Stuart Kaminsky: The Man Who Walked Like a Bear

“I’ve got to get back to the city,” Rostnikov said as the doctor moved to the far bed to comfort the girl and reassure the old woman.

“I wasn’t afraid, Porfiry Petrovich,” Sarah whispered.

“Thank you,” he said.

“No, not just because of you,” Sarah said, squeezing his hand. “I awoke from a dream I can’t remember and I saw him there and there was such pain in his face. He reminded me of Benjamin.”

Benjamin was Sarah’s older brother, a large, dark, sullen, and suspicious man who had, from the first, been opposed to Sarah’s having anything to do with Porfiry Petrovich. Sarah’s father had died in the war. No one knew how or where. No one was even certain. He had gone, and when the war ended, he did not return. There were no records. But Benjamin had returned angry and bitter over the treatment he had received at the hands of the goyim, the non-Jews. He had received neither deserved promotions nor the small considerations that were common. He never considered that part of the fault might lie not in the anti-Semitism of his superiors but in his own attitude. Even under the best of situations, Sarah had admitted, Benjamin carried with him a rage so deep its roots could not be found.

And so Benjamin hated Porfiry Petrovich, and the reasons he gave were many. Porfiry Petrovich was not a Jew, and though there was not great profit in being Jewish in the Soviet Union, it was still safer to remain with your own people, the chosen people. In addition, Porfiry Petrovich was young, crippled, and a policeman. Porfiry Petrovich remembered the last time he had seen Sarah’s brother. Benjamin had warned Rostnikov that neither he nor his mother wanted Rostnikov to see Sarah again, that if he persisted, Benjamin would kill him.

Rostnikov had looked into the blue eyes of his future brother-in-law and believed him.

“I will marry Sarah,” he had said. “And you will kill no one.”

“We will see, police boy. We will all see,” Benjamin had whispered.

And, indeed, they saw. Benjamin was killed in a street in front of the Aragvy Restaurant. Someone had insulted him, or Benjamin thought someone had insulted him. The someone had friends. This had not deterred Sarah’s brother, who tried to strangle the offender while the offender’s friends beat on the head of Benjamin Rosovsky with a convenient block of concrete from a nearby construction site.

“I wasn’t afraid,” Sarah said. “I … be sure he is all right.”

“I’ll be sure,” Rostnikov said, releasing his hands gently from her grip. “I’ll be back tonight.”

“You don’t have to come back,” she said. “I’ll probably be sleeping.”

They had gone through this pattern for the past two weeks, and they both knew it as a ritual of reassurance.

“I’ll see,” Rostnikov said.

“Tell me something, Porfiry Petrovich, something of the past,” she said dreamily. “My thoughts move to the past in here, to my brother, my mother, to Iosef when he was a boy. Remember when he built that boat and it sank in the park? He was only a baby, and he jumped in after it and tried to swim.”

Rostnikov smiled.

“I’m not good at sentiment,” he said.

“You are fine with it,” Sarah said. “Are you going to deny your ailing wife?”

“The week before we married,” he said softly, “we went to Gorky Park with a loaf of bread and some herring in a bottle. You wore a blue dress and sweater and we drank kvass from a jar and you laughed at a joke I made about vegetables.”

“I remember,” Sarah said, closing her eyes.

“You were beautiful,” he went on, almost to himself. “I should have borrowed Mikhail Sharinskov’s camera, even if it wouldn’t have captured the fire of your hair. But I …” and he could see she was asleep.

He leaned forward and kissed her forehead and then moved to the door, willing himself not to show the pain in his leg, knowing that he could not, ultimately, hide it from Sarah. All he could do was pretend so that she, too, could pretend.

So much is pretense, Rostnikov thought as he glanced at the young girl and the old woman across the room. He closed the door to the ward as Dr. Yegeneva moved past him and leaned over to look into Sarah’s eyes.

The corridor walls of the September 1947 Hospital were uniformly gray, and the windows were all decorated with white linen curtains. The individual ward doors were heavy and closed, and Rostnikov had a dreamlike feeling, a feeling that he was wandering through a maze, an endless, echoing maze. Yes, it was the echo more than the seamless, uniform walls that gave him the feeling. He turned a corner, moving slowly, bidding his leg to respond, knowing how much he could coax out of it. A man in white and a heavyset woman came toward him, talking to each other loudly about some meeting. The man barely glanced at Rostnikov as they approached and passed.

Rostnikov found the administrator’s office on the main floor after checking with a talkative, flighty woman at the central desk in front of the entrance to the hospital. The administrator’s name, he discovered, was Schroeder, and the administrator, according to the woman at the desk, was a remarkably busy man. He had been on the job only a few days. The previous administrator had suddenly received a transfer to a very important position in the city.

Rostnikov knocked and entered when he heard a clear male voice call, “Come in.”

The room was bright. A large window caught the morning sun and lit the cheerfully decorated room. There was a small white rug on the floor, an efficient and not uncomfortable-looking set of chairs around a low, round table, and a wooden desk behind which sat a pink-cheeked, robust man with short-cropped hair and a smile on his large lips. His suit was neatly pressed and he looked at Rostnikov like an indulgent priest.

“Yes?” the man asked eagerly.

“Comrade Schroeder?”

“Correct,” said Schroeder, waiting for more.

“My name is Rostnikov. My wife is a patient of Dr. Yegeneva on the third floor.”

“Sarah, brain tumor. Removed successfully. Prognosis excellent,” said Schroeder. “I know each and every patient in this hospital. Eighty-five patients at present. Learned the essential information in three days.”

“Admirable,” said Rostnikov. “May I sit?”

“Please,” said Schroeder.

Rostnikov sat and felt an instant easing as the weight left his throbbing leg.

“I want to ask you about another patient,” Rostnikov said.

“Bulgarin, Ivan,” Schroeder supplied.

“Yes. You’ve been informed, then, about the incident?”

Schroeder looked pleased with himself.

“I am responsible for all aspects of this hospital,” he said. “I am constantly informed.”

“Admirable,” said Rostnikov.

Schroeder reached into his desk and withdrew a folder, which he opened and flattened before him.

“Bulgarin, Ivan, age … let me see. He will be forty-two next week. He has been here for six days. Fatigue, overwork. He is a foreman in the Lentaka Shoe Factory. Diagnosis is a bit complicated but, essentially, he suffered a mental breakdown caused by hard work, an unstable personality, and domestic difficulties. He has a wife and four children. I am assured by the staff that he will be ready for release and a productive return to society in less than a month, depending on his response to medication.”

“You are most informative,” said Rostnikov, trying to make eye contact with the administrator.

“You are a police officer,” Schroeder said, closing the folder and looking up. “See, I even know that. Easy enough. It was in your wife’s admission record.”

“Who is paying for Comrade Bulgarin’s hospitalization? Why wasn’t he sent to a public hospital?”