Death Of A Russian Priest

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.”

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 face, 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.

“Iosef is a good actor,” said Sarah.

“The one playing Vasha, the compassionate soldier, is a fine actor,” said Rostnikov. “You like the play?”

“Of course,” said Sarah. “He’s afraid you won’t like it.”

“I’ll tell him the truth,” Rostnikov said.

“If necessary, lie,” said Sarah, and she kissed his cheek.

“So far I like it,” he said as they moved up the aisle with the crowd.

When they reached the line for the snack bar, someone behind them said, “Don’t you return telephone calls?”

Both Rostnikov and Sarah knew who they would see before they turned, and since Lydia Tkach had been so loud; many others turned with them. Lydia was wearing a green dress with a green necklace that was almost lost in the ruffles around her neck. In her right hand she carried a rather wrinkled coat.

“It is good to see you,” Rostnikov lied. “You have met my wife, Sarah.”

“Of course,” shouted Lydia, taking Sarah’s hand. “Jewish lady with the brain tumor. It is good to see you again.”

Rostnikov looked at his wife and was relieved to see a smile.

“It was nice of you to come to our son’s play,” said Sarah. “Are you enjoying it?”

“I don’t like plays about secrets,” she said. “Everyone whispers. Movies are better.”

“Perhaps we can suggest to Iosef that he write a movie, a loud movie,” said Rostnikov. “May I buy you a coffee?”

“I didn’t come to see the play,” she said. “I came to talk to you.”

“I considered that possibility,” said Rostnikov. “Coffee?”

“Pepsi-Cola,” Lydia said.

They were at the bar now and Rostnikov ordered three Pepsi-Colas. Then they stepped through the crowd, heading back toward the auditorium.

The intermission was ten minutes. Rostnikov knew there could not be more than five minutes left. He faced Lydia politely.

“She is going to get my son killed,” said Lydia, loud enough to attract the attention of at least a dozen more people.

“She?” asked Rostnikov.

“The little girl you have him working with, the one who is trying to seduce him and get him killed. Sasha is a husband, a father. Soon he will have two children. I don’t believe anyone in Russia today should have two children, but they did not ask me. I told them, anyway, but it was too late. He is behaving … Inspector, I think my son is afraid.”

The shrill insistence in her voice had given way to anguish as she finished. Sarah touched her shoulder, and Lydia bit her lower lip to hold back the tears.

“He’s out now with that girl in some bar called Nicholas looking for some Turkish woman,” Lydia said in a considerably lower voice than before. She lifted her eyes to Rostnikov and then went on, “I’ve never seen him afraid like this before. He doesn’t even know he is afraid. It’s making him angry like his father.”

It was time to go in for the second act and the crowd flowed toward the inner doors.

“We will talk to you after the next act,” Sarah said, putting her arm around the older woman.

“I’ve got to go back to the apartment,” said Lydia. “Maya and the baby need me. They don’t like to be alone. Besides, I don’t understand whispering plays. Your son is in the play, too? Which one?”

“The one who wanted to torture. …The tall one with the short brown hair,” said Sarah.

“Tell him to speak up,” she said, and turned to Rostnikov. “Will you do something for my son? You have one child. I have one child.”

“I will do something,” Rostnikov said.

“Does Porfiry Petrovich lie?” Lydia asked Sarah.

“When he must. But he is not lying now.”

Lydia nodded, looked at Rostnikov, not fully convinced, and put on her coat.

“I will do something,” Rostnikov said, touching Lydia’s shoulder.

Everyone was inside by now but the three of them.

Lydia nodded once and then once again before she moved into the night.

“What will you do?” asked Sarah.

“Now? Now I am going to see an Afghan die and a very angry soldier who called for blood be blamed for it, though he is not responsible. The disillusioned, compassionate soldier will turn out to be the murderer. He will have murdered this man who is like his own father because he cannot bear to see him killed by someone who doesn’t respect him.”

“Iosef let you read the script?” she asked as they moved back into the darkening theater.

“No,” he said, “but I am a policeman and he is my son.”

“You could be very wrong,” she said.

“I am probably wrong,” he agreed. “But that is the play I would write.”

“What will you do about Sasha Tkach?” whispered Sarah.

“Quiet,” said someone behind them, so Porfiry Petrovich didn’t have to answer.