The Kukotsky Enigma by Ludmila Ulitskaya

Author:Ludmila Ulitskaya [Ulitskaya, Ludmila]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Literary, Russia, Fiction
ISBN: 9780810133488
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: 2016-08-14T23:00:00+00:00

9

IT WAS A LONG, LOW MOAN THAT DESCENDED INTO A uterine growl. Skinhead searched with his eyes for Manikin, but the latter kept stomping along on its sluggish feet. The source of the groan turned out to be Fat Lady, who was dropping to the ground. With a professional’s hand Skinhead caught her up from behind. He helped her fall into a more comfortable pose. Fat Lady lay there, her legs bent at the knees as she attempted to clasp her enormous stomach. A puddle spread underneath her back . . .

“Is she giving birth?” Skinhead was astonished. “How strange that someone can give birth in this place . . . On the other hand, why not?”

The woman wore a flannel robe with large terry-cloth flowers, and a few of the buttons had managed to detach themselves under the pressure of her writhing body. With skilled fingers he undid the rest. He pulled the hem of her nightshirt back toward her enormous floppy breasts, and what he saw took his breath away. At first it seemed to him that her body was bound with a multitude of thick pink and lilac-crimson plaits with large sea mollusks, similar to those of the genus Tonicella or Neopilina, growing on them, each of them the size of a tea saucer. He touched one of the shells: it was not separable from her body, but some sort of parasitical growth. All these plaits and shells were attached with cords that had sprouted in her stomach. There was even a sort of monstrously attractive artistry to this living network.

Never in his long years of medical practice had Skinhead seen anything like this. He had no instruments with him, only the silver spoon he stuck between Manikin’s clenching jaws whenever its seizures began. Nothing but his bare hands . . .

He began to examine her, at least visually, and attempted to shift one of the shell-like growths and to palpate her stomach. On first palpation he thought he felt the fetus’s hand. High, very high up, right under her diaphragm.

“A breach presentation,” he uttered, dismayed, anticipating additional complications with the turn of the legs. He wanted to continue his manual examination, but something monstrous occurred: the little fist he had just felt punched through the taut wall of the belly and came through to the surface. Fat Lady howled.

“Hold on, hold on, my dear,” he calmed the woman.

What is this? Perforation of the uterus wall, the wall of the abdominal prelum, and the surface of the skin? That’s unimaginable! How macerated must the tissues be for them to perforate under pressure from a fetus’s hand? He pressed her stomach once again: it was hard and dense.

Just then his intravision clicked on, and an image appeared. The woman’s entire womb was packed solid with infants, like a fish with caviar. The little fist he held in his hand belonged to a completely formed nine-month-old fetus, as apparent from the dense little nails on its fingers—a significant indicator of maturation .

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