Stuart Kaminsky - Death of a Dissident

“Where were you?” Dyusha Malenko’s voice came from the corner near the window.

Lvov slowly took his coat off and hung it on a hook near the door.

“Ilyusha, my phone is probably monitored by both the police and the K.G.B.” He moved slowly and wearily from his recent outing and sat in his chair. “I had to get them away from here, lose them.”

“They are after me,” Malenko said, stepping away from the window.

“I advise you to remain right where you were,” said Lvov reaching for his pipe. “I shall leave the light off and we shall talk quickly. Then you shall leave. If you do not, they will surely catch you.”

“You know why I’m here?” whispered Malenko from the dark.

“You killed Aleksander,” said Lvov without looking back.

“Yes,” replied Malenko, his voice quivering. “And I killed Marie too.”

Lvov dropped his pipe and couldn’t resist turning to the voice.

“You-”

“You know why,” Malenko said. “You know why. You were part of it. Part of making a fool of me.”

“Ilyusha…” Lvov began trying to get up but finding himself trembling.

“Don’t say Ilyusha to me,” Malenko’s voice broke. “I trusted Aleksander. I trusted you, but you are no better than anyone else. No better than, than-”

“Your father?” Lvov supplied. “And Marie was no better than your mother?”

“Shut up,” Malenko hissed, taking a step away from the dark shadow of the wall.

Lvov shook his head.

“So you’ve come to kill me?”

“Yes. I’ll smash you. I’ll smash all the liars and cheats who have made me into a fool. I’ll not be a fool. You hear. I’ll not be a fool.”

“You came at the right moment,” said Lvov, his voice regaining control. “I think I have no great interest in remaining alive. Had you come an hour later I might have struggled and argued and wept, but I don’t want to argue with you. If you kill me it will be meaningless.”

“It’s not meaningless,” cried Malenko taking another step forward. In his hand he held a scissors, a heavy pair of tailor’s scissors. Lvov saw the object and choked back a sob of fear.

“No, it is not meaningless,” he agreed. “You kill me and someone else and someone else and someone else till the police catch you. You know why you are doing this? Because it is over for you and you won’t admit it to yourself. When you admit it to yourself you will stop running, stop killing, stop having meaning. You will be the nothing you fear you are.”

“Shut up,” shouted Malenko, raising his scissors.

“Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thy heart be glad when he stumbleth, lest the Lord see it and it displeases Him and He turn away His wrath from him.”

“What are you talking about?” Malenko cried, pausing.

“Proverbs 24:17–18,” said Lvov. “I’ve been sitting in this room for years with nothing to do but listen to hopeful young men and read. In the process, I remembered that I am a Jew. When you forsake one God, the God of communism, or it forsakes you, you search for another. I have read the words, but I have not accepted them. I’ve lost my belief in anything and so have you, but I am an old man who needs no father and you are a young man lost in the wilderness.”

“You’re a crazy old man,” Malenko whimpered, lowering his scissors still further.

“Maimonides said that when a man has a mean opinion of himself, that any meanness he is guilty of does not seem outrageous to him. You’ve come to this state, Ilyusha. Killing me won’t end it. I’ll tell you the truth. You’ve heard it in my voice. I’ve pretended, but I’m afraid. But at the same time, I am not wrong. You can’t get back what you lost, and you must accept that the meaning you have chosen will come to an end and leave you empty.”

“You are right,” Malenko said. “Of course. That is what I needed. I needed your advice. I can’t erase it by destroying all of the ridiculing faces. I couldn’t erase it by killing even my father. I must do to him what he did to me. I must balance the scales. His death and hers didn’t balance the scales. It brought justice but it didn’t balance the scale. Your death wouldn’t balance the scale.”

The late afternoon had brought darkness, and out of it came Malenko’s laughter.

“What will you do?” asked Lvov, straining to see the outline of his visitor.

“It is not simple murder that will set me free of what he did to me,” he said softly. “Why didn’t I see that? There was but one of her. There are two of them.”

And with that he went to the door and was gone.

Lvov knew that he had wet his pants and that his face was damp with tears. He pulled himself from his chair and went to the door, locking it. Then he hurried back to his heavy chair and slowly, slowly, slowly pushed it across the room against the door. When the chair was firmly in place, Simon Lvov took off his pants and underwear and started slowly across the room toward his dresser.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a man in the room, and before fear could overtake him he realized that the man was his own reflection. He looked at his distorted image in the window glass. It was a ridiculous sight. A tall old man in a sweater wearing no pants and a little shriveled penis bobbing up and down. Lvov began to laugh. And then he began to cry, and had anyone been able to ask him at the moment if he were very happy or very sad he would have been totally unable to answer.

By the time he got to bed that night, Porfiry Rostnikov concluded that he had experienced far better days. Karpo was almost certainly going to lose his left arm. Malenko had been lost, lost by Tkach’s inability to follow a nearsighted old man. In the morning he had to face Colonel Drozhkin at the K.G.B. The toilet was completely backed up, and while he was confident that he could repair it, he was aware that the part he needed might be almost impossible to obtain. That did not deter him. If necessary he would get a book on machine shop tools and learn to make the part. He was determined to absorb the totality of human knowledge if necessary to repair that toilet. But all this had been nothing compared to Sarah’s reaction to his news about Iosef.

He had told her after dinner and she had taken it well, too well. All she had said was, “I see,” and had gone back to watching television. It was a special film produced by the USSR Central Television and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. It was about Pavlov and showed the physiologist in his Leningrad research center while a voice told of his accomplishments. They both watched without speaking. They watched movies of H.G. Wells visiting Pavlov. They heard Pavlov speak about his concern with objective experimentation and the extension of conditioned reflex methodology to the problems of neurology and psychiatry. They watched and absorbed nothing. When it was over, Sarah had touched his hand and gone to bed two hours earlier than usual. Rostnikov had lifted weights for more than an hour till a tremor in the tendon of his weak leg warned him that he must stop. He defied the tendon, which knew more than he, concluded one more brief exercise, and then stopped. He took a cold shower, since there was no hot water, and tried to read an American paperback by a black writer named Chester Himes. It was about police in Harlem, New York, which struck Rostnikov as a mad, violent place. He prefered Isola or even Moscow.

The next morning he woke up early and touched Sarah, who slept soundly. She resisted, waking so he touched her again, and she sat up, turning on him.

“You don’t have to break my arm,” she shrieked.

“I just touched you,” he said.

“I didn’t sleep,” she said, turning back into the bed.

“You slept soundly,” he said, knowing he should simply stop but unable to do so.