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 yield 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 . . .
Pavel Alekseevich had been summoned in the middle of the night by his assistant, Valentina Ivanovna. She was a fine surgeon and knew that he trusted her entirely, but this case was special—for reasons she herself could not explain. She sent for him, woke him up, and asked him to come. When he entered the operating room, hands scrubbed for the operation and suspended in the air, her scalpel had just begun its incision into the pretreated skin.
He stood behind Valentina Ivanovna. His special vision switched on by itself, and he saw not just the surgical area Valentina Ivanovna worked on, but the female body in its entirety—a spinal structure of rare proportions and fineness, a narrow thorax with slight ribs, a diaphragm set slightly higher than usual, and a slowly contracting heart illuminated by a pale-green transparent flame that throbbed along with the muscle.
It was a strange sensation no one could have understood and he could not have explained: the body he saw was one he already knew well. Even the shadow along the top of the right lung—the vestige of juvenile tuberculosis—seemed as dear and familiar to him as the outline of the old spot on the wallpaper near the head of the bed one falls asleep in every night.
Looking at the face of this young woman who was so perfectly structured internally was somehow awkward, but he nonetheless cast a quick glance over the white sheet that covered her to the chin. He noticed her narrow nostrils and long brown eyebrows with a fluffy brush at their base. And her chalky pallor. But his sense of discomfort scrutinizing her face was so strong that he lowered his eyes to where the undulating form of her nacreous intestines should be. The worm-shaped pouch had burst, streaming pus into the intestinal cavity. Peritonitis. That was what Valentina Ivanovna saw as well.
A languid yellowish-pink flame that existed only in his vision and seemed slightly warm to the touch and gave off a rare flowerlike smell illuminated the woman from below and was, in essence, a part of her.
He also could see how fragile her coxofemoral joints were, the result of an insufficiently globular femoral head. Actually, quite close to dislocation. And her pelvis was so narrow that childbirth would likely strain or rupture the symphysis pubis. No, the uterus was mature and had given birth. Once, at least, she had managed . . . Suppuration was already enveloping both strands of her ovaries and her dark stressed uterus. Her heartbeat was weak but steady, while that uterus emitted disaster. Pavel Alekseevich had known for a long time that different organs can have different sensations . . . But how could you say something like that aloud?
Well, no more childbirth for you . . . He had yet even to imagine who exactly might give the woman dying right before his eyes cause to give birth. He shook his head, driving the haunting images from his mind. Valentina Ivanovna had resected the large intestine and reached the worm-shaped pouch. Pus was everywhere . . .
“Clean it all out . . . Remove everything . . .”
They had to hurry. “Damned profession,” Pavel Alekseevich thought before taking the instruments from Valentina Ivanovna’s hands.
Pavel Alekseevich knew that Ganichev, the head of the military hospital, had several bottles of American penicillin. A thief and a crook, he nonetheless was obligated to Pavel Alekseevich . . . But would he give it to him?
3
THE FIRST FEW DAYS—WHEN ELENA WAS NO LONGER dying but also not entirely alive—Pavel Alekseevich looked in on her in her screened-off corner of the ward and himself administered the injections of penicillin intended for wounded soldiers and twice stolen from them. She had not yet regained consciousness. She was in a place inhabited by talking half-people, half-plants engaged in an involved plot in which she figured as a, if not the, central character. Carefully laid out on a huge white cloth, she felt as if she herself were part of the cloth, with careful hands doing something to the cloth that felt like embroidering; whatever was going on, she felt the prick of tiny needles, and those pricks were pleasant.
Besides these caring embroiderers, there were others—villains, Germans even, it seemed, in Gestapo uniforms—who wanted not just for her to die, but something larger and worse than death. At the same time, something suggested to Elena that all this was a bit illusory, a kind of half-deception—that soon someone would come and reveal the truth to her. Over all, she surmised, everything going on around her had some relation to her life and death, yet beyond that there was something else awaiting her, something much more important and connected with the revelation of that ultimate truth, which was more important than life itself.
Once she overheard a conversation. A deep male voice addressed someone and asked for the biochemistry. An elderly female voice refused. Elena imagined the biochemistry as a big glass box with little clinking colored tubes that were somehow mysteriously connected to the mountainous landscape where everything was taking place . . .
Then the landscape and the little colored tubes and the illusory beings suddenly disappeared, and she felt someone tapping her on the wrist. She opened her eyes. The light was so crude and harsh it made her squint. A man with a face that seemed familiar smiled at her.