Stuart Kaminsky - Death Of A Russian Priest

“Perhaps we can talk again.” She walked him to the door. On the way they paused to look at the icon of the pale saint in prison clothes.

Karpo said, “When we do talk again, perhaps you can tell me who Oleg is.”

“You did not believe me?” asked Sister Nina.

“No.”

“There are things that are best left buried,” she said.

“Like the records of murdered priests inside Lubyanka?” Karpo asked.

“Father Merhum believed that such records are long dead,” she said.

“But you believe in resurrection.”

“You are clever and I am an old woman,” she said. “But my faith is strong and yours weak. Do you wish to arrest me for refusing to answer your questions?”

Karpo opened the front door. A wind was blowing through the woods and there was suddenly the smell of cold rain in the gray winter air. He stepped out while the nun held the door open. “No.”

“Good,” she said into the wind. “I’m too old for threats. We will talk again. God bless you.”

After she closed the door, Karpo stood for a moment. This had not been the afternoon he expected. He felt as if a migraine was coming, but he had none of the aura that usually accompanied it, no strange odors, no unbidden sexual impulses. He had to admit as he headed for the town that something about the nun and the service for the dead priest had shaken him. It reminded him of that day from his childhood, but it could not be what Sister Nina had said.

The murderer of Father Vasili Merhum stood back in the woods watching the tall pale policeman move slowly along the path to Arkush.

Moments ago the killer had stood next to the window of the dead priest’s house and heard Sister Nina avoid the question about Oleg. Then he had heard the policeman say that he did not believe her.

The murderer was shaken. At the moment he could see no alternatives. He wanted to see an alternative, a way out, but there didn’t appear to be one. She knew and someday she might tell the policeman or another priest or nun. He could not live with such a fear. It was not just he who would suffer, he told himself. Other lives would be ruined.

Besides, she was old. She believed in an afterlife. If there was an afterlife, he accepted his own damnation. If there was no afterlife and no damnation, then the nun had devoted her life to a lie.

The wind stirred as the policeman disappeared into the trees. The murderer let the next gust push him toward the small house.

Tears welled in his eyes as he reached the door of the house. He could take no time to think about it. If he took time, he would change his mind and Sister Nina would have an opportunity to tell the policeman.

No one locked doors in Arkush, especially a nun. He entered the house and found the old woman in the kitchen cleaning teacups. She looked over her shoulder when she heard his footsteps.

He was trembling, his hands at his sides, but he was determined to act. Sister Nina dried her hands on a small clean rag on a rod over the sink. She crossed herself and turned to face him.

“This is not the way,” she said softly.

“I can think of no other,” he cried. “God help me. I can think of no other. I have become a monster.”

“Then,” she said, “we will both suffer. I for a moment and you for eternity.”

Elena Timofeyeva and her aunt Anna lived with Anna’s cat, Baku, in a one-room apartment not far from the Moscow River. The apartment building was an old one-story plaster-and-wood box with a concrete courtyard of concrete benches. It was one of the apartment buildings constructed as temporary shelter after the war against fascism. The plan was to tear it down within a few years of its construction. That had been more than forty years ago. Until Elena came three months ago Anna had lived alone in the same apartment for more than half of her fifty-two years.

Elena had the bedroom. Anna had the living room/kitchen. It was hardly lyuks, luxury, but Elena had little choice. New to Moscow, Elena had been lucky to have an aunt who not only took her in but used her influence to get her on the Special Section staff.

Anna’s influence stemmed from her former status as deputy procurator. Three years ago, during her second ten-year term, she had suffered her third, and most serious, heart attack.

Anna had worked a lifetime of eighteen-hour days and six-and-a-half-day weeks, first as an assistant to a commissar of Leningrad in charge of shipping and manufacturing quotas, and then, as a result of her zeal and ability, as deputy procurator in Leningrad and Moscow. Because she came from sturdy peasant stock, she had felt free to neglect her health. But then, suddenly, she was idle. Rostnikov, her chief investigator, had brought his wife’s cousin Alex, a doctor, to examine her after the state security doctors told her she was to lie in bed and prepare to die.

Alex had looked at her dumpy egg-shaped body and told her to get out and walk, walk, walk. She had gradually worked her way up to four miles every day, though she refused to wear the Czech jogging suit that her sister, Elena’s mother, had sent her from Odessa.

Anna still retained the respect of the people in the apartment building, at least those who had not moved in the past three years. A few of them still called her Comrade Procurator.

Early in the evening when she returned from her afternoon walk, Anna had sat at her small table near the window overlooking the bleak courtyard. Below, four babushkas watched over their bundled grandchildren by the light of a few courtyard lamps and the lighted windows of nearby apartments. Two hours later Anna was still seated at the window. She held a book close to her eyes, and the fuzzy orange ball, Baku, was in her lap, when Elena entered. Anna took off her glasses and looked up.

“The man is insane,” Elena said, dropping her bag on the table near the door.

“You want something to eat?” asked Anna. She placed her book on the window ledge and Baku on the floor.

Elena kicked off her shoes and moved to a second chair near the window. “No … yes. What do we have?”

Anna went to the kitchen alcove. “We have two eggs,” she said. “ Keefeer. Bread. A tomato.”

“A tomato?”

Anna reached into her cupboard and pulled out a slightly overripe tomato. “And,” she added, “I made leek soup.”

“Let me do it,” Elena said.

Elena had learned to take over the preparation of meals whenever possible. Cooking was neither a talent nor an interest of Anna, whose true passions were crime and her cat.

“Who is insane?” asked Anna as Elena turned on the small electric stove that stood on the table in the kitchen corner.

Baku rubbed against Elena’s legs and she motioned for him to join her. The cat leaped into her arms and she stroked its head as she smelled the leek soup and pushed the pot onto the burner.

“Tkach,” she said. “He’s like a madman. You prepared me for the madness in the streets, but not in the people with whom I must work.”

“He is in the wrong business,” Anna Timofeyeva said.

Elena put Baku down and carefully cut the soft tomato with a less-than-sharp knife.

“He isn’t insane,” said Anna.

“He rants, he threatens.” Elena sighed. “He almost killed a man selling pizzas today.”

Outside the window one of the babushkas had taken off her gloves and was paddling a small child with her bare hand. The other babushkas were watching silently. The child’s wails penetrated the window.

“If I have children,” Elena said, carefully slicing the loaf of bread with the same dull knife, “I will not allow them to be hit.”

“Perhaps,” said Anna. “Tkach has a child and another on the way. Do you think he strikes his child?”