Stuart Kaminsky: Red Chameleon

“You all right, Kostya?” shouted Lev in fear.

Kostya came up the stairs, holding his bleeding head and shouting, “Go home to your gimp sister and crazy capitalist father, back stabber.” Then he raced down the street.

A trio of boys ran after him, and Lev darted into the building and hurried up the stairs with impossible energy in the heat. The wooden stairs sighed wearily under him and relaxed as he passed, going up the three flights and bursting through the door.

“I didn’t mean-” he started, his eleven-year-old face thin and pale like that of his father. Sofiya, wondering if someday her brother would be dry and wrinkled, shuddered and felt tenderness.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said, walking to Lev and guiding him to the kitchen and the sink. “Kostya was just frightened. He wasn’t hurt so badly.”

“I’m not scared,” Lev protested, panting as he wet his face and drank warm tap water from his dirty cupped hands. “Did you hear what he called you?”

“He called me the name after you hit him. You didn’t hit him because he called me a name,” she said, helping Lev peel off his now-wet shirt to reveal a chest of bones.

“No, it was before,” Lev insisted. “You think he’ll get the police?”

“He won’t get the police,” Sofiya said, touching his head. Lev started to back away from her warm touch, then changed his mind and accepted it. She was much older than he, old enough to be his mother. His resentment, confusion, and love were as great as hers, and they brought brother and sister together.

“Kostya’s uncle is in the KGB,” Lev said, ferreting out a piece of bread from under the bread box. “Maybe he’ll get mad and call his uncle on us.”

“Kostya’s uncle is not in the KGB.” Sofiya sighed, scooping up crumbs from the table where he dropped them. “He’s a stupid man who sells coffee in the Byelorussian Railway Station.”

She poured him a glass of milk and told him to wash the sink.

“He in the tub again?” asked Lev, sitting at the small kitchen table. She nodded, affirming what he knew. Lev’s breath was coming more slowly now.

“You have homework,” Sofiya said.

Lev’s dark face turned automatically sour, but the routine of homework was reassuring, so he went to the tiny bedroom he shared with his sister to fetch his books. Sofiya got her book and brought it to the table to sit with him.

The bathroom water pounded steadily behind them through the thin walls, washing concentration away, making the lines in the book become nonsense. Finally, the water stopped and she imagined Abraham turning the pages of Izvestia with displeasure. His presence was inescapable in the apartment, in her life.

The knock at the front door came firm and insistent, and Lev bolted upright in fear.

“It’s the police,” he said, knocking his milk over.

“It’s probably Kostya and his mother,” Sofiya said as calmly as she could, reaching over to clean up the milk with a rag. The prospect of Hania Shevchenko with her narrow eyes, sharp voice, and demands, made Sofiya bite her lip, but there was nothing to be done. Two boys had fought on a hot afternoon, and one had tasted his own blood and the hidden secret of his mortality. That taste had driven him to his mother, and her fear of mortality made her want to scream in anguish. It was a street ritual, and it required an audience, though no one expected any real action, for there was no real action to be taken. No one would call the Moscow police. Hania had the right, the obligation, to wail and be heard. Sofiya did not feel up to it, but she had no choice.

“Coming,” she shouted as Lev scurried past her to their bedroom and closed the door.

Sofiya paused in the dark hall in front of the door to look at the two mounted photographs, one of her father and some friends in their youth, the other of her sad, smiling mother. Since her mother had died, Sofiya had never passed the photograph without looking at it. A few times she had gone to bed in the early weeks unsure of whether she had passed the photo without the required look, but on such nights Sofiya had gone quietly as she could to turn on the light and make her eyes meet those of her mother.

Now Sofiya sighed and opened the door, not to the wild figure of Hania Shevchenko but to two dark, heavy men, one as old as her father, the other young. They were shadow figures of a far country and dressed exactly alike, and they were, she was sure, neither the police nor the KGB. Sofiya had the strange impression that they were not two separate men but one man presented before her at two ages.

“Abraham Savitskaya,” said the older man.

“He’s taking a bath,” Sofiya answered, her eyes moving from one man to the other.

The younger man said something to the older one in what Sofiya thought was English, and the old man, who had an ugly scar on his cheek, replied in the same tongue.

“Anyone here besides you and Savitskaya?” asked the old man.

“My little brother’s in his room,” she said, standing between the two men and the small apartment.

“If you want to wait for my father-” she began, but got no further. The younger man pushed her aside and drew from his pocket a huge gun that seemed to have a life of its own, pulling the young man behind it, searching corners. Sofiya staggered back a few steps with feelings she didn’t understand. She was afraid but excited as the young man stepped toward her and aimed the gun over her shoulder at the bedroom door.

“No,” she screamed. “That’s my bedroom-my brother. He’s just eleven.”

The young man slapped her out of the way again and pushed open the bedroom door. She could see Lev sitting on the bed, beyond looking up in terror.

“Who’re you talking to?” Abraham shouted down the hall from the bathroom.

“Pa,” Sofiya screamed. She hobbled forward toward the bathroom, but the younger man grabbed her by the hair and punched her in the left breast, sending streaks of pain through her body as she fell. The bedroom door came open, and Lev ran out, fear in his eyes.

“Go back,” Sofiya screamed, dragging herself toward her brother.

“What’s going on?” shouted Abraham. Sofiya could hear the old man rising from his bath. She turned and pulled her useless leg to the hallway, a confused Lev clinging to her. Then the room and the world went into a series of still images she would never forget, snapshot images of the young dark man handing the gun to the old man. Then the image of the young man with his foot raised. Then the bathroom door kicked open. A blast of light and the memory of a terrible ringing echo. The blast repeated and repeated. She covered her ears and felt Lev’s face buried against her sore breast, and then it was over. The two men came back to the small apartment, took something, gave Sofiya a warning glance, and left.

Sofiya and Lev sat huddled on the hall floor in shock forever. When forever passed, they stood hand in hand and moved into the hall toward the open door of the bathroom. They knew Abraham was dead before they saw his thin white arm sprawled awkwardly out of the tub and one gray foot twisted against the wall. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was angry, and Izvestia sank slowly in the red water. They stood looking down at the father they had never seen naked in life and were transported into a new world where time and life meant nothing.

“We’ll have to clean the floor quickly,” she said. “And then we’ll have to call Comrade Tovyev and tell him about the broken door and then …” But her voice was no longer saying words; it had taken on a life of its own and was screaming louder than the echo of death.

“An old Jew’s been shot in his bathtub on Balaklava Prospekt. Central desk has the house number.”