The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

8

A YEAR HAD PASSED SINCE A MURKY FILM HAD TOTALLY clouded over Vasilisa’s sole eye and darkness had occluded her vision. Blindness, a misfortune and terrible threat for the elderly, had liberated her from constant labor.

So began her lawful release from work, beyond which blind Vasilisa envisioned her final unlimited and boundless recumbency. Her constant activity directed outward now turned inward. Before she had prayed to icons. She had several: a dark three-tone Theotokos from Kazan executed in cursory traveling merchant style, an Elijah the Prophet split in half by some stupid ax and crudely glued together so that the Prophet’s face had been preserved, but the cape that hung from the chariot for the most part did not fall in Elisha’s arms, having broken off to remain as a chip in the village church and to burn up along with it. There was also a Saint Seraphim of Sarov with an earless bear, and a drowning Peter—halo shifted to one side and arm extended toward a Savior walking past him in the opposite direction. Now it was as if she were deprived of all these protectors. She stood on her knees in her usual place where the rug was bald from her kneeling and attempted to resurrect them in her memory, but could not. The darkness that enveloped her hung like a smooth wall with no shades or points of light whatsoever. This went on for a rather long while, and Vasilisa grieved: it seemed to her that her prayers hung in the stale air near her head and rose neither to the Lord, nor to the Lord’s Mother, nor to God’s saintly miracle workers. Then something like a flickering candle flame began to cut through the darkness. The flame was so weak and so unsteady that Vasilisa feared that it might be some charm of her imagination. But it was so alluring, that bright spot, it so gladdened her, that Vasilisa beckoned it from within and tried to hold on to the image of light a bit longer. And the unsteady light grew and became stronger, and shone, visible to no one, in her private gloom, moving her to incessant and almost wordless prayer. Her prayers now were only about the “little flame,” as she called it, that it not leave her. Even in her sleep her prayer did not abandon her, as if it dozed alongside her, like the old Murka who had long ago chosen for her night lodgings the space alongside Vasilisa’s skinny, cold legs.

So it was that Vasilisa thought that she had found a completely new, easier life for herself without her usual never-ending chores—without all those excessive, by her understanding, purchases of food, without washing large loads of hardly soiled laundry, and without enormous deck-swabbing housecleanings—leaving herself only her almost ritual duties of washing Elena in the morning and meeting Pavel Alekseevich after work. The larger part of the day she spent in her pantry in subtle meditation comprehensible only to Eastern monks . . . A blend of prayer-filled contemplation, spiritual communication—with the abbess, Mother Anatolia, with whom, of late, thanks to her blindness, she had grown even closer than before—and loving reminiscence of all those living and dead, close and distant, beginning with her own parents and the eternally memorable Varsonofy and ending with the nameless faces of the nuns of the N monastery, long ago deceased . . . by the light of that tiny flame that she had learned to fan within herself, as she would a coal in a stove . . .

Every day, as he accepted from Vasilisa’s hands his pauper’s dinner, completely indistinguishable from the hospital dinner the practical nurse brought him at work, Pavel Alekseevich reproached himself for not being able to overcome Vasilisa’s stubbornness: he was convinced that all she had was just a banal cataract that could be removed and her sight at least partially restored. He was not some absentminded professor incapable of turning on a gas burner. He could warm up his own food, he could even prepare it, but to deprive Vasilisa Gavrilovna of performing her duties he could not, yet to accept the services of a blind servant was also untenable . . .

Again and again he spoke to her about an operation. Vasilisa, though, did not want to hear about it, invoking God’s will, which determined everything for her . . . Pavel Alekseevich got angry, could not make sense of her, and tried, using her logic, to convince her that God’s will lay precisely in that a doctor given the call to operate on the blind would perform an operation on her, and she would be able to see the light, if only to sing the praises of God . . . She shook her head, and then he got even angrier, accused her of cowardice, illiteracy, and playing the holy fool . . .

Each time he drank just a bit more than usual, Pavel Alekseevich started in anew with Vasilisa. But no line of reasoning could move her. Then once, Toma, without at all having spoken with Pavel Alekseevich, but simply having hauled an enormous bundle of linen from the laundry up five flights of stairs (the elevator was not working that day) and completely drained, accidentally uttered the only words that would convince her.

“Look, Aunt Vasya, you’re so strong and healthy you could haul water, but all you do is pray . . . Why don’t you at least come with me . . .”

Despite her scrawniness, Toma in fact came from a hardy breed: she spent whole days on end pottering with her green babies, pushing her nose to the ground, tirelessly digging and weeding. The blood of the peasant had spoken in her: what she had not wanted to do for trite beets and carrots she did with tenderness and passion for rhododendrons and choisya.

She had never liked doing housework, which now required more and more of her time, and now she was enrolled at an evening trade school and in fact very busy.

For a whole day Vasilisa carried this reproach—vented by Toma in a fit of temper—inside her. As always, she thought slowly and assiduously, calling upon Mother Anatolia for help. Finally, on Sunday evening, after supper, she informed Pavel Alekseevich that she was agreed to an operation.

“But you didn’t want to do it.” Pavel Alekseevich was surprised. “First we need to show you to an oculist. For a consultation . . . Maybe they won’t agree to do it . . .”

“Why not? I’m agreed. Let them cut . . .”

The doctors found no contraindications. Two weeks later Vasilisa Gavrilovna was operated on at the eye institute on Gorky Street. Sixty percent of her sight was restored, and Vasilisa returned to her former household chores—once again she did the shopping, stood in lines, cooked their food, and did the laundry. Only her step remained unsure, wary, as if she were carrying some fragile precious object—her only seeing eye. Pavel Alekseevich’s words about God’s will effected by the hands of doctors had touched her heart. Although she remembered perfectly the entire operation—performed under local anesthetic—from the first acutely painful shot in her eye until the moment when they removed the bandage and she saw people, vague and quivering, like trees in the wind, she was constantly reminded of the New Testament story of Christ healing the man blind from birth, and she linked the doctors’ fiddling with her numbed eye with the Savior’s touching of the young blind man’s dead eye.

No one in the house guessed the extent to which Vasilisa’s attitude toward herself changed after she recovered her sight: she became filled with respect for her strong, eternally virginal body, for her muscular, calloused feet and hands, and especially for her unseeing, tearing eye which had upped and begun to see. The inner light that had illuminated her in times of total blindness had left her, and now, in her restored sightedness, she could not see it at all. She longed for her lost “little flame,” but remained strongly convinced that it would return to her again when her temporarily resurrected eye would once again go out.

Having reacquired her lost sight, she understood in what vain and fruitless fear for her last eye she had spent the larger part of her life. Only after having lost what remained of her sight was she able to liberate herself from that fear, and now, after the operation, having seen God’s earth anew, she found new faith not in God—her faith in God had never required reaffirmation—but in God’s love directed at her personally, at bent, stupid, and ignorant Vasilisa. She began to respect that same Vasilisa as the object of God’s personal love . . . Now she knew for sure that the Lord God set her apart from the enormous human multitude . . .

A completely new, outlandish thought crept into her head: that God loved her even more than others . . . Take Tanya: beautiful, wealthy, talented from birth, but she had left home to live the life of a vagabond, in other people’s spaces, and not out of need, but of her own free will . . . Or Pavel Alekseevich: what an imposing, famous man, the doctor of all doctors. How many children had he done away with: countless numbers, over his head in sin. Plus he drank, like a lowlife loser, like her deceased brother, God be with him . . . There was nothing to be said for Elena: what had happened to her was obvious as the palm of your hand. Kind, and quiet, and compassionate, she felt sorry for every last cat, but had forgotten about Flotov! Wasn’t that on her conscience? What else was God punishing her for? He’d taken away her mind and all her senses. She lived like an animal . . .

Vasilisa now treated Elena condescendingly, like a domesticated animal that needed to be fed and cleaned . . . She spoke with her as with a cat: into the air with inarticulate words of approval or discontent . . . No, there was nothing to discuss here—if the Lord had singled out anyone, it was she, Vasilisa. First He had taken her eye away, and then returned it . . . How else could you make sense of it?