The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

17

TANYA WAS HER PARENTS’ JOY. CODDLING AND INDULGING his daughter, Pavel Alekseevich expressed his concealed love for his wife. Elena felt that and was grateful to him for it, but answered him in a strange way by giving Toma more attention and care. A certain emotional balance was therefore maintained, while Vasilisa implemented a general strict policy of fairness by placing equal portions on their plates. This had stopped making sense long ago: food was plentiful, and everyone except Vasilisa had forgotten about food rationing, ration cards, and ration stations.

Tanya grew into a beautiful young girl—very lively and very talented in all pursuits, be it music, drawing, or the sciences . . .

In school they were already approaching the end of the ninth grade, and it was time to choose a profession, but Tanya was torn in different directions. Before Toma had appeared in their household Tanya had planned to enroll in music school, but as soon as Toma came to live with them, Tanya, to Pavel Alekseevich’s great chagrin, gave up music. For him there were no more pleasant moments at home than those spent watching her supple spine and fine shoulder blades as they moved under her sweater when she sat at the new instrument bought especially for her. Pavel Alekseevich kept wanting to get an answer as to why Tanya had absolutely refused to go to music school, but she would only clam up, then hug him around the neck, tickle him behind the ears, and mumble something about the Big-Eared Elephant, giggling and squealing, but uttering not a word in response.

Considerably later both Pavel Alekseevich and Elena understood what had happened to Tanya: apparently, she thought that her success in music would hurt Toma, who had never heard any music except what came out of the radio transmitter.

Tanya now found her father’s library more and more alluring. As always, Pavel Alekseevich worked a great deal, spent long hours at the clinic, and after arriving home and eating a quick supper in the company of a silent Vasilisa or a reserved Elena, he ever more often found Tanya in his study settled in a cozy nest of two throw blankets and sofa cushions, cat and book in hand . . . Near Tanya on the edge of a chair, with no comforts whatsoever, sat Toma, just as small as she had been at twelve, only fatter. One after the next she embroidered pillows, using a double Bulgarian cross-stitch on the lilac or exaggerated fruit patterns she clamped into her embroidery hoop. Her hunger—long ago forgotten and seemingly sated—had awakened in her a love for this luxury of the poor . . .

The girls were very attached to each other, and their attachment contained a mutual amazement: just as Tanya could not understand what pleasure lay in pulling threads through a stiff pattern, so Toma wondered how anyone could sit half the day with their head stuck in a boring book.

Observing the very different girls—his adored Tanechka and the charmless Tomochka, the scrawny feral brought into their home by special circumstances, Pavel Alekseevich, with his habit of regarding all phenomena in the world exclusively from a scientific point of view, fell to theorizing, noticing here too the manifestations of some great laws of nature that while not yet formulated nonetheless objectively existed.

Just as from the moment of fertilization a human embryo completes all the stages of its development to the hour and minute, Pavel Alekseevich thought, so in the child more complex psychophysical functions engage at strictly regulated intervals in strictly determined sequence. The chewing reflex cannot precede the sucking reflex. Yet both are stimulated from without: the feel of a nipple or even of some chance object, be it the edge of a sheet or the child’s own finger, arouses the instinct to suck within the first days of life; the placement of a piece of solid food on gums swollen from teething arouses the instinct to chew at the age of six months.

The functions of the higher nervous system are stimulated in exactly the same way, Pavel Alekseevich reflected as he observed the grown-up girls in his own family. Needs awakened at a certain age and unmet from without in the surrounding environment weaken and, possibly, die. Needs, therefore, precede necessities.

“They’ll accuse me of Lamarckism.” Pavel Alekseevich laughed to himself.

“It’s possible the whisper was born before the lips, and leaves fluttered in treelessness”—these lines had been written long ago and their author had already perished in the camps, and they never did make their way to Pavel Alekseevich’s consciousness. But there was no other person for whom this ingenious poetic epiphany was more comprehensible as a translation of a fundamental idea from the language of science to the language of poetry . . .

The child, tired of lying, that wants to sit up, will turn and fidget. Extend a finger toward it, and it will grab it and do what it so thirsts to do but still does not know it does. It will sit up. When it has matured enough to walk, give it the chance to take its first step. Otherwise it, like a child raised by animals, will never learn to walk on two legs but, like an animal, will move on all fours.

Give a child music when it feels the need to dance, a pencil when it gets the urge to draw, a book when it has matured to this level of obtaining information . . . How tragic it is when a new skill, a new need has ripened from within, but the moment has been lost and the world makes no effort to meet that need halfway . . .

Take Tomochka. Her mother had left her diapered in her little bed until she was two years old, because the poor woman had to go to work and there was no one to look after the little girl, and daycare was not even imaginable in blacked-out, evacuated Moscow. When Tomochka was set on the floor, she already had no urge to walk. She sat in a corner, on a pile of rags, and played with rags. She saw her first book only in school, when she was seven years old. Everything had been held back, everything slowed down. The poor little girl . . .

But Toma hardly thought of herself as unfortunate. Just the opposite, she was thoroughly convinced that she had drawn a winning ticket. A year after her introduction into the Kukotsky household, at the request of her Aunt Fenya, Toma had been sent to the village for the summer, and Toma, who had never spent a summer at Fenya’s when her mother was alive, came to despise village life with all her heart. She was horrified by the poverty, the filth, and, most of all, by the difficulty of daily life where she could not relax, as she would have with Tanya at their dacha, but from morning till night fed pigs, babysat Fenya’s three-month-old little daughter, and laundered filthy rags in cold water . . . Silently and unwillingly she did everything, never disobeying Fenya. Twice she traveled by bus to a distant village to visit her brothers. Her brothers horrified her: they had turned into villagers; dressed in rags, barefoot and dirty, they fought and cursed like adult peasants. Toma felt neither sympathy nor pity for them. Loving them was out of the question.

By the time she returned to the city Toma had firmly resolved that never again would she go to her aunt’s and that she would do everything possible in order to remain forever in the Kukotsky family.

Toma was completely unconcerned about whether she was loved in her new family. In their household she had her own place, which more resembled the place of a house pet. There was absolutely nothing insulting about this: in some households the entire world order revolves around a little dog that has to be taken out every morning or a cat that eats only a certain type of fish.

Toma had her own bed in the room she shared with Tanya, her own place at the table between Tanya and Elena Georgievna, and many other things that she had never had before when she lived with her mother: her own comb and toothbrush, her own towels in the bathroom, and a nightshirt—the existence of which she could not even have imagined before. In return nothing was asked of her. Surprisingly, much larger demands were made of Tanya—for misbehaving, for returning home late from school, and for the untidiness Tanya was constantly guilty of. Toma would cover for Tanya. Sometimes she would wipe up the puddle she left in the bathroom or wash the teacup she had left on the table, and, sometimes, when they were late returning from school, she would take the blame for their tardiness.

“Aunt Vasya, they made me stay after to redo an assignment, and Tanya waited for me . . .”

And Vasilisa, who had already reheated the girls’ dinners twice, would stop grumbling. She would even refrain from commenting on Toma’s behavior more than necessary, although she was very observant and knew perfectly well the real reason for all these little deceptions . . .

As for their studies, there was nothing to be said. Tanya was practically an honor student. All she lacked was vanity to become a straight-A student. In the time she spent living in their household Toma had succeeded in becoming a solid C student. The complication lay in that everyone was dissatisfied with Tanya’s Bs, but overjoyed by Toma’s rare B. A certain sensitivity was required of everyone in the household, who must never forget that equality was an exclusively theoretical thing and could not be regarded as a serious principle even in so practical an area as a child’s upbringing. Ideas of equality concerned Elena somewhat—memories of her Tolstoyan childhood were still keen. Vasilisa did not nibble at the bait.

“Tanechka is special, and Tomochka is something completely different.”

For that reason she would say to Toma simply, “Let me teach you how to brine cabbage, fry fritters, and other things, otherwise when I die you won’t know how to do anything . . .”

Tanya’s lack of such skills did not worry Vasilisa, but she obviously considered Toma her successor in her amorphous household position, which she herself endured with patience and a certain pride. It was precisely with Toma that Vasilisa could suddenly start a conversation about the most important and protected part of her life, about what was sealed in her little pantry as a result of Pavel Alekseevich’s longtime ban. In Tanya’s early childhood he had adamantly forbidden Vasilisa to have any conversations of any sort with the child about the divine. For that reason Vasilisa taught not Tanya but Toma the two most important prayers and instructed her in any and all difficult situations to turn to the Mother of God.

“In mathematics too?” Tomochka inquired simply when Vasilisa was explaining to her that her protectress and intercessor was the Mother of God, who cared for all orphans.

“What about Holy Queen Tamara?” Toma reminded Vasilisa, who had earlier spoken to her about her patron saint, Queen Tamara, after whom she had been named in baptism.

Vasilisa became angry and explained inarticulately, but with conviction: “Don’t you understand, they’re completely different things . . .”

IN THE KUKOTSKY HOUSEHOLD TOMA BEHAVED EXACTLY as demanded by her role as adopted child. Placing great value on the practical amenities showered on her, she feared losing them and tried hard to make her presence in the household both pleasing and useful. While there was always a grain of solicitousness to her manners, it was compensated for entirely by the fact that she adored Pavel Alekseevich, sincerely admired Tanechka, and for reasons she could not explain deep down in her heart, feared only Elena Georgievna.

Her relationship with Vasilisa was much more complicated. On the one hand, Vasilisa was just like her—not an urban creature; on the other hand, Vasilisa saw right through her, and if Vasilisa merely glanced at her over her string-trussed eyeglasses it was not at all pleasant, as if she knew some secret and very unpleasant thing about Toma. While there was a special kind of bond between the old servant and the little foundling, Vasilisa miscalculated entirely when she attempted to mold from Toma a successor not only to her dishwashing-housekeeping realm, but to her spiritual realm as well. It did not work out. If Toma, at first obeisant, memorized all the basic prayers and with drowsy attention heard out all of Vasilisa’s bumbling sermons, by the time she was fifteen, she began to slip away from Vasilisa—having figured out, likely, that she had no need for Vasilisa’s underground valuables—and grazed exclusively alongside Tanya, while Tanya buried herself in her father’s books, dragged her to the cinema, to the theater, and to concerts, and these outings were not just for culture’s sake: boys were also involved, which made an immense difference to Toma.

In Tanya’s presence she played an unenviable role, but she really did not need her own boyfriend, and the very atmosphere of an outing—wherever—in the company of young men suited her entirely. Just as she had once relished those innumerable sandwiches with butter and sugar, her toothbrush, and her nightshirt, she now took pleasure in the fact that boys bought their tickets, took them to the refreshment stand, and treated them to soft drinks and cake . . .

The boys did not think to conceal from Toma that she was an obligatory appendage to the holiday of an outing with Tanya to wherever, but this hardly distressed Toma: she had no need for any one of them in and of himself, but as a group they bore witness to the fact that Toma’s social status in society was very good because she got to go to the Bolshoi Theater, the Maly Theater, and the Art Cinema, and was treated to free refreshments in addition.

Among the young men attracted to Tanya’s simple gaiety, obvious good looks, and curly hair, were the Goldberg brothers, who had been enamored of Tanya since that horrible winter in 1953 when they went to Pavel Alekseevich’s to be fed. The feeding had not really ever stopped: the boys’ mother died soon after Ilya Iosifovich was released, and the old geneticist, who had courageously survived his last arrest without having to sign a single false statement, was totally destroyed by the death of his forty-year-old wife.

He fell apart physically too, losing as much weight as if he were in the camps. His only salvation was the work with which he loaded himself down beyond measure. He reviewed books for all the reference journals that would take him, and he kept writing his genius book about genius. Goldberg’s home life also fell apart; housekeepers came and left, one after the next. One stole, the other drank. The third, an intellectual Jewish woman who came three times a week, he suspected of being an agent of the KGB. In a word, in the absence of the deceased Valya, the Goldbergs’ favorite food—meat patties with fried potatoes—either did not taste right or was laced with the poison of suspicion, which was not life-threatening, but also not conducive to good digestion.

Once again, for the umpteenth time, Vasilisa demonstrated great insight and was the first to note that the meat patties were now in major competition with Tanya, and that it was time to figure out why those boys had taken to visiting every Sunday as well as on the occasional weekday . . .

The Goldberg brothers were identical to the point of being indistinguishable, but Tanya clearly favored the one who was studying to be a doctor. On Sundays they often lingered after lunch until supper, and Vitaly, the medical enthusiast, would pour fat in the fire when he talked about the complexity and fascination of studying at the medical institute, about the passions of anatomy and the mysteries of physiology . . .

The second brother, Gennady, who had chosen physics, contented himself with contemplation of this lively conversation, said nothing, and only occasionally answered the confused questions Toma, confident that Gena was her share of the package, put to him . . .

NINTH GRADE CAME TO AN END, AND IT WAS DECIDED that for their last summer vacation from school the girls would go to Yalta. Pavel Alekseevich at first planned to go with the family, but at the last minute was prevented from doing so by an unexpected prestigious trip to Switzerland to take part in a conference on infertility. Pavel Alekseevich laughed to himself: infertility interested Switzerland, the richest country in the world, but not China, Asia, or Africa . . . Pavel Alekseevich agreed to go to Zurich, and Vasilisa was offered the opportunity to travel to Yalta in his stead. She held out for a long time, and even argued slightly with Elena on this score, but in the end she agreed, on the condition, though, that first she would leave for three days to take care of her own affairs. And she left . . .

Owing to this unforeseen jaunt everyone arrived a day late for their reservation at the resort, because Vasilisa did not return on the appointed day. But the delay was compensated for by the notes of divine delight Vasilisa emitted all twenty-three remaining days she spent on the shore of the Black Sea.

All the women vacationers saw the sea for the first time. And each in her own way. Vasilisa found evidence of the might and wisdom of the great Lord God. The mountains made a greater impression on her than did the sea, but both evoked her delight in the Creator who had produced this grand inventory. Stoic and not inclined to cry, she frequently dabbed away incomprehensible tears with her crumpled handkerchief, and her usual occupation—in the absence of cooking, laundering, and cleaning—was to sit idly on their terrace looking out in the direction of the mountains, her face immobile, her gaze arrested, as if beyond those mountains there were still others visible to her alone . . . From time to time she would fall into ecstatic mumbling, and Elena—long familiar with her prayer repertoire—managed to catch bits of the psalms, of which Vasilisa knew only the fiftieth by heart, the rest only in bits and pieces, scraps, and separate phrases, from which she constructed her inspired babble . . . “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, thou art there too . . . Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength . . . The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy . . . For he commandeth and raiseth the stormy wind . . .”

Food at the resort was abundant, which was somewhat offensive for Vasilisa, so as soon as she caught her bearings, she refused to go to breakfast and came only to supper with everyone else, where she took her place at the table assigned them and enjoyed the service. The waitresses served her food, asked her why she had again not come for lunch and should they bring her anything else . . . Her satisfaction was tinged with a certain uneasiness, because in her not-great but tenacious mind she knew well that if someone has more than she needs, then someone else does not have enough . . . And her Christian soul, despite the luxury of their vacation, experienced a bit of shame. In the end she admitted to Elena that if it was going to be like this in heaven, then she would have to ask for the other place, because all this made her feel guilty.

Toma felt no guilt at all. She and Tanya exulted like puppies in the sun and the sea; they splashed, swam, and sunbathed with no thoughts for anything else. It became apparent in the process that Tanya enjoyed universal popularity among the young and not so young men, from the merchants at the market—where the family occasionally dropped in to make some exotic purchase like homemade cheese, that sticky South Caucasus sweet known as churchkhela, or a bunch of some unknown herb—to the young captains vacationing at the military sanatorium next door.

In the evenings the girls set off for the dances held in the cafeteria or on the embankment. Tanya danced, while Toma sat on a chair along the wall—or stood, if there were no chairs—in the company of two or three girls who were not popular. Toma went only for Tanya’s sake; left to her own devices she would never have gone along only to put up with this shameful boredom. She was somewhat surprised that intelligent Tanya found anything good in a dance called “a fast foxtrot” or “a slow tango.”

At 11:00 P.M. Elena Georgievna set out to look for them on the crowded dance floors and brought them home to sleep. Sometimes Tanya managed to make a date with an artful dancer and crawl out the window and disappear for half the night. Their family had been allotted two double rooms, and the girls occupied the one without a terrace.

Credulous Elena turned out to be unprepared for such craftiness on her daughter’s part and never discovered Tanya’s midnight adventures. Tanya’s first kisses did not make much of an impression on her: they smelled of some particularly stinky shaving lather and the unforgettable scent of Chypre aftershave and gave off an odor of boot wax and military action. Tanya rolled with laughter, and the young men—already slightly intimidated by her youthful beauty—retreated, hurt. In a word, Tanya brought back not a single romantic tryst from her trip to the South. She had the best time of her life.

Toma, on the other hand, acquired a lifelong, profound love in Crimea. On an excursion to the Nikitsky Botanical Gardens grace descended upon her: she fell in love with botany like girls fall in love with princes. It happened at the very end of their stay in Crimea, two days before their departure. Overall, the excursion to the gardens fizzled: the bus broke down and took a long time to fix, then the weather deteriorated, and although it never rained, the midday sun darkened, and the elegant luster of the South Shore grew turbid.

At the entrance to the Botanical Gardens they had to wait for their guide, who had gone to attend to other matters as a result of their delay. They stood alongside a dark-bronze plaque engraved with: “The Botanical Gardens were established in 1812 by Kh. Kh. Steven, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Medical Academy . . .” There was no one there to tell them that Christian von Steven was no stranger, but a close friend of Nikita Avdeevich Kukotsky, Pavel Alekseevich’s direct ancestor, and that the foundation for this state undertaking had been laid during the friends’ first joint trip through the Caucasus Mountains in 1808, that Nikita Avdeevich had visited his friend here in Crimea on more than one occasion, and that among the seven thousand pages of the great herbarium of the Taurida administrative district there were not a few specimens collected by Kukotsky himself . . .

Finally the guide arrived—a fat man in an embroidered Ukrainian shirt and gold-framed glasses who distantly resembled Nikita Khrushchev in a good mood—and led them down the shaded footpaths. It was cool and mysterious. The guide talked about the abundance of Crimean flora, about rare endemic plants that lived exclusively in this region, and about ancient myths connected with the plants . . .

Toma was a city girl and despised the countryside—one could say—for personal reasons. When she had spent her summer months in the village during her childhood, she had never noticed nature of any sort; everything there seemed ordinary and insultingly poor. For her, forest, field, and pond were connected with hard work: she was sent to the woods to gather berries for sale, to the field to help with the harvest, and to the pond to rinse laundry. Here in Crimea in the Botanical Gardens nature was selfless: it demanded no laborious effort. Even the sea, the salty water that no one had to haul in buckets from under the hill, had been created exclusively for the joy of swimming and diving.

Toma surreptitiously stroked the leaves—some smooth and some furry, some dry as old paper, and the needlelike conifers—that lined the paths of the Botanical Gardens, filling her fingers with a joy they had never known before. Insufficiently caressed in infancy, not having known a loving touch in her childhood, now, though provided with everything she needed, she was still as deprived as ever of the loving touch without which a living thing suffers, falls ill, and withers . . . Perhaps her small size could be explained by the fact that growing up without love was as difficult as without some special unknown vitamin . . .

Their Khrushchev-look-alike guide turned out to have a completely magical voice, and what he said was a real fairy tale.

“Here we have an acacia,” he said, pointing to a small tree covered with sweet yellow blossoms, “one of the greatest trees ever. According to ancient Egyptian beliefs, the Egyptian goddess Hathor, the Great Cow, who gave birth to the sun and the stars, also could assume the identity of an acacia tree, the tree of life and of death. Acacia was the oracle of one of the great goddesses of fertility in Western Asia, and even the ancient Jews, who rejected idolatry, were seduced by the acacia: they called it the ‘shittim tree,’ and in ancient times built the Ark of the Covenant from it . . .”

Of all the things he said Toma understood only one word: “cow.” Everything else was incomprehensible, but cool. It turned out that every tree and every bush, and even the tiniest flower, all had a foreign name, a history, a geography, and—most amazing—a legend about its presence in the world. While she, Tamara Polosukhina, had nothing of the sort; even by comparison with a fir tree or a daisy she meant nothing . . .

She also got the feeling—Toma had no formed thoughts, only feelings garnished by thoughts—of a mutual sympathy between herself and the plants as well as an equality with them in their insignificance.

“Probably among all these plants there’s one that’s exactly like me . . . If I saw it, I would recognize it right away,” Toma thought, stroking a rhododendron or boxwood as she walked.

Tanya and Toma almost never coincided in either their thoughts or their feelings, and if they did, it was exclusively thanks to Toma’s ability to adjust herself to Tanya’s thought waves. This time they were thinking about one and the same thing: if I were a plant, what kind would I be?

At the shop near the exit from the Botanical Gardens, with pocket money that Tanya spent immediately and recklessly and Toma scrimped, Toma bought two sets of postcards with local and Mediterranean types of plants and a boring book called Flora of Crimea.

That day the question of finding an appropriate profession for Toma, which Elena Georgievna and Pavel Alekseevich had been pondering and only Vasilisa considered completely decided—that Toma would follow in her footsteps—was resolved.

Still ahead was the tenth grade, a whole year to figure out details and prepare for exams. Tanya had set her sights on the biological faculty, to the amazement of Pavel Alekseevich, who could not imagine any other path for his daughter except medicine. But Tanya talked incessantly about higher nervous functions, about studying consciousness—the first American science fiction books had already been translated, and the Goldberg boys diligently supplied Tanya with the same. It was very romantic, much more romantic than a physician’s everyday routine. As for Toma, Pavel Alekseevich took her to the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy. There they were greeted with circumstance appropriate to Pavel Alekseevich’s rank, shown the experimental fields of corn and soybeans, and the laboratories. What impressed Toma was the artificial climate laboratory, the greenhouses with plants from the South; everything else reminded her of boring life on the collective farm with its crop rotations, cursing at the collective farm office, and village melancholy. On the way home she told Pavel Alekseevich she really did not take a hankering to the Timiryazev Academy and that she would prefer to go to a place where they worked with southern plants. Pavel Alekseevich attempted to explain to his foster daughter that once she received an education, she could work at the Botanical Gardens or at the Institute of Medicinal Plants, or anywhere else, but Toma would hear none of it: she did not understand why she needed an education if she could work at the Botanical Gardens without one. What she wanted most was to admire the beautiful plants, to care for them, to touch them occasionally, and to inhale their smells . . . In the meantime she set up a whole family of clay pots of all sizes on the windowsill and puttered with lemon and tangerine seeds . . .