Kogan loved his atrocious work, especially those of his dead who left at the proper time—old, weary of life, bald, having lost lush growth in armpits and crotches, their well-worn feet knobbly and calloused, their breasts and scrotums sagging. Slowly pulling on his chain-mail gloves, he looked over a petrified body, an unread book, and formed a first superficial impression, evaluating the body according to a gauge known to him alone—whether the dead man had died at his allotted time or had failed to live to the limit set him by nature. Those who lived well beyond that limit he called “the forgotten,” and he was a little worried about himself joining their number. He did not like to dissect children and young women, preferring his reliable and lawful contingent.
Shortly before their divorce, Kogan’s first wife, a gynecologist, said to him a phrase he never forgot: Only a pathological type can choose the profession of pathoanatomist. . . . Women’s foolishness. A pathoanatomist, in Kogan’s mind, was a priest of pure corporeality, the last caretaker of the temple abandoned by the soul. By contrast, his second wife, Ninochka, was a librarian and did not even know the word “autopsy.” And that was wonderful.
A careful autopsy usually took two hours. And during that time he was able to read the history of a life, as doctors read the history of an illness. Beyond the body of a feeble or slightly obese child splayed on a zinc table, his intelligent eye saw all the measles and scarlet fevers, the puberty crisis, the healed broken bones, the small traumas. . . .
In most cases he confirmed the diagnosis of what led to death, but occasionally the open book of the dead body presented unexpected subjects: here was a fifty-year-old man who died of a heart attack but had an undiagnosed last-stage tumor of the digestive tract. Or a famous actor killed in a car accident with blood vessels in such a state that the car accident delivered him from an impending, inevitable stroke. Or a woman suicide with undiagnosed leukemia . . . as if several illnesses competed in a still living body, and it was not always the strongest one that came out victorious.
Kogan was one of the oldest pathoanatomists and long retired, but from time to time he was invited to deal with particularly complicated autopsies and cases needing forensic expertise. This time they called him on Friday, but he had already gone to his summer place and did not want to go back. It was his former student, now the chief physician of a big Moscow hospital, a whole medical town, who asked him to come in on Monday, because the case was especially disturbing, and it would be good if it was Kogan who examined it first, before the investigators arrived.
On the table lay a young man, lean, impeccably built, with yellowish marble skin, a knife wound in the chest, multiple bruises on the facial part of the head, abrasions on the forehead, and broken feet. . . .
The morgue attendant, the old nurse Ivan Trofimovich, came up and lisped something unintelligible. Kogan had become hard of hearing lately and indistinct muttering to the side annoyed him. He grunted, the attendant nodded and turned the body so that part of the dead man’s back could be seen: on both sides of the spine, from the third to fifth ribs, parallel to the dorsal part of the shoulder blades, yawned two strange incisions, which seemed to have been made after death. The attendant again mumbled something indistinct, and Kogan, touching the strange incision, barked:
“Speak louder, Ivan Trofimovich, I don’t hear well. Has anyone touched the body?”
“No, they brought him like this on Friday. . . . I’m surprised myself.”
“All right, we’ll sort it out,” Kogan grunted, looked into the medical report, and shook his head. The patient had been brought to the hospital by an ambulance on Friday at 10:45 p.m. and had died an hour later. The cause of death was most likely the knife wound. . . .
Kogan looked at the laid-out instruments. A complete set: a scalpel, a saw, dissecting knives, a craniotome, a raspator . . . He began, as usual, with the skull.
Two hours later Kogan signed the report on the autopsy. Death had occurred as a result of the knife wound and the subsequent bleeding. The beating and the slight traumas to the head, as well as the crushed feet, could not be the cause of death.
He came home depressed and completely exhausted, having firmly taken a decision—this was the last autopsy of his life. . . . But the two symmetrical cuts on the dead man’s back would not leave his thoughts. His knowledge of human anatomy was perfect, yet it was the first time in sixty years of practice that he had met with anything like those two pockets within these cuts, those elastic bags of unknown purpose.
He was a medical professional with a broad horizon and rational frame of mind, without any metaphysical deviations, but this dead man’s anatomy directed his thoughts toward fantastic novels fashionable in the last century about extraterrestrials, alien visitors, or else toward textbooks in mythology for schoolchildren. . . . He was confused and perplexed.
It was the second day that Marya Akimovna had been sitting on a bench in the garden by the hospital. First she sat by the information window, and, when it closed, she went outside and sat down on the garden bench.
Her son, Vsevolod, Volechka, had gone out on Friday evening for a concert and had not come back. On Saturday morning his friend Misha, a pianist with whom Volya often performed, called and asked whether Vsevolod was home.
“I’m worried, Misha. He didn’t come home, and he didn’t warn me.”
“I’ll come right now,” Misha replied.
An hour after the phone conversation, Misha, his nose disfigured and with a bruise over half his face, arrived at Marya Akimovna’s on Delegatskaya Street.
“Yesterday, after the concert, we walked out. Some guys, also musicians, drove up on three motorcycles, very tough guys. . . . They disliked us intensely. From long ago. First they grabbed Volya, tore the case out of his hands. He reached for the guy, but another one drove his motorcycle over his feet, and he fell down. At that point somebody hit me in the eye, and I fell down, too. I didn’t see what happened next. Passersby must have called an ambulance. Where Nadya and Dasha were I don’t know. I called them in the morning—no one took the phone. . . . We should call now . . . now. . . .”
And Misha began to call around, trying to find out which hospital Volya had been taken to yesterday. Then Marya Akimovna called the churchwarden to tell her that she would not be able to come to the evening prayers, because her son was in the hospital, and that it would be good to invite Kirillovna or Zina to clean up in the evening. The warden was a stern woman, but she was nice, though condescending, to Marya Akimovna, and, having known her from long ago, called her Masha. Everybody except her son and his musician friends was condescending to Marya Akimovna, but she did not even notice.
They arrived at the hospital on Leninsky Prospekt between eleven and twelve. At the reception they were told that Volya had been transferred to the surgery section and that they had to go to the information window. At the information window a young woman with a bun and a bow looked into some papers and said, “Deceased.” At first Marya Akimovna did not understand and asked how she could see her son. . . .
“You can’t. He’s in the morgue. You’ll be able to see him only after the autopsy,” the woman in the window said. “You’ll get his documents in the surgery section.”
Misha, who understood what had happened before Marya Akimovna did, seated her on the bench and burst into tears. Marya Akimovna sat next to him, looked straight ahead, and said nothing.
Her life collapsed, ended, and she realized that she had always known, anticipated, that this was how it would be. The picture of her whole life unfolded before her, from the very beginning. How her mama had died, how she had lived with her father, a stern and silent priest in the village of Novoselovo, how she had gone to school and been the last in her class. Then the village school was closed, and the children were sent to Ples, five miles away, and she could not go so far, because she was very small, weak, often sick, so she stayed home, and her father did not make her go. She stayed home, stoked the stove, cooked soup and kasha, and when she grew up her father’s relative Uncle Osip came from Moscow. The two men talked for a long time—about her, she thought. And in the morning her father said that now she would live in the city, at Uncle Osip’s. Her father left for the North, to Pskov, and became a monk there. Masha had seen him only once since, when Volechka was born. At the time Uncle Osip, whom she had married on paper, because he was old and there was no other way that she could inherit his room, took her and Volechka to the monastery to see her father. Her father did not say a word to them, did not ask anything, but he baptized her little son under the name of Vsevolod, according to the church calendar.
The family returned to Moscow, to Delegatskaya Street, where they lived in their own room in a big communal flat. Masha and Volya were now registered in it. Soon Uncle Osip died. Masha took a job as a cleaning woman at the nursery school. She and Volechka stayed there for three years, and then he was sent to kindergarten. And again she was lucky: there was a vacancy for a cleaning woman, she was accepted, and so it went smoothly later on. All her life she was together with her son, at school and at the Conservatory.
Volechka was an angel, not a child. He did not keep company with hooligans but mostly with girls, both in kindergarten and at school. At the age of ten he made himself a reed pipe. He kept blowing into it, and tender sounds poured out. At school he was a poor student. He never finished his studies. Masha was not angry with him; she herself had not been so good at studies. She could read and write, but she had no use for the one or the other. Whenever she had free time, she knit scarves and jackets. Also sweaters for Volya.
Everything went well: they had their room; her salary, though small, came every month. Volya studied at the Conservatory; they accepted him although he had not studied at a music school. But the professors liked him; they said he had musical talent. Masha was taken as a cleaning woman there, too. She did her work very well—quietly, inconspicuously, cleanliness surrounded her somehow of itself. But Volya did not finish the Conservatory. He could not pass the social subjects—history of the Party, scientific atheism, all sorts of political economy—and he accumulated so many “gaps” that they expelled him. He was immediately called up for the Army, being of draft age. But he did not pass the medical examination—the commission found that he had tuberculosis. Marya Akimovna began to worry. The boy had always been in good health; what had happened? But a priest she knew said, Get him treated, pray, and trust in God. Doctors prescribed pills, he took them, got better. And he went to work in a woodworking shop. He liked it there. The workmen were all handicapped; they carved toys, spoons, bowls. Vsevolod learned to carve well. And he went on playing the flute. He played from scores, and sometimes his own music without a score. Masha loved it when he would stand in his corner, take the flute, and the flute would play now Haydn, now Mozart, now some very simple music Volya had composed himself, only three or four notes, but they were so modulated that it made you now weep, now smile. . . .
It was then that Misha, his former classmate at the Conservatory, who by then had already finished the piano class, came to Vsevolod, and they began to play together; later other musicians joined them, Nadya the violinist and Dasha the cellist. They organized a quartet, began to perform. And Volechka became their head. He composed his own music. His flute kept weeping and smiling, and without him it was not as good. Still, he did not abandon his woodworking, because music did not provide them with any income. There were only unnecessary expenses. They tried recording their music in a studio, but the recording did not sound very good. You could not hear the flute; the other instruments swamped its singing tone, and all the magic disappeared. Yet people came to their concerts. Not so many of them, but those who came kept coming. And brought others like themselves, who found a particular joy in the old-fashioned sounds of the flute trills. This music was as if childlike and transparent.
Masha was the same as ever, only she had aged and become Marya Akimovna, and she now did cleaning not at school, and not at the Conservatory, but at the church on Tverskaya Street. They offered her a job at the candle stand, but she did not want to deal with money, she was not so good at counting, was afraid to make a mistake, or—worse still—she could easily be cheated. And she got along very well with a rag and a bucket.
She knew, she had always known, that her boy was extraordinary, there was not a pennyworth of evil in him, everybody loved him. It was as if he did not see evil, and for a time evil did not look at him. But the girls did look at him, and many of them liked him. They would circle around him for a bit. There were not so many free men in our city, always more women. He never offended any of them, never promised anything, nor did he offer any male attention, and they withdrew from him one after another. . . . Obviously each of them would have liked Vsevolod to marry her. But Marya Akimovna never talked with him about it. . . . It was too bad, of course. Dasha was a nice girl, and Nadya, too. . . .
So Marya Akimovna sat on the bench by the information window, without a single tear, and next to her Misha sat and wept. She was going over her past life and saw clearly that Volya had gone just as he had come, in a miraculous way. She did not know who had made her pregnant, where Volya came from, and did not know where he had gone now. One thing alone was horrible—why was he killed? Who did it? Who had a grudge against him?
Obviously Misha was thinking about the same thing, because he embraced her—she was small, and Misha tall, a head taller—and said, “It’s Volya’s music, it’s all because of the music. They couldn’t stand it, it simply burned them. It’s fiery, his music. Heavenly. . .”
“Yes, yes,” Marya Akimovna nodded. She agreed that the music was heavenly. She tried to recall it, but could not. The music had gone along with him.
The pain was so enormous, astounding—greater than one could imagine. It was all located in the forehead, and he hung on it like a towel on a nail. The pain came to a point. It had a cone shape and was concentrated precisely in this point. There was nothing left in the whole world besides the pain. Then suddenly a tiny shining dot appeared; it seemed to move, spinning slightly and drawing him to itself. The walls of the black cone grew still more black, and it became apparent that they were moving, as if this bright dot made them turn, pulling them into itself. He sensed the pull of this movement. The dot expanded, a sharp ray of light burst from it, and he headed toward it. The pain was with him, but it was also spinning and had ceased to be so tormenting. In this expanding dot the note “la” emerged, and he adjusted himself to it and moved in the direction of the light. The corridor of the darkness spun, pressing him, but also expanded slightly, as if becoming larger, and his movement toward the bright dot was becoming ever more perceptible. He was being pulled there against his will, but his will was also directed there.
“Like a toilsome return home” flashed in his mind. The pressure of the black walls was weakening. He was already almost out into the ever-expanding light. But the pain returned, no longer as a cone piercing his forehead but now in his back—sharp and as if double. And then a powerful force pushed him out of the black tube, the pain in the back flared and went out. With a last effort he spread the big moist wings that had sprouted from his back.
His legs performed light movements as if he were swimming lazily, his arms were spread freely, the lifting power of the wings carried him upward, and he felt that all the dimensions had changed, the habitual grid system had collapsed, and the sound “la” expanded unimaginably, as if absorbing all the nuances of sound as well as all those that did not belong to the auditory span of a human ear. . . . He was higher than the pain, it remained under his feet.
“They think they killed me. But that’s impossible. It’s impossible to kill anybody. Poor wicked children. . . .” And now he saw with his side vision the tips of his new wings, semitransparent and iridescent. They did not have their own color; they reflected the radiance that spread around him, shimmering with pink and green, and it was as easy to work them as to drink or to sing—just a little effort, like walking or swimming. And he swam, enjoying the movement, the gentle wind, and the tingling light.
“But I didn’t fulfill my task. Could I have fulfilled it? I’m not the first one to fail. How many were they, the immaculately born ones? One spoke and wasn’t heard, another wrote and no one understood what he wrote, there was one who sang, and he, too, wasn’t heard. And I played the flute. . . . Where’s my flute? That wretched fellow in the black leather jacket, did he take it? What a pity.” But the flute—he suddenly realized—was there! Tucked into a wide belt that tightly girded his body. He pulled it out. A blockflute, wooden, warm, with seven holes in the front and a thumb hole in the back. He put it to his lips, blew. And it sang in the best of voices.
He was flying in an unfamiliar world, which was becoming familiar moment by moment, like a decal, gleaming under the layer of swelling cheap paper. No, this world is not unfamiliar. We’ve been here, been here. . . . He gave himself entirely to the movement, and to the melody, and to the elusive thought. This unuttered thought called him somewhere. And he floated to where it was sending him. There was no “in the beginning” and “then”—everything was happening simultaneously, and in all its fullness. Ah, time is no more, he realized.
For many years now Kogan had not slept in the bedroom with his wife but had made his bed in the study on a narrow couch. That evening he read for a long time, then wrote a letter to his son, who had lost his mind over some Kabbalistic books. The son lived in Bnei Brak, a little town near Tel Aviv, and old Kogan kept trying to have at least a semblance of contact with him. Then he wrote a letter to his daughter, a professor at an American university. She taught contemporary psychology. From time to time she sent him references to her work, and he read her articles with disgust and with the same feeling of protest his son’s reflections evoked in him. . . . He recalled today’s autopsy. Those mysterious cuts along the shoulder blades were inexplicable; their inexplicability was irritating, it flew in the face of his strict and exact knowledge.
He looked at his watch—it was already past two. He went to the bathroom, took out his dentures, put them in a glass of water, rinsed his mouth, urinated with some difficulty. Lay down and quickly fell asleep. But he soon woke up. Before him stood a hazily bright figure, unrecognizable yet familiar. Kogan stirred toward it, rose a little on his bed. Right, right, this was today’s dead man. No words were pronounced. Only the soft sound, as if from behind the wall, of poor, bright music. A flute. The visitor was inviting Kogan to follow him. And Kogan did. There was not the slightest trace of mysticism in what was happening. A convincing reality. . .
In the morning his wife twice called him to come and have breakfast. He did not come. She went into his study. The dead Kogan lay under a plaid blanket, smiling. ♦
(Translated, from the Russian, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.)
This is drawn from “The Body of the Soul: Stories.”
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