mother and save. When Arkady arrived at the shelter for the next outing, his mobile phone rang. It was the journalist calling to say she was sorry, but she wasn't coming; one afternoon with Zhenya was enough for her. By then Zhenya was almost at the car, and Arkady's choice was to either leap behind the wheel and drive away, or take the boy himself.
Anyway, here was Zhenya once again, dressed for winter on a warm spring day, clutching his fairy tales, while Olga Andreevna, the head of the shelter, fussed over him. 'Cheer Zhenya up,' she told Arkady. 'It's Sunday. All the other children have one kind of visitor or another. Zhenya should have something. Tell him some jokes. Be a jolly soul. Make him laugh.'
'I'll try to think of some jokes.'
'Go to a movie, maybe kick a ball back and forth. The boy needs to get out more, to socialize. We offer psychiatric evaluation, proper diet, music classes, a regular school nearby. Most children thrive. Zhenya is not thriving.'
The shelter appeared to be a healthful setting, a two-story structure painted like a child's drawing with birds, butterflies, rainbow and sun, and a real vegetable garden bordered by marigolds. The shelter was a model, an oasis in a city where thousands of children went without homes and worked pushing outdoor market carts or worse. Arkady saw a circle of girls in a playground serving tea to their dolls. They seemed happy.
Zhenya climbed into the car, put on his seat belt and held his book and chess set tight. He stared straight ahead like a soldier.
'So, what will you do, then?' Olga Andreevna asked Arkady.
'Well, we're such jolly souls, we're capable of anything.'
'Does he talk to you?'
'He reads his book.'
'But does he talk to you?'
'No.'
'Then how do you two communicate?' 'To be honest, I don't know.'
Arkady had a Zhiguli 9, a goat of a car, not prepossessing but built for Russian roads. They drove along the river wall, past fishermen casting for urban aquatic life. Considering the black cloud of truck exhaust and the sluggish green of the Moscow River, for optimism fishermen were hard to beat. A BMW shot by, followed by a security team in an SUV. In fact, the city was safer than it had been in years, and chase cars were largely for form, like the retinue of a lord. The most ferocious businessmen had killed one another off, and a truce between the Mafias seemed to be holding. Of course, a wise man took out all forms of insurance. Restaurants, for example, had both private security guards and a representative of the local Mafia at the front door. Moscow had reached an equilibrium, which made Ivanov's suicide all the harder to understand.
Meanwhile, Zhenya read aloud his favorite fairy tale, about a girl abandoned by her father and sent by her stepmother into the deep woods to be killed and eaten by a witch, Baba Yaga.
' 'Baba Yaga had a long blue nose and steel teeth, and she lived in a hut that stood on chicken legs. The hut could walk through the woods and sit wherever Baba Yaga ordered. Around the hut was a fence festooned with skulls. Most victims died just at the sight of Baba Yaga. The strongest men, the wealthiest lords, it didn't matter. She boiled the meat off their bones and when she had eaten every last bite she added their skulls to her hideous fence. A few prisoners lived long enough to try to escape, but Baba Yaga flew after them on a magic mortar and pestle.' ' However, page by page, through kindness and courage, the girl did escape and made her way back to her father, who sent away the evil stepmother. When Zhenya was done reading he gave Arkady a quick glance and settled back in his seat, a ritual completed.
At Sparrow Hill, Arkady swung the car in sight of Moscow University, one of Stalin's skyscrapers, built by convict labor in such a fever for higher learning and at such wholesale cost of life that bodies were said to have been left entombed. That was a fairy tale he could keep to himself, Arkady thought.
'Did you have some fun this week?' Arkady asked.
Zhenya said nothing. Nevertheless, Arkady tried a smile. After all, many children from the shelter had suffered negligence and abuse. They couldn't be expected to be rays of sunshine. Some children were adopted out of the shelter. Zhenya, with his sharp nose and vow of silence, wasn't a likely candidate.
Arkady himself would have been harder to please, he thought, if he'd had a higher opinion of himself as a child. As he remembered, he had been an unlovable stick, devoid of social skills and isolated by the aura of fear around his father, an army officer who was perfectly willing to humiliate adults, let alone a boy. When Arkady came home to their apartment, he would know whether the general was in just by the stillness in the air. The very foyer seemed to hold its breath. So Arkady had little personal experience to draw on. His father had never taken him for outings. Sometimes Sergeant Belov, his father's aide, would go with Arkady to the park. Winters were the best, when the sergeant, tramping and puffing like a horse, pulled Arkady on a sled through the snow. Otherwise, Arkady walked with his mother, and she tended to walk ahead, a slim woman with a dark braid of hair, lost in her own world.
Zhenya always insisted on going to Gorky Park. As soon as they'd bought tickets and entered the grounds, Arkady got out of the way while Zhenya made a slow perambulation of the plaza fountain to scan the crowd. Fluffs of poplar seed floated on the water and collected around the stalls. Crows patrolled in search of sandwich crusts. Gorky Park was officially a park of culture, with an emphasis on outdoor performances of classical music and promenades among the trees. Over time, the bandshell had been claimed by rock bands and the promenades covered by amusement rides. As ever, Zhenya returned from the fountain dejected.
'Let's go shoot something,' Arkady said. That generally cheered boys up.
Five rubles bought five shots with an air rifle at a row of Coke cans. Arkady remembered when the targets had been American bombers dangling on strings, something worth blazing away at. From there they went into a fun house, where they followed a dark walkway between weary moans and swaying bats. Next came a real space shuttle that had truly orbited the earth and was tricked out with chairs that lurched from side to side to simulate a bumpy descent.
Arkady asked, 'What do you think, Captain? Should we return to earth?'
Zhenya got out of his chair and marched off without a glance.
It was a little like accompanying a sleepwalker. Arkady was along but invisible, and Zhenya moved as if on a track. They stopped, as they had on every other trip, to watch bungee jumping. The jumpers were teenagers, taking turns soaring off the platform, flapping, screaming with fear, only to be snapped back the moment before they hit the ground. The girls were dramatic, the way their hair rippled on the way down and snapped as the plunge was arrested. Arkady couldn't help but think of Ivanov and the difference between the fun of near death and the real thing, the profound difference between giggling as you bounced to your feet, and staying embedded in the pavement. For his part, Zhenya didn't appear to care whether the jumpers died or survived. He always stood in the same spot and glanced cagily around. Then he took off for the roller coaster.
He took the same rides in the same order: a roller coaster, a giant swing and a ride in a pontoon boat around a little man-made lake. He and Arkady sat back and pedaled, the same as every time, while white swans and black swans cruised by in turn. Although it was Sunday, the park maintained an uncrowded lassitude. Rollerbladers slid by with long, easy strides. The Beatles drifted from loudspeakers: 'Yesterday.' Zhenya looked hot in his cap and jacket, but Arkady knew better than to suggest the boy remove them.
The sight of silver birches by the water made Arkady ask, 'Have you ever been here in the winter?'
Zhenya might as well have been deaf.
'Do you ice-skate?' Arkady asked.
Zhenya looked straight ahead.
'Ice skating here in the wintertime is beautiful,' Arkady said. 'Maybe we should do that.'
Zhenya didn't blink.
Arkady said, 'I'm sorry that I'm not better at this. I was never good at jokes. I just can't remember them. In Soviet times, when things were hopeless, we had great jokes.'
Since the children's shelter fed Zhenya good nutritious food, Arkady plied him with candy bars and soda. They ate at an outdoor table while playing chess with pieces that were worn from use, on a board that had been taped together more than once. Zhenya didn't speak even to say 'Mate!' He simply knocked over Arkady's king at the appropriate time and set the pieces up again.
