The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

14

ON JANUARY 13 OF THE NEW 1953, PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH went on another drinking binge. But this time there was no cheerful revelry, and no dacha. He was morose, silent, and would not come to the phone. He went to the clinic no more often than three times a week, and by two in the afternoon he was already home. Tanechka, with whom he had always spent much of his time at home, was now in the constant company of Toma.

Both Pavel Alekseevich and Tanya hesitated to offend Toma by leaving her alone, so only in the early morning would Tanya peek into her father’s study for a few minutes—to joke, giggle, and whisper in his ear one of her baby nicknames for him.

Two other children often came to the apartment, Ilya Iosifovich Goldberg’s sons, Gennady and Vitaly—thin, awkward, with breaking voices and violent acne. They came almost every day to eat dinner. Elena invited them, knowing the family’s difficult straits: Goldberg had been in prison since 1949, and Valya, who had worked in the laboratory of a Jewish doctor just arrested, was fired the day after. Left without a job, she fell ill, living from one heart attack to the next with respites only to take another trip to deliver a care package to her husband. She herself never ceased to be amazed that she was so sickly . . .

Vasilisa, whose clumsy and charitable hands passed on hundreds of money transfers and parcels, was unhappy about these dinnertime visits: as she saw it, alms were supposed to be handed out as small change or bread, not in the form of expensive meat patties. Elena guessed the reason for Vasilisa’s discontent, but said nothing . . .

Throughout the entire country, meetings of indignant citizens were held, and within the health system these events were conducted with particular inspiration. Anyone with any reputation was obliged to speak out and revile the criminals. Pavel Alekseevich realized from the outset that all doctors down to the very last one were being corralled into collaborating in these shameful accusations. He had not the least doubt that the doctors were completely innocent. Pavel Alekseevich was deeply depressed, and for the first time in his life he contemplated suicide. The thick volume, rebound in red leather, of Mommsen’s History of Rome lay constantly on his desk and whispered to him: in the period of late antiquity Pavel Alekseevich so loved, suicide was considered not a sin, but a courageous way out of a hopeless situation taken for the sake of preserving both honor and dignity. Pavel Alekseevich tried this seductive thought out on himself.

The holes in his relationship with his wife, which refused to be darned and only grew wider, depressed him. His beloved daughter was too small to become his confidante. Their closest friends now were almost all under arrest: geneticist Ilya Goldberg, forensic pathologist Jacob Shapiro, ophthalmologist Petya Krivoshey . . . All except Sasha Maklakov, his old university buddy who had long ago left medical practice to become a bureaucrat and unexpectedly turned up among the more inspired Jew-hunters . . .

But the biggest surprise awaited Pavel Alekseevich in his own home—Vasilisa Gavrilovna, who sincerely and absolutely despised Soviet power, for the first time in her life had taken its bait: the idea of covert enemies, clever doctors, and Jewish sorcerers struck a chord in her medieval soul. All the pieces of the picture fit: the Jews had led the revolution, killed the tsar, and destroyed the church. What could you expect from the people who had crucified Christ?

Vasilisa quaked, gasped, and prayed. From the street and from lines in stores she brought back eye-popping stories of doctors infecting their patients with blood from cadavers, blinding newborn infants, and inoculating their gullible patients of Russian descent with cancer. An enormous number of eyewitnesses and victims emerged. People refused treatment from Jewish doctors, and a mass psychotic fear of poisoning and the evil eye set in . . . Staff reductions, purges, trial by rumor . . . Lydia Timashuk received the Lenin Prize for exposing an underground ring . . .

During these months Vasilisa had no choice but to remain Pavel Alekseevich’s sole conversation partner, or, rather, listener. Elena went off to work, and the girls—to school. Following her morning grocery raids, Vasilisa came back to find Pavel Alekseevich waiting for her in the kitchen with a pot of coffee. He displayed an extreme degree of insensitivity and completely ignored Vasilisa’s obvious lack of interest in, and complete inability to maintain, a conversation. While she unloaded her patched shopping bags, he would settle in with a cup of tea or something stronger and embark on an unrushed lecture . . .

In fact, the lecture was intended for a different audience, one more enlightened and more populous, but there was no other: he could not lecture students on his investigations—having nothing to do with questions of medicine—into the history of antisemitism and its religious and economic roots. Mommsen served as his primary source, after whom Pavel Alekseevich rummaged around in the works of Josephus Flavius and real authors from antiquity; he read Saint Augustine and some of the Church Fathers . . . He worked himself toward the Middle Ages . . . Antisemitism, to his amazement, had plagued all of Christian civilization.

Vasilisa gloomily peeled carrots, sorted millet and buckwheat, and chopped cabbage. You couldn’t say that she did not hear Pavel Alekseevich, but for her his brilliant lectures were written in a foreign language. She was able to extract only the general idea that Pavel Alekseevich did not believe in the insidiousness of the Jews, just the opposite—he even condemned those who attacked the Jews. As he got more and more worked up, Pavel Alekseevich quoted something in Latin and then in German, which confused poor Vasilisa even more. Maybe he’s a Jew? Until recently she had believed in Pavel Alekseevich as in the Lord God, but after his fatal revelation, after he himself admitted to doing everything in his power to legalize infanticide, she did not know how she should feel about him. How much had he given away without ever counting? How many people had he helped without even knowing their name? And he was cutting children out of their mothers’ bellies, killing little babies . . . Maybe he’s the Anti-Christ? She seemed not to distinguish the various shades of gray between black and white, not to mention pink and green, and for that reason, lips pursed, she fried onions and maintained total and disapproving silence.

Once, having consumed a bottle of vodka over the course of a two-hour monologue, Pavel Alekseevich noticed that Vasilisa had not touched the coffee he himself had made for her.

“Vasilisa, sweetie, why didn’t you drink your coffee? Don’t tell me you’re afraid it’s poisoned?” he joked.

“So what if I am?” Vasilisa muttered.

Pavel Alekseevich wanted to laugh, but stifled his laughter. As happens with alcoholics, his mood suddenly changed. He was overwhelmed by repulsion for his life. He became morose and slumped.

“A great nation, damn it . . .”

Vasilisa crossed herself and whispered a prayer for protection: Pavel Alekseevich was now on her suspect list.