The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

7

AFTER THEIR NIGHT IN THE SHED EVERYONE HAD CHANGED slightly. Most appreciably—Manikin. It was no longer stiff as oak, had become more flexible, and had acquired certain details: even its ear helixes had come to life and formed a primitive pattern, and while its eyes still looked out blankly, they no longer seemed blind.

“Likely our nighttime visitors worked him over particularly thoroughly,” Skinhead noted to himself. “They’re good at plastic surgery, no denying it . . . And they made a leg for Limper: what’s not clear only is whether it’s a prosthesis or a transplant. It looks like they formed new bone tissue and fashioned the fibula and the tibia, then grafted the nerves and muscle tissue . . . Fat Lady has become even fatter. Sister has become transparent; the light shines through her fingers . . . Actually, everybody has changed except the Newling . . .”

He watched surreptitiously from afar as she sat down on a hump, removed her shoes, poured the sand from them, then ran her marvelous hands (with a slight scar on the left one, between the middle and ring finger where a fishhook had lodged itself in her childhood) along her narrow long feet (she’d always been embarrassed by her large shoe size), and brushed off the grains of sand. Then she pulled off the black lace headscarf and loosened her thick chestnut hair, and it fell in three separate, springy locks—like hair accustomed to long years of tight braiding; she shook out the sand . . .

Manikin, despite its improvement, worried Skinhead, while at the same time Skinhead was angry with himself: How had it happened that all of a sudden he had been put in charge of them? . . . Who was he, anyway? Just like them, brought there from who knew where or why, confused and lonely . . .

Skinhead had noticed Manikin’s strange behavior even before its first seizure: it started to display signs of alarm, which was out of character for it. It would look over its shoulder, or squat down and cover its head with haphazardly fashioned paws. At one point Manikin stopped dead in its tracks and listened: from somewhere far away in the distance it was struck by a subtle terrifying sound aimed like a thin, sharp needle at its face.

The first time the wait was quite short: the needle pierced Manikin’s forehead, and it fell to the ground with a loud scream. The seizure resembled epilepsy, and Skinhead immediately stuck the bowl of a spoon—where had it come from?—in its mouth, elevating its head on his knees so that its stone-hard skull did not beat against the ground. They had no medicine. If only he had about five tablets of phenobarbital . . .

Following this first seizure Manikin’s life changed, becoming horrible and considerably more conscious. It was now constantly in one of two states—before “that” and after “that.” But it knew that there was yet a third state—“that,” which was horrid. “That” was followed by “after that.” Manikin would get up, light as an empty sack, having completely forgotten what it had just undergone. Usually at that moment it saw Skinhead alongside it. If he was not there, Manikin would catch up with the rest, who sometimes had managed to go quite far. It experienced intense hunger and approach Skinhead, who without uttering a word stuck a small square cookie in its hand. Manikin ate the funny cookie and within a few minutes forgot about its hunger. It walked on and on once again, then suddenly recall how once when it had been walking just that way it had heard a subtle, terrifying sound. It anxiously attuned its hearing, and soon the sound arose: “before that” was approaching. The malicious needles, or bees, or bullets, that flew at it from some unknown distance multiplied. It seemed as if each of them was aimed at some particularly tender and painful part of Manikin’s body: at its eyes, throat, stomach, gut . . . Each target would turn into a kind of independent organ and experience a woeful expectation, an ever-intensifying horror, and all these independent sensations of individual organs multiplied geometrically and expanded cosmically and uncontrollably so that Manikin’s terror by far came to exceed its own dimensions, and in order to contain this uncontrollably expanding fear within itself it became enormous, much larger than itself, much larger than any largeness a human being could imagine. And all of this went on and on and on . . . At that moment Manikin would get the desperate urge to shrink, to become little, tiny, the most insignificant grain of sand.

It attempted to shrink into nothingness, but instead only grew more enormous, becoming an open target for all the arrows rushing toward it. The greater this insane expansion, this ballooning of its body, the more urgent was its desire to shrink into a grain of sand, into nothingness . . . And then the blows struck. The first, to the head, was crushing and burned its way through. The blow was sharp, sabrelike, and gleaming black in color. Then another, and another. They came one after the next, striking the ever-diminishing bounds of Manikin’s body, whipping, like lightning, the already charred but still shuddering tree of its body . . .

Skinhead held its jerking head, not allowing its clamped jaws to lock shut. Sometimes Longhair helped him: clamping between his rust-colored cowboy boots the fragile case he never put down for a moment, he grasped the wildly arching body with both arms, softening the blows that the madman dealt to himself . . .

Then Manikin would get up, and all of it repeated over and over . . . Skinhead looked inside its skull and saw that the two small hemispheres were covered with a dark brilliant membrane of not entirely determinable localization: either under the thick meninges of the dura mater or directly below on the soft arachnoid mater or pia mater. After each seizure this membrane would be covered with a new network of fissures, and small pieces of the membrane had fallen away, shrunk, and allowed healthy pale-gray portions of the brain, networked with pink blood vessels, to emerge . . .

“More analogues,” Skinhead noted. “We also have an electroshock method for treating schizophrenia . . .”

He would stroke the calmed half-wit on the head as the latter, like a child, rotated its head under the doctor’s hand so that not a place was left untouched . . .

Sister in the meantime had grown even more transparent, and when the journeyers sat down at the campfire, Skinhead noticed once how she pulled back her monastic cowl for an instant, and the face that peeked out from behind amazed him with its rare asymmetry—not one eye or eyebrow was where it belonged; there were only pale folds of limp skin with no eyelashes, and a scab on her forehead shaped like an eye, which bled at the center of the wound. With her almost invisible hand she replaced the cowl, and the location of her transparent hand against the background of her dark vestments was evident only because of her string of black woolen rosary beads.

Her departure passed unnoticed. Once after their usual rest her vestments lay alongside the campfire: her white blouse folded into her black inner rason; her cowl, the headdress of Eastern Orthodox Christian women monastics; and a red velvet purse. Skinhead opened the purse. Inside, wrapped in foil, lay a decayed woolen thread and a handful of ashes . . . Her vestments smelled of cinnamon, which since childhood he had not been able to tolerate, bitter almonds, and incense . . .

Sister had disappeared considerately, troubling no one, while the new person who just arrived caused everyone a mass of headaches. At first when he discovered himself next to the campfire, this middle-aged citizen of average height imagined that he was dreaming. And insofar as he could fathom no other state except consciousness and sleep, these woeful, somewhat constrained people sitting around the campfire seemed suspicious to him. The campfire itself, which burned at his feet, also seemed strange—too pale, and not hot.

“It’s all stage props,” the man in the sports jacket guessed. “Of course, this is a dream, a very entertaining dream.”

He began to peer diligently into this rather strange dream so as not to forget it when he woke up and to tell his wife, Nadya, about it. Her dreams were always unusually stupid: either she was taking his sports jacket to the cleaners, or her soup was boiling over in the pot. He dreamed only rarely, and never had he dreamed anything as intricate as this one with the campfire. He tried recounting the people sitting around the fire, but could not. Either they kept moving around slightly or their numbers changed. On closer examination it turned out that these people were not quite real, but shadows of some sort. Only one of them stood out among the others: a large, thickset fellow with his head shaved clean, a patch of light from the fire reflected on his forehead, his head half bald. A Lenin forehead. He chose Skinhead as the most respectable of the bunch to be his conversation partner.

“I have to ask him . . .” And then he stopped. He suddenly began to fear that this was no dream. And if it was not a dream, then the first thing he needed to ask was what this place was and how he had wound up here . . . If you ask that, they’ll decide you’re insane. What’s more, he could not remember what exactly had preceded his arrival at this place, which was obviously in the countryside, in some unfamiliar locale, and not even in Central Russia . . .

He peered once again at the faces of the people, decidedly strangers and somewhat bizarre: next to him was a thuglike half-wit, indifferent as a rock; next to him a long-haired fellow sat in a lotus pose with an unnaturally straight spine and a saxophone case clasped to his chest. His son had once carried around just such a case before he left home . . . There was a mangy dog, a fat woman of simple origins, and—he even perked up and calmed down a bit—to his left a very beautiful woman with a good Russian face lay right on the bare ground, supporting her chin in the palm of her hand.

“That one’s my type,” he thought with pleasure. “She looks like Nadya when she was young . . .” The others sank into the twilight, the fire illuminating first someone’s hand, then someone’s back . . .

“Need to collect my thoughts and figure out what caused this lapse,” he decided. The situation was unpleasant, but he felt no particular fear. He turned his thoughts toward home, the most secure place of his existence. So what did he remember? Nadya had served him a breakfast of fried potatoes and two meat patties. He distinctly remembered the patties lying on the plate angled toward each other. A piece of bread with sausage. Tea. It was Tuesday. He had a convenient class schedule: two more ninety-minute lectures on Wednesday and then free until Monday.

“Ever since I got promoted to full professor I’ve had a convenient schedule,” he mused. “True, I have extracurricular obligations, the party organization, and meetings at the rector’s office, which, by the way, I must not forget, are this week . . .” He drifted off on a tangent. “Right, next: I ate breakfast and took Kashtan out for a walk. In the distance I noticed that repulsive gray mastiff from the other entranceway . . . Then I went upstairs and changed . . .”

Just then he noticed that he was wearing his dark-gray dress suit with the lapels, not his dark-blue striped suit . . . He looked at the toes of his shoes: they were his black dress shoes. At that time of the morning he usually put on his old Romanian sandals with the slits . . .

“So, let’s think this out logically,” he told himself. “When I walked out of the house I had my briefcase. Today I’m lecturing first period to the fifth-year students on ‘Contemporary Issues in Gnosiology’; second period—‘Fundamentals of Scientific Atheism’ to the entire first-year class . . . I don’t have my briefcase. I don’t remember at all having delivered those lectures. I’m wearing different clothes. Consequently, between leaving the house and now, some event occurred that I do not remember . . . It happened between 8:25 A.M. and . . .” He wanted to look at his watch, but he was not wearing one . . . “It’s evening. But there’s no being assured that only ten hours have passed between the morning I imagine to have been today and now. Any amount of time could have passed since the moment I stopped keeping track . . . Consequently, I’ve had a lapse of memory. A cerebral vasospasm. So how do I reconstruct what happened next? Probably the Fourth Department Hospital, with a sanatorium or something similar after . . . But how could Nadya leave me on my own? A sick person requires . . . No, that’s not like her . . . Strange, strange . . .”

The Professor politely addressed Longhair: “Excuse me, what time is it?”

Longhair looked at him with a blank stare and said, it seemed to the Professor, with contempt, “The same as it was . . .”

“Typical hippie,” the Professor summed him up in a moment and turned away. Skinhead looked distinctly more decent than the rest; he got up to go over to him. Once on his feet, he noticed that something was wrong with his sense of space: either the horizon was too close, or the sky was too low . . .

“What a tight place this is . . . Devil knows where I’ve wound up,” the Professor thought, irritated. Skinhead stood up respectfully and walked over to him. “Sort of looks like Mayakovsky. The Professor liked Mayakovsky and often quoted him both in and outside the lecture hall . . .”

Skinhead came right up to him and unexpectedly placed his hand on the Professor’s shoulder, amazing him with this breach of formality. Skinhead spoke first.

“Professor, I ask you not to worry. And for the time being do not ask any questions. The situation you are in is highly unusual, and you will be required to spend a certain amount of time here. Then everything will be explained to you . . .”

The Professor nodded guardedly. He was beginning to surmise what had happened to him . . . Of course, only the all-powerful services could do this: put a person to sleep, move him somewhere, and then do what they wanted with him . . . Of course, this was not 1937, but they were very powerful: the Professor knew this firsthand. He gazed intently at Skinhead. Who was this Skinhead guy anyway?

Skinhead was dressed in a white cotton shirt with a button at the collar . . . He was wearing a military shirt . . . Military underwear . . . Not quite clarity, but something was beginning to come together . . .

And the Professor was gladdened by his own powers of observation . . .