with the married Cuban police officer who probably only wanted information from her. She had been far from promiscuous in her life. The graduate student engineer in the United States. The Canadian policeman she met in Boston. Iosef responded with careful references to his experience in Afghanistan, experience he had tried to deal with as a playwright and actor, and had failed.
They had been lying in his bed, naked, on their backs, looking up at the ceiling, a small light casting steady shadows.
“I was a murderer. I murdered the innocent during the war,” he had said. “I confess, too, that I did not like the Afghans. They are surly, nomadic people who kill each other over whether Allah wants them to cut their toenails or something. It was their land, but they killed my fellow soldiers, my friends. Some of our men hated me since I was considered Jewish. I fought with them. But I killed our enemies, the Afghans-even women and children. And I will live with that and dream about it and continue to wake up nights sweating and weeping.”
“But you seem so cheerful,” Elena said.
“That is the irony,” said Iosef. “I get that from my father. I find life interesting, a moment-to-moment adventure. My guilt I save for my dreams.”
“And you can do that?” she said.
“Much of the time,” Iosef answered. “Not always. So you see, your confession, though I respect it, is pale compared to mine. You require no forgiveness. I deserve none.”
“So, do you agree, Elena?” Lydia Tkach said.
“Agree?” Elena asked, half asleep and drawn from her memory of the night with Iosef.
“That Sasha deserves an office job,” Lydia shouted. “He has a mother, a wife, and two small children, and he is always depressed.”
In fact, Elena did agree, but it did not pay to give Lydia ammunition if she were again to approach Rostnikov, whom she blamed for the dangers her son had been subjected to.
“I am going to see Rostnikov again,” Lydia said with determination, folding her hands on the table resolutely when Elena simply shrugged and took a bite of her sandwich. “Porfiry Petrovich has been promoted. Now he can do this.”
“Does Sasha want a desk job?” Anna said.
Lydia paused for a moment and then answered, “Of course. It is his responsibility. With all the crime now, why would anyone want to be a police officer?”
“Lydia,” Anna reminded her guest, “Elena is a police officer.”
“I know that,” said Lydia impatiently. “She is alone. No responsibilities. She is not depressed.”
Anna nodded once to acknowledge the statement without agreeing or disagreeing.
When Elena was finished eating and cleaning her plate and utensils, Anna said she was growing tired. The hint did not work on Lydia, who was looking off into a corner of the room considering another assault on the injustice of human existence in general and specific humans in particular.
“My mother was raped and killed,” Lydia said, still looking at the wall, her voice so uncharacteristically low that Elena almost missed the words. “I was a little girl. During the famine. Five soldiers, drunken soldiers, came to our house in the village. They were our soldiers. They raped and killed her. I was too young and scrawny to bother with. I remember one rapist was a man in a brown uniform who got down from his horse and pushed us both into the house. My father was gone, in the same army as the men who attacked my mother. My father was dead when it happened, but we didn’t find that out for a long time, my baby brother and I. I have no idea how old the killers were. I don’t even remember their faces. Afterward, I took care of my brother. A cousin of my father barely kept us from starving.”
Lydia stopped as if coming out of a dream and looked around at Anna and Elena.
“I don’t know why I told you that,” she said.
Both Anna and Elena knew.
“I’ve never told anyone before,” Lydia went on, talking almost to herself. “Not even my brother. Never my son.”
“A game of chess?” Anna asked as Baku jumped back in her lap. “Some Mozart and some very competitive chess.”
“Yes,” said Lydia.
“I’m going to get a few hours’ sleep,” said Elena.
Anna was not a music lover. She had devoted her life to her work and had seen no plays, no movies, no ballet, no opera. Such things bored her. Even the idea of them bored her, but lately she seemed to have developed at least a high level of tolerance for Elena’s collection of CDs, particularly Mozart, Bach, and Vivaldi.
So the games began. Elena knew that her aunt would enjoy the competition. Unfortunately Lydia took a long time between moves. She couldn’t play under the pressure of a timer or a clock.
Elena had gone into her aunt’s bedroom, taken off her clothes, and fallen into the bed, jarred into near consciousness from time to time by Lydia’s shouts of triumph and defeat.
And now the weary Elena sat behind her desk looking up at Iosef standing in her doorway like Alain Delon, the French actor with the deadly smile. Sasha rose, having decided there was nothing more to say, only work to do. His head felt no better.
“I’ll start making the calls to the stations,” he said.
“Be tactful,” Elena said. “We are asking for a second disruption.”
“I will be tactful,” said Sasha. “I will also evoke the specter of the displeasure of the Yak should they balk. Who knows? Perhaps we can turn a profit, sell the photographs back cheaply to each policeman when we no longer need them, split the profit three ways, and have lunch at the Metropole.”
“I don’t think so,” said Elena.
“Why does that not surprise me?” Sasha said, moving past Iosef, who patted Sasha on the shoulder.
Elena wanted to tell Sasha Tkach to call his mother, but it was really not her place to do so. She watched him return to his cubbyhole.
Elena and Iosef could hear when Sasha began his calls. Iosef sat down in the chair across the desk from Elena and said quietly, “If you do not marry me, I will go as mad as the father Karamazov.”
“I do not plan to stop being a deputy inspector,” Elena said.
“Ah,” said Iosef, leaning over. “A thin, white band of glowing hope. A condition. The door is open. I say, ‘Fine, marry me and keep working.’”
“I don’t know,” she said, brushing back her hair and looking at the desk for an answer.
“That’s better than no.”
“It’s not yes.”
They could hear Sasha in the adjoining cubicle evoking the respected name of Director Yakovlev with some officer in one of the districts. Sasha sounded decidedly weary and impatient, and he had not yet really begun.
“Come to my apartment for dinner tonight.” Iosef said. “I can’t afford to take you out more than once every few weeks on my salary.”
“We could share the bill,” Elena said, “and eat cheaply. I know some places.”
“You can’t afford it on your salary,” said Iosef with a grin.
“You come to my aunt’s apartment for dinner tomorrow tonight,” she said. “I have to work tonight.”
“Anna Timofeyeva’s apartment. I’ve known her since I was a small boy,” Iosef said with a sigh. “I remember an enormous almost bare office. Behind the desk sat a massive, stern woman who greeted me as if I were an adult being examined carefully for evidence of a crime. She frightened me.”
“And now?”
“I am not so easily frightened. What time?”
“Eight,” said Elena. “I warn you. Neither my aunt nor I are good cooks. I’m a bit better, but I make no promises … about anything.”
Iosef nodded in understanding.
“One more thing,” Elena said. “Sasha’s mother lives in our building. She tends to drop in without invitation at rather regular intervals.”
“Lydia Tkach,” Iosef said, topping his last sigh with a deeper one, the exaggerated sigh of an actor who wants you to know he is exaggerating. “Sounds as if it will be a night to remember.”
