Death Of A Russian Priest Read online

  Maya looked at her husband with mild disapproval, but he ignored her.

  “So?” Lydia said, looking down at the dark red liquid in which the foot of the rabbit had disappeared.

  “You are not eating,” Sasha said to his wife.

  “I am not hungry,” Maya said softly.

  “The baby inside of you is hungry,” he said.

  “Answer my question,” Lydia insisted. She reached over the table to hand Pulcharia a piece of bread. “Without rabbit tricks.”

  “‘So?’ is not a question I can answer,” Sasha said, brushing the wild patch of hair from his eyes. He knew he would not drink this borscht, could not drink this borscht. He had a full hour before he had to meet Elena Timofeyeva, but he knew he would soon say he had to leave. Though they were hard-pressed for money, Sasha knew he would buy himself something on the way, possibly even a pahshtyehtah, a meat pie with little or no meat, if he could find someplace to buy one. A woman in a white apron had set up a table inside the Journalists Union Building two days before. She might be there again.

  He had bought two pies and asked the woman what kind of meat she had used. The pained smile she had given him made him regret his question. Still, it had not tasted at all bad.

  “Eat and answer,” Lydia went on.

  Sasha took a piece of bread and pretended to dip it in the soup. Pulcharia dipped her bread in the soup and dripped over her father’s pants and her own dress as she brought it to her mouth.

  “She’s gotten you dirty,” Maya said, handing her husband a cloth napkin.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “I have to leave.”

  He put Pulcharia on the chair next to him and got up.

  “So?” Lydia asked again. “How is she? The baby Rostnikov makes you work with while he runs to his son’s play?”

  Sasha looked down at his best trousers. The stain was evident. He tried to blot it but had little success. “She is older than I am, and Porfiry Petrovich is on a very important case. He deserves a few hours to see his son’s … why am I arguing about this with you?”

  “Good. Don’t argue. Tell us all about her, about this Timofeyeva.”

  “Her name is Elena,” he said. “I told you yesterday, and the day before and—”

  “So?”

  “So, she is fine,” said Tkach. “She doesn’t know anything. She talks too much. She gets in the way. She asks too many questions. She may well get me killed, but she is fine. Does that answer all your questions about her?”

  “Is she pretty?” asked Lydia. Maya found the question interesting enough to raise her eyes toward her husband.

  “She is fat,” said Tkach.

  “She can be pretty and fat,” said Lydia.

  “I am fat,” said Maya.

  “You are temporarily overweight from a natural condition which will soon end,” said Sasha, moving across the room toward the door. “You are not pretty. You are beautiful.”

  Pulcharia was trying to find something in the borscht with her fingers.

  “Ida Ivanova Portov, remember her? Married to your father’s partner, Boris. She was fat, but she was pretty. I remember the way your father looked at—”

  “Ben,” Sasha interrupted, putting on his coat. “Father’s partner’s name was Ben not Boris.”

  “You are changing the subject,” Maya said. “Your mother asked if Anna Timofeyeva’s niece was pretty.”

  “Is Comrade Anna pretty?” he asked.

  “Can you answer a question with an answer instead of a question?” asked Maya in a louder voice.

  “You are upsetting your wife,” Lydia said.

  Pulcharia began to cry.

  “She is beautiful,” said Sasha. “She is ravishing. She is a painting by … Rubens. I want to make passionate love to her. We are supposed to go to the Nikolai Café on Gorky Street looking for a missing Arab girl tonight, but the hell with it. We’ll go make love in the snow.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lydia cried. “It’s not even snowing.”

  “You’ve made the baby cry,” said Maya. Pulcharia climbed onto her mother’s stomach and stuck her thumb in her mouth.

  Sasha stood at the door, facing three generations of women who determined the course of his life, a life that was moving much faster than he wanted it to move. He wished that Maya would lose the child she was carrying. No, no. He wished no such thing. Instead he suddenly ached for a son.

  “Your wife needs calm,” Lydia shouted.

  “All right,” he said, opening the door. “I’ll give her a night of calm. I won’t come home tonight. I’ll sleep at my desk.”

  “Sasha,” Maya said, shaking her head as she patted Pulcharia’s head and comforted her. “Don’t be …”

  But he was in the hall and slamming the door before she could say more.

  “What’s wrong with him?” asked Lydia.

  “He will be thirty in two days and he doesn’t want to grow up,” said Maya, running her finger along her daughter’s nose.

  “But he can speak French,” said Lydia. “And he did not finish his borscht.”

  There was nothing to say to either comment by her mother-in-law, so Maya simply shrugged in resignation. She was reasonably sure her husband would be back, would climb into bed next to her, would hold her, would apologize even if he was sure she did not hear him. And if once he did spend the night at his desk, it would not be such a bad thing for him, though it would mean that Maya would have to face Lydia alone in the morning.

  “I’m very tired,” said Maya. “I’ll help with the dishes, put Pulcharia to bed, and then go to bed myself.”

  “I’ll do the dishes,” said Lydia, reaching for the borscht no one had eaten. “You put my precious child of the summer into bed. I have to go out tonight, anyway.”

  Maya stopped herself from asking where her mother-in-law might be going. An evening with no talk would be a luxury she dared not hope for. Lydia had, in fact, been very helpful since Maya had been ordered to stay at home in bed, but the price that had to be paid for such aid was almost more than Maya could bear.

  Nonetheless she did wonder where Lydia had suddenly decided to go.

  Going to a play or a movie was a problem for Porfiry Petrovich, which was why he seldom went to either, though he enjoyed them both. During a movie he could at least stand, move about a bit, coax his leg back to life. It was difficult to stand during a play, or even to shift about to find a less painful position. The audience would be disturbed and his movements, even if he were in the rear of the theater, would distract the actors.

  But this was a play written by his son, and Rostnikov was determined to attend the first performance, even though he didn’t take seriously Iosef s remark that there might not be a second performance.

  The train from Arkush had been late arriving in Moscow and Rostnikov had decided to take a taxi home, which had been a mistake. Traffic was heavy, the fare insane.

  When he entered the apartment on Krasikov Street after climbing the six flights of stairs, he reluctantly admitted to himself that he was tired.

  Sarah was seated at the table near the window, drinking a glass of tea and watching the news on their little television. The room was cold, but something was cooking that he did not immediately identify because he was absorbed by the sight of his wife. She was wearing her orange dress, and her red hair was long enough, four months after surgery, to wear swept up. In her ears were the dangling blue earrings he had given her for her last birthday. Her face was made up and her eyes were bright with anticipation. She looked like the Sarah of a year ago, before the disappointments, the pain, the tumor. Rostnikov, in spite of his weariness, felt a definite physical undulation of desire.

  “You look beautiful,” he said.

  “Flattery?”

  “No,” he said. “No. Had we time and you the inclination, I could prove what I say.”

  “Thank you, Porfiry Petrovich.”

  How long had it been since he has seen such an open smile on Sarah�
��s face? She had worried through Iosef s tour in the army, his time in Afghanistan, and the threat of assigning him to duty near Chernobyl, which was a direct result of Rostnikov’s too-frequent clashes with the KGB. She had been depressed when he failed to get the government to allow them to emigrate. She had abandoned her determination, put on a few pounds, and lost her job in the music shop. For almost a year, before the tumor, she worked only now and then, selling pots and pans for one of her cousins.

  But Iosef was back now. Iosef was safe, a playwright, an actor. And Sarah was growing healthy and was not gaining back the weight she had lost after surgery.

  Her determination had even begun to return and she had decided that when she felt completely well, in a month or so, she would again bring up to Porfiry Petrovich the possibility of leaving Russia. The borders were open. Perhaps even a policeman could now leave.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me I’m late?” he asked, heading toward the bedroom door.

  “You know you are late, but not too late to eat if you hurry.”

  “What is that smell?” he asked from the bedroom. “Is that … ?” He stepped back into the room with his shirt off, a hairy barrel of a man with a smile on his face and a sweatshirt and towel in his right hand.

  “I could only get half a chicken,” Sarah said. “And as for the prune sauce, I had to improvise and use—”

  “Chicken tabaka,” he said. It was his favorite dish, chicken fried under a heavy metal plate weighted down by a hand iron. Sarah served it with a special prune sauce and pickled cabbage.

  When she served this dish, it usually meant that she wanted something. Rostnikov decided that whatever it was, he would certainly try to give it to her.

  On the television a man said something about the death of Father Merhum while in the corner of the screen a woman within a circle used sign language to translate for the deaf.

  “Is sign language the same all over the world?” he asked. “Can deaf Chinese understand deaf Latvians?”

  Sarah reached over and turned the set off.

  “You went shopping?” he asked.

  “With Sophie.”

  Rostnikov moved to the cupboard in the corner of the room and looked at his wife.

  “I have time?” he asked.

  “Would I be able to tolerate you tonight if you didn’t?” she asked.

  “Ten minutes,” he said. “Maybe twelve. No more.”

  “Twelve will be fine,” she said.

  “You are beautiful.”

  “And you look like a small bear. You are fortunate that I have always loved small bears.”

  “I am fortunate,” he agreed. He opened the cupboard and removed the rolled-up mat, the weights, and the bar. He took the blanket off the weight bench in the corner and began to set up for his routine. “Any calls?” he asked.

  “Nuretskov on the fourth floor. Toilet is making noise.”

  “Toilets are a challenge,” Rostnikov admitted.

  “And Lydia Tkach.”

  Rostnikov sighed deeply.

  “No message,” said Sarah.

  “Twelve minutes,” Rostnikov said, reaching for a cassette.

  For many years Rostnikov had done his routine to the music of Bach or Rimsky-Korsakov, but lately, since Sarah’s illness, he had found himself attracted to plaintive songs, melancholy arias from operas, laments by Edith Piaf, blues sung by American women, particularly one called Dinah Washington. Even though he was a policeman, Rostnikov had paid dearly for the cassettes, but the price was of no consequence when it came to one of his few indulgences.

  He inserted his latest acquisition, a Dinah Washington, and pushed the button.

  Neither Porfiry Petrovich nor Sarah spoke for the next ten minutes, because Rostnikov’s routine was a form of meditation. It involved the patient shifting of weights after each exercise, because Rostnikov did not have enough weights to leave them on the bar after each set. He followed the same routine for each session so that it required no thought, so that he could lose himself in the distant realization of the music and the concentration on each pull of his muscles.

  His clean and jerk was awkward because of his leg, though he could manage almost two hundred and thirty pounds. He could do a dead lift of three hundred and forty pounds, but he did it with all the weight on his right leg. Even so, Rostnikov was sure that he could significantly increase that amount if there were room to store more weights in the cupboard. Since his weights were limited, he had to settle for increasing his repetitions, which led to a very long routine. This was the abbreviated sequence. He would rise early in the morning and lose himself in the longer, more satisfying routine.

  The music penetrated him as he moved. A voice, high and sad, yet powerful, sang of love for sale and claimed that “nothing ever changes my love for you.” Rostnikov counted without counting; his body told him when he had reached his limit. When his face turned red, his veins ridged high and purple along his arms and forehead, and his breath came in short puffs, then he would do two more.

  It was at that moment of satisfaction that Sarah turned away, unable to watch the combination of pain and ecstasy on her husband’s face.

  “Finished,” he said, wiping his forehead with his towel and reaching over to the cassette recorder. He let Dinah Washington finish her line and punched the button.

  Eight minutes later, after Rostnikov had taken a very quick cold shower and shave and changed into his good suit, they ate and talked of the dead priest, and of Sarah’s cousin Aaron who had just received permission to emigrate to Israel. She had not meant to talk of Aaron, but somehow it had come up.

  “They will never let me go, Sarah,” Rostnikov said, enjoying his food, though he could taste the missing ingredients in his mind. He appreciated what she must have gone through—the lines, the battles—to get half of a chicken. “Even with the new open emigration. They will never risk my telling their secrets.”

  “What is lost by trying?” she said.

  “Perhaps nothing,” he answered. “Perhaps our lives.”

  “Things are different now,” she said gently.

  “Faces in the Kremlin are different. The names of nations, cities, streets are different. People are the same. I know a seventy-year-old thief named Misha who changed his name to Yuri, got his teeth fixed, and began to wear decent clothes. People commented on how respectable he looked but—”

  “But,” Sarah concluded, “he continued to be a thief.”

  “I’ve told you about Misha before,” he said, using his spoon to find the last sweet remnant of sauce.

  “Several times,” she said. “With a different point each time. This time you were unusually cynical.”

  “I m sorry.”

  “You are and you are not,” she countered with a smile. “You want me to be happy, but you have never wanted to leave Russia.”

  “Iosef—”

  “—is a grown man,” Sarah said. “We would ask him to join us.”

  “And if he said no?”

  “You would persuade him to say yes.”

  He shrugged and ate. This could lead to dangerous words that could end the fragile mood of the evening. “We must go,” he said, standing. “This was wonderful, amazing, delicious. We will clean it up later, but we must go.”

  There was no question of taking the metro. Traffic had thinned. No rain had fallen. The night was chilly and the sky clear. This was a special night, a night for cabs.

  Pravda had said the play would start, as most plays started, at seven, but Iosef had asked them to come earlier. “Earlier,” as it turned out, was five minutes before curtain time.

  Iosef was standing on the street without a coat looking for them as the cab pulled up. “You are late,” he said, helping his mother out of the cab.

  Iosef stood a head taller than his father, and though he would one day fall victim to hereditary thickness, he was now, just a few months out of the army, lean and looking very much like his mother. There was a touch of makeup on his fac
e, which Rostnikov found disconcerting for an instant.

  “You look quite beautiful,” Iosef said to his mother as Rostnikov stepped out of the cab after paying the driver.

  “See,” Rostnikov said. “I told you.”

  Sarah smiled and Iosef guided them past the ticket takers and to their seats in the crowded little theater. They were on the aisle to the right of the stage so Porfiry Petrovich’s leg would have more room.

  “I’ll come back for you after the show,” Iosef said.

  The audience was of all ages, but mostly young.

  Iosef had gone halfway up the aisle when he returned to say, “I think it still needs some work, mostly the opening. It may be a little slow. Be patient.”

  “Go, act,” said Rostnikov, touching his son’s arm.

  A few moments later the audience grew silent as the houselights went down and the curtain parted.

  On the stage were three young soldiers and an older man who looked like an Arab in a strange but familiar uniform. The Arab was tied to a chair.

  In the first act of the play the three soldiers argued about how they should deal with the man in the chair, who was an Afghan rebel. One soldier wanted to kill him, recounting the brutality of the rebels. Another soldier, played by Iosef, wanted to torture him for information. The third soldier wanted to let the man go.

  The Afghan, speaking in broken Russian, claimed that he was not a rebel, that he knew nothing.

  At the end of the act the Afghan and the soldier who wanted to save him were alone on stage, and the Afghan admitted that he had killed Soviet soldiers and would; if he were not executed, do it again till his country was free.

  The compassionate soldier said that the Afghan reminded him of his own father.

  The dilemma for the compassionate soldier was evident as the curtain came down. On one hand, loyalty to his country and his fellow soldiers; on the other, sympathy for a man who reminded him of his father, a man who behaved out of principles far more clear than those of the Soviet soldiers. The compassionate soldier now had a terrible secret.

  The audience applauded politely, then headed for the snack bar.