Fall of a Cosmonaut ir-13

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Misha showed his best smile to the young men and said yes.

  It was more than twenty minutes later and Ivan was still no more than fifty yards from the bar. He was now parked at the dark, far end of the gravel-covered parking lot. The nearest car was about twenty-five feet away. He would have preferred to be someplace more private, possibly even their house, but Helga had reached down the front of his pants and between his legs before he could ask her where she suggested they go.

  The experience had been wonderful. She had proved to be experienced and he had been quite durable and willing. Now he was spent from her hands, her mouth, and, finally, from her surprisingly firm body in the back seat.

  She sat up and began to dress. She turned her head toward the entrance to the club as he sat up.

  “You wish to continue elsewhere?” he said, quite naked except for his shoes.

  “Not tonight, honey,” Helga said, leaning over to give him a moist, open-mouth kiss that tasted of her, of him, and of something quite sweet.

  “Then I can see you? …” he began.

  The door on his side suddenly opened. Helga, not yet fully dressed, opened her door and hurried out, saying, “Sorry, honey. I had fun.”

  The two men pulled the naked Ivan from the car. One of them kicked the door closed.

  “Bi’str iy, ‘quick,’” said one man to the other in Russian as they pulled Ivan toward the nearby trees, shredding his bottom on the gravel.

  Ivan struggled, but the men were strong and his leverage poor.

  A few seconds later Ivan lay in pain, naked, on his back, and the two men over him, behind a wall of bushes and trees.

  “What is this?” Ivan demanded.

  “You’ve talked,” one dark figure over him said.

  “Talked? About what? To who?” Ivan demanded, wishing he had something to cover himself.

  “You know,” said the second man.

  “I … you mean? No, I have not.”

  “But what is there to stop you?” asked the first man.

  “I wouldn’t,” said Ivan.

  “Why are we talking?” asked the second man. “Let’s do it and get out.”

  “You are going to kill me?” asked Ivan.

  The first man reached under his jacket for something. Ivan knew what it was.

  “No … I …” he said, trying to back away, holding his hand up.

  What happened next was a blur of imagination and confusion.

  The man with the gun grunted and staggered forward. The other man turned toward the first and Ivan could see something heavy, a rock, crash into his face. The second man fell next to Ivan, soundlessly bleeding, his nose broken. Ivan tried to sit up.

  The first man tried to level his gun but someone stepped forward and seemed to punch him in the stomach. The first man let out an “Ohh” that faded like the air from a flat tire.

  “Are you badly injured?” Misha asked, helping Ivan to his feet.

  “Badly? … No, I don’t think so. They tried to kill me. They are Russians,” said Ivan, bewildered.

  “We heard,” said Misha.

  Ivan looked at the two men who were with Misha. They seemed familiar. Yes, they had been in the bar.

  “How did you know? How did you find me?” asked Ivan, now on his feet.

  One of the two young men took off his jacket and handed it to Ivan, who tied it around his waist.

  “My friends told me that this was a place where people come to get together. We saw them dragging you from the car.”

  “You make friends quickly,” said Ivan.

  One of the two young men said, “Maybe another time.”

  The evening had already been a nightmare by the time Sasha and his mother had arrived at the movie theater.

  They had gone out for dinner. Lydia had insisted. This was a special occasion. She would pay. They had eaten at the Yerevan, with Lydia, who had picked out the restaurant, grumbling rather loudly that she was not terribly fond of Armenian food.

  “Then,” Sasha had said, loud enough for his mother and the people at the tables on both sides of them to hear, “why are we here?”

  “Because you love Armenian food,” she said.

  Sasha did not love Armenian food. He liked it reasonably well, but it was certainly not a culinary love. The bozbash-‘lamb and potato soup’-which seemed just fine to Sasha, was “too full of spices” for Lydia, who drank it all anyway. The chebureki-‘deep-fried meat pies’-which Sasha found delicious, were, according to Lydia, “filled with things that would block your heart and kill you.” She ate her entire plateful and drank a large glass of Armenian brandy.

  The waiter had refused to acknowledge Sasha’s shrug and search for sympathy in a conspiratorial glance.

  “What are you smiling about?” Lydia had said over brandy.

  “Nothing. I don’t know.”

  “You look content,” she said suspiciously. “You’ve found some woman.”

  “No,” he said, loud enough for her to hear. “But I was asked to be a movie star today.”

  Lydia shook her head. She did not understand her son’s jokes.

  “You should look terrible,” she said. “Your wife and children are gone. You should go get them. You could be in Kiev by train in half a day. I would pay. I want my grandchildren back.”

  Now the entire restaurant, Sasha was sure, knew the history of the Tkach family. He doubted if that history interested them.

  Lydia had paid the check, saying, “My son loves Armenian food. It doesn’t suit my stomach. He’s taking me to a movie.”

  The waiter had said nothing. He didn’t have to be particularly polite. His tip was built into the check.

  “Shto ehtah zah feel’m, ‘what kind of movie is this?’” she asked.

  “I told you,” Sasha said, “a kahmyehdyeeyoo, ‘a comedy.’”

  “It is Japanese?” she asked. “I don’t like Japanese. Your great-grandfather died fighting the Japanese, and for what, Vladivostok.”

  “It isn’t Japanese,” said Sasha, ushering his mother out of the restaurant. “It is English.”

  And then they were in the movie. It was crowded. Before it began, Sasha begged his mother to turn on her hearing aid. He still had daymares of the last time he had taken his mother to a movie.

  They sat.

  “I can hear perfectly,” she said, loud enough for a thin young man with glasses in front of her to turn and give a look designed as warning against such outbursts during the film.

  There were few empty seats in the theater. The murmur of the crowd was loud. Then Sasha Tkach’s nightmare in darkness began. The movie had started.

  The subtitles seemed too long for what the English actors were saying on the screen.

  “Which one is Monty?” Lydia asked aloud.

  How, Sasha thought, could one explain. “The skinny one with the bad teeth,” said Sasha. “It’s his nickname.”

  “Look, what? I thought those were women,” she said a little later. “One of them is standing by that urinal, peeing. It’s a man dressed like a woman.”

  “It is a woman making a joke about men peeing,” said Sasha.

  “Be quiet, please,” said the young man with glasses, turning to them.

  “What is funny about women pretending to pee like men?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sasha, sinking down in his seat, barely watching the movie, hoping for the end to come soon.

  “What is … why are those men taking off their clothes?”

  “They want to make money stripping,” Sasha explained. “They’re out of work.”

  “I know that,” she said. “I can read, but who would want to see those men take off their clothes? Well, maybe that nice-looking one. Ah, I knew it, he’s a sissy boy.”

  The young man with glasses turned around in his seat and said, “He is gay and you are loud and I think you should leave so that the rest of us in this theater can salvage some sense of satisfaction from this so-far intolerable situation.”


  “I’m a police officer,” Sasha said, sitting up and reaching into his pocket to pull out his badge. “This is my mother. If you think you are having a bad time, try, if you have the imagination, to think of how I am feeling. You will go home alone. I will go home with my mother.”

  “You have my sympathy,” said the young man with glasses, “but …”

  “Right,” said Sasha. “Mother, let’s go.”

  Sasha started to get up.

  “I like this movie,” she said, refusing to budge.

  “Listen to your son,” came a voice from behind.

  “Why are they breaking those beautiful little gnomes?” asked Lydia.

  “Sometimes, my mother, people get the uncontrollable impulse to break things. Let’s go.”

  “You don’t like the movie. We will go,” said Lydia. “He invites me to a movie and then we leave before we know what’s going to happen.”

  Sasha guided his mother up the aisle. Several people applauded their departure.

  Once outside, Sasha took a deep breath of relief.

  “I don’t understand why you didn’t like the movie,” Lydia said.

  “You didn’t laugh once,” he said as they walked down the Arbat toward the metro station.

  “It wasn’t a comedy,” she said. “You didn’t understand. That was the problem, why you didn’t like it. It was sad. They were out of work.”

  “Mother, you are absolutely right,” he said.

  “When are you going to Kiev?”

  Akardy Zelach sat at the small kitchen table, turning a chicken bone over with his fork. His mother shifted her position in the next room. He could see her. She, like him, was a bit heavy and awkward, but she had a confidence and dignity, a certainty about everything, that he would never possess.

  She was watching some game show on television. Akardy could see that it involved a big wheel with numbers that made no sense to him. Contestants spun the wheel and the audience shouted as it turned. His mother, fist clenched, urged the wheel on, turned sideways to will it another notch or turn.

  “Then,” he said. “I should refuse.”

  “If you can,” his mother said. “If you cannot …”

  She shrugged and reached for the glass of tepid tea on the table in front of her.

  Akardy adjusted his glasses and looked at the bone.

  “Then shall I lie?” he asked.

  “Will they pay you if you tell the truth?” she asked. “Look, look, if she just … she can win a car. She can … oh, no.”

  “I don’t know if they’ll pay,” he repeated. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to take it even if they do pay.”

  Akardy’s mother stood up, reached over, and turned off the television set.

  “Your grandmother, my mother, read tea leaves, palms, bumps on the head, cards,” she said, looking at her son.

  “I know,” he answered glumly.

  “And you know what? It was all for show. She didn’t know how she knew what she knew. It was just there. People want the show. That’s what my sister and I did when we learned we had the gift or curse. And you don’t know either.”

  “I didn’t … I just said whatever came into my head,” said Akardy. “I’m not even sure how to lie about it. Do I let something come into my head and then lie about it? And where does the new lie come from? Perhaps it is really the truth. How do I know? How am I to know? I don’t want to be studied.”

  His mother walked over to join him at the table and picked at the crumbs of the flat cake she had baked earlier that day. Akardy didn’t like when she picked at crumbs and then licked her fingers and picked again. He had never told her. She loved him, had taken care of him when he had been injured and almost died. That was when the gift or curse had come, after he had been beaten, after his skull had been cracked. It didn’t come often and he had always been able to ignore it before, but that dark woman with the glasses at the psychic center, Nadia Spectorski, she had been like a … a jumping dog, all over him, demanding, excited. He did not want to see her again, but he had no choice. Perhaps he could call in and say he was ill or that his mother was ill? She really wasn’t well. No, he would have to go. He would have to face Emil Karpo’s doubting eyes.

  He decided that he would try to lie. Perhaps the Nadia Spectorski woman would turn out to be the murderer. That would save him. He wished there were more cake.

  “What are you doing?” asked Elena.

  The night was relatively warm though there was a smell of the possibility of more rain in the clouds that covered the sky. They sat on a bench in the concrete courtyard just outside the window of the apartment Elena shared with her aunt, Anna Timofeyeva.

  Had she been home, Lydia Tkach could have looked out the window and seen them from her apartment in the far corner of the one-story building, but she was staying with Sasha.

  Anna Timofeyeva regretted the day she had agreed to help Lydia Tkach find an apartment in the building. As a former procurator, Anna still had friends or friends who had friends. She had misgivings when she agreed to help Sasha’s mother. To protect herself and Elena, Anna had set down clear rules by which Lydia was to abide. These rules regarded when Lydia could visit and under what conditions. Lydia had begun violating the rules the day after she moved in.

  The day before, Anna Timofeyeva had sat petting her cat, Bakunin, in the window and had said to Elena, “Perhaps we will be lucky. Perhaps Sasha’s wife will never return.”

  “You mean that?” Elena had asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Anna. “Maybe I do.”

  And now, Elena and Iosef sat in the dark and empty courtyard surrounded by dimly lit windows, possibly being watched by Aunt Anna.

  “What are you doing?” Elena asked, putting her hand on the shoulder of Iosef, who leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands.

  “Brooding,” he said.

  “Are you going to stop brooding sometime tonight? I have to get up early and catch a thief.”

  “I’ll stop,” he said. “It will take great effort. You can help by setting a clear date for our marriage, a date when you will be moving into my apartment.”

  “Which,” she said, “will then be ‘our apartment’ and which, you have agreed, will be redecorated to our mutual satisfaction.”

  He sat up and looked at her.

  “I thought you liked the way my apartment looks.”

  “Iosef, we’ve talked about this. I like it for you. For us, I want more of us, or me, to be there, which is why I want to pay half the rent. And please, don’t talk about how all of our money will be together. I don’t want to bicker about tables and chairs and … Iosef, tell me truthfully, am I fat?”

  He leaned back a bit to examine her as if for the first time, from foot to head.

  “Stop,” she said. “This is not a joke.”

  “You are not fat,” he said. “You are voluptuous. You are perfect. If you lose a pound, one pound, I will call off the marriage. If after we are married, you lose one pound, I will seek a divorce.”

  “You mean it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. If you want to brood some more, you have my permission,” she said.

  “No, you’ve taken the pain out of it.”

  “What were you brooding about?”

  “Dead poets. Dead cosmonauts. Did you know that Mikhail Lermontov was only twenty-seven when he died?”

  “Yes,” Elena said, tugging at his ear. “He died in 1841. Did you know he was descended from a Scottish family that came to Russia in the seventeenth century? And that Lermontov was a military officer transferred to the Caucasus for writing poetry attacking the royal court?”

  “No,” said Iosef. “You are fond of Lermontov’s work?”

  “Not particularly,” she said. “He is too brooding.”

  “Your point is taken,” said Iosef, leaning over to kiss her. She liked his kisses. His lips were ample, his mouth and tongue passionate. She had taught herself to be careful with men, but w
ith Iosef she felt she could let herself float without flying away.

  When the first kiss had ended, she said, “I will have to get some sleep and you have to be up early to get to the airport.”

  “I’m packed,” he said, leaning toward her again.

  “We’re being watched from many windows,” she said with a smile.

  “I would hope so,” he said. “I have never completely lost my desire for an audience.”

  “And I have never lost my desire for privacy,” she said.

  “A perfect match,” he said, placing her hand gently between his legs.

  “Perfect,” she said.

  Emil Karpo continued to believe that Communism was a nearly ideal social-political system. The problem, he had come to believe, was that humanity could not abide an ideal system. People were self-serving, animalistic, and were capable of destroying anything that required total cooperation. There were many individuals of worth who cared about others, who had, he knew not why, cared about him. Porfiry Petrovich and his wife clearly cared. Mathilde had cared.

  Emil Karpo sat at the table in his room, facing the floor-to-ceiling bookcase filled with files and notes of unresolved cases. Emil Karpo sat in the light of a single lamp behind him and the glow of his computer screen. He wore a white T-shirt over a pair of white shorts. In his room, alone, he wore white. Outside, he wore black.

  Barefoot, Karpo looked at the screen.

  When he had become a policeman, his goal had been clear, his task certain. He would find and help punish those who broke the law, those who were not fit for a Communist state. He knew that he would never stop all crime, not alone, not with the help of thousands, because people did not live for an ideal. They lived for themselves, for their families sometimes, for a few others or one other for whom they had often-fleeting feelings. But he could keep to a minimum the numbers of those who did not conform.

  He quickly discovered, however, that the task was beyond monumental. The people who ruled were corrupt. The people who were supposed to contain crime and prosecute criminals were corrupt. Soviet Communism had turned into a grotesque distortion of what his father, his readings, and the speeches of many had promised, but it had been replaced by an even more corrupt system.