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The child had already bent its head so that the posterior fontanel faced forward, turned it slightly, and, straightening its head, entered the pubic arch. The pain was so unbearable that Zhenya’s world went black.

The midwife slapped her, saying, “Hey, Mommy! Everything’s fine . . . Just a little bit longer,” while commenting to someone on the side, “Left occiput anterior position.”

Tears and sweat streamed over Zhenya’s face. The head tore through. He was already turning his shoulder, and the midwife, grabbing the wet, elongated head with both hands, coaxed the front shoulder forward . . .

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 . . .

4

ON THE EVENING OF THE SAME DAY VITALY SET OUT FOR the Central Telegraph: for certain reasons he did not call America from his home phone. He and his father were connected very quickly. Ilya Iosifovich picked up the receiver, heard his son’s voice—quick, businesslike, without “hello” or “how are you doing.”

“Zhenya gave birth to a son. Congratulations! You’ve got a great-grandson.” With no superfluous comments.

He did it within one minute. Then it took him twenty minutes to get through to Leningrad. He told Sergei that everything was all right. She’d had a boy, without any complications.

“Can I come to see her?” Sergei asked.

“Call Zhenya when she gets out of the maternity hospital. Figure it out with her.”

He felt no particular weakness for this long-haired musician and was even a little jealous of his relationship with Zhenya. Whatever connection they shared was completely incomprehensible . . . Sergei also did not know what connected him with this girl who had been his daughter for a few years. But he didn’t think about it. He took his instrument and began to play his old composition, “Black Stones.”

5

ILYA IOSIFOVICH HAD DECIDED LONG AGO THAT HE WOULD go to Moscow when his great-grandson was born. The visa was ready. Valentina at first was categorically against it, but then gave in—under the condition that she go along. All that was left to do was order the tickets. Their older daughter, born four months after Zhenya, had her own place. The younger one, the sixteen-year-old, brought from Russia when she was just an infant, they never left alone. She was a shy, rather strange little girl who loved cats and aquarium fish. They decided that it would be good for her to spend ten days living on her own.

There was a bit of difficulty with Valentina’s job. She taught at Harvard University and could not just up and take a vacation. But her class was over in three weeks. As for Ilya Iosifovich, he had retired long ago, and although he was an honorary member of a dozen or so various societies and editorial boards, he could pick up and leave whenever he wanted.

The last three years he had been reading the Torah in German and English, upset that his parents had not sent him to heder as a child. Learning Hebrew at eighty-six was not easy. On the other hand, he’d never been frightened by difficulties. He didn’t have and would never again have a conversation partner like Pavel Alekseevich. He spoke and even argued with him frequently in his head. Although he had to admit that a certain rapprochement was taking place between them: Ilya Iosifovich was now inclined to believe in the existence of a Universal Higher Reason and was toying with the idea that the Bible represented a grandiose encryption, that Universal Higher Reason’s cosmic message to humankind. But humankind had still not matured to the point where it could decipher this encryption. He constantly attempted to discuss questions of theology with Genka, who lived in New York, but Gena had a decided preference for all varieties of Eastern hogwash—beginning with Chinese food and ending with karate. When he found out that Zhenya had given birth to a son and his father was planning to travel to Moscow as a result, he was alarmed.

“A trip like that at your age! You’re better off sending her the money! And I’m ready to . . .”

But Ilya Iosifovich said firmly: “Don’t teach me how to live! The girl has a grandfather. I have a great-grandson. Too bad Pasha didn’t live to see the day.”

Translator’s Afterword

THE HISTORY OF THIS TRANSLATION IS WORTHY OF THE notebook of Chekhov’s Trigorin: “an idea for a short story.” But that is not what this afterword is about, or at least not entirely. I first read The Kukotsky Enigma in its debut incarnation, which was titled Journey to the Seventh Dimension (Puteshestvie v sedmuyu storonu sveta) and published in the Moscow literary journal Novy mir in 2000, its place of publication a recommendation in its own right. In 2005, along with millions of Russian television viewers, I watched Yuri Grymov’s twelve-part eponymous adaptation of the novel (on which Ludmila Ulitskaya collaborated), and my disappointment—despite the film’s talented actors and clever cinematography—was not atypical. As film adaptations often prove, there is more to a great novel than the love story at its core.

The love stories in The Kukotsky Enigma certainly deserve twelve episodes and great actors. Ulitskaya weaves wonderfully complex tales with unanticipated turns, and her storytelling has made her work popular among readers as diverse as her cast of characters. Tanya Kukotskaya’s Soviet hippie friend Nanny Goat Vika or Vasilisa’s intellectual monastic mentor, Mother Anatolia, both would have liked The Kukotsky Enigma, but for very different reasons. Certainly, the love story has attracted millions of Russian readers to this novel, now in its fifteenth printing and at the same time available free of cost online in Russian in the Russian Federation. But readers who focus on the love story alone will miss Ulitskaya’s true artistic innovation in this work.