Death Of A Russian Priest Read online

  “I do not expect you to,” she said. “But it will come. It has already begun.”

  “Do you have any idea who murdered Father Merhum?” he repeated.

  “He was killed on the morning of the day he was to denounce those for whom the day of retribution had come,” she said.

  “Party members,” said Karpo.

  “Father Merhum’s list was not limited to the secular. He was not beloved by the hierarchy of the Church.” She stood and placed her cup next to Karpo’s on the table. “There are Orthodox leaders who spoke for the government, supported government claims that freedom of worship was welcome. The Church donated millions of rubles to the Soviet Peace Committee. All religious activity was regulated through the Council for Religious Affairs.”

  “You believe that the Church ordered Father Merhum murdered because—”

  “—he was about to denounce the Church,” she finished. “There are those who believe this. There are a few in the Church who are not true Christians, and it is they who have risen as tyrants rose.”

  “You are a revolutionary,” Karpo said.

  “And you are in need of a new revolution.”

  “I must go,” he said.

  “Perhaps we can talk again.” She walked him to the door. On the way they paused to look at the icon of the pale saint in prison clothes.

  Karpo said, “When we do talk again, perhaps you can tell me who Oleg is.”

  “You did not believe me?” asked Sister Nina.

  “No.”

  “There are things that are best left buried,” she said.

  “Like the records of murdered priests inside Lubyanka?” Karpo asked.

  “Father Merhum believed that such records are long dead,” she said.

  “But you believe in resurrection.”

  “You are clever and I am an old woman,” she said. “But my faith is strong and yours weak. Do you wish to arrest me for refusing to answer your questions?”

  Karpo opened the front door. A wind was blowing through the woods and there was suddenly the smell of cold rain in the gray winter air. He stepped out while the nun held the door open. “No.”

  “Good,” she said into the wind. “I’m too old for threats. We will talk again. God bless you.”

  After she closed the door, Karpo stood for a moment. This had not been the afternoon he expected. He felt as if a migraine was coming, but he had none of the aura that usually accompanied it, no strange odors, no unbidden sexual impulses. He had to admit as he headed for the town that something about the nun and the service for the dead priest had shaken him. It reminded him of that day from his childhood, but it could not be what Sister Nina had said.

  The murderer of Father Vasili Merhum stood back in the woods watching the tall pale policeman move slowly along the path to Arkush.

  Moments ago the killer had stood next to the window of the dead priest’s house and heard Sister Nina avoid the question about Oleg. Then he had heard the policeman say that he did not believe her.

  The murderer was shaken. At the moment he could see no alternatives. He wanted to see an alternative, a way out, but there didn’t appear to be one. She knew and someday she might tell the policeman or another priest or nun. He could not live with such a fear. It was not just he who would suffer, he told himself. Other lives would be ruined.

  Besides, she was old. She believed in an afterlife. If there was an afterlife, he accepted his own damnation. If there was no afterlife and no damnation, then the nun had devoted her life to a lie.

  The wind stirred as the policeman disappeared into the trees. The murderer let the next gust push him toward the small house.

  Tears welled in his eyes as he reached the door of the house. He could take no time to think about it. If he took time, he would change his mind and Sister Nina would have an opportunity to tell the policeman.

  No one locked doors in Arkush, especially a nun. He entered the house and found the old woman in the kitchen cleaning teacups. She looked over her shoulder when she heard his footsteps.

  He was trembling, his hands at his sides, but he was determined to act. Sister Nina dried her hands on a small clean rag on a rod over the sink. She crossed herself and turned to face him.

  “This is not the way,” she said softly.

  “I can think of no other,” he cried. “God help me. I can think of no other. I have become a monster.”

  “Then,” she said, “we will both suffer. I for a moment and you for eternity.”

  NINE

  ELENA TIMOFEYEVA AND HER AUNT ANNA lived with Anna’s cat, Baku, in a one-room apartment not far from the Moscow River. The apartment building was an old one-story plaster-and-wood box with a concrete courtyard of concrete benches. It was one of the apartment buildings constructed as temporary shelter after the war against fascism. The plan was to tear it down within a few years of its construction. That had been more than forty years ago. Until Elena came three months ago Anna had lived alone in the same apartment for more than half of her fifty-two years.

  Elena had the bedroom. Anna had the living room/kitchen. It was hardly lyuks, luxury, but Elena had little choice. New to Moscow, Elena had been lucky to have an aunt who not only took her in but used her influence to get her on the Special Section staff.

  Anna’s influence stemmed from her former status as deputy procurator. Three years ago, during her second ten-year term, she had suffered her third, and most serious, heart attack.

  Anna had worked a lifetime of eighteen-hour days and six-and-a-half-day weeks, first as an assistant to a commissar of Leningrad in charge of shipping and manufacturing quotas, and then, as a result of her zeal and ability, as deputy procurator in Leningrad and Moscow. Because she came from sturdy peasant stock, she had felt free to neglect her health. But then, suddenly, she was idle. Rostnikov, her chief investigator, had brought his wife’s cousin Alex, a doctor, to examine her after the state security doctors told her she was to lie in bed and prepare to die.

  Alex had looked at her dumpy egg-shaped body and told her to get out and walk, walk, walk. She had gradually worked her way up to four miles every day, though she refused to wear the Czech jogging suit that her sister, Elena’s mother, had sent her from Odessa.

  Anna still retained the respect of the people in the apartment building, at least those who had not moved in the past three years. A few of them still called her Comrade Procurator.

  Early in the evening when she returned from her afternoon walk, Anna had sat at her small table near the window overlooking the bleak courtyard. Below, four babushkas watched over their bundled grandchildren by the light of a few courtyard lamps and the lighted windows of nearby apartments. Two hours later Anna was still seated at the window. She held a book close to her eyes, and the fuzzy orange ball, Baku, was in her lap, when Elena entered. Anna took off her glasses and looked up.

  “The man is insane,” Elena said, dropping her bag on the table near the door.

  “You want something to eat?” asked Anna. She placed her book on the window ledge and Baku on the floor.

  Elena kicked off her shoes and moved to a second chair near the window. “No … yes. What do we have?”

  Anna went to the kitchen alcove. “We have two eggs,” she said. “Keefeer. Bread. A tomato.”

  “A tomato?”

  Anna reached into her cupboard and pulled out a slightly overripe tomato. “And,” she added, “I made leek soup.”

  “Let me do it,” Elena said.

  Elena had learned to take over the preparation of meals whenever possible. Cooking was neither a talent nor an interest of Anna, whose true passions were crime and her cat.

  “Who is insane?” asked Anna as Elena turned on the small electric stove that stood on the table in the kitchen corner.

  Baku rubbed against Elena’s legs and she motioned for him to join her. The cat leaped into her arms and she stroked its head as she smelled the leek soup and pushed the pot onto the burner.

  “Tkach,” she said
. “He’s like a madman. You prepared me for the madness in the streets, but not in the people with whom I must work.”

  “He is in the wrong business,” Anna Timofeyeva said.

  Elena put Baku down and carefully cut the soft tomato with a less-than-sharp knife.

  “He isn’t insane,” said Anna.

  “He rants, he threatens.” Elena sighed. “He almost killed a man selling pizzas today.”

  Outside the window one of the babushkas had taken off her gloves and was paddling a small child with her bare hand. The other babushkas were watching silently. The child’s wails penetrated the window.

  “If I have children,” Elena said, carefully slicing the loaf of bread with the same dull knife, “I will not allow them to be hit.”

  “Perhaps,” said Anna. “Tkach has a child and another on the way. Do you think he strikes his child?”

  “I don’t care what he does to his child,” Elena said, turning her head from the window to her aunt.

  “He is young,” said Anna.

  “He is only two years younger than I,” said Elena. She examined the uneven piece of bread she had just cut.

  “In years,” said Anna. “In experience perhaps he is older, but in emotions, no. I’ve known him since he was twenty-three or twenty-four. What he wanted yesterday, he no longer wants today, and what he wants today will be forgotten tomorrow in the self-pity of not knowing what he wants. But he is a good policeman. I bought him a scarf from one of the old ladies. We’ll give it to him at the birthday party.”

  “Fine,” said Elena.

  The cat had taken the chair at the window and was curled up in front of Anna’s book.

  “The Arab girl … ?” asked Anna.

  “Amira Durahaman.”

  “You haven’t found her.”

  “No. That’s where we’re going tonight. To look for her. Her boyfriend was murdered this morning, a young Jew.”

  Anna watched as her niece moved to the window and looked out, then leaned forward to scratch Baku’s head and reach for the book.

  “What are you reading?” Elena asked.

  “Minds,” said Anna Timofeyeva. “Today I am reading minds, your mind. He is a good-looking young man.”

  “Who?” asked Elena, examining the book.

  “Who? Chairman Mao. You know who,” said Anna. She went over to the table and tried to place the cup of keefeer on the plate next to the bread and tomato in an appealing arrangement. “Let’s eat.”

  Elena put the book down, scratched Baku’s head once more, and took her place at the table. Anna poured the soup and placed a plate of food in front of her. They ate in silence for a few minutes.

  “I can’t work with him,” Elena said.

  “He is a good investigator,” replied Anna. “Smart. But too passionate.”

  “You said that.”

  “I suffer from lapses of short-term memory and the belief that the young are inattentive,” Anna said.

  Anna Timofeyeva knew that there was a highly classified file on Sasha Tkach’s indiscretions, a file of which he was not aware. There were thousands of such files—on members of the MVD, on government officials—files that Anna Timofeyeva had once had access to, and could still examine if she wished to do so. She wondered what the new zealots would do with this information.

  “I don’t think he will ever be able to control his passions,” Anna said, “which is why I think he should not make a career as a policeman.”

  “A minute ago you said he was a good policeman,” said Elena. “You see I am listening.”

  “A person can be a fine butcher and hate the sight of blood.”

  “It is unlikely that if he hated the sight of blood he would become a butcher,” countered Elena.

  “Destiny often hands us a sword too heavy to carry.”

  “You are being cryptic,” said Elena, tearing off a piece of bread from the loaf. “You are reading too much Freud.”

  “I’ve been reading too much Gogol,” said Anna with a sigh. “All right. I’ll be direct. Better for you if Tkach was byeezahbrahnay, ugly. The food is all right?”

  “It’s fine,” said Elena.

  “It’s soggy, the tomato, the bread,” said Anna. She put her half-finished plate on the floor, and Baku leaped from the chair to eat. “And the soup is hot water with three onions.”

  “He might get me hurt, even killed,” said Elena.

  “Let us hope you survive at least your second week. Your mother would never forgive me.”

  “I must get back to work.”

  “Trust his instincts and experience, question his passions,” Anna said, reaching down to pet Baku, whose head was bent over the cup of keefeer.

  “Can I ask you a question?” asked Elena, rolling a crumb of bread in her fingers.

  Anna had carried her niece’s plate to the sink in the corner. “You mean, may you ask a question which might make me feel uncomfortable? Since I am curious, ask.”

  “Are you bitter?”

  “Bitter? About … ?”

  “The system you worked for is gone. The Soviet Union has gone. The memory of Lenin is dying. The law—”

  “—remains the law,” said Anna, turning to her niece. “I did not dedicate my life to a cause. I dedicated my life to the law. The goal was to improve the law and to seek justice within it. There was nothing wrong with Soviet law. The problem was in its corruption.”

  “You are being philosophical today,” said Elena.

  “Philosophy is the perfect exercise for a woman with nothing to do but walk and read about hysteria.”

  Elena moved back to the chair by the window, sat, and put on her shoes. Then she went to the battered wooden wardrobe in the corner, opened it, selected a clean blouse, and moved to the small bathroom to examine herself in the mirror. “I’m getting fat,” she said.

  “It is your genetic burden,” said Anna. “Along with intelligence and determination. Your mother is heavy. I am heavy. But you are also pretty. You won’t be truly fat like us for ten years, twenty if you are careful.”

  “Thank you,” Elena said as she came out of the bathroom, buttoning her blouse. “You are very reassuring.”

  “I am very practical,” said Anna. “You want lies? Read Izvestia.”

  “I suppose I want the truth cushioned,” Elena said, putting on her coat.

  “It is still the truth. Besides, I don’t know how to do that.” Anna leaned over to pick up Baku’s clean plate. “It is a skill, like cooking, which I never learned.”

  “I don’t know what time I will be back,” said Elena.

  “Baku, Freud, Gogol, and I will be here,” said Anna Timofeyeva, moving back toward the chair near the window. “Maybe we’ll watch some television. ‘Wheel of Fortune.’ Who knows? The night is still young.”

  “Aunt Anna,” Elena said.

  “You look fine,” her aunt replied. “You look modern, efficient, pretty, determined. If I am sitting here with my eyes closed when you return, be sure I’m alive and then let me sleep.”

  Elena kissed her aunt’s head and left the apartment.

  Anna Timofeyeva folded her hands on the book in her lap and looked into the darkness of the courtyard. The babushkas and children were gone. There was nothing to see but the lights in the windows.

  “Well, Baku, what will it be, Gogol, Freud, or ‘Wheel of Fortune’?”

  Baku looked up at her and blinked his eyes.

  “So?” Lydia said, placing a bowl of borscht in front of her son.

  “So?” repeated Sasha Tkach, looking down at the dark red liquid filled with beets and a very small white touch of what may have been sour cream.

  Lydia Tkach was a proud woman of sixty-six who was almost deaf and quite unwilling to admit it. She continued to work, as she had for more than forty years, in the Ministry of Information Building, filing papers and telling anyone who would listen that her son was a high-ranking government official, a key adviser to the minister of the interior.

 
Sasha knew that his mother was no more popular in the Ministry of Information than she was at home. People avoided her because she drew attention to herself with her loud conversation. This tended to make her more lonely and crotchety with those who could not avoid her, particularly her son and daughter-in-law.

  Maya had insisted on getting up to sit across from her husband while he ate a hurried meal. Pulcharia sat on her father’s lap. Maya’s lap had slowly disappeared as the baby grew within her.

  “So?” Lydia repeated to her son.

  Sasha looked at his wife, who smiled in sympathy. Maya’s stomach was large, low, and very round, but her usually beautiful round face was pale and thin, which made Sasha angry, which was easier than being frightened. He did not want her to be sick. He wanted her to be vital, well, warm, and supportive.

  “Shchyee,” said Pulcharia, putting her fingers in her father’s bowl of borscht.

  Sasha had no worry that his almost-two-year-old daughter would burn her finger in the soup. He had been drinking his mother’s soup for almost thirty years and knew that she believed in tepid soup and room-temperature meat and chicken. What troubled Sasha at the moment was the strange thing in his borscht that looked like an animal claw.

  “What is this?” he asked, picking up the object, which was definitely a claw.

  “Don’t change the subject,” Lydia shouted, sitting down. “You’ll frighten the baby.”

  “Why should changing the subject frighten … what is this?”

  Lydia glanced at his spoon. “Meat,” she said. “Gives flavor to the soup.”

  “That looks like the claw of a—”

  “Kroolyek,” said Maya.

  Her voice, with its touch of the Ukraine, usually pleased and soothed Sasha, but there was a rage in him. He had awakened with it and had come through the door this evening determined to hide it. “The foot of a rabbit, yes,” he said.

  Pulcharia reached for his spoon. Sasha moved it out of her reach.

  “Times are hard,” said Lydia loudly as she poured herself a bowl of soup from the pot she had placed on the table. “Lines are long.”

  “You may have the foot of the rabbit,” Sasha said, leaning over to drop it in his mother’s bowl. “The Americans think it is good luck.”