Now the entire restaurant, Sasha was sure, knew the history of the Tkach family. He doubted if that history interested them.
Lydia had paid the check, saying, “My son loves Armenian food. It doesn’t suit my stomach. He’s taking me to a movie.”
The waiter had said nothing. He didn’t have to be particularly polite. His tip was built into the check.
“
“I told you,” Sasha said, “a
“It is Japanese?” she asked. “I don’t like Japanese. Your great-grandfather died fighting the Japanese, and for what, Vladivostok.”
“It isn’t Japanese,” said Sasha, ushering his mother out of the restaurant. “It is English.”
And then they were in the movie. It was crowded. Before it began, Sasha begged his mother to turn on her hearing aid. He still had daymares of the last time he had taken his mother to a movie.
They sat.
“I can hear perfectly,” she said, loud enough for a thin young man with glasses in front of her to turn and give a look designed as warning against such outbursts during the film.
There were few empty seats in the theater. The murmur of the crowd was loud. Then Sasha Tkach’s nightmare in darkness began. The movie had started.
The subtitles seemed too long for what the English actors were saying on the screen.
“Which one is Monty?” Lydia asked aloud.
How, Sasha thought, could one explain. “The skinny one with the bad teeth,” said Sasha. “It’s his nickname.”
“Look, what? I thought those were women,” she said a little later. “One of them is standing by that urinal, peeing. It’s a man dressed like a woman.”
“It is a woman making a joke about men peeing,” said Sasha.
“Be quiet, please,” said the young man with glasses, turning to them.
“What is funny about women pretending to pee like men?”
“I don’t know,” said Sasha, sinking down in his seat, barely watching the movie, hoping for the end to come soon.
“What is … why are those men taking off their clothes?”
“They want to make money stripping,” Sasha explained. “They’re out of work.”
“I know that,” she said. “I can read, but who would want to see those men take off their clothes? Well, maybe that nice-looking one. Ah, I knew it, he’s a sissy boy.”
The young man with glasses turned around in his seat and said, “He is gay and you are loud and I think you should leave so that the rest of us in this theater can salvage some sense of satisfaction from this so-far intolerable situation.”
“I’m a police officer,” Sasha said, sitting up and reaching into his pocket to pull out his badge. “This is my mother. If you think you are having a bad time, try, if you have the imagination, to think of how I am feeling. You will go home alone. I will go home with my mother.”
“You have my sympathy,” said the young man with glasses, “but …”
“Right,” said Sasha. “Mother, let’s go.”
Sasha started to get up.
“I like this movie,” she said, refusing to budge.
“Listen to your son,” came a voice from behind.
“Why are they breaking those beautiful little gnomes?” asked Lydia.
“Sometimes, my mother, people get the uncontrollable impulse to break things. Let’s go.”
“You don’t like the movie. We will go,” said Lydia. “He invites me to a movie and then we leave before we know what’s going to happen.”
Sasha guided his mother up the aisle. Several people applauded their departure.
Once outside, Sasha took a deep breath of relief.
“I don’t understand why you didn’t like the movie,” Lydia said.
“You didn’t laugh once,” he said as they walked down the Arbat toward the metro station.
“It wasn’t a comedy,” she said. “You didn’t understand. That was the problem, why you didn’t like it. It was sad. They were out of work.”
“Mother, you are absolutely right,” he said.
“When are you going to Kiev?”
Akardy Zelach sat at the small kitchen table, turning a chicken bone over with his fork. His mother shifted her position in the next room. He could see her. She, like him, was a bit heavy and awkward, but she had a confidence and dignity, a certainty about everything, that he would never possess.
She was watching some game show on television. Akardy could see that it involved a big wheel with numbers that made no sense to him. Contestants spun the wheel and the audience shouted as it turned. His mother, fist clenched, urged the wheel on, turned sideways to will it another notch or turn.
“Then,” he said. “I should refuse.”
“If you can,” his mother said. “If you cannot …”
She shrugged and reached for the glass of tepid tea on the table in front of her.
Akardy adjusted his glasses and looked at the bone.
“Then shall I lie?” he asked.
“Will they pay you if you tell the truth?” she asked. “Look, look, if she just … she can win a car. She can … oh, no.”
“I don’t know if they’ll pay,” he repeated. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to take it even if they do pay.”
Akardy’s mother stood up, reached over, and turned off the television set.
“Your grandmother, my mother, read tea leaves, palms, bumps on the head, cards,” she said, looking at her son.
“I know,” he answered glumly.
“And you know what? It was all for show. She didn’t know how she knew what she knew. It was just there. People want the show. That’s what my sister and I did when we learned we had the gift or curse. And you don’t know either.”
“I didn’t … I just said whatever came into my head,” said Akardy. “I’m not even sure how to lie about it. Do I let something come into my head and then lie about it? And where does the new lie come from? Perhaps it is really the truth. How do I know? How am I to know? I don’t want to be studied.”
His mother walked over to join him at the table and picked at the crumbs of the flat cake she had baked earlier that day. Akardy didn’t like when she picked at crumbs and then licked her fingers and picked again. He had never told her. She loved him, had taken care of him when he had been injured and almost died. That was when the gift or curse had come, after he had been beaten, after his skull had been cracked. It didn’t come often and he had always been able to ignore it before, but that dark woman with the glasses at the psychic center, Nadia Spectorski, she had been like a … a jumping dog, all over him, demanding, excited. He did not want to see her again, but he had no choice. Perhaps he could call in and say he was ill or that his mother was ill? She really wasn’t well. No, he would have to go. He would have to face Emil Karpo’s doubting eyes.
He decided that he would try to lie. Perhaps the Nadia Spectorski woman would turn out to be the murderer. That would save him. He wished there were more cake.
“What are you doing?” asked Elena.
The night was relatively warm though there was a smell of the possibility of more rain in the clouds that covered the sky. They sat on a bench in the concrete courtyard just outside the window of the apartment Elena shared with her aunt, Anna Timofeyeva.
Had she been home, Lydia Tkach could have looked out the window and seen them from her apartment in the far corner of the one-story building, but she was staying with Sasha.
Anna Timofeyeva regretted the day she had agreed to help Lydia Tkach find an apartment in the building. As a former procurator, Anna still had friends or friends who had friends. She had misgivings when she agreed to help Sasha’s mother. To protect herself and Elena, Anna had set down clear rules by which Lydia was to abide. These rules regarded when Lydia could visit and under what conditions. Lydia had begun violating the rules the day
