Stuart Kaminsky - Fall of a Cosmonaut

But hours after he had committed murder, Andrei Vanga could not sleep. His mind was racing. He had to slow it down.

He got back in bed and picked up the copy of War and Peace that rested on his night table. Perhaps once every month or so he would read a bit of it. He had never actually finished the book and felt guilty about it. Tonight he would read. He would read till he fell asleep.

He remembered reading somewhere or hearing on the radio or the television that a movie was being made about the life of Tolstoy. Though he seldom went to the movies, he would make it a point to see this one.

He read: “The day after his initiation into the lodge Pierre was sitting at home reading a book and trying to fathom the significance of the square …”

It was after midnight. Lydia was snoring in the bedroom and Sasha sat at the table in the tiny kitchen, cutting slices from the block of yellow cheese his mother had left out for him along with a small loaf of bread. He sat in his shorts, not wanting to get into the bed on the floor. He continued to feel free, able to do anything, full of good will, and, at the same time, wanting desperately for Maya and the children to come back. It was a contradiction Porfiry Petrovich had pointed out and that Sasha could not comprehend and was not certain that he wished to, though he knew the contradiction would haunt him.

The television, a small black-and-white on the table before him, was tuned to a station showing a documentary about bears in the Ural Mountains. He had the sound turned down very low so that Lydia would not wake up, come in, and complain. She was almost deaf, yet she could hear a television through a door even if the sound was nearly off. It was a gift granted only to mothers who in spite of failed eyesight could see the hint of a frown on a child’s face, or despite deafness hear the whisper of an aside across a room full of people, providing the aside was made by their son or daughter.

The table was cluttered. Sasha decided that it was time to clean up, which meant putting the bread back in the bag, covering the cheese with plastic wrap, putting them in the refrigerator, and consolidating the papers he had spread out to look at. He would brush his teeth in the small kitchen sink so he wouldn’t have to go past Lydia to the bathroom. That meant he would have to go down the hall to use the community toilet for the three apartments on the floor which had no private toilets. It was worth it.

A bear was standing tall on its rear legs in front of a woman with a very wide-brimmed hat. She looked skinny, English or American, but she could have been Russian. Russian women with a bit of money had learned how to look like people who spoke English or French. She was very pretty in a healthy kind of way. Sasha paused, cheese in one hand, bread in the other.

The woman was smiling at the bear. The bear was showing its teeth. The woman reached over and scratched the bear’s chest. Sasha was fascinated. The documentary was on film, so he knew the woman would not be torn apart on television. And yet there was a tension. If he could not have Maya in bed tonight, the woman with the hat … The bear turned its head sideways in ecstasy. It would have been nice to be that bear instead of a tired policeman whose wife had left him, and who stood holding a plate of cheese.

The scene changed. A sincere, thin man with white hair, wearing a suit, was sitting behind a desk. Behind him was a map of the Ural region. Sasha looked at the pile of papers he had to put away. If he didn’t organize anything, and he didn’t plan to do so, he could simply push it all together, shove it in his briefcase, and worry about it in the morning.

His eyes fell once again on his copy of the artist’s sketch of the man the beggar had described and the chess players had identified. Kon. It looked like many sketches, but something … the description-stocky, homely-and the drawing. Sasha, for just a moment, felt that he may have seen the man somewhere. He stood dreamily trying to put a living face to the drawing. His memory was normally very good, not as good as Emil Karpo’s but better than Elena’s.

No, it didn’t come. He turned off the television set, felt the stubble on his chin, put the food away, and gathered the papers into a pile with the sketch on top.

Then he went to bed.

In the dark, the baby did not turn restlessly or cry, Pulcharia did not come in and ask for water or to climb into bed with her parents. Maya did not reach over in her sleep to touch his bare bottom.

As he went to sleep, he felt the inexplicable euphoria of the past days begin to slip away.

In the morning, Nadia Spectorski awoke to a fresh, vivid, and inexplicable vision that seemed to mean absolutely nothing. It was another overcast day. Somewhere north of the city clouds were rumbling. Her room was small, brightly decorated, small computer desk in the corner with a flowerpot and cactus next to the Compaq Presario 2240. Next to the cactus was a kaleidoscope that she looked through every morning for a few minutes, losing herself in the never-repeating meditation of changing colors.

The vision was just as vivid as the one in which she had seen the murder of Sergei Bolskanov through the eyes of the killer. Nadia had feared that she had simply remembered what she herself had done and that she was the killer, but there were too many details, little things that convinced her she had not done this thing.

This morning she was as sure that she had not done it as she was that Boris Adamovskovich had not committed the murder. She had looked down through the killer’s eyes at the shoes and remembered now that the shoes had not fit, had been too large. Yes, Adamoskovich’s shoes would have been too large for her, but the leg was not that of a woman. Nadia reached for her glasses. She needed them to think.

The vision had been brief, mundane.

In the vision a book lay in her lap. The book was thick and open, facedown. It was War and Peace. Had the person in her vision turned the book over, she was certain she would have been able to read the words before her.

Such things happened to Nadia less frequently than they had when she was younger. When she was a young teen, the visions had come so frequently that they disrupted her life, set her trembling, caused her parents, who were both physicians, to send her for medication and treatment. Almost none of the visions had any meaning. She had seen unfamiliar couples screaming at each other, a cat dying in a doorway, screaming in pain, a boy writing something obscene on the wall of a school or church, a woman with an enormous head smiling at her. Medication and hundreds of hours in therapy, coupled with the passing of time, had kept the visions from lining up and leaping out. Her experiences and her curiosity had led her to her lifetime career and the hope, so far unrealized, that such phenomena could be understood in a scientific context.

Yes, Jung, Freud, and others had noted that what they called hysteria seemed particularly powerful in young girls reaching puberty. Witches, who were probably hysterical girls, began their calling early. She herself had concentrated much of her research on girls in their teens, many of whom had been considered extreme neurotics and borderline psychotics. She had taken them off of drugs and also taken them seriously. She had been one of them.

Occasionally, a man would turn up who had some of the psychic characteristics, someone like the not-too-bright, gentle slouching policeman who was afraid of his ability, wanted to deny it.

Nadia, wearing an extra-large plain-white T-shirt, got out of bed, deciding to get a copy of War and Peace. She had read it only once, when she was a brilliant, nearsighted girl who was being given drugs to help control her supposed deliriums. The book had absorbed her, helped calm her. She had been particularly fascinated by Tolstoy’s Napoleon, a tormented, overly confident creature moved more by chance and the inevitability of history than by his own design. But she had soon moved from fiction and for more than a decade now had read none at all.