Tarnished Icons

leg he dragged behind him. Now, as she sat in one of the chairs, an arm around a granddaughter on either side, she said, “Spahseebah” unable to keep the tears from her eyes.

Rostnikov nodded.

“You’re walking better,” she said.

“He has a new plastic leg,” the younger girl said.

Rostnikov rolled up his pant leg to reveal the creation.

“Take it off for her,” said the younger girl.

The older girl tapped her sister on the head.

“That won’t be necessary,” said Galina with a smile. “I have seen men with one leg before.”

“How does it go, Galina Panishkoya?” asked Rostnikov.

The woman shrugged and pulled her granddaughters even closer to her.

“Bweet zayela, every day life has challenged me, but I work and I eat. I’m making dresses here,” she said, “all the same kind, like this one. I am useful. I don’t have to stand. I used to work at the Panyushkin dress factory, but that was long ago.”

Rostnikov knew this, but he nodded as if it were new information.

“The light is not always good here,” she said. “But they let us read. They gave me reading glasses. I read better now.”

Rostnikov shifted his weight and pulled a tattered paperback from his pocket. He put it on the table in front of Galina. It was an Ed McBain novel called Mischief. Porfiry Petrovich had read it three times.

“Thank you,” Galina said, looking at the book.

“Galina Panishkoya,” he said, “you still don’t remember what happened that day in the store on Arbat Street?”

“No,” the woman said. She could pull her grandchildren no closer but she tried. “Not clearly.”

It was the right answer. The woman had always said she didn’t remember getting the gun or firing the shot. There was no doubt that she had done it, but Iosef’s friend, the lawyer, said that there was something called “temporary insanity” in the United States and other countries. Galina Panishkoya had ample reason to go insane that day. With the legal system still in post-Soviet chaos and no one knowing what laws to follow, the lawyer was trying to schedule a hearing with a sympathetic chief district judge, one of the new ones who might be willing to blame the Communist system for the woman’s temporary madness. The judge who sentenced Galina had been fired in disgrace. The trial had been a typical mockery, with the old woman sitting in a cage in the middle of the small dirty courtroom and being referred to by her own appointed lawyer as “the criminal being tried.” Things were different now. A well-timed request for a new trial before an election might be effective. Then, possibly with a vzyatka, an unofficial payment for services, including the judge’s, a new trial could be scheduled. There was even the possibility, though Iosef’s lawyer friend held out only a little hope, that a high enough judge might be willing simply to free the woman on the grounds that she may, in fact, not have fired the shot at all but picked up the weapon in a state of complete confusion. Such a ruling, however, would take a bribe far beyond what Rostnikov and his wife could come up with. Still, the possibility existed.

“Porfiry Petrovich,” the woman said meekly, “please thank your wife for taking in my granddaughters.”

“It is our pleasure,” the detective said. “It has been good to have children in the apartment.”

“He lifts weights on bars,” said the older girl proudly.

“And he fixes toilets,” said the younger one. “And tonight he’s going to fix some heating thing for some Jews.”

“Jews?” asked Galina. “You are going to work for Jews?”

“Mrs. Rostnikov is Jewish,” said the older girl.

“She’s Jewish?” asked Galina, looking at the detective.

He nodded.

“So many new things have come to me at such an old age,” the woman said, shaking her head as a male guard entered the room to indicate that the visit was over.

The woman and the detective both stood slowly, each for a different reason. The girls gave their grandmother hugs and kisses. Then the guard ushered them into the hall when Rostnikov motioned for him to do so. Rostnikov stood facing the woman who, he had noticed, now had a full set of teeth. When she had gone into prison, she had the brown minimum of teeth common in Soviet citizens. Rostnikov had arranged through a charitable fund he had once dealt with to have them removed and a false set fitted.

“You will bring them back?” she said, holding her hands together in a gesture of near prayer.

“I will,” he said.

“Can you, might you, bring your wife so I can thank her personally?”

“I will try,” he said. “Are you giving up hope, Galina?”

“No,” she said with a little smile. “I miss my girls. I want to be out of here, but I am at peace and the other women look at me as a grandmother. I am safe. I don’t think about hope. I make dresses. I read. I’m fed. I remember the good things outside, what few there were.”

“You have grown more articulate in prison,” said Rostnikov with his own smile.

“I know what ‘articulate’ means,” she said with something of the same pride her granddaughter had shown in Porfiry Petrovich’s artificial leg. “Thank you.”

Rostnikov said nothing. He moved past her and touched her arm as he walked out the door into the hallway.

The policeman was still in uniform when he got home. His daughter came rushing to him in her nightshirt, and he picked her up as his wife moved to the center of the room with a resigned smile.

The policeman didn’t remove his black jacket. He scooped the giggling child up in his arms and threw her into the air. Not too high. Not high enough to frighten her, but enough to make her giggle even more and to make her yellow curls bounce. She was a little alionshka, a fair-haired beauty.

“She heard you at the door,” his wife said. “She came flying out of her bed past me. I don’t understand how she could have heard. Maybe she just sensed it.”

The policeman nuzzled the child’s neck and asked her what she had done that day. It was a mistake. The girl was almost eight and could talk nonstop. Sometimes she made sense.

“She should get to sleep,” his wife said.

He nodded and held the little girl in his arms as she spoke. He grinned with love as he moved past his wife, pausing to give her a kiss on the nose. The policeman’s wife smiled, but it wasn’t a sincere smile. She hoped he didn’t notice.

“Hungry?” she called as he took me little girl to the bedroom.

“Starving,” he said.

“I have chicken,” his wife said.

“Amazing,” he said from the small bed in the corner, where he placed his daughter. This had always been the child’s bed. When she was an infant, they had pushed the bed against the wall and set up a trio of high-backed chairs on the other side. The head-and footboards of the bed were old but made of sturdy wood. The child, still talking, took her stuffed clown, Petya, into her arms.

The policeman gently touched the child’s lips to let her know it was time to stop talking. She yawned as he leaned over to kiss her.

“You will be home when I wake up?” she asked sleepily.

“For a little while,” he said. “But don’t try to get up early. I won’t leave without talking to you.”

“You promise me?”

“I promise you,” he said.

He left the room, moving around his and his wife’s bed, and closed the door. There was enough light from the window to keep the bedroom from being completely dark. Almost directly outside of the second-story apartment was a street lamp.

While his wife prepared his dinner, the policeman walked back to the apartment door and took off his jacket.

“I’m sorry I’m so late,” he called as quietly as he could across the small living room into the kitchen area.