The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

13

NANNY GOAT INHERITED A FORTUNE FROM THE ELDEST of her aunts and blew it immediately. More precisely, she blew only the packaging, a pudgy silver Fabergé jewelry box with a pseudo-Greek female profile and three yellow diamonds on the lid. The jewelry box was late moderne, ornate, and the embodiment of a butler’s concept of true luxury. The box’s contents, however, were charming pieces of jewelry of pearl and amethyst, not of great value, but marvelous pieces of work with a pedigree: they had been presents to her great-grandmother from one of the Yusupov princes.

The jewelry box brought Nanny Goat big money, approximately one one-hundredth of what it ultimately went for at an auction in London. But Nanny Goat never found out about that, while five hundred rubles were ooh-la-la what a sum of cash. Handed the money directly by an acquaintance, the director of a commission shop, she took a taxi to the dacha she had rented where her son Misha was stuck with her two remaining aunts and his own grandmother, Nanny Goat’s mother. She picked the kid up, and—paying almost twice the face value—bought train tickets to the South.

Tanya arrived at her place the next day in the morning, having missed her cheerful banter. There were still six hours before the train departed, and Nanny Goat persuaded Tanya to go with her.

“The ticket’s not a problem. If worst comes to worst, we’ll fix it so you can sleep in the conductor’s compartment.” Nanny Goat waved a fat bankroll before Tanya’s nose.

At eight in the evening they were sitting in the train. An hour later, after all the tiny suburban stops had winked good-bye and remained behind, they found themselves luxuriously ensconced in a compartment of their own, having resettled the inhabitants of the entire sleeping car. Among Nanny Goat’s many talents was the ability to set down roots instantly, and blithe to the effort it cost, she had dragged along a whole suitcase of things that, from Tanya’s point of view, were entirely superfluous: little napkin placemats, coffee cups from home, and even a copper crank coffee grinder . . . Tanya’s lean bag held a bathing suit, some underwear, and a spacious dress with enough room for her future belly. She hadn’t even taken a towel, planning to buy one once they got there . . .

It was not quite clear to her where “there” was. One of the Goat’s customers, an actress, who had dropped in the night before to show off her deep, still somewhat reddish, suntan, had sung the praises of the Dniester Estuary, from where she had just returned. Nanny Goat, white and freckled and never in her life ever able to get a real tan, was struck with envy and decided to try the same estuary sun, and now they were traveling to approximately the same places that the exiled Ovid had cursed . . .

Their route took them through Odessa. At a transfer point in Odessa they were supposed to meet the mother of one of Vika’s girlfriends, who would put them up for the night and the next day put them on a bus through Bilhorod-Dnistrovsky to a sandbar between the Dniester Estuary and the sea . . .

They arrived in Odessa toward evening. Waiting for them was a huge—couch-size—woman, Zinaida Nikiforovna, swaddled in flower-patterned silk. Next to her the buxom Goat seemed like a sparrow, and the woman immediately took to them with indulging tenderness. She dragged them down to her “ah-paht-ment,” two connected rooms in a communal apartment that had seen better times. A mirror in a gold-leaf frame occupied the space between two Venetian windows and reflected the ranks of five-pint canning jars of tender fruit boiled alive and intended for speedy consumption. The house burst with food and drink, and before they could wash up, their “open-ahmed” hostess started piling food on the table . . . Little Misha was falling asleep at his plate. Zinaida Nikiforovna waved him off in disappointment and told them to put him to bed. Like all seaside denizens, she had a stash of folding cots and bedding for the innumerable relatives who came to visit. While their hostess made up a cot for Misha in the next room, Goat whispered to Tanya:

“We’re in for it now . . .”

But they had no idea what adventures lay ahead.

Little Misha fell asleep immediately. Zinaida Nikiforovna declared that they should all call her “Mama Zina,” that right now she had to go to work, and proposed that they take a stroll through evening Odessa, because there was no other city like it on earth . . .

They walked out onto the boulevard submerged under a flood of people, taking in the overabundant denseness of the southern evening, the warm air weighed down by cachinnate voices, and the waves of food and beer lightly seasoned with the smell of vomit. Above all this floated the sounds of Odessa-Soviet radio music—crude thieves’ cant, but not without its own charm.

The crowd on Deribasovskaya Street respectfully circumvented Mama Zina, splitting into two streams as they approached her cephalothorax, while Tanya and Vika, moored to her powerful right and left sides, occasionally exchanged glances, barely able to contain their laughter. Never closing her mouth of gold teeth for a second, Mama Zina spoke about literary Odessa.

“We’ll take their Babel and Ilf and Petrov, even Bagritsky and Kataev, and even Margarita Aliger and Vera Inber. If we subtract them, who’s left? Do we need that Sholokhov of theirs? Their Fadeev? Bunin lived here. Even Pushkin spoke on behalf of Odessa! Right here!” she proclaimed, having stopped at the respectable entrance of the Hotel London. “Here’s where I work. We’ll go through the staff entrance.”

It was a sailors’ club. International. Hard currency. A nightclub . . . And Mama Zina was in charge of the beer . . .

“They’re with me,” she said, squeezing into the narrow corridor, to a whitish man who looked like a packing trunk and who had appeared from a dark corner. He nodded. They entered the main room. It was air-raid dark, and the pianist played quietly. Several sailors who had not yet had their fill lazily drank their beer, while two painted working girls sat at a corner table and lushly sucked something through straws.

People spoke quietly, and the place did not smell of fish. Even Mama Zina sort of partly faded behind the bar counter. The beer was domestic, but the money was real—hard currency. Not just anyone got hired for this kind of work, only the most trusted. Mama Zina was precisely that kind—every seam of her, down to her uterus, checked by state security, even before the war, a partisan and a member of the underground. Here too her watchful party eye insured nothing got out of hand. As for the girls, the friends of her daughter who’d split to the capital, let them sit here and take a look, have some fun with the sailors, dance a bit . . .

The pianist picked quietly at some song that was definitely not of the domestic variety, but soulful in its own way. It used to be that Zinaida Nikiforovna did not like this newfangled music, but then it grew on her. They played jazz here.

The drummer arrived and set up his drums. He started to warm up. The really hot one was the one with the horn. But he was running late.

It grew dark outside, and lights went on in the club. People started showing up. There was rarely a crowd here.

Tanya felt more and more like sleeping. The piano gloriously purred out one and the same tune, but in different variations, which was rather interesting musically and slightly intoxicating, and she had no desire to get up. Then the horn’s voice rang out. It cut through the piano’s murmur with a dramatic and bitter sound. Tanya turned toward the stage. A not very tall, thin boy held a saxophone with both hands, and it seemed as if the instrument wanted to tear itself from his grasp as he tried to hold it back. What torturous music it was—sweetly painful, bitterly salty, sadly joyous . . . These were improvisations on Miles Davis’s old album ’Round Midnight, the saxophone following Coltrane’s dramatic lead, but at that moment Tanya knew none of this.

The musicians played as if slightly out of sync, the drummer holding back, the pianist heading off ahead then slowing down, while the saxophone followed its own separate road, and occasionally they all came together as if accidentally, carrying on an exchange at the point they met, a question-answer session—about something important, but incomprehensible . . . They all played very precisely and subtly, but the saxophonist was the best of all . . . The wind spun around him, fluttering his straight, blond hair, and Tanya had the urge to place her face right under the sound of his horn . . . She didn’t even notice that Nanny Goat went off to dance with a foreign sailor who looked too scrawny and intelligent for so masculine a profession. Some creep approached Tanya, and she jolted in fright: no, no. He went away. Nanny Goat continued dancing with scrawny-guy and was even communicating something in a mix of German and French, which somehow overlapped with his English and Swedish . . .

“Why did I give up music? Dad was right: sit at the piano; it flows from your fingers; you’re just a container, a mechanism for making the transfer from sheet music to sound . . . I don’t remember why I gave it up . . . Because of Tomochka, that’s why . . . The Komsomol consciousness of the idiot . . . It wasn’t the right music anyway. Music like this I’d never have given up . . . That and that,” she thought, noting the sighs of the saxophone and the heartbeat of the drummer . . .

“Whatever dragged me into that scientific rat’s nest? I could have studied music . . . How expressive that saxophone is! I never realized that it had the intonations of a human voice. Or is the musician that talented? Yes, probably the latter . . .”

The Swede escorted them back to Zinaida’s place. The two of them liked each other, but it was clear that this evening would be the end of something that wasn’t even started. He gave Nanny Goat a present, a notepad that already had writing in it, with a black leather cover—really classy. He didn’t have anything else. He wrote his address on the first page. Rune Svenson. And that was it. Because the next morning his ship was heading out to who knew where and forever. What a shame!

They were let in by Zinaida’s sister, who lived in the same communal apartment and had kept watch over Misha’s sleep. By the time Mama Zina, who worked until three, returned, everyone was asleep. In the morning she saw her guests to the bus station, and they set off on the flat, dusty road. Sitting in the jolting, sweltering bus, Tanya remembered that that night she had had a dream with yesterday’s music in it, but in proportions larger than life, and it was performed by unusual sounding instruments . . .

Odessa and its suburbs ended about forty minutes later, giving way to a dusty, bumpy road, to fields annihilated by heat, to burned-out corn, and to feather grass. Nanny Goat was the first to get sick: she and her Swedish comrade had got carried away not just dancing, but with an exotic combination of cocktails that wrenched her Russian stomach even without the jolty road. Then little Misha threw up. Tanya held out the longest, but three hours of jostling suitable only for cosmonauts in training and not for delicate beings—particularly pregnant ones—unglued her as well.

They crawled out of the bus near a string of whitewashed peasant huts turned gray from the dust of orchards and tomato gardens. This miracle of nature was called Kurortnoe, “Resort Town.” Only there was nothing of a resort about it. Just more of the same dusty fields, with the sea nowhere in sight. In short, there was nothing there but heat and ferocious sun. They asked a woman passerby with a bucket full of tomatoes where the sea was.

“Over yonder,” she waved in no particular direction. “You lookin’ to rent?”

“Yes, to rent.”

The woman led them toward her place. Along the road they ran into two more women. They stopped and chatted quickly in not quite understandable Russian. After which the first woman passed them on to one of the others, and she led them off in a different direction. Sickly cypresses came into sight, with something resort-looking behind them. It was a resort hotel, behind which more little white houses appeared, and the new arrivals were taken to one of them. They rented a separate little house in a garden alongside a wooden outhouse with a tin sink attached with a huge rusty nail to a ridiculous lone wall—all that remained of a demolished shed. Beds of tomatoes stretched around the little house: they were “oxhearts,” a rare variety, huge lilac-crimson beauties, sooner fruit than vegetable . . . This was the sole local tourist attraction, the sole local delicacy, and almost the only food there was for people, pigs, and chickens. The tomatoes were used to make borscht and jam; they were boiled down into paste, dried, and left to rot. As the new arrivals figured out the next day, the local store had no bread, no butter, no cheese, no milk, no farmer’s cheese, no meat, and no lots of other things, but they did sell a low-grade flour, vegetable oil, canned fish, and chocolate candies . . . For the time being, having consumed the travel rations Mama Zina had provided, they set off to find the sea, which they still had not set eyes on and about which their landlady had said, waving in a certain direction, “over yonder.”

They set out in the indicated direction along a beaten path through the feather grass and arrived at a steep cliff. The land ended, and the sea began. It lapped—invisible and inaudible—far beneath their feet and merged with the sky in the blinding gray haze seamlessly, without even a hint of a horizon.

An earthen staircase haphazardly reinforced with wooden posts led to the water. Down it Tanya and Nanny Goat led a recalcitrant Misha, who was a bit cowardly and rather lead-footed. Having overcome about a hundred feet of crumbling steps, they found themselves on a sandy shore that was peopleless and touchingly sad, like the shore of an uninhabited island.

“Awesome,” said Nanny Goat.

“The end of the earth,” Tanya confirmed.

“There’s nothing here,” Misha whined in disappointment.

“What’s not here?” Nanny Goat said in surprise.

“Where they sell ice cream, and in general,” Misha explained his disappointment.

The sea was shallow, warm, and gray . . . It pretended to be calm, tame, as if it never battered the local shore with its autumnal storms that eroded many miles of barren, but hard earth . . .

They went in for a dip, gave Misha swimming lessons, built a maze out of wet sand, then fell asleep, waking up only toward evening when the sun had relented and a breeze blew from the sea . . .

Their landlady, a cook at the local resort hotel, turned out to be simply a treasure. In the evening she took them to the kitchen and showed them the cellar, whose shelves were lined with jars of butter preserved in salted water and pyramids of stewed meat—Soviet man’s daily bread.

“Take what you need and then we will figure it out. You have a child with you,” the landlady proposed generously.

Their vacation was working out sumptuously. Never in their lives had they eaten such quantities of stewed canned pork and butter as they did in those two weeks vacationing in the South. As for tomatoes, there was nothing to be said: that summer taught them that the product sold under the name of tomatoes in all other places had no relation whatsoever to the real thing.

But their principal discovery was made three days later, when having had their fill of looking at the sad, barely live sea, they made their way finally to the estuary.

The sandbar—overgrown in places with reeds and wormwood—stretched many miles, washed on one side by the languid sea and on the other by the estuary’s standing water, rather, that of one of its long inlets, which during spring high water was connected with the river’s main stream, but for the larger part of the year was entirely cut off. In a surprising way this small sandbar represented the entire local region: abandoned, almost nameless, cut off from its own history and alien to the present. This was the edge of the Bessarabian steppe, the setting for ancient civilizations trampled by Scythians, Gets, Sarmatians, and various nameless tribes. Once the outlands of the Roman Empire, it was now the wasteland of another, contemporary empire. Unfortunate, forsaken by all the gods, the motherland of white feather grass and fine suffocating dust . . .

Already sunburned, in long sundresses, their crimson backs covered with towels, Tanya and Vika dragged little Misha in his pajama bottoms along the unpopulated shore as they attempted to find a place where they could take cover from the direct rays of the sun. The round sand dunes, which had stopped growing short of full size, offered no shade. At noon, no one went outside except vacationers: the locals lived by the laws of the South, burrowing off for siestas at this time of day, regardless of their work schedules . . .

They found a small hill with three bushes with a trembling hint of shade underneath. They lay down on the hot sand. At this place the sandbar was about three hundred feet wide, the path running close to the estuary; having rested for a bit, they dipped themselves in its fresh water. You couldn’t say the water was warm; it was hot. They found a half-submerged dinghy in the reeds, which kept Misha busy for quite a while. Ducks with their adolescent ducklings scurried along the shore, accustomed to the heat, the warm water, and the abundance of food. The shallows, like a can of sardines, teemed with minnows. Only without tomato sauce. The thickets of reeds were filled with a live rustling: something there scurried by, started a ruckus, and emitted various sounds. Unidentifiable paws of various sizes had left their tracks along the tiny sandy shoal, and Misha bent over them, studying their script.

Tanya folded her arms across her stomach and tapped with her finger.

“You good in there? Satisfied?” She understood that yes, he was good . . .

The ever-prepared Nanny Goat, who in addition to water and food had hauled along a chubby volume, leaned her head into the scanty shade and opened her book. She started to read aloud.

“He thought that the mountains and clouds looked completely identical and that the particular beauty of the snowy mountains, about which he had been told, was as much an invention as Bach’s music and a woman’s love—none of which he believed in—and he stopped waiting for the mountains to appear. But the next day, early in the morning, he was wakened by the fresh air in his cart and looked casually to the right. The morning was perfectly clear. Suddenly he saw—about twenty steps away, as it seemed to him at first glance—the pure white colossi with their gentle outlines and the whimsical, distinct aerial line of their summits against the distant sky. When he comprehended the true distance between him and the mountains and the sky, the full enormity of the mountains, and when he sensed the full infiniteness of this beauty, he became frightened that it was all an apparition, a dream. He shook himself, so as to wake up . . .”

Tanya glanced over her shoulder. “You rereading Tolstoy? What for?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. I feel like it. Almost every year, and certainly in the summer. Like this, on the beach. On a train . . . In the yard, in the kitchen garden . . . Like visiting a relative. Out of a sense of duty. But love too. It’s a bit boring. But necessary.”

“Yes, yes. I know. My mother has read Tolstoy that way all her life. Her father, my grandfather, was a Tolstoyan or something like that. He was shot.”

“Are you kidding? They arrested Tolstoyans too?” Nanny Goat was surprised.

“How else? Absolutely . . .” She closed her eyes. She saw an unexpectedly lustrous picture—pure white colossi with their gentle outlines and the whimsical, distinct aerial line of their summits against the distant sky. “I don’t care for him. No, that’s not so. He writes that he doesn’t believe in the music of Bach or a woman’s love, in the beauty of mountains, and you’re prepared to agree with him. Then he ups and suddenly writes three sentences about the beauty of the mountains that hit you right between the eyes . . . And it all gets turned upside down.”

She rolled off her back onto her stomach and leaned on her elbow in the sand.

“Thank you for hauling me out to this hole. This place, of course, is awesome . . . Nobody around . . .”

In fact, there were lots of vacationers, who could be observed in the morning at the local market: people from Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Kishinev. Many vacationers arrived particularly toward the weekend. But they all gathered amicably on two beaches—the resort hotel’s and the so-called public beach . . . The Moldovans with their hanging mustaches, Ukrainian mine workers who succeeded in covering their coal-dust-darkened faces with crimson suntans, their full-bodied wives, and screaming children laid out their domestic supplies along a littered strip of shore where they drank warm vodka, played circle volleyball, splashed about in the shallows, then left, leaving behind stinking mountains of trash to be washed away by the cleansing storms of autumn. No matter what they called themselves, they were the true descendants of the extinct barbarous world.

Neither the sandbar nor the wild seashore down the staircase interested anyone. Walking past the feculent public beach, Tanya and her companions would come out on the sandbar, and a quarter mile later the remains of the barbarians’ campgrounds disappeared. If they followed the turn of the sandbar and walked another two to two and a half miles, they found themselves at such a remove, in such an uninhabited world, as was impossible to imagine . . .

On the second Saturday of their stay on the estuary, the pain of their sunburns having already subsided, they made their way to the very middle of the sandbar, where the remains of some indeterminate stone structure were still preserved. Likely the winter waves reached these ruins, but the vacationers did not, which meant that there were no broken bottles and no tin cans among the roots of the pathetic bushes that had sprouted under the cover of the heaped-up stones . . . They walked over toward the ruins and caught sight of a tent made out of a white sheet strung in seclusion among the rocks: there were several young men inside the tent.

“It’s the musicians from the club.” Tossing a quick glance in their direction, Tanya recognized them immediately.

“What club?” Nanny Goat wondered.

“The sailors’ club, where our Mama Zina . . .”

“I hadn’t paid any attention to them. Tanya, you have an incredible visual memory. How did you remember them?” Nanny Goat continued to be amazed.

The pianist, the eldest of them, thick-nosed and hairy-legged, waved cordially.

“Welcome, ladies, welcome!” he shouted in English.

Everyone called him Garik, but his real name was something Armenian and difficult to pronounce, and whenever he drank his first shot of whatever, he immediately switched to English, which he knew in the particular context of jazz—exclusively by way of musical terminology and classical blues lyrics. Jazz musicians at the time were totally insane, but until today there had been none in Tanya’s circle of friends. The saxophonist sat almost with his back to them, but Tanya recognized him by his light straight hair of a length considered in those days a challenge to the social order. He looked around, looked at Tanya, and she immediately seized her stomach: the child kicked about with unusual force.

“What’s with you?” Tanya asked him. He kicked about another time, and then fell quiet. Everything’s all right.

Tanya and Nanny Goat were still trying to decide whether they should turn in their direction or pretend that they were going somewhere else, but Misha had already run up to the musicians and declared: “You’re sitting in our spot. We always sit . . .”

So they did not walk on, but stopped . . . The forty feet between Tanya and the saxophonist passed as if in slow motion: he raised a slow hand to his temple, and a lock of long hair shifted in a protracted agonizing movement. He touched his hair, stopped, slowly turned his neck, smiled with the corners of his mouth, which flowed upward, revealing his large upper teeth and the small lower ones that resembled a young puppy’s. It all happened in enlarged close up. He smiled at Tanya, and he looked at her with the same slow gaze, and Tanya already then, it seems, had guessed that at that moment her fate was being decided.

The musicians were drunk, but within reason. In the evening they were supposed to play at the local resort hotel and were observing their work regimen. They had been playing together for half a year already, and they knew perfectly well how much wine would improve the music, and when it became destructive. The drummer started making moves on Tanya. Tanya couldn’t take her eyes off the saxophonist. At six o’clock, when the sun’s heat had abated, they set off together in the direction of the resort hotel. The guys had left their car at the entrance. Nanny Goat and Misha headed home to eat supper. Tanya squeezed into the back seat and went off with the musicians. She liked Sergei something awful. Like no one and never before.

The concert went off with great success. After the concert people danced for a long while to tape-recorded music. All the musicians got very drunk. Sergei did not dance. They sat behind the do-it-yourself stage and kissed till stupefaction, until he said that there was a room reserved for him but he didn’t remember the number. The key, though, just happened to have attached to it an oilcloth ticket with a violet number 16 penned on it.