Polina Dashkova: Madness Treads Lightly

“No.” Olga shook her head. “No, I can’t eat anything. Or drink. Open the window a little and let’s smoke while Liza’s asleep. What really happened, no one saw.” Olga shrugged nervously and took a deep drag. “We only know what she said, and she doesn’t remember anything. She pulled Mitya out of the noose herself.”

“Wait a sec,” Lena interrupted her. “But Mitya was six feet tall and solidly built. Katya’s like Thumbelina, half his weight and three heads shorter.”

“Yes, she said it was very hard. But she couldn’t leave him like that, and she was hoping he might still be alive. Don’t worry, I’m thinking straight. I realize that anything’s possible, but out of the blue like that, without even a note. And Mitya had always considered suicide a terrible sin. This is not enough to tell the police, of course, but Mitya was baptized, he was Orthodox, he went to confession and took communion. Rarely, but still. Now there can’t even be a funeral because suicides don’t get funerals. Any sin can be prayed away—except this one.”

Olga had dark circles under her eyes, and her hand holding the dead cigarette was trembling.

“He dropped by to see me about a month ago,” Lena said softly. “He had so many plans. He was telling me he’d written five new songs, he’d gotten in to see some famous producer, and now he said he’d have one music video after another coming. I don’t remember exactly what we talked about, but I got the impression Mitya was doing great. Maybe a little too excited, but in a good way. Did some hopes he had connected with that producer fall through?”

“Those hopes of his were born and died ten times a month.” Olga grinned sadly. “He was used to it and took it totally calmly. All kinds of producers, big and small, were endlessly popping up in his life. No, if we’re talking about what truly worried him, then it was his own art, not in terms of popularity and money, but whether he could—or couldn’t—write. The last month he’d been writing like never before, and for him that was the main thing.”

“You mean you’re not ruling out that Mitya didn’t do it himself?” Lena asked cautiously.

“The police assure me he did.” Olga lit another cigarette.

“Have you eaten anything at all today? You’re smoking like a chimney. Want me to make coffee?”

“Go ahead.” Olga nodded indifferently. “And if I can, I’ll take a shower here. I haven’t even washed today, and I’ve already been to the morgue. Forgive me for showing up here with this nightmare, but being home right now is so tough. I have to get my bearings and then take care of my parents and grandmother.”

“Come on, I’ll give you a clean towel.”

“Lena, I don’t believe he did it,” Olga said softly, standing in the bathroom door. “It’s all so bizarre. Their telephone was out all day. I checked at the station, and the line was completely fine. Something happened to the phone itself, and this morning a neighbor fixed it in a minute. His wife called the ambulance and police from their neighbors’ at five in the morning. It was the neighbors who called me. By the time I got there, they’d already taken Mitya away. You see, that night his wife was… well, high. They told me Mitya was, too. They said it was suicide from drug psychosis. They found needles in the apartment and tracks on his arm. So the police didn’t try too hard. ‘Ma’am, your dear brother was an addict,’ they told me. ‘So is his wife. It’s perfectly clear!’”

“Mitya wasn’t an addict,” Lena said slowly. “He didn’t even drink. And Katya…”

“She’d been shooting up for a year and a half. But not Mitya. Never.”

“Did you see him in the morgue?”

“No. I couldn’t. I was scared I’d faint. He was already in the cold locker. They said there was a line for viewing. There are an awful lot of bodies. If I write a petition to the Prosecutor’s Office, he’ll stay there, waiting his turn.”

“What have you decided?”

“I don’t know. But if he’s going to lie there in the cold locker, my mama and papa and my grandmother are going to have heart attacks over my brother. And they explained to me that a petition wasn’t going to do much. They’d hand the case to some girl working off her Moscow residency permit in the District Prosecutor’s Office, since they don’t have enough investigators. She won’t go and do any digging. It was so clearly a suicide. They have so many unsolved murders now, and this one, just some addict…”

She made a hopeless gesture and closed the bathroom door.

While Olga was taking a shower and putting herself in order, Lena stood by the window, holding the buzzing coffee grinder, and thought about Mitya Sinitsyn. What had they talked about then? He’d been over for a couple of hours, after all. He’d been telling her that he’d written five new songs and he’d even left a cassette. Lena had never gotten around to listening to it. She had to find it.

Yes, yet another megaproducer had appeared on his horizon. But Mitya hadn’t said his name, he’d said, “Terrifically famous, you wouldn’t believe it! I’m afraid I’ll attract the evil eye!”

Then they’d eaten dinner and talked about something else for a long time. We were just reminiscing about our student days, Lena thought.

Mitya graduated from the Institute of Culture and studied to be a theater director. It was an odd major, especially these days, and he never did work in his field. He wrote his songs, sang them for a small circle of friends, and had some gigs in clubs in the late 1980s. He was always in talks about some record, or some CD, or music videos for television.

Nothing ever came of the talks, but Mitya never gave up. He believed he had good songs, that they just weren’t pop. But there was demand for more than just pop. Mitya wasn’t counting on stardom, but he wanted to find his audience, and not through concerts in underground crossings but through more respectable channels—radio, television. For that, though, he not only had to compose good songs and perform them well, he also had to build up the right acquaintances and contacts, hobnob with producers, and offer himself as a product. And Mitya didn’t know how to do that.

Lately he’d been working as a guitar teacher at a children’s drama school. The money was pathetic, but the kids loved him. That was important to Mitya because he and Katya couldn’t have kids, though they’d wanted to badly.

If Lena was to assume what Olga said was true, and Mitya had been murdered, then her first question had to be who benefited? Who could have felt threatened by someone who taught kids classical guitar and wrote songs?

She had to find that cassette and listen it, only not now, around Olga. That might be painful for her. As it was, she was barely keeping it together.

Wet snow was falling outside. Looking into the courtyard, Lena mechanically noted that Olga hadn’t parked her little gray Volkswagen very well. She was thinking about how Olga was going to have a hard time getting out and might get stuck in a snowdrift when her gaze slipped over the dark blue Volvo, parked only a few meters from Olga’s car and already lightly sprinkled with snow.

“There, you see?” the woman sitting behind the wheel of the Volvo said quietly to her companion. “I never doubted they were still in touch, and pretty close touch, too. Close enough that after what happened, she rushed straight here.”

“I’m afraid,” the man murmured with dried lips.

“It’s all right.” The woman fondly ran her short, well-manicured fingers over his cheek. “You’re doing great. You’ll calm down and realize that this is the last push. Then it’s all over. I know how scared you are right now. Fear comes from deep inside, it rises from the belly to the chest. But you’re not going to let it rise any higher. You’re not going to let it into your head. You’ve been able to stop that thick, burning, unbearable fear lots of times. You’re strong now and you’ll be even stronger when we make this push—difficult and essential, but the last. I am with you.”