“Do you have any idea who killed Father Merhum?” Karpo asked evenly.
“You change the subject,” she said.
“I cannot believe in your religion simply because the revolution has failed.”
“I do not expect you to,” she said. “But it will come. It has already begun.”
“Do you have any idea who murdered Father Merhum?” he repeated.
“He was killed on the morning of the day he was to denounce those for whom the day of retribution had come,” she said.
“Party members,” said Karpo.
“Father Merhum’s list was not limited to the secular. He was not beloved by the hierarchy of the Church.” She stood and placed her cup next to Karpo’s on the table. “There are Orthodox leaders who spoke for the government, supported government claims that freedom of worship was welcome. The Church donated millions of rubles to the Soviet Peace Committee. All religious activity was regulated through the Council for Religious Affairs.”
“You believe that the Church ordered Father Merhum murdered because-”
“-he was about to denounce the Church,” she finished. “There are those who believe this. There are a few in the Church who are not true Christians, and it is they who have risen as tyrants rose.”
“You are a revolutionary,” Karpo said.
“And you are in need of a new revolution.”
“I must go,” he said.
“Perhaps we can talk again.” She walked him to the door. On the way they paused to look at the icon of the pale saint in prison clothes.
Karpo said, “When we do talk again, perhaps you can tell me who Oleg is.”
“You did not believe me?” asked Sister Nina.
“No.”
“There are things that are best left buried,” she said.
“Like the records of murdered priests inside Lubyanka?” Karpo asked.
“Father Merhum believed that such records are long dead,” she said.
“But you believe in resurrection.”
“You are clever and I am an old woman,” she said. “But my faith is strong and yours weak. Do you wish to arrest me for refusing to answer your questions?”
Karpo opened the front door. A wind was blowing through the woods and there was suddenly the smell of cold rain in the gray winter air. He stepped out while the nun held the door open. “No.”
“Good,” she said into the wind. “I’m too old for threats. We will talk again. God bless you.”
After she closed the door, Karpo stood for a moment. This had not been the afternoon he expected. He felt as if a migraine was coming, but he had none of the aura that usually accompanied it, no strange odors, no unbidden sexual impulses. He had to admit as he headed for the town that something about the nun and the service for the dead priest had shaken him. It reminded him of that day from his childhood, but it could not be what Sister Nina had said.
The murderer of Father Vasili Merhum stood back in the woods watching the tall pale policeman move slowly along the path to Arkush.
Moments ago the killer had stood next to the window of the dead priest’s house and heard Sister Nina avoid the question about Oleg. Then he had heard the policeman say that he did not believe her.
The murderer was shaken. At the moment he could see no alternatives. He wanted to see an alternative, a way out, but there didn’t appear to be one. She knew and someday she might tell the policeman or another priest or nun. He could not live with such a fear. It was not just he who would suffer, he told himself. Other lives would be ruined.
Besides, she was old. She believed in an afterlife. If there was an afterlife, he accepted his own damnation. If there was no afterlife and no damnation, then the nun had devoted her life to a lie.
The wind stirred as the policeman disappeared into the trees. The murderer let the next gust push him toward the small house.
Tears welled in his eyes as he reached the door of the house. He could take no time to think about it. If he took time, he would change his mind and Sister Nina would have an opportunity to tell the policeman.
No one locked doors in Arkush, especially a nun. He entered the house and found the old woman in the kitchen cleaning teacups. She looked over her shoulder when she heard his footsteps.
He was trembling, his hands at his sides, but he was determined to act. Sister Nina dried her hands on a small clean rag on a rod over the sink. She crossed herself and turned to face him.
“This is not the way,” she said softly.
“I can think of no other,” he cried. “God help me. I can think of no other. I have become a monster.”
“Then,” she said, “we will both suffer. I for a moment and you for eternity.”
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
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. “
“A tomato?”
