The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

15

THE STALIN ERA ENDED ON MARCH 5, BUT A LONG TIME passed before anyone figured that out. Early in the morning that day the leader’s death was announced over the radio. By this time he had been dead for several days, but those who were now supposed to steer the Soviet Union were so discombobulated that they decided first to inform the world that he was ill. These fallacious news flashes about a corpse’s health communicated more than just the gradual decline of his already nonexistent wellness. Medical terminology and statistics were cited that said little to the average person, but in itself the very phrase “the urine test was normal” conveyed that those on high also unfastened their fly, took out their member with thumb and index finger, and produced a certain quantity of urine. Even if it was of the very best quality, it was still urine! That was the first, devastating blow to the cult of personality. The new leaders also needed time to get accustomed to the idea that ultimately even the most immortal die.

The country’s population reacted stormily: they sobbed, fainted, and collapsed from shock-induced heart attacks. Others sighed with relief, secretly rejoiced, and gloated in their hearts. But even the deceased leader’s covert enemies—he hadn’t had any overt ones for a long time—were in a state of confusion: how could they live without him?

Pavel Alekseevich’s family represented the full range of possible reactions. Toma, who had surprised everyone with her businesslike cool at the funeral of her own mother, was now absolutely choked with grief. For a full two days she sobbed, taking short breaks to eat and sleep. She literally, in the biblical sense, ate her bread with tears.

Tanya experienced great discomfort and awkwardness: she found nothing in her heart comparable to the torrid emotions Toma displayed. She felt ashamed of her own lack of sensitivity, and, to the extent it was possible, she appropriated Toma’s grief. The latter wept so sweetly and selflessly that out of pity for her Tanya managed on someone else’s account to drop a few tiny tears of her own.

Pavel Alekseevich experienced a great sense of relief: there would be changes, now there would be changes. The absurd case of the doctors, in his opinion, would have to be dropped now. He expected controls to be loosened, and even pulled the folder with the dark-blue inscription PROJECT from his bottom drawer . . .

For her part, though, Vasilisa, who had long despised the powers that be and who gloated on the day Stalin’s death was announced, on the next day suddenly grew morose, fell into a stupor, and kept shaking her head and—making a fig with her small fist under her black rayon headscarf—repeating incessantly, “What’s going to happen now?”

Pavel Alekseevich, seeing her consternation, chuckled.

“We’ll survive, with God’s help!”

Elena, hearing Pavel Alekseevich’s remark, smiled: she found it very amusing that Pavel Alekseevich the nonbeliever was reminding Vasilisa of God’s help.

“When things calm down a bit, I’ll try looking for my family again,” Elena resolved.

Since 1938 the fate of her parents had been cloaked in impenetrable mystery. Ten years without the right to write or send letters had ended a very long time ago, but in reply to the inquiry she had sent back in 1949 she received a response stating that because she was not a close relation of her parents she had no right to submit an inquiry. Elena’s adoption by her grandmother, necessitated in order to save her from repression, now deprived her of the right to obtain information on the fate of her real parents lost somewhere in Altai . . .

“It’s going to be worse now, even worse,” Vasilisa muttered.

Elena, quiet as always, just shook her head.

“It won’t be worse, it won’t . . .”

ATTENDING CLASSES OR GOING TO WORK DURING THOSE days of national mourning seemed blasphemous. Workers came to work and were gathered at meetings. Upper-echelon, lower-echelon, and lowest-of-the-low-echelon bureaucrats, as well as average Soviet people, delivered incoherent words of grief—fantasy infused with make-believe—sobbed, and composed mournful telegrams to the supreme address: Moscow, Kremlin . . . Then, with a Lenten look, they drank tea, smoked themselves into a stupor, iterated the same gnarled, sincere words, and sobbed again, only now not on a grandstand, but in the smoking room . . . Certain people who felt otherwise discreetly looked the other way, finding neither compassion in their hearts, nor tears in their tear glands.

Children went to school, but classes were not held, replaced by a kind of exhausting nervous idleness. They read poems about Stalin and listened to Beethoven over the black loudspeaker . . . Tanya would remember well those quaggy, dragging hours filled with stuffiness and an infernal ennui that exceeded the usual schooltime boredom. The plaster bust strung with a garland of holly and artificial flowers was attended by an honor guard of blubbering Young Pioneer girls who stood almost as plasterlike as the deceased leader. Skinny little Sonya Kapitonova—the girl at the top of the gymnastics pyramid who, propped on the quivering shoulders of her heftier classmates, had not all that long ago shouted from her live tower “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!” fainted at the foot of the bust and struck her head against the massive pedestal.

Their gallant physical education teacher, practically the sole male teacher at the school, carried her off to the nurse’s room in his arms, to the undisguised envy of the older girls. The teachers scurried about and called an ambulance, and a crowd of girls in a tizzy over the turn of events shoved and pushed each other near the nurse’s room, while Tanya stood at the window in the lavatory watching the snowy blur outside the glass, saddened once again by her own hard-heartedness.

It was already known that the national farewell procession would begin at noon the next day in the Hall of Columns in the House of Trade Unions. Their principal had said that they would be taken there as a group, but not on the first day. The girls were worried that they would be deceived and not taken there. Toma was full of determination to scout out the situation in advance and go on her own, early in the morning, so as to get a good place in line. For some reason she was sure that only the senior girls and honor students would get to go.

A rather poor student—although with Tanya’s help she had caught up—Toma had no shortage of practical ingenuity.

Toma found Tanya in the lavatory, drew her close, and pressing her mouth to her ear, whispered, “Nadezhda Ivanovna said that tomorrow everyone is going to the Hall of Columns to pay their respects. The coffin’s put up so that anyone can go see. Wanna go?”

“They won’t let us.” Tanya shook her head. “No way Dad will let us go.”

“We won’t tell him. We’ll just pretend we’re going to school and not say anything . . .”

Tanya pondered: the proposition was tempting. She really wanted to have a look at dead Stalin. She also remembered how they hadn’t taken her to Toma’s mother’s funeral. On the other hand, she had not learned to lie to her parents . . .

The girls left school together. On the last turn toward their building Toma stopped, like a little goat, and announced resolutely, “You do as you want, but I’m going to the Hall of Columns right this instant to find out what’s going on . . .”

This was the first time in their almost yearlong life together that Toma had made an independent decision. Usually she followed Tanya’s lead in everything. Tanya stamped about in place, and they headed off in opposite directions: Tanya, as usual, turned in the direction of Novoslobodskaya, where they lived, while Toma headed down Kaliaevskaya Street toward the center of town . . .

At home there was only Vasilisa, and she did not ask where Toma was. Toma returned only toward six. Her absence had passed unnoticed. Before falling asleep the girls whispered back and forth for a long time. As a result of her excursion Toma knew what most Muscovites still did not: the center of the city had been barricaded off, with trucks and soldiers blocking all passageways, and since yesterday evening people had been lining up in columns . . .

Tanya slept poorly: she dreamed an unending dream from which she longed to wake up, but could not. In her dream she was overcome by a sense of duty, and the idea lurked that if she were able to wake up, she would be able to shirk having to fulfill an important assignment . . . The assignment was to take something very important to some place. What exactly the important thing was she did not remember, but it was small, the size of a fist, totally amorphous and, moreover, invisible. All through the night poor Tanya walked up an empty staircase, looking for a passageway or an elevator. She was supposed to find a certain address, but there were no apartment numbers, and no doorways where the numbers might be written. In addition, she was in a hurry, because the conditions imposed by her dream included urgent delivery. Yet everyone she encountered was either afraid of her or just mean: no one wanted to talk to her . . .

Toma woke Tanya very early. A true villager, she always woke easily. The girls slipped into the kitchen. Vasilisa had not yet come out of her pantry. That meant it was not yet six thirty.

It was a plot, an escape, truancy, and an excursion to boot. Tanya prepared sandwiches and wrapped them in a worn piece of the carbon paper her mother brought from work in which they wrapped everything. Usually their father took a thermos with him on long walks, but Tanya did not know where he had hidden it. Toma boiled water, and they both drank a cup of tea with yesterday’s tea leaves. Tanya listened: there was still the sound of mumbling coming from the pantry, but they had to hurry. Vasilisa ended her obeisances by seven.

“You write the note,” Tanya said with an intonation of hidden imperative, handing Toma a piece of paper.

“What do I write?” Toma asked.

“That we had to leave for school early today.”

“You write it yourself: you write better than me,” Toma groused.

“If I write it, they’ll know right away that I’m lying.” Tanya shoved the pencil into Toma’s hand. “Write it already.”

They put on their winter coats. Toma—a new one, bought especially for her not long ago. Tanya—an old one with an extended hem of beaver lamb from another coat. Toma stuck her legs into felt boots with galoshes. Tanya laced up high boots with a fleecy trim. Proud red boots made to order at an atelier for not just anyone. No one had anything like them. Pavel Alekseevich had been displeased to see these new additions: it was not good to stand out. But on that day all the petty details would prove significant, even these ostentatious boots . . .

Five minutes later they headed downstairs, hid both their satchels behind a radiator, having first put the sandwiches in the pockets of their coats, and set off for the Novoslobodskaya metro station. On the metro they only got as far as Belorusskaya. The transfer to the radial line toward the center of town was closed, and when they emerged upstairs, they discovered that Gorky Street was cordoned off. They saw an enormous multitude of red-and-black flags, and the ever-practical Toma wondered when they had managed to sew so many of them. From there they returned to Novoslobodskaya on foot, turning down Kaliaevskaya Street onto Chekhov Street.

The closer they approached to Pushkin Square, the more people there were, and even though there was no public transportation and people walked in the street, everything bottlenecked at Pushkin Square, where passage to Gorky Street was blocked by trucks and a chain of soldiers. Toma, who knew the city much better, pulled Tanya off to the left, and they found themselves on Pushkin Street in a tight crowd of silent people.

In this city accustomed to long lines no one had ever seen anything like this line before. For the moment it still preserved the shape and character of a line: it shifted, moved ahead slightly, rocked, squabbled, reeked, and ranked everyone fairly, giving each an equal ration of what they wanted—in this case, a piece of the spectacle about which each and every one of its participants would tell for the rest of their lives. But this line had one particular quality that made it singular and unique in all of Soviet history: people came here of their own free will and not out of some necessity—to grab a bread ration, a piece of soap, a quart of kerosene, or a forty-pound sack of grain . . . They had been standing in line all night to pay their civil respects, to bow, to grieve collectively, and to express their grief . . . and something elemental, deeply bestial—like a presentiment of an earthquake or the smell of a distant forest fire—had driven them from their homes and herded them into a single pack. Those who like Tanya were unable to find this invincible call deep in their hearts stayed home . . . But Tanya had been brought here by the ingenuous Toma, a child of the street, of communal apartments, and more susceptible to the laws of the herd.

No one had organized this funeral march, as all parades were usually organized. And the militia—in part paralyzed by the introduction of troops, in part thrown for a loop by all the various, mutually exclusive directives issued by the city’s authorities—was thoroughly unable to deal with the patient lines that slowly and irreversibly closed in on each other.

The girls squeezed between people, passing the theater where not long ago they had been taken to see Swan Lake; now they were simply incapable of imagining that such an amazing inanity as ballet could even exist in this world . . . They bored their way to the corner of Stoleshnikov Lane and got stuck near the small flower shop on the corner. The window of the half-basement shop was set so low that a fat water pipe driven into the wall of the building blocked the windowpane, which extended about two feet below the level of the street. A wide-spaced iron grating covered the rectangular pit just beneath the window. Their slow, laborious movement seemed to have bottlenecked, and then suddenly from somewhere below, from Pushkin Street, a sound—midway between a roar and a howl, a prolonged moan, and a muffled shout—swept over them like a strange tidal wave.

The sound came closer, crescendoed, and seemed like something entirely disconnected from the crowd, like the wind or rain. Holding each other by the hand, the girls now clasped each other even more tightly. The stalled crowd shifted and pushed them straight into the pipe protecting the shop window. A woman just in front of them with a big silver fox collar twisted around and let out a wild howl. The pipe seemed to have broken her in half. She hung from the pipe briefly, and the people pressing from behind trampled the lower part of her body into the window pit, and then with a loud thump her whole body toppled into it . . . When she fell, she was as dead as the silver fox on her shoulders.

The girls were swept past the pipe, then hauled toward the opposite side of the street right into one of the trucks lined up one after the other. They had just seen that woman crushed against the pipe and understood that there would be nothing they could do if they got pushed against the side of the truck.

“Get down,” Toma shouted. It was the only direction they could go—down. They were swept under the truck. There, between the wheels, among orphaned galoshes, they lay on the street—jumbled feet and the hems of clothing blocking the light to the right and to the left. It was stuffy and terrifying. Toma began to cry.

“Don’t cry,” Tanya said. Toma turned her pale face toward her.

“I feel sorry for Stalin . . .”

“Then you’re an idiot,” Tanya said in a tired adult voice.

She did not feel a drop of pity for Stalin. Inside she felt disgusted, as if by some immoral act. Probably because they had played hooky from school. She was so ashamed and felt so bad for having lied . . . Especially to Dad . . . The family probably already knew that they were not in school, and Vasilisa was probably waiting for them with dinner, wondering where they were.

They lay underneath the truck for quite a long time. It reeked of a public toilet, grease, and gasoline. At one point the forest of shoes, tattered trousers, and coat bottoms shifted and parted and seemed to thin out a bit.

“Let’s try getting out of here.” Tanya pulled Toma out from under the truck.

Just at that instant a break in the crowd occurred, and they slipped out from their shelter. While they had been lying under the truck, they had forgotten how easy it was to get lost in the crowd: their grip weakened, their hands broke apart, and they were pulled in different directions . . . They shouted desperately, but even as they still heard each other’s voices they floated, like two splints in a river, in the most uncertain of directions . . .

When they lost each other entirely, their powerful but nonetheless ordinary fear gave way to panicked terror. Toma was picked up and carried toward the wall of a building where the windows of the secondhand fur shop on the first floor had already been boarded up. The double doors onto the street also had been boarded up from within. Lower down, at the level of Toma’s chest, a part of the wooden door had been pushed in and the boards were coming apart. When Toma was pressed against the boards she pushed one of the boards with her shoulder, and it caved in, and Toma tumbled into the dark space between the two doors and found herself inside, as if in a cabinet. She sat down on her haunches and froze.

Toma could not recall how many minutes or hours she sat, huddled, watching through the wide crack between the boards as one set of feet in trampled footwear slowly replaced the next . . . until she saw a familiar red boot. Something lifted her from the ground. She pulled apart the boards and grabbed the leg just above the fleecy fur trim and shouted with all her might, “Tanya! Tanechka!”

It felt to Tanya like a dog had seized her by the leg.

“Where would a dog have come from?” The thought was running through her head, when suddenly she heard Toma’s voice.

“Tanechka! This way, down!”

Not letting go of Tanya’s leg, Toma pressed her entire skinny body against the loose board, which obediently gave way, and Tanya, crouching, squeezed into the narrow space between the doors. This movement downward toward the ground that killed so many that day saved the girls.

They reached for each other like long lost lovers, hugged, and froze. At precisely that moment they became sisters. Everything else remained as it was: Tanya’s uncontested superiority and indulgent patronage and Toma’s groveling deference, servile gratitude, and inner imploring dependence, but their sisterhood—imposed by circumstance and until now dubious, even false—had become real. All their lives they would remember this minute; the memory never faded—their hours embracing in a doorway six inches from a stampeding crowd, from death itself, which from that time on both of them saw in their minds’ eye as a closed, dark, malodorous place where unfortunate victims were trampled, their faces, extremities, and very souls crushed beyond recognition . . .

Suddenly Toma burst out, “Tanya, our satchels are behind the radiator in the entranceway!”

“The sandwiches, the sandwiches!” Tanya remembered and pulled the fatally crushed sandwiches out of her pocket.

They gushed with laughter—who knew why. Most likely because their terror-wracked childish hearts needed this . . .

In the meantime, Vasilisa Gavrilovna was running through the darkening yards of their neighborhood and howling like a conjurer, “Tanya! Toma! It’s time to come home!”

Elena Georgievna stood in the corridor near the phone on the wall, spinning the black dial with a numb finger. Everywhere the line was busy: the militia, the morgue, the ambulance station . . . Pavel Alekseevich, who had set out after three in the afternoon in search of the girls, also was nowhere to be found. Having stuck an officer’s flask of diluted alcohol in the pocket of his overcoat, he wandered along the edges of the city center, where he kept encountering militia and army barricades, and his mind boggled at the thought of how the funeral procession’s organizers had managed to re-create the Khodynka massacre in the center of a city crisscrossed with streets, lanes, walk-through courtyards, and, after all, metro lines. He could not find a single spot where even a trickle of the cordoned-off crowd might have escaped. There was no hope of finding the girls, who he had no doubt had slipped out of the house to go to the funeral.

He stood on the corner of Kaliaevskaya and Oruzheinaya streets, leaning against the wall of the milk store. He remembered that there were still a few drops at the bottom of his flask, and he drew out this last gulp, stuck the empty flask into his pocket, and just at that moment felt someone pulling at his sleeve. A crafty goggle-eyed kid looked him in the eye from below.

“Hey, gramps, want me to take you?”

“Where?” Pavel Alekseevich did not understand right away.

“I know a way to get through.” The boy gestured ambiguously in the direction of Karetny Lane.

Pavel Alekseevich waved him off and walked away. His mood could not have been gloomier. At Belorussky Station he saw a whole column of ambulances . . . They were stuck in the roadblock of trucks.

“A hecatomb, a hecatomb,” Pavel Alekseevich suddenly said aloud, surprising himself. At the moment, he did not know how right he was.