But Lydia was not abiding by the rules that Anna had instituted when Sasha had approached her. A rift would surely come between Anna and Sasha’s mother. Elena hoped that her aunt could remain calm when she became inflexibly firm.
Elena was sipping her tea and listening to Lydia talk about the reunification of the Soviet Union.
“Belarus first,” she said. “Then Ukraine. My daughter-in-law is from Ukraine. Then the southern states. The Soviet Union will be reborn. A world power. Dangerous criminal gangs with machine guns will be executed. The ruble will rise. Pensions will be worth something again to you and me, Anna Timofeyeva.”
“It will not happen,” said Anna. “Communism is dead. All parties, especially the Communists and extremists, are afraid of thoughts like those you have just expressed. The new Communist Party and the Nationalists are forcing displays, false hopes.”
“You were a Communist,” said Lydia.
“I am still,” said Anna. “I believe in what we did. What I did. It failed not because it was a bankrupt idea, but because of Russian corruption, the weakness and greed of human beings who get even a small fistful of power. I worked with them. I prosecuted them. These new Communists are vultures preying on dead hopes and memories.”
“Emil Karpo says the same thing,” Elena said, slicing off a piece of cabbage that did not taste quite good but wasn’t bad enough to discard. Elena was too hungry. She was on a diet, like the Americans, but it did little. Her problem wasn’t an excess of food. There was no excess of food. Her problem was genetic.
“Emil Karpo is a madman,” Lydia said, folding her arms and looking at the two other women for contradiction.
Neither responded, though from what Elena had said, Anna was convinced that since the end of the Soviet Union and the death in the crossfire of a street battle of Mathilde Verson, Karpo had become suicidal. She had seen many like that, disillusioned, confused. Karpo was a pencil wound tight with twine. He would never actually consider suicide, but he would and had taken chances that might well be considered very dangerous and foolhardy, though Karpo was no fool.
Elena was concerned whenever she was teamed with the Vampire. He didn’t talk very much, even less than when she had first met him, before Mathilde’s death. He remained focused and knew what he was doing. She knew she could learn a great deal from him and she did, but if he was going to risk his life unnecessarily, she did not want to be with him. She didn’t want Iosef with him either, but Iosef seemed to welcome the partnership. They made a strange pair, the straight, gaunt man in black with his black hair brushed straight back from a receding hairline and the brawny, handsome, and usually smiling ex-soldier, playwright, and actor who preferred light colors and worried little about his bushy auburn hair that held just a touch of the red of his mother’s.
Whatever love was, and Elena was not at all sure, she believed she loved Iosef Rostnikov. They had made love. It had been good. He had proposed frequently. She had told him of her experiences, down to the last affair with the married Cuban police officer who probably only wanted information from her. She had been far from promiscuous in her life. The graduate student engineer in the United States. The Canadian policeman she met in Boston. Iosef responded with careful references to his experience in Afghanistan, experience he had tried to deal with as a playwright and actor, and had failed.
They had been lying in his bed, naked, on their backs, looking up at the ceiling, a small light casting steady shadows.
“I was a murderer. I murdered the innocent during the war,” he had said. “I confess, too, that I did not like the Afghans. They are surly, nomadic people who kill each other over whether Allah wants them to cut their toenails or something. It was their land, but they killed my fellow soldiers, my friends. Some of our men hated me since I was considered Jewish. I fought with them. But I killed our enemies, the Afghans-even women and children. And I will live with that and dream about it and continue to wake up nights sweating and weeping.”
“But you seem so cheerful,” Elena said.
“That is the irony,” said Iosef. “I get that from my father. I find life interesting, a moment-to-moment adventure. My guilt I save for my dreams.”
“And you can do that?” she said.
“Much of the time,” Iosef answered. “Not always. So you see, your confession, though I respect it, is pale compared to mine. You require no forgiveness. I deserve none.”
“So, do you agree, Elena?” Lydia Tkach said.
“Agree?” Elena asked, half asleep and drawn from her memory of the night with Iosef.
“That Sasha deserves an office job,” Lydia shouted. “He has a mother, a wife, and two small children, and he is always depressed.”
In fact, Elena did agree, but it did not pay to give Lydia ammunition if she were again to approach Rostnikov, whom she blamed for the dangers her son had been subjected to.
“I am going to see Rostnikov again,” Lydia said with determination, folding her hands on the table resolutely when Elena simply shrugged and took a bite of her sandwich. “Porfiry Petrovich has been promoted. Now he can do this.”
“Does Sasha want a desk job?” Anna said.
Lydia paused for a moment and then answered, “Of course. It is his responsibility. With all the crime now, why would anyone want to be a police officer?”
“Lydia,” Anna reminded her guest, “Elena is a police officer.”
“I know that,” said Lydia impatiently. “She is alone. No responsibilities. She is not depressed.”
Anna nodded once to acknowledge the statement without agreeing or disagreeing.
When Elena was finished eating and cleaning her plate and utensils, Anna said she was growing tired. The hint did not work on Lydia, who was looking off into a corner of the room considering another assault on the injustice of human existence in general and specific humans in particular.
“My mother was raped and killed,” Lydia said, still looking at the wall, her voice so uncharacteristically low that Elena almost missed the words. “I was a little girl. During the famine. Five soldiers, drunken soldiers, came to our house in the village. They were our soldiers. They raped and killed her. I was too young and scrawny to bother with. I remember one rapist was a man in a brown uniform who got down from his horse and pushed us both into the house. My father was gone, in the same army as the men who attacked my mother. My father was dead when it happened, but we didn’t find that out for a long time, my baby brother and I. I have no idea how old the killers were. I don’t even remember their faces. Afterward, I took care of my brother. A cousin of my father barely kept us from starving.”
Lydia stopped as if coming out of a dream and looked around at Anna and Elena.
“I don’t know why I told you that,” she said.
Both Anna and Elena knew.
“I’ve never told anyone before,” Lydia went on, talking almost to herself. “Not even my brother. Never my son.”
“A game of chess?” Anna asked as Baku jumped back in her lap. “Some Mozart and some very competitive chess.”
“Yes,” said Lydia.
“I’m going to get a few hours’ sleep,” said Elena.
Anna was not a music lover. She had devoted her life to her work and had seen no plays, no movies, no ballet, no opera. Such things bored her. Even the idea of them bored her, but lately she seemed to have developed at least a high level of tolerance for Elena’s collection of CDs, particularly Mozart, Bach, and Vivaldi.
So the games began. Elena knew that her aunt would enjoy the competition. Unfortunately Lydia took a long time between moves. She couldn’t play under the pressure of a timer or a clock.
Elena had gone into her aunt’s bedroom, taken off her clothes, and fallen into the bed, jarred into near consciousness from time to time by Lydia’s shouts of triumph and defeat.