The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

6

TWO YEARS HAD PASSED SINCE TANYA HAD LEFT HOME, living in various places, with new friends—in the studio of an artist acquaintance on Shabolovskaya Street, in a winterized dacha of someone’s parents near Zvenigorod, or in caretaker quarters her janitor-caretaker girlfriend inhabited on Molchanovka Street . . .

The last six months a jeweler friend, Nanny Goat Vika—an enormous, unattractive woman with an aristocratic surname and commoner’s manners—had sheltered her. She was a cool woman, and Tanya lived with her as sort of an apprentice. As befits an apprentice, she did the housework and ran errands. Nanny Goat’s studio was in a half-basement on Vorovskogo Street, and her apartment in a new construction area. Her family of old Muscovites of God knows how many generations had been resettled from Znamenka Street to the Cheryomushki district, but Vika, after moving her mother, two grandmothers, and son, just could not tear herself away from her old neighborhood, and went home to the new apartment only to sleep, and that not every night. Tanya settled herself in a corner room the size of a closet formerly heaped full of pieces of expensive old furniture rescued from local trash bins.

Nanny Goat had hands of steel, a heart of gold, and the mad sensibilities of a truth-seeker. Ages ago she had graduated from radio-engineering trade school, where she had learned how to dexterously manipulate a soldering iron to just the right place on a circuit board. After having casually repaired a few antique rings and earrings for some elderly acquaintances on the Arbat, friends of her two grandmothers, she turned this otherwise unexciting skill into a new profession. She had a ton of work: fix this, create a setting for a stone, or make some simple earrings . . . After a while she discovered that repairs and resettings demanded highly developed intuition and more experience than creating new pieces. She went to study with a famous jeweler, an artist, and owing to a confluence of various strange circumstances, including those related to housing, married him. A few years later he left her, pregnant, but with compensation: his workshop. Along with the studio Nanny Goat inherited his marvelous bohemian lifestyle, which included the drinking, and the parties, and the interesting people from all sectors of society: prim little customers, various fans of just hanging out, self-declared musicians, poets, and philosophers who had strayed from the path of Marxist-Leninism, simply pleasant do-nothings, and, finally, the night people Tanya had observed during the adventures of her first year of freedom—estranged, belonging to no one, like peculiar animals that lived only at night and disappeared to no one knew where during the day. Tanya, however, now knew where they spent the daytime, which was so dangerous for them: in shelters like Vika’s studio . . . Tanya came to love the visitors to Vika’s studio all at once, in a bunch, almost without making distinctions among them and without studying their faces especially, sensing acutely how different they were from the people she had met at the university and in the laboratory, in stores, and at the conservatory. She learned to distinguish in a crowd those who might show up at Vika’s studio.

“Our kind of people,” Vika would say with a grin, and no more explanations on the subject were necessary. What precisely did that possessive pronoun entail? Neither social origins nor national identity, neither profession nor level of education, but something elusory connected in part, but not only, with an aversion to Soviet power. In order to be “our kind,” you also had to experience a certain discomfort, a certain dissatisfaction with everything that was possible and allowed, and discontent with the existing world as a whole, from the alphabet to the weather, to the Lord God himself, who had done such a lousy job of putting things together . . . In a word, that sense of Russian metaphysical melancholy that came to the surface, like grass at a springtime trash dump, after the permissive Twentieth Party Congress . . . Those who studied the properties of capillary development in the brain, Chinese grammar, or metal spark machining had no chance of becoming “our kind.” Although their ranks also included secret adversaries of Soviet power, they practiced the rules of disguise: in the morning they tied their ties, did their hair up, and, most important, kept a loyal expression on their face for eight working hours a day, for precisely which reason they remained in the category of “clients.”

“Our kind” of person was uncombed and unkempt and arrived at Vika’s studio toward midnight with a bottle of vodka, a guitar stuffed with “our kind” of songs, a new poem by Brodsky (or one’s own), or a pinch of hashish, and stayed to spend the night either with Nanny Goat or with Tanya, however the cards fell. “Our-kind-of-ness” trumped personal sexual attraction. Occasionally casual affairs would sprout within their own circle, which required the implementation of certain unwritten rules. Nanny Goat herself was a businesswoman who despised all that lovey-dovey stuff and, having been burned when she was young, extirpated all sentiment from her own life and successfully trained Tanya to do the same. Tanya liked these rules, according to which courting rituals of the variety the Goldberg boys had managed to spread over an entire five-year period were abolished, matters being decided in the short span of an evening at the table, and relations by morning either exhausted or continued, with no obligations attached for either of the dallying parties.

Overall, Tanya’s apprenticeship was exceptionally successful, her already disciplined hands readily and joyously acquiring new skills and techniques. She would extract an ingot of silver, formerly a teaspoon, from its soapy mold, pound it with a mallet, heat it on a burner until it turned cherry red, release it, and press it through rollers. Then she pulled it through a wire rolling mill, out of which emerged new thin silver wire . . . The work was not complicated, but Nanny Goat turned out to be a strict teacher and monitored Tanya’s work to make sure she did everything by the rules, as her former husband, a tiresome pedant, had once taught her. Tanya worked with a passion and quickly converted the entirety of Vika’s silver supply into millimeter-sized wire. Now Vika had no choice but to teach Tanya the next important stage of jewelry making, soldering. Here Nanny Goat Vika was a professor. Although she withheld none of the secrets of her craft and generously shared all the mysteries of soft and hard soldering and the slightest differences in color by which to measure the temperature of the melted solder, Tanya never achieved Vika’s level of mastery. On the other hand, she quickly mastered the torch: with a deft and lightning-fast movement of her left hand she raised the versatile flame to shoulder level and affixed it to the stand. She never once burned herself. Time passed, and Tanya began to learn how to do settings. She almost wore her thumb down to the bone with a needle file before she learned how to finish a piece for sale. But it appealed to Tanya that her hands—which she used to care for, growing long nails that she manicured—were now covered with grazes and scars of varying degrees of newness, just like a boy’s . . . She turned body and soul toward masculinity—cut her hair short, slipped on her first pair of jeans, which would replace all other options, bought two boys’ plaid shirts at the Detsky Mir department store, threw out her bras, and gave Toma all her blouses with their round collars and lacy inserts sewn to her mother’s taste . . . A unisex Chinese jacket lined with crude dog fur, dark blue, like everything working-class Chinese, and a rabbit fur cap with earflaps completed her new image, and people on the street would address her as “young man,” which she also liked. Even Tanya’s gait changed, became more abrupt with a swagger to her shoulders . . .

She had already turned twenty-two, but seemed to be experiencing her teenage years anew. Although her nocturnal sorties had ended almost entirely, she still treasured nighttime the most, especially those solitary nights when Vika would leave for the evening for Cheryomushki, hauling two bags of food from the Prague restaurant carryout store for her elderly female relatives, to kiss and shower presents on her little Mishka, fight with her mother, make peace with one of her grandmothers, and argue with the other. Relations in their family were stormy: they couldn’t let a day pass without tears, verbal abuse, and passionate kisses. On returning from Cheryomushki, Nanny Goat was always very invigorated and slightly aggressive, as though family turmoil opened up new sources of energy in her.

Tanya visited her own family infrequently. She usually arrived toward evening. The apartment, which had once been very light, now seemed gloomy at all times of day. Tomochka’s tropical vegetation consumed the light. The place was dusty and faded; only the ever-green leaves Toma was never too lazy to wipe down with a damp sponge gleamed with a waxy shimmer. Her mother, sitting in an armchair that had shaped itself to her lightweight body, rustled the woolen yarn that she either knitted—her knitting needles tinkling rhythmically—or undid with a quiet electric-like whirr. Balls of old wool covered with knots and the tails of knots turned softly at her feet. Two striped cats, Murka-mother and Murka-daughter, lazily pawed the rolling gray balls that picked up clumps of the cats’ shed fur and dust balls from the poorly swept floor.

Tanya would sit down alongside her mother, on the spinning piano stool. Elena Georgievna happily smiled when she saw Tanya.

“My little girl, I wanted . . .” Elena began to say, but did not finish her sentence.

“What, Mommy?”

Elena fell silent, having lost the thread of her passing desire. Unlike the broken wool that she caught and knotted together, she could not reconnect either her thoughts or her sentences at the point where they split, and pained by this, she attempted somehow to hide this terrible condition from those around her.

“Would you like me to bring you some tea?” Tanya offered the first thing that came into her head.

“I don’t want tea . . . Tell me . . .” And once again she fell silent.

“What are you knitting?” Tanya made a new attempt at communicating.

“Here . . . I’m knitting this for you . . . ,” Elena answered in confusion and smiled guiltily. “I undid it a bit . . .”

Elena did not know what she was knitting. When her work turned into a rectangle and she needed either to drop a stitch or pick up and knit the collar, she would become confused, undo the whole thing, and start all over again . . . Tanya quickly tired of the strain of their conversation, of the impossibility of communicating: her mother, of course, was sick, but her sickness was something very bizarre . . . A kind of slow deterioration . . .

“Do you want to go for a walk?” Tanya offered.

Elena looked at her in fright: “Outside?”

Following those awful lapses of memory that had happened to her outside the apartment, she completely stopped going out. It was difficult for her even to leave her own room. When she needed to make her way to the washroom or the kitchen, she would pick up a cat, because the cat’s warmth would lend her a sense of balance. Thoughts of the world that lay beyond the confines of their apartment evoked a wild terror in her. She was ashamed of this terror and attempted to hide it.

“Not today,” she would say childishly, and searched with her eyes for one of the Murkas. Her helpless and almost infantile intonation and convulsive searching for a cat flustered Tanya as well.

“Tell me something . . .” Elena asked vaguely.

“About what?” Tanya hid behind the empty words because it was impossible for her to tell anything about her current life.

Elena smiled pathetically. “About something . . .”

Their conversation about nothing lasted half an hour, then Tanya went to the kitchen, put on the teakettle, took note of the household’s degeneration and desolation, the unscoured pots and poorly washed cups . . . But there was food in the house: in the evenings Toma would bring home what she had managed to grab between work and her evening classes.

Then her father would arrive and, he too, instead of his former strength and power, emanated aging and decline . . . His field of energy, at one time so powerful and magnetic, had grown exhausted, and Tanya felt uncomfortable looking at him: it seemed as if he had committed some shameful act and wanted to hide it.

Pavel Alekseevich had shrunk and grown thin, his shoulders drooped, and his forehead and cheeks were deeply furrowed, as if his skin had become a size larger. He was happy to see Tanya, and at first his boxer-looking face would light up with all its doglike furrows, but it quickly paled when he saw Tanya’s sadness and poorly disguised pity. He suffered, like an abandoned lover, but out of pride never initiated the conversation: the easy, happy dialogue that could arise at any point between two people who understood each other no longer existed between them . . .

Vasilisa, now totally blind, would emerge from her pantry. She felt so sure of herself in the kitchen that her blindness was almost not noticeable. She set the table, warmed up soup for Pavel Alekseevich, and even placed a grubby three-ounce shot glass next to his plate . . . She made her way around the apartment by running one hand along the wall, her rummaging hands having traced the dark band of the trajectory of her movements on the blue-and-yellow wallpaper. She moved soundlessly on the mended soles of her old felt boots, and it was amazing how she still preserved her village smells—a combination of sour milk, hay dust, and even, it seemed, a whiff of smoke from a wood-burning stove . . .

Her parents’ house depressed Tanya and saddened her. She rarely ran into Toma these days, but each time she dropped by the house she would leave her a present: a ring with a cornelian, a pendant, or a package of cheap cookies.

At the end of February Tanya had her first sale: she made real money for real work. Fifty rubles for a silver ring with a transparent black smoky quartz, a tender oval stone she had worked on for two days. At one time her salary as a laboratory assistant had been thirty-eight rubles and fifty kopecks, so the jewelry sale seemed like easy mad money, and she decided to spend it all on presents for everyone.

She borrowed a shopping bag from Nanny Goat and did as her mentor: she loaded a bag with pedigree goods from the Arbat—Indian tea, cakes, cookies. For some reason that day they had put on sale a rare shipment of English cosmetics and German cigarettes. She bought those as well. She bought her father a bottle of Armenian cognac, although she knew he preferred vodka. But cognac was classier.

She was met by Pavel Alekseevich, who had already consumed his evening dose. He pressed her head in its gray rabbit fur fitfully to his chest and winced.

“Tanya, there’s been such trouble . . . They beat up Vitalik Goldberg. Genka came in from Obninsk and called. I just came back from the Sklifosovsky Hospital. His condition is serious. I talked to the doctor. He has a skull fracture. His arm is broken, his nose too. He still hasn’t regained consciousness . . . Ilyusha’s book has come out in the States . . . It’s a mess . . .”

Tanya did not even set the heavy bag on the floor, but just stood there in the doorway, stunned by the news. Although of late she had hardly any contact with them, the Goldberg boys were more relatives than friends.

Tanya set the bag on the floor and began to cry. Pavel Alekseevich pulled the wet rabbit cap and heavy jacket off his daughter.

“The KGB?” Tanya suddenly asked soberly.

“Looks like it. He got pounded by professionals. They didn’t want to kill. If they had wanted to, they would have.”

Vasilisa stood in her usual place in the corridor near the corner between the kitchen and the entrance hall, and seemed to be looking in their direction.

“Tanya, is that you?”

“It’s me, me, Vasya. I brought presents.”

“Presents? For what?” Vasilisa was amazed. It was Lent, hardly the time for presents.

“I bought you some Armenian cognac.” Tanya smiled with moist eyes, and Pavel Alekseevich perked up, not at the cognac, of course, which to this day his patients brought him in quantities that exceeded human consumption, but at Tanya’s smile, just like before, her usual former smile, as if all the recent years of alienation had not happened between them.

“Let’s go see Momma, and then you and I will drink some of your cognac. Okay?” Pavel Alekseevich proposed and nudged Tanya in the direction of her mother’s room.

“Did you tell her about Vitalik?” Tanya asked in a whisper.

Pavel Alekseevich shook his head: “We shouldn’t.”

They sat together, the three of them, for the first time in several years. Elena in her armchair, Tanya on her bed, which smelled either of cats or stale urine. Pavel Alekseevich drew closer, together with his round stool.

“So should we have a little drink, girls?” he asked buoyantly, then suddenly stopped short. Elena looked at him with horror.

“Have a drink, have a drink, Mom,” Tanya shouted unexpectedly, instantly bringing her cognac in from the corridor.

Pavel Alekseevich went to get glasses.

“Do you think that . . . Is it true . . . Pavel Alekseevich says . . .” Elena uttered uncertainly and incoherently, but doubtless in protest.

“Mom, one glass . . .”

Pavel Alekseevich stood in the doorway with three unmatched wineglasses. It turned out that Lenochka had not forgotten everything on earth: she had just remembered that her husband was an alcoholic. The sight of the bottle made her nervous for her husband . . .

“It’s good for you, Lenochka. It’s good for your circulation.” Pavel Alekseevich grinned.

Elena extended her hand uncertainly and awkwardly clutched the wet green wineglass. Her knitting slid off her knees and fell to the floor. Murka Jr. pawed it immediately. Elena got upset, the wineglass tipped, and a bit of cognac spilled out.

“Look, Tanya . . . It’s all fallen down . . . Like that . . . Wet . . .” She was not able to put down the wineglass and pick up her knitting: that was too complicated a sequence of actions . . . Pavel Alekseevich picked up the knitting and placed it on the bed. He poured for himself and for Tanya.

“To your health, Mommy.”

Elena moved the wineglass in the air in front of her, Tanya leaned the glass toward her mouth, and she drank it. They sat together for almost an hour, silent and smiling. They slowly drank the cognac and ate the cakes. Then Elena suddenly uttered completely coherently and distinctly, as she had not spoken for years already: “What a nice evening it is today, Tanechka. How nice it is that you came home. Pashenka, do you remember Karantinnaya Street?”

“What Karantinnaya Street?” Pavel Alekseevich was surprised.

Elena smiled, the way adults smile at children who don’t yet understand. “In Siberia, remember? The place you brought us from to the hospital . . . We had a good life there. At the hospital.”

“We don’t have it too bad now either, Lenochka.” He placed his hand on her head and stroked her cheek. She caught his hand and kissed it . . .

The strangest things would happen: Pavel Alekseevich could not remember any Karantinnaya Street. But Elena remembered. How could memory be so whimsical? Twenty years spent living together, of which one of them remembered one thing; the other—something else. To what extent had that life been spent together, if their memories of one and the same thing were so different?

Gena Goldberg arrived shortly after. He told what little he had found out about yesterday’s incident. His brother had returned home late and was beaten up in the entrance to their building. He had been found only in the early morning by a neighbor of theirs hooked on jogging who had come out after six in the morning to perform his athletic feats. Vitaly’s coworkers said that over the past week he had received several threatening phone calls.

“Did they call you?” Tanya asked.

“What’s the point of calling me: I’m far away from all that.” Gena seemed to be justifying himself.

By all appearances the matter appeared to be linked with the fact that Vitaly had just returned from Yakutia, where he had been gathering anthropological data on northern peoples. He had been summoned by the security services and requested to hand over all the material he had collected on his research trip on the grounds that his topic was about to be classified as secret. He refused. The secret had been known to the whole world for a long time already: ethnic groups in the North were drinking themselves to death, and the populations of Yakuts and other tribes had shrunk four times over the last twenty years. All of this fit Ilya Goldberg’s theory about the genetic decimation of the Soviet people perfectly logically, but it did not fit the conception underlying that golden wonder at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition known as the “Fountain of Friendship of Nations.”

A bit later Toma arrived. They invited her to drink together with everyone else what was left at the bottom of the bottle. One glass made her drunk and she began to laugh loudly. The evening was ruined. Tanya kissed her mother and her father, put on her Chinese coat, and remembering Vasilisa, went already dressed to say good-bye to her. She entered the tiny pantry and switched on the light. The lightbulb had burned out long ago, but Vasilisa did not know that. She turned her head at the sound of the switch.

“Tanya?”

Tanya kissed Vasilisa on the crown of her head, covered with her black headscarf.

“Tell me what to bring you?”

“I don’t need anything. Just bring yourself,” Vasilisa answered disagreeably.

“I do come by . . .”

Tanya walked out into the street with Gena. He wanted to see her home.

Toma led Elena into the bathroom to replace with a dry layer the multilayered rags rolled into a soft pad inside her old bathing suit stretched over even more spacious underpants. Toma paid not the slightest attention to her shamed resistance: she did this every evening, and every evening she chanted her tongue twister, without the slightest note of reproach.

“Now hold on, Mommy, hold on. We have to change the wet ones . . . You’re making it difficult for me.”

Then she washed and dried poor Elena, doing it all dexterously and roughly, like underpaid attendants in hospitals. Elena was so ashamed that she closed her eyes and just switched off. She had this little, subtle movement called “Imnothere.” Then Toma nudged Elena ahead of her, led her into her bedroom, and tucked her in. After that she called Vasilisa, who sat at Elena’s feet and took to muttering her evening encomium—a long, scrunched prayer pasted together from scraps of prayer formulas, psalms, and her own vociferations, the most frequently reminisced of which was “a Christian death, peaceful, painless, and without shame . . .”

With bright eyes that from year to year grew lighter and lighter, at one time having been deep blue and now turned smoky gray, Elena looked out from one darkness into another . . .