The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

16

PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH NEVER DID LEARN THE FATE OF THE monstrous sample he had brought to the high party office on Staraya Square. Though greatly impressed by his conversation with the mad doctor, the cautious bureaucrat decided not to raise the question of this delicate matter in the Politburo.

For several years the glass jar stood wrapped in paper on the lower shelf of his bookcase; on the eve of one May Day, in the fever of a general housekeeping in honor of the luminous holiday, a cleaning woman carried it out to the big garbage bin in the basement.

Strangely enough, “Soapface” turned out to be impressionable, and a few months after the great leader’s death the project to legalize abortions was studied and discussed. The state—having murdered countless millions of its citizens over the thirty-five years of its existence—deigned to allow women to decide the fate of the anonymous life that had sprung in their wombs against their wishes. A few demiurges signed, the valve at the top opened, and medical institutions were sent the corresponding circular that legalized the artificial interruption of pregnancies.

The former high party official who accomplished this on his last ascent of Olympus—there was no going any higher—to the day of his death (which occurred not long after) considered himself the great benefactor of the human race, while Pavel Alekseevich never did find out what role the ill-fated jar he had brought to Staraya Square had played . . .

The fate of the unfortunate hostages of their sex never ceased to concern Pavel Alekseevich; as before, he spoke at all conferences connected to infant and maternal welfare. He did not feel that he had won a victory: the conditions at maternity hospitals were, in his opinion, catastrophic. He returned once again to his principal project, hopelessly attempting to convince the country’s leaders of the necessity to reexamine the principles of health care financing, and delivering impassioned speeches about environmental concerns and a multitude of other factors that would adversely affect the next generation’s health . . . The word “ecology” had yet to enter the vernacular.

In the mid-1950s Pavel Alekseevich’s research interests took him in an unanticipated direction. While investigating several types of female infertility, Pavel Alekseevich discovered previously unknown phases within the monthly cycle. He focused his attention on women who had given birth to children after long-term infertility. He called such children “Abraham’s,” and meticulously studied and surveyed the women who had given birth to their first child in their first pregnancy after many years of childless marriage.

At the same time, by way of the work of the renowned Chizhevsky, he embarked on the study of natural cosmic cycles and biorhythms. Embryological research had shown that cytokinesis in fact occurred with clockwork precision. Comparing the daily activity of a human being with the speed of processes occurring within a woman’s body, he arrived at the theoretical conclusion that a certain percentage of women could not conceive at night.

His reasoning contained much that was intuitive and undocumentable by contemporary research standards, but it was based on conjecture about the existence of ova with unusually short phases of activity.

At the end of 1953 an amazingly handsome middle-aged Azerbaijani couple from Karabakh appeared during one of Pavel Alekseevich’s office hours. He was an artist, from a well-known family of carpet-makers, thin, with fine features and swarthy gray hair. His wife resembled her husband, like a copy of him reduced in size, with the same fine features, the same Persian facial structure. The lilac-tinged red silk of her dress, the emerald green of her shawl, her antique dark-silver jewelry . . .

Their tests showed that there was nothing wrong. Two healthy human beings who in twenty years of marriage had not given birth even to one little girl . . . The grief and disgrace of the wife.

Pavel Alekseevich looked at them for an indecently long time and listened: his secret adviser insisted.

“You must lie with your wife when the sun is at its zenith,” Pavel Alekseevich said in a strict tone of voice. “A year from now come to see me . . .”

The couple arrived not a year, but a year and a half later. And they brought with them a marvelous belly—taut, high, and with a beautiful little girl inside, whom Pavel Alekseevich himself delivered, and then, two years later, a boy . . .

Azerbaijan, Armenia, Central Asia—his first patients came from those areas. Then Russians began to come. Approximately half of them were hopeless, and Pavel Alekseevich always saw them and told them that there was nothing he could do to help. Some couples he recommended move to the East—to Vladivostok or Khabarovsk—for several years: this was a continuation and further development of his ideas having to do with natural rhythms and time zones . . . The table of his office was now covered with charts no one could make any sense of and that looked more like astrological tables than test results. The numbers of “Abraham’s” children continued to grow. And of each Pavel Alekseevich would say deep down in his heart, “Today I gave birth to you . . .” A child of midday, a child of dawn, a child of sunset . . . Expensive gifts piled up in his austere apartment: precious carpets, Chinese vases, and French bronze . . . He never charged a fee, but he also never refused donations. From time immemorial healers and priests took only natural products as payment for their services. As a rule, his patients were people of means who lacked only a child to complete their happiness. The poor either were not childless or did not go to doctors . . .

Both classical and the most modern Western medical books ceased to interest him, and he spent many hours in the history and foreign-language libraries reading medieval treatises, antique rarities, and translations of the books of the ancient priests . . . He was searching for something in these Sibylline allegories . . . The secret of conception—that was what interested him. Nothing more and nothing less.

His own wife had securely locked the door of their bedroom to him for all times of the day. He had long ago given up on restoring their suspended marital relations. Following his memorable ignominy, she seemed indeed to have stopped feeling like a woman. But she was just over forty, and over the years her beauty had grown all the more expressive. Her face seemed as if drawn anew by a more demanding, more experienced artist. The maternal puffiness of her mouth and cheeks was gone, and a new expression had appeared in her eyes—one of keen attention directed not outwardly, but inwardly . . . At times it seemed to Pavel Alekseevich that while answering his infrequent questions she was thinking of something else.

Relations between husband and wife could not be called bad: as before, they guessed each other’s desires, sometimes read each other’s thoughts, and avoided having their eyes meet. She looked at his neck, and he at the bridge of her nose . . .