Stuart Kaminsky - The Man Who Walked Like a Bear

“There are priorities,” Sasha explained. “We would fill the television time with announcements of crimes. There would be nothing but descriptions of criminals, pictures of stolen automobiles, missing children.”

The baby Pulcharia tugged at her father’s pants and grunted. She was more than ten months old, crawling and good-natured. They were seated around the table finishing their Moscow-style borscht of beet soup, tomatoes, cabbage, and a bit of ham. Sasha reached down to pick the baby up and smiled at his wife. She returned the smile without enthusiasm. Missing buses were not what she wished to be talking about. She wished her husband to address their forthcoming move, to tell his mother that she would not be moving with them. She knew his pain, but it had to be done, and putting it off would not make the task easier.

“So,” Lydia went on loudly, reaching over to pat her granddaughter’s head, “so the television would be filled with crime. What is so terrible about that? It’s better to see bald men reading the news and old men making speeches?”

“No one would watch,” said Sasha.

“Nonsense,” said Lydia. “They do in America. In America that’s all they do now, show pictures of murderers and the people watch and go out and drag the killers in. What are they showing here on television that’s better than murderers and bus thieves?”

Pulcharia leaned forward against her father and gave his neck a gentle, moist, and toothless bite.

“In any case,” Sasha went on, “we did find one bus driver who says he saw the missing bus heading away from the city, far off its route, a short time after it was reported missing.”

“Can we talk about something else?” Maya said softly, too softly for Lydia to hear.

“And no one else saw this?” Lydia asked, finishing her borscht. “Don’t let the baby chew on you. It will make her sick.”

Sasha sat the baby on his lap and whispered to her, “Krasee’v/aya doch,” beautiful daughter.

“A man reported having seen an old couple get off the bus in front of the park,” Sasha went on as the baby rubbed her eyes. “He didn’t exactly report it. We followed the bus route and found him on a bench, an old man himself. He thinks he knows the old couple but we couldn’t find them.”

“Television,” Lydia said. “You should put the baby to sleep. She’s tired.”

“Sasha,” Maya said softly, taking the baby from his arms.

“Not tonight,” he whispered back.

“‘What?” asked Lydia, reaching over to touch the baby.

“Sasha, she wants to know,” said Maya.

“All right,” he said with a deep sigh as Maya moved to the corner of the room to change the baby and get her ready for bed.

“What?” Lydia repeated.

“I … we,” Sasha began. What remained of the evening, Sasha was sure, would not be pleasant.

The uniformed man was standing at the window, looking across at a blank wall of stone. The wall, while not fascinating, did appear to hold his attention as the other man in the room gave his report. When the report was completed, the uniformed man spoke.

“Good. I want no mistakes, Vadim.”

“No mistakes,” Vadim said.

“The consequences of a mistake will be-”

“No mistakes,” Vadim repeated. “We have him. As Lenin said, a single claw ensnared and the bird is lost. We have that claw ensnared.”

The uniformed man at the window said nothing for perhaps half a minute and then turned and spoke.

“We have him when it is done. Understand that. And no one will be involved, have any specific knowledge but you, me, and Nikolai.”

“I understand, Comrade,” Vadim said.

The uniformed man now faced Vadim and looked into his eyes.

“The times are perilous,” he said. “The romantics are taking over all across the Soviet Union. Weasels who cheered us yesterday, today call for rebellion, chaos, all in the name of freedom. Religion is no longer the opiate of the people. Glasnost, openness, an invitation to mindless mimicry of a decaying West, is worse than an opiate. Revolutionary goals have been abandoned. Soviet identity is endangered. You go down the street, turn on the radio, read a newspaper, and you’d think you were in New York or Rome. It cannot last. It cannot be allowed to continue. My father and his rather lived, fought, died for the revolution. We cannot let it go to the god of Pepsi-Cola, Big McDonald’s, and Bruce Joels. We cannot have our history, our commitment demeaned by the triumph of materialism.”

Vadim was attentive. Basically he agreed with his superior, though he thought the game they were playing was less philosophical and more pragmatic than the uniformed man had stated it. He was also uneasy about his superior’s sharing of his thoughts about the project in which they were engaged. It was generally best simply to act and not to carry information that might later be an embarrassment, an embarrassment that his superior might decide to remove.

“Report again tomorrow,” the uniformed man said abruptly, perhaps sensing that he had said too much. He moved to his desk and Vadim turned smartly and left the room. The corridors of the KGB building echoed with the clap of his shoes. It was late, but he still had work to do, things to check. There could be no mistake. His superior was certainly right. A mistake and they could both be facing something far more fearsome than the presence of the Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company.

Boris Trush rubbed the top of his head where he had just been hit with a stalk of celery. The stalk had exploded from the unexpected, at least to Boris, collision with his head, and pieces of vegetable had sprayed around the room.

“The man is dense,” the young man said, looking back at the older man.

In the past few hours, Boris Trush had discovered the names of his captors. The older man was Peotor Kotsis, the younger his son Vasily. The other four people at the crumbling farmhouse had gone unnamed and, essentially, unseen since Boris had pulled the bus into the barn where he had been directed. Three men had climbed into the bus and had begun to move the body of the laborer as Vasily and Peotor had led Boris to the main house and the small room in which he now found himself nursing the emotional if not physical bruise of having been hit on the head with a stalk of celery.

“Look what I did,” Vasily said.

Boris was seated on a bed in the corner.

“Look what I did,” Vasily repeated, and Boris looked at the various pieces of celery he could see from where he sat. He also looked at the older man, who stood against the wall near the door, arms folded.

“Look what you made me do,” Vasily amended. “You are stubborn and stupid, Boris. I’m not trying to offend you here. Are you offended?”

“I’m not offended,” said Boris.

“Good,” said Vasily on his hands and knees, looking for a missing piece of stalk. “But you are stupid. You understand your situation here. If you weren’t stupid, you’d be agreeing with me.”

“But-” Boris said.

“No!” shouted Vasily, getting to his feet and throwing celery pieces on the table. “If you’re not going to make sense, don’t speak!”

“You wish to live, Boris,” said the older man against the wall.

“Yes,” said Boris.

“It wasn’t a question,” said Vasily with a sigh. “He was telling you. My father was telling you, reminding you.”

“But we will be killed,” Boris said in anguish.

Vasily removed his gun from his pocket and moved toward Boris on the bed.

“And what will happen if you don’t?” he asked.

“This isn’t right,” Boris appealed to the elder Kotsis. “I’m just a bus driver.”

“And that is precisely what we need,” Peotor Kotsis said gently.