Stuart Kaminsky - Tarnished Icons

They opened the door and looked across the room at the table where three women were sitting: Sarah Rostnikov, Lydia Tkach, and their grandmother, Galina Panishkoya. The girls stood for a moment with the door open, glanced at Rostnikov, who was smiling, and ran into the waiting arms of their grandmother.

Rostnikov took off his coat, hung it up, and looked at the table now surrounded by happy weeping women and children. The only one not crying was Lydia Tkach, not because she didn’t want to, but because she had an image to maintain, an image she had spent a lifetime perfecting.

“Do you have to go back to jail?” the older girl asked.

“No,” said her grandmother.

“Your grandmother will live here with us for a while,” said Sarah. “It will be a little crowded, but we’ll manage.”

“Apparently,” said Rostnikov, “your grandmother was confused. She didn’t do the thing we thought she did. It was someone else who has yet to be found. Your grandmother got caught in the middle of an unfortunate event. My superior reviewed the record of the trial and came to the conclusion that she should be released immediately. He exerted some influence to see that justice was done.”

“And I have a job,” said Galina, still holding her granddaughters, who had not yet taken off their coats. “I’m going to be working in the bakery of Lydia Tkach. I am going to sit on a stool, take orders, and learn how to use a cash register.”

“Older women are better workers than girls,” said Lydia.

Neither Sarah nor Porfiry Petrovich was sure of such an all-encompassing statement, but neither was going to engage Lydia Tkach in argument on this point.

They didn’t get to bed till nearly eleven, much too late for the girls, but this was a special night. Lydia insisted that Rostnikov not walk her down the steps and to the metro station when she left.

“No one is going to attack me from here to the metro station,” she said. “And, besides, I would have to walk slowly so you could keep up with me. It is cold outside and I want to move quickly.”

Sarah set up the bedroom for the girls and Galina. When they had gone in, Rostnikov and Sarah could hear them whispering for about ten minutes.

Setting up the living room to sleep in was a little awkward. Rostnikov knew how Sasha and Maya had done it when Lydia lived with them. A one-legged man getting onto a mattress on the floor was a sight best reserved for himself and his wife.

Sarah turned the lights out and got in under the blankets next to her husband after she had changed into her pullover nightshirt. Since the girls had come into their lives, he had taken to sleeping in boxer shorts and a variety of extra-large T-shirts of various colors and carrying various messages on front, back, or both. The orange one he wore tonight bore the words PLANT A TREE in black letters. Rostnikov found the shirt reasonably comfortable, though he planned to plant no trees. Before the girls had come, he had slept with nothing on, and so, usually, had Sarah.

“How did you do it?” Sarah asked in the darkness.

“Do what?”

“Porfiry Petrovich,” she said with mock exasperation, “Galina Panishkoya. How did you get her out of jail? She killed a man.”

“It was a mistake,” he said. “You heard me tell the girls.”

Rostnikov rolled over to kiss his wife and then rolled back, his arm touching the prosthetic leg next to the bed.

She touched his hand and he spoke very quietly. “Do you think a beautiful woman might consider making love to a one-legged policeman tonight?”

She answered by rolling on top of him as she pulled the nightshirt over her head.

Somewhere during that night in Moscow, two drunks passed out in doorways and died, frozen. A husband and wife who lived with another couple in a single room had a fight over his snoring. He threw her out of the fourth-floor window. There were two murders, five beatings, dozens of breaking-and-enterings, and countless drug deals and illegal transactions between midnight and dawn.

Sometime during the night, the snow began to fall again. It was falling when the members of the Office of Special Investigation awoke and looked out their windows. There was Pankov the anxious clerk; Zelach the slouch; Elena Timofeyeva, who had not slept that night; Iosef Rostnikov, who had been up most of the night writing some very bad poetry that he threw away; Sasha Tkach, who had fallen asleep with his wife in his arms in the darkness thinking of how close he had come the night before to being killed; Yakovlev the ambitious director; Emil Karpo, who had worked at his desk till midnight and immediately fallen asleep when he got into his narrow bed; and Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov. They all looked forward to a day in which Moscow would be covered in clean, soft, pure, cold whiteness.