Polina Dashkova: Madness Treads Lightly

“You can’t imagine how awful it is to be in a foreign country without the language,” she said. “The interpreter won’t be leading you by the hand from morning till night. He’s there for the whole group, after all. What if you just feel like walking around the city, stopping at a café or a store, and you can’t say anything besides ‘how do you do’? No one expects Oxford pronunciation, and you don’t have to know a gerund from a modal verb. But you have to have the conversational minimum.”

In the mailbox, besides a couple of ads for rowing machines and cosmetics, Sergei found a thick, long envelope addressed to Mrs. Elena Polyanskaya, Russia, Moscow… with a New York return address.

Lena got letters from America fairly often. In the past six years she’d gone there four times to give lectures at Columbia, or Brooklyn College, or the Kennan Institute. She had friends and business acquaintances in New York, Washington, and Boston.

When Sergei gave Lena the letter, she tossed it on the refrigerator distractedly without even opening it. And she didn’t ask to quiz him on his English. She was pale, very tired, and untalkative. Sergei immediately sensed that something was wrong.

What he feared most was Liza getting sick. That was the only thing he truly feared.

“Lena, darling, did something happen?” he asked, putting his arms around his wife.

“Not to us,” she answered quietly. “Liza’s healthy and so am I. Don’t worry. Have something to eat and relax. I’ll tell you all about it later.”

While Lena was heating up his supper, Sergei tiptoed into the nursery. Liza was asleep, curled up cozily. He kissed the warm brow under the blond bangs oh so lightly and straightened her blanket.

“Papa’s here…” Liza said loudly in her sleep, and she sighed and turned over.

There was a meal of steaming cabbage soup, sauerkraut, and pickles on the kitchen table—everything he loved.

Lena was reading, perched on the little kitchen sofa. Sergei was surprised to discover that a forensic medicine textbook lay open on the table in front of her. He knew she was translating some article about serial killers for Smart , but he was still surprised.

“Lena, darling, why are you working so late?”

“Please, help me,” she asked, preoccupied. “Can you tell for certain from the strangulation mark whether it was made when the victim was alive or if the person was first killed and then hanged? They list lots of signs here, but it doesn’t say how accurate they are.”

“At first glance, of course, no,” Sergei replied, starting in on the soup. “But if you’re looking for it, you can tell. You need a specific analysis of the skin in the area of the mark.”

“Do suicides ever get investigated for possibly being staged?” was Lena’s next question.

“Maybe you can tell me what happened so I can better help you?”

“All right.” Lena slammed the textbook shut. “Remember about a month ago when Olga Sinitsyna’s brother Mitya came to see us? You came home from work early and he was sitting here in the kitchen.”

“Yes.” Sergei nodded. “A real deadbeat. He talked so long I lost my pulse. He even left a cassette of his songs.”

“He hanged himself last night,” Lena said softly. “The police and the ambulance doctor say it’s a clear suicide, but Olga doesn’t believe it. There really is something very odd about it.”

“Well, suicide is always a very odd thing. And relatives always want to think the person didn’t do it himself. It used to be the prosecutor came out for each and every body, but now there aren’t enough of them. But if there were something to it…”

“Seryozha, I’m not attacking the honor of the uniform or saying your colleagues are hacks, but I would like you to hear me out.”

“Fine. I’m listening.” Sergei finished his soup and lit a cigarette.

“First of all, for some reason Mitya’s telephone was out for days. Olga had been calling him since yesterday morning and put her phone on auto redial. Then she clarified that there was nothing wrong with the line; something had happened to the phone itself. His neighbor fixed it in five minutes and said that some contact had been broken. This hadn’t happened in three years, and then it did, at just this time.”

Lena recounted every detail of what she’d learned from Olga.

“Lena, darling, I understand,” Sergei said gently after hearing her out. “Sinitsyna is your good friend, and it’s very hard for her right now, and you’re worried about her. But believe me, in five cases out of ten, suicide comes as a total surprise, especially for the relatives. He might have been shooting up, like his wife, only no one knew it, or he might just have gotten drunk out of grief.”

“What grief?” Lena grinned sadly. “That his wife was an addict? That grief was a year and a half old. And people don’t hang themselves over that. And he was not shooting up, that’s for sure. He loved Katya very much. He worshipped her. They were a terrific couple. They’d been together five years, though they couldn’t have kids because Katya had some medical problem. And then the drugs started. He fought for her the best he could. His parents didn’t know anything, only Olga. She put Katya in the hospital, but it didn’t work. But Mitya wouldn’t give in. He was constantly looking for addiction specialists, hypnotists, psychotherapists. He was proactive, he had no intention of giving up. Suicide would be admitting defeat, it would be giving up. No, he couldn’t have hanged himself over Katya being an addict. And there was no other reason, either.”

“Lena, how would you know why a person would hang himself? Sometimes someone loses everything in life, loses himself. One outcast exiled to Siberia who doesn’t even have the right to touch a doorknob gets kicked every day, fucked in every orifice, and forced to lick spit, yet he lives, he clings to life with every fiber of his being. Another is doing just fine—great family, job, friends, respect, money coming in—and bam! He kills himself. You know yourself that the countries with the highest standard of living have the highest suicide rates: Sweden, Denmark, Holland. But where there’s famine, war, and real hardships, people rarely kill themselves. Well-fed Roman patricians slit their veins. Here in Russia, at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, suicide was positively a fad. Putting a bullet in your head was considered a handsome, noble deed. You think they were all idiots, madmen? That some tragedy had befallen them?”

Lena shook her head. “No, I don’t. Although… there’s a certain inner pathology to it. And Mitya had no pathology. He was a healthy young guy. Talented and loved by all as well.”

“Fine.” Sergei sighed. “Let’s say he didn’t do it. Let’s say someone even had a motive to kill him. Think about it, though. Big bankers, political party leaders, and other powerful men of this world are being shot out in the open these days, without a second thought, shot on the streets and in the lobbies of big hotels. And who was Mitya Sinitsyn? Who would go to those lengths to kill him ? Do you know how much a hitman costs? And afterward a professional would have finished off the wife, too. What did they need a witness for?”

“What if that’s exactly why they didn’t finish her off? Maybe that’s just what the killer was thinking. After all, he had to be very smart to set it all up so well. If she was an addict, then she didn’t see or hear anything. I understand it’s a dead end. I understand that intellectually, but I can’t believe it. Something’s off.”

“Lena, when a healthy young man kills himself, something’s always off. It’s fundamentally wrong. I’ll gladly believe he wasn’t drinking or shooting up, wasn’t on the books at the psych clinic, and was an altogether remarkable person. And I’m very sorry for your Olga. If she wants, she can write a statement to the Prosecutor’s Office.”