The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

3

ELENA DOZED ON HER BENTWOOD CHAIR WITH THE humiliating hole in the seat. She dreamed a dream: one bright spring day when the buds had already opened on the trees but each separate leaf was still small, pale, and not yet its full color, she was walking down Bolshaya Bronnaya Street and turned into Trekhprudny, tilted her head back, and saw a crowd of people standing on the semicircular decorative balcony under the polycircular window of their old apartment on the top floor of the building. She wanted to look more closely to see who was standing there, and she found herself level with the balcony and even slightly above the balustrade and saw that there on a cot lay her grandfather—very old with a not entirely live face—and alongside him her grandmother, Evgenia Fedorovna, Vasilisa, her mother, her father, her young brothers, and all of them were waiting for her in order to tell her something important and joyous. In addition to her own family—the Miakotins and the Nechaevs—in the receding distance that widened like a wedge with the crowd she saw the adult bald Kukotskys with their exotic wives, Toma’s relatives from Tver, bearded Jews with a Torah at their head, and some completely unfamiliar people. What was so surprising was how many people could fit on that tiny balcony. More and more of them appeared, and suddenly, in their midst, there appeared two people—a young man who was tall with a head of thick hair, not very clean skin, and a puffy mouth, and a girl resembling Tanechka or Zhenya or Tomochka, with an infant in her arms. This couple was at the very center of this geometrically improbable composition, and Pavel Alekseevich took the infant into his arms and turned it so that it faced Elena . . . And this infant emanated light, sense, and all the joy of the world. As if in the middle of a sunny day another sun had risen . . . This infant belonged to them all, and they to it. And Elena Georgievna sobbed with perfect happiness, just a tiny bit amazed that she could sense both the salty sweetness of her tears and her total disembodiment . . .