“smart” music. The girls sat next to Leon’s son, Ivan. The three children had been promised ice cream after the concert, if they weren’t too tired for the treat.
They had all insisted that they would not be too tired, but a glance showed that only Laura, the older girl, was still alert and even attentive.
The piece ended with a solo closing by Leon at the piano. When the last note stopped echoing, the applause began.
“Are you enjoying?” asked Sarah.
“Yes,” said the older girl.
The younger one had fallen asleep and was now in danger of toppling from the wooden seat. Ivan was still awake, but he had begun fighting his heavy eyelids. Rostnikov reached past his wife, picked the sleeping girl up, and put her on his lap. She stirred slightly and put her head on his shoulder.
“It is beautiful,” said the older girl.
“It is beautiful,” Sarah agreed, reaching over to touch her husband’s arm.
The next piece began.
Destruction, creation. Death, beauty, thought Rostnikov. He decided that if he could make the time tomorrow, he would find the young Israeli rabbi, Avrum Belinsky, and have a serious talk which would probably clarify nothing but, Rostnikov was sure, would make a one-legged policeman a bit more at peace with the chaos that is Russia.
The trio on the low stage began another piece.
“Brahms,” Sarah whispered.
Brahms would be most appropriate, Rostnikov thought as he smelled the clean sweet hair of the child on his lap.
The children were both asleep in the living room and, thank whatever gods there may be, Lydia Tkach was not in the apartment.
Sasha sat next to Maya on the bed. Neither spoke. Neither reached out to touch the other. There was a night chill of impend-ing Moscow rain in the air. People were going nearly mad waiting for the rain that refused to come. Maya wore flannel pajamas Sasha had given her for her birthday two years earlier. Sasha was in his white boxer shorts and the extra-large Totenham Hotspurs soccer shirt he had confiscated from a shipment of illegally imported goods from England a few months earlier. The three suitcases were on the floor in the corner. They were closed, waiting, threatening.
“Something has happened to me, Maya,” he said.
She said nothing. He went on.
“I would normally be depressed now, afraid of losing you and the children, dreading the need to face my mother, cursing my work. But I’m not. I feel calm, as if the things that usually get to me are not important. I don’t want you to go. I will surely weep.
But if you must, I’ll try to understand. You surely have reason to leave.”
“You are reacting to being alive when you should be dead, Sasha,” she said softly, her head down. “Lydia is right. You should try to do something less dangerous, but I know you will not.”
She was right.
“Maya, I did it again. The weakness came. I became a different person, Dmitri Kolk, criminal.”
“You were with a woman,” said Maya. “I knew. I could tell from the guilt in your voice on the phone. Did she have a name?”
“Tatyana,” he said.
“Was she pretty?”
“Thin, but pretty, yes.”
“Did you have to do it? Would the people you were with be suspicious if you didn’t?”
“Maybe. No,” Sasha said, “I was drunk. I was playing a role.
Forgive me if you can, but I was enjoying playing that role.”
Maya turned her head toward him. “Sasha, you just told me the truth.”
“I know.”
“You have always lied in the past.”
“Yes. I told you. Something has changed. Don’t go, Maya.”
“Twenty-two days’ trial,” she said. “I’m not threatening you, Sasha. It just seems reasonable, enough time to see if you’ve really changed.”
“Twenty-two days,” he said. “An odd number.”
“I took a leave from work,” she said. “I have twenty-two days.
We can spend time together. I’m not sure I have much hope. I’ll call my office in the morning and say I might like to come back. They’ll be happy to have me. No one else knows the billing system program.”
Maya worked for the Council for International Business Advancement. She liked the job. She did not want to lose it. She would decide what to do about the Japanese businessman when the need to decide arose. What she would do would depend primarily on Sasha.
“Would you like to get under the covers and make love?” she asked.
“What?”
“I still love and want you,” she said, “I’m just not sure I can live with you.”
“I would like very much to make love. The moment you asked the question, I was immediately. . I love you, Maya.”
“I know, Sasha Tkach,” she said. “But that is not enough.”
Iosef sat in his small, comfortable one-room apartment trying to read a play by a new writer named Simsonevski. Simsonevski had three plays produced in the last year, all in the little theaters in storefronts or the back rooms of shoe stores or churches. Iosef had seen all of the plays, liked none of them. The one in his lap-he was wearing only his underwear and a plain white T-shirt-was even more grim than the others. There had been one suicide, one murder of a husband by a wife, one young woman going insane (with a stage note indicating that she should bite off her tongue), and a soldier who has an epileptic seizure onstage.
Iosef laughed. It was that or cry, but on balance the laugh was called for. He put aside the play knowing he would not pick it up again. It was very late but he thought he would try to find something on television, anything but the news.
He could not match the tragedies of Simsonevski’s play but he could beat it for simple irony. First, the Yak had purposely allowed Yevgeny Pleshkov to go free of a crime he surely committed. The Yak was not one to take bribes. From what Iosef could see, Yaklovev was not interested in material things. Porfiry Petrovich had told him that the Yak lived alone and simply. His wardrobe each day confirmed this in part. No, money was not the culprit in this injustice. Did Pleshkov or the woman have something on the Yak? Iosef didn’t think the Yak would stand for blackmail even if they did have something. He would find a way out. It was something Iosef would discuss tomorrow with his father.
But the problem of the Pleshkov case was less vexing than Iosef ’s embarrassment over arresting the man in the courtyard outside of Anna Timofeyeva’s window. The man proved to be the woman’s brother, a construction worker, not the woman’s husband.
Anna had been right about who the woman was, but Iosef had now revealed that her place of hiding and change of name were known.
They had alerted her, and she would alert her fugitive husband.
Anna Timofeyeva slept through the capture, and when she was told about it when she awakened, she shook her head and said,
“You should have awakened me. I know what the husband looks like.”
That was all she said. She asked them if they wanted tea, which she disliked but drank because she thought it might be good for her. As Anna had moved toward the stove, Iosef and Elena declined the offer of tea and told her that they planned to marry.
Anna went to the small sink in the corner, filled her teapot with water, and turned on the gas on the stove.
