19

RODION LISITSOV

HE JUMPED WHEN SHE KNOCKED on the door. He had told her repeatedly to knock gently if the door was closed: it meant he was working, and his work was often delicate, requiring calm and precision. If a loud noise—like one of her knocks, for instance: seven sharp raps in machine-gun succession on the thin, hollow door—made him jump, everything would be ruined. What he did not tell her was that he had developed safety measures: using two hands, one to steady the other, for the most precise parts of the job. What he did not tell himself, even in private, even in his own mind, was that he had developed this habit not just as a guard against sudden noises but to protect against the old man’s palsy—intention tremors, his doctor called them, though there was nothing intentional about them—that had started to wrack his hands and lips. Consequently, when she knocked this time he gave a start but his hands remained steady.

“Yes!” he barked.

She opened the door, peering around the frame with that indulgent look he had come to loathe: it implied the vast distance between what he used to be and what he had become. “I am going to the market,” she said. “Will you be home this evening for dinner?”

“What is the date?” he asked, not looking up from his work.

“The date? February thirteenth, is it not?”

He sighed heavily, glaring up at her from beneath a glowering front. “It is indeed,” he growled. “Two days before the feast of the Meeting of our Lord.”

“Ah. So you are leaving tonight, are you?”

He nodded.

“You need something to eat on the journey.”

“This is a meatless week.”

“Understood.” She looked at him steadily, admiringly. He felt her eyes on him. He tried to keep his expression fixed, but it didn’t work: a reluctant smile broke through and his eyes softened.

“Nearly finished,” he said proudly.

“What is it?”

“Ach. What kind of daughter have I raised? She does not know the holy feast days, she does not respect a father’s wishes for calm and privacy, and she cannot even recognize the instruments that protected her country and her freedom.”

She walked over to his desk just as he finished affixing the top of the conning tower. “It looks like a big boat to me,” she said with a mischievous smile, kissing him on the top of his head.

He shooed her away with operatic, pop-eyed, exaggerated exasperation. “This is a ship, not a boat. The Voroshilov. It was the second Kirov class cruiser we built, and it defended Sebastopol. If it were not for this ship, your mother would have fallen into the hands of the Germans. Then where would you have been?”

“Mother was from Kherson, not Crimea.”

“Don’t you think I know where your mother was from? Do you ever think I will be so old to forget that? She was in Kherson: correct. The Germans were in Odessa, and if it were not for this boat, as you call it, they would have taken Crimea. Kherson was between the two. It was undefended. So.”

“The boat goes with the rest of them?”

“It will. On the top.” He gestured to a display case filled with model ships that lined the entire wall of the room. There was only one empty space where the Voroshilov could go. “Next to the Molotov.”

“And then you’re finished. So sad.”

“Finished with our navy, yes. Then comes the British, the Germans, and the Americans.”

“Another ten years?”

“At least. Probably twenty.” He winked as he rose and wiped his hands on a towel. “I must pack. You can make something for me before you go?”

“Of course.” She hesitated meaningfully, one hand on the doorway and her mouth partly open, a gesture she took from her mother: it meant she had something to say but did not know how to begin.

“Masha, what is it?”

“There was someone outside again when I came home.”

“So?”

“He asked for you.”

“Uniform or suit?”

“Suit.”

“Russian?”

“Yes.”

“What did he want?”

“To speak to you. I told him you were not at home. He pressed. I told him you were receiving no visitors.”

“Yes, of course he pressed,” he said quietly. He unlocked the display case and began buffing the shelf where the ship would sit. “He said it would be to my advantage—no, one moment: my material advantage—or in keeping with my familial duty, my duty as a man, to talk to him. They always say it would be either my duty or to my advantage. How do they know what my advantage is?”

“Not yours,” she said, a frayed edge of worry in her voice. “This time he said it was for Katya.”

“What for Katya?”

“A job reading the news, a salary of two million rubles, a car, a driver, an apartment in . . .”

“Enough!” His voice sharpened, but remained quiet. He retrieved the ship from the desk and laid it gently next to the Kirov. Enough already. I don’t want to hear any more.”

“But should you not just talk with him, for her sake now, not for yours? He said all you had to do was talk, and she would have the job.”

“And you believe him? You believe any of these people? They are salesmen; they are not honest.” He crossed the room and put his small, delicate hands on his daughter’s shoulders, looking into her eyes evenly. “I am finished. Do you understand? My work is done. Now, if you would, please, make me a small something for the train, without meat. I leave in twenty-seven minutes.”

 
 
HE HAD GROWN used to them, and consequently brushed them away with neither pity nor hope. Only recently had they started to approach Masha, though. She was born later and, because of his work, always had a comfortable life, which she missed and wanted back. Materially, of course, not only were they not worse off, they were better: they retained their apartment, and now had two televisions (both color), a personal computer (Katya could spend hours reading foreign newspapers), a (Korean, shiny) stereo system, and all the food and clothes they needed. True, they lost their driver and had to trade down dachas; they vacationed in Sochi every other year rather than Tallinn or Bulgaria every summer; but plenty of people had fallen further. Between what Masha made as a doctor’s receptionist, Katya’s occasional supplements from acting jobs, his pension, and the occasional loan or favor, they got by. What they no longer had—what Masha wanted and could not admit she wanted—was the comparative advantage: she did not want to be rich; she wanted to be richer, if not in money than in status. Far from considering the solicitations a nuisance, she liked them: she liked being asked for things; she hated doing the asking.

The pride of a cosseted childhood: it never faded. Katya barely remembered, of course, and even if she did, well, not everyone had that nature. It was well known that goodness skipped a generation: darling sweet Katya reminded him of his wife, while ambitious and impatient Masha, alas, reminded him only of himself. He kissed her good-bye anyway, then crossed the apartment’s threshold, turned to face the icon, crossed himself three times (with three fingers, of course), then put his hat on and set off for the train.

He picked them out across the courtyard. They sat in one of those new, tanklike cars that suddenly were everywhere; the one in the back put on his hat at a smart angle and prepared to open the door. He suddenly turned around and went through the back entrance.

He neither knew nor wanted to know who they were. They and their kind had been after him for a decade, ever since Biopreparat had closed—or transformed, or gone under, or expanded, or done whatever it did: ever since his Biopreparat had closed. At first he listened to their offers and took the time to explain to each one of them: he worked for one country, one cause, and now that was gone. He was done. Did he feel sad? Did he feel betrayed? Did he feel angry? Of course: so did millions of his countrymen. Was he not proud of his work? Again, of course: so was his neighbor, a pipe fitter and a Hero of Soviet Labor. Did he not crave new challenges, new renown? No. He had somehow managed to eke out a living pension from the thieves busy selling their country piece by piece to the highest bidder. That pension somehow continued to be honored, even augmented, however occasionally and irregularly. He had lost a wife; his daughter had lost a husband; he wanted nothing but family, quiet, and the comforts of church—ritual, peace, devotion, brotherhood—like he had out east when he was a boy.

It had long stopped being worth explaining to them. To see the in-comprehension in their eyes when he declined promises of wealth and fame saddened him too deeply. True, appealing to Katya, and to him on Katya’s behalf, was clever. He won’t pretend he didn’t feel his heart quiver at the warm breath of temptation. But it was also devious. Katya would have to make her own way, as he had made his and his wife had made hers.

As he walked out of the back archway onto Pyatnitskaya, a sharp-eyed young muzhik in a leather jacket whistled, put out his cigarette, and saluted ironically. “How about a lift, Grandfather?” he asked, in a thick, honking Moscow accent. He pointed to a new lime-green Skoda. “Good price, top speed, wherever you like.”

He shook his head and headed off in the opposite direction. The pleasure of walking through Novokuznetskaya’s tangle of narrow streets on a snowy day: was anything better? He inhaled the city’s rough, industrial/piney scent, following the street’s curve as it took him past a children’s playground dotted with smiling wooden gnomes, past a frosted apartment building the color of beaten eggs, past a courtyard where an auto-repair shop sat between an instrument restorer and the Church of St. Methodius the Revealer, whose roof was a riot of scallops and crenellations, icons both hollow-eyed and rejoicing, blood vermilions and spring-forest greens, summer-sun golds and summer-sky blues. Was any city as nakedly human? Did any other city display our capacity for beauty and brutality in such harrowing, thrilling proximity? Someday he knew he would be unable to walk through it, but until then he would never ride. He would fade but it would not; he would be whisked to his grave through a kaleidoscope; as a blind old bedridden man this visible world would disappear, leaving nothing but color, color, color, and the memory of Katya on his lap and snow on his tongue.

 
 
HE LEFT HIMSELF ENOUGH TIME for his Belorussky Vokzal ritual. He went around to the back of the station, away from the crowds. By some unspoken urban arrangement, it was understood that this was where they slept it off. Street whores—women, girls, and boys—were on the east side; drugs of unreliable quality you could buy to the west. The front entrance was for straight begging. The back was where they came afterward.

He walked slowly without strolling; he looked over the unconscious masses without staring; he kept his expression unthreatening but not soft. Huddled in a crook between a column and a service door was a grime-streaked old woman, dead to the world, head back, mouth open, body sexless and ruined, face hairy, teeth blackened and mostly gone. Bodily extrusions crusted the edge of her headscarf closest to her mouth. She snored deeply but slept with the coiled rigidity of the street-sleeper.

Silently, he took the herring and beet salad that Masha had made out of his satchel, and leaned down to tuck it into the bend of her arm. He placed it there as securely as he could without waking her. As he straightened up he felt a scratch, then a prick where his trousers rode up, exposing a line of sock above his boots. Three seconds later the world shut on him like an eye: without color.