The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

8

ONLY NOW THAT THE JUDEAN WAS NO LONGER AROUND did Skinhead begin to understand how many various responsibilities had fallen to him. At first it had seemed to him that his chief concern was Manikin with its constant seizures. But gradually it emerged that in that gray crowd there were no supernumeraries; each character had his or her own storyline. In fact, less a storyline than a task formulated in keeping with the famous fairy-tale maxim: “Go thither—unknown whither; and fetch that—unknown what . . .” It appeared that they all were welded to some task, like prisoners to a ball and chain, and that they could not leave this place until they fulfilled it. He also was getting the impression, however, that not all of them had even an inkling of what exactly the stage director of this entire production wanted from them. Even Skinhead himself did not know for sure why he was here.

Essentially, to the extent he could, he continued to do here what he had done all his life at the institute, the clinic, and the hospitals . . . Something not quite a physician’s or a pedagogue’s role . . . An auxiliary role . . . A midwife’s . . .

When he had first seen the Newling here, she had been so familiar, with all the precious features of her face and her figure, with all her gestures, that he had realized immediately that she was separated from him by some impenetrable and insurmountable wall. She did not recognize him. His first and most urgent desire had been to take her by the hand, to stroke her hair and her face . . . But the Judean had warned him back then: “Careful. What we have here is a case of total amnesia. Let her get used to you, then approach her . . .”

“Will this ever pass?” Skinhead had asked, suppressing the desire to press her immediately to his body, to run his fingers from her neck to the crown of her head, to pull all those hairpins out so that her long chestnut hair would fall about her shoulders . . . This was his only woman, the one predestined for him, and he was prepared to start anew, to approach her as any man first approaches a woman he likes but has not been introduced to yet.

“Perhaps. In part . . . You can tell someone took care that you would recognize her, but that she would not recognize you . . . It seems to me,” he concluded softly, “that in this case it’s better not to resist, but to be accepting . . . To meet her on her own terms, so to speak . . .”

Since that time Skinhead had tried not to let the Newling out of his sight, and whenever a question or alarm appeared in her eyes, he turned up alongside her. Her presence, incidentally, created no particular difficulties for him; just the sore spot in his heart, that old scar, throbbed . . .

He had difficulties with the others. There were those two women, beyond doubt a couple—a rather comical one, owing to the enormous difference in their sizes, one petite with a large curly head and short arms and legs, and the other tall, long-legged, with a bent, rounded spine and a tiny head that sat snakelike on her long neck—who on closer examination turned out not to be girlfriends at all, but each other’s captives. A small chain, like that on a bicycle, connected the tall one’s right leg to the little one’s left leg. It encircled their ankles in a figure eight. Skinhead saw that the chain’s connecting clasp had been replaced by a shining ball of either glass or metal. When they walked, they inflicted pain on each other with each step, and when they sat down at rest stops, instead of the respite they might enjoy by not moving, they began slowly pulling at the ball, each movement causing the chain to dig deeper into their wounds . . .

“They’re trying to divvy something up and can’t do it,” Skinhead figured out at a certain moment.

Shortly after, he discovered what could provide each of them some relief from their mutual torture: when he placed his huge hands, slightly inclined toward each other on their heads, they would calm down. Before his eyes their wounds stopped bleeding, dried up, and scabbed over . . .

The initial sense of disorientation Skinhead experienced after the Judean left soon passed. His lifelong assistant—what he called either his intravision or simply intuition—now awakened in him not at those moments when he was examining patients or performing operations, but in those situations when Skinhead experienced uncertainty or perplexity.

After one of their rest stops, when Skinhead waved his hand over the flame and turned off the lighter glued firmly to his palm, which made the fire lull, the heat ceased to be emitted, and only its remnant continued to warm his palm for quite some time, at which point he sensed clearly which direction they needed to go. What used to show him those “inner pictures” now suggested which direction to move in . . . They set off in their usual order: single, maximum double file—Longhair with his case, Fat Lady with her enormous stomach, and Tiny and Longlegs with their chain . . . Skinhead had prepared himself for a long trek, but rather quickly a dark structure resembling an outbuilding came into sight in the distance. Closer up, they discovered that it was not a structure at all, but a section of forest densely bound with leafless branches. Like a nursery. Strange low-standing trees. Their trunks and branches were almost identical in girth, grayish brown, without the slightest hint of leaves. From a short distance it seemed as if the branches moved slightly. There was something invidious about their movement.

“Let’s go closer,” said Skinhead, and all of them, like children, obediently moved closer. The branches really were moving. They were covered over entirely with strange creatures the size of large rats, with old, completely hairless, loose, baggy, wrinkled skin and just as gray-brown as the trunks of the trees. They gnawed at the bark hungrily, ravenously, emitting an almost machinelike buzz.

Skinhead took one of these creatures by the scruff of its neck and pulled it off the trunk. It grumbled with discontent: “Let me go, let me go . . .” He straightened out the fat but scrawny little animal, and his fellow travelers saw that this repellent creature was a human being. Its tiny legs and arms were atrophied, its head was oversized like an embryo’s with barely perceptible slits for closed eyes, its nose undeveloped, and its mouth large and protruding, with bright-white rodentlike teeth. The muscles around its mouth automatically tensed, and its jaws continued to make their gnawing movement.

Skinhead petted the humanoid rodent and placed it back on the branch he had just removed it from.

“My Lord, who is that?” asked Newling in horror.

“The thirsty seeking to be filled,” Skinhead said derisively, then hesitated immediately: What am I doing? Why am I teasing her again? What inveterate madness . . .

Some wall cracked or curtain tore, and a huge piece of former knowledge surfaced in her memory: her parents, her grandmother, their house in Trekhprudny Lane, the commune in Troparevo . . . Lev Tolstoy and the Gospel, not the Gospel of Tolstoy, but the original one that she had received from her grandmother . . . Immediately she choked on his derisive tone: she recognized the words from the Gospels that he had obviously and deliberately distorted: “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled . . .”

“No, no, I am not making a mockery. I’m sorry. That’s just my way . . . I only wanted to say that that is their truth . . . All passion ultimately dies, does it not?” he continued, but her heart beat painfully from his words. “Just not everyone manages to find peace in the time allotted.”

He bent over and picked up off the ground a startled creature that had just fallen off a tree trunk. Now it was not a human rodent, but resembled more a human worm. The creature was motionless, its teeth had disappeared, and its mouth had acquired a size proportional to its head, while its tiny face seemed completely childlike.

“That’s it. It’s been filled. Now it most resembles a five-month-old human embryo.”

The Professor glanced over the Newling’s shoulder. Something terrifying came into his head, and he asked hoarsely: “Is it dead?”

“What are you saying! There is no death, Professor. And this one, I think, is considerably closer to the beginning than to the end,” Skinhead answered mysteriously.

At this point the Professor exploded: “I hate riddles! I demand a clear and concise answer to the question of what is going on here. If you consider it obligatory to show me all these so-called miracles, then could you at least explain your parables and allegories so that they make some sense . . . ?”

“What parables!” Skinhead laughed sincerely. “You and I haven’t even got to the alphabet yet!”

“Mind you, I’m going to complain! I have important connections in the most serious of organizations too!” the Professor chirred, and Skinhead seemed to retreat at his shouting and started to reason with him.

“Do pardon me. I in no way wanted to offend you or anything like that . . . You and I can discuss all this, just not right now. A little bit later. Now’s not the time. It’s not appropriate . . .”

The Professor calmed down: that it was not appropriate was something he could understand; it sounded convincing. And it was also pleasing that at the mention of his connections Skinhead had changed his tone of voice . . .

The beautiful woman stood alongside, tears flowing down her cheeks. It was apparent to the Professor that Skinhead had his eyes set on her.

“The poor, poor things,” she whispered. And unexpectedly quickly she asked Skinhead: “Is the tree bitter?”

He looked at her and responded very quietly, but the Professor heard it all down to the last word.

“Bitter? Of course, it’s bitter . . .” He motioned with his hand that it was all right to keep going in the indicated direction.