The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

2

THE LATE SLUGGISH SUMMER DREW TO ITS END WITH AN August heat wave. Tanya had been living her strange nocturnal life for two months and was increasingly more drawn into it. The geography of her lonely walks expanded. She traipsed the lanes of old Moscow and developed a particular fondness for the Zamoskvorechye region with its stocky merchant houses, enclosed gardens, and an unexpected chain of ancient trees that stood like guards before nests of gentle people demolished long ago. She often strolled along Patriarch Ponds, exploring the baffling confusion of its connected courtyards. She liked to go by way of Trekhprudny Lane and the Volotsky buildings that her great-grandfather had built, approaching from the side of the Shekhtel building, then turning left and ending her tour at the ponds, just before dawn, dozing a bit on her favorite park bench on the side facing Bolshoy Patriarshy Lane.

The night people there, with whom she occasionally struck up conversations, were entirely unlike ordinary day people who filled the streets when it was light out. Morosely sobering drunks, unlucky prostitutes, the twelve-year-old boy who had run away from home, homeless couples who for the sake of their refugeless lovemaking nested in entranceways with wide windowsills and unlocked attics . . . Once, on the uppermost landing of a staircase that led to a locked door onto a roof she stumbled on a sleeping man and was horrified: was he dead . . . ?

The other thing about night people was that they came in shifts depending on the hour: before one in the morning, you could still encounter a lot of decent couples on their way home. In fact, these were not night people, but day people simply slightly delayed. After one, they were replaced by loners, inebriated for the most part. They were not dangerous, although sometimes they accosted her. They would ask for something: a cigarette, matches, a two-kopeck coin for the phone booth; or offer something: to have a drink, to make love . . . She sometimes had conversations with these inebriated loners . . . The most dangerous people, it seemed to Tanya, came out between three and four thirty. In any case, her most unpleasant meetings occurred at that particular time.

She spat out like a plum pit all her former knowledge from school and from books. What interested her now was a different kind of experience, the kind that privileged unexpected maneuvers and nimble moves: she delighted every time she found a new courtyard that connected two dead-end lanes or a building with entrances at both sides—the façade side and the servants’ entrance side. She knew Moscow’s last water pump, forgotten by the waterworks’ authorities and still functioning in the area of the former Bozhedomka, and she discovered an apartment in a half-basement—a thieves’ den?—where very criminal-looking types gathered at night. The miles she trekked at night were paved with reflection: until recently, life had seemed to her an even uphill journey, a gradual ascent, the goal of which was a scientific accomplishment combined with merited success and even, perhaps, fame. But now instead of this heroic picture she saw a trap, and science seemed as much an idol as that wretched imposed socialism which of late radio announcers had started to pronounce as “socialeezism,” trucking up to the barely literate Khrushchev, who could hardly put two words together . . . When she had been little, the world had naturally divided itself into “grown-ups” and “children,” “good people” and “bad people.” Now she had discovered a new dimension: “the obedient” and “the disobedient.” This was not about children, but about adults—intelligent, enlightened, and talented adults . . . Tanya decisively and happily crossed over to the second category. True, she was still not quite clear where her father stood: he did not fit in either category. He seemed to be socially useful, that is, obedient, but he always acted of his own accord, and forcing him to accept someone else’s opinion or to submit was impossible . . .

Once in a dead-end courtyard in Sredne-Kislovsky Lane Tanya found a stern old man sitting very erect on a park bench, his back not touching the rolling back of the bench, his wooden hands leaning on a lordly wooden walking stick with a sturdy polished handle. Tanya sat down on the edge of the bench. Without turning his large head, which was illuminated at an angle by the weak streetlight, he said to her in a deep voice: “Tanya, I think it’s time to put dinner on the table.”

“How do you know who I am?” she wondered, at first not realizing it was pure coincidence.

“I’m telling you again: it’s time to eat dinner.”

“Where do you live?” Tanya asked.

The old man seemed a bit perplexed, then worried, then answered not entirely confidently.

“I live . . . here.”

“Where here?” Tanya asked again, this time realizing that the old man had lost his memory.

“In the town of Gadyach, in the Poltava guberniya . . .” He answered with dignity.

“What is your name?”

“It’s time to serve dinner.” He shifted on the bench, attempting to raise himself from its depths, and leaning on his cane. “It’s time to eat dinner.” He sank back down, unable to liberate his rather unwieldy body.

Dawn was approaching. Tanya helped him free himself from the deep bench that was as awkward as a wooden hammock and said, “Let’s go. It really is time for dinner. Tanya’s waiting for you with dinner.”

She led him off to a precinct station where they might help him find the cunning Tanya who had not put dinner on the table on time. At the precinct station, as she turned the majestic old man over to the petty powers-that-be, Tanya noticed the writing in white paint along the length of the cane: “Pechatnikov Lane, House 7, Apartment 2. Lepko, Alexander Ivanovich.”

“Good-bye, Alexander Ivanovich.” Tanya bid him farewell, regretting that she had not noticed earlier the calling card written along the stick.

“The penultimate stage of freedom.” Earlier such a thought would not have occurred to her.

When she left the precinct station, dawn was already breaking. The night people had taken cover, while the day people had not yet emerged from their lairs. Tanya was in a wonderful mood, and she decided that after getting some sleep she would go to the laboratory around one in the afternoon, when all the lab assistants got together in the prep room for tea, and that she would buy a cake and some candy as a way of celebrating her liberation . . .

Her tea party did not go as planned. Of the six lab assistants three were on vacation, one was ill, and the remaining two were precisely the least pleasant—the elderly Tasya Kukharikova and thieving Galya Avdiushkina. They each ate two pieces of cake and put the rest in the refrigerator. There was no one in the laboratory: some people were on vacation, some at a conference, and others on their research day in the library. MarLena Sergeevna also was away.

Tanya dropped into her former room and with no regrets or sentimentality whatsoever recollected that first day when her father had brought her here. Everything stood in its former place: the microscopes, the microtomes, the torsion scales, the batteries of glass bottles of alcohol and xylol secured with slightly bent metal lids. What had once seemed to her the temple of science now looked poor and dilapidated. In the molecular biology building at the university they had been using an electron microscope for a long time already, they had modern equipment—not the stuff in this museum of the history of science, the nineteenth-century room. She wanted to have nothing to do with any of this anymore. Only the smell—the heavy laboratory smell of alcohol and formaldehyde mixed with vivarium and chloroform—remained, after all, a bit thrilling.

Tanya pulled out the drawer of her desk and gathered her personal belongings: a long wooden cigarette holder, a compact for face powder, a typed collection of Mandelstam’s verses, and—who knows for what purpose—her notebook . . . She tossed it all in her bag and headed for Gansovsky’s office. She knocked on the antiquated door with its opaque glass inserts. She entered. Gansovsky—tanned, his hair freshly dyed brown, in his white coat—was sitting at his enormous desk, reading a journal.

“Come in, come in.”

The only chair for visitors held a mountain of books. He indicated to Tanya that she sit on the folding wooden library stepladder. The bookcases ran to the very ceiling and could not be reached from the floor. In its folded state the staircase resembled a high chair.

“Take a seat.”

Tanya plopped herself on the tiny upper platform, which turned out to be rather uncomfortable. Her legs did not reach the floor, so she rested them on the lower rung. Her orange skirt, which was very short, as dictated by the latest scandalous fashion, gathered almost at the level of her panties, and she noticed the tenacious male gaze with which the old academician surveyed her bare legs. Gansovsky removed his gold eyeglasses, neatly folded them temple to temple, and looked at Tanya most empathetically.

“Well, Tatiana Pavlovna, I hear you’re planning on leaving us.”

“Yes, I’ve already resigned, Edmund Algidasovich.” Tanya was the only laboratory assistant capable of properly pronouncing his intricate name, the product of a Polish-Lithuanian and, rumor had it, Jewish mix.

“Aren’t you being a bit hasty, Tatiana Pavlovna?”

He stood up, and Tanya’s position atop the stepladder became even more ridiculous. The professor stood right in front of her, and she found herself pinned in a corner between the bookcase and the chair piled with books. Tanya turned her legs so as not to touch his hip.

“You made such a good start at your work. I have to admit that I had already decided to take you on and to give you a research topic. It’s very important for a person to begin their research career early. Next year you could publish your first scientific article already . . .”

Tanya did not understand very well what he was saying insofar as she was distracted by the feel of his cool lab coat against her bare leg and the unpleasant rustling of his hand in his pocket, visible through the cloth of the coat.

“You’ve mastered the technique of experimental hydrocephaly,” he continued. “MarLena Sergeevna told me that she could trust you with any stage of the work. I just don’t understand why you want to leave.”

Now he gripped the side of the stepladder with one hand, while the second accidentally, but with absolute assuredness, lay on her hip. Like any well-brought-up person trained not to notice an interlocutor’s faux pas, Tanya pretended not to notice.

“You have three years of classes left, and in that time you could succeed not just in writing a course paper and your diploma thesis, but half your dissertation.”

He looked her in the eye: his expression was absolutely matter-of-fact and even stern. He took his hand off her hip and stuck it between the buttons of his lab coat, beneath his belt, and rummaged about. Tanya followed his manipulations out of the corner of her eye.

“There is this substance called auxin.” His heavy hand went for her tightly closed knees, then slid up her leg.

Tanya was ready to faint. Not because his hand had firmly and precisely penetrated under her panties and the pads of his closely manicured fingers were pressed against a place never before touched by a foreign object, except soap, but because his stern and professional demeanor stood right before her and his powerful voice hypnotized her with its multivalent “auxin,” which had no relation whatsoever to what was taking place at the moment.

“This growth hormone wonderfully stimulates capillary growth; the introduction of, let’s say, five milliliters increases the number of developing capillaries by one hundred to one hundred twenty percent . . .”

He undid the lower button of his lab coat, and Tanya, completely petrified and incapable of turning her head away, saw with her peripheral vision the swarthy pink bulb with the longitudinal slit in the middle that he held in his broad freckled hand. He had already positioned himself between her spread knees, preparing to enter her with one hand, while moving Tanya closer with the other, pressing on the back of her waist . . . Tanya’s lockjaw ended the moment he stopped talking about auxin and said equally authoritatively and matter-of-factly: “Spread your legs a little wider and throw your shoulders back.”

Tanya shoved him in the chest.

“Sit still!” he bellowed, but she had already jumped from the stepladder and run for the door, grabbing it by the round knob that was exactly like his bulb. The door would not budge.

“The pig, he locked it!” Tanya thought, and bashed her fist with all her strength against the glass insert. The glass flew out with a clang, but the door still did not open.

“Idiot,” he said calmly. “Turn the handle.”

He closed his lab coat over the flash of his bare chest and academician’s bulb in the unfastened fly of his light-colored slacks . . .

Tanya flew out of the institute like a cork out of a bottle and ran as fast as she could from the temple of science with all its nastiness, filth, and sleaze.

THE YAUZA WAS CONSOLING, ESPECIALLY IF YOU DID NOT look at the factory buildings along the bank, which almost since the time of Peter the Great had taken their water from the river and dumped their sewage back . . . The potters, tanners, the first industrialists . . . But the river remained untainted, alive . . .

Tanya ascended the hunchbacked bridge that hung over the river and peered into the morosely green water.

Her slashed hand hurt. The bleeding had already stopped, but the bandages had managed to soak through. At the drugstore she had chanced on a kind pharmacist. Without saying a word, the woman had taken a sterile pad and some gauze and tied a very professional bandage. She bound Tanya’s middle and ring fingers with surgical tape. The deepest cut was between the fingers in exactly the same place as her mother’s scar from the fishhook—wasn’t that weird?

Tanya had no money on her—she had left her bag in Gansovsky’s office, hanging on the back of the chair piled up with medical books that Tanya would never read in this lifetime. A good idea would be for her father to pick up her bag from Gansovsky. Lay it out just like that: Gansovsky tried to screw me, but I got away. And ask him what he thought about proprieties and all that bunk he so respected. Actually, there was no way she could say anything to him. Though he was a well-mannered person when it came to forks and knives, “thank you,” and “good-bye,” if she told him this story, he would simply murder Gansovsky. No, not murder. Beat the hell out of him. Make hamburger out of him. Tanya laughed, picturing to herself how her father would trap Gansovsky in the same corner where Tanya had sat on that stupid stepladder, and pummel his dyed head with his heavy fists.

“Poor Liza!” she said aloud, peering for the last time at the Yauza’s water. “No drowning for us.”

She no longer trembled from excitement, and she had the urge to tell someone right away about her adventure. But there was no one to tell. She, it goes without saying, had tons of girlfriends, but her closest friend, with whom she had studied in the same class, had married immediately after graduation, quickly gave birth, and was now sitting at their dacha with her baby. Tanya did not know the address of the dacha. Two of the nicest girls in her year at the university had set off for the Caucasus mountain region for vacation. Toma in this case was out of the question. Besides, she was not Tanya’s friend. Discussing this adventure with the young men who flocked around Tanya by the dozen would be uninteresting, and impossible. In addition, for all the sleaziness of what had happened, the whole business madly excited her. That bulb had made an impression . . .

“Seems I’ve fallen behind . . . That old coot is vile, but he got to me somehow . . . It’s about time . . . That’s nonsense: I don’t like anyone, and I certainly don’t love anyone . . . All my girlfriends already have lovers . . . I could use some advice from a knowledgeable older woman, but there aren’t any around . . .”

Without noticing, she had turned off the embankment onto a tidy street completely atypical for Moscow, planted with old lindens at regular intervals. There were military hospitals, antiquated and semiantiquated yellow buildings, maybe barracks or dormitories. The street was called Hospital Rampart. This was Lefortovo, and Tanya was here for the first time in her life.

Since morning she had had nothing to eat, but she did not want to go home. All her money was in her bag.

“It’s much better to have no money at all than not enough,” the thought suddenly occurred to her. It was a strange awakening: whatever else there hadn’t been, she had always had money. She had her own salary, and there was the tin in the kitchen from which anyone could take however much they needed. (Vasilisa was constantly amazed how quickly the money disappeared and had attempted to organize their spending.) For the first time in her life Tanya had not a kopeck, which she found amusing and gay. She knew perfectly well how to get home without paying by sneaking on board trolleybuses and trams, or she could simply take a taxi and pay the fare at home . . .

She also, however, was without keys: they too were back in her bag. That new skirt was nice in all other respects—Italian-made, a rusty orange color, with studded snaps, but it had no pockets. I will never buy anything without pockets again . . . She also enjoyed being hungry today: it made her feel light and free . . . Wait, wait, something important had finally come to her, about freedom. What, for example, had made her decide that she wanted to study biology? As a child, she used to draw, and people had praised her; then she took up music, and people had praised her. She started reading her father’s books, and they praised her again. That’s what she wanted really—praise . . . She tried, and she studied, and she pored over her notebooks so that her father would praise her. She’d been bought on praise, the good girl . . . Enough! Over! From now on my actions will no longer depend on whether they please my father, my mother, Vasilisa, anyone. Only me. I am my own judge. Freedom from the opinion of others. What if I asked Dad if Gansovsky’s opinion means anything to him? Of course, it does. They all want to be liked by each other. That is, not all, but by everybody. Circles. Castes. Closed societies . . . Rat-killers. Obedient. We, intelligent human beings . . . What banality . . . Not for me . . .

It never entered her head that the entire student population at the time, in the 1960s, in Paris and London, New York and Rome, all thought approximately the same thing. But she had arrived at this on her own, without anyone’s suggestions or cheat sheets. Independently . . .

She walked along the high cemetery fence behind which stood tall grave markers under tall trees . . . She stopped at the gate: VVEDENSKOE CEMETERY. Right. This was the former German Cemetery where all the Kukotskys lay buried, Tanya surmised, and entered.

The path crossed the cemetery perpendicularly, from one gate to the other, with graves and grave markers extending in all directions. Antiquated ones, with German Gothic inscriptions, and ones that were just old, without Latin script. Chapels, marble angels, plaster vases, crosses and stars, stars and crosses . . . Amazingly, in all her twenty years Tanya had never been to a cemetery. She had never once been to a funeral, unless you counted Stalin’s. She had been in a crematorium once or twice, but had not really understood what went on there. But here it was beautiful and sad—neglect lent the place charm. She walked through the old part of the cemetery, studying the inscriptions on the monuments: the Kukotskys had to be here somewhere. But she encountered none of them.

She found herself once again at the fence, this time at the other end of the cemetery. Two men sat near a newly excavated grave. There was a pile of shoveled earth on one side, and the two workmen sat in the low bushes of the grave site to the other side. Their simple fare was spread out in front of them on a newspaper: a round of stone-ground bread, a pale piece of sausage, and some yellowed green onion. The bottle of vodka was propped against two bricks for stability.

One of the workers was elderly and wore a cap; the other was younger and bald, and wore a cap folded from newspaper. Neither of them looked at Tanya. The freedom that had fallen to her today prodded her to ask them for some bread.

Barely looking at her, the elderly one grumbled: “Go ahead.”

The one who was younger made a fuss: “What about earning it?”

“I cut my hand.” Tanya trustingly raised her palm with the bandage coated from below and the side with darkened blood.

“I wasn’t talking about with your hand,” the young man retorted.

“Take it and get lost.” The old man looked with a disapproving eye at both Tanya and his partner, and even at the opened bottle.

But the younger one would not let up.

“Pour you some, maybe?”

“No, thank you.” She took a large hunk of bread and small piece of sausage, bit off a piece, and spoke as she chewed.

“My grandfather is buried here. Kukotsky’s the name. I can’t find the plot.”

“Go to the office, they’ll tell you,” the elderly one said more respectfully than earlier. The girl might be a prostitute, but she was one of theirs, a client . . .

Thanking them, Tanya left, leaving the two of them with their bottle.

“You amaze me, Senka,” the old man said thoughtfully. “You’re supposed to be married, and you’ve got a decent woman, and a kid. What do you need that stick for? Phoo!”

Senka snorted. “Uncle Fedya, what’s so bad about it? I would have screwed her right here on this grave. What’s so bad?”

Tanya walked past the office. The path led her out through the other gate onto a ramshackle street toward a dried-up pond or foundation pit overshadowed by a sprawling center of so-called culture further in the direction of the tram lines. The tram was a good mode of public transportation suitable for freeloaders. It was already turning dark, but something was not right with the time: the day was turning out to be too long. She looked at her watch, a present from her father, and it showed two thirty. It had stopped.

A completely empty tram, the No. 50, approached. She did not have time to see where it went. Most likely, to some metro station. The tram was long in transporting her alone; then an elderly couple got on. They crossed the Yauza. The last stop turned out to be the Baumanskaya metro station. It was nearly ten, but she didn’t feel like going home . . . Tanya circled the large cathedral and found herself on Olkhovskaya Street. The courtyards on this street of almost entirely one-story buildings were good dirt yards, with gardens and benches, children’s sandboxes, and swings. There were no new buildings, just old lower-middle-class dwellings. Only one of them had five stories, a Moscow moderne building from the early 1900s. Tanya felt tired, walked into the first courtyard, and saw—what a gift!—a gazebo. Inside the gazebo there was a crude table and two benches set into the dirt. A place for playing dominos.

Tanya lay down on one of the narrow benches and turned her head in order to see a piece of the sky thick with stars. From somewhere came the sound of radio music mixed with the sounds of a proletarian argument.

“I am a very, very free person,” Tanya said to herself, admiring the phrase, and fell asleep without noticing. She woke up from the cold. There was no telling how long she had slept. Not long, it seemed. In the meantime, the moon had come out, filling everything with its artificial light. She still had no desire to go home, but it was time . . . On the earthen parapet of a completely rural-looking house in the depths of the courtyard sat a boy. With concentrated attention he was conjuring over his wrist.

Tanya walked up closer. He heard her steps, turned around, and froze, grasping the wrist of his left hand with his right hand.

“Beat it,” the boy said rudely.

Tanya just stood there without moving. Half of a razor blade shone in the strong light of the moon. Understanding, she said to him: “That’s not going to work.”

“Why not?” He raised his head, and she saw a pale face that seemed tear-stained, with a fresh black-and-blue mark swelling under one eye.

“You need to do it in the bathtub, in warm water . . . ,” she said, sympathizing. “It won’t work otherwise.”

“How do you know?” the boy asked glumly.

“I’m a vein specialist. I spent two years studying veins. That’s going to drip for a bit and stop. You’re better off jumping from the roof—Bam! And it’s over.”

“Not for me!” The boy smirked. “I need a machine. Understand, I don’t have a machine. But if I cut it wider, I can stick a vial inside . . . If you’re such a specialist, maybe you have a machine on you?”

Now Tanya did not understand him: “What kind of machine?”

“A syringe, idiot!” he explained.

“Oh, a syringe. I have one at home.” Wonder of wonders, she had lived her whole life being so smart, but today had spent the whole day playing the idiot . . .

“You live far away?” The boy lit up with interest.

“Far away.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I’m out for a walk. I like to walk around at this time of night.” She sat down alongside him and noticed that he was older than he had at first seemed. “Let’s go for a walk. I like to look inside windows . . .”

She pulled him by the sleeve of his checkered shirt, and he obeyed. He wrapped the razor blade in a piece of paper, stuck it in the pocket of his shirt, and hurried after her. She led him out into the street, then turned confidently into a passageway between two houses that led to a barely visible walkway toward an illuminated window. A dirty lightbulb streaked with whitewash hung naked on its cord. A chair stood on a table, and there were sawhorses as well. The room was being remodeled. Obviously, they had forgotten to turn off the light. The window was open. The first floor.

“Let’s crawl in,” Tanya proposed.

“No, I’ve already done time for a shop. That’s enough for me.” The boy scurried ahead. “What if we go to your place?”

“I lost my keys . . . And, in general . . .” Tanya was at a loss. Everything was a bit topsy-turvy.

“All right, let’s go,” the guy proposed magnanimously, and they set off to wander further.

They walked with their arms around each other, then, in some courtyard, they kissed, then they wandered about a bit longer, and then it turned out that they were standing in a large entranceway, pressing against each other with their arms and their hollow stomachs and hands that were sticky from the little bit of blood that had managed to flow through the tiny cut across his vein.

They went up to the last floor of the very same Moscow moderne building that Tanya had noticed at the beginning of her journey along Olkhovskaya Street. A light burned on the fourth floor, but beyond that lay mysterious darkness. A story above the last floor, near a padlocked entrance to the attic, there was a small semicircular window with flowing casements that cast curvilinear shadows in the strange light. They kissed a bit longer, standing at the wide windowsill. Then she sat down on the windowsill and did everything that Gansovsky had wanted of her.

“Gansovsky ordered that stepladder especially for that kind of stuff!” Tanya guessed as the boy pulled her onto himself.

With neither a thrill nor inspiration she bid farewell to her senseless virginity, imparting absolutely no significance to the event whatsoever. The boy accepted this unexpected gift in total bewilderment.

“You still got your cherry? You’re my first. And do you know how many broads I’ve had?”

Tanya laughed at his street slang and shook her bandaged hand.

“What a bloody day I’ve had today . . . And you too . . .”

Then he sat down alongside her on the windowsill. Though wide, the windowsill was too short for them to lie down on.

Ten minutes later he was telling her about some girl named Natasha who had played with him for two years—because all broads are bitches—and about his deferral—he was going to join up during the fall draft as a border guard—and some other gibberish about real men . . . Tanya had no interest in this whatsoever. She jumped off the windowsill and waved to the little chump.

“I’m out of here!”

And she flew down the stairs, clicking distinctly with the heels of her flats.

By the time he slowly figured out what had happened, she was already two floors down.

“Where are you going?” he shouted after her.

“Home!” she replied, without slowing down.

“Wait! Wait!” he shouted, dashing after her. But she was already out of sight.