The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel Read online

  The Kukotsky Enigma

  The Kukotsky Enigma

  A Novel

  Ludmila Ulitskaya

  TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY DIANE NEMEC IGNASHEV

  Northwestern University Press

  Evanston, Illinois

  Northwestern University Press

  www.nupress.northwestern.edu

  English translation copyright © 2016 by Diane Nemec Ignashev. Published 2016 by Northwestern University Press. Originally published in Russian as The Kukotsky Case (Казус Кукоцкого), copyright © 2001 by Ludmila Ulitskaya. Published by arrangement with ELKOST International Literary Agency. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Uli͡tska͡ia, L͡iudmila, author. | Nemec Ignashev, Diane, 1951– translator.

  Title: The Kuko͡tsky enigma : a novel / Ludmila Ulitskaya ; translated from the Russian by Diane Nemec Ignashev.

  Other titles: Kazus Kukotskogo. English

  Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016007590| ISBN 9780810133488 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810133495 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Gynecologists—Soviet Union—Fiction. | Abortion—Government policy—Soviet Union—Fiction. | Families—Soviet Union—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PG3489.2.L58 K3913 2016 | DDC 891.735—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016007590

  A note to the reader: This e-book has been produced to offer maximum consistency across all supported e-readers. However, ereading technologies vary, and text display can also change dramatically depending on user choices. Therefore, you occasionally may encounter small discrepancies from the print edition, especially with respect to indents, fonts, symbols, and line breaks. Furthermore, some features of the print edition, such as photographs, may be missing due to permissions restrictions.

  Truth is on the side of death.

  —Simone Weil

  Contents

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Translator’s Afterword

  Part One

  1

  SINCE THE END OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ALL OF Pavel Alekseevich Kukotsky’s male ancestors on his father’s side had been physicians. The name of the first of them, Avdei Fedorovich, appears in a letter written in 1698 by Peter the Great to the city of Utrecht to a certain Professor Ruysch whose lectures on anatomy the Russian emperor had attended incognito as Piotr Mikhailov the year before. In his letter the young emperor requests that the professor take on as his student the son of an apothecary’s assistant, Avdei Kukotsky. How the surname Kukotsky originated cannot be established with certainty, but according to family legend, the ancestral Avdei had come from the area in Moscow known as “Kukui” where Peter I had built the German Quarter.

  Since that time the Kukotsky surname has appeared repeatedly in decrees of state honors; it also can be found in the enrollment records of schools established in Russia following the Decree of 1714. By entering government service upon graduation from these new schools, the “low-born” gained entry to the nobility. After the Table of Ranks was introduced, the Kukotskys’ meritorious service earned them membership in the “superior senior nobility with all privileges and advantages.” A Kukotsky figures among the students of Dr. Johann Erasmus of Strasbourg, the first Western doctor in Russia to teach, among other medical disciplines, “the midwyf’s art.”

  Since childhood, Pavel had held a secret fascination for the order of all things living. Sometimes—usually in the uncertain, unclaimed moments that occurred just before dinner—he managed to slip undetected into his father’s study, where, breathless with anticipation, he pulled from the middle shelf of the barrister bookcases with their heavy glass drop-fronts three treasured volumes of the Platen Handbook of Hygienic Rules of Life (the most well-known medical reference book at the time) and settled on the floor with them in a cozy corner between the tiled stove and the bookcase. The supplements to the volumes included cardboard paper-doll figures of a rosy-cheeked man with black whiskers and a comely but quite pregnant woman with a flap-like womb that opened up to reveal a fetus. Likely, it was precisely because of this figure, which for most people—no denying it—was just a naked lady, that little Pavel kept his studies secret from his family for fear of being caught doing something wrong.

  Just as little girls tirelessly dress their dolls, so Pavel spent hours assembling and disassembling the cardboard models of the humans and their various organs. Flap by flap the cardboard people shed their outer layer of skin, then their healthy rosy muscles, to reveal a removable liver, lungs that dangled from the pliant trunk of the trachea, and, finally, the bared skeleton, tinted dark yellow and seemingly completely lifeless. It was as if death were always lurking inside the human body, hidden from view by living flesh: Pavel would have cause to ponder this much later.

  One day, Pavel’s father, Aleksei Gavrilovich, found his son there, between the stove and the bookcase. The boy expected to get his ears boxed, but his father, looking down from his great height, merely harrumphed and promised to bring his son something better.

  A few days later his father really did give him something better—Leonardo da Vinci’s Dell Anatomia, Folio A, eighteen sheets with two hundred forty-five drawings, published by Sabashnikov in Turin at the end of the nineteenth century. The volume—one of only three hundred hand-numbered copies—was more splendid than anything Pavel had seen before. Inside was an inscription by the publisher: Aleksei Gavrilovich had performed an operation on some member of the Sabashnikov household …

  Placing the book in the hands of his ten-year-old son, Kukotsky senior advised: “Look here … Leonardo was the premier anatomist of his time. No one drew anatomical specimens better than he did.”

  Kukotsky senior said something else, but Pavel no longer heard him. The book had opened up before him as if with a bright light that flooded his vision. The perfection of each drawing was magnified by the inconceivable perfection of the object depicted, be it an arm, a leg, or the pisciform tibialis anterior muscle, which Leonardo referred to lovingly as “the fish.”

  “Down here you’ll find books on natural history, zoology, and comparative anatomy.” Aleksei Gavrilovich directed his son’s attention to the shelves below. “You can come here and read.”

  PAVEL SPENT THE HAPPIEST HOURS OF HIS CHILDHOOD and adolescence in his father’s study delighting at the incredible articulation of bones in the multisequential processes of pronation and supination, and thrilled almost to tears by the chart illustrating the evolution of the circulatory system—from the earthworm’s simple vessel with its thin threads of muscle fiber to the triple-beat miracle of the four-chambered human heart, by comparison with which a perpetual motion machine was remedial arithmetic. Indeed, for the boy the world itself seemed like one enormous perpetual motion machine that ran on its own resources, charged by the pulsating movement of living to dead, and dead to living.

  After little Pavel’s father gave him a small brass microscope with fifty-power magnification, anything that could not be mounted on a glass slide ceased to be of interest. In the world beyond the field of his microscope he noticed only that which corresponded to the amazing pictures observable under his lens. For example, the pattern on the tablecloth caught his eye for its resemblance to the structure of skeletal muscle …

  “You know, Eva,” Aleksei Gavrilovich said to his wife, “I am afraid Pavlik will become a physician, but he has too good a head for that. He ought to go into research …”

  Aleksei Gavrilovich himself had spent his entire life bearing the double bur
dens of teaching and clinical work: as head of the Department of Field Surgery, he continued to perform operations. In the short interval between the two wars—Russo-Japanese and the war with Germany—he labored as if possessed to create a modern school of field surgery, while attempting simultaneously to direct the attention of the Ministry of War to the obvious (for him) fact that the impending war would alter the nature of war in general and that the incipient century would witness wars of a new scale with new weapons and demanding new military medical practices. According to Aleksei Gavrilovich, the system of field hospitals needed a complete overhaul, with priority given to rapid evacuation of the wounded and the creation of centrally directed specialized hospitals …

  The war with Germany began earlier than Aleksei Gavrilovich had anticipated. And so he departed, as they said in those days, for the theater of war. He was appointed chief of the very same commission he had lobbied for in peacetime, and now he found himself torn in all directions, because the stream of wounded was enormous while the system of specialized hospitals he had devised remained merely a plan on paper: he had not had enough time to surmount bureaucratic barriers before the war began.

  Following a fierce clash with the Minister of War, he resigned his commission, maintaining responsibility solely for the mobile hospitals. Set up in Pullman coaches, these operating rooms on wheels retreated through Galicia and Ukraine along with the debilitated army. In early 1917 an artillery shell struck one of the mobile operating rooms, and Aleksei Gavrilovich perished along with his patient and a nurse.

  That same year Pavel matriculated to the medical faculty of Moscow University. The next year he was expelled, due to his father having been no less than a colonel in the tsar’s army. A year later, at the behest of Professor Kalintsev, his father’s old friend and head of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, he was reinstated as a student. Kalintsev admitted him to his own department and took him under his wing.

  Pavel pursued his studies with the same passion with which a gambler gambles and a drunkard drinks. His obsession with learning earned him the reputation of an eccentric. Unlike his mother, a spoiled and capricious woman, he hardly noticed material hardship. After his father’s death there seemed to be nothing else to lose.

  In early 1920 the Kukotskys’ living space was “consolidated”: three more families were moved into their apartment, leaving only the former study to widow and son. The university professoriate, surviving the best it could under the new regime, could do nothing to help. They too had been reduced to tight quarters, and the scare of the revolution had not passed: the Bolsheviks had already demonstrated that the human life these putrefied intellectuals fought to preserve was not worth a kopeck.

  Eva Kazimirovna, Pavel’s mother, had an attachment to material things and a knack for keeping them. She managed to stuff almost all her Warsaw furniture, dishes, and clothing into the study. His father’s venerable office, once spacious and orderly, turned into a warehouse, and no matter how Pavel pleaded with her to dispose of the clutter, his mother only cried and shook her head: this was all that remained of her former life. Ultimately, though, she was forced to sell, and gradually she bartered away her things at the street market, shedding tears of farewell over every item from her countless trunks of shoes, collars, and handkerchiefs …

  Relations between mother and son cooled, then soured, and one year later, when his mother married the indecently young Filipp Ivanovich Levshin, a petty railroad bureaucrat, Pavel left home, reserving the right to use his father’s library.

  He managed only rarely, though, to make his way over to his mother’s place. At the same time he attended classes, he worked at a clinic where he spent long hours on duty, sleeping where he could, usually in the linen room, with the permission of the old linen-lady, who remembered not only Pavel’s father but his grandfather as well …

  He had already turned twenty-one when his mother gave birth to a new child. Her adult son only underscored her age, which aggravated the mutton-dressed-as-lamb Eva Kazimirovna. She let Pavel know that his presence at home was not desirable.

  At that point relations between Pavel and his mother ceased.

  After a while the Medical Faculty was made independent of the University, and appointments were reshuffled. Professor Kalintsev died and was replaced by another man, appointed by the party, with no reputation whatsoever as a scientist. Oddly enough, he supported Pavel and allowed him to remain in the department for his residency. In medical circles the Kukotsky name was no less well known than Pirogov or Botkin.

  Pavel’s first research project focused on certain vascular disorders that caused miscarriages in the fifth month of pregnancy. The disorder affected microcapillary functions, which interested Pavel because at the time he was fixated on the question of how to influence processes in the peripheral regions of the circulatory and nervous systems, which he considered more tractable than higher-order functions. Like all residents, in addition to his hours at the clinic Pavel did rounds in the lying-in hospital and saw patients twice a week at the clinic.

  Precisely that same year, while examining a female outpatient who suffered from systematic miscarriages in the fourth and fifth months of pregnancy, he realized that he could see a tumor in her stomach as well as metastases—one quite visible in her liver and a second, less conspicuous, in the mediastinum. He completed his examination of the patient as if all were normal, but referred her to a surgeon. Afterward he sat for a long time in his office before summoning his next patient, trying to make sense of what had happened and where that full-color schematic image of fully developed cancer had come from …

  That day Pavel Alekseevich discovered his strange but useful gift. To himself he referred to it as “intravision,” and during the first few years he made cautious inquiries to determine whether any of his colleagues possessed a similar capacity, but found no traces thereof.

  Over the years his inner vision strengthened, intensified, and acquired a high image resolution. In some cases he even saw cell structures, tinted, so it seemed, with Ehrlich’s hematoxylin. Malignancies had a deep purple tint; areas of active proliferation flickered with tiny crimson granules … Embryos in the earliest stages of gestation appeared to him as shining light-blue clouds …

  There were days and weeks when his intravision would recede. Pavel Alekseevich continued working, seeing patients, and performing operations. His confidence in his professional qualifications never abandoned him, but deep inside he felt a subtle anxiety. The young doctor was, it goes without saying, a materialist with no tolerance for mysticism. He and his father had always made fun of his mother’s proclivity for attending high society séances with magical table-spinning or dabbling in mystical magnetism.

  Pavel Alekseevich regarded his gift as if it were a living thing separate from himself. He did not trouble himself with the mystical aspect of this phenomenon, but accepted it as a useful professional tool. Gradually it became apparent that his gift was an ascetic and a misogynist. Even too hearty a breakfast might weaken his intravision, and Pavel Alekseevich acquired the habit of going without breakfast, not eating until lunchtime or—when he had afternoon hours at the clinic—in the evening. Physical contact with women temporarily deactivated the slightest transparency of his patients.

  He was a good diagnostician, and in his practice of medicine had no need to resort to such unorthodox support, but his research seemed to beg for assistance: the hidden workings of capillaries held secrets ready to reveal themselves at any moment … It turned out, though, that Pavel’s personal life got in the way of his research. So, after breaking up with his on-again off-again heartthrob—a surgical nurse with cold, precise hands—he gently avoided intimacy, was slightly daunted by female aggressiveness, and accustomed himself to abstention. Like anything one does by choice, this was not a particularly onerous trial for him. From time to time he would take a liking to a cute little nurse or young female doctor, and he knew perfectly well that each and any one of them would yie
ld to him at his first beck, but his intravision meant more to him.

  Guarding his voluntary chastity was a challenge: he was single, wealthy by the beggarly standards of the time, well known in his field, and maybe not handsome but manly and quite attractive, and for all these reasons—only one of which would have sufficed—every woman who caught his slightly interested gaze would launch such an onslaught that Pavel Alekseevich barely was able to escape.

  Some of his female colleagues even suspected that he was hiding a certain masculine defect, which they linked to his profession: what inclinations could a man have if his professional duties dictated that he spend each day groping with sensitive fingers the intimate darkness of womanhood …

  2

  BESIDES THEIR HEREDITARY COMMITMENT TO MEDICINE, the men of the Kukotsky family shared another peculiar trait: they took their wives as if they were spoils of war. His great-grandfather had married a captured Turkish woman; his grandfather—a Circassian; and his father—a Polish woman. According to family legend, all these women were exquisite beauties. The addition of foreign blood did little, though, to alter the hereditary looks of these big men with their high cheekbones and premature baldness. An engraved portrait of Avdei Fedorovich by an obviously German-trained anonymous artist, treasured to this day by Pavel Alekseevich’s descendants, testifies to the power of their blood as the conduit over the centuries of the family’s traits.

  Pavel Alekseevich Kukotsky also had a wartime marriage—hasty and unexpected. Although his wife Elena Georgievna was neither a captive nor a hostage, he first saw her—in November 1942 in the small Siberian town (of V) where the clinic he headed had been evacuated—on an operating table, her condition such that Pavel Alekseevich realized fully that the fate of this woman, whose face he had not yet seen, lay beyond his powers. She had been brought in by ambulance, late. Very late …