“It’s finished?” she asked.
He shrugged and looked over in the corner toward his beloved weights, but he was too tired. He should rise above his weariness and do some lifting, show his resolve.
“The hell with it,” he said instead with a huge glob of bread in his mouth.
“What?” asked Sarah.
“Nothing,” he said and reached for his plumbing book.
Anna Timofeyeva had a cat. It was one of the few things in her life about which she felt guilty, for she spent very little time with the animal. Home, except for the cat, was where Anna went because it was improper to sleep in her office.
“I hear, Bakunin,” she told the ancient grey fluff that waddled toward her as she took off her coat, “that in America they have special food for cats, special food. You go to the store and stand in line for cat food.”
In spite of her position, Anna Timofeyeva lived in a small one-room apartment in an old one-floor concrete building that had originally been built as a barracks for an artillery unit. When the site was abandoned after ground-to-air missiles were developed, the barracks along the Moscow River were converted into small apartments with a communal kitchen which had once served as the kitchen for the artillery unit stationed within its walls. Anna Timofeyeva felt comfortable in the small room. It required little cleaning, was conveniently located and quite practical.
It was somewhere around three in the morning, she knew, but she had no interest in checking the time. The important time was when she got up, not when she went to sleep. She had named the cat Bakunin, for the infamous anarchist who had opposed Marx, because she liked to think the cat was an adventurous troublemaker who had to be forgiven. Bakunin purred loudly and rubbed against her as she pulled a can of herring from her pocket. Bakunin was, in fact, a remarkably docile creature who, having been denied the opportunity to roam, became like a beast in a zoo, dependent on the one who feeds him and in a general state of physical torpor with occasional moments of undefined resentment.
“Patience, Baku, patience,” she said, finding her can opener and working on the herring. “We must learn patience.” And, she thought, above all we must learn to compromise.
Although she was hungry, Anna Timofeyeva knew that sleep was more important to her. She would not go down to the kitchen to cook something or even make some tea. Such an act would disturb the other tenants. Not that they would complain. They all deferred to Comrade Timofeyeva, who was a legend in the building, a legend seldom viewed but often discussed. That one of her high rank should live among a group of the relatively poor was most puzzling. The tenants vacillated between extreme suspicion and fear and pride, believing that somehow her presence provided those under the roof with a special protection.
She had lived in the building for more than twenty years, but Anna Timofeyeva was barely aware of the other tenants. She knew that at least one of the other six was a family with a small baby that occasionally awoke crying in the middle of the night.
After rubbing her eyes, Anna Timofeyeva allowed herself to move to her bed where she slowly pried at the can of herring with an old metal opener. The cat purred loudly, and Anna moved surely with thick, strong fingers.
“Allow me a taste,” she said dipping her fingers past the jagged edges of metal. “It passes inspection.” She put the can on the tile floor and leaned over to pet the cat as it ate.
“Bakunin,” she whispered. “Lenin said that to reject compromises ‘on principle,’ to reject the permissibility of compromises in general, no matter of what kind, is childishness, difficult even to consider seriously. Sometimes I think Rostnikov fails to understand the nature and need for compromise.”
Bakunin was working on a particularly unresponsive piece of fish which dangled from the corner of his mouth.
Anna Timofeyeva removed her uniform carefully, brushed it, and hung it on the high hook where Bakunin could not rub against it. There was no mirror in the room. Anna Timofeyeva was only interested in her image insofar as it displayed conviction and authority and that she could see in the window in the morning.
She changed her warm, practical woolen underwear and moved to the small basin in the corner to brush her teeth with salt and a calloused finger. Something tugged at her chest like a marionette master pulling all the strings at once, and then it passed. She breathed deeply, rinsed her mouth and retrieved one of the small pills that had been given her by the doctor at the Institute Sklefasofskala. The tightness slowly passed as the pill began to work.
“Bakunin,” she said softly. “I must straighten the room.” She moved slowly, putting what little there was to put in order in the right place and then she removed the note from her dresser drawer. It was a simple note that she had prepared three years before. It stated that if she were to be found dead, instructions for the continuance of her cases were in the top drawer of the desk in her office. Her instruction book was brought up-to-date each day before she came home to sleep. Her note asked that Bakunin be given to Rostnikov in the event of her death, but she had made no provisions for the eventuality of going to a hospital.
Her principal fear, as she turned off the light and got into bed under the woolen blanket, was not that she would die at night, but that she would simply suffer a heart attack and live. Her nightmare was that she would lie helpless while someone in the building heard her gasps and dialed 002 for “fast help.” She could imagine the big white ambulance with its red cross and its soft siren pulling up in front of the building and the attendants coming in to lift her from the bed and take her out.
The cat finished chewing down a bit of fish, and she could hear it in the darkness lapping at the bowl of water on the floor. Then the animal leaped softly to the bed and sought the warmth of Anna’s solid body.
“The worst thing,” she whispered to the cat as she stroked it, “is not to be useful.”
Someone padded down the hall outside her door, moving toward the communal toilet, and somewhere else in the distance, a car hummed down the street.
“I’ll not sleep this night,” she told her cat, resisting the urge to roll on her side for greater comfort. The doctor had told her to sleep on her back. “I’ll not sleep.”
She slept.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sasha Tkach was disturbed when he woke up. He had slept soundly and dreamed not at all of the boy he had killed the previous day. He felt guilty about his lack of guilt. He should have tossed and turned and wept and worried, but he had not. He had slept comfortably with one arm around Maya. In fact, just before he had fallen asleep, he had a strong urge to make love to her, and he felt she would have responded, but the guilt had been too much, or at least the feeling that he should feel guilty.
“Do you understand?” he had whispered to Maya, so they would not wake his mother in the next room.
“You don’t feel guilty,” she said, touching his face.
“I should, shouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“I’m growing insensitive,” he whispered.
“You are being honest. It is too bad the boy is dead, but you didn’t know him. He meant nothing to you. You had invested nothing in him and you killed him while doing your work. You are probably a bit ashamed of being proud.”
“Perhaps,” he mused. “It is difficult to be a policeman.”
“It is difficult to be anyone in Moscow,” Maya said, sitting up.
And then it struck Tkach. He pushed his yellow hair from his face and remembered. Sasha Tkach was unaware that the case was over, that Vonovich the cab driver had confessed, that he was to go back to his regular caseload. Tkach was not aware that he was about to disrupt a politically tranquil situation. He was simply being a policeman. He leaped up and went to his pants searching for his notebook.