Stuart Kaminsky: The Man Who Walked Like a Bear

Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov sat in a rough but apparently sturdy wooden chair in ward three on the third floor of the September 1947 Hospital a little over twelve miles outside of Moscow. The September 1947 Hospital got its name from the fact that the city of Moscow was eight hundred years old in the year 1947. The citizens of Moscow had celebrated, cheered, drunk, and wept that their city had survived the war, the Nazis, the antirevolutionary forces.

People had hugged strangers in the street, and Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, an army veteran at age fifteen with a leg badly mangled in an encounter with a German tank, had sat on a stone bench in front of the Pashkov Mansion, which had become the Lenin Library. The leg had been patched, sawed, stretched, sewn, and supported, and Rostnikov had worked dutifully to use the appendage, which had almost been removed by an overworked and underexperienced young doctor in the field.

Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov allowed no one to see his pain, and not one of his superiors on the uniformed MVD traffic patrol knew of the pain he felt each day as he stood on some prospekt directing postwar traffic. It was that day in September 1947 that he met the woman who lay before him in Bed One of the hospital ward. Sarah had sat next to him on the bench, an old-fashioned kerchief around her head, her cheeks bright with life, her red hair curled over her forehead. She couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. She had asked him if he was all right. He had replied that he was fine, and she had offered to share an apple with him. The rarity of an apple and the enormity of sharing such a gift with a stranger overwhelmed him, and he loved her, he loved her at that moment as he loved her at this moment. He had learned her name, her address, and had stayed away from her for six years, waited till she grew up. And then he had found her again.

Rostnikov shifted his weight in the sturdy chair and considered pulling out the battered American paperback mystery in his jacket pocket. His eyes met those of the young girl, Petra Toverinin, in Bed Two. Petra Toverinin was fourteen years old. Officially, she was there for gynecological complications. Unofficially, she was there for an abortion. Rostnikov had discerned this from no direct inquiry but from the guarded comments of the medical staff when he was present. Petra Toverinin was not pretty. She was thin. Her nose was too large and her hair too straggly and lifeless, but her eyes were large and blue and her lips carried a knowing smile, which she exchanged with Rostnikov whenever he came to visit his wife in Bed One. Petra Toverinin and Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov shared a knowledge of life that needed no words and no conversation.

In Bed Three, however, there resided a woman named Irinia Komistok, heavy of heart, body, and thought. Irinia Komistok, somewhere over age sixty, whose heart had been abused by diet and discontent, had undergone one operation and was awaiting another.

“You are a policeman,” Irinia Komistok informed Rostnikov, looking at him critically.

Rostnikov exchanged a knowing glance with Petra Toverinin, who put her head down on the pillow and turned away from the older woman in the third bed. Rostnikov looked at his sleeping wife and wondered if after the bandages were removed her red hair would grow back as bright as before, or if the gray would now take over. She was within a month of her fifty-fourth birthday. Dr. Yegeneva had assured him that Sarah would, barring complications, be home for her birthday.

“I am a policeman,” Rostnikov confirmed, since Irinia Komistok had made a statement and not asked a question.

“I knew it,” said the woman, who folded her hands in front of her over her blanket. “I knew it,” she told the wall. “I could tell. My cousin Viktor was a policeman. A man named, named-I don’t remember-lived downstairs from us in Volgograd. That was a few years ago. You know Volgograd?”

“No,” said Rostnikov. Somewhere beyond the closed door of the ward a voice called out, distant, indistinct.

“Volgograd is beautiful,” Irinia informed him, nodding her head. “I was a girl and the policeman looked at me with longing. I was a handsome girl. Not beautiful, mind you. I’ll make no great claims. I’m an honest woman. Why did you become a policeman?”

Petra looked at Rostnikov with sympathetic blue eyes.

“I don’t know,” said Rostnikov. “I had always wanted to be a policeman, perhaps because my parents had named me Porfiry Petrovich. He is the policeman in-”

“Crime and Punishment,” Irinia injected impatiently. “I am no uneducated Gypsy.”

Another sound, deep, almost a growl beyond the ward’s door.

“Have you noticed,” Irinia Komistok said with a smile on her face that indicated no joy, “that time moves faster as you get older? When I was a girl, a year took forever, and now two years ago seems like last week.”

“I have noticed,” said Rostnikov.

And now the sound outside the ward’s door could not be ignored. It approached in an echo, the corridor echo of a wounded animal. Petra Toverinin sat up afraid, her wide eyes wider from fear. Sarah stirred and shifted. Rostnikov leaned forward to touch her leg reassuringly through the blanket. Irinia Komistok seemed to have heard nothing. She spoke to the wall and saw ghosts until the door to the ward exploded open and banged with a roar into the wall. A large white sack hurtled through the door, crashed into the wall, and groaned.

An animal bellowed in the doorway, a huge, bearded, and quite naked animal. In the corner, the man who had been thrown against the wall tried to rise, groaned, and sank back to the floor. Irinia Komistok whimpered and Petra Toverinin scrambled painfully from her bed and climbed in next to Irinia, who hugged her. Sarah shifted her weight, and Rostnikov used the edge of the bed and the back of the sturdy wooden chair to stand. His back was to his wife’s bed, and he faced the creature, who he knew was a man.

The man groaned and ambled forward like a great black bear Rostnikov had seen in the Moscow Circus the year before, a bear, he understood, who later attacked its trainer during a visit to Canada. The bear man slouched forward. Behind him Petra whimpered and Irinia comforted. The creature took a step toward Sarah’s bed, and Rostnikov put up a hand.

The moment was fixed, frozen. The great creature, who stood a foot taller than the compact barrel of a policeman, let out a low growl and took two steps toward the window. Rostnikov stepped between the man and the window.

“No,” Rostnikov said softly, firmly. “You are frightening these women.”

The bearded creature blinked and looked around at the three women, noticing them for the first time.

“Sit in that chair,” Rostnikov said, nodding at the chair in which he had been sitting.

The creature looked at the chair and then back at the policeman.

Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov was, with good reason, known to his colleagues as the Washtub. There was nothing imposing about the fifty-seven-year-old man with one good leg and one very bad one, but Rostnikov had his passions-his books, his wife and son, his job, his weights. The creature before Rostnikov was at least fifteen years younger and at least fifty pounds heavier, in addition to which the man was obviously quite mad.