mind, a test to prepare him for a greater pain from some unnamed enemy of the state at some unspecified moment in the future that would probably never come.
When he was fully dressed and had brushed back his dark thinning hair, Karpo stepped out into the hall outside of his small cell-like room. He closed the door quietly, setting the hair-thin wire that would later tell him if anyone had visited him or might be inside waiting when he returned. He expected no such visit and had never had one.
“Rostnikov here, come to three-forty-four Dimitri Ulyanov Street. Apartment six-hundred-twelve.”
“What…” Sasha Tkach started to answer, but cut himself off and began to say, “I’ll be right there,” but the line went dead before his last word.
The phone had rung six times in the two-room apartment. Sasha’s mother slept no more than a foot from the phone in the bedroom but she was nearly deaf. He had really wanted the phone in the other room, the living room/kitchen where he and his wife Maya slept, but the phone had been installed when he was at work and he did not want to complain. The phone had been a sign of his priority, his standing as an investigator, a person to be respected, but it was a privilege one did not want to abuse. So the phone remained in the bedroom. He gathered his clothes quietly and went back out to the living room.
“You’re going?” Maya said, sitting up on her elbows. She turned on the light. Her hair was long and straight and covered part of her sleepy face. She had an accent of the Ukraine. To Tkach, who was twenty-eight and had been married for four months, it still sounded exotic. She had come to Moscow to work as an accountant in the State License Bureau and he had met her there while doing a few days of investigation on a black market case. The case had been a success. They recovered four cartons of American blue jeans which had been turned over to the case procurator after Tkach committed the first legal violation of his adult life. He had taken one pair and given it to Maya.
“That was Rostnikov,” he said, running his hand through his blond hair and pulling on his pants.
She looked at the clock. It was three and she would have to get up in an hour.
“Take your lunch in your pocket,” she said. His salary was two-hundred-fifty rubles, hers ninety rubles. They spent almost 70 percent of that on food and couldn’t afford to have either of them eat any meals at restaurants.
He nodded, moved to her, kissed her lightly and touched his hand to her shoulder, indicating that she should go back to sleep.
If there was no delay on the Metro, he could get to Dimitri Ulyanov Street in twenty minutes. A cold cloud of snow came dancing down the street as he stepped out, wondering what might cause Rostnikov to call him so early. There was a night shift for emergencies. It must be something big.
At three o’clock a dark figure stood swaying on Lenin Avenue. He was not drunk. He was trying desperately to think, but all that would come to him was that he would go home and wait for her.
He knew he had been walking for-how long? Perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour or more. And there were many things to do, to plan, but they would not form into words and pictures. It had been like this when he was a child, but he was no longer a child. It was like trying to put ideas together when sleep is coming.
Logic was the proper recourse, think it through, come to a conclusion only after you had asked the right questions. That was what Granovsky had taught him. Maybe if he could phrase the question clearly, he could trick it, get it done and answered, and go on to other problems, go home and wait for her.
Through the snow flakes on his eyelashes, he looked up at the tall apartment buildings and felt dizzy.
The taxi was in front of him and a thick-necked man leaned out and said something. The voices that plagued him vanished and he looked at the man in the taxi.
“You want a taxi?”
He had never been in a taxi alone. In the past two years he had really only been in a taxi three times, always when someone else paid. Two of those times it was Granovsky who had paid. He climbed into the back of the cab, touching the seat, smelling the sweat of the day and trying to fix the blue-black face of the driver in the present.
“You drunk?” asked the driver with a sigh.
“No,” he said, “I…I’ve been thinking and my mind is just…Take me to Petro Street.”
“Where on Petro?”
“One three six.”
“You want a bottle?” Ivan held up a vodka bottle pulled from under the seat. “Two rubles.”
The passenger reached forward and took the bottle. He opened it in darkness as the cab moved slowly forward, and he drank deeply, waiting for the sting of cheap vodka. Maybe it would give him a moment, just a moment of clarity. He felt if he could just break through, be sure, there would be a tremendous surge of power, strength. He wanted to be fully awake and aware. A man cannot cope if he is not awake and aware, not in control. He had learned that from Granovsky. He did not want to be a dreamer. He had almost been lost in dream those years earlier at the hospital. But there had been no comfort in the dream. It had sucked him deeper and deeper, drowning, as he called for wakefulness and had not been heard. It had taken long, and his family had abandoned him at his father’s decree. Slowly he had awakened and felt the touch of objects and people. He had gradually gotten better. Then he had met her, had met Granovsky. Granovsky had helped him. They had both helped him move from dream to reality, but he felt the tug of the dream again and knew he might slip back if he did not make a mighty effort. It had to be stopped. If he could be sure that he had done it, then it might stop. He drank from the bottle and this seemed to help.
“It’s not the best, not American or Czech,” said the driver, unable to turn his fat neck, “but it’s not bad, right?”
The passenger said nothing. He thought. He would wait for her. But what if his father’s voice were right? What if he hadn’t done it? He leaned forward toward the sweat smell and solidness of the driver, who sensed him and was startled.
“My problem,” said the passenger, “is that I’m not sure if I did something tonight. If I didn’t do it, I can’t take the next step. Each thing must come in order. To do one without having done the other would make me a fool. Do you understand?”
The driver grunted. He had hauled drunks and lunatics through the streets of Moscow for over thirty years and he had learned not to argue, simply to listen and agree. Ivan Sharikov had his own problem, the pain in his back that was too severe to ignore.
“Moscow is a city of pain,” said the passenger.
“True,” said the driver. The cab skidded on a patch of ice on the bridge across the Moscow River and spun slightly. The passenger said something else, but the driver was too busy with the skid to pay attention, though he caught the last few words:
“…it again, but I couldn’t go back, could I?”
“No,” the driver agreed, “you couldn’t.”
For blocks the passenger was silent, and then fear came. He felt himself sinking into the dream. He felt panic and knew he had to talk, to claw with the fingers of his mind to stay in the world of cold and pain. In the rear-view mirror, Ivan could see the passenger sweating as if it were half time in a summer soccer game.
“You can’t know what it is like. Something has to be done. I have to feel, touch, know I’m here. If I did it, I have a purpose, things to do. I can wait for her.”
At best, drunk, at worst, mad, Ivan was thinking, and he sped up slightly, afraid of skidding but eager to get rid of the sweating, babbling passenger and get to his room where he could wrap a blanket around his back.
“If I act in this world, I stay in this world. You understand?”
“Yeah,” grumbled Ivan.
“He told me that. Granovsky told me that, and he was right. I used to think the whole world was a fake, cardboard sets like a play with everyone acting their roles. I used to think there was another world quite different from ours, and I could get to it if I could just get past one actor on the street, just make it around a corner before they had time to set up another façade. I have a sense of that coming back now. There’s no point asking you because if you’re part of it, you’ll lie. You see. I’m thinking logically again.”
The passenger now leaned back into darkness and covered his face with his hands.
“It’s logical,” said the passenger. “The only way to know is to do it again and do it right and feel it, have evidence, blood, something.”
