The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

16

SHE HAD REALLY DREAMED IT. A VERY SIMPLE DREAM—water. It splashed at her ankles, and then rose higher. At first the water rose slowly, then it began to whip from the side and from above, and she was no longer standing on the bottom, but suspended. The water kept coming, poured over her head, filled her nose and mouth, and made breathing difficult. Impossible.

“Now I’ll drown,” she realized, when she was over her head in water. She held her breath, then slowly released the last remains of warm air through her nose and saw a cluster of bubbles float upward. “How stupid it is to drown, when everything has ended so well . . .”

When holding her breath was no longer possible, she opened her mouth and allowed the water to enter her. But either the water was not really water, or she was not quite herself, because nothing terrible happened; she didn’t choke, although at first she sensed a cool stream filling her throat and lungs.

She dove and swam off. The water penetrated her body, and this was just as natural as if it were air. Floating islands of seaweed and schools of small varicolored fish engulfed her. The layers of water overhead were pale, the color of the northern sky; below—blue dark as ink, with no bottom to be seen. But, when her eyes accustomed themselves, she was able to make out the subtle twinkle of stars. Warmer streams mixed with cold ones, creating a sliding movement, like that of the wind.

Her body did what she wanted it to, but she could not remember having been taught to swim. It seemed that she had not known how to swim before. She pulled her arms above her head, cupped her fingers together, quickly rose to the top, and came up for air. That’s when she woke up.

She exhaled: a small amount of water ran from her nostrils and mouth. A slippery garland of seaweed had tangled itself around her knee. Her hair dripped. Using both hands, as if wringing linen, she squeezed the water out of her hair and walked away from the shrubbery to a sunny place. Her hair dried quickly in the sun, but immediately began to curl above her forehead and along her temples, which she did not like. Straightening out the locks of hair, she pulled them between her fingers, as if through a giant comb.

“Elena.” She heard her own name and turned around. Before her stood her husband, Pavel, neither young nor old, but exactly as he had been when she had met him—forty-three years old.

“Pashenka, finally,” and she pressed her face into the most familiar part of his body, where his clavicles came together.

He sensed how the outlines of her moist, thin body corresponded with precise detail to the breach inside him, closing the lifelong wound that he had borne within him since birth, pained and suffering from melancholy and dissatisfaction without even realizing what hole they resided in.

Elena with all her being wanted only to hide herself entirely inside him, to enter him forever, to give him her defective memory and pale “I,” secure in nothing and adrift in splintered dreams and constantly losing its uncertain bounds.

It was not he entering her like a spouse, filling that narrow aperture of hers that led to nowhere; it was she entering and filling his hollow core, the center he himself had been unaware he had and had suddenly discovered within himself.

“Soul of my soul,” he whispered into the damp curls above her ear as he pressed her tightly to himself.

At the place where their skin met she melted with happiness. This was the attainment of the unattainable that brought people who love one another together in conjugal embraces, over and over again, for years and decades, in their unconscious aspiration to achieve liberation from physical dependency. But poor human copulation ends in inevitable orgasm, beyond which there’s no greater corporeal proximity. Because the bounds are set by bodies themselves . . .

Between them the impossible was taking place. Of what remained within the confines of human comprehension there was still the sensation of their bodies—of one’s own and another’s—although what in earthly existence was known as interpenetration in this other existence expanded beyond all horizons. In this newly formed oneness, this mutual ascent into the orbit of a different world, they discovered a new stereoscopy, an ability to see many things at once and to think many thoughts simultaneously. All these pictures, thoughts, and sensations appeared to them now in a perspective that made Elena simply smile at her former fear of being lost, of losing herself in spaces stretched between unknown systems of coordinates, and of losing the axis she once really had lost—the axis of time . . .

A final surge of intravision showed that the two arciform branches of her fallopian tubes lay where they were supposed to be, the uterus that had been removed in 1943 was in its former place, and not a trace remained of the scar across her belly.

But that does not mean that what had been was no longer, they—man and woman—guessed. It means that everything—thoughts and feelings, bodies and souls—can be transformed. Even those tiny—nonentities, just about—transparent projections of bodies that had failed to transpire, whose journey on earth had been interrupted by the grim circumstances of disfigured, bloody life . . .

When they had settled into each other, free and happy, soul to soul, hand in hand, letter to letter, it turned out that between them there was a Third. The woman recognized him immediately. The man—an instant later.

“Was it You?” he asked.

“I,” came the answer.

“Merciful God, what an idiot I was . . .” the man moaned.

“It’s nothing to fear.” A voice familiar to him since youth calmed him.

There was nothing to fear . . .