The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

22

IN PITER, SERGEI TOLD NO ONE OF HIS ARRIVAL. HE immediately went to the workshop. He did not have keys: they were back in Odessa with Tanya’s things. He easily picked the lock. There was the same mess they had left when leaving. A coffeepot abandoned in haste stood unwashed in the sink. A mysterious flower of fungus sprouted from the teapot. Tanya’s black dress hung on a wooden hanger on the wall. Her high-heeled shoes that made her a half-head taller than him stood alongside the narrow couch, one on top of the other . . . On the eve of their departure they had gone to a party at the house of a young director who intended to invite him for some sort of vaguely enticing staging . . . Lord, and the bed wasn’t made either, the striped sheet hanging from the foot of the bed, and the only pillow, which each of them in their sleep dragged to their own side, preserved the indentation of their heads . . .

Sergei sunk his face into the pillow, and the smell scalded him. She was still here. On the white pillow lay one of her dark hairs curled in a spiral. Under the pillow lay her tiny black underpants, pushed to the side. Still dressed in his clothes he lay down on the couch and fell asleep.

He woke up after an indeterminate length of time, drank some water straight from the tap, and pissed in the sink: the toilet was on the stair landing—one for all four basement apartments—and locked. The key to the toilet hung on a nail near the entrance, but Sergei for some reason decided that it was on Tanya’s key ring in Odessa.

He lay down to sleep again, this time having undressed. Tanya’s smell intensified each time he crawled out of the bed and returned to it again. All that remained were her smell and the bunched up nylon underpants. He would keep them for an indeterminate number of days and nights. He fell asleep, then woke up. He drank water from the tap. He pissed in the sink. He had no appetite. His unfed stomach idled.

At long last he crawled out from under the blanket and sat down at Tanya’s workbench. He touched her tools and her moldings. The metal said nothing to him about Tanya. But when he opened the motley tin box with the black stones, he could not tear his eyes from them for a long time. They seemed to have preserved the touch of her hands: polished layered agate, blackish-blue magnetite, rough black nephrite, and his very favorite—the translucent obsidian . . . He selected two at random and put them in his jeans pocket. Then he grabbed his case and walked out of the workshop. The door, not fastened with a hook from inside, flapped in the doorway: the lock was broken. He turned back, found a hammer with a nail remover, and a large nail. He hammered the nail from the outside into the doorframe and with a strike of the hammer bent it so that the door seemed locked. Then he put the hammer under the doormat so that there would be something to extract the nail with when he came back. A strange thought ran through his head: but will I come back?

Poluektova—whom everyone considered a world-class shrew, but whom Sergei knew was still a human being even though she really was a bitch—had assumed that he was stuck in Moscow. Garik had called Piter from Odessa and informed everyone of Tanya’s death. He also had said that Sergei had set off for Moscow with the coffin. All of Seryozha’s friends were certain that he would remain there.

Sergei seemed to have lost the keys to Poluektova’s apartment. In any case, he rang the doorbell, not at all sure that anyone would open the door for him. The door was opened by the mistress herself in full make-up and with hair-sprayed black ballet bun at the top of her head.

“What do you want?” she asked and stopped short. She had not recognized Sergei at first. He was thin with long stubble or a patchy beard, pale and slightly jaundiced, and looking totally deranged. Gray bounded toward him to lick him on the lips . . . He stood in the door, as if he had come there unconsciously, on autopilot.

Poluektova gasped and began shouting in an ugly high-pitched voice, bombarding him with her silly prattle.

“So you couldn’t call, could you? I’m leaving today. Damn, it’s all so stupid, stupid. Don’t dare say anything. I know all about it. Anything but about that . . . I’m taking the dogs with me. That’s it. Why didn’t you call, scarecrow? I’ve rented the apartment. Maybe, I should have left it for you? Don’t dare say anything to me!”

She hugged his shoulders: her boy, her—who knew what—student, old lover, nephew, pal . . . It always happened that way with her, between genres, never anything reliable, definite, or socially upstanding . . . That is, at just that moment, it seemed as if someone like that was about to bite . . . How to avoid jinxing it? A man with no artistic inclinations whatsoever: exactly what she needed. Gremin, Gremin. An honest-to-goodness general . . .

She stroked Seryozha’s dirty, disheveled locks, which he had not pulled back with an elastic band (he’d lost it), patted him on the back, and pushed him away.

“Go take a bath. I’m making you something to eat.”

He went to the bathroom, turned on the water, which streamed sumptuously from the faucet, and realized that he had not bathed since Odessa . . . He lay down in the almost unbearably hot water and began to sob . . .

Poluektova-the-bitch called her general in Perm and in a squeaky voice most ill-suited to her mighty martial spirit, informed him of a change of plans: he did not need to meet her train; she was returning her tickets and staying on for at least a week. Her former husband, who had just been widowed, had dumped himself at her place like an avalanche, and she was going to have to take care of him, because there was no leaving him alone in this condition . . .

The Siberian general nodded into the receiver, said drily “yes, yes, yes,” and marveled at what a proper, strong, and real woman he had found himself, even if she was a ballerina with a flat hard chest and a back as muscular as a new recruit’s. He smiled and quietly relished the resuscitation occurring below his belt: never in his life had he had such a woman; he had never even thought that they existed . . .

A week was not enough for Poluektova. She cared for Sergei for almost a month, fed him food and pills, turned on his favorite music, forced him to go for walks with the dogs, and gradually he returned to himself and began to play. The very same day when, after the long hiatus, he was scheduled to perform at the club, Poluektova flew off to her gray-haired lover who, although he wasn’t quite tall enough, was in all other respects the most proper of husbands even for a prima ballerina and who, in the course of his unplanned extended wait, had reached a final decision to put an end to his drawn-out widowerhood and to marry this exceptional, outstanding woman with the past of a whore and the future of the grand dame of a region large enough to accommodate fifteen Belgiums, eight Frances, and five Germanys all at once . . .