“So?” she said.

“I’m looking for Ivan Bulgarin,” he said.

“Where are my suspenders?” the man inside the apartment demanded, moving toward the door. “Who?” the fat woman asked.

“Bulgarin, Ivan,” Rostnikov said. “He lives in this building.”

“Forget the suspenders,” said the man. “I’m leaving.”

“No Bulgarin,” she said. “Bulgakov, Bulmash. No Bulgarin. Not since I’ve been here.”

“And,” said Rostnikov, “how long is that?”

“Twelve years. Twelve years with him,” the fat woman said, pointing over her shoulder where the man suddenly appeared. There was nothing to him. He couldn’t have weighed more than 120 pounds and couldn’t have been younger than sixty-five or seventy.

“Maybe Bulgarin is in one of the other buildings,” Rostnikov tried. “A very big man with a beard.”

“No,” said Mariya, putting up her arm to stop the thin man from escaping past her. “I know the buildings on this street. No Bulgarin. Nobody very big with a beard.”

The thin man ducked under the fat woman’s arm and dashed past Rostnikov.

“Thank you,” said Rostnikov, stepping quickly out of the way to allow her to go in pursuit of her man.

When he arrived at his desk slightly after noon, Rostnikov considered several ways of finding the man who walked like a bear. He was considering this when the phone rang.

Andrei Morchov had risen early this morning, as he did every morning. Now he stood looking at himself in the mirror. He was not completely displeased. He had cultivated a brooding, intense look that had long ago ceased to be a mask. He looked like a man carrying a heavy burden of responsibility but not just trivial, domestic responsibility. No; Andrei Morchov, as anyone could see who saw him stride quickly to his waiting limousine or put on his glasses to absorb a document, was concerned with matters of great pith and moment. His suits were properly dark. His ties were somber. He never looked as if he needed a shave or haircut. Andrei Morchov knew that he was not a handsome man, but he had presence.

Andrei Morchov adjusted his tie and, in the mirror, saw his daughter Jalna in the next room walking carefully toward the door of the dacha.

“Where are you going?” he said evenly without turning from the mirror. In fact, although he was ready to turn, he continued to watch her reflection. Andrei Morchov knew how to seize and hold an advantage.

“Out, to the city,” she said.

“No.”

“I have nothing to do here!” she cried.

“Schoolwork. Reading. Gardening.”

He pretended to adjust his tie just a bit more.

“I’ll go mad here,” she said to her father’s back. “Mad.”

“You’ll not go mad,” he said, turning.

“I’ll leave when you are gone,” she said. “You won’t even know I’ve left.”

“I’ll call from my office,” he said, walking past her to get his coat and briefcase at the door.

“I’ll say I was in the garden or on the toilet. I’ll say I was simply outside loving the trees and grass,” she taunted.

“And the flowers,” he added.

A smile touched Andrei Morchov’s lips, but he controlled it as he adjusted his coat and picked up his briefcase. He could manipulate ministers, confound bureaucrats, and control generals, but it took enormous energy to exert the slightest control over this one teenage girl. There were those in the government who would delight at watching this domestic scene. And it was at this moment that Andrei Morchov realized not for the first time that he truly loved his daughter.

The revelation was quite startling each time it came. They had never gotten along well. Certainly, it had been worse when Mariankaya, the girl’s mother, was alive, but it had not improved when she died.

Andrei Morchov stood looking at his daughter. He knew that, like her mother, she was quite beautiful, a pale northern beauty he recognized but that held no intrigue for him. He preferred dark women with the hint of a serpent about them, like Svetlana.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Jalna asked defiantly. She wore a pair of American jeans and a man’s white shirt tied in front the way she had seen it done in a French magazine.

“You’ll do as you are told,” he said, but he thought as he had on other such occasions that his conflict with his daughter was what kept him truly alive. The rest of his existence was a performance without substance, with any satisfaction long since exhausted. His life, with the exception of this girl, was a chess game he could play with skill and no heat.

“Do you know what?” she said, advancing on him. “Do you know what?” she shouted. “I hate you! I’ve always hated you!”

And Andrei Morchov did the wrong thing. He laughed. He laughed because she was expressing her hate at a moment in which he was acknowledging to himself a love for her. He laughed because he expected that this rush of affection in him would fade, as it had before, when he was in the backseat of his car looking at the trade union papers. He laughed because the expression of hate in his daughter’s eyes was so clearly false. Yes, she hated him, but she hated him because she loved and needed him. She hated him, but she hated herself more for her need of him. And, he realized, even if this feeling of love remained within him, he could and would do nothing about it, as he had done nothing in the past when this feeling for her had come. Their roles were set. He could not simply repent, embrace her, and promise her a new life. They would go on like this till she was grown and moved out or accepted their relationship. The forum of their love would be emotional, volatile. Andrei Morchov had laughed at himself.

The laughter froze Jalna in midstep, and her anger went beyond words.

He was laughing at her, laughing at her. He would not even take her hatred seriously.

“I must go,” he said. “I will be home late tonight.”

She did not answer. He turned and went out the door, closing it behind him with a firm, controlled snap.

Jalna found herself moving to the window, moving as she had done hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, moving to the window to watch her father pull away in a dark car, pull away and leave her alone for hours, days. She watched the car move slowly down the paved road through the trees. She watched as it turned right and moved out of sight. She watched even when there was no car to see and she decided that when her father returned that night, with or without Yuri, she would kill him.

The flower vendor named Sonia arrived just after ten. Her cart was small, her supply limited to bunches of small yellow flowers. She was, Sasha decided, about twenty and quite pretty if a bit thin. Her dark hair was cut short, and her skin was bronzed by heredity and the sun.

Sasha tucked the newspaper into his pocket and approached as passersby paused to look at the flowers and then generally moved on without buying. As he approached, the girl adjusted the flowers, perking up a bunch in the back with her fingertips, and switching several bunches about.

“Your name is Sonia?” he asked.

She looked up and smiled. Sasha returned the smile.

“Yes,” she said.

There was in her voice an accent of the South, not like Maya’s Ukrainian accent, which spoke of mountains and the past, but an exotic accent that suggested the Orient.

“Police,” he said, removing his wallet and showing his photo identity card.

Before he could put the wallet away she reached over to hold and examine it. A man had been approaching the flower cart, but when he saw Sasha open his wallet and say “Police,” he veered away, as if remembering some urgent business elsewhere.

“Sasha,” the girl said without fear. “A good name. I had a boyfriend named Sasha once. I stayed with him longer than I should have just because I liked the way our names went together, Sasha and Sonia. It sounds like a balancing act at the circus. You like the circus?”

A bus roared behind them and a wave of shoppers burst from the mouth of the Metro station. Tkach put his wallet away. The girl continued to smile at him.

Вы читаете The Man Who Walked Like a Bear
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