The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

2

TIME HERE WAS MARKED, AS THE NEWLING SUBSEQUENTLY noted, not by the alternation of days and nights, not by the changing of seasons, but solely by stops at the campfire and a sequence of events that struck the Newling as one stranger than the other. But nobody required that she express her opinion of what was taking place, and gradually she ceased to have any opinion at all of these various strange events, merely observing and occasionally participating in them. She did not always understand the essence of the events, but she never was forced to do anything against her will. Sometimes situations would arise requiring a certain effort on her part, but the general rhythm of their movement was such that their stops would occur just when she would begin to think that it would not be a bad idea to have a rest.

She long ago had come to realize that in these environs fatigue resulted not from their movement over the flat sand hills—movement that was really quite sluggish, although not enfeebled—but from the lack of that certain warmth emitted by the pale fire.

The locale was monotonous, gradually creating the impression that their seeming orientation toward some goal merely masked the fact that they were moving in a circle.

Yes, something was not right with the system of coordinates here, the Newling surmised at one point, and rejoiced, as she always rejoiced whenever her current existence was pierced by some thread from the past, which constantly loomed somewhere nearby but as if under lock and key, sooner an article of faith than a reality, like the dry plants in this place or the quite tangible tiny grains of sand that sometimes got in her eyes and irritated her tear glands.

One time the Judean sat down beside her and laid his hand on her shoulder. He had a habit, she noted, of touching his fellow travelers—on the head, the shoulder, or on the forehead sometimes . . .

“Do you want to ask me a question?”

“I do . . . Is there some other system of coordinates in this place?”

He looked at her with surprise.

“It’s completely different.”

“Not three-dimensional, that is?”

“It’s multidimensional: everyone has their own set.” He smiled with his thin lips, the wind stirring what remained of the gray hairs that grew just above his ears and on the back of his head beneath his bare crown.

“Does that mean that each of us is located in our own personal space with its own set of coordinates?”

“Not everyone. I know where you are and that fellow over there . . .” The Judean pointed to Skinhead. “But you two do not yet fall within my space . . . But that’s not final. In these parts nothing is final. Everything is very mutable and changes with great speed . . .”

“Ah-ha, that means time exists . . .”

“And what did you think? Time exists, but not just one. There are several time systems, and they’re all different: hot time, cold time, historical, metahistorical, personal, abstract, accentuated, reverse, and many, many others . . .” He stood up. “Nice talking to you . . .”

And walked off. The Newling sat, absorbing the rays of light with her body and filling with strength. That sickly fire nourished them all . . . The deserted place, so infertile and poor, was becoming more interesting than one could have supposed at the very beginning. What the Judean had said about time was rather enigmatic, but she nonetheless had the sense that she had known about this but had forgotten. That thought almost burned her it was so unpleasant.

The Newling looked about: the fine sand, the silent people, and the boring landscape . . . “Once I knew many other things—other places, other people—but I’ve forgotten it all; I can’t remember anything. Perhaps I’ve fallen out of the realm of time where everything, everything in the past, took place?” She closed her eyes, because all that remained to her was the pleasure of the warmth and their eternal march through the fine sand . . .

Some of the travelers were so locked inside themselves and incommunicative that they reminded the Newling of patients at a psychiatric clinic. They fulfilled the Judean’s infrequent orders lethargically at best, while he treated them like children—tenderly and with a firm hand. The majority of them recognized each other by sight, although they interacted little and only reluctantly. But there were some who were mutually disposed toward each other, and they would sit around the fire talking quietly among themselves.

New faces occasionally appeared, and some would disappear. Usually they disappeared unnoticed. Only one woman—gray and distinctively bandy-legged, weighed down with two sacks and a knapsack—left in everyone’s presence. Once in what seemed relatively like morning, when they were just about ready to set out and even the fire had been extinguished, the woman approached the Judean, removed her cloth knapsack, placed the two stuffed bags at his feet, bowed, and kissed his hand.

He withdrew his hand, patted her comradely and roughly on the shoulder, and, extinguishing his smile, growled, “Well, go, go . . . They’re waiting for you . . . You’re a clever girl, go, and don’t be afraid of anything . . .”

Those who bothered to raise their heads saw two festive green streams floating above her as a semblance of music sounded—something halfway between the short signals of some unknown radio station and études for a musician just beginning to learn some instrument still unknown to the world—and the woman disappeared, and all that remained in her place was the messy heap of discarded bags and a slowly diminishing smooth funnel of fading movement in the air. The mongrel grew agitated, began to bark, rushed over to the still fluttering spot, yipped inquisitively, its light head lifted upward . . . The second dog—the big shaggy one—sighed and covered its eyes with its paw . . .

Soon they were all walking down an indeterminate path, while the wind, full of fine sand, poured down on them a burden none of them needed . . .

Shortly thereafter, at their next rest, a newcomer appeared—a long-haired young man. Up to this moment, he had been wandering for a rather long time through the scraggy, blanched desert, his rust-colored cowboy boots sinking deep into the sand. He carried a bizarre little suitcase, and with the cold curiosity of someone who had just consumed some exotic drug he pondered where he had managed to wind up. His memory was completely blank. There were at least three things he did not know about himself: where he was; why he was hauling the ridiculous burden of that heavy little suitcase so ill-formed it was impossible to make it stand upright and it could only be placed on its side; and, third and most unpleasant, what was that dark vortex that kept flying over him now and again . . . The animated stream of air rumpled his hair and blew under his clothes—first too hot then too cold—nastily and annoyingly demanding, begging, whining . . . Besides these more or less distinct sensations, of which he was consciously aware, he also had the vague feeling of some enormous loss. The loss by far surpassed everything that he possessed, and in general everything that he had was, so to speak, absolutely insignificant in comparison with what he had lost. But what exactly he had lost he did not know.

He grew tired of walking, and he dropped onto the sand, shook his head, and white sand fell from his hair. He placed the little suitcase under his head. The sand crunched between his teeth and pricked him under his clothes. From somewhere off to the right the dark little vortex twisted upward, wobbled in the distance, and started to move toward him. Longhair felt a fatigued irritation and said under his breath, “Get lost, will you!”

The vortex shuddered and stopped. Then the fellow decided that the vortex was sensitive to his moods and could be driven away by invoking his own inner powers. This was, perhaps, the first positive impression he had had of late. With the palm of his hand he swept a layer of sand off the suitcase and closed his eyes. You couldn’t say he had fallen asleep: rather, he had fallen into a kind of catalepsy. While he was still conscious, he admonished himself: I do not want to come here anymore, no more coming back here . . . Sometimes such self-injunctions helped. He had experience with this sort of thing.

When he opened his eyes, however, nothing had changed except that his neck was stiff from the rigid corner of the bizarre object underneath his head. He wiped his neck and lay there a bit longer, and when he finally opened his eyes, he was encircled by people who sat in silence: they struck him as gloomy and poorly drawn. One of them was a bit more perceptible: he was bald, tall, and stood in profile, bent over a pile of dry stalks. He extended his hand over the tinder, and a thin flame rose up. The fire ignited of its own, without matches or a lighter. This somewhat calmed the young man: he had already visited places like this where water, fire, and wind merely laughed at the ambitions of small creatures who thought that with the flimsy reins of cause and effect they had tamed everything on earth . . .

That Jew playing with fire is the leader here, Longhair guessed.

The Judean approached him, rapped on the little black suitcase, and immediately revealed his perceptiveness:

“You’ll hardly need that thing in these parts.”

“I can’t just throw it out!” Longhair shrugged.

“Naturally . . .”

“What’s inside it?” The question had occurred to Longhair for the first time. “What’s so important inside it that I’m hauling it around?”

“Open it and look,” the Judean advised.

Longhair stared in amazement at his interlocutor: why hadn’t that occurred to him earlier? But it hadn’t . . . In part this too was consoling and reminded him of that stereotypical dream, familiar even to cats, where you want to move, to run, to save yourself, even simply just to get a glass of water, but your body won’t obey you, and you can’t budge a single muscle . . .

The little suitcase was locked with two clasps, and Longhair could not figure out at first how they worked. As he pondered the mechanisms of the intricate locking latches, his hands of their own pressed a bracket along the side and the suitcase opened. It was not a suitcase, but a case for an object of inconceivable beauty. The very sight of it took Longhair’s breath away: it was a metal tube with a flared bell of yellow precious metal—neither warm gold nor cold silver, but soft and luminiferous. The elongated letters engraved in the oval stamp read SELMER, and Longhair deciphered the small letters immediately. He whispered the word, and it was sweet in his mouth . . . Then he touched the wooden mouthpiece with his fingers. The wood was matte and tender as a maiden’s skin. Its curve was so acutely feminine that Longhair was abashed, as if he had inadvertently caught sight of a naked woman.

“What a wonderful . . .” He faltered, looking for a word: toy, machine, thing? Rejecting the inappropriate words, he repeated with a declarative intonation: “How wonderful!”

He had the urge to do something with it, but he did not know what . . . He tore off the tails of his plaid wool shirt, and, breathing warm air on the flared golden surface, he gently stroked it with the red-and-green rag.

Now he was walking with all the others, and the circling that seemed to some senseless or monotonous had acquired sense for him: in his black case he carried a wondrous object whose flowing, lithe outlines the case reiterated; he guarded it from all possible danger, particularly from the impudent black vortex that stretched out behind him in the distance awaiting the moment to attack him with its pathetic yowling and unpleasant touch . . . It seemed as though this vortex was somehow interested in the black case, because it kept trying to touch it. Longhair frowned. “Shoo,” he said to himself, and the vortex leaped to the side in fright. At rest stops Longhair would extract the plaid rag from the back pocket of his jeans and lovingly rub the metal tube all the while they sat.

Sometimes he caught the gaze of the tall lean woman with the black headscarf over her voluminous hair. He would smile to her as he was accustomed to smiling at nice women, his gaze able to convey total happiness, love until the grave, and generally everything you would ever want . . . But her face, for all its loveliness, seemed to him much too distracted . . .