The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

10

AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME A STRANGE LETTER ARRIVED addressed to Elena Georgievna. Vasilisa pulled it out of the mailbox together with the newspapers. She brought it to Elena. Elena took the official white stamped envelope into her hands, made no attempt to figure out what it was, and sat that way with the unopened envelope in her hand until evening, when Pavel Alekseevich dropped into her room. She handed him the letter.

“Here. Please . . . An envelope . . . For Tanechka . . .”

Pavel Alekseevich took the envelope. It bore the impressive stamp of INIURKOLLEGIA. The pale letters printed on white paper spelled out that the International Legal Collegium writes to inform of its search for the heirs of Anton Ivanovich Flotov, who died January 9, 1963, in an oncological clinic in the city of Buenos Aires and bequeathed half of his estate to his wife, Elena Georgievna Flotova, and to his daughter, Tatiana Antonovna Flotova. The office of the International Legal Collegium similarly reports that documentation of a change of surname and of an adoption had been obtained from the civil registry office of the town of V, and summons Elena Georgievna to discuss registration of inheritance as well as to provide more complete information about the status of her daughter Tatiana Pavlovna Kukotskaya . . .

Pavel Alekseevich put the letter on the table and walked out. The news was mind-boggling. According to this official letter written in typical bureaucratic style, Anton Ivanovich Flotov had not at all perished during the war, but somehow had made his way to South America, where he died twenty years later. What worried Pavel Alekseevich was neither the death of this man he had not known and to whom he had only an indirect relationship, nor the information about some mythical inheritance . . . What had crashed down on him was the inevitability of having to tell Tanya that her birth father was someone else, and of having to tell her that now, when their relationship was already falling apart.

In his office he sat down at his desk, having forgotten for a moment what he had come for. Automatically he rummaged with his hands along the shelf next to the desk: his hands remembered his needs better than his head, and he pulled out a half-bottle of vodka and small—“just the right size,” as he liked to say—glass and drank. A minute later everything was clear. Right now he would tell Elena everything, and then he would call Tanya and reveal to her the secret of her paternity and let her decide at that point what she wanted to do about the inheritance. He had forgotten about Vasilisa, the only other person besides Elena who had known Flotov. His life as a father, once so happy, was drawing to an end in the most banal and trite way: the real father had turned up, dead by the way, and upset the entire set of lies. His heart was crushed, like a finger in a door. He winced and drank the remainder.

He returned to the bedroom. Elena was sitting in her chair, the younger Murka in her lap purring loudly like an oncoming suburban train and it seemed that at any moment a whistle would blow. Catching sight of Pavel Alekseevich Murka fell silent and tucked her fluffy tail under herself.

“You know, Lenochka, that letter contains a message about the death of your first husband, Anton Ivanovich Flotov. According to the letter, he did not perish at the front, but, probably, was taken prisoner and then wound up in South America . . . He died only a few months ago . . .”

Elena responded briskly and unexpectedly: “Yes, yes, of course, those huge cactuses, those prickles . . . That’s what I thought. They’re prickly pears, right?”

“What prickly pears?” Pavel Alekseevich became alarmed.

Elena absentmindedly gestured with her arm, confused.

“You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

“About what?”

She smiled an unbearably pathetic smile and grabbed the cat the way a child grabs the hand of its nurse.

“They’re huge, with prickly thorns, on the reddish earth . . . And there was a horseman, that is, first he didn’t have a horse . . . Now I think that it was him . . .”

“You didn’t dream that?”

She smiled a condescending smile, like an adult to a child.

“What are you talking about, Pashenka! It’s more likely that you’re a dream for me.”

Elena had not called him Pashenka for a long time. Elena had not spoken with such a firm voice for a long, long time. Ever since that last attack—an unquestionable and long seizure, a complete prolapse of memory that she herself had noticed as well as those around her—her voice had sounded insecure, and the intonation of her speech was that of inquiring doubt. Does this mean that all her prolapses of memory are accompanied by a sense of derealization . . . What was this? Pseudo-memories? Hypnogogic hallucinations?

He took her by the hand.

“And where did you see those cactuses?”

She grew confused and upset. “I don’t know. Maybe in Tomochka’s room . . .”

Pavel Alekseevich took the letter in hand and ran his eyes across it one more time. Why at the mention of the death of her first husband had she started talking about cactuses? There was no connection. Except perhaps mention of Buenos Aires . . . What a peculiar array of associations. And now was she trying to conceal her train of thought by supplying a false argument? The cunning of the mad?

“Lenochka, Toma hates cactuses. She doesn’t have a single cactus. Where did you see cactuses? Maybe you dreamed them?”

She bent her head even lower, practically snuggling the cat, and he saw that she was crying.

“My little girl, what’s wrong? Are you crying because of Flotov? That all happened a long time ago. And it’s good, isn’t it, that he wasn’t killed . . . Please stop crying, I beg you . . .”

“Those stinging prickles, there they are, those stinging prickles . . . No, not in a dream . . . Not at all in a dream . . . In a different way . . . I can’t explain it . . .”

Oneiric confusion syndrome, perhaps? Dreamlike delusional derangement of the consciousness: is that what it’s called? Find the details in the psychiatric literature. The most tenuous, most vague of the medical sciences, psychiatry . . . His wife’s illness put Pavel Alekseevich at a loss because he could not understand it. A derangement of consciousness . . . A particularly malicious form of early dementia? Alzheimer’s disease? Pre-senile dementia? What were the limits of this disease? . . . One way or another, though, today had been one of the better days: she was reacting and answering questions. It was almost full-fledged communication.

“It’s possible Flotov was taken prisoner and became a displaced person. Thousands of Russian soldiers did not return home, you know that. Perhaps it was all for the better. If he’d returned, they would have sent him to the camps . . .” Pavel Alekseevich spoke insignificant words only so that her speech mechanisms would not shut down, as frequently happened with her.

“No, you don’t understand . . . Flotov was a Baltic German. His great-grandfather was from Königsberg, von Flotow, and he had a lot of relatives who had stayed behind. He hid who he was . . .”

“What are you saying, Lenochka? That’s simply amazing . . . That means he was one of the guilty? When I was young, everyone in my circle of acquaintances, well, perhaps except for a few idiots and bastards, knew that they were guilty of something, and they hid who they were . . .”

“Yes, of course. I remember how I felt it the first time. When my parents took me from my grandmother and brought me to a colony near Sochi, in the spring of 1920. That’s when I first saw the vegetation in the South . . . And that’s when I understood that something bad made us colonists different from all other people . . . A portrait of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy hung in the communal dining room. Done in oils, a clumsy portrait, his bare forehead shining and his beard fluttering in the wind, and, what really annoyed me, the frame was crooked. And no one noticed . . .”

Pavel Alekseevich listened to his wife’s story, a coherent and detailed narrative with precise details. With an analysis of the situation, criticism, and an ability to arrive at meaning. Not a shadow of dementia. There could be no thought of dementia here . . . So why, two hours ago, had she been sitting with the cat and the unopened envelope, answering with irrelevant information, with nonsense answers typical of the insane, unable to control even the simplest movements, and at times forgetting how to hold a spoon. No, she hadn’t quite forgotten entirely, but was experiencing obvious difficulty dealing with the simplest of things. She couldn’t remember what she’d eaten for breakfast . . . If she had even eaten breakfast . . . The picture more likely suggests pseudodementia. A seeming loss of the simplest skills. A sui generis game of hide-and-seek of the mind with itself . . . No, I could never solve this puzzle. Maybe I should read Freud. In 1912 my dead mother had traveled to Vienna for psychoanalytic sessions with one of Freud’s students. What a shame I know absolutely nothing about that. It seems my mother had some variety of hysteria . . . Pavel Alekseevich frowned. Silly Vasilisa: his sin lay not in aborting fetuses, half-ounce clots of high-potency protein with enriched potential, but in the stupid rigidity with which he had rejected his mother’s second marriage, and his mother herself, a fair-haired beauty who had grown old with dignity and died in Tashkent in 1943 from ordinary dysentery.

With the acuity of the mentally ill Elena noticed the lightning speed of Pavel Alekseevich’s frown and fell silent.

“Yes, yes, Lenochka. The frame was crooked . . . Tell me more . . .”

But she had fallen silent, as if someone had switched off the power. Once again she sank her fingers into Murka’s fur, charged with live, slightly crackling, electricity, and withdrew entirely from the conversation and from the letter that had served as the indirect reason for the conversation, and from Pavel Alekseevich, who just seconds ago she had called “Pashenka” . . . Once again her face resumed its expression of “Imnothere.”

Pavel Alekseevich knew that no force could bring her back. She would wake up to communicate again in a week, a month, or in a year. Sometimes these glimmers lasted hours, sometimes days. These temporary glimmers threw him for a total loop because Elena would become herself and even resemble herself in those mythological times when their marriage had been complete and happy.

The exact same thing had happened last time, three months ago, when she had spoken to him about Tanya, as if she had wakened from her illness, and she had spoken bitterly, almost in despair about alienation and loss, about emptiness and the torturous loss of sensation that afflicted her, about her indescribable confusion at not being able to recognize the world around her . . . And then her speech had stopped in the middle of a word, and she buried herself in the cat.

“Always the cat,” the thought entered Pavel Alekseevich’s head. “Next time when she begins to talk again, I’ll chase the cat into the corridor . . . How strange: the cat is like a conduit to madness . . .”

“Lenochka, you and I were talking about Flotov . . .”

“Yes, thanks much . . . I don’t need anything . . . Yes, everything’s completely fine, please, don’t worry . . .” Lena babbled, addressing either the cat or someone else who existed imaginarily inside her dusty, unkempt room.