moment of total dark, a woman’s cry, “Stalin!”
As the doors opened everyone streamed out but Arkady, who watched Platonov, and Zelensky, who watched Arkady.
The tape cut to the platform and a crowd that had grown with the addition of passengers who had disembarked from forward cars. Stalin’s photograph rested against a platform pillar. Young Misha and Tanya lit a candle at the photo and expressed their gratitude to Stalin for saving mankind and being the beacon of his age. Veterans solemnly nodded; women dabbed their eyes. Zelensky smoothly interviewed some sweet old ladies and handed out Russian Patriot T-shirts and the party was rolling along when, from nowhere, a madman in a pea jacket kicked the candle onto the tracks, stopped the meeting by diktat, and seized the camera. Arkady didn’t look good.
At no point did the tape show the two Americans or Bora. Also, in slow motion it was the prostitute with red hair who first shouted Stalin’s name, then Mendeleyev and Antipenko.
Arkady decided that he should eat something, which remained a theory because there was no food in the desk except a rind of cheese wrapped in greasy paper. He had a cigarette instead. And tried Eva’s cell phone again. Still off. Arkady would have expected a slower night at the clinic. A snowstorm usually kept people-even the criminal set-at home.
The second videotape had obviously been shot earlier for purposes of rehearsing the boy and girl. They walked across a room, the girl carrying a feather duster in place of flowers, the boy holding a pen for a votive candle. The children couldn’t walk for giggling at the graffiti on the apartment walls: oversized sexual organs, phone numbers, “Olga Loves Petya.”
Zelensky directed from off screen. “This is not a joke. Do it over, slower, like in church. Have you ever been in church? Okay, back to your mark and go! Like that. Even slower, kids, this isn’t a race. Pay no attention to the camera. Look straight ahead and concentrate on the picture, the man’s friendly face. He’s a saint and you’re bringing him these special gifts. Stay together, stay together, stay together. That’s more like it. Petya, how did that look to you?”
The cameraman said, “They missed the mark.”
“Hear that, kids? The camera doesn’t lie. The blue tape on the floor marks where you start and where you stop. Tonight there’s going to be a lot of people. You have to block them out and the only way to do that is to practice.”
The children walked across the room again.
“Dear Comrade Stalin,” Zelensky cued.
“Dear Comrade Stalin, the children of Russia thank you…”
And again.
The boy said, “You rallied the Russian people and threw back Fascist invaders.”
The girl said, “As a beloved humanitarian you led a Russia that the peace-loving nations of the world admired and respected…”
Again and again until Zelensky clapped and said, “I love you, kids.”
It was clearly the end of the rehearsal and Arkady expected the television screen to go dark. Instead, it switched to a bedroom scene of three men and a woman. The men were Bora, Zelensky and an individual whose face was hidden by lank, long hair. It took Arkady a moment to recognize Marfa, the schoolgirl from the Metro, because her face bulged like a goose with a funnel down its throat. Zelensky had seduced her and used her in the space of a single day. So much for Arkady’s advice.
Petrov was conserving cassettes, recording new material over old. Arkady jabbed Fast Forward and the tape speeded to a race of men running around the girl, taking turns, on and off, on and off.
When Arkady found Marfa crying he returned to Play. She sat on the edge of the bed, naked, her face turned away from the camera as she wailed. The way she twisted emphasized the baby fat on her waist.
“She sounds like a bagpipe,” Bora said off camera.
A hand came into view and pointed to her tattoo. “A butterfly. How did I miss that before? Cute.”
Zelensky said, “Marfa, you were great.”
“You were great,” Bora said.
“You were great,” the third man said. “You were born to fuck.”
“This is a private tape,” Zelensky assured her. “No one’s going to see it. I had to find out how good you were and you were a pro.”
Marfa went on sobbing.
Zelensky said, “Remember, you told me you were a big girl and I took you at your word.”
The third man said, “Vlad makes porn, that’s all he does. What did you expect?”
“That’s not all I do,” Zelensky said.
“Really? Name something else.”
“I have other projects, other movies. You’ll see.”
“Right. It seems to me that as a film director you have one piece of direction. ‘Suck faster.’”
“Sasha, go fuck yourself.”
“No. Thanks to your little friend I’m set for the day.”
“Get the fuck out.”
“I’m getting out in a new Mercedes.”
“Heil Hitler!” Zelensky shouted as a door opened and closed. “Bourgeois prick.”
The camera remained on Marfa. Run, Arkady thought. Get out while you can.
She stifled a sob. “What other movies?”
By the time Arkady finished viewing the tapes it was seven in the morning. He locked the dossier and tapes in his safe and dragged himself to his car on the off chance Eva or Zhenya had returned to the apartment and ignored his phone calls; although it was rude, some people did that sort of thing.
But no apartment could have been emptier. There were no new notes, no messages on the machine. His footsteps sounded clumsy and intrusive and he couldn’t help but think of Eva moving lightly in bare feet. The mattress on the bedroom floor looked more temporary than ever.
An acrid smell drew Arkady to the window. Down on the street the road crew was boiling tar to fill the same pothole as the day before. The women shoveled while the man, the chief, waved cars by. A blue plastic tarp was set up as a shelter, a sign that the crew was settling in.
Eva’s clothes hung in the closet, which suggested that she was coming back to pack, at the very least. Her tapes were still in a box, fifty or more audiotapes stacked chronologically beside the recorder. He fed one into the recorder and pushed Play.
The heavy breathing of exercise.
“Arkasha, catch up.”
His voice from a distance. “I have a better suggestion. You stop.”
“I’m recording you. I am compiling evidence that on cross-country skis the senior investigator couldn’t catch a snowman.”
He listened to a winter day, a trail that wound through birches and voices ringing in the cold.
“Eva, I am carrying brandy, bread, sausage and cheese, pickles and fish, the full weight of luxury, while you carry nothing but a seductive smile. Perhaps you would like me to carry you, as well.”
He heard laughter and an accelerating slap of skis.
Another tape caught the arm-in-arm quality of a stroll. “Between the two of us, Adam was innocent.” His voice.
“Seriously?” Hers.
“He had no choice. Between keeping Eve happy and displeasing the Lord, the creator of the universe, any sane man would have made the same decision.”
“I should hope so.”
Nothing profound, the throwaway lines of life.
A third tape had only the drone and counterdrone of motorboats and the shouts of water-skiers treading water, for some reason a happy memory. Eva was a light sleeper and Arkady would find her in the middle of the night sitting up with a cigarette and vodka, concentrating on the tapes as if they were her proof of a new life.
