The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

20

IN LENINGRAD LIFE SEEMED TO TANYA TO BE MORE PEDIgreed, with interesting roots, and somehow better accoutered in all respects—the streets, and things, and people had more substance to them, was that it? The past peeked out from under every bush, and you had to be a complete numbskull, like dear Tolya Aleksandrov, to put a hot frying pan on a wood mosaic table and never once in twenty years wonder to whom the table had belonged before. It had belonged to Zinaida Gippius, who had lived in precisely this room, having moved in as a young girl with her young husband. The city was a marvel of perpetual history, but the scars of the frying pan were also visible everywhere, which occasionally invoked a certain melancholy. There was no time, however, for melancholy: their little child did not allow it. Morning and daytime life were filled with things to be done, their bohemian, artistic life ensuing in the evening. They hired Aunt Shura, who for not very much money agreed to babysit Zhenya in the evenings and sometimes through the night. Tanya and Sergei dashed to friends’ or to the cafés—no small number of which had cropped up in those days—drinking, smoking, and dancing. From time to time Sergei would perform. Their trio had not only not broken up, but, just the opposite, was becoming more and more well known in the world of the city’s younger generation, but—it goes without saying—that fame was of the half-underground, private variety.

During her second Petersburg winter Tanya began to experience a wearying drowsiness and sluggishness, which she battled unsuccessfully, sleeping with little Zhenya up to twelve hours a day between December and February. But when winter’s gloom began to recede a bit, she set herself into calculated motion, and already in February managed to lease a rather decently equipped workshop. There she planned to begin making strange jewelry from wire and cheap Siberian stones that a geologist friend brought from the Urals.

Tanya’s daughter was blessed with a marvelous disposition, amused herself, never got bored, and it was enough to put a toy, a spoon, or a piece of string in her hands for her to spend hours of total delight investigating it, gnawing at it with her fresh tooth, sticking it in her pocket, spinning it, and deriving from it masses of interest. Sergei came to love the little girl in the most natural of ways, just as Pavel Alekseevich had once come to love Tanya, so that few of their friends knew that the little girl was hardly Sergei’s daughter or Tanya—his wife. The couple did not bother with the issue of matrimony. Technically, neither of them was officially free: Sergei was married to Poluektova, and Tanya was married to Goldberg. The only problem that could possibly arise was that Tanya lacked a residence permit, which was required to get a job or to have access to health care. But Tanya had no intention of getting an office job and was completely healthy. Were anything to happen to her little daughter, she would immediately jump on a train and the next morning place the sick child in the best hands on earth . . . But nothing of the sort happened, not even a cold.

Tanya rose early, like a working woman, fed Zhenya, dressed her in her little fur coat, hat, and the stuffing underneath that one was supposed to put on children in those days before down snowsuits and hygroscopic diapers had been invented, and, with the heavy bundle loaded into her carriage, traveled—no matter what the weather—from the south mainland bank of the Neva to the checkered Petrogradsky district, where she had managed to lease a studio on the west bank of the Nevka, right next to the house of the artist Mikhail Matiushin, of whom, at the time, she knew absolutely nothing, although she quickly sensed the bizarre springs of avant-gardism that poked through the local decaying bogs.

The route from home to the workshop took at least an hour, which made for a good walk, after which Zhenya slept for an hour in her carriage, which had become a tight fit. Tanya constructed large, deliberately crude jewelry pieces with black jet and smoky quartz, which she intended to make fashionable on the Neva’s left bank among her pretentious contemporaries, lovers of Petersburg jazz. Since childhood she had been aware of a special quality she had: when she put something on, all of her classmates immediately imitated her . . . For that reason, the first thing she needed to do now was to drape herself with as much of her own handmade beauty as possible, hang out, and wait for customers.

At lunchtime Sergei would arrive, having taken care of his morning responsibilities—walking the dogs and communing with his saxophone. He brought food from a takeout store and kefir for little Zhenka. Although she was more than a year old, she loved baby food and obviously preferred liquids to solids. Tanya set the teakettle on the electric hot plate, and Sergei steeped tea. Opinion was that he did that better than anyone else. They ate student-style. Like a true Petersburger he referred to white bread as buns and was careful not to waste food: the blockade had left its mark, although he, a sickly little boy, had been evacuated that year over the ice . . .

Afterward he either left to hang out with the guys, to practice, or just shoot the breeze and drink, or they spent the rest of the day together until evening. When he stayed, he would lie down on the filthy couch and play with Zhenya.

Their dinners together concluded with after-dinner games, considered harmful from the point of view of digestion. He would hoist the little girl dancing in his arms into the air, trying to catch the rhythm of her movements and tooting intermittently with his lips, while Tanya pounded out her own working beat with her mallet—metal against metal. Sergei delighted in how rhythmically conceptualized their existence was—filled through and through with musical meaning, while they themselves formed a kind of cool trio with a bass line, a lead, and a sub-lead, just as in a jazz ensemble, and even their acoustic space was divided into distinct niches, like the three melodic voices in New Orleans Dixieland . . .

“We’re having a terrific jam session,” Sergei said to Tanya, who, beating out another cascade of blows, objected.

“No, we have a marvelous family music box.”

“Are you kidding? Music boxes make dead music . . .”

“You’re right, you’re right,” Tanya agreed instantly.

They did not reflect on their happiness, just as the blissful pair in the never-ending Summer Garden had not a care for their daily bread, their health, or their bank accounts. Even the question of where to live did not faze them: they were living for free in a pricey bourgeois apartment in exchange for services rendered to their hostess, also for free—feeding and walking the two stupid, handsome borzois. This was work, but Sergei was used to it, knew where to buy bones, what kind of meat to add, and who to get vitamins from. Two enormous pots never left the stove top, and there were times when Tanya and Sergei served themselves from the dogs’ pots, adding salt to taste.

Of course, this improbable idyll was not without problems. For example, the climate. It was cold. Or, for example, where to buy a bottle of vodka at night? From a taxi driver? Go all the way out to the airport? And there was the political order, which was disagreeable and at times downright dangerous. On the other hand, politics was everywhere, and where there was no politics there were either mountain precipices or wild beasts and venomous snakes. And other inconveniences . . .

Everyone had it bad, while for these kids, in the 1960s, life was a wonderful time.

That is difficult to believe—convincing evidence is required, a survey of eyewitnesses, the testimony of onlookers. Over the many years since, a lot has been erased from memory, and each remembers his own: Goldberg—the insides of the camp; Pavel Alekseevich—Elena in her strange transitional state as she slowly departed the world of living people; Toma—long lines for food that she had to stand in despite the food rations PA brought home from work. Others remembered the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Searches and arrests. The underground. Gagarin’s launch into space. Radio-buzz and tele-pandemonium. Memories of how closed-in life was, of fear dissolved in the air like sugar in tea.

But these kids at play had a wonderful time. In their frivolity they lived without day-to-day fear, taking fright instead only for minutes at a time. Then, shrugging off their fears, they took up their redemptive music, which not just made them free, but was free in itself. This was where the invisible divide existed between Sergei and his parents. This was the very thing that had jarred the two of them—Sergei’s Marxist-Leninist father and the father’s musician hooligan son—apart. They were like sulfuric acid for each other . . . The child’s attachment and the parent’s love hissed and went up in acrid smoke, leaving neither pity nor empathy in the burnt-out hole . . .

Sergei and his parents had cut each other off long ago. His father referred to his son as none other than a bum and a renegade. His mother could not forgive her son’s betrayal, although she was unable to explain whose faith he had violated with whom. Funny, but it couldn’t have been with music! From Sergei’s neighborhood friends his mother learned that he had a daughter. She yearned for reconciliation but, fearing her husband, lacked the courage to take the first step. Sergei’s disgust with his parents was stronger than hatred. He had not seen them for eight years already, since his grandmother’s death, having left home as soon as he finished school.

“There is nothing human in them. Everything that they think and say and do is one big lie. Nothing human.” Talking about them wrenched his guts.

His mother sent Sergei’s former classmate—Nina Kostikova, one of the neighborhood girls who had had a crush on him since first grade—to visit him. She had a mission: to set up a family reunion.

“What’s the big deal?” Nina petitioned on Sergei’s mother’s behalf. “You could show them Zhenya.”

“Tell her that the kid isn’t mine, and she’ll calm down.” He took the baby in his arms, pressed her little forehead to his own, and cooed “ooh-ooh-ooh.” Zhenya jumped with joy. “Tell her that someone dropped her on my doorstep. In her mother’s lap.” He chuckled as if he were being God knows how witty.

Tanya arched her brow. “So what’s wrong with my lap? All right, next time I’ll deliver the kid right into your arms . . .”

She had not forgotten about a new child. Several times it had seemed to her that she was pregnant, but each time she was mistaken. She loved her little daughter very much, but she wanted a little boy, and this desire had a strange persistence, as if she were obliged to give birth to a boy for the sake of some unknown higher goals. From the vantage of their everyday existence a second child would be insanity. But the first one had not been any less so. They were completely bereft of so-called material resources. Although money came in from Sergei’s performances, and Pavel Alekseevich, who came to visit his children once every six weeks or so, also always left them money. This weighed slightly on Tanya, but she hoped that soon she herself would begin earning money. However, both of them—Sergei and Tanya—ruled out as an option the sweaty servitude of working for someone else, figuring that money for their livelihood should come about of its own, in the process of their free play . . .

In the meantime Tanya had become increasingly more engrossed in music. She even got herself a recorder and conversed with it occasionally, on the sly from Seryozha. The instrument was poor, but the sound was touching and childish . . . Tanya did not miss a single one of the performances of Sergei’s trio and went with him to hear other jazz groups, of which no small number had formed in Piter at the time. There were not that many truly worthwhile musicians: you could count them on one hand. Sergei’s idol at the time was Germann Lukianov, a Muscovite with conservatory training, of a different social breed entirely—a snob in black tails who played multiple instruments (at the time, principally the flügelhorn), and was an interesting composer as well. Later Sergei became disenchanted with him and got hooked on Vladimir Chekasin . . . But in general everyone was mad over Coltrane and Coleman. Each new album was a celebration; Sergei even celebrated the anniversary of the first time he had heard each album. He and Garik sucked every note dry and discussed every turn, every chord progression, every rhythmical shift, every tempo change, and the asymmetrical phrasing. Though Tanya far preferred listening to live music rather than these hours-long analyses, she completely understood what they were talking about: though it was not extensive, she did have musical training.

The most fortunate of their circumstances was the complete confluence of the components of their lives, which usually only somehow coexist, sometimes pulling a person in different directions. Tanya’s love, family, creative, and routine household interests all flowed in a single line, her everyday life lived “musically,” by the same laws as a musical composition—a symphony, for example—was organized. The analogy amused her, and early in the morning when Sergei was still asleep and Zhenya was already cooing in her crib, she would give herself over to a sonata-like allegro, a dual-themed harmony in which the first theme, Sergei’s, was initially stronger and more voluminous, then subsided and conceded to the child’s line, which was burbling and joyful. She caught the andante on the dark street, pushing the carriage ahead of her, and its tripartite form corresponded to the geography of the streets, with the last part, so to speak, the most indistinct, beginning at the Petrogradskaya embankment.

At her workshop the music initially stopped: she undressed her daughter, fed her water from a bottle, sat her on her pot, and tucked her back into her carriage for a nap before lunch. After that Tanya smoked her first cigarette of the day and went to her workbench. Here she was overtaken by the scherzo, which amused and lightly urged her on, rushing her as she lived for the finale, which led to the rondo, where the coda arose, a tender coupling of the morning’s theme connected to the sleeping Sergei, who would arrive toward lunchtime. A ring of the doorbell, and a very sweet recapitulation: AEACADAE.

In spring the music season began. Tanya wanted to go with Sergei to the jazz festival in Dnepropetrovsk and then to Crimea. Toward the end of the winter two or three of the Petersburg jazz clubs started to get boring, and the trio’s relationship with one of them, The Square, soured. Sergei did not suffer from ambition, was easy going and friendly, but Garik would periodically get into some stupid conflict with one of the city’s jazz elders, first with Goloukhin, then with Lisovsky. Tanya, by that time already familiar to a certain extent with the ins and outs of jazz life and having made the acquaintance of many musicians, thought that Sergei should leave Garik. They played great together, but Garik never gave Sergei the amount of freedom he had grown to deserve. Sergei did more and more composing. Garik looked down his nose at these exercises and made light of them, but once, when they had been drinking, he said sternly and unambiguously: “As long as you’re playing for me, we’re playing my music . . .”

Sergei was bitter. Tanya—all the more. It even seemed to her that the moment had arrived for her to get involved and direct the situation a bit. In the winter Sergei had been invited to play with Dixieland. Why not play with someone else? Garik wasn’t the only show in town . . . She called her father and asked whether he was still burning with desire to take Zhenya for the summer. If so, the two of them would come and live for a while in Moscow so that she got used to everyone . . .

In the middle of May Pavel Alekseevich met Tanya and Zhenya at the Leningrad train station. He neatly finished off all of his duties at work by the end of the month. Now he wanted only one thing: to stay at their dacha with his granddaughter, feed her porridge in the morning, take her for walks, try to figure out her incoherent words and first thoughts. The women in his family were all falling apart: Elena got up from her armchair only unwillingly, Vasilisa had become decrepit, and her vision, despite the successful operation, was very weak. Toma helped him as much as she could, but her evening studies took a lot of her time, and Pavel Alekseevich could only quietly wonder why precisely Toma, with her very average abilities, banged her head so zealously against the sciences, while Tanya sat in a half-basement, molding something with her skilled hands, while her wonderfully organized head went completely unused.

His granddaughter, whom he had visited in March, had not forgotten him and stretched out her little hand and turned her check for him to kiss. He kissed her creamy skin and was filled with hot air, like an aerostat . . .

Tanya spent a week living at home. She did a deep cleaning of the place, digging out all the corners. She washed the windows. She was very tender with Vasilisa and took her to the public bathhouse: Vasilisa recognized no other form of bathing, but she was afraid to go on her own after she had slipped on the bathhouse’s stone floor. Toma rarely agreed to accompany her. In addition, Vasilisa did not recognize bathing on any day except Saturday, while Toma usually had her own plans for Saturdays. The bathhouse was not far away, on Seleznevskaya Street, and Vasilisa always brought her own basin, loofah—wherever did she get them?—smelly tar soap, and fresh change of underwear. For the first time in her life Vasilisa accepted Tanya’s help. First Tanya helped her peel off her thick coat, which was somewhat binding in the sleeves, then bent down and removed her all-weather felt boots. Nowadays she dressed year-round for the winter, just like a real old woman from the village. Vasilisa had stopped wearing shoes several years ago . . . Vasilisa grimaced and said in self-deprecation: “Well, miss, I’ve lived to see the day . . .”

Then Vasilisa herself quickly unbuttoned her flannel house robe and removed her gray patched underwear. Her nakedness was as abject as her clothing. A gray, wrinkled body, knotty long legs with inky veins and a red rash of tiny vessels, and a withered, spiderlike rib cage with a big crucifix that hung down almost to her navel. Looking at Vasilisa was discomfiting, but her vision was so poor that she did not sense Tanya’s gaze, and for all her innate prudishness Vasilisa at the bathhouse took off her inhibitions along with her clothes. Tanya noticed hanging between her legs a rosy-gray fist-sized little sack that was relatively disgusting to look at . . .

“Vasya, what’s that hanging between your legs?”

Vasilisa bent over slightly, squatted a bit, and with an awkward movement stuck the hanging little sack back inside.

“It’s my child parts, Tanechka. It ripped off. In 1930, when we were pulling a cart . . . It’s nothin’, nothin’ . . . It doesn’t get sick . . .”

Tanya sat her down on the bench, put the basin with hot water under her legs, took a bathhouse basin full of water, and started to wash her with the loofah. Vasilisa moaned a bit, and groaned, emitting various degrees of pleasure . . .

Awful, just awful . . . She worked for us all her life, carried bags, washed windows, ironed laundry with a two-ton iron . . . Reinserted her prolapsed uterus and climbed up the stepladder . . . In the house of the country’s leading gynecologist . . . Should I tell Dad? Awful, just awful . . . Standing in her rubber shower flip-flops on the slippery bathhouse floor as she scrubbed the old woman’s boney back, Tanya mumbled: “Lord, what am I supposed to do with you all? Vasenka, am I supposed to move back home . . . Why are you all grown so old . . .”

The place was noisy with voices and flowing water, and Vasilisa did not hear her.

“Enough. We’ve had our good time. Now we have to get back home,” Tanya said to herself. And she despaired at the horrible prospect of life in their old house between aging Vasilisa and her out-of-her-mind mother, with her daughter, and with Seryozha . . . The most intolerable thing was the smell of stale urine, both human and feline, of soured food, dust, grime, and dying—even after the most painstaking cleaning . . . Poor Dad, how does he bear it all? Then she remembered his chilly office and the ever-present empty bottle between the desk’s two columns of drawers . . . What if she were to have Toma quit her job and take care of the house? Then she realized immediately that she should be ashamed at the thought.

When Tanya brought steam-mellowed Vasilisa back home and sat her down next to the teakettle, her mind was made up: she was going to the dacha right now to prepare it for the summer season and make a deal with some local woman to help out with the housework, then move them all out there and leave them there till fall. In the fall, after she returned to town, she would move to Moscow. With Sergei . . . The last point was still up for question . . . But, ultimately, they could rent a room . . . And people played jazz everywhere!