Stuart Kaminsky - The Man Who Walked Like a Bear

Neither Yuri nor Jalna spoke till they had selected kvass and a bread pudding to share and sat in a corner away from the door, the other customers, and the humming workman.

“I heard him on the phone,” Jalna said softly. She broke off a small piece of the crisp pudding and put it in her mouth. Yuri adored the way she ate, talked. “He’ll be sending me away in two weeks. He’s told me nothing of it, nothing. He talks as if nothing is happening.”

She would certainly cry now. Yuri was sure. He couldn’t stand that.

“You won’t go,” he said.

“I can’t do it,” she said, looking around at the faces in the luncheonette, not seeing them. “I can’t let you.”

“If you go, I will never see you again. We will never see each other,” he whispered, reaching for his kvass, knowing he couldn’t drink it.

“You could join me,” she said without expression, without hope or expectation. “We could defect. I don’t care if I embarrass him.”

“Jalna, there is no way I can get out of the country, get to Switzerland,” he said with a sigh.

“We know what must be done, and it must be done soon, tonight, tomorrow,” she said.

Yuri shuddered, remaining motionless for eternity, then shook his head yes. They had been through this before. There was nothing else to do if he and Jalna were to remain together, nothing to do but kill Andrei Morchov. He put his hand into his jacket pocket, came out with a small box, and handed it to Jalna, who slipped it into her purse.

Emil Karpo had not gone into the luncheonette. He was sure, as he had planned, that Yuri Vostoyavek had seen and noticed him. The young man had reacted with guilt, apprehension. True, there were many things one could feel guilty about in the Soviet Union or anywhere else, but Yuri Vostoyavek had, upon seeing Karpo in the church, reached for his pocket as if to check that something was there or would be safe. Karpo, when he had been assigned early in his career to watching the large tourist hotels, had seen the same gesture by visiting businessmen who wanted to protect their wallets. It was a giveaway for the pickpockets, who would often bump into a mark in the lobby not to grab a wallet but to step away and see which pocket the mark would check. Emil Karpo had spent almost a year watching pickpockets, thieves, robbers, and their victims, and he had learned that almost anyone but a complete professional would react in giveaway patterns.

Yuri had given himself away, and Karpo had no doubt now that he had seen the young man with this girl that he was planning something and that whatever he was planning would involve something the young man was going to carry in his pocket. It wasn’t there now, whatever it was, because Yuri had not actually touched the pocket and there was no bulge in the pocket beyond a few coins that Karpo had heard jangling as the young man walked.

He could see them clearly, thought they could not see him. He stood across the street behind the window of a furniture shop. The woman who ran the shop had risen to take care of him when he walked in, but Karpo had simply looked at her unsmilingly and turned to watch the couple through the window. The woman who ran the shop had smiled falsely as if she did not care and had returned to her seat behind a counter to hope for the early departure of this less than welcome intruder.

Karpo watched the unheard conversation of the two young people. If they were conspirators, they were not happy ones. Their faces were pale with dread, resignation. At least that was clear in the face of the young man. The girl’s face, beautiful, bright, unmarked, and clean, was more difficult to read. It was also clear that they had come to a decision. The young man said something, looked around to be sure no one was listening, watching, and men leaned back in his chair as if something had ended. The girl had stopped eating, turned to look at the young man with concern, and touched his cheek reassuringly.

Karpo shuddered with recognition from a depth he did not understand. He could almost feel the touch of the hand on his cheek, smell the girl. He also knew that in the aftermath of a migraine he could count on a weakness in the knees for a good part of the next day and an inexplicable connection, a needle-thin connection to elusive memories of the past. Karpo tried to catch the memory of the hand against his cheek and men dismissed it, ordered it away with an anger that must have showed on his face, for behind him the woman who owned the shop said in a quivering voice, “Can I help you, Comrade?”

“No,” Karpo responded, watching Jalna and Yuri finish their snack and head for the luncheonette door.

Emil Karpo knew without thinking or acknowledging that he was one week and two days from his next meeting with Mathilde Verson, the prostitute with whom he met, coupled, and relieved himself once every two weeks. Perhaps it was the touch of Mathilde’s hand against his cheek that he remembered, but he could recall no waking moment in their relationship when she had attempted to touch him tenderly, when he had permitted her to do so. And she had understood, understood that a barrier existed through which their relationship could not pass if Emil Karpo was to retain his identity. A break in that identity, that persona, might be devastating. Mathilde had respected that barrier, had treated him with a tender amusement.

Emil Karpo was sure that he did not need her specifically, that he exercised only animal needs, needs he accepted as a limitation of the human species, and yet there were moments when Mathilde … The young girl and Yuri Vostoyavek walked onto the Arbat and looked around, seeing small crowds, people passing, and moved to their left, heading again toward Arbat Square.

Without looking back at the woman in the shop, Karpo stepped into the street half a block behind the couple and followed them at a safe distance. He repressed the feelings he had. When the aftermath of the migraine was gone in a few hours, it would be no problem. Then he could think and not feel. Emil Karpo was a police inspector. He had his duty, and his duty was clear, as clear as the law. If others evaded the law, moved around it, teased its corners, corrupted it, it would not deter him from his duty. Compassion would lead to destruction. The law was all there was, the law and the State, which created the law. There was no morality, only law. He thought it, almost said it to himself, but deep within him a vague face he could not identify was smiling.

The man in the suit stood for only a few moments at his window in the KGB’s building at Lubyanka. He had spent an uneventful evening and night with his wife and a cousin from Kiev who was in Moscow for a trade union assembly. The cousin had suggested, when the children were not present, that the effects of the Chernobyl disaster were still being felt, that fruit was checked in the Kiev markets, that the nuclear power generators were actually back on but that workers remained only two weeks before being rotated.

“The radiation levels are beyond the minimum even two hundred miles away, but they’re letting old people return,” the cousin had whispered.

“They shrug and say ‘What difference does it make?’ It takes twenty years for the radiation to kill them and they’ll be gone from something else long before that, but they’ll outlive their dogs.”

The KGB man had said nothing, nodded, leaving the conversation to his wife, thinking about other things.

“And,” the cousin went on softly, leaning across the table as if bugs were planted in the walls, which the KGB man knew was not the case because he checked at least twice each month, “and, the reports are coming in from Yugoslavia. People are dying of cancer. Statistics are far beyond the normal. They won’t be able to keep it under wraps for long, I tell you. I’m doing what I can to get Yana and the children out. That’s why I’m here for the trade union meeting. I was hoping …” He paused.