The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

18

AND SO IT CAME TO PASS THAT A YEAR LATER TANYA TOOK university entrance examinations, overcoming steep competition and her own—who knows from where—fear of tests, while Toma simply applied for gardener courses at the Moscow Executive Committee of the City Soviet of People’s Deputies, from which, six months later, she would receive a white piece of paper testifying to her acquisition of a new profession.

Tanya did not make it into the day division, earning one less point than she needed, but she was accepted into the evening division. By September 1 she had to get a job in her field of specialization in order to be able to present proof of daytime employment. Pavel Alekseevich—who had not even considered helping Tanya matriculate by making a single phone call to one of the university’s heavyweights equal in rank to himself—now picked up the phone and called his old colleague, Professor Gansovsky, a physician and researcher, who headed the clinic of pediatric brain defectology and a laboratory specializing in brain development. Pavel Alekseevich’s request was modest: would they hire his daughter, a student in the evening division of the biology faculty, as a lab assistant? Professor Gansovsky chuckled and said that he could take her as soon as tomorrow.

Pavel Alekseevich delivered his pride and joy several days later. Tanya recognized this building alongside the Ustinsky bridge from childhood: they had brought her here for an X-ray or for an appointment with the pediatric cardiologist . . . But now she entered through the battered door of the yard entrance, through a corridor with a black board with numbered tags hanging from it. This was a completely different experience. She was coming to be hired for a job.

Professor Gansovsky lived almost year-round at his dacha and did not come to work every day, but he had made an appointment with Pavel Alekseevich and his daughter for that day because one of his leading researchers, MarLena Sergeevna Konysheva, had prepared the manuscript of her doctoral dissertation for him to read and was supposed to give him the weighty volume.

Old Professor Gansovsky’s relationships with his female research staff were prolific. He was already over seventy, his bald spot shone merrily with shades of henna and silver, but the fringe of hair encircling his temples from ear to ear was dyed deep chestnut. His eyebrows he kept their natural black, and for that reason his entire henhouse debated constantly whether he dyed his eyebrows, and with what . . . Despite a coquettishness unworthy of his sex, he was so unconditionally masculine that his hair coloring—not quite war paint and not quite mating colors—sooner caused frustration than scorn. Not tall, but broad-chested, with large birthmarks on his cheeks, he resembled an old boxer, in the canine sense as well. In his laboratory full of women he was tsar, and his entire female staff—with the exception of janitor Maria Fokovna, practical nurse Raiska, and his two graduate students (one an Ossetian, the other Turkmen, both inclined to consider their boss’s indifference a form of discrimination)—had passed through his powerful, disproportionately long arms and, if truth be told, had not been left dissatisfied. Pavel Alekseevich was unaware of all these piquant details of Gansovsky’s biography. In order to know gossip you have to take a certain interest in it. Pavel Alekseevich was not even aware that Gansovsky’s first wife had worked in the laboratory all her life, while his second, younger wife, had done her graduate work there and stayed on at the clinic for her residency, or that there was yet another woman, who had not achieved the rank of wife—Zina, the plump, sweet-looking, not very young woman whose son Gansovsky helped raise—plus Galya Rymnikova, tall as a bell tower with a head the size of a doll’s, who had worked as his personal lab assistant for two years and then left in a huge scandal that barely fit under the rug, and a few more trifles, of interest, generally, only to the participants in this long-running performance. On the other hand, Pavel Alekseevich knew Gansovsky’s superb publications on embryogenesis of the brain, and for this reason considered him a suitable mentor for Tanya.

Tanya was led into the professor’s office. There were bookcases with pedigreed volumes, two bronze busts of who knows whom, and some large glass jars with brain specimens—stiffened spirals the color of children’s soap . . . In the space between the windows hung black-and-red-colored charts and photographs of tinted landscapes whose rivers were micron capillaries, and their banks—fibers of striated muscle, flowing through huge mountains with gaping hollows: all of this seemingly geological activity had been captured under a microscope lens of not even God knew what power . . .

“I’m going to put you, Tatiana Pavlovna, in the hands of my student, MarLena Sergeevna. She will teach you how to perform the necessary histologic work. She’s a great master of slide preparations. We’ll start with that . . . and take it from there . . .”

Rising, he turned out to be short-legged and half-a-head shorter than Tanya, but he moved with the speed and deliberateness of a tennis ball. He gestured with his arm for them to follow.

The laboratory was located in an old building and occupied two floors as well as some recesses between floors with windows adjacent either to the floor or to the ceiling, as if the building’s two former floors had been remodeled as three. The two honored academicians walked ahead of the slender, curly-headed girl whose heart skipped a beat with every smell—from the animal facility, of something chemical, boiled, stinging and nasty, and yet attractive. Probably a young girl with her sights set on the theater experiences the same sensations her first time backstage.

The corridor took its last turn near a fire hose curled like a snake behind a glass door, and they entered the inner sanctum . . . It was all glass and crystal, transparent and splendid. There was an old laboratory table with a marble top suitable for a gravestone, a broad-shouldered cupboard with heavy sliding glass doors and transparent shelves with gleaming instruments laid out inside, and racks of laboratory glassware with sterilized insides. A wonderland of small glass tubules, of spherical and conic flasks . . .

Ordinary wooden desks held microtomes on stocky iron object-stage platforms and monstrous triangular dissecting knives with razor-sharp edges. Microscopes—their little copper details and various screws gleaming—stood with horns raised. Torsion scales shone under glass covers that thickened unevenly toward the bottom . . . And there was a great variety of still other, yet unfamiliar objects that attracted Tanya’s enchanted gaze.

At the marble laboratory table stood a tall, unattractive woman with salt-and-pepper bangs, narrow eyes, and too short a distance between the tip of her nose and her upper lip. Her face expressed fastidiousness, cleanliness, care, and something else particularly attractive to Tanya—something between confidence and impeccability . . . Her medical coat gleamed with the whiteness of mountain peaks, her hands were scrubbed for surgery, and she performed the most delicate movements with her fingers.

Glancing at them for an instant, she buried herself once again in her lapidarian operations, apologizing that she needed a few more minutes to finish.

“It’s old German equipment,” Pavel Alekseevich noted with surprise.

“Yes, all prewar. Brought from Germany. But so far we haven’t figured out a way to make anything better yet. Jena optics, you know, Solingen steel . . . ,” Gansovsky smirked. “I brought it back myself. This equipment here is from Humboldt University . . .”

But Tanya did not hear what they were talking about. She could not take her eyes off MarLena Sergeevna as the latter worked the satiny pink round bubble form on the preparation table with exquisite tiny scissors and thin tweezers. Nearby on the marble tabletop lay a whole string of identical glass containers with more pink bubble forms and a repulsive-looking dental surgery tray.

“MarLena Sergeevna, I’ve brought to you the daughter of our dear Doctor Kukotsky. A budding biologist,” the professor heh-hehhed rather disgustingly, “for you to train. Why don’t you have a chat with the girl while I show Pavel Alekseevich the laboratory . . .”

They left, leaving Tanya. MarLena Sergeevna nodded to her.

“Come closer and take a look at what I’m doing . . .”

And Tanya looked. The scholarly woman destined to become Tanya’s idol for several years used manicure scissors to slit the surface of the pink bubble form, which turned out to be the tiny little head of a newborn rat, folded back the edges of the incision with tweezers, and meticulously, so as not to disturb the tender white substance—the most complex thing created by nature, the brain tissue—below, removed a cranial bone the thickness of a child’s fingernail . . .

After slicing small disks from the stem, MarLena Sergeevna removed them with the light touch of her tweezers, laying bare two elongated hemispheres and the two olfactory bulbs that jutted forward. Not a scratch or cut could be seen on the mirror-form surface. The brain shone like mother-of-pearl. With her thin tweezers MarLena Sergeevna pinched the elongated brain where it connected to the spinal cord, lifted this flickering pearl with a special little spatula, and just as the brain rested on the spatula, Tanya noticed a faint network of blood vessels barely visible to the eye. A moment ago the brain had rested, as in a bowl, in its natural bed and had seemed like some sort of architectural construction; now it slid like a heavy drop from the chrome-plated spatula into a glass container filled with transparent liquid . . . The container held several other identical peas that had already managed to shrivel a bit . . .

“This requires great concentration and accuracy,” MarLena Sergeevna said. “Actually, small cuts along the sides are admissible, because what interests us is not the surface, but the deeper layers of the brain . . .”

As she spoke, she raised a gauze napkin from the tray: several newborn baby rats scurried about inside together with the already decapitated trunks whose heads had been sacrificed to the lofty and bloodthirsty god of science . . . This dreadfully lawless combination of the living, blindly scurrying, warm and trusting, with the headless, “decapitated,” as MarLena Sergeevna said, made nausea rise from Tanya’s stomach to her throat. She gulped back saliva . . .

“My little rats,” the learned lady said, picking up a little rat with two fingers, stroking it on its narrow spine, and then—with a different, larger, pair of scissors lying to the right of the tray—accurately and precisely cutting off its little head. She tossed the slightly shuddering little body into the tray and lovingly spread out the head on the object glass. After which she looked searchingly at Tanya and asked with a shade of strange pride: “Well, do you think you can do that?”

“I can,” Tanya answered without hesitating for a moment. She was far from sure that she really could.

“I have to,” she said to herself and, heroically stifling the urge to vomit, she picked up the tender satiny nastiness of a newborn—warm to the touch—baby rat with her left hand and the cold perfectly ergonomic scissors with her right hand, and clutching that silly immortal soul in the grasp of enlightened reason striving toward science, she pressed down on the upper ring of the scissors with her thumb. Crunch—and the little head fell onto the object glass.

“Good job,” a soft female voice said approvingly.

The sacrifice had been accepted. Tanya had passed the test and was initiated as a junior priestess.