Fall of a Cosmonaut

how to look like people who spoke English or French. She was very pretty in a healthy kind of way. Sasha paused, cheese in one hand, bread in the other.

The woman was smiling at the bear. The bear was showing its teeth. The woman reached over and scratched the bear’s chest. Sasha was fascinated. The documentary was on film, so he knew the woman would not be torn apart on television. And yet there was a tension. If he could not have Maya in bed tonight, the woman with the hat … The bear turned its head sideways in ecstasy. It would have been nice to be that bear instead of a tired policeman whose wife had left him, and who stood holding a plate of cheese.

The scene changed. A sincere, thin man with white hair, wearing a suit, was sitting behind a desk. Behind him was a map of the Ural region. Sasha looked at the pile of papers he had to put away. If he didn’t organize anything, and he didn’t plan to do so, he could simply push it all together, shove it in his briefcase, and worry about it in the morning.

His eyes fell once again on his copy of the artist’s sketch of the man the beggar had described and the chess players had identified. Kon. It looked like many sketches, but something … the description-stocky, homely-and the drawing. Sasha, for just a moment, felt that he may have seen the man somewhere. He stood dreamily trying to put a living face to the drawing. His memory was normally very good, not as good as Emil Karpo’s but better than Elena’s.

No, it didn’t come. He turned off the television set, felt the stubble on his chin, put the food away, and gathered the papers into a pile with the sketch on top.

Then he went to bed.

In the dark, the baby did not turn restlessly or cry, Pulcharia did not come in and ask for water or to climb into bed with her parents. Maya did not reach over in her sleep to touch his bare bottom.

As he went to sleep, he felt the inexplicable euphoria of the past days begin to slip away.

Chapter Ten

In the morning, Nadia Spectorski awoke to a fresh, vivid, and inexplicable vision that seemed to mean absolutely nothing. It was another overcast day. Somewhere north of the city clouds were rumbling. Her room was small, brightly decorated, small computer desk in the corner with a flowerpot and cactus next to the Compaq Presario 2240. Next to the cactus was a kaleidoscope that she looked through every morning for a few minutes, losing herself in the never-repeating meditation of changing colors.

The vision was just as vivid as the one in which she had seen the murder of Sergei Bolskanov through the eyes of the killer. Nadia had feared that she had simply remembered what she herself had done and that she was the killer, but there were too many details, little things that convinced her she had not done this thing.

This morning she was as sure that she had not done it as she was that Boris Adamovskovich had not committed the murder. She had looked down through the killer’s eyes at the shoes and remembered now that the shoes had not fit, had been too large. Yes, Adamoskovich’s shoes would have been too large for her, but the leg was not that of a woman. Nadia reached for her glasses. She needed them to think.

The vision had been brief, mundane.

In the vision a book lay in her lap. The book was thick and open, facedown. It was War and Peace. Had the person in her vision turned the book over, she was certain she would have been able to read the words before her.

Such things happened to Nadia less frequently than they had when she was younger. When she was a young teen, the visions had come so frequently that they disrupted her life, set her trembling, caused her parents, who were both physicians, to send her for medication and treatment. Almost none of the visions had any meaning. She had seen unfamiliar couples screaming at each other, a cat dying in a doorway, screaming in pain, a boy writing something obscene on the wall of a school or church, a woman with an enormous head smiling at her. Medication and hundreds of hours in therapy, coupled with the passing of time, had kept the visions from lining up and leaping out. Her experiences and her curiosity had led her to her lifetime career and the hope, so far unrealized, that such phenomena could be understood in a scientific context.

Yes, Jung, Freud, and others had noted that what they called hysteria seemed particularly powerful in young girls reaching puberty. Witches, who were probably hysterical girls, began their calling early. She herself had concentrated much of her research on girls in their teens, many of whom had been considered extreme neurotics and borderline psychotics. She had taken them off of drugs and also taken them seriously. She had been one of them.

Occasionally, a man would turn up who had some of the psychic characteristics, someone like the not-too- bright, gentle slouching policeman who was afraid of his ability, wanted to deny it.

Nadia, wearing an extra-large plain-white T-shirt, got out of bed, deciding to get a copy of War and Peace. She had read it only once, when she was a brilliant, nearsighted girl who was being given drugs to help control her supposed deliriums. The book had absorbed her, helped calm her. She had been particularly fascinated by Tolstoy’s Napoleon, a tormented, overly confident creature moved more by chance and the inevitability of history than by his own design. But she had soon moved from fiction and for more than a decade now had read none at all.

But now … she suddenly felt weak. Her knees threatened to abandon her. A vision. Brief. A computer monitor with a file open on the screen. The file had a name. She could read the name. Sergei Bolskanov. The name was suddenly deleted. The vision was gone.

Nadia put one hand on the bed, adjusted her glasses with the other, and moved to the window to whisper to her cactus and look through her kaleidoscope.

In the morning, Iosef awakened and looked at his watch. It was after seven. He had stayed up late, reading. When he had been a soldier, for three years Iosef had gone to bed early and been awakened early. When he had left the army and become a self-employed and not-successful playwright and actor, he had gone to bed late and awakened well after eleven. And now he found himself caught between two routines. He went to bed late and got up early.

The sun was up. The day was slightly overcast.

He got out of bed, rubbed his stomach to be sure it hadn’t ballooned to a grotesque size, and walked across the small room in his underpants to put on his trousers. On top of his trousers, someone had placed a towel and a very small bar of soap. He picked them up and went in search of somewhere to shave.

On the narrow landing he saw that the door to his fathers room and that of the man who called himself Primazon were open. Iosef looked into both rooms. They were empty. A woman was in Porfiry Petrovich’s room making the bed. He had noticed her the day before. With the sun behind her through the window, she reminded Iosef of a painting by Vermeer. The illusion was shattered when she sensed him watching her and turned to face him with a smile. It was a good smile but one in need of serious orthodontia.

He smiled back as she brushed her hair from her eyes and examined his bare upper body.

“Gdyeh tooahlyeht? ‘Toilet?’ ‘Wash room?’” he asked.

“Downstairs,” she said.

He nodded, took his towel, soap, toothbrush, and razor and walked barefoot down the wooden stairs, following now the sound of voices. The shop was empty. The voices came from behind a curtain. Iosef followed them and found himself in a large room, surrounded by cabinets containing dishes, pots, books, candlesticks, and children’s board games.

In the center of the room was a round table with six chairs. Only three of the chairs were occupied. Porfiry Petrovich, fully dressed and shaved, sat in one chair, drinking tea. In another chair, also fully dressed, sat Anatoli Primazon, tearing pieces of bread from a loaf in the center of the table and popping them into his mouth. The third person at the table was Boris Vladovka, who looked somber and pale and was neither eating nor drinking.

“Bathroom?” asked Iosef.

Primazon pointed deeper into the room to another curtain.

Whatever they had been talking about, they had stopped when Iosef entered.

Iosef looked at his father, who turned his head to face his son.

“There is a pot of tea in the other room,” Rostnikov said. “And a refrigerator. Alexander Podgorny’s wife has