The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

1

THE SAND, PICKED UP BY A STREAM OF AIR, RANG LIGHTLY as it struck against the transparent stalks of the dry, brittle plants. A haze stretched across the horizon in every direction, and the sky held not a single suggestion of any light source. Tiny whirlwinds spun—dissipating, then rising up again—over barely formed, low-lying hills. The sand slowly rolled from place to place, flowing like dry water, but the outlines of this pale earth barely changed.

On one of the flat hills lay a woman, half-covered by the sand. Her eyes were closed, but her fingers sifted the sand, and gathering a handful, sprinkled it in fine streams.

“It’s probably all right for me to open my eyes now,” the woman thought. Hesitating a moment, she opened them. The soft semitwilight was pleasant. She lay for a little while longer, then rose up on one elbow. Then sat up. The sand tickled as it poured from her clothes. She examined the sleeve of her white nightshirt with the tiny green florets.

“Brand-new, made in Pakistan. A present: I didn’t buy one like this,” she observed to herself and sensed a certain discomfort from the knot of the white polka-dot kerchief tied village-style under her chin. She smiled and flung it off. Sitting straight up, she tucked her knees under her chin: that felt good . . . light and easy . . .

She stuck her hands under the hem of her nightshirt and felt the coarse scaliness of her legs. She ran her palms over her calves, and the sand fell off. The woman drew up her hem and was astonished by the sight of her legs: they were covered with rough cracks. Near the cracks the skin rippled with pink, scaly tubules. She rapped on them, and they fell off, exactly like paint off an old mannequin. She took a certain pleasure in scraping off this dried paint, releasing the dirty plaster dust underneath and exposing new young skin inside. Her big toes were particularly frightening: each of them was encrusted in a grayish-yellow layer from which the nail stuck out like an overgrown wooden mushroom.

“Yuck, how disgusting!” She rubbed the almost limy growths with a certain revulsion, and they unexpectedly detached themselves, falling off and instantly blending into the sand. They revealed new pink toes—like those of an infant. A pair of olive-colored canvas shoes with bone buttons appeared from somewhere. They were so familiar . . . Of course, Grandmother had bought them and a dark-blue wool sweater for her mother at the Torgsin store in exchange for a gold chain and ring: shoes for her . . .

Her hands, too, were covered with a dry, dusty crust. She rubbed them, releasing long, slender fingers, glove-smooth, without any knobs on the joints or dark raised veins . . .

“How wonderful,” she thought. “I’m like new.”

And none of this surprised her in the least. She stood up and felt that she had grown taller. Remnants of old skin dropped in sandy layers at her feet. She ran her hand over her face and hair: everything was her own, yet everything was changed. The sand crunched under her feet, and her heels sank into the sand. It was neither cold nor hot. It grew neither darker nor lighter: it was early dusk, and it seemed as if nothing here intended to change.

“I’m all alone.” The thought ran through her head. Just then she felt a slight movement near her feet; a common household cat, gray with squiggly dark stripes on its sides, brushed against her bare legs. One of the innumerable Murkas that accompanied her everywhere. She bent over and stroked its arched spine. The cat purred in appreciation. Then suddenly everything changed: the air around her turned out to be inhabited. It moved with warmth, with waves of a certain quality that she could not put a proper name to: the air is alive, and it is not indifferent to me. In fact, it is rather well-disposed toward me . . .

She inhaled it. It smelled of something familiar and pleasant, but inedible. Where in the world had the memory of this smell crept into her head from?

She ascended a small hill and saw a multitude of similar tablelands.

“Rather monotonous.” Then she set off forward, with no point of reference—there was none to be found in this place, really—with no intended direction, wherever her eyes would lead her. The cat walked alongside, its paws sinking lightly into the dry sand.

WALKING FELT GOOD. EFFORTLESS. SHE WAS YOUNG AND light. Everything was absolutely as it should be, although not at all like what she had prepared herself for so long. Nothing of what was happening corresponded to her now forgotten expectations; it all ran counter to the crude folk descriptions of the old women at church and the elaborate schemes of various mystics and visionaries, yet at the same time it conformed to her early childhood premonitions. All of the physical discomforts of her existence connected with her swollen, rusty joints, her sunken and stooped spine, her lack of teeth, her weakness of hearing and sight, and the slackness of her bowels had disappeared completely; she took pleasure in the lightness of her own step, in the enormity of her visual horizons, and in the marvelous harmony of her body with the world stretched out around her.

“How are they doing back there?” she thought, but “there” was bare and deserted. “Okay, so I don’t need to know,” she agreed with someone who did not want to show her any pictures. “They” also could not be made out as individuals . . .

She held something in her hand. She looked: it was a black lace headscarf, gathered along the seams and as rigid as if new. She spread it out: the pattern was familiar—not quite bells, not quite flowers, little bells braided together with sinuous whiskers. A memory seemed to break through from somewhere, as if through an invisible wall, and the woman smiled: at last she could orient herself . . . This was the headscarf she had searched for long ago when her grandmother had died. Grandmother had insisted on being buried in this headscarf, but she had hidden it so well that no one had been able to find it. So they buried her without it, covering her head with a white kerchief . . . She flung the headscarf on her head and with a familiar gesture tied it at the back of her neck.

She walked for a long time: nothing changed in the landscape or in time, and though she experienced no fatigue, she suddenly felt terribly bored. She noticed that the cat had disappeared. And then she saw some people—come from who knew where—sitting around a small campfire. Its transparent white-blue flame was barely visible, but streams of air flowed visibly around it.

She approached them. A tall, thin man with characteristic Semitic features rose up to greet her, his bald spot gleaming together with his smile, which was directed at her.

“We have a Newling,” he said welcomingly. “Come here. Come. We’ve been expecting you.”

The people around the fire stirred, making room for her. She stepped closer and sat down on the sand. The Judean stood alongside her, smiling like an old acquaintance. She felt awkward, because she could not remember where she had seen him before. He placed his hand on her head, chanting:

“That’s good, that’s good . . . Newling . . .”

And she understood that Newling was her name now. He was the Judean. The ten or so people sitting around the fire were men and women. Some also had familiar faces, but she had long ago grown accustomed to driving away those agonizing sensations of something once familiar and now fleeting; her efforts to remember, to excavate some scrap of memory and connect it to the fabric of existence had been so futile that she just waved them off as a function of habit. “They can’t remember either,” the Newling guessed, noticing with what breathless attention a smooth-shaven man sitting Asian-style slightly off to the side watched her. There were also two dogs and a strange animal the woman had never seen before.

“Just sit, sit and rest,” said the Judean. Something she had never known before was taking place alongside the fire. More than anything else it seemed as if they were sunbathing . . . at twilight in the light of the small campfire . . . An enormous bulky woman wrapped head to foot in a crude flannel robe shifted, turning sideways toward the fire, while an old man with a gloomy face extended his arms, palms facing outward. A tall elderly woman in a black cowl that covered her face pressed toward the fire . . . Besides warmth the campfire exuded a radiating light that was very pleasant . . . One of the dogs rolled over on its back, exposing its stomach, covered with thin white fur. The mutt’s mug had bliss written all over it. The second dog, a shaggy sheepdog, sat with its paws crossed in front of itself, exactly like a human being.

They sat for a while in silence. Then the Judean extended his hand over the campfire, making a gesture as if he were squeezing something in his hand, and the flame went out. In place of the burning fire the Newling saw neither ash nor charcoal, but a light-silver powder that blended with the sand before her very eyes.

The people stood up and shook the sand from their clothes. The Judean walked ahead, the others strung out in pairs or one by one behind him. The Newling remained sitting on the sand, studying them from behind: though their movements were marked by total uncertainty, they seemed to share a strange singleness of purpose and concentration . . . Last in line was the one-legged Limper leaning on a stick. Both his stick and his foot sank in the sand, yet although he was last, he did not lag behind . . .

They had already moved rather far off into the distance when the Newling realized that she did not want to be left on her own, and she easily caught up with the chain, overtaking Limper, the Old Woman in a cowl, the Warrior in his strange jacket that seemed to have been taken from someone else, the strange creature—more likely human than animal, but absolutely not a monkey—and pulling up alongside Skinhead.

“That’s good,” he said.