When the military light truck arrived at the elderly couple’s farm, deep mud greeted the sergeant as he slid from the cab and left his intoxicated companion behind. The Parskys nearly collapsed on learning that they had been denounced as “exploiters and parasites.”
“Who . . . who would accuse us?” sobbed Mrs. Parsky.
“Five minutes. Then into the truck. If I was you, I’d take a few valuables to trade and a heavy coat for the winter.”
Overhearing the sergeant, the Parskys’ son fled to his childhood hideaway, the haystack. A thousand times as a child, Sasha had burrowed into the stack to escape monsters, giants, witches, evil spirits, and ghouls. He knew the permeable part of the hay and how to lose himself in it. Sasha noted that the policeman spoke Russian badly, using the crude colloquialisms of the whorehouse and the inn. Like so many young men who had left their subsistence farms for work in the OGPU (secret police) and other defense forces, his language and behavior betokened “I am a faithful son of the state, a dependable Bolshevik.” These social misfits, often stationed in towns as public officials, had been waiting years to settle scores with landowners and the literate. Among the resentful, literacy functioned as a divining rod to identify enemies of the people, though, ironically, the benighted wanted their children to read and write.
Yes, the Bolsheviks knew how to exploit differences. With one decree they condemned landowners and the educated classes, and with another they promised drunkards, thieves, and wife beaters that the government would school their children.
Sasha watched as the policeman herded his parents toward the lorry. Mikhail Parsky, still energetic at sixty-five, vaulted onto the truck bed. But Sasha’s mother, nursing a bad knee, fell as she reached for her husband’s outstretched hand. Sasha would have remained hidden had the man not lifted her from the ground by the beautiful braid that hung down her back, causing her to cry out in pain. Leaving his place of concealment, Sasha bolted into the barn, grabbed a sickle, and fell upon the man, decapitating him with one slash of the blade. The other policeman could not believe what he briefly glimpsed in the side-view mirror: a headless torso. Climbing down from his seat to investigate, he stared in shock at his comrade and then at the Parskys. His primal scream reached back across the centuries, across the steppes, to Kazan and the khanate, to those innocents pleading for mercy before the conquering Mongol hordes. He unholstered his pistol. But Sasha, who had stolen around the other side of the truck, came up behind him. This time the blade failed to pass through the neck. The man’s head dangled like a slack puppet. The Parskys stared wordlessly. He who had never hurt another person, who had never caused his parents a moment’s trouble from his birth in 1915 to this moment in 1935, had become a monster.
Was this the same Sasha who had frequently brought from the field injured birds and nursed them back to health? Other children used slingshots to wound or kill wildlife. He hated hunting. With his gentle hands he often cradled sick animals, and when a creature died he was inconsolable. His kindness extended to beggars on the road, whom he brought to the kitchen door and implored his mother to feed. His principles and honesty were not of the straitened Soviet type: unbending, blind to the individual, and devoid of allowance for the dissenter and the weak. His behavior exemplified his belief that the seats of justice should be filled with good people but not so absolute in justice as to forget what human frailty is. Imbued with this idea, Sasha had saved Pavel Zimmerman, a young man of fourteen, subjected to continual abuse at the hands of his drunken father, who beat him for any infraction of his rules. One night, the father threatened to shoot his son and brandished his Winchester 10 rifle that he had brought back from the war with Germany. The son tried to wrestle the weapon from his father. During the skirmish it discharged, wounding the father in the leg. Pavel fled.
While police and peasants searched the countryside, the boy took refuge in the Parsky barn, where Sasha found him asleep in the hay and promised his protection. Although questioned by the gendarmerie, Sasha said he knew nothing of the boy’s whereabouts. In a few days the searchers disbanded, declaring that the boy was no longer in the oblast. In reply to Sasha’s questions, Pavel said that he would be safe if he could reach his grandmother, but she lived 120 kilometers distant. Sasha prevailed upon his family to pay for the boy’s transportation and saw him off on the train.
But who really was this Sasha? For that matter, who was any Russian, so many of whom were part European and part Asian? And what of the Russian characteristics that writers and rulers so often invoked? In Sasha, the Parskys saw some of the same traits: pride and emotion, longing for the unknown, unpredictability, spontaneity, lack of moderation, and, like the land, a spacious soul. His generosity was unrivaled, to family and friends, and also to strangers. He preferred working with others to working alone, a trait handed down from Old Rus and the Orthodox Church. When he had money, he lent it; if the borrower couldn’t repay, he ignored the debt. The Russian proverb applied to him: “Give, spend, and God will send.” He genuinely believed in the common good, sharing and exchanging with others, and he addressed soul mates with the most intimate word in the Russian vocabulary: rodnoy, kinship. Most Russians, the Parskys believed, harbored in them “Yemelya,” the great idler, a fairy-tale hero who never wishes to leave his favorite place—his bed or seat above a warm stove. Sasha, though contemplative, was not lazy. Long on thought and academically suspicious of extreme feelings, he was typically slow to act, enduring grievances with resigned patience. Like other Russians, he knew what his country had lived through: centuries of the Tatar yoke, a world war, revolution, a civil war, repression, and now Stalin. But once he saw the OGPU agent grab his mother’s braid, he was like an icy current driven by a compulsive course. His acute sense of justice, which transcended any law or Russian habit, raced from his head to his hand, leaving him no choice other than to kill the two policemen who embodied a government that wished to confiscate his parents’ farm without any regard for the age or health of the owners. Sasha had, unbeknownst to himself, been gripped by madness.
✷
Without a word of regret or the sign of the cross, Sasha said to his parents, “You must leave at once for uncle’s farm in Perm. Given the incompetence of Bolshevik bookkeeping, they’ll never trace you. Return to the house and pack what you hold dear. We’ll drive to the Kamyshlov Station. From there you can take a train to Yekaterinburg and then Perm. If asked, I will say that you have gone to Sochi.”
His mute parents retreated into the house, where they filled two suitcases with clothing and stowed their most treasured belongings in three flour sacks, all of which Sasha put in the back of the military truck under a tarpaulin. In a field behind the barn, he buried the two men and the sickle, but not before he removed the personal contents from their pockets and from the truck. Setting out for the station by a circuitous route to avoid any villagers, Sasha questioned his parents’ silence. What could they say? His father wondered if ten years in a labor camp wouldn’t have been preferable to seeing his son commit murder. And his mother cried softly, unable to believe the scene that she replayed in her mind. Had she actually given suck to a boy who had beheaded two men as easily as he might have harvested wheat?
At the station, Sasha bought train tickets. Although fear and disbelief had rendered them speechless, his parents paused briefly on the platform to embrace him with an energy that bespoke their terror. Sasha started to leave and then paused. Behind him, a train exuded great clouds of steam that briefly enveloped him. His parents, who later spoke of this moment, treated it as an omen signifying a cloud of unknowing.
As the steam faded, the first part of him to reappear was his face, then his hands, and finally his body. As he moved toward his parents, intending to embrace them a second time, they backed away, frightened by this son who had several hours before figuratively vanished into a fallen world to serve as an avenging, satanic angel, and who now emerged from a white mist.
Mr. Parsky, more worldly than his wife, summoned enough sense to say, “If they come for you, denounce us. We’ll understand.”
“Just speak of me kindly,” Sasha said, “in the years to come.”
His parents obliged their son, whom they never saw again.
✷
Outside of town, Sasha wiped the steering wheel, abandoned the truck, and hailed a ride on a hay cart to the next station. In the icy drizzle, the lantern hanging from the cart cast pools of light in the puddles, which seemed like underground portals beckoning Sasha to enter. He took a train west to Tula, the site of his college studies in history. Several days later, two secret policemen, Rockoff and Zoditch, arrived at his dormitory to question him about the “slaughter.” The police had learned from the Parskys’ neighbors that Sasha had traveled to his village for Easter. He was questioned interminably. On what date had he returned to the school? Who had seen him return? Witnesses? Where were his parents? The local stationmasters swore that they had not taken train tickets from him, and, at the Yekaterinburg terminal, the ticket sellers explained that they hardly had time to stare at travelers’ faces.
“Did you drive the truck to a distant city?”
“No.”
“We can examine the truck for fingerprints, so you would be well advised to tell the truth. Our records show you have a license to drive. Correct?”
“Correct.”
The questions seemed endless. Yes, he had visited his home, but left a day before the “event in question” and was as shocked as the secret police. His parents had written him from Sochi, but omitted a return address. They had said they’d keep in touch. Did he have the letter? The police wished to look at the postmark. No, he had thrown it away. Had he any suspicion that his parents harbored ill feelings toward the government, that they would desert their home, that they would reside in Sochi? None. He was as amazed as the agents.
“Surely,” he asked, “you don’t think my parents murdered two policemen and then disappeared?”
“Come with us,” said Zoditch, and the two policemen led him to a car.
Rockoff took the wheel and drove to a distant police station of unpainted cinder blocks and a roof sprouting antennae. The building resembled a large insect, surrounded by a gray, featureless landscape shrouded in the melancholy of madness. In the distance lay a soccer field. Trash littered the vacancy between station and field, and a raw wind blew out of the east, tossing papers in the air like a whimsical juggler. Rockoff entered the station, behind which stood several police cars protected from vandals by a chain-link fence. Zoditch and Sasha remained outside. The former lit a cigarette. His stained fingers resembled orange tentacles. He suggested they walk, leading Sasha past stalks and field grass crushed from the morning frosts. Water squished underfoot. Zoditch stopped to watch two soccer players, one defending the goal and the other trying to pass him.
“I played midfield good,” said Zoditch, “but my father he beat me for running off from farmwork to kick a ball. That was his words.”
A small, cunning fellow with a narrow forehead and yellow eyes jaundiced from drink, he had grown a goatee, in the manner of Lenin, but his beard was spotty, bare in places. He ran a hand over his pocked face, exhibited decaying teeth, and spat through a gap between them. His other hand he kept running over his wrinkled uniform as if he wished to correct its disorder. Unlike his unkempt appearance, the policeman spoke in straight lines, briskly and to the point, even if his remarks were frequently ungrammatical.
“You are under a cloud,” he said, “and to come out . . .”
“Yes?”
“You must denounce your parents.”
Sasha and Zoditch approached the goal as the kicker lined up a shot.
Mr. Parsky’s advice echoed in Sasha’s head. After pausing a moment, he said, “Here and now, Comrade Zoditch, in your presence, I denounce them.”
The goalie blocked the shot. Zoditch mocked without mirth. “Not good enough. In Pravda, you denounce them by the words ‘traitors’ and ‘murderers.’ You swear them enemies of the people, and you say those hiding them, unless they turn them in, love the Tsar.”
Sasha fingered the netting of the goal, which reminded him of fishing with his father in a favorite river and Mr. Parsky’s hook net, which he had bought from a nepman. His father, adept with a rod and reel, put his son in charge of netting the fish. Without facing Zoditch, Sasha asked, “Do I write the denunciation or do you?”
Strident laughter greeted his question. “We have people who these kinds of things they like to do.”
For a few minutes, the kicker had a good run. He beat the goalie four times in a row. Then they exchanged places. Zoditch and Sasha walked toward the station over the decaying bronze leaves.
“First, I am a Pioneer,” said Zoditch, referring to a Communist children’s group. “Second, I am a Komosol,” he said, citing the acronym for the Communist Union of Youth. “And you?”
Sasha Parsky had never shown any interest in politics, but rather in books. As a youngster, he had tried to imitate Pushkin, writing verse and short stories, but quickly decided that he had no talent for literature and turned to history, which captivated him even more than fiction. His decision became final once he had read Lord Byron’s lines from Don Juan: “’Tis strange—but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction.” Those words, he had decided, were written for him, because he loved nothing more than he loved the different, the strange, the eerie, the outré.
“I entered poetry contests but never won,” Sasha mused.
Zoditch spat between his teeth. “Poetry,” he scoffed, “that’s a long time ago what the court wrote—and not in Russian.”
He was referring, of course, to the successors of Peter the Great, the Tsar who admired the West and built Saint Petersburg, a city looking toward Europe. Those who served the subsequent Tsars, and the numbers were thousands, spoke and wrote in French. Russian was considered a doggerel language. Not until Pushkin wrote poetry in the idiom of the people, and eschewed stilted Church Slavonic, did Russian literature come alive. The most avid readers of poetry were women, a fact that did not escape Zoditch’s contempt.
“Women, they read poetry, not men.”
Dark clouds massed overhead, and a few snowflakes began to fall. Soon the poplars and beeches would be leafless, and bleak winter would blanket the land.
“They read everything more than men. Writers depend on them. If women didn’t buy literary subscriptions and journals, no bookseller could survive.” The policeman seemed unready to give up the argument. “I don’t like make-believe, women do.”
“And yet you’re a Bolshevik.”
Zoditch eyed him suspiciously. “You are suggesting what?”
“Self-improvement, the new man, the paradise to come . . . are these not all fictions? And yet you embrace them.”
The policeman, feeling that his imperfect command of language put him at a disadvantage, decided not to detain Sasha in the police station but rather to take him for further questioning to the chief of the bureau, Major Boris Filatov, who was a certified engineer with his own office and a college degree.
“Into the car! I’ll get the key.”
✷
Major Filatov, head of the Tula oblast OGPU, fervently believed that the future would be socialist and just. He had invested too much of his life in the Party to believe otherwise. All the denunciations and sacrifices that had earned him his current position . . . had they not been in the service of the common good? Why else would he have lent himself to prisons and torture and shooting squads? To maintain his sanity, he had to accept that the investment in blood was worth the price, and that the ends justified the means. The logic was inescapable. If the ends didn’t justify the means, what did? To make an omelet, the Soviets loved to repeat, you have to break eggs. A future paradise requires effort. The soil must be tilled, weeds and tares removed. If bloodshed provides the fertilizer for Eden, then let it leave no place untouched.
At the unmarked building that housed Filatov’s office, a guard met Zoditch and took Sasha to a cold basement cell, where he waited several hours, reading and rereading the poignant graffiti declaring the innocence of the occupant. Sasha surmised that his treatment was all part of the “method” used to gain a confession—or make a convert. Before long, the guard brought a young man to the cell, a suspected murderer. He was about twenty, well-dressed, with handsome features and straight teeth. His dark hair, parted down the middle, had been recently cut, and his pink face newly shaved. The fellow even had about him a slight whiff of cologne. Introducing himself as Goran Youzhny, he garrulously asked Sasha his name. But when Sasha failed to respond, the man, in well-spoken phrases, said:
“You’re probably wondering why I am here. But I could ask you the same.” Sasha refrained from replying, and Goran continued. “I killed two policemen, decapitated them and then trod through the sticky blood to bury them.”
In the half-dark light, Sasha groped for one of the boards and sat. He tried to sort out his riotous thoughts. Was this man an OGPU “plant”; was he, like so many others, a religious fanatic who took upon himself the sins of the world; or was he a coincidental murderer? Lest he appear skeptical, Sasha took the young man at his word.
“Why did you kill the policemen?”
Goran sat down next to him and answered softly, “They had come to expel my parents from their farm. Kulaks, that was the charge.”
Don’t lower your guard, Sasha told himself. Be wary. Feign horror and disgust at the young man’s story. “What a detestable crime!” said Sasha. “I am accused, falsely I might add, of a similar one. Now I see why they put you in a cell with me.”
Goran then recounted the location of the farm and the name of the family, Parsky. Sasha could only conclude that Goran Youzhny was either a spy or a member of a forest community of religious zealots who feel that they are born with primordial guilt and must assume responsibility for the world’s sins, even if such behavior includes confessing to crimes they didn’t commit. But the forest priests dressed in disheveled robes, never shaved, and wore their hair long. Perhaps they had spawned a new breed of zealots. In any case, surely Filatov could see that this man was not a double murderer; but then, based on appearances, the same could be said about Sasha.
“Why did you kill them?” Sasha asked impassively.
“Given the absence of justice and fairness, I acted to right a wrong. The laws we live under, as you know, have nothing to do with justice and fairness, so I acted according to my own moral law.”
“Even at the expense of your life?”
“Human history is littered with the bodies of the just.”
“Perhaps an appeal to the local Soviet might have helped. Murder is an admission of failure, moral and legal.”
“The local Soviets are elected; they are not moral arbiters.”
“Tell me, Citizen Youzhny, in your opinion, which comes first, guilt or the crime? I mean, do we feel guilty for plotting a crime or for committing it or both?”
“If you believe in original sin, the answer is both. But whether or not one believes in original sin, one may feel equally guilty.”
Sasha warmed to the subject. Here was a chance to mentally exercise. Even if Goran was a plant and the cell bugged, he had said nothing amiss. This discussion would ready him for Major Filatov. If the police chief wanted to argue about the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin, he would be ready.
“And if one feels no guilt at all, what then?”
Goran sucked air through his clenched teeth and issued a low whistle. “Such a person would be devoid of conscience and merely a creature of instinct. Sin is punished, one way or another.”
“A minute ago, you decried the law. So I assume you believe that transgressing the law is justifiable. Would refusing to denounce a friend qualify?”
Goran’s silence betokened his moral quandary.
Sasha goaded him. “Isn’t it a fact that some sinners escape judgment?”
“Perhaps here, but not in the afterlife. And don’t underestimate conscience. Thank God, I am not one of those who make up all manner of excuses to explain their felonies. I do not blame my own on Soviet arrogance or the confiscation of private property.”
Sasha smiled, knowing full well that Goran was preparing to recite a litany of Soviet sins—in order to draw him out.
“They promised religious freedom and then closed the churches. They promised the different nationalities the right to continue their cultures and then suppressed them. They gagged the writers and promulgated their own form of art. They restricted the right to travel. They promoted hacks and exiled genius. They introduced the cult of personality—Stalin’s—and imprisoned the Vozhd’s former comrades. It’s intolerable. Don’t you agree?”
Sasha knew not to agree with criticisms of the government. Once you agreed, the trap sprung shut. Goran was undoubtedly an OGPU stooge told what to say. And even if Sasha couldn’t prove that Goran’s list of Soviet sins was rehearsed, why take the chance of assenting? The rule was “Never agree or disagree, even with a friend. The walls have ears.”
“How did you kill the policemen?” Sasha asked.
“With a sickle. I cut off their heads cleanly. Swipe. Swipe.”
At that moment, Sasha knew that his cell mate was a plant. One of the heads had failed to come free. Goran’s factual error was small, but just large enough to brand him a liar. You can never be too careful.
When the guard finally led Sasha upstairs, he entered a carpeted room with a desk and sofa and three chairs. On the wall behind the desk hung a large portrait of Stalin. Affixed to another wall was a colored map of the Soviet Union, covered with red and yellow pins, indicating the major war zones during the Great War and the civil war. Two windows looked out on a wooded area. Behind the desk, Boris Filatov, ramrod straight, wore not a uniform or a tunic but a beige suit. In front of the desk, a woman sat with legs planted firmly on the floor, a pad in her lap, and a mechanical pencil at the ready, waiting in a totally impersonal manner to record the proceedings.
“Please make yourself comfortable on the couch,” said Filatov. “Comrade Olga is our secret service stenographer.”
Sasha leaned back on the couch and stretched his legs, now cold and cramped. He noted that while Filatov was a handsome man who exuded energy and strength, the woman was pale and dispirited. Her flaxen hair, pulled back carelessly, revealed a lifeless face with black holes for eyes. She nervously tapped one foot on the floor and then rubbed a thigh, revealing more leg than one would have expected from a lady commissar. Her drab officer’s dress accentuated her flat chest. Sasha looked at her hands but saw no rings. Was she married? Did she always look so absent? Perhaps she had liver trouble and smoked too much.
“How are your parents?” asked Filatov, breaking the spell of Sasha’s thoughts.
“My parents?” Sasha repeated. The question had taken him by surprise. “I thought you knew.”
“Knew what?” asked Filatov, stroking his ample well-barbered mustache that bore a striking resemblance to Stalin’s.
“They left for Sochi and haven’t yet sent me their address.”
Filatov shook his head sympathetically. “No news. It’s a shame how badly our postal service works. Or perhaps I should say doesn’t work. Our people ought to investigate.”
“I’m rather surprised myself,” said Sasha, rubbing his hands to dispel the lingering cold.
Filatov came from behind his desk and extended a hand to Sasha. “Such poor manners on my part. I am Boris Filatov, and you are Citizen Sasha Parsky.” They shook hands. “I hope you are well.”
“Just chilled from your basement apartment.”
“I like irony, Citizen Parsky. It shows wit. I will have to tell my people to install central heating downstairs.” Filatov returned to his desk. Zoditch knocked, entered, handed him a note, and left. “My apologies as well,” added Filatov, “for the clumsy attempt of one of our agents to induce you to talk about a crime you didn’t commit.” He left his desk and repaired to the couch with a folder in hand.
Sasha remembered what his professors had told him, albeit in whispers, as well as the many students interrogated by the secret police. Avoid garrulousness. Exercise caution. Reject friendship. Folders like Filatov’s were often stage props. The contents? Perhaps damning, perhaps nothing. To escape OGPU traps, be doubly deceptive.
“Comrade Parsky,” Filatov said, eliciting a smile from Sasha, who noticed the shift in diction from “Citizen” to “Comrade.” “According to our files . . .” He rustled some papers.
For the first time, Sasha noticed Filatov’s hands. The nails were polished, the mark of a dandy. “Comrade Parsky,” Filatov repeated and pointed at the map. “The red pins signify the important Russian fronts during the Great War.” He paused. “Are you any relation to General Parsky?” Sasha shook his head no. Filatov then rattled off a number of facts about Sasha’s personal life. “While you were waiting,” said Filatov, “Comrade Zoditch dictated to our typist. It says here that you are a cooperative witness and that you are willing to see your parents denounced.” He paused. “Not so much as a demurral? Most children take convincing. But you are ready and willing, as the saying is. Are you familiar with their crime? Were you told?”
“Murder.”
“Two policemen . . . we recovered the remains . . . and the murder weapon, a sickle. They were buried in a shallow grave, freshly dug.”
“Sounds awful,” said Sasha, wiping his perspiring forehead with his sleeve.
“Inconceivable is what I would call it: two elderly people with the strength to overcome two policemen and behead them, or almost.” He paused. “Do you suppose a third party could have been present?”
“We have no paid workers except at harvest time.”
“I was thinking of you.”
Sasha decided to play Filatov’s game and come to the same conclusion, thus weakening Boris’s argument. Protestations of innocence were to be expected, not agreement. “If I were you, I would think the same thing. But I was not present. Perhaps a bandit or runaway zek was in the area. Have you checked?”
Filatov nodded sagely, as if he had expected this line of reasoning, and answered, “As a matter of fact, we have.”
“A sickle, you say? A great many itinerant farmworkers come through our area carrying sickles. Scythes, too. Or perhaps it was someone who ran away from a collective farm.”
Studying his hands, Filatov said without looking up, “I return to the point that two elderly people were unlikely to have the physical strength to decapitate two men. Do you agree?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good. Then what are we to conclude?”
“They are innocent and someone else is guilty.”
“And yet you are willing to denounce them.”
It took very little for Sasha to realize that in Filatov he was facing a different kind of policeman. To make light of his acquiescence and elicit a smile, Sasha rejoined, “If you’d like me to resist, I can say no and protest loudly.”
Filatov’s gentle face turned hard. “Don’t jest about betrayals. To denounce a parent is a life-altering decision. No one should ever be put in that position.”
Sasha saw that he was not wrong about this inquisitor. He had been selected for his cunning. Filatov had the brains to side with his adversary, and the personality to insinuate himself into the prisoner’s trust. His comments had the effect of causing Sasha to remember a spring day in school, with the fragrance of lilacs drifting through the open windows. All the children were asked to stand as the teacher related the story of a wife who denounced her husband for making comments critical of Lenin. A gentle sort, the teacher, who had grown up in an educated family, impressed upon the children the importance of motives. The husband, related the teacher, was removed by the Cheka and, in front of the villagers, made to kneel and ask for forgiveness. Hoping to save his life, the poor man confessed to the crime of undermining morale. But a soldier stepped forward and shot the man in the back of the head.
Alas, events are not always as they seem. The villagers subsequently learned that the man’s wife had been conducting an affair with a young fellow from another village and wanted her husband out of the way. When her motives were reported to the police, they shrugged and did nothing. So the villagers took matters into their own hands and drowned the woman in a nearby river. The teacher’s conclusion was not that one should remain silent in the presence of a crime, though he was quick to point out that the disparagement of Lenin was allowed by the guarantees of free speech in the Soviet Constitution, but that before rushing to judgment, one should have all the facts or as many as possible, given the self-interest of people who supply “truth” in excess of demand. The teacher’s lesson might have been forgotten in the farrago of childhood experiences had not a boy in his class denounced the poor man for saying that it was acceptable to criticize Lenin, with the result that the teacher was removed from the school and never seen again.
“You are finishing your degree,” said Filatov, shuffling some papers. “In this area of the country, we have need of secondary-school directors.” He paused, admired his fingernails, which glinted in the light, and glanced at Sasha’s hands, which Filatov rightly marked as those of a scholar. “I trust that you would like such an assignment, which is not possible without someone like myself signing off on your loyalty.” He opened a silver case, removed a cigarette, lit it, and offered Sasha one.
“I don’t smoke.”
After a few puffs, Filatov quit and exclaimed that tobacco was a filthy habit. Sasha guessed that Filatov cared more about his stained fingers than whether smoking was de rigueur. After all, Stalin smoked, and it was whispered that his fingers and teeth were yellow.
“A secondary school would suit me perfectly,” replied Sasha, and instinctively turned toward the window to gain a better view of the autumn leaves and the whispers of ground fog. Like so many Russians, he found comfort in the landscape.
Filatov, ever observant, commented, “At this time of year, so often the sun resembles a dying patient. It grows increasingly pallid, and of course eventually dies, as do our citizens who drink profusely to escape the dreary darkness.”
Sasha found the medical analogy unsuited to the scene—unless Filatov was trying to link Sasha’s ashen face to sickness and guilt.
“Having grown up in the country,” Sasha remarked, “I have experienced the pain of loneliness and the absence of culture.”
“In Moscow, they die in doorways, drunken and diseased.” Before Sasha could reply, Filatov rose and pulled down another map. This one detailed the topography of Tula Province. He pointed to a spot on the outskirts of Tula, not far from Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Poliana.
“The neighboring villages once enjoyed the patronage of the great writer himself. Will this area suit you? It’s a choice location and only 120 miles from Moscow.”
Sasha excitedly asked, “You can arrange it?”
Without moving his facial muscles, Filatov sighed wearily, as if Sasha’s question was hardly worth the answering. Sasha feared that Filatov found him taxing. “The secret police can arrange whatever is in the best interests of the country.” For the first and only time, the stenographer smiled. “You graduate in a few months. I’ll see to it that you receive a position as director of a secondary school. I have in mind a particularly good one in need of reform. Repetition is good for some things but cannot eclipse reasoning. Russians love learning. The written word is sacred. A book makes you a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.”
Sasha, who had expected the knout, not a niche in the world of education, felt his face redden. Was it from appreciation or fear of a trap? He put a hand to his forehead and stuttered his thanks.
“The murdered policemen had families, one, a wife and child, the other, a brother who writes political polemics. Visit them! Here are their files. I regret we have no photographs.”
A bewildered Sasha fingered them awkwardly. Should he open them at once or later? He waited for a signal from Filatov, but the major was now staring silently out the window. Sasha knew that of all the forms of human communication, silence speaks loudest. He thought of his parents’ neighbor Mr. Zaslavsky, who would move his queen but not release his hand to indicate that the move was complete. All the while, he would study Sasha’s face to see his response. Sometimes he returned the queen to its original position, sometimes not. Filatov at last spoke but without turning round. His words were strangely strangled. He seemed to be choking on grief. Perhaps Filatov had met the dead men, knew their families, maybe even worked with them, or shared a cigarette.
“You are no doubt asking yourself why you, a stranger, should be making condolence calls? On what pretense?”
“It did occur to me.”
“When the time comes I will give you a letter of introduction explaining that you work for the police, and that you are calling on behalf of the government. We have already awarded the survivors a financial settlement. You are simply following up.”
Sasha had by now regained his composure. This Filatov was a sly one. The chief obviously felt that Sasha was implicated in the murders and wanted to render him vulnerable with the offer of a plum position and the request that he visit the families. Well, if Filatov thought that Sasha would drop his guard and succumb to sentiment, thus putting his head in a noose, he was underestimating Sasha’s resolve and determination to survive.
But when Filatov finally turned to face Sasha, his moist eyes had an immediate effect on young Parsky, who could feel his own throat tighten and his breath shorten. “Their names are Galina Selivanova and Viktor Harkov. The child’s name is Alya. She’s adopted. Both families live in Ryazan. I would suggest that you write them first and give them ample notice of your visit. At the moment they are in mourning, so I would wait, perhaps until summer, when the weather will favor you.”
Fighting against his own humane impulses, Sasha wondered whether Filatov’s tears were real or confected. A second later he upbraided himself for his cynicism. His next thought was how does a slayer condole with his victims’ families? He felt strangely as if he were observing the murders both as an outsider and as the perpetrator. Until a minute ago, the dead policemen meant nothing to him; and then he saw Filatov’s sorrowful eyes. Perhaps, on further reflection, Sasha was closer to these men than he imagined. If creation and destruction are two poles of the same arc, then he had merely completed a nexus that others had started. He would assuage his guilt through kindness and care. He would take the woman and child on a boat ride or a picnic or maybe a trip to the fair, with a ride on the carousel. But first he would bring the mother a box of candy, and the child a nested doll. And the brother? A fine fountain pen might please him. He was, after all, a writer. In the meantime, he had only a few days to prepare to defend his honors thesis before a group of fractious university examiners.