The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

4

THE QUALITY OF THE AIR VARIED: SOMETIMES IT WAS LIGHT, dry, and “well-disposed,” as the Newling referred to it, and sometimes it grew heavy, dense, and seemingly filled with a dark moisture. When that happened, they would all move more slowly and tire more quickly. The wind, which never for a moment abandoned their caravan, also could shift: it might beat at your face, or cleverly peck at you from the side, or breathe down your neck. The light, however, always remained the same, and this more than anything else created the sensation of tiresome monotony.

“Tired of the local landscape?” the Judean quietly asked Skinhead. The Newling, who at rest stops tried to keep close to these men whose proximity made her feel more self-assured and protected, did not turn her head, although she overheard the quiet remark.

“Got anything more cheerful to propose?” Skinhead responded offhandedly.

“A small detour off the main route? Any objections?”

“That’s news to me: you mean there’s a route? And I thought that we were stomping around in a circle for some higher purpose.” Skinhead smirked. He had long ago tired of the monotonous dim transitory light that deceptively promised the approach of either total darkness or sunrise . . . “I can tolerate the landscape: a desert like any other . . . If only there were sun . . .”

“Let’s go then.” The Judean examined the cohort dozing near the fire and searched with his eyes for the Newling. She was alongside them. “We’ll take the Newling with us.”

The Newling smiled with gratitude.

“And the others?” Skinhead spoke up, moved by a noble urge for fairness, or at least equality . . .

The Judean laughed: “What do they . . . We’re not handing out vacation packages at the union office . . . Trust me, dragging the rest of them along is senseless.”

Skinhead shrugged his shoulders.

“Whatever you say . . .”

“Let’s go for a walk . . . ,” he beckoned to the Newling with a tenderly assertive voice, and she stood up and shook out her clothes.

THE THREE OF THEM WALKED THROUGH CRUNCHING SAND. Distances in this place were relative and incalculable, measured solely in terms of fatigue and events along the way; for that reason one could say that their excursion began the moment Skinhead, and the Newling after him, noticed on the horizon a sort of flickering column of light that was moving in their direction or that they were quickly approaching . . .

The column glowed and filled with a metallic sheen. Then, there they were, standing at its base, which gradually metamorphosed into a rounded wall of translucent light metal . . .

“There,” said the Judean, making an indeterminate gesture in the air, and a rectangular depression appeared in the surface of the wall, a doorframe, and a door appeared inside it. He pressed with the tips of his fingers.

“I know, I know how it’s done; I’ve already seen this somewhere before,” the Newling rejoiced inwardly.

There, beyond the door, the light was solid as a column, strong and dense, almost like water. They entered. The door, of course, disappeared, as if it had dissolved behind their backs.

Inside it was a bright, sunny day. Morning, but not early. The beginning of summer. A wall of huge subtropical trees stood not any which way, but arranged in order. The Newling understood that there was some simple formula underlying their arrangement, and if you could figure it out, you would understand the message they contained in themselves and for themselves, but which held meaning for others as well. The message was also encoded in the shades of green—from a pale green tone barely short of yellow to a rich green, triumphal as a choir—with all conceivable modulations in between: from the color of newborn grass to the pale silver of willow leaves to the shrill, the dangerous color of duckweed, opaque reed-green, plain Muslim-green, and even that machine-green you find only in hardware and building supply stores . . .

The Newling squinted with pleasure.

“How happy her eyes are now,” thought Skinhead, who sometimes experienced the sensations of other people’s individual organs . . . Now his own eyes exulted, transmitting their joy to the rest of his body.

A young woman sitting on her haunches between two cryptomeria stood up, and catching sight of the Judean, approached him, and they kissed each other heartily.

“He knows absolutely everybody,” mused Skinhead. He and the Newling stood at a short distance so as not to interfere with their meeting.

“Landscape architecture was what I dreamed of . . . I wasn’t able to finish the last year: I had only two exams and my diploma thesis left to write. But, see, I learned to do it all here.” The woman stroked the cryptomeria, and it nuzzled against the palm of her hand as if the plant were a good pussycat. “These two are constantly arguing with each other; they just can’t learn to get along. I keep having to mediate.”

Her face was attractive, although a bit coarse: the bridge of her upturned nose was wide and indented, her mouth large; her eyes were enormous, gray, each of them double-outlined with black—once around the iris, and a second time by thick black eyelashes under broad, masculine brows.

“Let me show you, let me show you,” she said, addressing Skinhead and the Newling. “My name is Katya.”

The Newling noticed that Katya wore a man’s sleeveless undershirt, the kind boxers wear in the ring, and the undershirt stretched over large young breasts. A multistring coral necklace covered her entire neck . . . Skinhead could see just what precisely was hidden under those cheerful corals—a slipshod pathologist’s seam from the supraclavicular fossa down . . .

“I get the best results with trees: we speak the same language.” Katya pointed to the two trees turned away from each other. “And these cryptomeria are my favorites . . . Maybe you remember that silly game called floriography? A yellow narcissus means unfaithfulness; a red rose—passionate love; a forget-me-not—fidelity to the grave . . .” She smiled, displaying teeth with spaces in between. “Well, the funniest thing is that it’s all more or less true . . . So you need to plant them so as not to mix the messages they carry . . . This garden is for nameless children.”

Skinhead and the Newling exchanged glances: what nameless children?

The Judean, who walked slightly off to the side, mumbled under his breath, “You could have figured that out yourself, without any hints . . . Yours are here too . . .”

The path of cryptomeria led downward toward the water. No water was visible, but there was a smell that promised water, the same smell that animals can sense dozens of miles away, the smell that leads them to watering holes . . .

The lake was quite small, round, and seemed slightly convex. Its blue water rippled and sparkled.

“Hard to look at?” Katya surmised. “At first my eyes hurt too, until they got accustomed to it. You need to look a little bit off to the side, not straight on. Shall we take a closer look?” The last question was addressed to the Judean.

He nodded. Katya ascended an airy little footbridge that hung in an arc over the lake. She lay down on her stomach and lowered both her arms into the water. Flapping her hands a bit, she uttered something quietly, then stood up, holding something in her hands that at first appeared to be made of glass. It sparkled. Katya slid the ingot of light, water, and blueness into Skinhead’s hands. He took it into his cupped palms and whispered: “A child . . .”

The Newling did not see any child. The Judean crouched down on the footbridge and began to speak solemnly, as if at a meeting.

“It was born completely healthy, of healthy and handsome parents, and died a week later of an infection. The little boy cried and suffered. His father ran from their house, the best house in their city of stone, the only house made of wood, and for a whole week he lay on the ground, neither eating nor drinking, and prayed to the Almighty to spare his child’s life. But that time the Almighty turned away from his favorite: he should not have taken carnal pleasure with another man’s wife, even if her breasts were like two lambs and her hair like a herd of goats descending from the Mount of Gilead . . . And so on . . . He had even sent the beauty’s husband to his certain death in order to possess yet one more woman, when he had more than enough of his own . . . Well?”

“No, I don’t know,” Skinhead shook his head.

“Hello! . . . This baby died—to put it in your terms—unbaptized. Then the couple had another baby. That one survived. They named him Solomon.”

Skinhead chuckled: “How do you know? You’ve never read the Bible in your life.”

“I have. Only at that time I didn’t get the point. But I’m a Jew, you see. And Jews were given the Bible sort of by default. It’s a part of us, and we’re a part of it. Even if we don’t want it that way. And even if you don’t want it that way . . . Therefore, when it was presented to me at one critical moment, it turned out that it and I were one. Regardless of the fact that the world has never known anyone more idiotic, egoistical, or insignificant.” The Judean smiled over the scintillating sphere. It was Skinhead’s turn to mumble.

“My friend, what are you saying? That this is the elder brother of King Solomon, the one who erected the First Temple of Jerusalem? That it’s two thousand seven hundred years old?”

“But it knows no time, only being,” noted Katya, about whom they had forgotten.

“Okay, assume that’s true. But what about the others? Who are the others?” Skinhead placed the scintillating sphere in Katya’s hands. She walked to the middle of the footbridge, got down on her knees, arched catlike, and lowered the mysterious creature into the infant hatchery. Then she waved with her hand, beckoning them all onto the bridge.

The lake was full of—veritably swarming with—transparent, bluish spheres. The Newling remembered the long cardboard box where they had kept the Christmas ornaments in her childhood, and of them all, each wrapped in its own paper, her favorites had been the spheres . . .

“Of course, that’s how it’s supposed to be.” The Newling grew excited. She could not have explained just what was as it was supposed to be.

“The unborn children, the aborted ones, are here too . . . Sometimes they ripen and reemerge,” Katya explained matter-of-factly. “Speaking of which, that one over there, it’s completely ripened.” She stuck her arm in the water, attempting to fish out something that obviously did not want to be fished out.

“You and I used to be good at philosophy,” the Judean began, but Skinhead interrupted him.

“No, no. I was more interested in history.”

“Never mind. Remember Leibnitz’s monads? It’s very similar, you have to admit. And Saint Augustine was on the right track . . . Well, I won’t even mention the Cabalists. For all the intolerableness of their method, they figured out a lot . . .” He suddenly smirked. “What was that your Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky used to say about a child’s tears? That comment he made to the Almighty about not having enough humanity . . .”

The Newling could not take her eyes off Katya, who had extracted a completely transparent sphere the size of a large orange, breathed on it, placed it on her palm, and stopped still. The sphere rocked slightly, then pulled lightly, and was about to begin its unsteady movement upward when suddenly, as if frightened by something, it once again sank into Katya’s palm.

“He’s afraid, the little one,” said Katya with a happy smile. “It’s very frightening for them at this point . . . They’re going to do work. Some to commit great deeds, some—vileness . . . But this one here is very good . . .”

“Are there bad ones?” the Newling wondered.

Katya sighed.

“Yes, they’re all different. There are frightened ones, and traumatized ones . . . And the more terror they’ve endured, the more evil they do . . .”

That sounded convincing, especially since the Newling once again got the sense that she herself knew something about all this.

“Take it,” said the Judean to Skinhead.

Skinhead felt that he too wanted to hold the creature in his hands. With his palm he covered the sphere pressed against Katya’s hand. Katya turned her palm so that the sphere lay firmly in Skinhead’s hand. Judging by its weight and the sensation of warmth, disquiet, and trustfulness, this was a child. Undoubtedly a boy.

“Give it your blessing,” said the Judean.

“That’s up your Jewish line, not mine. I don’t know anything about that.” Skinhead smiled, not at the Judean, but at the being sealed in its sphere that promised to become an infant.

“It’s no stranger to you. Give it to me . . . If you don’t want to give it your blessing, don’t. Just wish that it becomes a good doctor.”

“Now you’re talking,” agreed Skinhead. “So be it.”

The sphere lightly disconnected itself from his palm and, like a bubble of air in water, floated upward . . . until it reached a certain invisible barrier, where it slowed, then pushed against it with enough force to break through, and disappeared, leaving behind only the sound of the burst film and carrying away in the core of its essence the recollection of having overcome the boundary between two environments . . .