Stuart Kaminsky: Death Of A Russian Priest

He paused at the birch tree where at the age of sixteen he had cut a cross to impress the young large-breasted daughter of the then mayor of Arkush. There was no longer a trace of that cross. He stopped now because something was in his shoe, a pebble perhaps. As he paused, reached down, and removed the shoe, Father Merhum was aware of a rustling in the leaves behind him, a rustling that suggested something larger than a ferret or rat. With his right shoe in one hand and balancing himself against the familiar birch with the other, he turned his head and saw not a person but an upraised ax.

There was no time to think, pray, or respond. The priest fell backward as the blow came and his shoe sailed into the woods. He tried to turn his back, but he had no time. The next blow brought no great pain, just a sudden throbbing as he rolled onto his back and looked up.

“You,” he said. “You.”

The assassin was going to strike again, but he stopped in midblow. The priest had fallen backward, eyes opening and closing in confusion as his mouth let out a deep breath and a cloud of steam. The assassin stared at the bearded, wide-eyed dog who looked up at him, blood and something yellow coming out of the back of his head, staining the leaves on the ground dark. Instead of striking again, the assassin turned his back and walked into the woods, ax at his side.

Father Vasili Merhum, not yet dead, rolled over onto his knees, touched the back of his head, and felt the soft cushion of his own brain flecked with sharp edges of bone. He began to crawl, trailing his bloody handprints in the snow and along the stone path. Were he to live, it would truly be a miracle.

Through the clearing he could see his small house. The heavy cross on the chain around his neck scraped against the stone path as he crawled forward, slowly losing sensation in his shoeless foot and his right arm. He could imagine his cross sending up sparks.

At the low wooden gate to his house he saw his father, who had been dead for more than forty years. His father flew toward him, his vestments prepared for Easter. The old man’s cross bounced on his chest. His beard, long, gold gray, and silken, trailed behind as he approached his son.

And then, as his father knelt at his side, Father Merhum could see that it was not his father but a woman from his childhood, Yelena Yozhgov, and suddenly it was not she but Sister Nina, her rosary of silver around her neck. She sat, put his head in her lap, and wailed, a wail that was pain and justification to the dying priest. He would be a martyr. He could simply be quiet now and die a martyr, but he could not keep his mouth from moving.

“Sister, Oleg must forgive me,” he said, and she leaned forward to hear what he would say next, but there were no more words and the priest was dead.

TWO

IT WAS NOT ATALL clear to Galina Panishkoya how she came to be sitting in the back room of the former State Store 31 with a gun in her hand pressed hard against the neck of a young woman in a faded and not very clean white smock.

Galina was a sixty-three-year-old grandmother, a babushka, in a cloth coat. She had two arthritic knees and she had two granddaughters to take care of. If there was one place she should not be, it was here.

She shifted on the rickety wooden stool in an attempt to get a bit more comfortable. The movement made the gun in her hand shift, and the young woman in white sitting in front of her gasped as the barrel tapped bone just above her ear.

“I’m sorry,” said Galina.

The young woman, whose name was Ludmilla, sobbed, and tried not to look at the body of Herman Koruk, her boss, who sat on the floor, his legs spread, eyes wide open in surprise. There was a spot in his neck just below his chin where Galina had shot him. There was very little blood.

“Please let me go,” said Ludmilla.

“Shhh,” said Galina, looking at the partly open door to the shop.

She was trying to hear what the policemen were saying, but they were too far away. The first policeman through the door had been a young man. Most policemen seemed to be young. For that matter, most people seemed to be young. She had already sat the shopgirl on the floor in front of her when the young policeman had entered.

“Stop,” she had told him, and though he was young, he was not stupid.

He stopped and moved his hand away from his holster.

“Don’t hurt her,” he had said.

“Go away,” Galina had said.

“I …”

“Away,” Galina repeated, and he had gone away.

Ludmilla, who was twenty-five years old and just a bit on the scrawny side, wanted to do two contradictory things at the same time: become invisible, and plead with the madwoman with the gun to let her go. She started to turn her head slightly to address the woman and felt, even smelled, the steel of the gun barrel against her ear. She decided invisibility would be the better choice.

When the call went out on the police band that someone had been shot and a hostage taken at former State Store 31, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov had been seated next to the driver of a new Mercedes police car speeding to the morning meeting of the Special Affairs Department. The car happened to be passing the massive gray block of the Lenin Library, which meant that State Store 31 was five minutes away.

“Go,” said Rostnikov.

When they arrived in front of the store at the entrance to Arbat Street, two uniformed policemen were trying to keep a crowd from pressing up to the store window and possibly getting their frozen noses shot off by the madwoman inside.

Rostnikov stepped out of the Mercedes and closed the door.

The cold began immediately to work its way up Rostnikov’s left leg. The leg, a tyrant in the tradition of the Czars, was quick to complain of changes in weather or requests for activity. The leg, rather badly served by a German tank during the Great War, placed full blame on Porfiry Petrovich’s youthful patriotism. In the forty-six years that had passed since the event Rostnikov had learned to endure the accusations of his leg.

He addressed the appendage-internally, of course-and made deals with it. Give me only minimal discomfort today, he would bargain, and I will prop you up tonight with a pillow and not move for three hours.

Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, wearing an imitation leather jacket over his still-serviceable black suit, moved slowly through the crowd that parted resentfully.

“Go home, all of you,” shouted the young policeman who had seen Galina in the back room of State Store 31.

“Why?” asked a gravelly voice that could have belonged to a man or a woman. “There’s nothing to eat at home.”

“We’ve got a free country now,” came another voice, a younger male voice. “We can’t be ordered home by the police anymore.”

“Yes,” shouted several people as Rostnikov broke through to the front of the crowd.

A snaggle-toothed little man wearing an orange wool hat pulled over his ears and an oversized coat pushed his face toward Porfiry Petrovich and squealed, “No more pushing around.”

Rostnikov could smell alcohol on the man’s breath.

“The police will always push,” came the gravelly voice from the rear. “No matter what color they wear.”

Two more uniformed police had arrived and were helping push the crowd back. The young policeman spotted Rostnikov and broke away from the man with whom he was arguing. Rostnikov, hands plunged into his pockets, was looking at the bare windows and the partly open door of State Store 31.

“Inspector Rostnikov,” the young man said, assuming a position something like attention.

Some people in the crowd laughed at the young police man. He tried to ignore them. He had joined the police when he came back from Afghanistan, thinking he could make a living and command some respect. He was wrong on both counts.