elena Georgievna and Pavel Alekseevich’s family happiness had faded and withered. Pavel Alekseevich’s clumsy attempts to restore spousal relations met with no success. Particularly the last time when on one of his binges in the middle of the night he had entered their bedroom, where Lenochka dreamed her lonely, illuminative dreams, and heeding neither her protestations nor her disgust, he committed loveless rape, coming to his senses only in the morning and horrified by the events of that night.

He tried to ask for forgiveness, but she just nodded, and, without raising her eyes said flatly, without any expression whatsoever, “There’s nothing to discuss. I ask only that it never happen again.”

He saw the bouncy lock of hair that, as always, had fallen out of her bun and hung in a loop from her forehead to her ear; he saw her cheekbones and the tip of her nose, and he burned with shame and desire, and at that moment he would not have hesitated to give the best thing he owned, his nameless gift, so as to restore the happy simplicity and ease with which until not long ago he had been able to place his index finger into the dimple beneath that soft lock of hair and slide it from there down along her narrow backbone in the even groove of her spine to the slightly elevated base of her tailbone—os sacrum, the sacred bone . . . Why, by the way, was it sacred?—and further downward, between her tight-pressed musculus gluteous maximus, past the delicately ridged button of her perineum, parting her slightly flaccid labia majora and shy labia minora to settle in her vestibulum vaginae and feel her satiny moist mucosa—he knew all this anatomy, morphology, histology—and caress with his finger the longish bead of her corpus clitoridis—ellipsis, space, heartbeat—further and further, through the thin forest of hair on the tangible round of her mons pubis, past her cosmetic, double-stitched scar (he hadn’t realized then that the effort had been for himself), upward toward the tiny funnel of her navel, past the sharp nipples of her breasts spread in different directions, and stopping at her infraclavicular fossa so that the bowed arches of her clavicle spread beneath his palm . . .

He winced with his entire face and moaned: it was all over, gone. Silently he left their bedroom, went to his study, pulled an uncorked bottle from behind the curtain, and opened it . . . He drank. And smiled. That putrefied, sick uterus he had removed ten years ago had taken its revenge. The wretch.

How in the world had those idiotic words spoken in anger and aggravation been born in his head? What had made him say to her “You’re not a woman”? To her, the epitome of femininity, perfection. Lost. Everything was lost. He drank another half-glass and realized that he would not be able to fall asleep. From the bottom drawer of his desk he pulled his favorite folder with the blue inscription: PROJECT. He opened it. He read the first page: Stalin’s name was mentioned twice. He shuddered again.

“How have I managed to live so long with the happy delusion that I was a decent person?” Pavel Alekseevich put the cruel question to himself. He pulled out the first page of the manuscript, folded it in four, and ripped it apart twice. Then tidily placed the pieces in the wastepaper basket. He looked through the entire manuscript—the leader’s name was not mentioned anywhere else. He yawned, shook his head, but could not fend off the disgusting gnashing of his heart and realized that there was nothing else left for him to do except fall asleep.

Pavel Alekseevich never bothered his wife again. Just as he never again attempted to discuss this new sad state of affairs with her.

That last nocturnal episode, which in no way coincided with Elena’s sense of her husband, in fact changed little: her hurt was so profound that she could no longer do anything with herself. It was as if the phrase her husband had spoken in anger had killed all desire and poisoned the very soil from which the need for tender contact, for caresses, and for spousal intimacy grew.

Over time the hurt neither increased nor decreased. It penetrated her to her depths, and Elena lived with it the same way people live for years with a birthmark or a tumor.

Even outwardly Elena began gradually to change: she lost weight and acquired sharp corners. Her softly rounded movements, the soft angled turn of her head, her catlike manner of curling up in an upholstered chair or on the couch, lightly easing her body into every corner of the furniture—her natural, unique way of moving that had always attracted Pavel Alekseevich—was abandoning her.

The clothes that had once suited her, with the round collars, gathered sleeves, and innocent open necklines that revealed her slightly drooping, but long neck, had by then gone out of style, and she happily recut and resewed all her light dresses for the girls—the one with the tiny flowers, the one with the small wreaths, and the one with the little bouquets—and bought herself two suits (one summer, the other winter) and turned into a school marm.

Sitting next to his wife at family dinner one Sunday, Pavel Alekseevich sniffed the air. Through the crude aromas of Vasilisa’s simple cooking came something new: instead of her former flowery scent, Elena smelled of widowhood, dust, and vegetable oil. Almost like Vasilisa, only Vasilisa’s smell was mixed with either sweat or the stench of old greasy clothing . . . He moved his eyes from his wife to Tanya, and smiled to her: what a delightful little girl she was, her mother’s image, all Lenochka . . . The former Lenochka . . .

The happy period of their marriage was over. Now all that was left was the marriage, like everyone else’s, and even, perhaps, better than most people’s. After all, lots of people survive somehow from day to day, year to year, never knowing joy or happiness, only mechanical habit.

Never, ever—they both understood—would they reenter the happy waters they had sailed for ten years . . .

TIME AND AGAIN ELENA’S GAZE WOULD STUMBLE UPON the puny little girl with the habits of a small rodent—benign, meek, and as pathetic as could be—the unintentional cause of their family’s breakdown, which for Elena was more bitter than all the misfortunes she had endured, including the deaths of her parents, of her grandmother, of her husband, her own deadly illness, and even the war. Living with her was impossible, but so was getting rid of her, sending her back to her relatives, or placing her in a children’s home.

Vasilisa mumbled, as if to the wall: “And you thought it would be simple? Nothing is simple . . . You’re gonna have to work at it now . . . Yes, you are . . . You can’t just pray that one away . . .”

What sins of Elena’s did she have in mind? Vasilisa Gavrilovna had her own special, complicated way of adding things up, but underlying her method was a strange, even if somewhat silly, truth.