“I am not married,” she said seriously.
“Perhaps you will be,” he said, satisfied that he could think of nothing further to pack. “Let us go in with the others.”
“I am not going to get married,” the girl said. “I am going to be a foot doctor.”
“A noble ambition,” he said, taking her hand. “You can be my foot doctor.”
“I’ll only charge you half,” she said. “Because you have only one foot.”
“Most generous and fair. Maybe your sister will become an engineer and she can work on my other foot.”
“She wants to be a plumber,” Nina said as they moved through the bedroom door into the living room-dining room area. “Like you.
“An equally noble ambition,” said Rostnikov.
Sarah, Galina, and Laura were seated at the table. The adults had said nothing to the children about the meeting with their mother.
Sarah Rostnikov was talking about a concert they would be going to while he was gone. They had an extra ticket. Sarah’s cousin, Leon the doctor, was appearing with his quartet. Leon played piano, had a particular passion for Mozart, and made lots of money in his practice catering to those who could afford his services and held the widespread and almost mystical belief that Jewish doctors were far better than those who were not. Rostnikov was not a fan of classical music though he went dutifully to such concerts and found that he could lose himself in a dreamy, open-eyed meditation almost approaching the near-nirvana he felt when he lost himself in the pragmatic magic of a plumbing problem.
Sarah looked up at him and smiled. He nodded to show that he was packed. Sarah was still a beauty. Her natural and shiny red hair had grown out following her surgery and she had regained some but far from all of her former plumpness. Her pale smooth skin was a bit more pale than he thought looked healthy, but she’d survived. Except for the frequent headaches, Sarah had recovered enough to go back to work at the Dom music shop on a half-time basis.
Not for the first or thousandth time, Rostnikov thanked whatever gods might be (or common genetic chance) that their son had turned out to look like his mother. Porfiry Petrovich was not ugly, but he knew that he possessed the flat, homely face common to millions of Russians descended from dozens of generations of peasants. He was comfortable with his face, the face of his own father, and his body, the compact solid body that had earned him the nickname of “the Washtub.”
“The cake is good,” said Laura, who bore a resemblance to her mother even more striking than Iosef’s to Sarah.
“Your grandmother is the giver of all cakes and cookies,” he said. “Look at me. I have grown fat with the sweets she brings home from the bakery.”
“You are not fat,” Nina said, touching his stomach. “You are round and strong and have a plastic leg.”
“Thank you,” said Rostnikov.
There were five chairs at the table. Three matched. The other two did not. One of the solid metal chairs with the slightly padded seat was always left open for Porfiry Petrovich, who had learned from experience that the last few inches before he hit a chair with a slight thud could do great damage to a wooden chair. He had destroyed two of them and taken falls that would have embarrassed him had anyone but Sarah been present when they happened.
There was a mug in front of his place, his Dostoyevsky mug, white, with a drawing of Fyodor on the side. Dostoyevsky had been the favorite author of Porfiry Petrovich’s father. Porfiry Petrovich was, in fact, the name of the lawyer in
Sarah poured hot coffee into his mug and Rostnikov nodded thanks.
“Are you going to do the weights?” Laura asked.
It was one of the high points of the girls’ day. Rostnikov would solemnly open the cabinet under the television and CD/cassette player, pull out his bench and heavy rings of weights, turn on something by Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, or Ella Fitzgerald, and in his black gym shorts and one of his sweat shirts with the sleeves cut off, he would do curls, presses, and crunches with appropriate grunts and sprays of sweat. His favorite shirt was a black one with the words “The Truth Is Out There” in white letters across the front.
The girls would watch, sitting on the floor, enthralled by the spectacle of the powerful one-legged man turning red, the veins of his muscles expanding in purple bands.
“Yes,” Rostnikov said. “Very soon.”
Tonight he would wear his Chicago Bulls red sweat shirt, his second favorite. He would do his regular routine, shower, dress, call the cab, and then pick up Sasha and head for the train station.
“Which way is Siberia?” asked Nina.
“Toward the rising sun,” said Rostnikov.
“I had a dream about the sun,” Laura said.
They all looked at the girl.
“In the dream,” she said, “the sun faded away slowly, so slowly you couldn’t be sure it was disappearing.”
“Were you frightened?” Rostnikov asked with great interest.
“No,” she said. “It was in no hurry and neither was I, and something or someone said ‘Don’t worry.’ I think it was you.”
“It was,” said Rostnikov. “I have been thinking about the sun.”
Galina looked at him, remembering the conversation in the Paris Café with her daughter and Rostnikov’s curious comments about the sun.
“What have you been thinking?” Laura asked.
“That it is a miracle,” he said; “That if mankind has anything to worship, it is the sun. The ancient religions were right. We owe all to the sun. But the sun does not need our worship. It does not think. It simply is. Just enough of it means life. Too much exposure is dangerous.”
“I do not understand,” said Nina.
Rostnikov looked at Sarah, who smiled.
“Nor do I,” said Porfiry Petrovich. “Nor do I.”
“Are you going to do the weights now?” asked Laura.
“As soon as I finish my coffee,” he said.
The weights were round like the sun and the full moon. There was a wholeness to the circle. The circle Director Yaklovev had given him was not whole. It was not bright, a flawed icon. There was much he had not been told about his mission and much he had been told that rang of Russian fairy tale more than the reality of three hundred pounds of weights on a steel bar.
“Are you going to be in the weight-lifting contest in the park? Grandmother says you are.”
“I am,” Rostnikov said, removing the bench, bar, and weights from the cabinet under the television in the living room.
“Will you win?” Nina asked.
“Perhaps,” he said. “But there are other strong men in Moscow, many, and they do things to help them win.”
“Like what?” Laura asked as he slid the weights onto the bar.
“Take pills, herbs they think will make them stronger, legal pills,” he said, making sure the weights were balanced.
“Is that fair?” asked Nina.
“It is legal,” he said, getting next to the weight and lifting it so that he could set it atop the bracket at the end of the bench.
“What else do they do? To win?” asked Laura.
“When the judge claps his hand, the competitor must lift,” he said, lying on his back. “If one is watching the judge, one can begin an instant before the hands come together and have a fraction of a second more for the lift.”
