The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

1

EVERY TIME ZHENYA STOPPED IN FRONT OF THE DOOR OF the apartment where she had spent her childhood she experienced the most complex of emotions: affection, anger, melancholy, and tenderness. The door was battered and chipped, the bronze plate with her deceased grandfather’s surname was tarnished. Alongside the door, to the neighbors’ aggravation, stood a broken chair piled high with sacks stuffed with Toma’s crap. It reeked of destitution and a communal apartment.

Zhenya had not had keys since they changed the old lock. It just happened that way: they hadn’t taken her key away, they just forgot to give her a new one. Zhenya asked once, but they ignored her request . . . She rang the bell. Toma hobbled down the corridor, tapping with her cane. The poor thing’s arthritis had flared up again.

“Zhenechka, is that you?”

She opened the door. And gasped. “How round you’ve got!”

Mikhail Fedorovich—smelling of Chypre aftershave, sweat, and, for some reason, old leather—peeked out of Granny’s room. “How unfair I am toward them after all,” she reproached herself. “They don’t stink on Sundays. They take baths on Saturdays.”

Zhenya’s inner smile showed slightly on her lips.

“How are you, Mikhail Fedorovich?”

All the time he had served in the army, he had always greeted his senior officers first. Now, in civilian life where there were no lieutenant colonels, he decided as he saw fit whom he was supposed to greet first—the director, the deputy director for operations (not the deputy director for research), and the head of the polyclinic he was assigned to . . .

Mikhail Fedorovich nodded with self-importance, “. . . day.” With no name. And remained standing in the doorway. Which was unusual.

Zhenya removed her shoes, bending over her stomach first from the right side, then from the left. With a sense of repugnance she put on some old, crudely stitched house slippers and set off down the corridor to Granny’s room. Toma stopped her.

“Zhen, we’ve done some rearranging. Rozina’s relatives gave us their big bookcase. It didn’t fit in there, so we had to put it in here . . . Mikhail Fedych’s collection fit perfect, so we moved Granny to Vasilisa’s room . . .”

The blood rushed to Zhenya’s head. By hook or by crook. They’d chucked Grandma out into the pantry.

“What do you mean?” Zhenya’s chin trembled with rage. Mikhail Fedorovich’s collection was mind-boggling idiocy: newspaper and magazine cuttings about aviation . . .

“What difference does it make to her? She didn’t even notice. It’s peaceful and quiet in there. We took out Vasilisa’s chest and put a table in. She can eat there too. Vasilisa, rest her soul, always ate there.”

Mikhail Fedorovich remained standing in the door of Granny’s room ready to step in at any moment.

Zhenya held back and said nothing. She went to the kitchen without even looking into the room that last week had been her granny’s and would always be Granny’s . . .

She walked through the kitchen and opened the pantry. They had not changed anything in there since Vasilisa’s death. There were the two large icons she had known since childhood, the Mother of Kazan and an Elijah the Prophet that had been either rent by a Red Army ax in times immemorial or had split from age, with a crude seam of glue running down the flying red mantle and separating it from the swarthy hand . . . So where are you now, all you helpless helpers?

Granny was sitting on a bentwood chair with a hole cut through the seat, her face toward the tiny window that looked out onto a solid brick wall. A bucket stood under the chair. The pantry smelled of urine and aged infirmity. One gray cat slept on the blanket that covered the trestle bed. Elena Georgievna held a second on her lap, her fingers with their unevenly trimmed nails lying on the cat’s striped side.

Zhenya kissed her thinning hair with the two wisps at the temples, where young Lenochka had used to stick bobby pins. The old woman stroked the cat’s side.

“Hi, Babulya. Why did you . . .” Zhenya began agonizingly, because she knew that it would be better for her to keep silent in this shameful, intolerable situation. “We’re going to take a bath now . . .”

The old woman silently stroked her on the hand. In the kitchen water was flowing and knives were chopping. Toma and her husband divided everything in half, the housework included. They peeled the four potatoes in pairs: two for him, two for her. For reasons of family fairness.

Zhenya headed for the bathroom. As she passed through the kitchen she noticed that Toma and Mikhail Fedorovich were now sorting the buckwheat—they’d finished with the potatoes.

The bathroom was, as always, beyond description. Wet laundry hung on lines. Saturday was bath day. Half the day they prepared, and half the day they washed. And then they relaxed—with tea, candies, and ginger cookies. A patriarchal family scene. Everything totally serious. On Sunday morning, before Zhenya’s arrival, the week’s laundry was done in the tiny washing machine Mikhail Fedorovich had bought for the needs of his small family. He was squeamish, and washing Granny’s nasty linen in the machine was not allowed.

Zhenya pulled a washbasin out from under the old footed bathtub. From the zinc container with the bent lid she pulled out shabby rags and pieces of sheets, all of them damp and soiled. The disposable diapers she used to buy had gone unused: Toma thought that they were synthetic, and Mikhail Fedorovich did not tolerate synthetics. Zhenya had stopped bringing anything into the apartment for Granny long ago: Toma would immediately take away anything new, saying: “Oh, Zhen, what a swell nightshirt this is: good enough to get buried in . . .”

At moments like this Zhenya did not know whom to pity more: Granny, who had shattered her own psyche so as not to notice what she could not battle, or Aunt Toma with her mousy snout and arthritis-stiff knee, happy with her marriage, proud of her past, present, and the future toward which she was making slow but steady progress. She was writing her candidate’s dissertation on the viral infections of her evergreens and considered herself the spiritual successor of her famous mentor, Pavel Alekseevich Kukotsky. That might possibly have been the case . . .

Zhenya sorted the pile on the stool-bench, where she would sit Granny for her bath. Old washbasins, one inside the other, jars, and raggedy loofahs. How close-fisted they were . . .

Turning her nose aside, she soaked Granny’s rags in the largest basin and pushed it under the bathtub. After the bath would come laundry. She cleaned out the bathtub. The faucets dripped, and water collected under the tub. Everything was shabby, but cleverly fixed to get by. Mikhail Fedorovich was a genius when it came to tying clotheslines, twisting wires, filling holes, and making patches. Wonder what he did in aviation?

At long last, everything was ready. The water was a bit hotter than needed. It would cool down while she got Granny ready. At the last minute she dripped some shampoo into the water. To make foam. Toma never used anything that Zhenya brought into the house. She and Mikhail Fedorovich did not use shampoo: they couldn’t stand anything foreign. Patriots they were. Not soap, not medicine, not clothing. Their line for everything was “ours, made in the . . .” How pathetic . . .

Zhenya lifted her grandmother from her chair.

“Let’s go, Babulya, everything’s ready.”

Elena Georgievna obediently stood up. Her back was straight, her legs thin and long, slightly bent by old age . . . Zhenya held her by her fragile shoulders and led her off. Granny walked well, but her torn house slippers with their unglued sole got in the way. Three pairs, if not more, of new ones were in Toma’s room. Oh, how grudging . . .

They went inside the bathroom. Granny pointed to the latch with her finger. Zhenya locked it. Slowly Granny undressed. She seemed to want Zhenya to help her, but resisted at the same time. She fought with the button of her robe. She had forgotten how to undo buttons. She was straining to remember. She couldn’t.

Zhenya helped her to undress.

Damn, what was Toma thinking of when she invented those idiotic elastic bands under her knees. Why couldn’t she put diapers on her, or at least put a diaper underneath her?

They undressed.

“Okay, now raise your leg. The right one. Hold on to me.”

Zhenya’s stomach was in the way. A lot in the way.

“Now the other . . .” Elena Georgievna lifted her long legs easily. Her foot was awful. The nails were covered with yellowish-gray fungus. Her bunion stuck out. How could someone who had worn only house slippers for more than twenty years have developed a bunion? Elena Georgievna stood knee-deep in water and could not figure out how to sit down. Her figure . . . Her bone structure was highly symmetrical. Her waist small, her sides angled. Her breasts were small and not at all droopy, and her nipples were fresh. Her stomach was flat, her navel hidden inside a horizontal fold. Another fold hid a scar beneath her navel. Her body was hairless, white, and completely wrinkled, like crushed cigarette paper. Her face was white too. The only hairs growing were under her chin. Zhenya used to tweeze them, but now she just cut them with scissors. There wasn’t enough time. There was too little time. She had no idea how she was going to manage when the baby was born . . . Probably, she’d have to take Granny to her place on Profsoiuznaya, as soon as Dad moved to his new apartment. In Dad’s old apartment with the two connected rooms there was room for all of them. But Toma might object . . .

“Sit down, sweetie, sit down.” Zhenya pressed her grandmother lightly on her back. Granny cautiously sat down. Zhenya directed the stream from the shower over her. Granny moaned with pleasure. Now what would happen was what had brought Zhenya here weekly for the last ten years. Ever since her grandfather had died and she had moved to her father’s.

“Thank you, my child,” Elena Georgievna said. Toma was certain that Elena Georgievna had forgotten how to talk. That wasn’t so. She knew how to talk. But only here, in the latched bathroom, when Zhenya sat her in the warm water. There was an inexplicable closeness between them. Zhenya had been raised by her grandfather. Granny had always been silently present and observed her tenderly. For as long as Zhenya could remember, her grandmother had been sick. And they had always loved each other, if love without words or actions, purely in the air and hinging on nothing else, could exist at all. Zhenya stroked her head.

“Feel good?”

“Bliss . . . Lord, what bliss . . . In Siberia we all used to go to the bathhouse together—Pavel Alekseevich, Tanechka, Vasilisa . . . With birch branches . . . There was so much snow . . . Do you remember, child?”

“Who does she take me for?” Zhenya thought. But essentially that did not make any difference. Once a week Elena Georgievna would utter several words. For but a few minutes her link with the here and now would be restored.

“Why did you move into the pantry?” Zhenya asked.

“Into the pantry? What difference does it make . . . Let it be.” Then confidentially: “Why didn’t you bring Tanechka with you?” She shuddered and seemed confused.

Zhenya suffered most at those times when she sensed that her granny was confused and bewildered. Zhenya soaped her sponge and ran it along the jagged vertebrae of her spine. How should she answer? Sometimes it seemed to Zhenya that her grandmother took her for her deceased daughter. That, probably, was what it was, because in her moments of confused speech the name Tanya would slip out addressed to her . . . But it also happened that Granny would call her “Mama . . .”

“Is the water okay? It hasn’t cooled down, has it?”

“Very good . . . Thank you, child.” She thought and added in a whisper: “Today some man shouted at me.”

“Mikhail Fedorovich? Mikhail Fedorovich shouted at you?”

“No, child, he would never allow himself to do that. Someone else was shouting.”

Zhenya pulled her head back slightly and placed her hand on her forehead.

“We’re going to wash your hair. Squeeze your eyes tight so no soap gets in.”

Elena Georgievna obediently closed her eyes.

While Zhenya washed her hair, she gathered water in the cup of her hands and poured it on her shoulders and chased it with her fingers: she was playing, just the way children play, except without the rubber ducks and the little boats . . .

Then she said unexpectedly: “Don’t be angry with Tomochka. She’s an orphan.”

Zhenya had already rinsed her hair and now pulled a plait of hair upward and stuck in a hairpin so that it would not get in the way.

“And who am I? And you? We’re all orphans. I don’t understand why she in particular needs to be felt sorry for.”

“My head is one big hole. It’s difficult,” Elena Georgievna complained.

“Mine too,” Zhenya admitted. “Yesterday I turned the whole house upside down and spent three hours looking for my documents. I couldn’t remember where I’d put them. Stand up, please. I’m going to rinse you with the shower, and then we’re done . . .”

Zhenya helped Elena Georgievna get out of the tub, wiped her dry with a bath towel that was disintegrating from age, coated her legs and her intimate creases with baby cream against diaper rash that threatened with time to turn into bedsores, dressed her in a clean nightshirt and a clean robe. She wrapped the towel into a turban, and wiping down the steamed mirror, she told her grandmother to take a look at herself.

“See how beautiful you are.”

Elena Georgievna shook her head and laughed. There in the mirror she saw a completely different picture . . .