SCHAEFFER

ON THE TELEPHONE, Schaeffer hardly seemed surprised. Kolia wanted clear and concise answers to his questions, but the director wouldn’t shut up. He was one of those pretentiously effusive types. It was plain as day where the melodrama and cloying sentimentality of his film had come from. Kolia did manage, nonetheless, to get two answers out of him: Iosif had used a firearm to kill himself, and no, he hadn’t missed.

“It’s hard to miss when you’ve got a cannon stuck in your mouth,” Kolia offered.

The director fell silent. Kolia asked if Iosif had killed himself in Bucharest.

“Yes.”

He had found Iosif’s body on returning to the room where the two of them had been crashing with a mutual friend who had spent the night with a prostitute. Iosif was lying on the floor naked. Schaeffer described how the pool of blood had reached the ornate lion’s paws of their dilapidated sofa. Iosif had burnt all his papers in the kitchen sink. All that remained were ashes and a few matches strewn about the floor. He had also disposed of his army uniform, which was never located. In fact, he had done such a thorough job that no one but Schaeffer and the other roommate could have formally identified him. They both cleared out before the police arrived.

But before he left, Schaeffer made a sketch of Iosif’s face on a sheet of paper he ripped from a notebook. Once it was done, he ran down the stairs to the ground floor, made a phone call, and then fled.

Kolia wanted to see the sketch.

“I lost it.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“No, really.”

“Why would you draw the face of a dead man?”

“It was the only way of remembering him. I would have taken a photograph to keep him alive, so to speak, but I didn’t have a camera. To me, portraits of dead people are soothing. I wanted to keep an image of Iosif like that.”

“Even with a huge hole in the back of his head and a sea of blood as a backdrop?”

“Yes, even like that.”

“Mr. Schaeffer, I loved him more than my own father.”

“I know, but . . .”

“Thank you . . .”

“You can call me Hans-Jürgen.”

“Thank you, Hans.”

He called Tanya back. He asked her if she could arrange the appropriate documents to leave Russia and spend a week in Romania, as soon as possible.

It took two weeks for Tanya’s influence to make itself felt, but the documents she finally produced proved that the rules of any political system can be circumvented with a little imagination. Kolia felt obligated to thank Tanya somehow, and spent an hour with her on the sofa — and on the clock — doing exactly that. Her daughter was spending the night with her fiancé again.

Masha, on the other hand, had adopted a tomcat whose prodigious bladder was making their cohabitation difficult.