Stuart Kaminsky - Fall of a Cosmonaut

She shrugged and reached for the glass of tepid tea on the table in front of her.

Akardy adjusted his glasses and looked at the bone.

“Then shall I lie?” he asked.

“Will they pay you if you tell the truth?” she asked. “Look, look, if she just … she can win a car. She can … oh, no.”

“I don’t know if they’ll pay,” he repeated. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to take it even if they do pay.”

Akardy’s mother stood up, reached over, and turned off the television set.

“Your grandmother, my mother, read tea leaves, palms, bumps on the head, cards,” she said, looking at her son.

“I know,” he answered glumly.

“And you know what? It was all for show. She didn’t know how she knew what she knew. It was just there. People want the show. That’s what my sister and I did when we learned we had the gift or curse. And you don’t know either.”

“I didn’t … I just said whatever came into my head,” said Akardy. “I’m not even sure how to lie about it. Do I let something come into my head and then lie about it? And where does the new lie come from? Perhaps it is really the truth. How do I know? How am I to know? I don’t want to be studied.”

His mother walked over to join him at the table and picked at the crumbs of the flat cake she had baked earlier that day. Akardy didn’t like when she picked at crumbs and then licked her fingers and picked again. He had never told her. She loved him, had taken care of him when he had been injured and almost died. That was when the gift or curse had come, after he had been beaten, after his skull had been cracked. It didn’t come often and he had always been able to ignore it before, but that dark woman with the glasses at the psychic center, Nadia Spectorski, she had been like a … a jumping dog, all over him, demanding, excited. He did not want to see her again, but he had no choice. Perhaps he could call in and say he was ill or that his mother was ill? She really wasn’t well. No, he would have to go. He would have to face Emil Karpo’s doubting eyes.

He decided that he would try to lie. Perhaps the Nadia Spectorski woman would turn out to be the murderer. That would save him. He wished there were more cake.

“What are you doing?” asked Elena.

The night was relatively warm though there was a smell of the possibility of more rain in the clouds that covered the sky. They sat on a bench in the concrete courtyard just outside the window of the apartment Elena shared with her aunt, Anna Timofeyeva.

Had she been home, Lydia Tkach could have looked out the window and seen them from her apartment in the far corner of the one-story building, but she was staying with Sasha.

Anna Timofeyeva regretted the day she had agreed to help Lydia Tkach find an apartment in the building. As a former procurator, Anna still had friends or friends who had friends. She had misgivings when she agreed to help Sasha’s mother. To protect herself and Elena, Anna had set down clear rules by which Lydia was to abide. These rules regarded when Lydia could visit and under what conditions. Lydia had begun violating the rules the day after she moved in.

The day before, Anna Timofeyeva had sat petting her cat, Bakunin, in the window and had said to Elena, “Perhaps we will be lucky. Perhaps Sasha’s wife will never return.”

“You mean that?” Elena had asked.

“I don’t know,” said Anna. “Maybe I do.”

And now, Elena and Iosef sat in the dark and empty courtyard surrounded by dimly lit windows, possibly being watched by Aunt Anna.

“What are you doing?” Elena asked, putting her hand on the shoulder of Iosef, who leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands.

“Brooding,” he said.

“Are you going to stop brooding sometime tonight? I have to get up early and catch a thief.”

“I’ll stop,” he said. “It will take great effort. You can help by setting a clear date for our marriage, a date when you will be moving into my apartment.”

“Which,” she said, “will then be ‘our apartment’ and which, you have agreed, will be redecorated to our mutual satisfaction.”

He sat up and looked at her.

“I thought you liked the way my apartment looks.”

“Iosef, we’ve talked about this. I like it for you. For us, I want more of us, or me, to be there, which is why I want to pay half the rent. And please, don’t talk about how all of our money will be together. I don’t want to bicker about tables and chairs and … Iosef, tell me truthfully, am I fat?”

He leaned back a bit to examine her as if for the first time, from foot to head.

“Stop,” she said. “This is not a joke.”

“You are not fat,” he said. “You are voluptuous. You are perfect. If you lose a pound, one pound, I will call off the marriage. If after we are married, you lose one pound, I will seek a divorce.”

“You mean it?”

“Yes.”

“Good. If you want to brood some more, you have my permission,” she said.

“No, you’ve taken the pain out of it.”

“What were you brooding about?”

“Dead poets. Dead cosmonauts. Did you know that Mikhail Lermontov was only twenty-seven when he died?”

“Yes,” Elena said, tugging at his ear. “He died in 1841. Did you know he was descended from a Scottish family that came to Russia in the seventeenth century? And that Lermontov was a military officer transferred to the Caucasus for writing poetry attacking the royal court?”

“No,” said Iosef. “You are fond of Lermontov’s work?”

“Not particularly,” she said. “He is too brooding.”

“Your point is taken,” said Iosef, leaning over to kiss her. She liked his kisses. His lips were ample, his mouth and tongue passionate. She had taught herself to be careful with men, but with Iosef she felt she could let herself float without flying away.

When the first kiss had ended, she said, “I will have to get some sleep and you have to be up early to get to the airport.”

“I’m packed,” he said, leaning toward her again.

“We’re being watched from many windows,” she said with a smile.

“I would hope so,” he said. “I have never completely lost my desire for an audience.”

“And I have never lost my desire for privacy,” she said.

“A perfect match,” he said, placing her hand gently between his legs.

“Perfect,” she said.

Emil Karpo continued to believe that Communism was a nearly ideal social-political system. The problem, he had come to believe, was that humanity could not abide an ideal system. People were self-serving, animalistic, and were capable of destroying anything that required total cooperation. There were many individuals of worth who cared about others, who had, he knew not why, cared about him. Porfiry Petrovich and his wife clearly cared. Mathilde had cared.

Emil Karpo sat at the table in his room, facing the floor-to-ceiling bookcase filled with files and notes of unresolved cases. Emil Karpo sat in the light of a single lamp behind him and the glow of his computer screen. He wore a white T-shirt over a pair of white shorts. In his room, alone, he wore white. Outside, he wore black.

Barefoot, Karpo looked at the screen.

When he had become a policeman, his goal had been clear, his task certain. He would find and help punish those who broke the law, those who were not fit for a Communist state. He knew that he would never stop all crime, not alone, not with the help of thousands, because people did not live for an ideal. They lived for themselves, for their families sometimes, for a few others or one other for whom they had often-fleeting feelings. But he could keep to a minimum the numbers of those who did not conform.

He quickly discovered, however, that the task was beyond monumental. The people who ruled were corrupt. The people who were supposed to contain crime and prosecute criminals were corrupt. Soviet Communism had turned into a grotesque distortion of what his father, his readings, and the speeches of many had promised, but it had been replaced by an even more corrupt system.