the passports he added a business card.
'Mr. Brodsky, please take my card, which has my office phone and fax. If you call me first, I can organize much better accommodations, and perhaps a day visit for a much larger group, strictly supervised because of radiation, naturally. Late summer is good. Strawberry season.' If the captain expected an effusive response from Yakov, he didn't get it. 'Anyway, let's hope the rain is over. Let's hope we don't need Noah and his ark, right? Well, gentlemen, a pleasure. Renko, you weren't going anywhere, were you?'
'No.'
'I didn't think so.'
As the captain climbed into his car, Bobby waved and muttered, 'Asshole.'
Arkady asked, 'Bobby, how many passports do you have?'
'Enough.'
'Good, because the captain's brain is like a closet light that sometimes lights and sometimes doesn't. This time it didn't; the next time it might, and he'll connect Timofeyev and me and you. He'll check on your papers or call Ozhogin. He has the colonel's number. It might be wise to go now.'
'We'll wait. By the way, Noah was an asshole, too.'
'Why Noah?' Arkady asked. This was a new indictment.
'He didn't argue.'
'Noah should have argued?'
Yakov explained, 'Abraham argues with God not to kill everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah. Moses pleads with God not to kill worshippers of the golden calf. But God tells Noah to build a boat because He's going to flood the entire world, and what does Noah say? Not a word.'
'Not a word,' said Bobby, 'and saves the minimum. What a bastard.'
Perhaps Eva had gone to the Panasenkos' to give Roman a physical examination, but the cow had gotten out during the storm and trampled the vegetable garden, and Maria and Eva were in the middle of trying to resurrect what they could when Arkady arrived and joined in. The air was hot and humid, the ground damp and baked and oozing humors, and each step produced a sharp scent of crushed mint or chamomile.
The old couple had laid out their garden in straight-as-a-string rows of beets, potatoes, cabbage, onion, garlic and dill, the necessities of life; celery, parsley, mustard and horseradish, the savor of life; buffalo grass for vodka and poppies for bread, everything chopped by the cow into muck. The root vegetables had to be rebedded and the greens salvaged. Where water pooled, Roman shaped drainage with a hoe.
Maria wore a shawl around her head and around her waist a second shawl to hold what she picked. Eva had laid aside her lab coat and shoes to work barefoot in a T-shirt and shorts, no scarf.
They worked separate rows, digging their hands into the mud and freeing the greens or replanting root vegetables tops up. The women were faster and more efficient. Arkady hadn't worked in a garden since he was a boy, and that was just at the dacha to keep him out of the way. The neighbors-Nina on her crutch, Olga squinting through her glasses, Klara with Viking braids-came to witness. From the general interest and the size of the lot, it became clear that Roman and Maria fed the entire population of the village. Maria could have pulled a small train behind her, the way she leaned in to the work and smiled with satisfaction in it, except when she looked up from strangling red-veined greens of beets to gaze on Roman.
'You're sure you latched the cow's stall? She could have been eaten by wolves. The wolves could have gotten her.'
Roman acted deaf, while Lydia, the cow, peeked through an open slat of her stall; the two put Arkady in mind of a pair of drunks who remembered nothing.
Eva had ignored him since his arrival, and the more he thought about it, the more he realized that the night with her had been a mistake. He had gotten too involved. He had lost his sacred objectivity. He was like one of those telescopes launched into space with lenses so distorted it could be seeing either headlights or the Milky Way.
When the garden was done, Maria brought cold water for Arkady and Eva and kvass for Roman. Kvass was a beer made from fermented bread, and a summons to life for Roman. Eva managed to keep one of the old couple between her and Arkady at all times: a dance of avoidance.
Arkady's mobile phone rang. It was the director of the Moscow children's shelter.
'Investigator Renko, this is impossible. You must return at once. Zhenya waits every day.'
'The last time I saw Zhenya, he didn't as much as wave goodbye. I doubt very much that he's upset.'
'He's not demonstrative. Explain to Zhenya.'
Again the void on the phone, from either the bottom of a waste bin or an undemonstrative boy.
'Zhenya? Are you there? Zhenya?'
Arkady heard nothing, but he could feel the boy pressing a receiver close to his ear and pursing his lips in a disagreeable way.
'How are you doing, Zhenya? Driving the director insane, it sounds like.'
Silence and perhaps a nervous shift of the phone from one ear to the other.
Arkady said, 'No news about Baba Yaga. Nothing to report.'
He could see Zhenya gripping the phone tight with one hand and chewing the nails of the other. Arkady tried to outwait him, which was impossible, because Zhenya just hung on.
'We had a storm during the night. A dragon got loose and went on a rampage, tearing up the fields and knocking over fences. Bones everywhere. We chased him over the fields to the river, where he escaped because the bridge was guarded by a monster that had to be defeated in a game of chess. None of us was good enough, so the dragon got away. Next time we should take along a better chess player. Other than that, nothing happened in the Ukraine. We'll talk again soon. In the meantime, behave.'
Arkady folded the phone and discovered Roman and Maria regarding him with astonishment. Eva seemed unamused.
Nevertheless, they carried scythes into the field behind the cow barn to cut grass and barley bent by the rain. The scythes were long two-handled affairs with blades so sharp they whistled. Eva and Maria bundled cut grass into sheaves with binding twine, while Arkady and Roman waded ahead. Arkady had cut grass in the all-purpose Red Army, and he remembered that the rhythm of scything was like swimming; the smoother the motion, the longer the stroke. Straws flew and insects spiraled in a golden dust. It was the most mindless labor he had performed for years and he gave himself over to it completely. At the end of the field, he dropped the scythe and lay down in high grass, in the warm stalks and cool ground, and stared numbly at the sky slightly spinning above.
How could they do it? he wondered. Work this field so happily when a short walk up the path, four grandchildren lay in unmarked graves. He imagined each funeral and the rage. Could he have stood it? Yet Roman and Maria and the other women seemed to approach every task as God's allotment. Work is holy, he remembered one of Tolstoy's heroes saying.
A body dropped nearby, and though he couldn't see her, he heard Eva's breathing. It was so normal, Arkady thought. Although it wasn't in the least normal. Did he normally perform farm labor? Through closed eyes, he felt the dull pulsation of the sun. What a relief to think of nothing, to be a rock in the field and never move again. Even better, he thought: two rocks in the field.
Unseen behind the grass, Eva asked, 'Why did you come here?'
'Yesterday Maria said you would be here.'
'But why?'
'To see you.'
'Now that you've seen me, why don't you go?'
'I want more.'
'Of what?'
'You.'
Directness was not a language he generally spoke, and he expected her to leap to her feet and walk away.
There was a stir, and Eva's hand grazed his.
She said, 'Your friend Zhenya plays chess.'
