Tatiana

19

Her name was Lotte. This time she didn’t let Zhenya off the hook. Being a pawn down to her was a slow descent into the grave. He knew what she was going to do; he simply couldn’t stop her. By the end of the match, her cheeks were flushed and Zhenya was as sweaty as a wrestler. Mr. Stanford was gone. Almost all the onlookers were gone because they had expected a quick victory for Lotte, and the match had run into class time. It was the first game Zhenya had lost in weeks, yet he was strangely exhilarated.

She lived in an artistic household across from the conservatory, where music drifted from floor to floor. Her grandfather was Vladimir Sternberg, the most famous portrait artist of his time. Sternberg had cannily decided to paint only one subject: Stalin. Stalin addressing the Sixteenth Congress of the Soviets, Stalin addressing the Seventeenth Congress of the Soviets, and on and on, painting a Stalin a little taller, a bit more substantial, without a withered arm and never, ever with another Party leader, those fatuous demi-tyrants who sooner or later were erased from pictures and marched to a cell. Sternberg avoided them as if they were contagious, while the stature of the Beloved Leader only grew until all that surrounded him were silvery clouds and the beams of a radiant sun.

Sternberg was little more than bones and blue veins dressed in a lounge robe and slippers, but he maneuvered his rattan wheelchair around easels draped with cloths. Smaller works of art, also covered, hung on the wall.

“Lotte, sweetheart, get this young man some tea. You’ve put him through the wringer.”

Zhenya took his cue and sat.

“Lotte has told me all about you,” Sternberg said.

Zhenya didn’t know what the artist was talking about. He was still surprised that Lotte had even noticed him, and he felt as out of place as a bird that had flown haphazardly in an open window. He had been sleeping on a mattress behind a video arcade, enduring the relentless chatter of machine guns and the whoosh of rockets long into the night. In comparison, the easels were silent and solemn in their drop cloths. Palettes and tables were daubed in colors. He had never noticed before that paint smelled and never seen cloths so mysterious.

“Go ahead, take a look,” Sternberg said.

“Which one?”

“Any one.”

Zhenya cautiously pulled a cloth from an easel and stepped back to study the painting. Stalin was waving; it wasn’t clear at whom or why, only that he was watching out for his people below. Zhenya unveiled a second portrait and a third, each painted with the forceful edge of propaganda. Stalin was a quick-change artist, in army green one moment and summer whites the next, and perpetually waving.

Sternberg said, “I could do five a day.”

Zhenya supposed that was “pretty good.”

“Good?” Sternberg almost rose from his chair. “That’s faster than the school of Rubens. Of course, the market for portraits of Stalin suffered for some time.”

Lotte delivered tea to Zhenya and whispered, “Ask my grandfather about his other paintings.”

“He’s not interested,” Sternberg said.

“Whatever,” Zhenya said.

“It’s not interesting. I painted them privately.”

“Look.” Lotte unveiled a painting of a village in banks of blue snow.

It was a rustic night scene, and the more Zhenya looked, the more he saw. Rendered in agitated strokes, embers from the fireplaces turned to imps of fire. Frozen shirts flew through the air. Windows lit so late at night suggested gaiety or disaster, and Zhenya crossed his arms for warmth.

The rest of the paintings-half a dozen-were the same and different. Each promised a rural subject and each, on examination, was at the point of explosion. A barn about to be a tinderbox, a skater under the ice, a horse’s eye rolling in panic.

“You hid these?” Zhenya asked. “Why?”

“A bold question from a first-time guest, but I like that.”

“So?”

“What do you think? To save my head. Lotte, would you bring some cookies too? Thank you, dear. You are too good.” To Zhenya, he said, “She loves her grandfather. So, tit for tat, what are you going to do with your chessboard? What are your plans?”

“Nothing in particular.”

“Which is nothing at all, of course. Lotte says you’re actually quite good at chess, a diamond in the rough. How good are you?”

“I’m okay.”

“Just okay? Maybe twenty players in the world make a living at chess. Are you one of the twenty best players in the world?”

“I don’t know.”

“You aren’t even ranked because you don’t play in real tournaments. Invisibility might be a shrewd tactic if you’re hustling games in a railroad station, my friend, but to the chess world, you don’t exist.”

Lotte returned with madeleines.

Sternberg produced a smile. “Lotte, I was just telling your friend the good news. The Stalin portraits are beginning to sell again.”

Zhenya and Lotte made nice for ten minutes. His glance stole to the paintings of snowbound villages, peasant revels, bear cubs following their mother. Nothing warmed a Russian heart like bears up a tree.

Later, when Zhenya and Lotte were alone in a café, she said, “I love my grandfather. He’s a sweet man and a fantastic artist. But to spend your life denying your art? Now no one knows him and it’s too late.”

• • •

Maxim was driving Arkady back to the airport in the rain. The ZIL’s windshield wipers slapped back and forth. Foot traffic had become huddled umbrellas. Boots made an appearance. At sidewalk stalls, shopkeepers stretched tarpaulins over boxes of fruit, a table of Prada knockoffs, a row of bicycles.

“Pull over,” Arkady said.

“What now? You’re going to miss your flight,” Maxim said.

“I’ll be right back.”

He stepped over a gutter and slipped between the water that drained from either end of an awning that read KOENIG BICYCLES. A repairman in a plastic bag repositioned bikes. Another, in the dark of the shop, fine-tuned a wheel, spinning it until the spokes blurred and hummed. The more Maxim gestured for Arkady to hurry, the more Arkady was the picture of someone in a mood to browse among pennants, key chains, calipers, bright biking gear and brighter helmets.

Posters of the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia, Tour St. Petersburg streamed on the walls in one endless, continuous race. A bulletin board announced local races from Kaliningrad to Chkalovsk, to Zelenogradsk, to the Curonian Spit.

“It’s an obsession, isn’t it?” Arkady ran his hand over a rack of glossy helmets.

The man with the wheel murmured, “It becomes your fucking life. You can’t let it take over.”

“Well put,” Arkady said. “You do a lot of rides?”

His friend said, “We have a club that rents bikes and tents. We’re very sociable. I would suggest a nice local tour from Kaliningrad to Zelenogradsk or Baltijsk. We go overnight, build a campfire, have a dip in the lake. It’s kind of an adult tour.”

Arkady studied the array of pennants. “It looks like you do races too. Do you use your own bikes?”

“Of course. I mean, we’re showing off the goods, aren’t we?”

“Do you ever fly with them?”

“Sure.”

“Do they go as cargo?”

The man at the wheel stopped it short. “Fuck no. I’m going to put a thousand-dollar bike in the hands of those apes in cargo? We buy a seat for the bike and stow it in the vestibule.”

“Your name is. .?”

“Kurt. I’m Kurt, he’s Karl.”

“A thousand dollars? Is that the limit?”

“There is no limit.”

“Ten thousand dollars?”

“We can do that,” said Karl.

“Ten thousand dollars? You’re wearing a plastic bag and you’ve got bikes selling for ten thousand dollars?”

“Not in the shop. Not at the moment.”

“But we can get whatever you want,” said Kurt.

“I want an Ercolo Pantera.”

This was the point at which they should have tried to steer him to another “top of the line” bike in the shop. Instead, they asked, “What would a Pantera be doing in Kaliningrad?”

That was the question, wasn’t it? Arkady thought.