Sarah St.Vincent - Ways to Hide in Winter

“Never mind. I knew what you meant.” I emptied the water in a cascade of brown, then took my place behind the register, sliding the book onto the hidden shelf where he could no longer see it.

He stood with his hands folded in front of him, gazing hesitantly around the store. Something about him looked apologetic, I thought, although—as I remembered belatedly—I was the one who had left him to shiver through a second mountain night with no heat.

“You want something?” I asked, making an effort to sound, if not friendly, then at least slightly less hostile. “Coffee?”

“Oh—no, thank you. I left my wallet up there at the, ah—” He gestured uphill. “Not the hotel. What did you call it?”

“The hostel.” I reached for the glass pot. “It doesn’t matter—just take some. Whatever I don’t drink by the end of the day just goes to waste anyway.”

I put a cup on the counter and filled it. With a quick look at me, he took it and held it in both hands, as if to warm them.

When he didn’t show any sign of leaving, I had the unfamiliar sensation of realizing I would have to think of something else to say.

“Um. Have you been out hiking?” I glanced around in search of a task with which I could busy myself.

“Hiking? Oh, no. I wish I could, but it’s not good for me to be out in the cold air for very long, unfortunately. I’ve just been, you know, looking around a bit here and there.” He took a sip of the black coffee and grimaced. I pushed the tall glass sugar jar toward him, and he tipped it carefully, watching the thread of sugar disappear into the liquid.

There was something about his face—the set of the eyes, maybe, or the fine-looking line of the jaw, like a bird’s bones—that almost compelled me to look at it. Disconcerted, I turned away from him and settled on cleaning the coffee machine even though it was still hot.

“You’re really in a very pretty place,” he said behind me. “This park, I mean.”

“I’ve always thought so,” I replied, wetting a napkin. It was, in fact, a place so beautiful I sometimes felt as if my entire soul were bound up with it, although I wasn’t about to explain that to a stranger.

“So are you the only one who works here?”

I pulled out the used filter and wiped down the dull metal inside the machine. “I certainly seem to be.”

“I see.” There was a slight pause; I could picture him sweeping his gaze over the small space again. “You’ve been here for a long time?”

I shrugged, keeping my back to him as I rubbed at a stain. “Depends what you mean by ‘a long time,’ I guess.”

“A year or two?”

“Something like that.”

“Oh. Longer?”

I scrubbed harder. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Since you finished university?”

I stopped and looked down at my reflection in the scratched surface of the machine.

“Martin says you’re a lawyer,” I said after a moment, turning and throwing the napkin away. “Is that true?”

He seemed to be studying me. “Martin is the man I met at the hostel?”

“Yes.”

He smiled, although I didn’t see what was funny. “Well, in a sense, yes, I’m a lawyer. I was a lawyer in Uzbekistan, although that isn’t very useful here, I’m afraid.”

“So what brings you here, then?” It was my turn to study him, looking over the rim of my coffee cup as I raised it to my face.

“You mean, to America?”

“Yeah, I guess.” There were thin lines at the corners of his eyes, I noticed, and his brows seemed somehow weighted, as if he spent much of his time thinking about problems that could only be solved with great difficulty.

“I’m a student,” he said simply.

“Oh. You’re on your winter break or something?”

“Yes, something like that.” He rolled the sugar jar between his palms. “So, you like Dostoyevsky?”

I narrowed my eyes—was he about to mock me?—but his face was sincere. I looked down, fingering the book under the counter.

“Yeah, I do,” I said softly, surprising myself with the honesty of the words. Then, “Well. I don’t know, exactly. I mean, I read The Brothers Karamazov in school, and it—I guess you could say it drew me in. This one, though…”

He waited, watching me expectantly. “You don’t like it?” he said finally.

I bit the inside of my lip. “It’s not that. It’s…” I remembered the hours I’d spent hunched over the opening chapters on the very day he’d first walked in, how vividly the scenes had played out before me in the emptiness of the store. “Actually,” I admitted, “I like it very much. It’s just that it’s so focused on the psychology of the main character, the murderer. And as strange as it probably sounds, I still can’t really understand why he killed the old woman to begin with.”

A light came into his eyes. He spoke softly. “Do you happen to have the other chair? May I sit down?”

After a moment of hesitation, I walked to the broom closet and dragged it out for him.

He sat and faced me across the counter, folding his hands. “Perhaps you could tell me why you think he killed the old woman?”

His pose was so earnest that I almost laughed in spite of myself. “I thought you were a student, not a professor.”

“Oh, I’m not a professor at all. It just happens that Crime and Punishment was one of my father’s favorite books. He and I used to talk about things like that sometimes—over tea, much like this.” He waved a hand at our cups of coffee, smiling. “He wasn’t well-educated, but somehow he always used to find the best books, even the ones the government didn’t allow. I used to see him sitting in his chair for hours, just reading, and then he’d call me over. I was a boy with his head in the clouds—I always thought foreign books were better—but those were some of my favorite times.”

I blinked at the openness of the words, the frank affection in them. Nobody I knew would have spoken that way. I reached under the counter and retrieved the book, thumbing through the pages.

“My grandfather was a bit like that,” I said, almost to myself. “All right, Dan—Dahn—sorry, how did you say your name?”

“Daniil—like ‘Daniel.’ You can call me that if you like. Or ‘Danya’—that’s what friends call me in Russian.”

“Russian? Is that what they speak in Uzbekistan?”

He chuckled. “That’s what I speak in Uzbekistan. I’m from a Russian family, as I mentioned.”

“Okay. Daniil. Right.” I held a hand to my cheek, looking down at the open pages. A moment passed as the wall clock ticked. If this man really was a lawyer, I thought, then he probably had twice the education I did. It would be absurd to go on.

“Please,” he urged.

I looked up, surprised.

“Well,” I said slowly, “the first few chapters make you think he did it for the money, obviously. You can tell he’s desperate, wandering around penniless and in rags. And yet…” I paused. “Somehow, that doesn’t seem to be what bothers him the most. He spends all those hours dwelling on his sister and how she’s thrown herself away—marrying that older man—for his sake. And that other girl, too, the one who becomes a—a prostitute so she can feed her family after her father dies.” I looked up with embarrassment, expecting to find an expression of disappointment on his face, but he was leaning forward, paying attention to every word. “I don’t know. I guess I don’t quite understand it, really. Especially since, after the murder, he just buries the jewelry and the money he steals and never comes back.”

“Yes, that’s the mystery, isn’t it? He goes to all the trouble of planning and carrying out the murder, and then he seems to care very little about the money.” The stranger gripped his cup, the light glancing off his ring. His eyes held mine. “Do you think he kills the old woman, the moneylender, just because he can? That’s what some people say.”