The revolutionist, p.45
The Revolutionist, page 45
Zander handed the urn to her. Uncapping it, she pulled out a handful of ashes. "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, or whatever," she muttered. Her eyes glistened. She looked up at the brilliant white clouds being lashed across the sky by high winds unfelt on earth. "Dearest Ronzha," she cried, "if you are watching us from a corner table of some celestial Stray Dog, kindly take this as an act of love." With that she began casting the ashes into the air, handful after handful, until the urn was empty and the view of the river below was masked by the soot drifting down toward it.
"Now he is dead," Appolinaria calmly announced when the last of the ashes had been discharged into the air. "Now I can begin mourning him properly."
In a gloomy hallway several days later. Zander had difficulty finding the right door. He could see the whitish glow of the nameplates, but he couldn't read them even with his new eyeglasses. He was about to abandon the search and come back in the morning, when a door opened and a woman set out a lidded garbage pail. She was startled to see someone in the hallway.
"I am looking for the Evpraksein apartment," Zander told her.
She squinted at him and decided it was none of her business. "One flight up, second door on the right." She closed the door before Zander had a chance to thank her.
He found the door and knocked softly on it. After a moment he knocked again. He could hear a faint scuffing inside. He knocked a third time. The door opened the length of the safety chain. The eye of an old woman peered out. It was very alert.
"You do not know me," Zander said quietly, "but I have a message for you from Konstantin Evpraksein. You must be his mother."
The woman snickered. "I am his wife, not his mother."
"Excuse me. I thought . . . what I mean is . . ."
"I own a mirror. I know what I look like," the woman snapped. "It is a natural mistake." She shut the door and unhooked the chain
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and opened it wide. Zander entered a large room filled with furniture. There were four beds and two tables and eight wicker chairs and two easy chairs and several side tables and a sofa with a high curved back and two dressers and an armoire. Every surface was covered with lamps and bookends and candlesticks and samovars and tortoise picture frames without photographs and ashtrays and a collection of glass paperweights with rural scenes in them. It was, Zander realized, as if the contents of an entire house had been stuffed into this space.
The door closed behind Zander and he found himself facing four women. Two were in their twenties, but it was possible to guess their ages only from the way they dressed. From their faces, from their posture, they might have been twice that. The other two women looked as if they were in their seventies. The one wrapped in a shawl was. She was Evpraksein's mother. The other woman, the one who had answered the door, must have been roughly as old as her husband, but then Russia aged people prematurely these days.
"My name," Zander began, "is Alexander Til. I was, until recently, in prison—"
"You were in prison," Evpraksein's wife interrupted carefully, "and they let you out.'*"
"It happens occasionally." Zander was swept by a wave of guilt at being alive; even he couldn't explain why it had worked out as it did. "While I was inside, I was taken for an eye examination. The doctor was an inmate—he fitted me with these." Zander fingered his thick eyeglasses. "The door was open and there was a guard outside, but the doctor managed to whisper his name and address before I left. He said he had a wife, a mother, two daughters. He charged me, if I ever got out, to send his love to them."
"How long ago did this take place.'"' the wife asked.
"I have a bad leg. Do you mind if I sit down.'*" The older of the two daughters brought a chair. Zander sank gratefully into it. The four women hovered over him. He looked from one to the other. "This happened four months ago. I have been out of prison two months. I apologize for not coming sooner, but I have not been well."
"What did Father say.''" the older daughter asked as if Zander had not already delivered the message.
"He said to send you his love. Only that. There was no time to tell me more."
The other daughter said in a tight voice, "He is a traitor, a wrecker. We have no wish for his love."
The wife of Evpraksein said, "We have reason to believe he is dead."
Zander said, "How do you know that.^"
"We sent him packages as often as the regulations permitted. Two
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weeks ago the last one we sent came back to us. They had stamped the word "deceased" across the front of the package in large letters."
"Maybe there has been a mistake," Zander said.
Evpraksein's mother shook her head. "I feel it in my bones, there is no mistake. Our Konstantin is certainly dead."
"For us," hissed the younger daughter, "he has been dead since they took him. Do you know what it has done to our lives to have a father who betrayed his country.''"
Evpraksein's wife reached for Zander's hand and squeezed it, and nodded her thanks. "We were about to light a candle," she told him.
"A memorial candle," added the mother.
"Just a candle," insisted the younger daughter. "It has no special significance."
"Stay with us for a moment, if you like," the wife said.
"I am ... I am honored to participate with you in the lighting of a memorial candle for Dr. Evpraksein," Zander said.
The wife released Zander's hand and took a simple candle from a dresser drawer and lit it with a kitchen match and, tilting it, let some of the wax spill into a saucer. She planted the candle in the spilled wax, steadied it, and stood back. The younger of the two daughters let a burst of air flutter through her lips and stalked off to fog up the window with her breath. Evpraksein's wife and mother and oldest daughter, and Zander, gathered around the candle to silently contemplate the mystical flickering of the memorial flame.
"I blame myself," Sergeant Kirpichnikov said, shaking his heavy head, tapping the stump of his left hand on the kitchen table. "I ought to have beaten him more than I did."
"I should have put my foot down the day he came home wearing that leather jacket and said he was working for the people Atticus Tuohy worked for," Serafima said. She used the edge of her shawl to dab tears away from the corners of her eyes. "He was basically a good boy. Pasha. He always remembered my birthday."
"He remembered your birthday," Sergeant Kirpichnikov muttered, "because I reminded him."
"He let himself be reminded," Serafima said impatiently. "That showed he cared."
Sergeant Kirpichnikov got up and went over to the stove and stirred the soup with a large wooden spoon. He looked across to Zander and cleared his throat. "There is something I have been meaning to say to you."
Zander thought he knew what was coming. "You don't owe me
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any explanations," he told Pasha. "Everyone knows you had to do what you did."
"Say it to him anyhow," Serafima instructed Pasha.
Again the sergeant cleared his throat. "I am not much given to speeches, or excuses, but I hold it necessary to tell you I am not proud of what I did. If you decided never to talk to me again, I would give you the right of the matter. It is only that Melor called me in and showed me all the evidence against you, showed me the business of the American rolltop desk being your code for me, and said we could save ourselves by coming clean, it was our only choice."
"I understand," Zander said. "I bear you no grudge."
But the sergeant had to finish. "So when he put the paper before me, to tell you the godawful truth, I never even read the damn thing. I asked him where I signed, and he showed me, and I signed." Pasha breathed in deeply through his enormous nostrils. "And that is how it was. And I am ashamed to tell you this, but I had to get it off my chest."
Zander nodded. Everyone was silent for a while. Pasha sat down again at the kitchen table. "At least eat something," Serafima told the two men.
"I am not hungry," said the sergeant. He pushed his bowl away.
"Maybe later," Zander said. He turned to Pasha. "How did you find out about Melor.''"
Serafima began crying again. The sergeant filled Zander's glass, and his own, and both men downed some vodka. "He always came for dinner on Wednesdays," the sergeant began.
"Wednesdays, always," Serafima agreed. "He brought packages from the commissary. Lard. Bacon. Butter sometimes. Sweets sometimes." And she burst out, "I tell you he cared more than he let on."
"When he didn't show up Wednesday, she got worried," Pasha continued. "I thought he might have been off with a girl, but Serafima made me go around to his place anyway. He had a small apartment, but he had it all to himself. I knew something was wrong as soon as I turned the corner. There were two cars and a truck, and some men in blue suits and orange ties were carrying down boxes and piling them in the back of the truck. They weren't taking furniture. And they didn't look like moving men to me."
"When he came home and told me," Serafima picked up the story, "I thought I would have a heart attack. We waited all day Thursday for word. You can imagine the state I was in. By Friday morning it was either find out what had happened to him or kill myself."
"I was against her going," the sergeant said.
"A mother," Serafima burst out, "is not like a girlfriend or a wife even, though I have nothing against wives. A mother is a mother, and
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if she feels her son is in trouble, she will walk through burning oil, through walls, you see what I mean?"
Zander nodded sympathetically.
Serafima pushed herself to her feet and circled the table and settled back into her chair. Zander tried to imagine her charging up to the front door of Butyrskaya Prison and demanding to see her son. "You will have to go through appropriate channels," the guard would have said, but Serafima, who had put on weight over the years, who had in fact become quite fat, would have shouldered her way past the poor man into the courtyard. Zander could imagine her scanning the dozens upon dozens of windows and shouting, "Melor, it's me, it's your mother, Serafima. Come out this instant!"
"I never made it to the front door," Serafima said in a whisper; she felt if she talked any louder the dishes would come crashing down from the cabinet, the overhead fixture would fall out of the ceiling. "The place was jammed with mothers, there must have been half a hundred of us, all squeezed up on the curb so the traffic could pass, milling around the closed door, some sobbing, some angry, all ready to walk through burning oil for sons who had disappeared. I suppose," Serafima added after a moment, "if there is an afterlife, the entrance to hell will look like that."
"It was me," Sergeant Kirpichnikov continued, "who saw his name in the newspaper. I do not usually read these things, but with Melor missing and all . . . you must have seen it—the announcement on the inside page of Pravda about the arrest of the head of the police. Only the week before they ran a photograph of him standing next to Comrade Stalin, and the caption identified him as Stalin's right arm. Turns out the right arm was a German spy! And down in the story they listed twenty-six lower-level functionaries who had been tried and convicted and . . . and . . . you know what I'm getting at . . . and Melor's name—"
"My little Marx-Engels-Lenin-Organizers-of-Revolution an agent of imperialism!" Serafima cried. "Can you believe such a thing.^ With a name like that.^ An agent of imperialism! My Melor!"
Sergeant Kirpichnikov reached into the pocket of his tunic and took out an article torn from the pages of Pravda. Melor's name was underlined in pencil.
"I always dreamed of seeing his name in print," Serafima said, "but God knows I didn't want to see it in print like that."
Sergeant Kirpichnikov offered the article to Zander. He read it and passed it to Serafima. She pressed it to her bosom. "I gave birth to him and bathed him and clothed him and loved him for thirty-one years. And this is all I have to show for it—his name in an article in
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Pravda. How, I ask you, can such a thing have happened? How? I ask you."
"Control yourself," Sergeant Kirpichnikov pleaded. He had closed the door of the room, but he was still afraid the people they shared the apartment with would overhear them.
Serafima nodded miserably. "How?" she whispered. "How? I want to know how?"
Arishka clutched the twelve red roses wrapped in newspaper to her breast. Ludmilla walked on one side with a wrist hooked through her arm. Zander, limping along on the other side, was about to slow down, but decided the exercise would do him good. They headed across the small park sandwiched between the wide boulevard and the Kremlin wall toward the tomb of the unknown soldier.
"There is a terrible difference between someone who has died, and someone who has disappeared," Arishka was saying. "When someone is dead, the survivors at least know where they stand. When someone has only disappeared, you are left in a limbo—you slide back and forth between despair and hope, and there is no middle ground, no place you can plant your feet and begin to reconstruct your life."
"You don't need to explain," Ludmilla assured her. "You are doing the right thing."
"You really think so?"
"Absolutely."
"Even the hypnotist?"
"Even the hypnotist. Someone in your position has to try everything."
Arishka breathed a sigh of relief. "It means a great deal to me to hear you say that. Some of my friends thought going to a hypnotist was ridiculous. I don't see why. These days people use hypnosis to help them stop smoking, or stick to a diet. So why not use it to convince yourself someone is dead?"
"Did it change anything?" Zander asked. "Did you come away feeling any different about your friend?"
"I have to admit it really helped me. Overnight I stopped hoping. I became convinced in my heart of hearts that there was only one explanation for his disappearance. I continue to dream about him, but in my dreams he is always dead. Even when he talks to me, he is dead. There is no doubt in my mind that I will never see him again."
"At least you know where you stand," Ludmilla said, squeezing Arishka's elbow. "That's more than most can say."
"Kindly keep your voices down," Zander cautioned. "There will
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be people at the tomb, and we don't want anyone overhearing this kind of conversation."
"You do see, don't you, that you can't hve with doubt?" Arishica said. "You can't function. One day last winter I left the office without putting on my galoshes. I didn't realize it until I found myself waiting in knee-deep snowdrifts, waiting for the trolley, but by that time it was quicker to go home than back to the office." Arishka lowered her voice so only Ludmilla could make out what she was saying. "Even my period was affected. My whole life I have been as regular as the moon. After Arkadey disappeared"—Arishka quickly corrected herself— "after his death, I would go five weeks, six, once even seven. If I had been sharing a bed with a man and that happened, I would have been lining up for another abortion."
"Pay attention, now," Zander warned. They were approaching the tomb. It was directly under the Kremlin wall, and covered with bouquets and wreaths. An eternal flame burned at its foot, and two soldiers in smart uniforms with rifles at parade rest stood motionless on either side of the flame. Several civilians in blue suits and orange ties hovered off to one side, watching the crowd file past.
"Whose idea was it for you to put flowers on the tomb.''" Ludmilla whispered.
They joined the queue, about twenty people, and advanced step by step toward the roped-off area.
"The hypnotist suggested it. I did three sessions with him altogether, and he didn't give them away, let me tell you. At the last session he put me into a trance and suggested that Arkadey was the unknown soldier; that he was buried here in the tomb. When I woke up, he told me what he had done and I said, why not.^ He might be buried here. It was possible. I mean, whoever is buried here is unknown, so why couldn't it be Arkadey.'"'
The people in line ahead of them moved on, and Arishka stepped up to the cord and stared solemnly at the flame and the tomb. Then she reached over the cord and gently added her bouquet of roses to the flowers and wreaths piled around the base of the stone.
Walking back through the park, Arishka was morbidly silent. Zander glanced at Ludmilla behind Arishka's back. Ludmilla shrugged. Arishka pulled a lace handkerchief from her purse and blew her nose into it. She began sniffling. Tears welled in her eyes and brimmed over onto her cheeks. Her body shook with silent sobs.
"Are you all right.'"' Ludmilla asked worriedly.
Arishka moaned. "We had so little time together. It took me months to work up my nerve and tell Atticus I was leaving. It was torture—loving Arkadey and sleeping with Atticus. Then just when we were starting our life together, I lost him."
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Ludmilla said, "At least you know now that he's dead." Arishka stifled her sobs in her handkerchief. "What if it isn't Arkadey in the tomb.'' What if it is someone else, and he is still alive.''"
Sergeant Kirpichnikov was in bed with a cold, but he insisted on Serafima going anyway. So Zander wound up escorting what the ladies teasingly called "his harem" to the film. The theater was crowded and they had to take seats down in front in order to stay together. The house lights dimmed. Quick shots of Red Army tanks fording a river and Soviet athletes clearing hurdles and a glistening submarine breaking to the surface through a layer of Arctic ice introduced the news-reel. The first item concerned the recent trial of the census takers. There was a sequence showing them in the courtroom, their shaved heads bowed in guilt; they obviously were unable or unwilling to look directly at the camera. "The glorious Soviet intelligence service," explained a passionate voice-over, "has smashed a viper's brood of traitors in the Institute of Soviet Statistics."
