Stuart Kaminsky - Fall of a Cosmonaut

Maya had said she was going to an afternoon concert and she had fully intended to do just that, but as she had approached Philharmonia Hall, she knew she could not possibly sit through even a short afternoon concert of light baroque works.

Instead she had wandered.

Maya was the only one who really knew why she had left her husband in Moscow. Yes, he had betrayed her with other women at least five times since their marriage, but she also knew that Sasha was very vulnerable. It was his prolonged depressions that were more responsible for her decision to leave him than were his indiscretions.

Those were the reasons for which he himself was responsible.

Her own responsibility was the real secret. He had entered into his encounters with women impulsively. Maya had entered into her one affair with calculation and determination. She had first told herself that she had begun the affair with the Japanese executive who dealt with her office to get even with Sasha. Then she had told herself that she had done so because she was lonely and beginning to feel unwanted. Then she told herself that she had begun the relationship to escape from the deadening blanket of Sasha’s depression. Finally she had concluded that it was all these things and a simple desire to be desired. It had gone on for a long time, far longer than all of Sasha’s encounters put together.

So, one important reason for her fleeting was a deep sense of guilt.

But something now had to be done, had to be decided. Sasha had called. She had chosen not to carry on a conversation. Lydia Tkach had called. Maya had been polite and let her talk to the children, though the baby knew nothing of what was going on and had no more than a few words to say, prompted by Maya’s mother and sister.

A decision had to be made soon. Maya would have to get work or consider returning to Sasha. If she returned, should she confess? No, she decided, no. She would live with her guilt. But returning to Sasha would require more than her willingness to try. For her sake, for the sake of the children, she would need to truly believe that Sasha would and could change, that he had made a beginning.

Time was running out. Maya had heard quiet conversations in Moscow about Kiev and Chernobyl, which was a short ride away. Kiev, she had been told officially, was a safe city to visit for as much as four months or even longer. Unofficially, she had been told that it would take a century for the entire region to be safe.

Stories had come from her brother about sickness in the family, aunts, uncles, cousins with cancers and other illnesses. All were explained away, but now Maya had seen with her own eyes. More than a decade after the nuclear disaster there were sick people on the streets, sickness that could not simply be explained by heavy smoking and alcoholism that matched that of Russia and caused a death rate equal to that of the poorest African countries.

She had to get her children someplace safer. She knew of no other place but Moscow.

As she crossed Leipzig Street, she willed her husband to call tonight. She willed him to sound genuinely different, not just guilty and contrite. She was no longer really interested in guilt. They had more than enough between them to last a lifetime.

He will call, she thought. Sasha will call. If not tonight, tomorrow. And then what will I say? She really had no idea.

She remembered that there was something she had to do before she went back to the apartment. Something … oh, yes. She would stop at the sweet shop near the Tchaikovsky Conservatory and bring something back for her children and her brother.

“A great chain of being,” Mikhail Stoltz said, sitting in his small office behind his desk. “An action begets another action which begets two reactions and …”

He leaned forward and looked around his office. There were photographs of him with astronauts, cosmonauts, visiting dignitaries, and members of the current government. He had other photographs with now-discredited leaders. They were in a drawer in the desk behind which he sat looking at the man across from him.

The man sat back, his umbrella between his legs. The umbrella was upright on the floor. The man had both hands on the curved handle. He said nothing. Stoltz would say what he had to say and the man with the umbrella would do what he had to do.

Stoltz sighed. “How many will we have to eliminate before this is ended?” he asked.

Since the question was not really being asked to the man with the umbrella, he did not answer.

“There are some secrets too big to conceal forever,” said Stoltz. “For such secrets there is only the possibility of delay.”

The man with the umbrella nodded in agreement.

“The two in America?” Stoltz asked.

“It is being taken care of,” said the umbrella man.

“The one in China?”

“Done,” said the umbrella man.

“Then …”

“There is just Vladovka,” said the man with the umbrella. “And I will find him.”

“Rostnikov.”

“Rostnikov.”

“It flew through the air?” asked Laura with the skepticism of both a twelve year old and a Russian.

“Yes,” said Rostnikov, examining the weights he had laid out for the nightly ritual.

“A green bench?” said Nina with the desire of an eight year old to fix on a fact.

“Green,” said Rostnikov. “It flew down Petrovka Street about three feet higher than a car, flew like a spaceship, zing-zing-zip.” He reached over to turn on the Dinah Washington tape he had set up.

“Why didn’t you fly?” asked Nina.

“I clung to a tree,” he said as Dinah Washington began to sing “Nothing Ever Changes My Love for You.”

“Did you stick straight out like in cartoons?” asked Nina.

“Straight out,” said Rostnikov, sitting on the bench which he kept stored in the cabinet in the corner of the living room along with his bars and weights.

“And you didn’t fly away?” said Nina.

“Porfiry Petrovich is very strong,” said Laura.

Sarah was in the bedroom, reading and listening to her own music. She preferred Mozart, chamber music. Porfiry Petrovich was not fond of chamber music, though he now took them all regularly to the concerts put on by Sarah’s cousin Leon and three of his friends. Leon was a doctor who catered to the well-to-do and well connected and was probably quite wealthy, but his passion was the piano.

Rostnikov began to do curls with his fifty-pound dumbbells. He did twelve with each hand and then twelve more with each hand and then a final dozen with each hand while the girls stood watching and, perhaps, listening to the sadness of Dinah Washington.

“Porfiry Petrovich,” Laura said, and then puffed out her cheeks like a balloon. “Nina and I took one of those out yesterday. It took both of us to lift it just a little.”

Rostnikov adjusted the weights on the bar, tightening the lock, being sure that all three hundred pounds were secure. “I know,” he said.

“How?” asked Laura. “We put it back exactly.”

“I’m a detective,” he said, lying down awkwardly, his gray sweat suit already showing patches of perspiration under the arms and at the stomach. “I’m obsessive about details.”

“What is obsessive ?” Nina asked.

“It means,” said Laura to her sister, “that he weighs too much and it makes him watch his stomach and other things carefully.”

Rostnikov dried his hands on the towel beside him on the floor and reached up to grip the weight. Since he had no spotters, he could not push himself to the maximum, but he came close, very close, painfully close. The senior competitions were coming up in less than two months. Rostnikov was looking forward to them. He imagined Mikhail Stoltz in some gym at this very moment with five pounds more on each end of the bar or maybe even working on five hundred pounds.