The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

21

PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH ARRIVED FROM POLAND WITH A SUITcase full of presents. As usual, he had gone into the first shop he saw and bought everything there, including the suitcase. The shop turned out by chance to specialize in items for newlyweds; consequently, all his purchases were white, lacy, and in rather poor taste. Vasilisa and Toma oohed and aahed over the beautiful things, while Tanya and her mother only smiled at each other understandingly . . . Father had missed his target. However, the white shoes were just in time for both Elena and Tanya . . . Three more days passed before Sunday morning, which Tanya so awaited. By this time over the course of her senseless walks she had arrived at a whole theory for rejecting the foolish, insane, rotten world, by whose laws she absolutely refused to live.

At breakfast she told her father about the main incident. Very restrainedly and precisely. He needed no time to mull things over; he instantly grasped the heart of the matter.

“You understand, what I want to talk about?” she concluded her story.

He sat silently, and Tanya waited also in silence for what he would say. He remembered her as a three-year-old, then as a five-year-old, and tried to apply to this grown-up young woman with the sad face all the silly nicknames of her childhood: Big-eyed Squirrel, Cherry, Kitten . . . Was there another defeat lying in wait for him?

“You want to talk about professionalism?” he asked his daughter.

“Precisely.” She nodded.

“You see, a profession is a way of looking at things. The professional sees one piece of life extremely well but might not see other things not pertaining to his profession.”

“Dad, I’ve read about the SS doctors. They conducted experiments on human beings to measure the impact of low temperatures and various chemical substances. They performed experiments using prisoners already sentenced to be executed. Exterminated, I mean.”

“Yes, yes, I know. Terrible business. They were later tried at the Nuremberg Trials. You’re right. This conflict essentially exists.” He rubbed his eyes, which had immediately grown tired of this conversation. “Only don’t forget that the sentence—both the doctors’ and their patients’—in a certain sense had been signed in advance.”

Tanya arched her brows.

“Are you trying to tell me that all people are mortal? If we take that into consideration, then it’s even worse. Even more heinous. There’s not a drop of sense in anything then. Right now we’ve got a child in the pathology ward, this tiny little body with a head three feet in diameter. A thin film of skin stretched over a huge bubble of water. And no rats are going to save him. Which means it’s better to kill him and do a vivisection on him?”

“That is not even a possibility. That’s idiotic reasoning.” Pavel Alekseevich shrugged his shoulders. “She’s picked up some of the family’s prejudices,” he thought with irritation, but decided that the conversation had to be played out to the end. “In our line of business, Tanya, the professional is the one who assumes responsibility, who chooses the most acceptable from available alternatives, and sometimes it is a choice between life and death. Medicine has its own code of ethics. Take Hippocrates and read him: he’s already written about this. There are predetermined decisions: in my profession when it comes to a choice between the life of the child and the life of the mother, usually the choice is to save the life of the woman. It doesn’t happen that rarely. As for your experience, the question here is absolutely speculative: for a minute it occurred to you that you could turn out to be a murderer . . .”

Tanya interrupted her father.

“Dad, it didn’t just occur to me. What have I been doing these two years? Murdering rats. I’ve slashed a whole mountain of rats. It seemed really easy. Snip, snip . . . As a result . . . Some barrier just sort of broke down . . .”

“No, no, no. That’s for your mother. I know nothing and don’t want to know anything about those barriers. There is a certain hierarchy of values, and human life is at the top. And if in order to save the life of a single person, to learn how to treat only one human disease, hundreds of thousands—whatever number—of animals need to be destroyed, there is no question.”

“Dad, you don’t understand. I’m talking about something else. Lord take the rats. I’m talking about me. What’s happened to me?” Tanya stretched out her amazingly thin arms.

“I don’t see any tragedy here. It’s a question of your state of mind as a professional. You hit a bump. That happens.”

“One helluva bump! What’s with you? Don’t you understand? I’m cutting heads off of rats, piling up whole baskets of little corpses, in order to achieve some result. In order to discover something, to cure something, and along the way something happens to me that makes me lose my fundamental values: I lose sight of the difference between the life of a human being and a rat . . . I don’t want to be the good little girl who cuts rats anymore!” Tanya was almost shouting. Pavel Alekseevich frowned even more, and the wrinkles on his bare forehead ran almost all the way to the nape of his neck.

“I’m sorry, my child. And who do you want to be?”

Tears began to sprinkle from Tanya’s eyes. Pavel Alekseevich could not bear this.

“I want to be the bad girl who doesn’t cut anyone up!”

“Have a chat with Ilya Iosifovich. He’s the philosopher. He’ll prove to you that everything is material. You, and me, the rats, and drosophila: it’s all one and the same. I’m not interested in philosophy. I work in applied science: breech births, double nuchal cords . . . I refuse to try to solve problems of global significance. As it is, half the country is already busy doing that . . . It’s an irresponsible preoccupation. Anyone who does anything competent bears responsibility. The majority of people try to do nothing at all . . .”

“I don’t want that kind of responsibility!” Angry tears were now flowing down Tanya’s face. She had expected sympathy and understanding from her father, but had found nothing of the sort in him. Pavel Alekseevich looked at her with an alien disapproving gaze.

“Then you should have stuck to playing the piano. Or replanting cactuses. Or, if you wish, do drafting . . . and don’t go into science . . .”

“I’m not doing anything of the sort anymore. That’s it. I quit.” With slow, not entirely confident movements Tanya collected her cup from the table and placed it in the sink.

PAVEL ALEKSEEVICH WATCHED HER TENSED SPINE WITH the repugnant feeling that this had already happened to him before. Of course, he’d insulted, he’d hurt the girl, the old fool! Just as he’d done with Lenochka . . . Insulted, Tanya had collected her cup from the table in the very same slow and uncertain way . . .

He grabbed her by her pointed shoulders and hugged her.

“Tanya! Don’t turn an experiment into a tragedy.”

The slender young woman so resembled her mother at that moment that Pavel Alekseevich’s heart wrenched. She turned her angry, tear-streamed face to him and said quietly, “You’re just the same as the rest . . . You don’t understand anything . . .”

She walked out of the kitchen, slamming the door loudly behind her and leaving Pavel Alekseevich in a state of profound dismay and bewilderment: what had he said that was so out of line, how had he offended his favorite little girl?

Pavel Alekseevich sat down at the head of the enormous table and sank his smoothly shaved head in his hands. He reflected . . . There was a multitude of factors that kept people from becoming close to each other: shamefulness, fear of interfering, indifference, and, ultimately, physical repulsion. But the stream flowed in the opposite direction as well, pulling and drawing people to the closest proximity possible. Where was the dividing line? How real was it? Having drawn around themselves their own magic circles—some wider, some narrower—people live in cages they have defined for themselves and relate to their self-designated psychic space each in their own way. Some cherish their imagined cage beyond measure, others suffer from its constraints, and still others seek to admit into their personal space only chosen favorites while excluding those who would impose themselves . . .

The majority of Pavel Alekseevich’s many acquaintances could not tolerate self-isolation, fearing more than anything else that they might remain alone, face-to-face with themselves, and for that reason they were willing to drink tea, chat, and do all kinds of work just not to remain alone. Discomfort, pain, suffering—anything to be in the public eye, to be among people. There was even a proverb: misery loves company. But people who think, who seek to create, and are, in general, worth something, always fence themselves off with a protective band, an alienation zone . . . What a paradox! The most severe insults resulted precisely because people who are extremely close to each other draw the internal and external radii of their personalities in different ways. One man absolutely has to have his wife ask him five times a day why he’s looking so pale. How is he feeling? Another regards even a slightly too attentive look as an infringement on his freedom . . .

“What a strange, singularly strange family we are,” Pavel Alekseevich reflected. “Perhaps because only two of us—Elena and Tanya—are connected by real blood ties . . . The rest of us came together through the whims of fate. What inexplicable wind dropped gloomy Vasilisa at the door, or good-for-nothing Tomochka with her evergreen pleasures . . . Elena is melancholy, Tanechka is rebelling who knows why . . . Each in her impenetrable, separate cage, separate, and each with her own simple secret . . .”

In fact, Pavel Alekseevich had planned to do some work today: to skim through the American journals and write a commentary on a dissertation that had been lying around for two weeks already . . . But his mood was ruined, and he had no desire to read someone’s son’s dissertation. He opened the door of the cupboard—the bottle was where it should be—and peeled off the metal lid . . .

“And I’m to blame for it all, old fool. I’ve hurt everyone: Elena, Tanya, Vasilisa . . .”