The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

19

AS THE YEARS PASSED, PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH FOUND MORE and more sense in reading the ancient historians.

“It’s the only thing that allows me to tolerate today’s newspapers.” He tapped his firm, iodine-framed fingernail on the leather cover of The Twelve Caesars.

As Vasilisa cleaned his study, he sat in the girls’ room, awaiting the end of this monthly ritual. In surprise Tanya raised one thin brow with its hereditary brush in the corner.

“I don’t see any connection, Dad.”

“How should I put it? Julius Caesar was considerably more talented than Stalin as a commander; Augustus—one hundred times smarter; Nero—crueler; and Caligula much more inventive when it came to depravity. Yet everything, absolutely everything—the bloodiest and the most sublime—becomes the exclusive property of history.”

Tanya sat up on her pillow.

“But it’s sort of sad to think that everything is so senseless and all the victims have died in vain.”

Pavel Alekseevich grinned and stroked his book’s shagreen cover.

“What victims? There are no victims. There is only the instinct of self-justification, of justifying actions that are sometimes stupid, sometimes senseless, but more often malicious and mercenary . . . A thousand or so years from now, Tanechka, or perhaps five hundred, some old gynecologist like me—no matter what progress occurs our profession will always be around—will read the ancient history of Russia in the twentieth century, and there will be two pages about Stalin and two paragraphs about Khrushchev. And a bunch of anecdotes . . .”

Tanya smiled. “That’s not so, Dad. They will know Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak, while Stalin and Khrushchev will merit mention for the sole reason that they repressed them.”

“That will happen when there’s true communism,” Toma inserted wistfully as she carefully bathed an ailing Monstera deliciosa.

Pavel Alekseevich was in a good mood and allowed himself to joke.

“No, Tomochka, it will be only after that . . .”

“I should ask Tanya later what he meant by that,” Toma decided. No one had ever told her that anything could come after communism. Although, ultimately, what difference would it make, since we won’t be around anyway . . . She had something serious to worry about: pale spots had appeared at the base of the plant’s leaves, and their wax covering had somewhat softened in those spots. She stroked the leaves’ surfaces with the soft tips of her fingers: yes, they really were softer. And there seemed to be a similar spot on her treasured Yucca plant.

“Oh, no, not a virus!” she thought in horror, forgetting about communism forever. She was already a rather experienced employee of MosUrbGreen and had dealt with plant viruses twice, but those had been state-owned plants—one in the square in front of the Bolshoi Theater, and the other in the greenhouse that sent them seedlings. In both cases the virus had proved incurable, and it had wiped out the marigolds and the gillyflower. But these were her plants, her favorites, and Toma stuck the thumb of her left hand in her mouth and chewed in concentration at the root of her nail . . . Having chewed off a microscopic bit, she set to inspecting her jungle—by the end of the 1950s the Kukotsky apartment had metamorphosed entirely through her efforts: there was not a single surface left without pots of plants and jars with evergreens.

At first the rigid green plants had been pleasing to Elena’s eye, but then she embarked on a lame struggle against the tin cans and old pots and pans in which Toma potted her nurslings. Elena bought clay pots and planters, but the tin cans from the trash kept multiplying. Once the windowsills were thoroughly occupied, the vernicose army advanced to the dining room table and the desks, and then descended to the floor. The nursery, which had once been Tanya’s room, looked like the storeroom of a florist shop.

The abundant vegetation did not disturb Tanya at all since she was practically never at home. In the early morning she ran off to work—to her rats and rabbits, operations and preparations—and from work she rushed straight to the university, returning home only at half past eleven, dead tired. On days when she had no classes she also disappeared for hours on end, either visiting friends or at various entertainments. Toma gradually stopped participating in Tanya’s life after hours. Tanya had taken up with some new friends: the Goldberg boys had given way to other, more interesting young men who never came to the apartment.

Elena usually arrived home from work shortly after six o’clock to find not Tanya, but Toma—children’s watering can in hand—whispering to her plants. Toma’s workday ended early, and by four thirty she was already at home. Grumbling, Vasilisa fed them all separately.

Pavel Alekseevich labored like a worker at a steel plant, two shifts back-to-back. In addition to the institute and the clinic, he had begun teaching advanced qualification courses for doctors, which at once amazed and irritated everyone: it hardly befit an academician to spend three nights a week lecturing until the wee hours to provincial obstetricians and old midwives who, if they had received any medical training at all, had long ago forgotten what it had consisted of. He completely neglected his duties as a member of the Academy. Like a schoolboy playing hooky, he failed to appear at Presidium meetings and avoided his superiors. His reputation as an alcoholic was augmented by rumors of his eccentricity.

Long ago the upper echelons at the Ministry had changed: Workhorse was replaced first by an old KGB man trained in veterinary medicine, then by a famous surgeon who was also a ruthless careerist and a thief. With no regrets Pavel Alekseevich said good-bye to his great project of reforming health care, and the reforms took place without his participation, although the papers he himself had long ago forgotten still lay in the safe of the new minister, who occasionally skimmed them, to no avail.

Despite his frosty relations with his superiors, Pavel Alekseevich’s influence in medical circles was unusually far-reaching. All those provincial ladies from the distant corners of the huge country were trained by him both in the old methods of assisting birth and in new approaches to sustaining pregnancy, in the treatment of inflammatory processes and of postnatal complications . . . He wrote several textbooks for middle-level medical personnel—which category he considered unfairly neglected—and a monograph on questions of infertility.

But his principal concern always remained his large-bellied patients, who came to him with their damaged wombs, their malfunctions, and their fears. He saw them at consultations on varying levels: weekly office hours, by special request of acquaintances, and private consultations. Although the Kremlin Hospital had already been in existence for some time, the wives and daughters of the heads of state often appealed to him—for assistance giving birth, for an operation . . .

In one section of the clinic with the euphemistic tag “Diagnostics,” they performed dilatation and curettage, some of which was in fact diagnostic . . . It was practically the only place in the city where anesthetics were administered; at other clinics sin was punished severely, the impudent decision to rid oneself of an unwanted child almost always included trial by pain . . . In this section four surgeons and four registered nurses dilated and scraped nonstop all sixteen hands at a time. The most primitive of anesthetics—local administration of Novocain—twenty-five minutes of work, an ice bag to freeze the belly, and next in line . . .

Pavel Alekseevich seldom came into this section. He considered the artificial interruption of pregnancy the gravest of operations in moral terms both for the woman and for the doctor . . . Was it not here that the essential divide between humans and animals lay: the ability and right to step beyond the limits of biological law, to breed not at the will of natural rhythms, but of one’s own desire? Was this not where human choice, the right to freedom, ultimately was realized?

Vasilisa represented the opposite—radically opposite—opinion. From the moment she replaced her adulation of Pavel Alekseevich with total rejection he even began to relate to her more seriously in a way. Her position was ludicrous, from a doctor’s point of view, even ignorant and inhumane, but in its own way moral. What was sad was that her obscurantist abhorrence of abortion had influenced Elena, whom she had inculcated with Christian-church intolerance. Vasilisa’s semiliteracy combined quite harmoniously with her views. But Elena? How could he explain to her that he was the servant not of Moloch, but of the miserable people of an invidious world . . . Besides, he himself practically never performed artificial interruptions of pregnancy. Perhaps the only thing that theoretically interested him in the whole procedure was the issue of how best to utilize the valuable bio-products considered waste in these procedures. But that was being studied by hematologists, a whole laboratory of them, headed by a competent student of his . . . No, there was another aspect that preoccupied Pavel Alekseevich, and he even recommended to one of his staff to give some thought to hormonal post-abortion protein folding, that is, the still completely unstudied process the female organism undergoes during artificial pregnancy termination, the hormonal consequences thereof, and how to assist the body in recovering from this condition with minimal damage . . .

The dissonance between his reasoned professional activity and the stone wall of rejection he encountered at home—from his wife, that is, and not from brainless Vasilisa—aroused a certain reflectiveness in him, and, as if in self-justification, he constantly wrote comments and notes to himself in which he combined medical incidents with the most abstract considerations, a kind of homebrewed philosophy of medicine. He made absolutely no attempt to organize his scattered thoughts into something orderly or intelligible . . . Ilya Iosifovich Goldberg, who was constantly producing innumerable sheets of paper filled with tiny script, each time announcing his latest grandiose plans to his friend, had cured Pavel Alekseevich of any desire to construct overarching theories or to erect planetary plans . . .

Unlike Goldberg, who ignited like dry brushwood at each new turn of scientific thought, Pavel Alekseevich had spent decades observing one and the same object, spreading its pale shutters with his rubber-covered left hand, inserting his mirror with its bent handle, and peering fixedly into the bottomless breach of the world. From there came all that was living; these were the true gates of eternity to which all those girls, aunts, ladies, and grand dames who spread their thighs before him never gave a second thought.

Immortality, eternity, freedom—they were all linked to this hole that engulfed everything: including Marx, whom Pavel Alekseevich had never been able to read, and Freud with his ingenious and erroneous theories, and him himself, an old doctor who had accepted into his hands hundreds, thousands, an unending stream of wet, screaming creatures . . .

Whenever Ilya Iosifovich—long ago released from his penultimate (it later turned out) prison term, inspired by the recent revival of his beloved field, and captivated now by molecular genetics—waxed profusely about the secret code of life discovered in DNA by those lousy Englishmen, as he referred to Watson and Crick, and bristled at how we, the Soviets, that is, had been beaten to the draw, Pavel Alekseevich, his chin resting in his big knitted palms, would stop him in midflight.

“You, Ilyusha, are a hot-shit scientist, while I’m just a simple cunt-cutter, and I just can’t figure what you’re so worked up about. So those heathens invented that spiral of yours. They have good financing. The Swiss equipment in my clinic was made in what year? Nineteen hundred and four. And the centrifuge in your office, when was it made?”

“That’s just the point, Pasha. If we had their money, we’d run rings around them. Our upcoming generation is super-talented, what potential!” For a moment his concern was replaced by a warm shadow. “You know my Vitaly turns out to have a terrific head on his shoulders. Just terrific! Too bad he’s leaning toward biophysics. Blum seduced him . . . Don’t you understand, Pavel, give us their money . . .”

“Where do they get their money from, Ilya?” Pavel Alekseevich tossed Goldberg some bait, and he bit instantaneously.

“The colonies, Pasha, the English colonies, imperialism and horrendous exploitation. You’re like a child, Pavel. Amazing.”

Pavel Alekseevich nodded.

“Child. Child. You’re the child, Ilyusha. A case of gerontological chickenpox. I’m prescribing for you spiritus vini, one hundred and fifty grams three times daily. How, after eight years in the camps, can you even pronounce that awful word: im-pe-ri-al-ism?”

Pavel Alekseevich poured one hundred fifty grams of vodka exactly to the drop into a glass and slapped a slab of fatback on a heavy chunk of bread—the way Vasilisa liked to lay it on, thick . . . This time they were drinking in Pavel Alekseevich’s study. Nowadays Goldberg frequently dropped in on the Kukotskys: the trip to Malakhovka was long, and he would sit in his laboratory until late at night and sometimes spend the night in the apartments of his Moscow friends.

Goldberg would jump up, overturn a chair, knock over a lamp, or at the very least sweep a plate off the desk.

“Because of types like you, types like me . . . ,” the wounded Goldberg wailed. “My father had an account in a Swiss bank, he was a timber merchant! With a house on the Moika, and a house on Lubyanka Street. And a dacha in Yalta! Socially, I’m a dead man. I’m not the one to tell them that they’re violating Lenin’s principles. Who would listen to me? As far as this country’s concerned, I’m guilty for life.”

“Okay, so you’re guilty. But what am I guilty of as far as this country’s concerned?” Pavel Alekseevich asked, although he knew perfectly well what his best friend would accuse him of.

“What? Your father was a general! He had control of . . .”

Pavel Alekseevich yawned, shook his head, and asked Elena to give them a folding bed and linen. She had everything ready. She loved Ilya Iosifovich and felt sorry for him.

Ilya Iosifovich snored on his folding bed, defeated by fatigue and alcohol. Unable to fall asleep owing to this nasal trisyllabic music, Pavel Alekseevich reflected with the clarity of nighttime introspection. How much moral majesty and impassable nonsense could there be in one person! A Jewish dzhigit! Was it some kind of Jewish disease—Russian patriot syndrome? Like psoriasis or Gaucher’s disease.

Pavel Alekseevich recalled a recent patient, a young Jew who had given birth to a second child with Gaucher’s disease. A genetic ailment . . . Goldberg had said something about the accumulation of recessive genes in ancient peoples with high frequencies of consanguineous marriages. And blurted something about curing humankind through miscegenation. He practically raved about the creation of a new race of people . . . In fact, when examined closely, everyone was sick. Everyone around was sick. His current assistant, Gorshkov, was sick with hate for his mother-in-law. Even the quality of his voice changed when he talked about her. But what’s the point of talking about her: a cantankerous old woman with a bad heart and diabetes? His nurse, Vera Antonovna, was mad about microbes: she ran her own underwear through the sterilizer . . . And Lenochka? With those dreams of hers . . . ? Her eyes look inward, and what does she see there? You ask her something, and it’s as if she’s just woken up. Her face is filled with fright, tension. Toma whispers to her flowerpots; Vasilisa makes the sign of the cross over the stove before she turns on the gas . . . It’s one big madhouse. Tanechka is the only healthy person with normal reactions. But even she’s been looking bad of late. Pale. With circles under her eyes. Either she’s pushing herself too hard, or . . . Maybe we should do an X-ray?

“I’ll talk to her on Sunday,” Pavel Alekseevich resolved.

Sunday mornings were usually their own, when they were absolutely alone. The evening before Vasilisa usually left town for services somewhere. Of late, Elena, who had never gone to church before, had taken to attending services, as if to spite Pavel Alekseevich. True, she didn’t go to the same place as Vasilisa. She had found a priest, a former architect, in some old church on the Ostozhenka, with whom she could also talk about her drafting dreams. Toma headed out to worship rhododendrons and oleanders at the Botanical Garden.

Sunday mornings belonged wholly to Tanya and Pavel Alekseevich. They had breakfast together and spent an hour or two discussing everything on earth—things at work, literature, politics. At night Pavel Alekseevich listened diligently on their ancient electron tube Telefunken to all the enemy “voices” that made their way through the clamorous jamming; Tanya took to reading the first samizdat to come out—the unknown verses of known poets as well as those of new, fresh-baked writers. Sometimes she handed her father something that had especially appealed to her. It was important for them to tell each other about everything. Politics occupied them to a certain extent, but both were much more interested in talking about blood vessels and capillaries.

Tanya had mastered the skills of a histology laboratory assistant as if it were child’s play: the job demanded precision and dexterity, and she loved everything about it. She prepared stains, hematoxylins, using antiquated, almost medieval formulas. She spent hours evaporating, settling, filtering, and redistilling. She told Pavel Alekseevich about her achievements, and he grinned: nothing had changed, everything was the same. When he had been a student they had studied slide preparations stained in the same way. With Erhlich’s hematoxylin. Kulchitsky stain . . .

Tanya enjoyed the entire procedure of preparing slides, which was governed by strict rules—from the moment the rat’s brain slid smoothly into the fixing solution to using the heavy microtome knife to slice the opaque paraffin cube that contained the paraffined brain. A thin ribbon of micron cuts remained on the knife, and with a light brush Tanya would sweep them onto the slide, affix them, and stain them with the same hematoxylin she had spent three days processing . . . Only Old Lady Vikkers’s—Gansovsky’s personal laboratory assistant’s—slides were better than Tanya’s. But Vikkers had not done anything else for the last fifty years. Besides, Karolina Ivanovna was incapable of mastering any technique on her own, while Tanya undertook each innovation with pleasure and a passion.

Tanya told her father in detail about the precise and rather tricky operation she had learned together with MarLena Sergeevna. They extracted a pregnant bicornate uterus from an anesthetized rat, spread the right and left horns of the uterus out on the shaved belly of the rat, and inserted a needle into the embryo’s skull precisely at the vertex where the two hemispheres joined and where deep inside the brain there was a certain mysterious gland. When the insertion was successful, they were able to induce artificially an obstruction of the flow of cerebrospinal fluid and thereby induce experimental hydrocephalus, that is, water on the brain . . . That is, of course, provided the operation was done well, and the rat did not miscarry or devour her defective young, and gave birth on time. Ultimately, all these delicate manipulations were supposed to lead to an understanding of the causes underlying this birth defect and, moreover, even more ultimately, to deliver humankind from this grave, but fortunately rather rare, affliction.

Tanya delighted in the sense of professionalism, entirely new for her, when eyes and hands work together, requiring neither commands nor oversight from above, performing their task independently and autonomously, while the task itself takes to one’s hands as if rejoicing at the process under way . . . From Tanya’s sighs of delight and the fervor of her stories focusing specifically on the details he recognized in her someone who was one with him by nature—a doer.

Pavel Alekseevich listened with sincerest attention—this kind of scientific enthusiasm was very familiar to him . . . Tanya had just completed her second year at the biology faculty, but she was already chin-deep in the game of science that Pavel Alekseevich understood so well. “Still, it’s a pity she didn’t go into medicine. She has good hands, but she’ll spend her life gutting rats,” the old doctor thought to himself.

In his treasured nocturnal jottings during those months he noted: “The windbags have achieved a stranglehold like never before. A preponderance of people has evolved whose profession consists solely of vapid and even malicious word-mongering. The entire nation has been divided into talkers and doers. Whole institutions and special appointments have been created—it’s a terrible virus. What a relief that Tanya belongs to the species of doers. One’s job, one’s profession is the only thing one can stand on. Everything else is in flux.”

The laboratory studied brain structure and development. Morphologists and histologists observed through the lenses of their primitive microscopes the developing microvascular trees of the brain, and tracked the mysterious process by which new networks in the brain were formed to replace those damaged or defective. Often they used the technique of experimentally infusing dye into the vascular system. The blood was gradually replaced by dye, and in specimens prepared afterward one could trace distinct dark branches filled with granular dark-gray caviar, which is precisely what the dye looked like under a microscope. This method was most effective when the infusion was performed on a live animal. Its heart would beat, not having figured out that instead of live blood it was pumping deadly ink, and only gradually, as it succumbed to oxygen deficiency, would the heart slow down and stop. More often, though, the injection was performed on a dead animal that had already been subjected to various scientific interventions. It was simpler, but the blood vessels did not fill as well with dye. The sets of instruments required for these two procedures differed somewhat, and it was at this relatively insignificant juncture that a decisive turn in fate awaited Tanya.

On one of their Sundays Tanechka proudly announced to her father that she had been placed in charge of the surgery room: she now kept the keys to the case that held all the laboratory’s instruments. Now anyone who intended to enter the operating room in the space in the half-basement would have to come to Tanya for forceps, clamps, scalpels, and saws—the frightening and beautiful tools required for cutting and sawing bone tissue. There, downstairs in the operating room, they cut not just rats, but cats, and dogs, and rabbits . . . But Tanya’s principal responsibilities lay in preparing the thinnest of histological sections, and she was good at this work.

IN THE SPRING OF 1960 TANYA COMPLETED HER EXAMS with straight A’s, and she was offered the opportunity to transfer to the day division. She refused, without even consulting her family. Although night school really was difficult, she had no intention of quitting the laboratory. Her real life was there, among the beakers, the rats, the slide sections, and in close communication with MarLena Sergeevna. Gansovsky himself had started paying attention to her. Old Lady Vikkers was planning to retire, and he was thinking about taking Tanya on in her place. MarLena Sergeevna guessed her boss’s intention and, valuing Tanya as a laboratory assistant, told him just in case that Tanya was planning to transfer to the day division. A minor, but absolutely classical, intrigue developed out of a purely work-based situation. As usual in such intrigues, Tanya was clueless.

During the summer months the children’s clinic attached to the laboratory usually closed down, except for the trauma section and the child development section that housed healthy children abandoned by their mothers while still in maternity hospital. Until these children turned three they were kept here under the watchful eyes of pediatricians and physiologists who observed the development of “normal” children, then sent them to orphanages. During these summer months when the clinic was virtually closed down, graduate students and researchers had the opportunity to focus on the “experimental” sections of their dissertations. Life at the laboratory became more intense, the operating room was in use every day and on a rigid schedule. Tanya’s responsibilities also increased: she was responsible for sterilizing and issuing instruments.

The incident that would become the most significant in her entire life began very ordinarily and banally. Holding in her tenacious grip a tray covered with a cloth yellowed by multiple sterilizations, Raya, a cute laboratory assistant who limped on one polio-stricken leg, asked to be issued a set of instruments for ink injections.

“What are you injecting?” Tanya asked matter-of-factly.

“A human embryo,” answered Raya.

Jangling her key, Tanya unlocked the glass case with its small metal treasures, pulled out tweezers, scalpels, and clamps from a broken sterilizing box, recounted all the antiquated metal piece by piece, and while selecting a clamp asked matter-of-factly, “Alive or dead?”

“Dead,” cute Raya responded calmly, then signed for the instruments she had received, and set off lopsidedly along a steep staircase down into the half-basement . . .

She had already rumbled to the bottom of the stairs and was scraping the wall with her hand in search of the light switch when Tanya suddenly realized what exactly she had asked about . . . Realizing it, she put the key to the operating room in its place, took off her white lab coat and hung it on a hanger, and left the laboratory. She would never return there. Nor would she return to the university. Her romance with science had ended at that very moment, forever.